MARIUS JANSEN, DEAN of American historians of modern Japan, liked the word “magisterial,” which is exactly what this work is. Published weeks before his death in December 2000, The Making of Modern Japan is the fruit of six decades of scholarship, chronicling Japan's political, intellectual, and economic life from 1600 to 2000.

The book treads a middle road between narrative survey and analytical essay. Drawing on the majority of English-language works on Japan, as well as many in Japanese, it approaches Japan's past first chronologically, then topically. The long section on the Tokugawa era (1600 to 1868), for example, looks first at the political system, then, serially, at foreign relations, status groups, urbanization, mass culture, and intellectual life, before moving to the dramatic changes of the mid-nineteenth century. The Meiji era (1868 to 1912), when Japan rushed to modernity, is treated similarly, as are the periods of war and recovery in the twentieth century. As a result, differences over time sometimes get muddled, but the tapestry surrounding each topic is richly nuanced.

The Making of Modern Japan is traditional history at its most essential, both good and bad. For one thing, it abounds in stories. It opens with the tale of Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu giving his daughter, as a dowry present, an eight-screen painting of his battle victory at Sekigahara in 1600. Nearly two centuries later, there comes the tale of physician Sugita Genpaku arranging for the nighttime autopsy of an old woman, to see if Dutch anatomical sketches were correct (they were, and Sugita became a founder of Western studies). And 150 years after that, in 1929, we see an angry young emperor Hirohito telling Prime Minister Tanaka Gi’ichi that he should resign for mishandling a case of military insubordination in Manchuria. Jansen has few peers in using the pithy story to illustrate the larger point.

A less satisfying facet of his traditionalism is the overweening focus on political and intellectual elites. Workers and women appear, but always on the margins, never speaking. The book's assertion that by the 1800s the value of all groups within Japan's society had become congruent (p.222), surely could not have been made if Jansen had seriously examined commoners.