Review of "East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History," Ebrey, et.al

Susan W. Brown
The Park School
Baltimore, Maryland
Upper School Art History and Studio Art
4th and 5th Grade Studio Art
I came to the Ebrey text a neophyte—I know very little about Japanese history. I’ve taught visual arts to 4th and 5th graders for 15 years and Western art history to grades 10 through 12 for the past 10. My art history class this fall was my first foray into East Asia; although I hoped to cover both China and Japan, we only skimmed the surface of Chinese art. As I reread Ebrey in preparation for our trip and to familiarize myself with the history I will teaching to my students next fall, a number of things struck me—some positive, many negative.
At its best, the Ebrey text gives the reader a working overview of Japan’s governmental systems (the shogunate, the daimyo, the “bakufu,” the dissolution of the shogunate, the turmoil that follows, the imperial restoration, just to name a few), the changing economic conditions as the country moved from its agrarian roots to a “modern” industrial nation, the shifting class systems as the population moved between village and city, and the tensions inherent in society experiencing continual, monumental changes. What I found new and most interesting were the “Material Culture” insets: that the approach to Night Soil followed the stratified aspects of society at large, that human power propelled transportation until the advent of the rickshaw in 1869, that rice (rice!) was not a staple of the Japanese diet until its importation from China and Korea in the last quarter of the 19th century and that new selections of meats and selective adaptation of Western foods help improve Japanese nutrition, that as the middle class shifted from merchants to government bureaucrats their housing needs also shifted, that the transistor (a staple of my own childhood) went through a number of incarnations before its “technological breakthrough based on high-performance alloy germanium,” and finally, the rise of Manga with its cultural and societal implications.
I would be hard pressed to use Ebrey for anything other than short, supplemental readings as I did when I taught the art of China last fall. The text is dry, choppy and hard to follow. The visuals are disappointing in their size, quality and labeling. Ebrey at times deals with cause and effect, but rarely is there an interesting narrative that moves the reader forward or impels her to want to know more. People, drama, anecdotal stories and experiences, and the examination of primary sources all make for fascinating historical reading; they peak your interesting and keep you questioning. Ebrey deals with all of these, but only tangentially, through insets and text interruptions, not within the main body of the text. The Manga inset encapsulates what can be so intriguing about history and what Ebrey does so rarely: to take a topic or idea, deal with its inception, explore its rise and decline (and in this case its popular appeal) and relate those factors to societal conditions. Ebrey focuses on facts, figures and abstractions while only dabbling in the interesting.