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Capital and Countryside in Japan, 300-1180: Japanese Historians Interpreted in English , no. 129 in the Cornell East Asia Series, is a collection of essays that discuss center-periphery relations in premodern Japan. Arranged in chronological order, the fourteen essays of the tome provide a lucid overview of the institutional and political transformations that took place on the Japanese archipelago between the fourth and thirteenth centuries. However, there is much more to Capital and Countryside than this simple description indicates.
Each of the essays is a translation/interpretation/explanation of scholarship originally published in Japanese. For the volume's compilation, Joan R. Piggott requested seven "American researcher[s] ... to select essays to which they frequently returned, and which are still cited frequently in contemporary scholarship" (p. 1). Exactly why the list of contributors was limited to U.S.(-based) scholars remains unexplained. Given Piggott's strong presence in the work--not only is she the editor of the volume, she also contributed six essays in addition to the introduction--one wonders why interpretations by non-U.S. scholars such as Gina L. Barnes, Charlotte von Verschuer, and Francine Hérail are absent. Possibly as a result of this, Capital and Countryside contains very few references to translations or secondary sources in languages other than English or Japanese.
Nevertheless, in terms of being "a valuable source for everyone interested in premodern Japan" and "useful for advanced courses and seminars in Japanese history" (back cover blurb), Capital and Countryside exceeds expectations, as it makes influential research in Japanese widely accessible to nonspecialists.
The majority of the texts appear in English for the first time; the only...