Joshua Fogel's work is a translation of a monograph by Ōba Osamu entitled Edo jidai no Nit-Chū hiwa (Japanese-Chinese relations of the Edo period). As in all translations, Fogel is not so much literal translator as he is artist, striving for a balance between legible English prose and faithfulness to the original Japanese text. Readers of Western-style history might be surprised by the style of the book since Ōba, like many Japanese scholars of the time, did not use endless footnotes; rather, the many scholars to whom Ōba refers, as well as the titles of their works, are simply mentioned in the text without page numbers or other bibliographical information. Another wonderful peculiarity of Ōba's work is that not only is it history of the finest order, but it is also peppered throughout with personal reflections on the author's wide-ranging research.

This book makes two major contributions to the field of Edo-period foreign relations. First, when the bakufu was wrestling with the arrival of Westerners from 1853 onwards, the fashion amongst even scholars of the period has been to see Western studies as paramount, when in fact, as Ōba masterfully points out, Kangaku, or Chinese studies, was at least if not more important to those wishing to gain a more thorough understanding of the nineteenth-century world. When Japanese scholars read Western works of political philosophy, for example, they read them not in Western languages, but in classical Chinese translation. Secondly, while there has been an overwhelming emphasis on the role that the Dutch played in the bakufu's knowledge of the outside world, the Chinese role was probably much more important. The Chinese supplied the shogunate with annual reports on the goings on in the world, imported to Japan reams and reams of books on all manner of subjects, and brought to Japan exotic flora and fauna from across Southeast Asia, as illustrated by an account of a pair of elephants imported for the shogun.

The book can be divided into two parts: the first deals with a detailed study of the Chinese book trade in Japan and the second is an equally detailed study of the mechanics of the Sino-Japanese trade. In the first part, Ōba outlines the titles of various Chinese books brought to Japan as well as the process by which those books were received. He provides, for example, a description of the “Inspectorate of Books,” an office held by the Mukai family, explaining that the inspectorate was instituted in an attempt to prevent the importation of books that had even the slightest reference to Christianity. Along the way we are treated to Ōba's wealth of knowledge about Chinese books and his ability to make his way through archives both in Japan and China, an ability that I can personally attest will make any scholar of Japanese history feel absolutely inadequate. Ōba goes on to detail who amongst the powerful officials and daimyo of Japan were ordering these books and how such books made their way into Japanese libraries.

The second part of the book is a detailed description of the Chinese who came to Japan, the types of ships they sailed on, the people who worked on the ships, the items the ships were importing, and the Japanese goods carried out of the country. A number of prominent Chinese are listed, including a scholar named Shen Xie'an who was responsible for preparing Chinese texts for the shogun Yoshimune, for which he was handsomely rewarded. In an interesting footnote, Ōba notes that in a few cases, Japanese translations of Chinese classics were later sent back to China where they had been lost, a point, no doubt, of some pride on the part of the Japanese, and an example of what Ōba calls “Sino-Japanese cultural interchange in the Edo period that has left a legacy to the present” (p. 161).

For even scholars of the Edo period, many parts of Ōba's book can seem laden with minutiae, for example, the many Chinese books imported to Japan in the first section of the book, or the many different sorts of people who served on the Chinese ships in the second part. It might have made the book more accessible to edit out some of the detail and in its place provide a little more background information about the Edo period, both within Japan and internationally, perhaps in an extended translator's preface. This, however, is most definitely a minor quibble, for in the end, Professor Fogel has provided the scholarly community with an eminently readable English translation of a classic of Edo-period history in which Professor Ōba's often humorous anecdotes, mixed in with his immense knowledge of his subject, make this important work a pleasure to read.