DOCSLIB.ORG

Urban Fictions of Early Modern Japan: Identity, Media, Genre

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Urban Fictions of Early Modern Japan: Identity, Media, Genre Urban Fictions of Early Modern Japan: Identity, Media, Genre Thomas Gaubatz Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Thomas Gaubatz All rights reserved ABSTRACT Urban Fictions of Early Modern Japan: Identity, Media, Genre Thomas Gaubatz This dissertation examines the ways in which the narrative fiction of early modern (1600- 1868) Japan constructed urban identity and explored its possibilities. I orient my study around the social category of chōnin (“townsman” or “urban commoner”)—one of the central categories of the early modern system of administration by status group (mibun)—but my concerns are equally with the diversity that this term often tends to obscure: tensions and stratifications within the category of chōnin itself, career trajectories that straddle its boundaries, performative forms of urban culture that circulate between commoner and warrior society, and the possibility (and occasional necessity) of movement between chōnin society and the urban poor. Examining a range of genres from the late 17th to early 19th century, I argue that popular fiction responded to ambiguities, contradictions, and tensions within urban society, acting as a discursive space where the boundaries of chōnin identity could be playfully probed, challenged, and reconfigured, and new or alternative social roles could be articulated. The emergence of the chōnin is one of the central themes in the sociocultural history of early modern Japan, and modern scholars have frequently characterized the literature this period as “the literature of the chōnin.” But such approaches, which are largely determined by Western models of sociocultural history, fail to apprehend the local specificity and complexity of status group as a form of social organization: the chōnin, standing in for the Western bourgeoisie, become a unified and monolithic social body defined primarily in terms of politicized opposition to the ruling warrior class. In contrast, I approach the category of chōnin as a diverse and internally stratified social field, the boundaries of which were perpetually redefined through discourse and practice. I argue that literary depictions of chōnin identity responded not to tensions between dominant and dominated classes but rather to internal tensions within commoner society. Fiction written by and for commoners was focused on topics of everyday concern: how to make a living, how one should (or should not) exist within one’s family or community, how to advance (or merely maintain, or imprudently spend and exhaust) one’s social, economic, or cultural capital. I seek to replace the politicized trope of “chōnin literature” with an image of multiple urban literatures: a series of writings and rewritings through which urban writers and readers probed, questioned, and reimagined the range of identities that were possible to them. To do so, I use an interdisciplinary method that draws from recent scholarship in social history and historical sociology on the status group system, building in particular on studies of the social structure of early modern urban space. The two-and-a-half centuries of the Tokugawa reign saw dramatic transformations in how urban identity was conceived. As a result of the increasing integration of early modern society, categories of identity that were once collective, external functions of social relationships and community membership came to be internalized and expressed by the individual as patterns of behavior, taste, and disposition—speech, sartorial expression, habits of consumption, aesthetic tastes, lifestyle, and so on—and the circulation of print media itself was part of these shifts, communicating new social and aesthetic norms across boundaries and to new readers. The readings that I develop in this dissertation are situated at key turning points in this overarching narrative. By contextualizing my close readings in relation to the shifting matrix of discourses, practices, spaces, and media forms shaping chōnin identity, I reveal how techniques of literary characterization were both shaped by and used to understand the contemporary urban world. In Chapter 1, I offer a polemical reading of Nippon eitaigura (Japan’s Eternal Storehouse, 1688), a collection of stories of commercial success and failure written by Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693). Ihara Saikaku has often been taken as the archetypal chōnin author, and among his works, Eitaigura in particular is most regularly used by both historians and literary scholars alike as a document of chōnin values. Instead, I show the ways in which Saikaku’s text retains traces of the social diversity, class tensions, and shifting values within a heterogeneous and stratified social body. I argue that this text represents a dramatic shift in chōnin consciousness, wherein the nature of chōnin identity, which was originally a function of the urban ward (chō) as a local and organic urban community based on the concrete social relations of its members, is rewritten by Saikaku into a universalizable category of values and economic practice, prioritizing the interests of the house (ie) over the community of the chō. One of the main ways in which the identity of the chōnin house was figured was in terms of a “house trade” (kashoku or kagyō), a term used to refer to the livelihood associated with a given household, while certain forms of identity performance and trespass were possible through cultural training in the leisure arts (yūgei). In Chapter 2, I use this binary as context for a study of the life and writings of Ejima Kiseki (1666-1735). Kiseki was born into a wealthy Kyoto merchant house, and had taken up writing as a form of leisure, but in his lifetime he saw his family business decline and was forced to make a living as a writer and publisher of fiction. His writing likewise depicts eccentric and profligate chōnin protagonists driven to dereliction by obsessive involvement in leisure practices. Focusing on Seken musuko katagi (Characters of Worldly Young Men, 1715) and Ukiyo oyaji katagi (Characters of Old Men of the Floating World, 1720), I argue that Kiseki playfully inverts the hierarchy of work and play in an attempt to imagine new possibilities of chōnin self-definition. In Chapter 3, I examine the confrontation between bushi and chōnin concepts of social and cultural capital in the context of the Edo pleasure quarters. Here I focus on the sharebon (witty booklets), a genre of short, satirical fiction that grew in close dialog with the guidebook literature of the pleasure quarters, and the figure of the “sophisticate” (tsū or tsūjin): the paragon of urban fashion and savoir-faire. Where existing scholarship has assumed that this term refers to a concrete, specific leisure subculture, I argue that the tsū was an empty signifier used by authors of differing social positions to make competing claims for the nature of cultural capital, setting bushi intellectual ideals of classical erudition, written language, and specialist knowledge against chōnin cultures of improvisational wit, spoken language, and conspicuous consumption. I also argue that the sharebon itself played an overdetermined role in these dynamics, communicating norms of fashion and social grace to a wide readership while simultaneously throwing into question the authenticity of social performances based on such mediated knowledge. Chapter 4 shifts to the lower margins of Edo commoner society. Here I offer a reading of the fiction of Shikitei Sanba (1776-1822), focusing on Ukiyoburo (The Floating World Bathhouse, 4 vols., 1809-1813) and Ukiyodoko (The Floating World Barber, 2 vols., 1813-1814), which depict the interaction of a range of generic middle- and lower-class social types in the context of the public spaces of Edo tenement society. Tracing the links between Sanba’s fiction and the emerging performing art of otoshi-banashi (the antecedent of modern rakugo storytelling) and the performance space of the yose, both of which emerged out of lower-class craftsman culture, I argue that Sanba constructs an image of the performative use of the voice as a tactic for navigating and integrating the margins and interstices of status-group society. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 39 Taking the Town out of the Townsman: Ihara Saikaku and the Synthesis of Urban Identity Chapter 2 87 The Woe of Being Saved by One’s Arts: Play as Work in the Life and Writings of Ejima Kiseki Chapter 3 143 Who was the Sophisticate? Status, Distinction, and Mediation in the 18th-Century Sharebon Chapter 4 204 Mapping the Edo Tenement: Identity and Community in the Fiction of Shikitei Sanba Conclusion 268 Selected Bibliography 278 i Acknowledgments In writing this dissertation, I have incurred too many debts to count. Above all, I must express my earnest gratitude to my advisors, Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, who have shown me a mental culture that a younger me could not have grasped and that I still struggle to honor. If not for their inexhaustible interest, encouragement, feedback, advice, patience (at times, mercy), and above all faith, I could not have come so far as to embark on this dissertation, let alone complete it. Paul Anderer has also been ceaselessly supportive and gracious with his time and guidance, broadening my perspective to horizons I never would have discovered on my own. David Lurie has been a perennial source of critical insights and shudderingly apt asides, the significance of which would take me years to unearth. If the debt of mentorship can never be truly paid except forward, then I hope that someday I will be able to impart to my students even a fraction of what these teachers have given me. I owe thanks also to Anne Walthall for agreeing to read my dissertation on rather short notice, and for her incisive and thought-provoking commentary during the dissertation defense. My research in Japan was made possible through generous support by the Fulbright Program, the Waseda University 125th Anniversary Commemorative Junior Visiting Researcher Program, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 'The Apish Art': Taste in Early Modern England
    ‘THE APISH ART’: TASTE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND ELIZABETH LOUISE SWANN PHD THESIS UNIVERSITY OF YORK ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE JULY 2013 Abstract The recent burgeoning of sensory history has produced much valuable work. The sense of taste, however, remains neglected. Focusing on the early modern period, my thesis remedies this deficit. I propose that the eighteenth-century association of ‘taste’ with aesthetics constitutes a restriction, not an expansion, of its scope. Previously, taste’s epistemological jurisdiction was much wider: the word was frequently used to designate trial and testing, experiential knowledge, and mental judgement. Addressing sources ranging across manuscript commonplace books, drama, anatomical textbooks, devotional poetry, and ecclesiastical polemic, I interrogate the relation between taste as a mode of knowing, and contemporary experiences of the physical sense, arguing that the two are inextricable in this period. I focus in particular on four main areas of enquiry: early uses of ‘taste’ as a term for literary discernment; taste’s utility in the production of natural philosophical data and its rhetorical efficacy in the valorisation of experimental methodologies; taste’s role in the experience and articulation of religious faith; and a pervasive contemporary association between sweetness and erotic experience. Poised between acclaim and infamy, the sacred and the profane, taste in the seventeenth century is, as a contemporary iconographical print representing ‘Gustus’ expresses it, an ‘Apish Art’. My thesis illuminates the pivotal role which this ambivalent sense played in the articulation and negotiation of early modern obsessions including the nature and value of empirical knowledge, the attainment of grace, and the moral status of erotic pleasure, attesting in the process to a very real contiguity between different ways of knowing – experimental, empirical, textual, and rational – in the period.
    [Show full text]
  • The Development of Japanese Cotton Weaving Industry in Edo Period
    Takeshi Abe Osaka University [email protected] The Development of Japanese Cotton Weaving Industry in Edo Period Introduction Prior to the Japanese industrialization which began in the late 1880s, manufacturing such as weaving, silk reeling, brewery, and the related commerce had already highly developed around the farming villages in the Edo period (1603-1868). We have many Japanese books and articles that argued about the Japanese manufacturing in the period, especially after the latter half of 18th century1. However, most of them argue about only one industry at a specific narrow area, and neglected the development of the industry in the whole Japan. In addition, such basic facts as the starting period of the respective local industries, the transition of their production, and so on, are not necessarily known, although the literature well elucidated the differences of production forms (i.e., putting-out or manufactory). There were lots of manufacturing industries in the Edo period. Table 1 shows the production values of the important industries in 1874, which reflect the approximate situation at the end of the Edo period. According to this table, brewery and weaving were most important, and in weaving, cotton and silk were overwhelming. This paper focuses on the cotton weaving industry, and confirms quantitatively the transition of production volumes, further considering about some aspects of its development all over Japan. 1 Ichikawa (1958) is an excellent survey about them. 1 1. Basic Data In the Edo period, with the penetration of market economy, cotton cloth, which was the material of popular kimono and the other wear, came to be woven in the many local areas, closely related to the production of raw cotton and hand-spun yarn.
    [Show full text]
  • Cora Ginsburg Catalogue 2015
    CORA GINSBURG LLC TITI HALLE OWNER A Catalogue of exquisite & rare works of art including 17th to 20th century costume textiles & needlework 2015 by appointment 19 East 74th Street tel 212-744-1352 New York, NY 10021 fax 212-879-1601 www.coraginsburg.com [email protected] NEEDLEWORK SWEET BAG OR SACHET English, third quarter of the 17th century For residents of seventeenth-century England, life was pungent. In order to combat the unpleasant odors emanating from open sewers, insufficiently bathed neighbors, and, from time to time, the bodies of plague victims, a variety of perfumed goods such as fans, handkerchiefs, gloves, and “sweet bags” were available for purchase. The tradition of offering embroidered sweet bags containing gifts of small scented objects, herbs, or money began in the mid-sixteenth century. Typically, they are about five inches square with a drawstring closure at the top and two to three covered drops at the bottom. Economical housewives could even create their own perfumed mixtures to put inside. A 1621 recipe “to make sweete bags with little cost” reads: Take the buttons of Roses dryed and watered with Rosewater three or foure times put them Muske powder of cloves Sinamon and a little mace mingle the roses and them together and putt them in little bags of Linnen with Powder. The present object has recently been identified as a rare surviving example of a large-format sweet bag, sometimes referred to as a “sachet.” Lined with blue silk taffeta, the verso of the central canvas section contains two flat slit pockets, opening on the long side, into which sprigs of herbs or sachets filled with perfumed powders could be slipped to scent a wardrobe or chest.
    [Show full text]
  • Copper in the Early Modern Sino-Japanese Trade Monies, Markets, and Finance in East Asia, 1600–1900
    Copper in the Early Modern Sino-Japanese Trade Monies, Markets, and Finance in East Asia, 1600–1900 Edited by Hans Ulrich Vogel VOLUME 7 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mmf Copper in the Early Modern Sino-Japanese Trade Edited by Keiko Nagase-Reimer LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: From “Scroll with views of the Dutch Factory and Chinese Quarter in Nagasaki 唐館図 蘭館図絵巻” drawn by Ishizaki Yūshi 石崎融思. Courtesy of Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture 長崎歴史文化博物館. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nagase-Reimer, Keiko. Title: Copper in the early modern Sino-Japanese trade / edited by Keiko Nagase-Reimer. Description: Leiden : Brill, 2016. | Series: Monies, markets, and finance in East Asia, 1600-1900, ISSN 2210-2876 ; volume 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015029107| ISBN 9789004299450 (hardback : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004304512 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Copper industry and trade—Japan—History. | Copper industry and trade—China—History. | Japan—Commerce—China—History. | China--Commerce—Japan—History. | Japan—Economic conditions—1600–1868. Classification: LCC HD9539.C7 J323 2016 | DDC 382/.4566930952—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029107 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2210-2876 isbn 978-90-04-29945-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30451-2 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing.
    [Show full text]
  • Sino-Japanese Interactions Through Rare Books
    Timelines and Maps Sino-Japanese Interactions Through Rare Books English Version © Keio University Timelines and Maps East Asian History at a Glance Books are part of the flow of history. But it is not only about Japanese history. Many books travel over the sea time to time for several reasons and a lot of knowledge and information comes and go with books. In this course, you’ll see books published in Japan as well as ones come from China and Korea. Let’s take a look at the history in East Asia. You do not have to remember the names of the historical period but please refer to this page for reference. Japanese History Overview This is a list of the main periods in Japanese history. This may be a useful reference as we proceed in the course. Period Name of Era Name of Era - mid-3rd c. CE Yayoi 弥生 mid-3rd c. CE - 7th c. CE Kofun (Tomb period) 古墳 592 - 710 Asuka 飛鳥 710-794 Nara 奈良 794 - 1185 Heian 平安 1185 - 1333 Kamakura 鎌倉 Nanboku-chō 1333 - 1392 (Southern and Northern Courts period) 南北朝 1392 - 1573 Muromachi 室町 1573 - 1603 Azuchi-Momoyama 安土桃山 1603 - 1868 Edo 江戸 1868 - 1912 Meiji 明治 Era names (Nengō) in Edo Period There were several era names (nengo, or gengo) in Edo period (1603 ~ 1868) and they are sometimes used in the description of the old books and materials, especially Week 2 and Week 4. Here is the list of the era names in Edo period for your convenience; 1 SINO-JAPANESE INTERACTIONS THROUGH RARE BOOKS KEIO UNIVERSITY © Keio University Timelines and Maps Start Era name English Start Era name English 1596 慶長 Keichō 1744 延享 Enkyō
    [Show full text]
  • A World Like Ours: Gay Men in Japanese Novels and Films
    A WORLD LIKE OURS: GAY MEN IN JAPANESE NOVELS AND FILMS, 1989-2007 by Nicholas James Hall A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Asian Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2013 © Nicholas James Hall, 2013 Abstract This dissertation examines representations of gay men in contemporary Japanese novels and films produced from around the beginning of the 1990s so-called gay boom era to the present day. Although these were produced in Japanese and for the Japanese market, and reflect contemporary Japan’s social, cultural and political milieu, I argue that they not only articulate the concerns and desires of gay men and (other queer people) in Japan, but also that they reflect a transnational global gay culture and identity. The study focuses on the work of current Japanese writers and directors while taking into account a broad, historical view of male-male eroticism in Japan from the Edo era to the present. It addresses such issues as whether there can be said to be a Japanese gay identity; the circulation of gay culture across international borders in the modern period; and issues of representation of gay men in mainstream popular culture products. As has been pointed out by various scholars, many mainstream Japanese representations of LGBT people are troubling, whether because they represent “tourism”—they are made for straight audiences whose pleasure comes from being titillated by watching the exotic Others portrayed in them—or because they are made by and for a female audience and have little connection with the lives and experiences of real gay men, or because they circulate outside Japan and are taken as realistic representations by non-Japanese audiences.
    [Show full text]
  • 85 Improvements in the Sociolinguistic
    Dialectologia 8 (2012), 85-132. ISSN: 2013-2247 Received 24 September 2011. Accepted 2 November 2011. IMPROVEMENTS IN THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC STATUS OF DIALECTS AS OBSERVED THROUGH LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES — UTILIZATION OF GOOGLE MAPS AND GOOGLE INSIGHTS — Fumio INOUE Meikai University, Japan [email protected] Abstract The sociolinguistic status of Japanese dialects will be discussed on the basis of linguistic landscape in this paper. A steady increase in dialect shop names over the past fourteen years was concretely ascertained in a southern island on the basis of tour guide books. This increase in dialect shop names is observed also in other areas of Japan. The fieldworks are examples of “insect’s eye view” research. The geographical distribution of dialect shop names can be shown also on distribution maps of Google maps. These maps give us a “bird’s eye view”. It has been ascertained that Japanese dialect forms are utilized both domestically and abroad. Many more examples are observable using Google street view as “fly’s eye view”, and Google insights as “witch’s eye view”. The background of dialect landscape can be explained partly by the progress of language standardization, or decline of dialects. Dialects are now economically utilized because of their scarcity value. Three sociolinguistic types can be distinguished historically: ERADICATION, DESCRIPTION and UTILIZATION. Now Japanese dialects are in the state of UTILIZATION. Dialect landscape is a reflection of language standardization, and is regarded as a sensor of standardization. On the basis of the Linguistic Atlas of Japan, three historical stages of standardization can be distinguished: first, language standardization from the former capital Kyoto, and secondly from the new capital Tokyo, and thirdly nationwide standardization among junior high school students.
    [Show full text]
  • A Naturalist Lost – CP Thunberg's Disciple Johan Arnold
    九州大学学術情報リポジトリ Kyushu University Institutional Repository A naturalist lost – C. P. Thunberg’s disciple Johan Arnold Stützer (1763–1821) in the East Indies Wolfgang, Michel Faculty of Languages and Cultures, Kyushu University : Professor emeritus http://hdl.handle.net/2324/1563681 出版情報：Japanese collections in European museums : reports from the Toyota-Foundation- Symposium Königswinter 2003. 3, pp.147-162, 2015-03-01. Bier'sche Verlagsanstalt バージョン： 権利関係： A NATURALIST LOST - C. P. THUNBERG'S DISCIPLE JOHAN ARNOLD STUTZER (1763-1821) IN THE EAST INDIES Wolfgang MICHEL, Fukuoka Johan Arnold Stiitzer was one of two disciples man barber surgeon, Martin Christian Wilhelm of the renowned Swedish scholar Carl Peter Stiitzer (1727- 1806). Martin Stiitzer had im­ Thunberg who traveled overseas as an employ­ migrated from Oranienburg (Prussia) to Stock­ ee of the Dutch East India Company to lay the holm during the 17 50s. After traveling to the foundations of an academic career. Following West Indies in 1757 and undertaking further in the footsteps of his famous teacher, he even studies including an examination to become managed to work as a surgeon at the Dutch trad­ a surgeon in 1760, he married Anna Maria ing post ofDejima in Nagasaki. However, after Soem (?- 1766), whose father, Christian Soem years of rapidly changing circumstances and ( 1694-1775), was also a barber surgeon. 1 twists and turns, this promising young naturalist Surgeons were educated and organized settled down to serve the British in Ceylon with­ in guilds and, like his father-in-law, Martin out ever returning to Europe. While most of the Stiitzer took part in the fight for recognition objects collected by Westerners in Japan ended and reputation.
    [Show full text]
  • Illustration and the Visual Imagination in Modern Japanese Literature By
    Eyes of the Heart: Illustration and the Visual Imagination in Modern Japanese Literature By Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Japanese Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Daniel O’Neill, Chair Professor Alan Tansman Professor Beate Fricke Summer 2018 © 2018 Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe All Rights Reserved Abstract Eyes of the Heart: Illustration and the Visual Imagination in Modern Japanese Literature by Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe Doctor of Philosophy in Japanese Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Daniel O’Neill, Chair My dissertation investigates the role of images in shaping literary production in Japan from the 1880’s to the 1930’s as writers negotiated shifting relationships of text and image in the literary and visual arts. Throughout the Edo period (1603-1868), works of fiction were liberally illustrated with woodblock printed images, which, especially towards the mid-19th century, had become an essential component of most popular literature in Japan. With the opening of Japan’s borders in the Meiji period (1868-1912), writers who had grown up reading illustrated fiction were exposed to foreign works of literature that largely eschewed the use of illustration as a medium for storytelling, in turn leading them to reevaluate the role of image in their own literary tradition. As authors endeavored to produce a purely text-based form of fiction, modeled in part on the European novel, they began to reject the inclusion of images in their own work.
    [Show full text]
  • Title the NEW ECONOMIC POLICY in the CLOSING DAYS of the TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE Author(S) Honjo, Eijiro Citation Kyoto University Ec
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Kyoto University Research Information Repository THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY IN THE CLOSING DAYS Title OF THE TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE Author(s) Honjo, Eijiro Citation Kyoto University Economic Review (1929), 4(2): 52-75 Issue Date 1929-12 URL http://hdl.handle.net/2433/125185 Right Type Departmental Bulletin Paper Textversion publisher Kyoto University 1 Kyoto University Economic Review MEMOIRS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS IN THE IMPERIAL. UNIVERSITY OF KYOTO VOLUME IV 1929 PUBUSIIED bY THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS IN 'fHR IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY OF KYOTO THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY IN THE CLOSING DAYS OF THE TOKUGAW A SHOGUNATE The period of about 260 years following the Keicho and Genna eras (1596-1623) is called either the Tokugawa period or the age of the feudal system based on the centralisation of power; but, needless to say, the situation in this period, as in other periods, was subject to a variety of changes. Especially in and after the middle part of the Tokugawa Shogunate, commerce and industry witnessed considerable development, currency was widely circulated and the chanin class, or commercial interests, gained much influence in consequence of the growth of urban districts. This led to the development of the currency economy in addition to the land economy already existing, a new economic power thus coming into being besides the agrarian economic power. Owing to this remarkable economic change, it became im· possible for the samurai class to maintain their livelihood, and for the farming class to support the samurai class as under the old economic system, with the result that these classes had to bow to the new economic power and look to the chiinin for financial help.
    [Show full text]
  • The Making of Modern Japan
    The Making of Modern Japan The MAKING of MODERN JAPAN Marius B. Jansen the belknap press of harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Third printing, 2002 First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2002 Book design by Marianne Perlak Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jansen, Marius B. The making of modern Japan / Marius B. Jansen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-674-00334-9 (cloth) isbn 0-674-00991-6 (pbk.) 1. Japan—History—Tokugawa period, 1600–1868. 2. Japan—History—Meiji period, 1868– I. Title. ds871.j35 2000 952′.025—dc21 00-041352 CONTENTS Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii Note on Names and Romanization xviii 1. SEKIGAHARA 1 1. The Sengoku Background 2 2. The New Sengoku Daimyo 8 3. The Unifiers: Oda Nobunaga 11 4. Toyotomi Hideyoshi 17 5. Azuchi-Momoyama Culture 24 6. The Spoils of Sekigahara: Tokugawa Ieyasu 29 2. THE TOKUGAWA STATE 32 1. Taking Control 33 2. Ranking the Daimyo 37 3. The Structure of the Tokugawa Bakufu 43 4. The Domains (han) 49 5. Center and Periphery: Bakufu-Han Relations 54 6. The Tokugawa “State” 60 3. FOREIGN RELATIONS 63 1. The Setting 64 2. Relations with Korea 68 3. The Countries of the West 72 4. To the Seclusion Decrees 75 5. The Dutch at Nagasaki 80 6. Relations with China 85 7. The Question of the “Closed Country” 91 vi Contents 4. STATUS GROUPS 96 1. The Imperial Court 97 2.
    [Show full text]
  • Latest Japanese Sword Catalogue
    ! Antique Japanese Swords For Sale As of December 23, 2012 Tokyo, Japan The following pages contain descriptions of genuine antique Japanese swords currently available for ownership. Each sword can be legally owned and exported outside of Japan. Descriptions and availability are subject to change without notice. Please enquire for additional images and information on swords of interest to [email protected]. We look forward to assisting you. Pablo Kuntz Founder, unique japan Unique Japan, Fine Art Dealer Antiques license issued by Meguro City Tokyo, Japan (No.303291102398) Feel the history.™ uniquejapan.com ! Upcoming Sword Shows & Sales Events Full details: http://new.uniquejapan.com/events/ 2013 YOKOSUKA NEX SPRING BAZAAR April 13th & 14th, 2013 kitchen knives for sale YOKOTA YOSC SPRING BAZAAR April 20th & 21st, 2013 Japanese swords & kitchen knives for sale OKINAWA SWORD SHOW V April 27th & 28th, 2013 THE MAJOR SWORD SHOW IN OKINAWA KAMAKURA “GOLDEN WEEKEND” SWORD SHOW VII May 4th & 5th, 2013 THE MAJOR SWORD SHOW IN KAMAKURA NEW EVENTS ARE BEING ADDED FREQUENTLY. PLEASE CHECK OUR EVENTS PAGE FOR UPDATES. WE LOOK FORWARD TO SERVING YOU. Feel the history.™ uniquejapan.com ! Index of Japanese Swords for Sale # SWORDSMITH & TYPE CM CERTIFICATE ERA / PERIOD PRICE 1 A SADAHIDE GUNTO 68.0 NTHK Kanteisho 12th Showa (1937) ¥510,000 2 A KANETSUGU KATANA 73.0 NTHK Kanteisho Gendaito (~1940) ¥495,000 3 A KOREKAZU KATANA 68.7 Tokubetsu Hozon Shoho (1644~1648) ¥3,200,000 4 A SUKESADA KATANA 63.3 Tokubetsu Kicho x 2 17th Eisho (1520) ¥2,400,000
    [Show full text]