The Samurai and the Sacred
While I've seen myself as a history enthusiast, I've definitely read a lot more about the West than the East. So I sought to remedy that by reading The Samurai and the Sacred, a contemporary look into Japanese history and culture. It was an informative book but I felt it was aimed more at those well-versed in Japanese culture than at the layperson.
The book starts off strong and covers exactly what you would expect a book on Japanese culture to cover. The thesis of the book seems to be "the relationship between the Japanese and religion is difficult to quantify and definitely is not what you are commonly taught", and uses the metaphor of a "religious supermarket" to describe the pick-and-choose attitude undertaken by the Japanese with respect to religion. The idea seems to be that instead of having a single religion with a set of beliefs and standards, the Japanese have historically taken many religions and meshed them as needed. The process was definitely not uniform: everybody seems to get a unique blend of religions based on local and temporal influences.
What is confusing in this book is that despite this blend, there seem to be parts in Japan's history where a single, well-established religion (let's take Buddhism as one example) is seen as problematic and somehow de-integrated from the existing culture. Since the book goes out of its way to tell us how well Buddhism and Shinto are in Japan, it's hard to grasp how this happens, and is a point of confusion in the book. The history and interplay involving Christianity is a lot more clear and a lot of this seems to be because Christianity was not integrated as well into Japanese culture as Buddhism was (although over time it appeared to have gained good traction there).
The book is unique in the large number of visuals it displays: nearly every other page has an image on it, and goes a long way towards making the book readable. The iterative style of the book goes a bit against this, however. What I mean is that the book is broken down into themes, so each chapter focuses on a particular theme, and can run from the beginning of Japan's history to the present day. This means that once we've gotten to the present, the very next chapter can jump all the way back to the beginning again. This would be ok but in this book a lot of important events or people were not thoroughly explained the first time through. I had no idea what the Meiji Restoration was until the third time I saw it, when it was finally explained. I get that it wasn't that important the first two times, but since the actual explanation was really only a sentence long, it just created a lot more confusion than necessary.
