Includes bibliographical references (pages 379-388) and index.

Maps, tables, and figures -- Preface -- Introduction: Enduring imprints of the longer past -- Part 1: Crisis Of The Tokugawa Regime: -- 1: Tokugawa polity: -- Unification -- Tokugawa political settlements: -- Daimyo -- Imperial institution -- Samurai -- Villagers and city-dwellers -- Margins of the Japanese and Japan -- 2: Social and economic transformations: -- Seventeenth-century boom -- Riddles of stagnation and vitality -- 3: Intellectual world of late Tokugawa: -- Ideological foundations of the Tokugawa regime -- Cultural diversity and contradictions -- Reform, critiques, and insurgent ideas -- 4: Overthrow of the Tokugawa: -- Western powers and the unequal treaties -- Crumbling of Tokugawa rule -- Politics of terror and accommodation -- Bakufu revival, the Satsuma-Choshu insurgency, and domestic unrest -- Part 2: Modern Revolution, 1868-1905: -- 5: Samurai revolution: -- Programs of nationalist revolution: -- Political unification and central bureaucracy -- Eliminating the status system -- Conscript army -- Compulsory education -- Monarch at the center -- Building a rich country -- Stances toward the world -- 6: Participation and protest: -- Political discourse and contention -- Movement for freedom and people's rights -- Samurai rebellions, peasant uprisings, and new religions -- Participation for women -- Treaty revision and domestic politics -- Meiji constitution -- 7: Social, economic, and cultural transformations: -- Landlords and tenants -- Industrial revolution -- Workforce and labor conditions -- Spread of mass and higher education -- Culture and religion -- Affirming Japanese identity and destiny -- 8: Empire and domestic order: -- Trajectory to empire -- Contexts of empire, capitalism, and nation-building -- Turbulent world of diet politics -- Era of popular protest -- Engineering nationalism.

Part 3: Imperial Japan From Ascendance To Ashes: -- 9: Economy and society: -- Wartime boom and postwar bust -- Landlords, tenants, and rural life -- City life: middle and working classes -- Cultural responses to social change -- 10: Democracy and empire between the world wars: -- Emergence of party cabinets -- Structure of parliamentary government -- Ideological challenges -- Strategies of imperial democratic rule -- Japan, Asia, and the western powers -- 11: Depression crisis and responses: -- Economic and social crisis -- Breaking the impasse: new departures abroad -- Toward a new social and economic order -- Toward a new political order -- 12: Japan in wartime: -- Wider war in China -- Toward Pearl Harbor -- Pacific war -- Mobilizing the nation for war -- Living in the shadow of war -- Ending the war -- Burdens and legacies of war -- 13: Occupied Japan: new departures and durable structures: -- Bearing the unbearable -- American agenda: demilitarize and democratize -- Japanese responses -- Reverse course -- Toward recovery and independence: another unequal treaty? -- Part 4: Postwar And Contemporary Japan, 1952-2012: -- 14: Economic and social transformations: -- Postwar "economic miracle" -- Transwar patterns of community, family, school, and work -- Shared experiences and standardized lifeways of the postwar era -- Differences enduring and realigned -- Managing social stability and change -- Images and ideologies of social stability and change -- 15: Political struggles and settlements of the high-growth era: -- Political struggles -- Politics of accommodation -- Global connections: oil crisis and the end of high growth -- 16: Global power in a polarized world: Japan in the 1980s -- New roles in the world and new tensions -- Economy: thriving through the oil crises -- Politics: conservative heyday -- Society and culture in the exuberant eighties -- 17: Japan's "lost decades": 1989-2008: -- End of Showa -- Specter of a divided society -- Economy of the first "lost decade" -- Fall and rise of the liberal democratic party -- Assessing reforms, explaining recovery -- Between Asia and the west -- 18: Shock, disaster, and aftermath: Japan since 2008: -- Lehman shock -- Politics of hope and disillusionment -- Making sense of the perception of decline -- Disasters of "3-11" and their aftermath -- Appendix prime ministers of Japan, 1885-2012 -- Notes -- Select bibliography -- Index.