Background
Seidensticker, Edward George was born on February 11, 1921 in Castle Rock, Colorado, United States. Son of Edward George and Mary Elizabeth (Dillon) Seidensticker.
(This book looks at the metamorphosis of Japan from a coun...)
This book looks at the metamorphosis of Japan from a country with little contact with the outside world to one brimming with Western ideas and technologies. Seidensticker focuses on Tokyo in the years between the Meiji Restoration and the earthquake of 1923 to illustrate this change. He shows how Tokyo, which was called Edo until 1867, emerged from being the shogun's capital and the biggest city in a country which had been closed to the outside world for two and a half centuries, to a modern city, open to Western ideas.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394507304/?tag=2022091-20
(Engagingly written. A stylist of great attainments, Seide...)
Engagingly written. A stylist of great attainments, Seidensticker has a nice way with an aphorism, and his prose is studded with observations that linger in the memory...Low City, High City is an uncommonly perceptive and revealing analysis of the Westernization or modernization of Japan...It illuminates the extraordinary metamorphosis of Japan over the last 125 years more effectively and pleasurably than many books that have tackled the theme head on. (Robert C. Christopher New York Times Book Review ) I cannot imagine a finer work on the subject nor a more knowledgeable guide. Nor one more imbued with that special feeling which this city ideally calls forth...The century has seen an incredible amount of change and it is this upon which we ought properly to focus. Seidensticker gives us example after example in this rich, generous, overflowing book...What an enchanting book this is. (Donald Richie Japan Times ) Seidensticker has admirably re-created the vibrant, even tumultuous, spirit of those days when kimonos, parasols, and topknots were first traded for trousers, derby hats, and horn-rimmed glasses. (Wilson Quarterly ) It is a story...less of revolution and disaster than of the 'little things'...which only adds to the engrossing texture of this elegiac prose tour of a Tokyo lost. (Bloomsbury Review ) Product Description This book looks at the metamorphosis of Japan from a country with little contact with the outside world to one brimming with Western ideas and technologies. Seidensticker focuses on Tokyo in the years between the Meiji Restoration and the earthquake of 1923 to illustrate this change. He shows how Tokyo, which was called Edo until 1867, emerged from being the shogun's capital and the biggest city in a country which had been closed to the outside world for two and a half centuries, to a modern city, open to Western ideas.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QBNV6I/?tag=2022091-20
("These two volumes by Edward Seidensticker may well be th...)
"These two volumes by Edward Seidensticker may well be the envy of every university press…desirable reading for amateur historians and tourists alike."—Thomas Stanley, Director of Walk Japan Limited There can be few cities in the world that live, pulsate, and breathe through their geography as Tokyo does, few cities with a history that shifts through the creases of space as does that of Tokyo. This is particularly ironic in a city whose neighborhoods today hold few distinctive features and whose gentle topography has been all but obscured by batteries of building. But it was not always so, and what better way is there of writing Tokyo's history than by reflecting this shifting geography as neighborhoods prospered and declined while others, more aspirational, climbed up the socio–spacial ladder? This is precisely what Edward Seidensticker does in the pages of these books, brought together here together for the first time under one cover with numerous illustrations and an insert of beautifully colored Japanese woodblock prints of Tokyo from the era. Tokyo: From Edo to Showa tells the story and history of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to one of the most renowned modern cities in the world. With the same scholarship and style that won him admiration as one of the premier translators of Japanese literature, Seidensticker offers the reader his own brilliant picture of a whole society suddenly emerging into the modern world. By turns elegiac and funny, reflective and crisp, Tokyo: From Edo to Showa is an important cultural history of Asia's greatest city.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4805310243/?tag=2022091-20
(The Great Earthquake of 1923 left much of Tokyo desolate....)
The Great Earthquake of 1923 left much of Tokyo desolate. Shitamachi, the Low City, heart of Tokyo's cultural life for centuries, was a smoking ruin--hundreds of blocks of wooden dwellings, teahouses, and entertainment quarters gone forever. Yet Tokyo was a city that would not die. Here, in his brilliant sequel to "Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake," Edward Seidensticker carries the story of this irrepressible metropolis forward to the present, showing it rising not only from the disaster of the earthquake but a second time, from the still more serious catastrophe of 1945, to become a city in which skyscrapers stand in the midst of neighborhoods jammed full of little bars and "soaplands," baseball is the national sport, one can spend $500 on a meal, the best subway system in the world is matched by the worst traffic jams, and only a multimillionaire can afford to buy a house. Exciting, horrifying, utterly distinctive, modern Tokyo comes to life in "Tokyo Rising" as never before.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394543602/?tag=2022091-20
Japanese language and literature educator
Seidensticker, Edward George was born on February 11, 1921 in Castle Rock, Colorado, United States. Son of Edward George and Mary Elizabeth (Dillon) Seidensticker.
Bachelor of Arts, University Colorado, 1942; Master of Arts, Columbia University, 1947; postgraduate, Harvard University, 1947-1948; Doctor of Letters (honorary), University Maryland., 1991.
With, United States Foreign Service, Department State, Japan, 1947-1950; member of faculty, Stanford University, 1962-1966; professor, Stanford University, 1964-1966; professor department Far Eastern languages and literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1966-1977; professor Japanese, Columbia University, 1977-1985; professor emeritus, Columbia University, since 1986.
(This book looks at the metamorphosis of Japan from a coun...)
("These two volumes by Edward Seidensticker may well be th...)
(The Great Earthquake of 1923 left much of Tokyo desolate....)
(The Great Earthquake of 1923 left much of Tokyo desolate....)
(Book by Seidensticker, Edward)
(Book by Seidensticker, Edward)
(Engagingly written. A stylist of great attainments, Seide...)
Served with United States Marine Corps Reserve, 1942-1946.