This large, beautiful and indispensable volume is a translation of "Le Japan: Dictionnaire et Civilisation," published in 1996, the year of the author's death. It is a detailed but concise guide to Japanese history from its beginnings until now, filled with general information but with a particular emphasis on religion and the arts. It contains a detailed chronology as well as a concise bibliography. In addition, cross-references and an index help the reader find what is wanted.
Frederic, whose lifelong and final work this was, is well known to anyone interested in Japan for his masterly volume translated into English as "Daily Life in Japan at the Time of the Samurai: 1185-1603." In the introduction to this most readable of social histories, he wrote: "There are countless ways of getting to know a race, countless ways of understanding. Moreover, the Japanese themselves are the first to have extremely diverse and contradictory ideas and points of view about their country."
For this reason, many of the most unified histories of Japan have been written by foreigners -- in English alone, George Sansom, Edward Reischauer and Marius Jansen, among others. The same holds for such historically based works as encyclopedias where the "countless ways" must be refined through knowledge and judicious choice.