Asia Jinbutsu-shi (Great Figures in the History of Asia, 12 Volumes)

The present series of books, published as the 95th anniversary project of Shueisha, is a quite ambitious one which aims at delineating the whole history of Asia from the dawn of civilizations to modern times through the biographies of diverse figures who have lived in Asia. It is an unprecedented attempt involving more than one hundred and seventy authors of diverse disciplines, not limited to history, in depicting as many as ten thousand historical figures. The fact that such a project could be launched and completed demonstrates the deep layers of Asian studies accumulated in Japan through the ages.
 
Volumes are divided period-wise, with some overlaps, and each chapter basically forms a cluster consisting of a main figure and the others related with her/him. The relations among those figures are defined widely and include not only the actual social connections but also relations formed by contemporaneity, by influences of ideas and activities, and even by perceptions of later generations. A reader may pick up and read a volume covering a person or a period which interests her/him. Going through the entire volume beyond a single chapter or a cluster, s/he will realize that an unimaginably wide range of people lived in the same period and will obtain a certain vision of the period itself. Further, by going through all the volumes, s/he can read the dynamism of history through which respective areas of Asia, which affected each other within certain geographical limits, started to be more closely linked together following the Mongolian integration of most of Eurasia, later experienced the parallel processes of early modern development, were then forced to confront the common problem of modernization due to the European expansion, and finally came to the present state of mutual entanglement through this process of modernization. It is a great surprise to me, a scholar specializing in the ancient and early medieval history of South Asia, in which the personal characters of historical figures are beyond our reach due to the limitation of available sources, that we can so vividly depict the period and society, and also their changes, by focusing on particular figures who lived in them.
 
Adding to that, there is one more thing I would like to draw to the attention of our readers: the kinds of relations we authors have established with the figures we have depicted. As in the cases of the Buddha and Ashoka in Volume One, people of later periods have given diverse images to a particular historical figure according to the milieus of the respective periods. The images of historical figures depicted by the authors could also be interpreted as new additions, created in the present, to the images which have been drawn by our predecessors. In this manner, we authors, who have formed certain relations with those historical figures, could also be as much a part of the clusters as our predecessors. I hope that through this series, readers will be able to realize a tangible feeling for the figures that lived in Asia in the diverse periods, including the authors living in the present, which is becoming a part of history, and also the history woven by their mutual relations.
 

(Written by FURUI Ryosuke, Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia / 2024)