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Japan was the first non-Western nation to compete with the Western powers at their own game. The country’s rise to a major player on the stage of Western music has been equally spectacular. The connection between these two developments, however, has never been explored. How did making music make Japan modern? How did Japan make music that originated in Europe its own? And what happened to Japan’s traditional music in the process? Music and the Making of Modern Japan answers these questions. Discussing musical modernization in the context of globalization and nation-building, Margaret Mehl argues that, far from being a side-show, music was part of the action on centre stage. Making music became an important vehicle for empowering the people of Japan to join in the shaping of the modern world. In only fifty years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese. Music and the Making of Modern Japan represents a fresh contribution to historical research on making music as a major cultural, social, and political force.

The establishment of a national education system soon after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 is recognized as a significant factor in Japan's modernization, hence research on education is concentrated on the state system. However, this development did not mean the disappearance of the juku, the private academies which were so much a feature of the Tokugawa period. Indeed, these played a far greater role than has been appreciated so far and this book aims to rectify the omission. This comprehensive study of a little-known but significant area not only contributes to a better understanding of education in the Meiji period but is also relevant to the reform of Japan's public education system today. Education was once viewed and organised very differently from today, and the modern state-controlled system we take for granted is just as much a product of historical circumstances as the juku was; it, too, must therefore be open to challenge.

Margaret Mehl describes the rise of modern historical scholarship in the context of the nation state in nineteenth-century Japan. She focuses on the Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo, a research institute which was originally a government office. It was established to compile an official national history to legitimize the new imperial government, which replaced shogunal rule in 1868. The book pays particular attention to the relationship between history and political ideology, German influence and the importance of history for national identity. It will be of special interest to those studying Asian history and Japanese studies.