Akira Iriye presented the information in this book as a lecture series in 1989 and later had it published in this form. He discusses China and Japan in their international roles and relations from the 1880's to relative present, dividing the periods into "power," "culture," and "economics." I will begin by presenting a brief summary of the book, followed by a critique on the information presented and the way it was presented. I will conclude my paper with a conclusion of how the information Iriye wrote of related to our class.
The first and perhaps most permeating aspect of the book is the focus on military power and the relationships it formed between China and Japan. To do so, Iriye first delves into the historical role of military in both countries. China is presented as a country that, while not unfamiliar to military, has founded a civilization on the belief that military is more of a necessary evil while civilization itself, mixed with culture and the accompanying tassels are what truly defined a historical China and established the mind set of the Chinese elite as they entered the modern setting. In fact, the groundwork of the modern army that was established in the latter half of the 19th century had a focus primarily on provincial armies dedicated to quelling peasant uprisings, rather than resisting imperialist aggressions by the militant western states. The military views would be one of the many facets of Chinese culture that would be revolutionized in the modernizing of the Chinese state. .
The Japanese began mobilizing a centralized military in 1871, using samurai who knew how to properly mobilize an army, as opposed to the scholar-gentry who were charged with the military in China. Japan also began to think of external threats, specifically, a hypothetical Russian war (which eventually became reality) which enabled the Japanese to solidify a central army against a central external threat.