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Live Machines: Hired Foreigners and Meiji Japan

mid-Heian to the mid-Muromachi period of conventional historiography) as a single, coherent whole. Yet, although there is every reason to be grateful for this stimulating challenge to some cherished assumptions, it is unfortunate that Ishii's ideas were not developed at somewhat greater length. This book is a distillation—and a distillation into only 130 pages of text—of ideas that Ishii has pursued in much greater depth in his Nihon hoseishi gaisetsu (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1948), Nihon hoseishi gaiyo (Tokyo: Sobunkan, 1952), and Hoseishi, vol. 4 of the Taikei Nihonshi sosho (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1964). Of course, brevity is frequently a virtue^ and a precis of the accumulated wisdom of an eminent scholar is always to be appreciated. Still, in compressing his valuable insights into what is an exceedingly narrow compass, Ishii occasionally provides so little detailed argumentation that a reader who does not already know a great deal about the issues being discussed is likely to be confused. Two examples will suffice here. First, although someone well-versed in early Japanese history might well be prepared to concede that Suiko's reign (592-628) was marked by a major shift toward Chinese patterns of statecraft, the more casual reader of this text might find himself hard pressed to accept the proposition that Shotokutaishi's purported creation of a system of twelve "cap-ranks" in 603 constitutes sufficient grounds for dividing Japan's Ancient from its Archaic Period. And second, it is all very well to argue on purely constitutional grounds that the Medieval Period is best dated from the time in 967 when the Fujiwara Regency first became permanent, but the relationship between this somewhat formal datum and the emergence of "shoenfeudalism" is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, the specialist in Japanese history will find Ishii's insights most stimulating and will be grateful that an exposition of those insights is at last available in English. Let us hope that this is but the beginning, and that further translations of Ishii's work will appear in the future.