Part I The Civilizational Background; Chapter 1 Japan in Context: The West, the East and the Far East; Chapter 2 Cultural Patterns and Civilizational Complexes; Chapter 3 The Constitution of the Japanese Tradition; Part II Court, Domain and State; Chapter 4 Japan and Europe; Chapter 5 Decomposition and Reconstruction; Part III The Tokugawa Synthesis; Chapter 6 Pseudo-archaism and Proto-modernity; Chapter 7 Crisis, Containment and Transformation; Part IV Japanese Patterns of Modernity; Chapter 8 Theoretical Perspectives; Chapter 9 Modernization and Westernization; Chapter 10 The Japanese Reinvention of Capitalism;

First published in 1997. This book is addressed to two kinds of readers: to social theorists, on the grounds that the Japanese experience is or should be of particular relevance to their problems, and to scholars working on Japanese history, culture and society, in the hope that the theoretical interpretations outlined below may be of some interest to them.