The Beginner’s Guide to Medieval Japan (Illustrated) (English Edition)

The public to which this work is tendered is not those professional historians and students of history now abounding in our country, who are already perplexedly encumbered with, and engrossed by, a superfluity of overdetailed materials and a plethora of contradictory conjectures and hypotheses. In short, the book is, strictly speaking, intended for those Europeans and Americans who would like to dip into the past, as well as peer into the future, of Japan,—Japan, not as a land of quaint curios and picturesque paradoxes only worthy to be preserved intact for a show, but as a land inhabited by a nation striving hard to improve itself, and to take a share, however humble, in the common progress of the civilization of the world.