Oh, "if men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" Thus Samuel Taylor Coleridge on history.
He might have had more hope had he possessed these chronologies of history from the Paleolithic Era through the Pax Americana of 1998. We can see political patterns repeated and track waves of change, times of peace and war and decades of achievement and devastation.
This book is the first to fully chronicle Asia, with more than 30 chronologies for all its countries. These are compiled in conjunction with a detailed index that allows the reader to find specific information -- the invention of the iron plow, fireworks, the fall of the Han, the rise of Showa.
Under each general area -- China, India and Japan -- are three chronologies on politics/history, art/culture/religion and science/economics, followed by a combined chronology for each of the other nations. There are three appendixes, devoted respectively to the various national days, the technological achievements of Asia and a chronological overview of Asia's entire history.
Though this is very much a bird's-eye view, there is a surprising amount of detail. For example I have before me a lesson learned in 1970. At the end of July that year, there was a photochemical-smog emergency in Tokyo that sickened 8,000 people and led to a ban on automobiles in the central city and, eventually, to an Environment Agency and a compensation law. I had forgotten this, even though I was here.
Standards are also set, including facts and figures. Those murdered by the Japanese Army at Nanjing are numbered at 140,000, which is lower than some figures and higher than others. How anyone will ever know, I do not know -- at any rate, four or 40 is just as atrocious as 140,000.
In addition, there is much welcome historical explication. For example, I have always been a bit dim on the mechanics of the "insei" or "cloistered government" system where the reigning emperor resigns but continues to reign even after the nominal ruler (often a child) succeeded him. The system continued, says this chronology, until 1840. In party politics, it continues even today.
The chronology is broken by quotes, often from literature of the period, that comment upon what is recorded on that page. For the 1972-89 period, when there was the history-textbook "revision" crisis, the Recruit scandal and the arrest of former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, a box in the corner contains a passage from the autobiography of Akira Kurosawa that asks: "Why is it that Japanese people have no confidence in the worth of Japan? Why do they elevate everything foreign and denigrate everything Japanese?"
The sections on Japan are those I feel most competent to comment upon, but the same high level of historical interpretation seems to prevail throughout. One learns much from the political history of Tibet, though the full tragedy is obscured by the cutoff date. The same for Bhutan, that skillfully guided quasi-medieval kingdom I am fortunate enough to have visited. Now I wonder, since television with its attending benefits and ills has recently been allowed in.
Coleridge would, I think, have been particularly interested in the third appendix to these chronologies. Here the double-spread page is divided into four columns and by reading across them we can find that in the 1340s, the Hojo regency was overthrown, Benin was a powerful capital, the cathedral of Florence was going up, Zeami was fiddling with new noh drama, the pyramid at Tenochtitlan was erected, and Geoffrey Chaucer was writing away. How's that for historical patterning and perspectives from the past?
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