Tessa Morris-Suzuki offers a overview of recent scholarship regarding changing Japanese notions of nation, culture, race, gender, civilization and citizenship, with a particular and distinctive emphasis on the spatial and temporal dimensions of these concepts. Her writing is lucid and nuanced, and her treatment of these topics is both accessible to a general audience and of interest to specialists in the field.

Morris-Suzuki has written a work which is comprehensive, particularly in terms of Meiji era Japanese economic thought, when it was still emerging from its feudal roots and becoming mixed with the more academic Western thinking of that time. Not enough attention is given to the influences of the protectionist thinkers, like Henry Charles Carey and - particularly - Friedrich List, but the fact remains that her research shows she knows the literature and her conclusions are sound. Frankly, we need more books like this one if we are to ever come to terms with the Japanese economic challenge