Edited by Donald Denoon, Mark Hudson, Gavan McCormack, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki. This collection of papers brings together the powerful tools of historiography, archaeological evidence, linguistics and postmodern critical theory to demolish the modern nationalistic ideology of a monocultural Japan projected back into the past. This collection of papers was commissioned in connection with a 1993 academic conference on Japanese identity at ANU in Canberra. The book is therefore best understood as a conference proceedings. That takes away the expectation of systematic or exhaustive treatment of themes along with the suitability of the collection as a textbook.
Concise chapters give deep insight into areas each author has researched.
Readers are expected to have a basic understanding of Japanese time periods, but otherwise specialist jargon is used sparingly. But again, the proceedings would not serve well as an introduction to Japanese culture, because the reader needs to place many powerful insights in perspective without becoming too disillusioned about Japanese scholarship to study original sources any further. For despite pulling their punches, the overall findings of these Japanese as well as non-Japanese authors can be rather devastating. Instead of welcoming the latest archaeological discovery on the front page of the vernacular dailies, the reader may start to wince at the tendentious attempts to read a distinctive Japaneseness into roots without grounds. Having taken the trouble, for example, to read what Japanese archaeologists are telling the public, one could feel duped by assertions such as that the Jomon period people were identical to the Japanese today.