Im looking for a good text book for studying Japanese history and geography any suggestions?
Im looking for a good text book for studying Japanese history and geography any suggestions?
For history and geography (my major and minor, by the way), you want to steer as far away from textbooks as possible. Textbooks are always written about topics that are too broad for what you are looking for, probably the best geo textbook would be Asia, there will be history ones, but a regular book is always better and goes into far greater depth. If you are just getting into the field, it is helpful to first chose a relative time period. Or you can get a general Japanese history book, the Table of Contents will tell you if it is really worth your time., make sure that they give you dates, a lot of history books can only cover a certain period, either from the beginning up to some sort of milestone, or just modern, such as when the Japanese Empire opened up to the west and went to war with Russia. If you are in college you can get books through inter library loan if you school does not have these, as my school doesn’t have anything on Russian geography!
As far as geography is concerned, you may actually want to look at a basic volcano-type book first, as Japan is actually just a series of volcanic islands. You also need to think about what type of geography you want to study, either human/cultural (things like migration, settlement, development, growth, etc) or physical (geology, physical features, and physics). You do not have to chose, doing a search for geography, Japan, will bring up some good books, but most of them will be physically focused, just so you know, unless you specifically search for human or cultural geography.