Tanaka, Stefan 1952–

PERSONAL:

Born August 8, 1952. Education: University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1986.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of California, San Diego, History Department, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093-0104. E-mail—stanaka@ucsd.edu.

CAREER:

Academic and historian. University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, associate professor of history.

WRITINGS:

Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1993.

New Times in Modern Japan, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

Stefan Tanaka is an academic and historian. Born on August 8, 1952, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1986. Tanaka eventually went on to become an associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include issues dealing with the social constitution of time in modern societies, primarily the way that communication technologies and the media are able to invent and reinvent pasts. Tanaka published his first book, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History, in 1993.

Tanaka published his second book, New Times in Modern Japan, in 2004. The book looks into the pivotal moment in Japan's history when, in 1872, the Meiji government instituted the change of calendars in favor of following the Gregorian one and adopting the system of a twenty-four-hour day. In the process of making these time changes, Japan's past also was altered as a result in order to make Japan's climb to Western-defined modernity more palpable to the population. The change resulted in Japan glorifying sites from its past as opposed to artifacts. Through modernity, Japan partly distanced itself from its history as its people began to see themselves as a geographical part of a bigger world and gained a sense of nationalism in the process. Tanaka then explains how literature, the arts, and history itself was used to enhance Japan's new sense of nationhood and promote the idea of a seemingly immeasurable existence of the island nation. He also shows the unique difficulties Japan struggled with in facing the two forces of modernization and Westernization.

W. Dean Kinzley, writing in the Historian, remarked: "Although thought provoking, this new book is too often repetitious and difficult to follow," adding that more linearity and order would have helped to "make his story and arguments clearer and more compelling." Kinzley concluded that "for scholars of time and modernity, this book will provide useful comparativist insights." Mark A. Jones, writing in Pacific Affairs, commented that the insights in the book should encourage "scholars to rethink how they locate and explain the modern transformation of a non-Western country that was also part of a globe equally swept up in transformative change during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." Ann M. Harrington, writing in History: Review of New Books, found that New Times in Modern Japan "provides many new insights into Meiji Japan, and will open new areas of research in the understanding of modern Japan and in the concept of time in history."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October 1, 1994, George M. Wilson, review of Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History, p. 1381; December 1, 2006, Leslie Pincus, review of New Times in Modern Japan, p. 1485.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, January 1, 1994, J.H. Bailey, review of Japan's Orient, p. 846.

Historian, March 22, 2006, W. Dean Kinzley, review of New Times in Modern Japan, p. 178.

History: Review of New Books, September 22, 2005, Ann M. Harrington, review of New Times in Modern Japan, p. 26.

History: The Journal of the Historical Association, June 1, 1995, Margaret Mehl, review of Japan's Orient, p. 268.

Journal of Asian History, March 22, 1996, Linda H. Chance, review of Japan's Orient, p. 108.

Journal of Asian Studies, February 1, 1994, Kyu Hyun Kim, review of Japan's Orient, p. 233; May 1, 2005, Daniel Botsman, review of New Times in Modern Japan, p. 477.

Journal of Japanese Studies, June 22, 1994, Takashi Fujitani, review of Japan's Orient, p. 547.

Pacific Affairs, September 22, 2005, Mark A. Jones, review of New Times in Modern Japan, p. 483.

Times Literary Supplement, September 10, 1993, Carol Gluck, review of Japan's Orient, p. 8.

ONLINE

University of California, San Diego, Department of History Web site,http://ucsd.edu/ (May 15, 2008), author profile.