"The Making of Modern Japan," Marius Jansen's last work, is a reliable, solid and authoritative interpretation of Japan's recent past. It is a fitting testament to a learned man whose scholarly career might be described using the same terms: reliable, solid and authoritative.
As a pioneer in establishing Japanese studies as a modern academic field in the United States, Jansen guided successive generations of postwar students and scholars. The distance he traveled can be seen in his career's starting and end points. When he began studying in the U.S. Army in 1943, his subject was the obscure language of a supposedly enigmatic enemy nation.
As Jansen demonstrated in a survey of the field for the Japan Foundation several years ago, since the mid-1940s Japanese studies has become an established academic field, one replete with study centers in universities across the globe, conferences and specialized journals. Along the way, Japan and the Japanese have shifted from being the inscrutable other to subjects routinely and thoroughly scrutinized.