Dyer, Henry. Dai Nippon: a study in national evolution. [*]$3.50. Scribner.
The latest book on Japan by Dr. Henry Dyer, “a hard-headed, thick-skinned Scotchman,” belongs to the literature of knowledge, and will interest especially those who like unembroidered facts and plenty of statistics and tables, and who hate anything like “fine writing,” eloquence or “gush.” The author who established the College of engineering in Japan, has since his return to Great Britain kept in touch with the makers of modern Japan, and “out of the intellectual kinship thus engendered has grown the present work, designed to afford the foreign reader an adequate idea of the spiritual, moral, mental, and material Japan of to-day.” (Outlook). The book does not aim to be a history of Japan, but is rather a study of the influences which have made the country “a member of the community of nations.” The subjects discussed at length are education, the army and navy, means of communication, industrial development, art industries, commerce, food supply, colonization, constitutional government, administration, finance, international relations, foreign politics, social results, the future, and recent events.
“Excellent as the present volume is—among the most lucid and fruitful that have appeared in recent years upon Japan—it is, of necessity, uncritical—accepts the Japanese estimate of themselves and the estimates of their perfervid admirers almost without examination.”
| + + — | Ath. 1905. 1: 8. Ja. 7. 1430w. |
“States all that he sees and knows in terms of plainest common sense. In one point Dr. Dyer has excelled all other writers on Japan. He shows clearly and forcibly, as well as copiously, what the great army of Yatoi, hired assistants and salaried organizers and advisers, in the days of their youth and strength thirty years ago, did for the Japanese in raising their ideals and pointing the way to future success.”
| + + — | Dial. 38: 92. F. 1, ‘05. 540w. |
[*] “He marshals many facts frequently overlooked by writers on twentieth century Japan, but essential to a proper appreciation of the problems—social, religious, economic, and political—now confronting the country.”
| + + | Lit. D. 31: 625. O. 28, ‘05. 270w. |
“Untrustworthy in theories, perhaps no other single volume gives so wide and correct a view of the main facts in the several phases of Japanese national life.”
| + — | Nation. 80: 337. Ap. 27, ‘05. 2710w. |