The most recommended books about civilization

Miyamoto is a famous ethnologist who walked the length of Japan, padding through its far-flung hamlets, to compile books about provincial livelihoods in the 1930s. The result is a look into the hard lives of rice farmers and their wives.

Miyamoto’s interviews revealed many of the cultural quirks, such as the promiscuous ways of certain country women and their equally unrestrained suitors—often traders passing through town. The characters Miyamoto interviews offer fascinating, frank, and impactful voices, especially from women who would not have otherwise been heard.

Philosopher Roland Barthes visited Japan in the 1960s when it had rebuilt and reinvented itself as a global economic power. Empire of Signs, which he published a few years later, is a profound, yet entertaining reflection on “otherness” and how it helps us see ourselves. I read the slim volume – in the original French – in the plane that took me to Tokyo for the first time. It was a revelation and has inspired me ever since to look for the myriads of little things that fascinate and contradict all preconceived ideas. The book is a wonderful and subtle lesson in seeing the invisible!

It is impossible to talk about gaming without mentioning the influence Japanese culture has had on the pastime. Specifically, Nintendo. This collection of essays and photos offers an anthropologist’s view to the Kansai region of Western Japan, and helps gamers (and travelers) understand the complex culture in which Nintendo is based.

This is one of the first books on Japan that I read when I moved to the country in 1997, and it still resonates with me. While still a college student, Alex Kerr buys a rundown farmhouse in the Iya Valley of Shikoku, re-thatches it, and maintains the traditional Japanese architecture of pre-WWII Japanese wooden houses.

Kerr went on to write many more books on Japan, most of which have become classics. He is the foundation of the akiya movement, lectures widely around the archipelago, and is responsible for revitalizing country villages around Japan.

Zen and Japanese Culture, the twentieth century's leading work on Zen Buddhism, completely changed my life when I read it at sixteen. This classic text, a profoundly simple introduction to Japanese art and philosophy, held the key to my young compulsion toward the transcendent aesthetic perfection of Japan and began to prepare me for understanding the world of the Geisha. It awakened the need within me to move to Japan to study Zen Buddhism in an authentic Zen Temple. Which I did. 

This is essential background for any reader of the Tale of Genji, the famous novel written by Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century. In a breezy style that pulls the reader along, Morris describes how the court nobles of Heian—the original name for  Kyoto—had created a distinctive high culture inspired by borrowings from China but uniquely Japanese. We learn about a polygamous society in which males among the court nobles competed for the affection of high-born females through poetry and aesthetics. Political ambitions were channeled into the pursuit of higher social rank rather than into government works and policies. That last sentence could describe Japanese politics of today. Readers of this book will learn that even in the eleventh century, Japan already had a sophisticated culture, government, and style of life. The nation’s economic development has roots that extend at least that far into the past. 

This book first excited my interest in the Tokugawa period and directly led to my first two academic books on the subject. Kaempfer’s History of Japan was a best-seller from the date of its publication in London in 1727. The author was a German doctor in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, who were the only Europeans the Tokugawa rulers would allow into Japan until 1853. He was able to make two trips to the capital of Edo, likely the largest city in the world at the time, and thus was able to observe Tokugawa society broadly.

He recorded important events (such as meeting the shogun) as well as the mundane minutiae of life. It is, hands down, the best informed and liveliest foreign account of Tokugawa Japan before the mid-19th century. Bodart-Bailey translated the text from the original German, annotated it, and wrote a very helpful… show more.