A HISTORY OF JAPANESE POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1600-1901, by Hiroshi Watanabe. Translated by David Noble. LTCB International Library Trust, International House of Japan, 2012, 543 pp., ¥3,000 (hardcover)

"The evolution of political thought in this relatively isolated island nation during the period in question is unique to the point of being somewhat freakish," writes political thought scholar Hiroshi Watanabe of the University of Tokyo. This book, first published in 2010, has been newly translated into English.

Maybe all ideas are inherently strange, given the nonsense time tends to make of them. Imagine how odd our thinking will seem 100 years from now — or would have seemed 100 years ago. Is "freakish" too strong a word? Whether it is or not, the ideas Watanabe discusses here with such clarity and vigor are the ones that animated two of the most astonishing phases of Japanese and, arguably, world history: the 2½ centuries of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1867) and the subsequent national transformation of backwater Japan into superpower Japan.