Weapon

My recent bedtime reading is Strategy, Tactics, and Weapons of the Medieval China (戰略戰術兵器事典：中國中古篇) .

Seriously this is not a book but, rather, a collection of monographs on the history of military science of China - by several Japanese scholars. I found it in Eslite during a trip to Taiwan last year and, as a lover of both weapons and history, it was impossible to resist the temptation of buying it.

Like all multi-author texts, some chapters are brilliantly written with gems here and there, while others are practically intellectual plagiarism. A considerable length of the book is used to discuss and compare the cavalry and infantry systems of the Middle Kingdom and Turks and Mongols. In my opinion, however, the most interesting piece of information appears towards the end of the book, in a table which summarized the population of the whole China at each dynasty.

Why should Japanese scholars have such a keen interest on all these?