ENNOBLING JAPAN'S SAVAGE NORTHEAST: Tohoku as Postwar Thought, 1945-2011

摘要

Nathan Hopson's book, a "history of ideas, ideas about the idea of Tohoku" (17), is a triumph of contemporary Japanese intellectual history. It is also a work of historical synthesis grounded in the regional, but national in scope with a focus on Tohoku, an administrative region in the rural northeast of Honshu Island. Bringing together articulations of Tohoku-as-idea over a half century-both popular and academic, obscure, and canonical-Hopson accomplishes a number of challenging feats. The most obvious intervention is historiographical. Over the course of the book, Hopson explains how various authors mobilized Tohoku-as-idea in the post-war era, thereby illuminating the multiple retellings of the history of Japan's northeast over a millennium along with hotly contested scholarly debates about the role of this region within the Japanese nation. With Ennobling Japan's Savage Northeast, Hopson succeeds in integrating post-war Tohoku studies into the intellectual history of contemporary Japan while also enriching the national history of Japan with a clear articulation of a multi-vocal, regional past of Tohoku.