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This book is based on the grueling lessons learned by a senior scholar during three decades of tutoring by, and collaboration with, Japanese historians. The book argues for an inductive process in which the scholar seeks out facts on a subject and, through observation and examination of an extensive body of data, is able to discern patterns until it is possible to formulate certain propositions. The book relates how and why the author decided to adopt a positivist approach and explains what he means by the term as it applies to humanistic studies. It enumerates the difficulties linked with reading primary sources in Japanese by looking at a variety of unpublished and published materials and identifying a major problem in reading published primary sources: the intervention of editors and compilers. It illustrates the pitfalls of such intervention by comparing the recently published seventeen-volume diary of Prime Minister Hara Takashi (1856–1921), a photo reproduction of the diary in Hara's own hand, and an earlier published version. Using documents related to Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), a figure of central importance in Japan's post-Restoration political history, the book demonstrates the use of published and transcribed primary sources to sustain, question, or strengthen some of the themes and approaches adopted by non-Japanese scholars working on modern Japanese history. It ends with two case studies, examining closely the methods of the highly acclaimed American historians John W. Dower and Herbert P. Bix.

This book is a challenging new study about the production, spread, and use of understandings of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century Argentina. Based on extensive research of primary and published sources, it analyses how nationalist views about what it meant to be Argentine were built into the country's long-drawn-out crisis of liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s. Eschewing the notion of any straightforward relationship between cultural customs, ideas, and political practices, the study seeks to provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between popular culture, intellectuals, and the state in the promotion, co-option, and repression of conflicting narratives about the nation's history. Particular attention is given to the conditions for the production and political use of cultural goods, especially the writings of historians. The intimate linkage between history and politics, it is argued, helped Argentina's partisan past of the period following independence to cast its shadow onto the middle decades of the twentieth century. This process is scrutinized within the framework of recent approaches to the study of nationalism, in an attempt to communicate the major scholarly debates of this field with the case of Argentina.