In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan’s history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and economic dynamo.

What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues to this day. If one book is to be read in order to understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans, Inventing Japan is surely it.

From the Hardcover edition.

伊恩•布魯瑪（Ian Buruma），生於荷蘭海牙。曾擔任《遠東經濟評論》和《旁觀者》雜誌記者，為《紐約時報》《新聞周刊》等報刊撰寫關於亞洲的政治和文化評論，並曾任教於牛津、哈佛、普林斯頓、格羅寜根等大學。現為《紐約書評》主編、紐約巴德學院保羅•威廉斯教席之民主、人權和新聞學教授。齣版的著作有《零年：1945現代世界誕生的時刻》《罪孽的報應：德國和日本的戰爭記憶》《日本之鏡：日本文化中的英雄與惡人》《殘忍的劇場》等。2008年被授予“伊拉斯謨奬”以錶彰他“在歐洲對文化、社會或社會科學做齣的重要貢獻”，同年以其卓越的著作幫助美國讀者理解亞洲的復雜性而獲得“肖倫斯特新聞奬”。2008年和2010年被《外交政策》雜誌列入“全球頂尖思想傢”。

倪韜，1985年齣生，畢業於復旦大學國際政治係，法學學士，現從事新聞工作，任英文報紙Shanghai Daily評論員。