The Shortest History of Japan
By Lesley Downer
Old Street Publishing (2024)
ISBN-13: 978-1913083632
Review by Laurence Green
Lesley Downer will be most familiar to many for her many volumes - both in fiction and non-fiction - on the mysterious world of the geisha, with her Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World seen as a definitive work on the subject. Originally released around the turn of the Millenium in the wake of the all-encompassing geisha boom instigated by the remarkable success of Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha and its subsequent movie adaptation, Downer’s historical survey of this enticing world of art and beauty remains a clear entry point for those looking to learn more about a subject often muddied by misconception.
Who better then to expand that clear-eyed historical scope to the subject of Japan as a whole? The Shortest History of… series has been running for a while now, taking in locales ranging from England to India, as well as more thematic studies including Democracy, War and Economics. Their great success, in an age of short attention spans, Tik Tok and reading time invariably crammed into hectic commutes, is to pack what might in years past been presented in epic multi-volume historical tomes into snappy clear-cut surveys that not only tell the story of their events and key players with clinical precision but do so with an eye to bite-size chunks of narrative. This is history that can be consumed at a sitting, each chapter offering up a clear, self-contained passage of time told in a manner that allows the reader to come away with a fresh perspective on how it might relate to today.
What’s important to note here is that Downer’s “Shortest” history of Japan is precisely that, a history - those looking for a way into contemporary Japan and its many manifestations of popular culture are better served elsewhere. Of the book’s 235 pages, it takes until nearly page 200 to reach World War 2, meaning the vast bulk of the historical narrative here places its focus squarely on Japan “of old”. This is no bad thing - many of Japan’s most labyrinthine subjects, eg. the rise and fall of the samurai class, and its ever-changing capital cities - are given the attention they need here, and done so in a manner that breaks them down into manageable sub-sections.
Therefore, we get a pacey run-through of Japan’s broad historical eras - Heian (794-1180), Kamakura (1180-1333), Muromachi (1333-1573) and so on, with each of these further divided into short segments that pick up the points in time that acted as clear pivots or points of note in that top level narrative. Of particular clarity and interest are the many sections on Japanese religion, the import of Buddhism to Japan, and the theme of Mappo - or The Latter Days of the Law - occurring around 1052, when after a period since the Buddha’s death, it was feared ‘his teachings would lose their power and the world would enter an age of decadence, destruction and chaos’. The capital of Heian-kyo began to crumble and the surrounding vicinity became wasteland, plagued by thieves and beggars, as well as becoming a dumping ground for corpses and unwanted babies. Downer’s prose is lucid and vivid with its imagery - illustrating memorably moments in time that feel unknowable to us 1000 years hence.
All this is supplemented by box-outs devoted to historical figures or themes of particular historical note, for example the 12th century woman warrior Tomeo Gozen, or the ever popular Friar Tuck-like figure Benkei, a giant mountain priest who serves his master Yoshitsune with loyalty until his final last-man-standing showdown, where he dies on his feet, his body pierced ‘like a porcupine’ by arrows as he holds off the enemy, allowing time for Yoshitsune to flee.
For those freshly under the spell of the lavish TV drama Shogun, Downer’s history serves as a pitch-perfect primer to Japan; concise and eminently readable, but backed up with a clear depth of knowledge. This is no cheap-and-cheerful tourist booklet, to be crammed down on the flight to Tokyo, but rather the distilled essence of Japan as an object of study, built up over generations of scholarship and now re-fashioned into a more modest, manageable format. This might be the shortest history of Japan, but like the best of appetisers, it offers just enough to whet your appetite, priming the stage for further ventures into whichever aspect of Japan’s multifaceted history best catches your fancy.