"Focusing on Toyama on the Sea of Japan, the author explores the interplay of central and regional authorities, local and national perceptions of local rights, and the emerging political practices in Toyama and Tokyo that became part of the new political culture that took shape in Japan following the 1868 Meiji Restoration.

Using a wide variety of sources - government records, newspapers, biographies of local worthies, economic statistics, and poetry - Lewis argues that the national policies put in play after the Restoration and the local responses to them created Ura Nihon, a peripheral zone that includes Toyama and the surrounding region. He challenges the notion of unchanging structural backwardness by considering the national policies and local responses that made for underdevelopment.".

"Although Becoming Apart centers on Toyama, the prefecture's modern history is a microcosm of a process of political centralization, popular resistance, and imperfect national integration that happened in many other regions, both in Japan and elsewhere."--BOOK JACKET.