This book should be required reading for all who want to talk about Korea’s constant, deep-seated anxiety regarding the lack of a place in the Western imagination held by South Korea, and many Koreans’ jealousy of the place that Japan and China have in the Western mind, the foolish attempts to “brand” Korea and market the country onto the imaginative map of Westerners, and so on. What Benfey’s book shows is that Tokyo and Kyoto were not built in a day, and certainly not just in the 20th century. We might remember history as if Americans got interested in Japan …
The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey
