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•布鲁玛（Ian Buruma），生于荷兰海牙。曾担任《远东经济评论》和《旁观者》杂志记者，为《纽约时报》《新闻周刊》等报刊撰写关于亚洲的政治和文化评论，并曾任教于牛津、哈佛、普林斯顿、格罗宁根等大学。现为《纽约书评》主编、纽约巴德学院保罗•威廉斯教席之民主、人权和新闻学教授。出版的著作有《零年：1945现代世界诞生的时刻》《罪孽的报应：德国和日本的战争记忆》《日本之镜：日本文化中的英雄与恶人》《残忍的剧场》等。2008年被授予“伊拉斯谟奖”以表彰他“在欧洲对文化、社会或社会科学做出的重要贡献”，同年以其卓越的著作帮助美国读者理解亚洲的复杂性而获得“肖伦斯特新闻奖”。2008年和2010年被《外交政策》杂志列入“全球顶尖思想家”。

倪韬，1985年出生，毕业于复旦大学国际政治系，法学学士，现从事新闻工作，任英文报纸Shanghai Daily评论员。