Book Reply was New Oda Nobunaga Book

|The problem I have with the field of
| Japanese historiograpy is that there are few (very few) well written
| narrative histories like the type done by say Robert Massie, Simon Schama,
| David McCollough, or Stephan Ambrose. While I*am*not a historian I do love
a
| good book on history.

But I see a couple of reasons for this. One, you don't have as many people
trained in Japanese history in the West as say European or American history.
Your pool of potential writers is much smaller.

Second, for the authors you list above, while writing good introductory
books, these would not necessarily make tenure committees or promotion
committees happy. In fact, one could advance the thesis that the more
popular and well received a non-fiction book is by
the general public, the less academics will like it.

Third, is there a market for books as you want on medieval Japanese history?
Publishing is a money making enterprise and most publishers seem to shy away
from books that don't sell well over 10,000 copies.

Later, Mark Hall