Volume XI Number 1 CONTENTS Spring 2003

From the Editors' Desk 編纂者から 2

Articles 論文

The Political and Institutional History of Early Modern Japan Philip C. Brown 3 The People of Tokugawa Japan: The State of the Field in Early Modern Social/Economic History Selcuk Esenbel 31 Summary of Discussions: The State of the Field in Early Modern Japanese Studies Philip C. Brown 54 Book Reviews. 書評

Howard Hibbett, The Chrysanthemum and the Fish: Japanese Humor Since the Age of the Shoguns Cheryl Crowley 64 Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467-1680: Resilience and Renewal Carol Richmond Tsang 66

Bibliographies 参考文献

The Political and Institutional History of Early Modern Japan: A Bibliography Philip C. Brown 69 The People of Tokugawa Japan: The State of the Field in Early Modern Social/Economic History Selcuk Esenbel 83

Basic Style Guidelines for Final Manuscripts: Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal 88 EARLY MODERN JAPAN SPRING, 2003

From the Editor 編纂者のメッセージ the editors and outside referees) must conform to these guidelines. In addition, we are actively looking for colleagues to help with copy editing In this issue we present the final set of essays and preparation of files for posting on the from the State of the Field conference held in the EMJNet web site. spring of 2000 at The Ohio State University. Finally, EMJNet was originally created based The two substantive appraisals focus on politi- on the idea that it would give us extra opportuni- cal/institutional history and socio-economic his- ties to do interesting and innovative things, either tory. These are followed by a summary of con- on our own or in conjunction with the annual cerns reflected throughout the discussions at the meetings of the AAS. In the past two years, conference. EMJNet has sponsored regular panels at the AAS The essays we have published through this and and has also held independent round table discus- the last two issues of EMJ represent our most sions at each of the last two annual meetings, one ambitious effort to date. Response from readers, on bunjin culture and society organized by Cheryl in the form of requests for additional copies, has Crowley and the other on the theme of Blood in been impressive and very rewarding for all of us Tokugawa culture, organized by Bettina Gram- who have been a part of this effort. Several of lich-Oka. A panel for the EMJNet meeting in these essays have been translated and/or reprinted association with the 2004 AAS annual meeting in already. San Diego is now largely complete (more in the The magnitude of this effort raises two impor- fall issue of EMJ), but proposals for additional tant questions. The first concerns what might be EMJNet activities for the next AAS meeting done in future issues that will be of similar inter- can still be considered. est to readers. One possible approach would be Readers with an interest in proposing a the- to plan future issues in whole or in part around matic issue of the journal, activities for the forth- clearly identified themes. To this end, the edi- coming AAS, or volunteering to assist with edit- tors issue a CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR ing and manuscript preparation (both printed and THEMATIC ISSUES OF EMJ. Proposals internet) should contact Philip Brown at Depart- should 1) indentify a well-defined theme and po- ment of History, 230 West 17th Avenue, Colum- tential contributors, and 2) a guest editor who will bus OH 43210 or at [email protected]. Pro- be in charge of soliciting contributions, assuring posals for EMJNet’s meeting in conjunction with their submission to referees and for publication the AAS annual meeting need to be submitted by on time, and who will take a substantial role in September 15, 2003. copy editing. As always, we continue to encourage subscrib- A second concern has become clear during ers and readers to submit materials for publica- preparation of the three State of the Field issues: tion with EMJ. Scholarly articles are routinely There are parts of our work that deserve more sent out to colleagues to be refereed, but in addi- attention than the current staff involved in pro- tion, we have published a variety of other kinds duction of EMJ – Lawrence Marceau and Philip of work in the past: translations of documents, Brown – have been able to devote to them. In essays on early modern Japan studies in different particular, this involves copy editing in prepara- countries (France and Russia, with others recently tion of the journal for print and preparation of solicited), articles on teaching and the use of files (e.g., bibliographies from the State of the computers in Japanese studies and research. We Field series) for posting on our web site. continue to seek a broad array of materials that go As part of efforts to deal with the first issue, beyond what scholarly journals ordinarily publish we have established a basic style sheet for the but which clearly serve the development of early journal that will appear in the back matter of modern Japanese studies. every issue and on our web site. Final submis- sions (after revisions based on comments from

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The Political and Institutional connections between the late Tokugawa era and post-Meiji developments, they found it attractive * History of Early Modern Japan to characterize Tokugawa Japan as “early mod- ©Philip C. Brown, Ohio State University ern”, but there is much of Japanese history prior to the very late eighteenth century that has never Introduction1 comfortably fit this mold. Some recent works Western studies of late sixteenth to mid- begin to evoke characterizations associated with nineteenth century political and institutional his- feudalism rather than early modernity. Given tory have increased greatly in number and sophis- further study of the era, we might conceivably tication over the past quarter century. Scholars recast the political and institutional history of late now explore domain and village politics as well sixteenth to mid-nineteenth century Japan as as those associated with the Emperor and Shogun. something less than “early modern,” something They employ an array of documentary evidence more traditional even if we are not favorably dis- that increasingly extends beyond the records of posed to use words like “feudal.” great figures and Shogunal administration (the Before exploring this issue and others, it is im- bakufu) into the realms of village archives and portant to define the basic parameters of this es- handwritten manuscript materials. Analytical say and to define some key terms as employed frameworks now encompass those of anthropol- here. ogy, sociology, and political science. The num- Defining Terms: I discuss materials that fo- ber of scholars has increased substantially and cus on the “early modern” period rather broadly there may now be something close to a critical defined, and I use the term here solely as the cur- mass that encourages an increased diversity of rent, conventional shorthand for this era. I do interpretation and level of debate within the field. not employ it with any presumption that it entails Despite such advances, there are significant is- a specific set of characteristics such as those that sues that remain. The field is still relatively were associated with the “modernization theory” small and that means that much work, some of it of the nineteen-sixties or any other paradigm. It very basic, remains. Most notably, studies of is not the purpose of this essay to take sides on the mid-seventeenth to early nineteenth century this conceptual issue, but to encompass the range 2 are relatively few in number. Most studies focus of positions taken in published work in the field. on the formation of a stable central authority or, more typically, the end of the Tokugawa Sho- gunate. While there are some very good recent 2 My usage here is not unusual. For the most studies that may lay a foundation for filling this part, scholars do not explicitly confront potential void, in the political histories there is little sense substantive use of the term “early modern” in their of some substantive tie between the ends of the writings. While the term implies links with “the era that lends it some sense of unity. In the modern,” seldom does either term find explicit defi- realm of political history the center of gravity is nition and informal discussions with Japan scholars clearly located at the interstices of the Tokugawa reveals a range of definitions, from those that would (1600-1868) to Meiji (1868-1912) transformation. encompass the Kamakura era to those that would Since post-World War II scholars often identified treat Japan’s history into the twentieth century as “feudal” rather than anything approaching “mod- ern.” Even where scholarly publication directly * I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers addresses operational definitions, there is not clear for comments that helped sharpen this essay and consensus on how to define the term or the era and also thank Patricia Graham and James McMullen its characteristics. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt is one of for their very helpful suggestions. the few social scientists of the “modernization” 1 In the citations below, the following abbrevia- school who have continued to develop these theo- tions are employed: Harvard Journal of Asiatic ries, explicitly rendering them less unidirectional Studies HJAS, Journal of Asian Studies JAS, Jour- and taking ultimate outcomes of the process as nal of Japanese Studies JJS, Monumenta Nipponica problematic rather than presumed. His work now MN. clearly allows for cultural variation based on a vari-

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Into the nineteen-sixties scholars tended to treat end of the era as typically defined, there is some the Tokugawa hegemony as defining the bounda- recognition that the old ways did not fade as rap- ries of early modern political history, more recent idly as early scholarly emphasis on the reforms of work has shown affinities between its organiza- the Meiji Restoration (1868) suggested.5 tional patterns and those of earlier years, extend- Reflecting these developments, I focus on ma- ing back into the mid-sixteenth century. To cite terials that largely deal with the period from mid- one prime example: While John Hall (19613) sixteenth century to the very early Meiji transi- marked a clear distinction between the daimyo of tion. Other periodizations are certainly possible, the Oda and Toyotomi years (ca. 1570-1599) and and the discussion below touches on some that those of the era the Japanese historian treats as scholars have suggested either explicitly or im- kinsei (commonly translated into English as plicitly. This approach not only permits discus- “early modern”), a more recent tendency elides sion of the wide range of definitions (often only that difference and extends the birth of more ef- implicit) that Japan scholars and others have fective patterns of administration back a few dec- brought to the term “early modern” Japan, it also ades (e.g., Michael Birt, 19854). At the other permits inclusion of the early stages of develop- ments that provided the building blocks of the Tokugawa political order. ety of factors including historical experience prior Within this chronological framework I treat to the commencement of “modernizing.” See works that deal explicitly with “political history” Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, and “institutional history,” very broad and amor- “Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities – A phous categories for classifying historical studies Comparative View,” Daedalus 127:3 (Summer despite the fact that they are often taken as the 1998) 1-18. This essay focuses especially on de- core of the broad range of historical studies. velopments associated with the emergence of “civil One can argue that all activity is political, for society” and a “public sphere.” (Eisenstadt is one example. Today we recognize that many areas of the very few sociologists who have maintained a of activity that were not traditionally treated as long-term interest in Japan’s historical experience part of political history have a clear political edge. and that of other Asian societies.) David L. How- Ikki or “leagues” provide a readily identifiable ell, in the same issue, “Territoriality and Collective example. Formed on a temporary basis to pro- Identity in Tokugawa Japan,” 105-32, identifies this era as “feudal” rather than “early modern” and re- test perceived injustice, they consciously sought lies on a very broad Marxist definition of the term to redress official malfeasance, over-taxation, and as an exploitative, coercive extraction by a variety the failure of domain or bakufu governments to of means of all surplus from peasants by landown- provide for the obligatory minimum conditions of ers (see esp. 116-19). This is in marked contrast to economic well being for villagers. The object of the typical usage of “feudalism” as employed by such protest is clearly political and designed to scholars of the 1950s and 1960s, a definition that change policy, yet would often have been classi- focused on decentralized political structures. See, for example, the essays in Rushton Coulborn, comp. Feudalism in History, Princeton: Princeton Uni- 1985): 369-399. versity Press, 1956, including an essay by Edwin O. 5 See, for example, the monographic works of Reischauer. Broader debates on the subject of Karen Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, “feudalism” are sketched by Elizabeth A.R. Brown, 1750-1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer- “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and His- sity of California Press, 1995; David L. Howell, torians of Medieval Europe,” The American His- Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the torical Review 79:4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 1063-1088. State in a Japanese Fishery. Berkeley, CA. Univer- As indicated below, there are even scholars who see sity of California Press, 1995; and Edward E. Pratt, “feudalism” and “early modern” as co-existing. Japan’s Proto-Industrial Elite: The Economic 3 “Foundations of the Modern Japanese Dai- Foundations of the Gono. Cambridge, Massachu- myo,” JAS 20:3 (May 1961): 317-29. setts: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard Uni- 4 ”Samurai in Passage: The Transformation of versity Press, 1999. Other periodical literature the Sixteenth-Century Kanto,” JJS 11:2 (Summer also develops this perspective.

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fied as social history (the history of the actions of function is largely one of taxation, but it can also commoners, ordinary folk as opposed to major include regulation of publicly shared facilities political leaders and elites) in the nineteen-sixties such as irrigation networks, defense, and the like, and nineteen-seventies. Similarly, we all recog- or public relief in times of famine. The latter nize that villages, for example, have enduring function is largely composed of activities and structures of organization and governance. Are regulations we associate with the legal system in they to be considered part of a social history, or all its aspects: administrative law, civil law, and part of institutional history? Those who would commercial law. classify this field of study as social history, like Some might argue that there can be no institu- the adherents of the nineteen-sixties classification tional history and that individuals and groups of ikki as social history, in effect stress a dichot- make history; while not contesting the premise omy between high and low society. In this view, that individuals and groups make history, there institutional and political history dealt with high- are also frameworks built on formal regulation level concerns, the activities of royalty, presidents, and custom that influence people’s expectations national armies, and the like, not the hoi polloi. and behavior. Within these frameworks they I have chosen to examine studies of politics and work, and against them they may rebel. While institutions at all levels. In the discussion that these frameworks may be delineated explicitly follows, for example, no effort is made to treat through a constitution or law, they may also re- popular disturbances (ikki) comprehensively, but flect more informal but consistent patterns of po- only to comment on their political dimensions as litical behavior. No one, for example, mandated scholars have explored them. We will be con- that daimyo spend the legal maximum on their cerned with the general level of commoner input retinues as they traveled between Edo and their into domain and Shogunal policy, but not with the home provinces as part of their obligation of classification and patterns of protest. These regular visits to the Shogun’s capital, yet such subjects are left to Professor Esenbel’s essay on behavior was a regular part of these excursions. social history in this issue of EMJ. Studies of Economists, political scientists, and sociologists local institutions are discussed regardless of level, as well as those we might designate as social sci- e.g., village governance, rural administration ence historians, broadly recognize the existence within domains, and other formal organizations, of such patterns that extend beyond a specific but not studies of informal organizations or eco- issue or law. In addition, scholars tend to cast nomic organizations such as rural credit networks. their studies in ways that imply or explicitly gen- I shall treat studies of the political - institutional eralize beyond the case(s) at hand. Given these context and policy side of economic activities, predispositions, it seems reasonable to retain “in- but not works related to the organization of indi- stitutional” as a descriptive term here. vidual enterprises. Intellectual movements may also have political implications, but we will treat Birth of the Field intellectual histories only at the point where they Institutional and political analysis of Japan are converted into significant efforts to challenge from the late sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centu- or change political practice. Such an effort at ries has mushroomed in the last quarter of a cen- differentiation is admittedly imprecise and per- tury. Viewed from the perspective of the twen- haps arbitrary, but it reflects concern with the tieth century as a whole, the smattering of studies links between political power or organizations by such early twentieth-century scholars as Neil and society at large. Skene Smith and John Henry Wigmore did not By political history I mean the history of com- spark a consistent flow of research. Even in the petition over who has the right to exercise and the immediate post-war era, the period when some of actual exercise of administrative, governmental the giants of the field first appear, the flow of power. Political power is used to varying de- studies was intermittent. A consistent pattern of grees to distribute the wealth a society produces publication only emerges well into the nineteen- but also exercises sanctions that define the seventies for both periodical and monographic boundaries of acceptable behavior. The former literature.

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The period from the end of World War II to the A second clutch of publications attempted to beginning of the nineteen-seventies produced crack the sharp divide between Tokugawa and the some very important monographs and articles Meiji transformation. The Tokugawa essays in despite their limited number. Their energetic the Princeton series on Japan’s modernization and prolific authors became the founders of the typify this approach.7 These essays often sketch- field: John W. Hall, Marius B. Jansen, Thomas ed a background for those studies that formed the C. Smith, and Dan F. Henderson. Others, while core concern of each of these volumes, post- not so prolific (at least at that stage of their ca- Restoration Japan. These essays were not with- reers), still played a significant role in the devel- out in-depth scholarly antecedents. Thomas C. opment of the field: E.S. Crawcour, Charles Smith had already published his study of domain Sheldon, Conrad Totman. industrialization and his now-classic Agrarian The number of publications in the political and Origins of Modern Japan,8 for example. But institutional fields increased beginning in the most of these publications were surveys painted nineteen-sixties, but many of these essays and in quite broad brushstrokes, and clearly designed books fall into two categories. The first is the to serve the needs of the larger modernization publication of survey texts. These were de- series rather than to illuminate the history of poli- signed to introduce Japanese history to American tics and institutions during the three-hundred year audiences, reflecting both its position in the cold period which preceded the Meiji Restoration. A war arena as “America’s unsinkable aircraft car- number of other publications during the nineteen- rier” and, by the end of the sixties, to explain and sixties and nineteen-seventies duplicated this pat- tout its remarkable economic recovery and tern (e.g., the James Crowley [19709] and Arthur emerging prominence in the world economy and Tiedemann [197410] essay collections). the realm of technological advancement. As the nineteen-seventies dawned, this interest in Japan even found its way into high school curricula; survey texts appear on the market in rapid succes- some states such as New York, added a Japan unit sion: Conrad D. Totman, A History of Japan, to its new, mandatory ninth grade social studies Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2000; James McClain, Japan, a Modern History, (Afro-Asian Culture Studies) curriculum. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002; Andrew Many survey texts began with the Meiji Resto- Gordon, The Modern History of Japan: From ration, giving virtually no attention to pre-modern Tokugawa Times to the Present, New York : Oxford antecedents and even acknowledgement of the University Press, 2003. To this list can be added groundwork laid by Tokugawa institutional and Totman’s earlier Early Modern Japan, Berkeley: political changes was sometimes omitted. University of California, 1993. Those texts that did attempt to “cover” more of 7 Marius B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese At- Japan’s history often crammed 1200 years of po- titudes Toward Modernization, 1965; William W. litical and cultural change into only half of the Lockwood, ed., The State and Economic Enterprise book, and the early modern era typically com- in Japan: Essays in the Political Economy of prised an even smaller percentage of the whole. Growth. 1965; R. P. Dore, ed., Aspects of Social Indeed, a number of texts continued to treat pre- Change in Modern Japan, 1967; Robert E, Ward, ed. Meiji Japan as “feudal” despite the relatively Political Development in Modern Japan, 1968; long-standing disenchantment with that charac- James William Morley, ed. Dilemmas of Growth in terization among leading American scholars of Prewar Japan. 1971; Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradi- the late nineteen-sixties.6 tion and Modernization in Japanese Culture, 1971; all published Princeton: Princeton University Press. 8 Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford: 6 It is fair to say that the nineteen-sixties and Stanford University Press, 1959. nineteen-seventies boomlet in the publication of 9 James B. Crowley, ed. Modern East Asia: Es- survey texts and essays fell off quite sharply since says in Interpretation. New York: Harcourt Brace & that time. Although other texts appeared by World, 1970. Mikiso Hane, Peter Duus, and Kenneth Pyle, only in 10 Arthur Tiedemann, ed., An Introduction to the past several years have we again had a burst of Japanese Civilization. New York: Heath, 1974.

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Chronological Patterns of Emphasis ments until the nineteen-eighties. The publica- The concerns of these early works – the Meiji tion of Japan Before Tokugawa: Political Con- transformation and Japan’s modern history – con- solidation and Economic Growth, 1500-1650 16 tinue to shape student and recent academic inter- (1981 ), while comprised almost entirely of est. This is manifested in studies treating the articles in which the principle author was a im-pact of Japan’s nineteenth century transforma- highly-regarded Japanese scholar, marks the tions of course, but it is also reflected in many beginning of a more consistent pattern in treating 17 studies that confine themselves chronologically to this era. Mary Elizabeth Berry’s Hideyoshi Tokugawa subjects (e.g., Luke Roberts, 199811). and James McClain’s Kanazawa: A Seventeenth 18 A recent review of books and monographs pub- Century Japanese Castle Town appeared in lished in the preceding decade alone showed that 1982. Neil McMullin’s Buddhism and the State 19 almost half of the publications were either direct- in Sixteenth-Century Japan (1985 ) was the ly concerned with the Meiji transformation or third major monograph to appear at this time. laying the foundation for the Meiji transformation The publication of these extended studies was and post-Meiji developments.12 accompanied by a small flurry of institutional A second chronological focus has been the sub- studies, often, scholarly articles, by these authors 20 ject of more intermittent interest, the transforma- and others such as Michael Birt, Beatrice Bo- 21 22 tions of the late sixteenth century that led ulti- dart-Bailey, William Hauser, Bernard mately to the founding of the stable and long- lived Tokugawa hegemony. The initial publica- 16 tions in this field were limited to articles. The Hall, John Whitney, Nagahara Keiji, and Ko- editors of Studies in the Institutional History of zo Yamamura, eds., Princeton: Princeton University 13 Press, 1981 Early Modern Japan (1968 ) not only collected 17 earlier articles on domain formation and develop- Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1982. ment, they also commissioned a number of im- 18 New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. portant new studies. While there was consider- 19 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. able excitement surrounding the publication of 20 ”Samurai in Passage: The Transformation of this collection, Hall’s Government and Local the Sixteenth-Century Kanto,” JJS 11:2 (Summer Power (1967 14 ), and Toshio G. Tsukahira’s 15 1985): 369-399. Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan (1967 ), 21 Bodart, Beatrice M., “Tea and Counsel: The the themes associated with the late sixteenth Political Role of Sen Rikyu,” MN 32:1 (Spring and early seventeenth centuries did not get sub- 1977) 49-74; "The Laws of Compassion," MN 40.2 stantial additional attention in extended treat- (Summer 1985), 163-189; "The Significance of the Chamberlain Government of the Fifth Tokugawa Shogun," in Harold Bolitho & Alan Rix, eds. A Nor- 11 Mercantilism In A Japanese Domain: The thern Prospect: Australian Papers on Japan, Can- Merchant Origins Of Economic Nationalism in 18th berra: Japanese Studies Association of Australia, - Century Tosa. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge Uni- 1981, 10-27; “Tea and Politics In Late-Sixteenth- versity Press, 1998. Century Japan,” Chanoyu Quarterly (Kyoto) 41 12 Philip Brown and Taniguchi.Shinko, “Ameri- (1985) 25-34; “ A Case of Political and Economic ka ni okeru Nihon kinsei-shi kenkyū no dōkō,” (in Expropriation: The Monetary Reform of the Fifth Japanese), Nihonshi Kenkyū (May, 2000) 53-70. Tokugawa Shogun,” Papers on Far Eastern History 13 John W. Hall and Marius B. Jansen, eds. Stud- (Canberra) 39 (March 1989) 177-189; “Councilor ies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Ja- Defended; Matsukage Nikki and Yanagisawa Yo- pan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968 shiyasu,” MN 34:4 (Winter 1979) 467-478; "Toku- (hereafter cited as Studies). gawa Tsunayoshi (1646-1709), A Weberian Analy- 14 Government and Local Power in Japan, 500- sis," Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques, XLIII:1 1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province. Princeton: (1989), 5-27. Princeton University Press. 1966. 22 “Osaka Castle and Tokugawa Authority in 15 Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on East Western Japan,” In Jeffrey P. Mass and William B. Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1966. Hauser, Eds. The Bakufu In Japanese History, Stan-

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Susser, 23 Willem Jan Boot, 24 Philip Brown, 25 tablishment of peace through the seventeenth- Reinhard Zollner, 26 and Kozo Yamamura. 27 century consolidation of political authority in the These works examined land surveys, consolida- hands of Shogun and daimyo represent an emerg- tion of domain power and finances, the bakufu’s ing, increasingly visible field, what of the middle use of castle re-construction to consolidate its years of the Tokugawa period? Two periods control over daimyo, and other subjects. While have received some concentrated attention. The hardly a torrent, a steady flow of books and arti- first is the era surrounding the Kansei Reforms. cles on aspects of the politics, law and institutions We have monographic political biographies of of this era continued in the nineteen-nineties. Tanuma Okitsugu (J. W. Hall, 195528) and Ma- If the late Tokugawa developments comprise tsudaira Sadanobu (Herman Ooms, 197529; Petra the most intensive era for Western political and Rudolph, 197630) as well as two articles on re- institutional studies, and the period from the es- lated subjects by Robert Bakus (198931) and Isao Soranaka (197832). The second concentration of studies focuses on Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. The ford: Stanford University Press, 1985, 153-172. “Dog Shogun” and his peculiar image have at- 33 23 Including his works from the late 1970s: tracted Beatrice Bodart-Bailey (1985, 1989 ), “The Cadastral Surveys of the Sengoku Daimyo,” Donald Shively (1970 34 ), and Harold Bolitho Study Reports of Baika Junior College 26 (1977): (1975 35 ). Nonetheless, Tsunayoshi’s charms 35-46; “The Policies of the Oda Regime,” ibid., 28 (1979) 1-16; “The Toyoyomi Regime and the Daimyo,” in The Bakufu in Japanese History, 129- 28 John W. Hall, Tanuma Okitsugu, 1719-1788: 152. Forerunner of Modern Japan. Cambridge, Massa- 24 Willem Jan Boot, “The Deification of Toku- chusetts: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard gawa Ieyasu,” Japan Foundation Newsletter, 14:5 University Press, 1955. (Feb. 1987) 10-13. 29 Herman Ooms, Charismatic Bureaucrat: A 25 "Feudal Remnants" And Tenant Power: The Political Biography of Matsudaira Sadanobu, 1758- Case Of Niigata, Japan, In The Nineteenth And 1829. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Early Twentieth Centuries," Peasant Studies, 15:1 30 Petra Rudolph, Matsudaira Sadanobu Und (Fall, 1987), 1-26; "Land Redistribution Schemes in Die Kansei-Reform: Unter Besondere Beruck- Tokugawa Japan: An Introduction," Occasional sichtigung Des Kansei Igaku No Kin, Bochum: Papers of the Virginia Consortium for Asian Studies Brockmeyer 1976. 4 (Spring 1987), 35-48; "Practical Constraints on 31 Robert L. Backus,”Matsudaira Sadanobu and Early Tokugawa Land Taxation: Annual Versus Samurai Education,” in C. Andrew Gerstle, ed. 18th Fixed Assessments in Kaga Domain," JJS 14.2 Century Japan: Culture and Society. Sydney, (Summer 1988), 369-401; "The Mismeasure of N.S.W., Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1989, 132-152. Land: Land Surveying in the Tokugawa Period," 32 Isao Soranaka. "The Kansei Reforms-Success MN 42.2 (Summer 1987), 115-155. Or Failure?" MN 33.1 (Spring 1978),151-164. 26 “Kunigae: Bewegung und Herrschaft in der 33 Beatrice Bodart-Bailey. "The Laws of Com- Tokugawa-Zeit,“In: Antoni, Klaus; Portner, Peter; passion," MN 40.2 (Summer 1985), 163-189; “A Schneider, Roland, eds. Referate des VII. Deutschen Case of Political and Economic Expropriation: The Japanologentages in Hamburg, 11.-13. Juni 1987. Monetary Reform of the Fifth Tokugawa Shogun,” Hamburg: Gesellschaft fur Natur- und Volkerkunde Papers on Far Eastern History (Canberra) 39 Ostasiens, MOAG, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft (March 1989) 177-189; "Tokugawa Tsunayoshi fur Nat 1988, 323-330. (1646-1709), A Weberian Analysis," Asiatische 27 "From Coins to Rice: Hypotheses on the Kan- Studien/Etudes Asiatiques, XLIII: 1 (1989), 5-27. daka and Kokudaka Systems," JJS 14.2 (Summer 34 Donald Shively, "Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, the 1988), 341-367; “Returns on Unification: Economic Genroku Shogun," in Albert M. Craig & Donald H. Growth in Japan, 1550-1650,” in John Whitney Hall, Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese History. Nagahara Keiji, and Kozo Yamamura, eds. Japan Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, Before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and 85-126. Economic Growth, 1500-1650. Princeton: Princeton 35 Harold Bolitho, "The Dog Shogun," in Wang University Press, 1981, 327-372. Gungwu, ed. Self and Biography: Essays on the

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have proved insufficiently enticing to stimulate a This is not to say that the situation is intellectu- full monographic treatment. ally terminal in some sense: Conrad Totman’s One senses that rather fortuitous circumstances Early Modern Japan (1993), Luke Roberts’s led to this clustering of interest, for these works – study of Tosa (199839), and Mark Ravina’s ex- whether we look at the late eighteenth century or amination of three large domains (Yonezawa, Tsunayoshi’s era – do not play off each other in a Tokushima, and Hirosaki; 199940) indicate that significant way, and although Hall was once quite we have a story of attempts to come to grips with taken with Tanuma, his planning of volume four an increasingly tense relationship between natural of the Cambridge History of Japan relegated resources, population size, urban development treatment of Tsunayoshi, Tanuma, and Matsudaira and the consequences of efforts to squeeze as Sadanobu to a single fifty-page chapter which much as possible from nature’s storehouse. also included discussion of the Shotoku era, To- Such studies indicate that within these parameters kugawa Yoshimune, the Kyōhō Reforms, and the members of the samurai class struggled mightily, Hōreki era – a good century of political develop- and sometimes very violently, over policy, threats ments.36 to their status and to loss of income. In addition, This well reflects the problems that Western through the example of Tosa, Roberts indicates scholars have had in coming to grips with the the possibilities for non-samurai classes to exert political and institutional history of the mid- effective influence on the formation of domain Tokugawa.37 The fact that the Tenmei, Bunka policy. and Bunsei eras – eras of some substantial reform While the field of political and institutional his- efforts at least in a number of the domains – are tory has grown considerably, especially in the last also not singled out for much attention in either decade or so, a cautionary note is in order. In Volume 4 or Volume 5 of the Cambridge History spite of the growth, the publication record reflects further reinforce the lack of a strong, attractive a continued heavy reliance on translations of the theme underlying mid-period institutional and work of Japanese scholars. Our purpose here is political history.38 Even the theme of popular not to explore this aspect of Japanese studies in protest (ikki), the subject of about a half-dozen the West, but a few well-known recent examples recent monographs, does not fill the gap. In con- are worth noting as illustrative. As mentioned trast to the early Tokugawa, which is a story of above, Japan before Tokugawa contains primarily pacification and consolidation of political author- work by Japanese scholars. Non-Japanese ity in new and rebuilt institutions, and the nine- scholars solely author only two articles. While teenth century, which is the story of crisis and Volume 5 of the Cambridge History of Japan collapse, the late seventeenth to early nineteenth contains only one article by a Japanese scholar, centuries lack a discernable political identity. Volume 4 relies heavily on translations of the work of Nakai Nobuhiko, Furushima Toshio, Tsuji Tatsuya, Bitō Masahide, Wakita Osamu, and Individual and Society in Asia. Sydney: Sydney Asao Naohiro. More than half of the articles in University Press, 1975, 123-139. Osaka: The Merchants’ Capital of Early Modern 36 John Whitney Hall, and James L. McClain, Japan (199941) are translations of work by Japa- eds. The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan, Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991 (hereafter CHJ). 39 Luke Roberts, Mercantilism In A Japanese 37 Discussions with colleagues in Japan suggest Domain: The Merchant Origins Of Economic similar issues, although there are certainly more Nationalism in 18th - Century Tosa. Cambridge, book-length works on the period. The problem UK, Cambridge University Press, 1998. seems to lie in where and how to find an overarch- 40 Mark Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early ing theme to the era. Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 38 Marius B. Jansen, ed. Cambridge History of 1999. Japan, Vol. 5: The Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 41 James L. McClain, and Wakita Osamu, eds. UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, Osaka: The Merchants' Capital of Early Modern 1989. Japan. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,

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nese scholars. Examination of Edo & Paris: cal history. Post-war treatment of late sixteenth Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era to mid - nineteenth century Japan began with the (199442) also draws on the research of a number same emphasis. Except during the movement of Japanese scholars. Other works could readily toward the re-establishment of a peaceful national be added to this list, but would only serve as un- order, attention focused overwhelmingly on he- necessary reinforcement of the point these exam- gemons, Shogunal institutions, and the relation- ples make.43 ships of emperor, domains and daimyo to them. This phenomenon has a very positive side. It Early examples of political and administrative exposes students in the West to a wider array of history (Boxer’s The Christian Century in Japan: subjects than would otherwise be possible. In 1549-1650, 195145 and Brown’s Money Economy the long run, one hopes that publication of such in Medieval Japan: A Study in the Use of Coins, work will stimulate non-Japanese scholars to ex- 195146, which treats the Tokugawa era in part, plore new subjects. In addition, these publica- despite its title) focus heavily on the roles of tions bring Western scholars into broader contact Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa when they analyze with the Japanese scholarly world. The benefit policies related to the kinsei era. Thomas here is not just one of exposing ourselves to sub- Smith’s "The Introduction of Western Industry to jects as yet unexamined by Western scholars, but Japan During the Last Years of the Tokugawa also one of revealing some of the distinctive Period," (194847) examined the role of daimyo characteristics of western scholarly conception efforts in the field of technological transfer in and interpretive style.44 Yet even granting this mid-nineteenth century. Hall’s Tanuma Oki- benefit, there is no escaping the fact that Japanese tsugu, 1719-1788: Forerunner of Modern Ja- scholars are called upon to “cover” subjects in pan (1955) and Donald Shively’s “Bakufu versus which Western scholars have not yet published Kabuki,” (195548) examined policies and reform due our small numbers. movements in a bakufu setting. This emphasis on the center becomes much more pronounced Trends in the Field when we include the numerous books and articles that deal with the movement toward the Meiji Restoration (e.g., Beasely 1972,49 Craig, 1959 I. Diversification: From Top to Bottom and 1961, 50 Sakata and Hall, 1956, 51 Jansen,

Shogun and Emperor. Traditionally, histo- rians place the development of the institutions of 45 C.R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan: central government and contests for control of 1549-1650, Berkeley: University Of California them at the heart of their institutional and politi- Press 46 Delmer Brown, Money Economy in Medieval Japan: A Study in the Use of Coins, New Haven: 1999. Yale University Press. 42 James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and 47 Thomas C. Smith, "The Introduction of West- Ugawa Kaoru, eds., Edo and Paris: Urban Life and ern Industry to Japan During the Last Years of the the State in the Early Modern Era. Ithaca: Cornell Tokugawa Period," HJAS II (1948), 130-152. University Press, 1994. 48 Donald Shively, “Bakufu versus Kabuki,” 43 Although a number of the essays in these col- HJAS 18:3-4 (December 1955), 326-56. lections deal with political and institutional history, 49 W. G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration, Stan- these collections go well beyond the confines of ford: Stanford University Press, 1972. those fields. In this sense, my observation con- 50 Albert Craig, "The Restoration Movement in cerning the heavy reliance on Japanese scholarship Choshu," JAS 18 (1959), 187-198; Choshu In The extends to many other fields. Meiji Restoration, 1853-1868. Cambridge, Mas- 44 If there has been a downside, it lies in the very sachusetts: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard long delay between the introduction of new perspec- University Press, 1961. tives in Japan and their dissemination in Western 51 Yoshio Sakata & John W. Hall. "The Motiva- publications. tion of Political Leadership in the Meiji Restora-

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1961,52 Smith, 1961,53 etc.). Although still focused on the Tokugawa elites, These studies generally presume that Shogunal Harold Bolitho (197459) uncovered unexpected edicts and authority were pre-eminent and em- fractures in the unity of the Tokugawa adminis- ployed as a model pretty much throughout the trative structure. Harootunian (196960), Kosch- land. T. G. Tsukahira’s work on the sankin-kōtai man (198761), Webb (196862), and Earl (196463) (1966) suggested the degree to which even con- found cracks in the ideological foundations so trol of the person of the daimyo could serve to carefully constructed and institutionalized at the constrain vast financial resources that might have start of the period and which Arai Hakuseki had been devoted to creating a military base sufficient hoped to build into a stronger central government for launching a challenge to the Shogunate. in the early eighteenth century (see Kate W. Na- Peppered throughout survey texts and through kai, 198864). Each of these studies focuses on many scholarly works by Hall (1966, 1981, long-term developments in political thought and 199154), Elison (198155), Bolitho (199156), Tot- action that laid a foundation for the Meiji Resto- man (196757), Yamamura (1981), Berry (1982), ration. and Zollner (198758), land surveys, the inspector- These studies on the more routine relationship ate (metsuke), the Laws of the Military Houses, between Shogun and Emperor are worthy of note, and fief transfer and attainder are all sketched as especially since this sort of study is rare. Bob T. effective devices for keeping daimyo in their Wakabayashi (199165) has argued that the Impe- proper place and forcing them to implement ba- rial institution was routinely more important than kufu policies. Western historians have traditionally assumed and he explored the role of dual sovereignty in a more constructive light than did studies of late tion," JAS 16.1 (1956); reprinted in John Harrison, Tokugawa court-bakufu relations. Lee Butler ed., Japan, Tuscon, Arizona: University of Arizona (1994) re-examined the Shogunal edicts that were Press, 1972, 179-198. 52 designed to regulate the behavior of the Emperor Marius Jansen, Sakamoto Ryoma and the and then extended his study to view fifteenth to Meiji Restoration, Princeton: Princeton University seventeenth century characteristics of the Em- Press, 1961. 53 Thomas C. Smith "Japan's Aristocratic Revo- lution," Yale Review (1961), 370-383; reprinted in Jon Livingston et al., Imperial Japan, 1800-1945, 59 Harold Bolitho, Treasures Among Men: The New York: Pantheon) 1973, 91-101. Fudai Daimyo in Tokugawa Japan. New Haven: 54 John Whitney Hall, “Hideyoshi's Domestic Yale University Press, 1974. Policies,” in Japan Before Tokugawa, 194-223; 60 Harry D. Harootunian, Toward Restoration. “Japan's Sixteenth-Century Revolution,” in George Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Elison and Bardwell L. Smith. Warlords, Artists, 61 J. Victor Koschman, The Mitō Ideology: Dis- and Commoners: Japan in the Sixteenth Century. course, Reform and Insurrection in Late Tokugawa Honolulu: University Press Of Hawaii, 1981, 7-21; Japan, 1790-1864. Berkeley: University of Cali- “Introduction [early modern Japan],” in CHJ, Vol. 4, fornia Press, 1987. 1-39. 62 Herschel Webb, The Japanese Imperial Insti- 55 George Elison, "The Cross and the Sword: tution in the Tokugawa Period. New York: Colum- Patterns of Momoyama History" and “Hideyoshi, bia University Press, 1968. the Bountiful Minister,” both in Warlords, Artists, 63 David M. Earl, Emperor and Nation in Japan: & Commoners, 55-86 and 223-244 respectively. Political Thinkers of the Tokugawa Period. Seat- 56 Harold Bolitho, "The Han," in CHJ, Vol. 4, tle: University of Washington Press, 1964. 183-234. 64 Kate W. Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Ha- 57 Conrad Totman, Politics In The Tokugawa kuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule. Cam- Bakufu,1600-1843. Cambridge, Massachusetts: bridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Council on East Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Asian Studies, Harvard University Press. Press, 1967 (reprinted by University of California 65 Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “In Name Only: Press, 1988). Imperial Sovereignty in Early Modern Japan,” JJS 58 Reinhard Zollner, "Kunigae." 17:1 (Winter 1991) 25-57.

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peror and aristocracy.66 Both attempt to see the Steele (1976, 1982 75 ), Bolitho (1977, 1983, Emperor in contexts other than in his position as 198576), Fraser (197777), D. Brown (198178), focal point for anti-bakufu malcontents and sug- Huber (1981, 1982, 198379), Koschman (198280), gest very significant roles for Emperor and court long before late Tokugawa. Much early work through the nineteen- formism: Bakufu Policy, 1853-1868,” in Tetsuo seventies sought the sources of the Restoration Najita, and J. Victor Koschmann, eds. Conflict In Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition. and its radical shift from apparent conservatism Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, 62-80; to radical reformation of the political and social “The Meiji Resoration: From Obsolete Order to order by government fiat. In addition to studies 67 Effective Regime,” in Harry Wray and Hilary Con- already introduced, Smith (1961, 1967 ), Dore roy, eds., Japan Examined: Perspectives On Mod- (196268), Frost (197069), Hall (197070), Najita 71 72 ern Japanese History. Honolulu: University of Ha- (1970 ), Sakai (1970 ). Totman (1970, 1975, waii Press, 1983, 72-78. 73 74 1980, 1982, 1983 ), Wilson (1970, 1982, 1992 ), 74 George M. Wilson, "Pursuing the Millennium in the Meiji Restoration,” in Conflict in Japanese History, 177-194; Patriots and Redeemers in Japan: 66 Lee Butler, “Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Regulations Motives in the Meiji Restoration. Chicago: Univer- for the Court: A Reassessment,” HJAS 54:2 (May sity of Chicago Press, 1992; ”The Bakumatsu Intel- 1994), 509-552; Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, lectual in Action: Hashimoto Sanai in the Political 1467-1680. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council Crisis of 1858,” in Personality In Japanese History, on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 234-263. 2002. 75 M. William Steele, “The Rise and Fall of the 67 Thomas C. Smith, “’Merit’ as Ideology in Shoogitai: A Social Drama,” in Conflict in Japa- the Tokugawa Period,” in Aspects of Social Change nese History, 128-144; Katsu Kaishu and the Col- in Modern Japan, 71 – 90. lapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu. Ph.D. Thesis, Har- 68 Ronald P. Dore, “Talent and the Social Or- vard University, 1976. der in Tokugawa Japan,” Past and Present: A 76 Harold Bolitho, “Aizu, 1853-1868,” Proceed- Journal of Historical Studies 21 (April 1962). ings of the British Association for Japanese Studies 69 Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis. (Sheffield) 2, pt.1 (1977), 1-17; “The Meiji Restora- Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council On East Asian tion,” in Japan Examined, 59-65; “Abe Masahiro Studies, Harvard University, 1970. and the New Japan,” in Jeffrey P. Mass and William 70 John W. Hall, "Tokugawa Japan, 1800-1853," B. Hauser, eds. The Bakufu In Japanese History, in James B. Crowley, ed. Modern East Asia: Essays 173 - 189. in Interpretation. New York: Harcourt Brace & 77 Andrew Fraser, “Political development in the World, 1970., 62-94. Awa (Tokushima) domain: the final decade, 1860- 71 Tetsuo Najita, "Oshio Heihachiro (1793- 1870,” Papers on Far Eastern History (Canberra) 1837)," in Albert Craig & Donald Shively, eds., 15 (Mar 1977) 105-161; “Local Administration: Personality In Japanese History, Berkeley: Univer- The Example of Awa-Tokushima,” in Jansen, sity of California Press, 1970, 155-179. Marius B. & Gilbert Rozman, eds., From Tokugawa 72 Robert K. Sakai, ”Shimazu Nariakira and the to Meiji. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Emergence of national Leadership in Satsuma,” in 1986, 111-132. Personality In Japanese History, 209-233. 78 David Douglas Brown, From Tempo to Meiji: 73 Conrad Totman, “Political Reconciliation in Fukuoka Han in Late Tokugawa Japan. Univer- the Tokugawa Bakufu: Abe Masahiro and Toku- sity of Hawaii, Ph.D. Thesis, 1981. gawa Nariaki, 1844-1852,” in Personality In Japa- 79 Thomas M. Huber, The Revolutionary Origins nese History, 180-208; “Tokugawa Yoshinobu And of Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Kobu Gattai--A Study Of Political Inadequacy,” Press, 1981; ”Men Of High Purpose and the Politics MN 30:4 (Win 1975) 393-403; “Fudai daimyo and of Direct Action, 1862-1864,” in Conflict In Mod- the Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu,” JAS 34, ern Japanese History, 1982,107-127; “The Cho- no.3 (May 1975) 581-591; The Collapse of The To- shu Activists and 1868,” in Japan Examined, 66-71. kugawa Bakufu, 1862-1868, Berkeley: University of 80 J. Victor Koschmann, “Action as a Text: California Press, 1980; “From Reformism to Trans- Ideology in the Tengu Insurrection,“ in Conflict In

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Flershem (1983, 1988, 1992 81 ), Fedoseyev less intense concern since the mid-nineteen- (1985 82 ), Jansen (1985, 1989 83 ), Latyshev eighties. (198584), Yates (1987, 199485), McClain (198886) Official organization and control of merchant and Quah (198887) all treat aspects of this issue.88 organizations and the problems both merchants This brief listing, in combination with previously and the Shogunate had in maintaining their exclu- mentioned titles, however, also suggests that sive privileges also comprised a subject of early study of the Restoration movement has been of scholarly attention. Charles Sheldon (195889) first approached the question in the context of official control of large merchants such as Zeniya 90 Modern Japanese History, 81-106. Gohei. William Hauser (1974 ) introduced a 81 Robert G. Flershem, “Kaga Loyalists, 1858- more nuanced approach when he demonstrated 1868,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Sym- the degree to which un-licensed merchants were posium on Asian Studies, Hong Kong: Asian Re- successful in challenging official cotton monopo- search Service, 1983, 121-143. Flershem, Robert G. lies in the Osaka region. & Yoshiko N. Flershem, "Kaga's Tardy Support of More recent “local” studies have revealed simi- the Meiji Restoration: Background Reasons," lar contests even within local domains (Wigen Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (To- 1995 91 ; Pratt 1999 92 ). Constantine Vaporis kyo), 4th series, 3 (1988), 83-130; “Kaga's Restora- (199493) has examined Tokugawa efforts to main- tion Politics: The Toyama and Daishoji Aspects,” tain and control a national road system that pro- ibid. 4th Series, 7 (1992), 1-42. vided the main trunk lines that linked major po- 82 Pyotr Fedoseyev, “The Significance of Revo- litical and commercial centers. As Hauser re- lutionary Transformations,” in Nagai Michio & vised Sheldon, Vaporis is also more sensitive to Miguel Urrutia, eds., Meiji Ishin: Restoration and the constraints of bakufu power than Tsukahira. Revolution. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, Two areas are notable for having engendered 1985, 52-7. 83 few studies: the position of the military as a Marius B. Jansen, “Meiji Ishin: The Politi- formal organization and the court system for de- cal context,” in Meiji Ishin: Restoration and Revo- livering law and justice to the subjects of the lution, 3-19; "The Meiji Restoration," in CHJ, Vol. realm, including to the daimyo. The former 5, 308-366. 84 received much popular attention with the publica- Igor Latyshev, “Meiji Ishin: Unaccom- 94 plished Bourgeois Revolution,” in Meiji Ishin: Res- tion of Noel Perrin’s Giving Up the Gun (1979 ) toration And Revolution, 43-51. and James Clavell’s novel, Shogun (1980). 85 Charles L. Yates, "Restoration and Rebellion Clavell’s work even spawned a volume of schol- in Satsuma: The Life of Saigo Takamori (1827- arly essays designed to address issues raised by 1877)." 1987: Ph.D. dissertation in East Asian Stud- ies, Princeton University; “Saigo Takamori in the Emergence of Meiji Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 89 Charles D. Sheldon, The Rise of the Merchant 28:3 (1994), 449-74. Class in Tokugawa Japan, 1600~1868, Locust Val- 86 James L. McClain, "Failed Expectations: ley, NY: Augustin, 1958. Kaga Domain on the Eve of the Meiji Restoration," 90 William B. Hauser, Economic Institutional JJS 14.2 (1988), 403-447. Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai 87 Esther Quah, “Factors Leading to the Collapse Cotton Trade. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer- of the Tokugawa Bakufu,” Journal of the History sity Press, 1974. Society (Singapore) (1987-1988) 5-7. 91 The Making of a Japanese Periphery. 88 For a more detailed analysis of the recent 92 Japan’s Proto-Industrial Elite. scholarship on this and related issues, see Albert M. 93 Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Bar- Craig, “The Meiji Restoration: A Historiographi- riers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan, cal Overview,” in Helen Hardacre, ed. The Postwar Cambridge, Massachusetts, Council on East Asian Development of Japanese Studies in the United Studies, Harvard University Press, 1994. States, Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 1998, 115-142, 94 Noel Perrin, Giving Up The Gun: Japan's Re- which also carries the story farther into Meiji than version To The Sword, 1543-1879. New York: attempted here. Godine, 1979.

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the novel and television series/movie (Smith devotes only one chapter to the Tokugwa era, but 198095). Scholarly follow-through in the form stresses the limits of the legal system, a system of serious and extended studies has been very that forced villagers to handle many issues in limited, however. The works of Stephen their own, often informal, way. J. Mark Ram- Turnbull survey samurai throughout the ages, but seyer (1996102), like Haley and Henderson’s study place most of their emphasis on pre-Tokugawa of conciliation, devotes only a section of his work materials. John M. Rogers (199096) treats mar- to the Tokugawa era, but he introduces a new tial training in an age of peace and Oguchi Yujiro perspective, that of rational choice theory, to ar- (199097) examines the circumstances of hatamoto gue that Tokugawa law provided substantial pro- and gokenin. Rogers’ doctoral thesis and tections for those often seen as exploited. Her- Howland’s historiographical essay on samurai man Ooms (1996103) has examined local uses of class, status and bureaucratic roles (200198) hold law (especially in status manipulation), and while out the possibility of future serious publication in he touches on criminal law, that field remains this area. largely unexplored in Western language literature. In the early twentieth century the Tokugawa le- Dani Botsman, however, has begun to focus on gal system proved highly interesting to scholars this subject (Botsman, 1992104). of comparative law but have not drawn much Domains. Study of the structure and politics attention in the post-war era.99 Dan Fenno Hen- of domain administrations have been of sporadic derson is the most prolific of the clutch of schol- interest for some time, but have received more ars who have looked at the operation of law and concentrated attention in the past decade. For the courts on the ground level. He is most the period of domain formation, Hall’s previously known for his work on the Tokugawa era prece- noted work on stages in the evolution of daimyo dents using conciliation (1965), but has also writ- rule (1961) and the development of castle towns ten on the evolution of legal practice (1968), (1955105) have been very influential. The first agreements and governance (1992) and village- wave of domain studies was largely confined to level contracts (1975).100 John Haley (1991101) article - length publications. Jansen’s work on

95 Henry Smith, II, ed. Learning From "Sho- gun”: Japanese History and Western Fantasy. versity of Washington Press 1975; “Agreements and Santa Barbara, California: Program in Asian Studies, Governance in Tokugawa Japan,” in Bernard Hung- University of California, Santa Barbara, 1980. Kay Luk, ed. Contacts Between Cultures. Volume 4. 96 John M. Rogers, "Arts of War in Times of Eastern Asia: History and Social Sciences, Lewis- Peace: Swordsmanship in Honcho Bugei Shoden, ton, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992, 231-235; Chapter 5," MN 45.4 (Winter 1990), 413-447; The “The Evolution of Tokugawa Law,” in Studies, 203- Development of the Military Profession in Toku- 230. gawa Japan, Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, 101 John Owen Haley, Authority without Power: 1998. Law and the Japanese Paradox. Oxford: Oxford 97 Yujiro Oguchi, “The Reality Behind Musui University Press, 1991. Dokugen: The World of the Hatamoto and 102 J. Mark Ramseyer, Odd Markets in Japanese Gokenin," Gaynor Sekimori., transl., JJS 16.2 History. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University (Summer 1990): 289-308. Press, 1996. 98 Douglas R. Howland, “Samurai Status, 103 Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, and Bureaucracy: A Historiographical Es- Class, Status, Power, Law. Berkeley and Los An- say,” JAS 60:2 (May, 2001), 353-80. geles: University of California Press, 1996. 99 The works of John Henry Wigmore and Neil 104 Dani V. Botsman, “Punishment and Power in Skene Smith are the best known. the Tokugawa period,” Canberra, Australia: Insti- 100 Dan F. Henderson. Conciliation and Japa- tute of Advanced Studies, Australian National Uni- nese Law: Tokugawa and Modern. Seattle: Univer- versity, 1992. sity of Washington Press., 1965 (esp vol. I); Village 105 John W. Hall, “The Castle Town and Japan’s Contracts in Tokugawa Japan: 50 Specimens with Modern Urbanization,” Far Eastern Quarterly XV: English Translations and Comments, Seattle: Uni- 1 (November 1955), 37-56.

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Tosa (1963, 1968106), Sakai’s on Satsuma (1968, James McClain’s case study of early castle town 1970, 1975107), Hall’s early work on Bizen and development (1982).112 much more that appeared after the publication of From the late 1980s there has been a rising Government and Local Power fall into this pat- tide of domain studies published as both mono- tern. 108 Through the sixties only one mono- graphs and articles. John Morris (1988 113 ) graphic domain study appeared (Hall’s Govern- examined retainer fiefs in Sendai domain, Philip ment and Local Power, 1966) and even that was Brown explored domain formation and rural not specifically a study of late sixteenth to seven- administration in early Kaga (1988, 1993 114 ), teenth century domain formation. James McClain (1992 115 ) explored festivals This early work on domain institutions led to and state power in Kanazawa, Luke Roberts a number of dissertations that gave more ex- (1994, 1997, 1998116) has analyzed development tended attention to the subject. Les Mitchnick of economic policy in Tosa with a focus on (1972, Chōshū109), Franklin Odo (1975, Saga110), mid-period fiscal challenges, Kären Wigen and Ronald DiCenzo (1978, Echizen, Tottori, explored related issues as part of her study of and Matsue111) completed doctoral theses on kin- Shimo-ina (1995), and Mark Ravina (1999) sei domains, but their work was not otherwise has also explored samurai rulers’ attempts to deal published. Indeed, no monographic domain with mid-period economic crises in Yonezawa, study appeared again until Yale published Tokushima, and Hirosaki domains. A concern for these and other mid-period issues lies at the heart of the Flershem’s (1984) study of reform 106 Marius B. Jansen, “Tosa During the Last in Kaga domain. 117 Arne Kalland (1994) Century of Tokugawa Rule,” in Studies, 331-348; focuses on other issues, but includes fairly “Tosa in the Seventeenth Century: The Establish- extensive discussion of the domain political ment of Yamauchi Rule,“ in ibid., 112-130; “Tosa context in his study of Fukuoka-region fishing in the Sixteenth Century: The 100 Article Code of Chōsokabe Motochika,” Oriens Extremus X:1 (April 1963) 107 Robert Sakai, “The Consolidation of Power 112 James L. McClain, Kanazawa: A Seventeenth in Satsuma-han,” in Studies, 131-139; “Introductory - Century Japanese Castle Town. New Haven: Analysis,” Haraguchi Torao et al. The Status System Yale University Press, 1982 and Social Organization Satsuma: A Translation of 113 John Morris, Kinsei Nihon chigyōsei no ken- the Shumon Tefuda Aratame Jomoku. Honolulu: kyū, Seibundo, 1978. University of Hawaii Press, 1975. 114 Philip C. Brown, Central Authority and Local 108 John W. Hall, “From Tokugawa to Meiji in Autonomy in the Formation of Early modern Japan: Japanese Local Administration,” in Studies, 375-86; The Case of Kaga Domain, Stanford: Stanford Uni- “The Ikeda House and its Retainers in Bizen,” in versity Press, 1993. ibid. 79-88; “Materials for the Study of Local His- 115 James L. McClain, “Bonshogatsu: Festivals tory in Japan: Pre-Meiji Daimyo Records,” HJAS and State Power in Kanazawa,” MN 47:2 (Summer 209:1 & 2 (June 1957), 187-212; “Ikeda Mit- 1992), 163-202. sumasa and the Bizen Flood of 1654,” in Personal- 116 Luke Roberts, "The Petition Box in Eight- ity in Japanese History, 57-84. eenth-Century Tosa," JJS 20.2 (Summer 1994): 109 Les Mitchnick, Traditional and Transitional 423-458; Mercantilism In A Japanese Domain: Tax systems During the Early Modern Period: A The Merchant Origins Of Economic Nationalism In Case Study of Choshu Han, 1600-1873, University 18th - Century Tosa. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D. Thesis, 1972. University Press, 1998; “A Petition for a Popularly 110 Franklin Odo, Saga - Han: The Feudal Do- Chosen Council of Government in Tosa in 1787,” main in Tokugawa Japan. Princeton University, HJAS 57:2 (December 1997) 575-596. Ph.D. Thesis, 1975. 117 Robert G. Flershem and Yoshiko N. Fler- 111 Ronald DiCenzo, Daimyo, Domain and Re- shem, “Kaga: A Domain That Changed Slowly,” tainer Band in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of in Burks Ardath W., Ed. The Modernizers: Over- Institutional Development in Echizen, Tottori and seas Students, Foreign Employees, and Meiji Japan, Matsue, Princeton University, Ph.D. Thesis, 1978. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984, 85-143.

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communities.118 ducted extensive investigations of the tax policy Although focused primarily on medieval to late of the Tokugawa in their role as domain lords and Sengoku developments, two other domain-level stresses the difficulty of maintaining effective studies deserve note. Michael Birt (1983, control over an agricultural base rendered unsta- 1985119) and Reinhard Zollner (1991120) examine ble by the vagaries of nature. Les Mitchnick’s the transformation of domain organization in the (1972) study is the only extended effort to move sixteenth century. Both discuss developments beyond the land tax system into other forms of that, through the crucible of widespread civil war, taxation in his study of Choshu, but Constantine laid foundations for the growth and final stabili- Vaporis has explored corvee in a 1986 article that zation of daimyo rule. arose from his research on the Tokugawa- In addition to studies of domain organizational controlled system of national roads.124 structure, a number of scholars have taken an Several studies have taken the investigation of interest in closely examining the most fundamen- domain economic activities in a different direc- tal aspects of revenue raising for the Tokugawa tion – direct exploitation of natural resources. ruling classes, the land tax system. From a na- Conrad Totman began to investigate the man- tional perspective, Kozo Yamamura (1988) of- agement of forest resources with two studies in fered an explanation of the change from cash to 1984125, one of which focused intensively on rice-based assessments of land value for purposes Akita. The culmination of his work (1989126) of taxation, Thomas Smith’s study of land taxa- was a major overview of village and domain re- tion (1958121) first raised the possibility that land sponse to a decline in readily available forest re- taxes did not keep pace with increases in agricul- sources. Byung Nam Yoon (1995127) took the tural output and even remained absolutely flat throughout the Tokugawa period. He analyzed data from several domains, but other studies fo- (1989) 53-79; “Practical Constraints on Early To- cus more intensively on single domains. Philip kugawa Land Taxation,” "A Case of Failed Tech- Brown examined the accuracy land survey tech- nology Transfer--Land Survey Technology in Early niques that created the standard of the land’s as- Modern Japan," Senri Ethnological Studies 46 (March, 1998) 83-97, Central Authority and Local sessed value and three land tax assessment sys- Autonomy, passim. tems, especially in Kaga domain (1987, 1988, 123 122 123 Patricia Sippel, Financing the Long Peace: etc. ). Patricia Sippel (1994, 1998 ) con- The Agricultural Tax in the Tokugawa Domain. Harvard University, Ph.D. Thesis, 1994; "Popular Protest in Early Modem Japan: The Bushu Out- 118 Arne Kalland, Fishing Villages in Tokugawa burst," HJAS 37.2 (1977), 273-322. Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 124 Les Mitchnick, Traditional and Transitional (Curzon Press), 1994. Tax systems During the Early Modern Period: A 119 Michael Birt, Warring States: A Study of Case Study of Choshu Han, 1600-1873; Constantine the Go-Hojo Daimyo and Domain, 1491-1590, N. Vaporis "Post Station and Assisting Villages: Princeton University, Ph.D. Thesis, 1983. Corvee Labor and Peasant Contention," MN 41.4 120 Reinhard Zollner, “Die Takeda als (Winter 1986): 377-414. Feudalherren in Kai no kuni im Spiegel des Koyo 125 Conrad Totman, "Land-Use Patterns and Af- gunkan,“ in Eva Bachmayer, Wolfgang Herbert, forestation in the Edo Period," MN 39.1 (Spring Sepp Linhart, Sepp, eds. Japan, von Aids bis Zen: 1984), 1-10; The Origins of Japan’s Modern For- Referate des achten Japanologentages 26:28. ests: The Case of Akita, Honolulu: University of September 1990 in Wien. Wien: Institut fur Hawaii Press, 1984. Japanologie, Universitat Wien, 1991, 165-180. 126 Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago: 121 Thomas Smith, "The Land Tax in the Toku- Forestry In Pre-Industrial Japan. Berkeley: Univer- gawa Period," JAS 18.1 (1958), 3-20. Reprinted in sity of California Press, 1989. Studies, 283-299. 127 Byung Nam Yoon, Domain and Bakufu in 122 Philip C. Brown, “The Mismeasure of Land,” Tokugawa Japan: The Copper Trade and Develop- “Never the Twain shall meet: European land survey ment of Akita Domain Mines, Princeton University, techniques in Tokugawa Japan,” Chinese Science 9 Ph.D. Thesis, 1995.

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investigation of domain economic activities into tion on ordinary communities.131 Arne Kalland still another arena, the development of mining (1994) departed from the typical focus on agricul- resources in Akita. In contrast to limited treat- tural communities to look at fishing villages, also ments of gold and silver mining in survey works, the venue for David Howell’s (1995132) examina- Yoon chose to look at copper mining. We still tion of the development of the Hokkaido fishing lack extended studies of development of domain industry. While both of these works go well monopolies although they do come in for some beyond a straight institutional history, descrip- treatment in works focused on local economic tions of the relevant institutions and policy de- policy and development (e.g., Roberts, 1998 and bates form an important part of each. The same Ravina, 1999). may be said for Kären Wigen’s (1995) study of Our story thus far has emphasized politics and craft industries in the Shimo-Ina region.133 political organization at the top, first in the efforts Village – generated institutions have also been to create national stability and solid institutional the object of some study. Tanaka Michiko’s structures, and with a greater emphasis in recent doctoral thesis (1983134) explored young men’s years, examination of domain organization and associations (wakamono nakama). Late medie- politics. If one wished to treat the Shogun and val and Sengoku village institutions that created Emperor as the apex of political institutions, even self-governing patterns and paradigms for village the increased attention devoted to domain organi- institutions under the Tokugawa settlement have zation and policies represents a shift in scholarly been the focus of Hitomi Tonomura (1992135) and attention downward from the top. But recent Kristina Troost (1990136). A number of the ex- scholarly gaze has shifted much further down the amples of corporate control of arable land studied political hierarchy. by Philip Brown were purely village creations Village, Town and City. Studies at the dis- (1988, etc.), and patterns of land ownership in trict and village level have never been entirely one village, Chiaraijima have been explored by absent from the scholarly agenda. Thomas William Chambliss (1965).137 Smith (1952, 1959128) did much to lay the foun- The question of land ownership is fundamen- dation for the field, and William Chambliss pro- duced the first extended village study (1965).129 131 Neil Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Anthropologist Harumi Befu (1965. 1966) con- Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in the Kawa- sidered the office of village headman, and Dan saki Region. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on Henderson (1975) examined village contracts. East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1983. William Kelly, another anthropologist, explored 132 Capitalism from Within. institutions of regional cooperation that devel- 133 The Making of a Japanese Periphery. oped around the need to share and cooperatively 134 Michiko Tanaka, Village Youth Organiza- 130 administer irrigation resources (1982). Neil tions (Wakamono Nakama) in Late Tokugawa Poli- Waters (1983) chose to examine a district when tics and Society. Princeton University, Ph.D. Thesis, he investigated the impact of the Meiji Restora- 1983. 135 Hitomi Tonomura, Community and Com- merce in Late Medieval Japan: The Corporate Vil- 128 Thomas C. Smith, "The Japanese Village in lages of Tokuchin-ho. Stanford: Stanford University the Seventeenth Century," Journal of Economic Press, 1992. History 12.1 (1952), 1-20. Reprinted in Studies, 136 Kristina Kade Troost, Common Property and 263-282. Community Formation: Self-Governing Villages in 129 William Chambliss, Chiaraijima Village: Late Medieval Japan, 1300-1600, Harvard Univer- Land Tenure, Taxation, and Local Trade, 1811- sity, Ph.D. Thesis, 1990. 1884. 1965: Tuscon, Arizona: University of Ari- 137 Philip C. Brown, "State, Cultivator, Land: zona Press, 1965. Determination of Land Tenures in Early Modern 130 William Kelly, Water Control in Tokugawa Japan Reconsidered," JAS 56:2 (May, 1997), 421- Japan: Irrigation Organization in a Japanese River 444; “Warichi seido: soto kara mita omoshirosa, Basin, 1600-1870, Ithaca, New York: Cornell naka kara mita fukuzatusa," Shiryōkan kenkyū kiyō, China-Japan Program, 1982. (March, 1999): 161-227; Chambliss, Chiaraijima.

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tally related to how land was registered for tax Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the purposes – primarily seen as a function of he- Early Modern Era (1994; William Coaldrake143, gemons like Hideyoshi and domains. Prior to William Kelly144) explore urban institutions. the 1990s, standard interpretations stressed the A common theme has begun to emerge from role of national land surveys in determining who these studies of local communities: In typical has the right to exploit farmland and the obliga- studies prior to the nineteen-eighties which tion to participate in the payment of a village’s viewed the commoners as largely passive or inef- land tax. Kozo Yamamura relied on this analy- fective in modifying or opposing their seigneurial sis when he proposed that seventeenth to nine- overlords, recent studies explicitly recognize that teenth century Japanese who held superior culti- commoners had a very active role in creating lo- vation rights in effect had rights of nearly modern cal institutions and running them.145 The role of private possession that assured them of the fruits commoner initiative even in the formation of do- of investments they might make in land (1979).138 main policy is given especially strong emphasis Yet in more recent, ground level studies, Philip in Roberts (1997), and Herman Ooms (1996) has Brown (1987 [“Mismeasure” and “Land Redistri- stressed the way in which some villagers were bution Schemes”], 1997, 1999) has argued that capable of transforming laws and edicts to serve the situation is more complex and determination their own ends or of successfully getting domain of land rights lay at the domain and village level. authorities to act on their behalf against other In part as a result, in about a third of Japan’s vil- villagers. Some of these themes are also re- lages, villagers exercised corporate control over flected in Mark Ravina’s work on domain politics arable land. In these villages there was no direct (1999).146 tie between any particular plot of farmland and a Cutting across a number of the themes noted al- village “shareholder” who had the right to man- ready, the study of popular disturbances, ikki, age arable land and pay taxes. experienced a boom in the 1980s and 1990s, with Studies of village institutions have been contributions from Herbert Bix (1986147), Selcuk matched recently by more extensive examination Esenbel (1998), William Kelly (1985148), Anne of the institutions of urban centers. James 139 McClain (1980, 1982, 1992, 1994, 1999) , McClain and Ugawa Kaoru (1994)140, McClain 141 chants' Capital, 1-21. and John Merriman (1994) , McClain and 143 142 William H. Coaldrake, “Building a New Wakita Osamu (1999) , and their co-authors in Establishment: Tokugawa Iemitsu’s Consolidation of Power and the Taitokuin Mausoleum,” in Edo and Paris, 153-74. 138 Kozo Yamamura, "Pre-Industrial Landhold- 144 William W. Kelly, “Incendiary Actions: ing Patterns in Japan and England," in Albert M. Fires and Firefighting in the Shogun’s Cap[ital and Craig, ed. Japan: A Comparative View. Princeton: the People’s City,” in Edo and Paris, 310-331. Princeton University Press, 1979, 276-323. 145 This is a major theme of the essays cited in 139 James L. McClain, "Castle Towns and Dai- the preceding paragraph, but also in my work on myo Authority: Kanazawa in the Years 1583-1630," land redistribution systems (see, for example, “State, JJS 6.2 (Summer 1980), 267-299; “Edobashi: Cultivator, Land”) and the development of rural Power, Space and Popular Culture in Edo,” in Edo administration (Central Authority and Local Auton- and Paris, 105-131; “Space, Power, Wealth, and omy). Status in Seventeenth-Century Osaka,” in Osaka: 146 Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Do- The Merchants' Capital, 44-79. main; Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice, Ravina, 140 James L. McClain and Ugawa Kaoru, “Vi- Land and Lordship. sions of the City,” in Edo and Paris, 455-464. 147 Herbert P. Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan, 141 James L. McClain and John M. Merriman, 1590-1884. New Haven: Yale University Press, “Edo and Paris: Cities and Power,” in Edo and 1986. Paris, 3-41. 148 William W. Kelly, Deference And Defiance 142 James L. McClain and Wakita Osamu. in Nineteenth-Century Japan, Princeton: Princeton “Osaka Across the Ages,” in Osaka: The Mer- University Press.1985.

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Walthall (1986149), James White (1988, 1992, and Marius Jansen.156 1995150), George Wilson (1982)151 and Stephen Vlastos (1986152). Some protests were sparked II. New Perspectives by domain or bakufu policies, especially taxation, but others concerned issues of village governance The field of institutional and political history or attempts to gain administrative redress for the now has a sufficient history and a large enough growing influence of the market. These latter contingent of practitioners to have produced issues form an important part of William some important, competing perspectives. The Hauser’s early study of the Kinai cotton trade.153 most significant of these discussions concerns the Finally the interest of historians in the trans- characterization of the state from the late six- formation of institutions at all levels during the teenth to mid-nineteenth century. The oldest Bakumatsu-Meiji transition merits notice. An characterization cast Tokugawa and its immediate early collection of essays on the subject edited by predecessor regimes as feudal, a term typically Jansen and Rozman (1986154) focused on these defined in more often political-structural terms problems and included essays on the central gov- than specified as an economic or Marxian con- ernment by Albert Craig, the military by Eleanor ceptualization when it was defined at all.157 By Westney, Gilbert Rozman on urban structures, the 1962, John Hall had begun to question that Richard Rubinger on education, Umegaki Michio characterization and by 1968, when he and his on domains and prefectures, Henry Smith II on co-editor, Marius Jansen, sought a title for their the transformation of Edo into Tokyo, Andrew collection of new and republished essays, they Fraser on local administration, Martin Collcutt on labeled the period “early modern:” Studies in the policy toward Buddhism, and Marius Jansen on Institutional History of Early Modern Japan. In the ruling class. Neil Waters (1983) and James no small part this re-characterization was sparked Baxter (1994) examined district and prefectural by their perception that ties between daimyo and transformations in much greater depth.155 Other Shogun, retainer and daimyo, quickly became de- shorter treatments include works by John Hall personalized and routinized in the seventeenth century. In place of personal ties of loyalty, a stable, very bureaucratic organization lay at the core of domain institutional life. In the nine- 149 Anne Walthall, Social Protest and Popular teen-sixties this transformation was the wave of Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan, Tuscon, Ari- the future (based in part on the emerging applica- zona: University of Arizona Press, 1986. tion of contemporary functionalist-structuralist 150 James White, "State Growth and Popular Pro- definitions of modernization to Japan which were test in Tokugawa Japan," JJS 14.1 (Winter 1988), 1- heavily influenced by Talcott Parson’s, Reinhard 25; Ikki: Social Conflict and Political protest in Bendix’s and others’ readings of Max Weber’s Early Modern Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University and Emile Durkheim’s work), but some textbooks Press, 1995; The Demography of Sociopolitical in the nineteen-seventies continued to refer to Conflict in Japan, 1721-1846. Berkeley: Institute pre-Meiji warrior government as “feudal.” In- of East Asian Studies, University of California, deed, Joseph Strayer’s introductory essay in Stud- Berkeley, Center for Japanese Studies, 1992. 151 George M. Wilson, Patriots and Redeemers. 152 Stephen Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Upris- 156 Hall, “From Tokugawa to Meiji;” Jansen, ings in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of “Tosa During the Last Century.” California Press, 1986. 157 Feudalism in History was one of the early 153 Economic Institutional Change. post-war efforts to explore feudalism in a compara- 154 Japan in Transition. tive historical context based on a single definition of 155 Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists; James C. the term for purposes of the project. David Howell Baxter, The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of is one of the few scholars who now explicitly em- Ishikawa Prefecture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: brace a Marxist definition of feudalism as applica- Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University ble to the Tokugawa. See “Territoriality and Col- Press, 1994. lective Identity.”

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ies, comparing Japan and early modern Europe, miliar, the United States, the sense of state iden- used both terms, early modern and feudal, with- tity and negotiations with other states as “for- out a sense of mutual exclusivity or contradic- eign” entities is still a prominent characteristic of tion.158 political life, even in the face of the central gov- Regardless of whether the political order and ernment’s expanding power. Ronald Toby has the era were treated as feudal or early modern, taken Roberts and Ravina to task for over- the vexing question of how to describe the rela- emphasizing the autonomy of domain authority, tionship of political periphery and center has not particularly in the context of his view that Toku- been resolved. A number of characterizations gawa Japan is an emerging nation-state and do- have been offered, all of which focus in varying mains clearly are functioning within a Tokugawa- degree on the balance between centralization and dominated political framework.162 decentralization in the early modern state. Tot- One suspects that the reason Ravina and Rob- man’s Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu (1967) erts separate themselves from Berry lies partly in and Bolitho’s Treasures Among Men (1974) ex- the different eras on which each focuses. Berry plicitly considered the Tokugawa failure to cen- treats Hideyoshi, the kingpin who laid the foun- tralize authority along the lines of the strongest dation for national peace and a stable political European absolutist rulers. Totman, from the pub- order. Ravina and Roberts are interested in later lication of Japan Before Perry (1981) came to domain-level developments and perspectives. characterize the political order as an integral bu- Berry’s subject must contend with openly hostile, reaucracy.159 Mary Elizabeth Berry (Hideyoshi, external opponents in the form of other daimyo 1982) treated the political structure as a federal alliances led by the Tokugawa, Date and others; system. Mark Ravina adopted Mizubayashi the domains in Roberts’s and Ravina’s studies Takashi’s characterization of the state as “com- have a very stable relationship with the Sho- pound” and one in which domains not only re- gunate and other domains, and certainly one that tained an identity as independent states, but in does not come to a military confrontation that which relations of authority between daimyo and would illuminate the degree of forceful control Shogun on the one hand, and daimyo and retainer the Shogun might be capable of imposing.163 on the other are described in terms that represent Quite apart from characterization of the struc- a rejection of the order as non-feudal: feudal tural order in its entirety, Brown (Central Author- authority, patrimonial authority and seigneurial ity and Local Autonomy) has attempted to assess authority.160 Luke Roberts saw domains as act- the capacity of central political figures, especially ing in ways that straddle the line between inde- Hideyoshi and to a lesser degree, the early Toku- pendent states conducting foreign affairs among gawa, to impose their administrative will on the themselves and components of a larger, unitary daimyo through purportedly national policies – political order.161 Why these latter characteriza- land surveys, class separation, for example. tions should be preferred over “federalism” or Rather than stress state fiat, based on his case even “confederation” is not entirely clear, for in that federal system with which we are most fa- 162 Ronald P. Toby, “Rescuing the Nation from History: The State of the State in Early Modern 158 Joseph Strayer, “The Tokugawa Period and Japan.” MN 56: 2 (Summer 2001), 197-238. Japanese Feudalism,” in Studies, 3-14; on the influ- 163 Given the very sparse definition of key terms ence of contemporary sociological and economic (such as federalism, feudal, seigneurial, patrimo- theory, see the various volumes in the Princeton nial) in these works, it is also possible that there is series on Japan’s modernization listed above, note 7. more agreement among these scholars than might 159 Japan Before Perry: A Short History, Berke- appear to be the case. Terms of political analysis ley: University of California Press, 1981. like these have a long history of discussion in West- 160 “State-building and Political Economy in ern scholarly literature and creating good opera- Early Modern Japan,” JAS 54:4 (November 1995), tional definitions requires rather fuller treatment 887-1022. than most of the literature on early modern Japan 161 Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain. provides.

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study of Kaga domain and its local administration, across the domains, but that they would vary he suggests common problems encouraged dai- based on factors such as size, geographical and myo to move in similar directions that were social distance from the Shogunate, and other manifested in a variety of institutional structures, characteristics. an argument also made by Ravina for a later pe- Perception of the relative strength of central riod.164 John Morris (Kinsei Nihon chigyōsei, political authority has important implications for 1990) has also questioned the dominance of cen- explaining institutional and legal history. If we tral models of administration. His studies sug- determine that Hideyoshi’s edicts on issues such gest that hatamoto lords, widely treated as akin to as class separation were instrumental in generat- automatons of the Tokugawa, actually display a ing reforms outside of his own domains, then we substantial degree of autonomy in their policies not only have evidence for very substantial na- and administrative development. tional administrative authority, we can also ex- Two short studies, White’s on the legitimate plain the motivations for such policies largely by use of force (1988) and Totman’s on river conser- examining Hideyoshi and his advisors. In later vancy (1992) both suggest that the reach of ba- periods, we could examine only the motives for kufu authority became stronger with the passage Shogunal edicts on the sale of land and people, or of time.165 While the picture they present con- specific reform efforts such as the Kyōhō Re- trasts sharply with the image of the Bakumatsu forms, strictly in terms of central planners. bakufu administration as inept, it does not by any If, however, we conclude that central initiatives means contradict that impression. Both treat- of this sort are not determinant, then explanations ments focus on limited areas of operation – quell- for both divergent and similar domain policies ing civil disturbances and flood prevention – in must be sought at lower levels. New questions which domains and bakufu were likely to share arise. Which kinds of daimyo were most subject interests rather than contexts in which they came to Shogunal models? How much institutional or into conflict. policy variation is there throughout Japan on a These studies by White and Totman, and in given issue? Are there indirect influences of subtle ways, those of Ravina and Roberts, raise Shogunal policies that we can discern (e.g., by the important question of how the relationship regulating the central markets of Osaka, does the between the domains and Shogun changed over bakufu encourage the spread of its mercantile time. Even if the bakufu never achieved central practices to the provinces)? The possibility of control to the degree of eighteenth and nineteenth regional variation in domain institutions and pol- century England, for example, even if it failed to icy has been addressed to some degree in the build sufficient resources to keep itself together work of Luke Roberts (e.g., commoner initiative to fend off the Restoration, this subject is of great in domain policy), Mark Ravina (e.g., disparate importance and deserves further attention, espe- patterns of retainer control), Philip Brown (e.g., cially if we are to understand the under-studied village landholding rights) and John Morris (re- political realm of the late seventeenth to early tention of retainer control of fiefs and hatamoto nineteenth century. We can anticipate that administrative autonomy), and some of this per- changes in these relationships were not uniform spective has been incorporated in Conrad Tot- man’s survey, Early Modern Japan, but the wide- spread impression remains one in which domains 164 Brown describes state-society relations as are seen as similarly structured and following “flamboyant” (lots of bark, little consistent “bite”) largely similar policies. To the degree that fu- rather than typical of a “strong state” as political ture studies bear out the findings of these studies, scientists might describe define it: having a sub- the impression of bakufu administrative, legal and stantial capacity to formulate and implement poli- policy patterns as typical would have to be sub- cies on a wide variety of issues; see Ravina’s Land stantially modified. and Lordship. Finally, the debate over the degree of bakufu 165 White, “State Growth,” Conrad Totman, authority over domains has a bearing on how we "Preindustrial River Conservancy," MN 47.1 (Spring 1992), 59-76. view the process of Restoration in the mid-

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nineteenth century. As pre-1990s interpretations of small or scattered domains. Although the have it, early modern central authority moves logic underlying this argument is attractive (large, from the great power of Hideyoshi and the early contiguous domains offer fewer chances for es- Tokugawa to a struggling, internally divided and cape into less heavily regulated communities), the largely ineffective authority in the Bakumatsu era. pattern has never been verified and given the in- If, however, scholarly evaluation of the early creased long-distance mobility of villagers during Shogun’s authority is reduced along the lines the eighteenth century, there is even reason to suggested by recent studies, we at least sense that doubt this widely accepted claim. the loss of authority and administrative effective- Such issues suggest that a more systematic ap- ness was not as great as we had perceived. This proach is needed to assess regional patterns of may not suggest completely new explanations for variation. Simple divisions of Japan into ad- the Restoration, but it does indicate a less dra- vanced and non-advanced regions, common in matic decline over the course of the eighteenth characterizations of regional differences in eco- century on the one hand while still allowing for nomic history, will not suffice since many sub- some actual enlargement of bakufu authority dur- jects of potential interest are not grounded in the ing the period as James White (“State Growth”) market economy. For example, many regions and Totman ("Preindustrial River Conservancy") with only modest commercial and economic di- suggest. (N.B.: We can look forward to a versification converted retainers to a stipend and rather different perspective on the nature of the withdrew their seigneurial rights, others did not early modern state and the transition to the new or did so incompletely. What combination of political order of post-Restoration Japan in the factors made complete confiscation of such rights forthcoming publication of David Howell’s Ge- desirable and feasible? Household disturbances ographies of Identity in Nineteenth Century Ja- (oie sōdō) wracked a number of seventeenth- pan.166) century domains. Are there underlying patterns Issues of this sort run deeper than bakufu and to them that reveal systematic sources of political domain structure or policy issues. Thomas tension and/or weakness within domains? Smith (Agrarian Origins) postulated a tendency Regardless of the answer to these kinds of for villages to abandon hereditary village head- questions, the current state of English-language ship under the pressure of parvenus. Herman scholarship clearly indicates the existence of mul- Ooms (Tokugawa Village Practice) has suggested tiple – sometimes, competing – institutional pat- that increased efforts to create legal restrictions terns that discourage simple reliance on motives on outcastes grew out of a rural status insecurity of the political center to explain either stability or that resulted from a blurring of old class lines. change during the period. Political power was Village political conflicts erupted over continued spread throughout different layers of Japanese use of common land (iriai) by the community as society, and even if that held by the Shogun was a whole in the face of demands that it be privat- preponderant, it was nonetheless shared. ized. A number of prominent examples of these and other phenomenon can readily be identified, III. Theories, Methods and Materials but an important issue remains: How typical of the general pattern of institutional change were The shifts in focus and interpretation just out- they? As village organizations changed, how lined partly result from a tremendous expansion effective or ineffective were domain administra- in the kinds of materials and methods scholars tions in capitalizing on the changes or managing employ and in the theoretical frameworks that them? It is almost passé for historians to indi- stimulate or aid their investigations. cate that large contiguous domains were more Methods and Theory. While rather tradi- effective in controlling their subjects than rulers tional approaches to the study of political and institutional history still dominate the field, multi- disciplinary methodological and theoretical influ- 166 ences appear in a smattering of works. Kalland Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming. (Fishing Villages) and Kelly (Water Control) pro-

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duced major studies from an anthropological per- (e.g., Ikki), Brown (“Practical Constraints”) and spective. Kalland, Howell (Capitalism from Ravina (Land and Lordship) have taken advan- Within), and Totman (Green Archipelago, Early tage of this approach. Even in the realm of Modern Japan, for example take up a concern theoretical perspectives to which historians tradi- with the influence of natural environmental fac- tionally feel more open, Marxism, only David tors on man typically understood to be the con- Howell (e.g., Capitalism from Within) currently cern of geographers, and Kären Wigen explicitly employs an avowedly Marxist perspective. argues for the introduction of geographic perspec- Biography has not received a great deal of at- tives into our study of Tokugawa history. 167 tention, at least relative to the large number of Ooms’s (Tokugawa Village Practice) employs the candidates for such treatment one can readily perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu in analyzing ma- envision. Biographical works are widely scat- nipulation of law at the local level and his analy- tered across time and few in number. Hall’s sis of status issues in local politics, but others in study of Tanuma (1955), Jansen’s of Sakamoto diverse fields find much of value in this sociolo- (1961), Herman Ooms’s (1975) and Petra Ru- gist’s work. James White’s study of monopoli- dolph’s (1976) work on Matsudaira Sadanobu, zation of the use of legitimate force and his clear and Masato Matsui on Shimazu Shigehide differentiation of claims to authority from the (1975170) have been followed more recently with ability to implement policies (“State Growth”) as extended biographies by Berry on Hideyoshi well as his studies of popular disturbances (Ikki, (1982), Totman on Tokugawa Ieyasu (1983171), Demography of Sociopolitical Conflict) are sol- and Kate Nakai’s study of Arai Hakuseki (1988). idly grounded in concepts and theories of the po- Finally, it was only in 2000 that a book-length litical scientist. Literary criticism has informed study of Oda Nobunaga appeared in English, that a number of more recent studies of Bakumatsu of Jeroen Lamers.172 The list gets extended a bit politics (see, for example, the 1982 studies by if we add article-length treatments; nonetheless, Harootunian, Koschman and Steele; Koschman we could profitably add to this listing studies of a 1987).168 Gregory Smits takes some of this per- number of early kinsei daimyo, key Shoguns (e.g., spective to heart in his analysis of the ambiguous Hidetada, Iemitsu, Tsunayoshi), as well as promi- position of Okinawan political leaders as they nent figures in the Restoration Movement, all dealt with their Satsuma overlords.169 The wave people who were the movers and shakers of their of interest in sophisticated statistical analysis that day. characterized a substantial segment of social sci- While seldom the choice for doctoral thesis and ence history in the nineteen-seventies and nine- first major publication, there can be little doubt teen-eighties was not much applied to the prob- that greater availability of biographies has the lems of Tokugawa political history. Only White potential to personalize Japan’s historical experi- ence in ways that increase its appeal. The chal- lenge to historians of pre-modern Japan has al- 167 Kären Wigen, "The Geographic Imagination ways been to convey a sense of individual char- in Early Modern Japanese History: Retrospect and acter to figures who left us very little in the way Prospect," JAS 51.1 (1992), 3-29. of personal observations, detailed descriptions of 168 Harootunian, Toward Restoration; Koschman, their meetings with others or other tracks by “Action As Text,” Mitō Ideology; Steele “Rise and which we can explore their personalities. Fall.“ The list of publications influenced by literary- critical theory becomes longer when we move out- side the realm of political action into the sphere of 170 Masato Matsui, Shimazu Shigehide, 1745- intellectual and religious history. See the essays 1833: A Case Study of Daimyo Leadership. 1975: by James I. McMullen and Janine Sawada, Early University of Hawaii, Ph.D. Thesis, 1975. Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10:1 171 Conrad Totman, Tokugawa Ieyasu: Shogun, (Spring, 2002), 22-38; 39-64 respectively. San Francisco: Heian International, 1983. 169 Gregory Smits, Visions of Ryukyu: Identity 172 Jeroen Lamers, Japonius Tyrannus: The and Ideology in Early Modern Thought and Politics. Japanese Warlord Oda Nobunaga Reconsidered, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2000.

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New Materials. In the realm of research ma- tions of printed sources. Printed sources typi- terials, the diversification in subjects studied, the cally select documents representative of particu- analysis of the actual operation of political insti- lar sorts of records kept by authorities (tending to tutions and the implementation of laws on the include the earliest examples) or documents that ground level necessarily entailed exploitation of are clearly pivotal – indicating a major shift in new sources. The shift from bakufu policy- policy, for example. Even very large compendia making and pre-Restoration political activities to of transcriptions tend to be very selective rather domain administration and policies itself meant than comprehensive. When serial statistical data moving beyond collections of primary materials are needed one has no recourse but to descend such as Dai Nihon Shiryō and similarly massive into dusty archives, rummage through indexes of “national” compendia, to materials collected at varying utility, and sometimes just peruse unclas- the prefecture, city, town and village levels. The sified records to uncover appropriate documents Japanese publication boom in local histories since with which to construct a series.174 the end of World War II has greatly facilitated our At this point it would not be fair to say that the access to these important sources. The past two turn to manuscript materials is mainstream, of decades also evince movement toward exploita- course, but the trend does seem to be growing not tion of non-traditional sources such as archeo- only in the realm of political history but also in logical artifacts and artwork.173 Increased ar- other fields. The studies enumerated above rep- cheological activity by our Japanese colleagues resent a very incomplete complete listing of promises further enticement for us to focus works reliant on manuscript sources, and younger greater attention on these kinds of evidence. scholars show an increased interest in exploiting We have come a long way from the nineteen- these kinds of sources.175 While studies of ba- fifties when John Hall could claim new scholarly kufu and domain policy formulation may con- advances based on the increased ability of West- tinue to rely heavily on printed primary sources, ern scholars to employ primary documents in other areas of current interest simply cannot be printed form; today, recent studies increasingly explored effectively based solely on printed engage subjects for which reliance on printed sources. Consequently, it is hard to imagine a materials alone is insufficient. Thomas Smith’s study of the land tax system (“Land Tax,” 1958) and William Chambliss’s village study (Chiarai- 174 Philip Brown’s studies of land taxation, land jima, 1965) are early examples, Kate Nakai em- survey methods and corporate landholding and ployed some manuscript materials in her political David Howell’s study of Hokkaido fishing (1995), biography of Arai Hakuseki (1988), as did Anne for example, have required use of exactly this kind Walthall (Social Protest, 1986) and Philip Brown of data. Herman Ooms (1996) exploited a number (e.g., Central Authority, 1993). Most of the ex- of manuscript materials in sketching the operation citing and innovative aspects of Luke Roberts’s of institutions in ordinary village disputes and the work (especially Mercantilism, 1998) would have manipulation of local and domain institutions by been impossible without examination of hand- villagers. written diaries, ordinances, and petitions. Mark 175 I base my conclusions on an Internet survey Ravina (Land and Lordship, 1999) similarly re- of primary source use patterns to which 326 indi- lied extensively on manuscript materials. viduals responded. Survey conducted August to Efforts to examine the fate of policies, admini- October, 2001, and reported in Gakujutsu shiryō stration of justice, and local institutions of land- riyō no jūsōka to guroobaruka, in Koide Izumi, ed., holding and the like increasingly abut the limita- Kenkyū to shiryō to jōhō wo musubu: “Nihon ken- kyū gakujutsu shiryō jōhō no riyō seibi ni kansuru kokusai kaigi no kiroku, Tokyo: Kokusai Kōryū 173 Constantine N. Vaporis, “Digging for Edo: Kikin, 2002, distributed by Nihon Toshokan Kyōkai, archaeology and Japan's Pre-Modern Urban Past,” 12-25, article appendix, 240-255 and “State of the MN 53:1 (Spring 1998): 73-104, “A Tour of Duty: Field: The Odd Couple? Digital Data and Tradi- Kurume Hanshi Edo Kinbun Nagaya Emaki,” MN tional Primary Sources in Japanese Studies,” Asian 51:3 (Fall 1996): 279-307. Studies Newsletter 48:1 (February, 2003) 16-17.

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decline in the need to exploit manuscript sources. by figures with a very strong Meiji connection. Yet despite this emerging trend, there is no regu- While we have yet to see how career interests lar program in Western institutions that concen- will play out for a number of younger scholars, trates on training scholars to read manuscript ma- one can not help but be struck by relatively recent terials. hires for positions advertised as “early modern Japan” that were filled by people whose initial work at least was focused on the Meiji connec- Periodization and Connections to Non- tion or questioned it. In institutions that cannot Japanese Histories afford more than one specialist in Japan or East The preceding sections have raised questions Asia, the pattern of hiring tends to favor modern- that help us understand the development of Toku- ists or those whose work has a clear Meiji tie. gawa administrative organizations, law and legal In reflecting on hiring tendencies of this sort, practice, political disputes and policy shifts in certain affinities appear to be influential. The their own context rather than in terms of what the process of “modernization” (broadly conceived) Tokugawa may have contributed to Meiji. The is one with which non-Japan specialists feel con- “Tokugawa as Foundation for the Meiji” perspec- versant at some general level. In the institu- tive was in large part the stimulus for the creation tional realm, it involves processes that are famil- of the field. It reverberates through the very iar: the emergence of generally stronger central earliest work of John Hall, Marius Jansen and governments, the extension of state interests into Thomas Smith. These individuals and others the promotion of new technological and business were sufficiently broad-minded historians so that innovation, the transformation of the legal con- their own intellectual reach extended much fur- text in which businesses can be organized and ther back in time and they made considerable promoted, the assumption by governments of a efforts to develop our awareness of elements of direct role in education, and the like. Similar the Sengoku, Shokuhō and Tokugawa past even issues could be listed for other fields of history, though such work may have had little direct rela- too. tionship to the birth of Meiji. Nonetheless, that When the non-Japan specialists who dominate set of intellectual concerns occupies the largest history departments hire a Japanese historian, place in the entire range of Western political and they tend to feel they can make at least some institutional studies for this period. general intellectual connections with candidates This tendency to stress the Meiji connection who specialize in the nineteenth and twentieth partly reflects the newness of the field. The act centuries. I do not wish to take this observation of compiling the bibliography for this essay drove to an extreme, for recent essay collections on ur- home very forcefully the newness of our enter- ban history suggest that some scholars are mak- prise. My impressionistic sense is that even by ing successful connections between Japanese his- comparison with Chinese political history for a torians and others for earlier periods. Nonethe- comparable period, a field that also did not “take less, I do sense a pattern of increasing isolation of off” until after World War II, the volume and those Tokugawa specialists who lack the Meiji range of early modern studies is small. connection and I believe there is a de facto ten- Institutional factors are also at play. For many dency for non-Japanese historians to exert a years the graduate program in Japanese history at strong pressure on the field of Japanese history to the University of Chicago has characterized itself re-define “early modern Japan” as the period as one focused on Japan’s nineteenth and twenti- from the very late eighteenth through nineteenth eth century history. The Meiji connection has centuries. been explicitly institutionalized in this setting, If part of the tendency to stress Tokugawa his- although that connection has not been defined in tory as the foundation for Meiji lies in the predis- the same way as it was for the “modernization position of non-Japanese historians, part of the theory” perspective of the Princeton series. responsibility may also lie in the approaches of Elsewhere, for much of the post-war period pro- Western, largely American, historians of Japan to grams at Harvard and Princeton have been guided their subject. For one, scholars tend not to

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translate descriptions of pre-modern Japanese through eighteenth centuries as one unit, and institutions into terms that connect us with histo- nineteenth and twentieth century Japan as another. rians of other lands. At the most basic level, we The latter part of what was typically treated as a typically treat bakufu governance as sui generis. single, pre-modern period is cut out and ap- We make no effort to compare or contrast it with pended to the modern era as explanatory prologue. other forms of military government. Indeed, in In combination with the emerging, more somber the late nineteen-sixties the field gave up the one evaluations of the Meiji reformation, the nine- conceptual framework that helped us connect to teenth century increasingly takes on the cast of pre-modern European historians (for example): the “early modern” period” that is manifested in feudalism. It was replaced for the most part the twentieth century. with “early modern,” a term that, in its political The self-descriptive statements sent to me by and institutional implications, is extremely dif- people who want to join two professional elec- fuse and vague as applied to Japan. Japan tronic networks I administer (Early Modern Japan lacked the foreign pressures that encouraged the Network and H-Japan) reinforce this image of extended, active “state-making” of the Western periodization. It is not uncommon for people to world – the context that gave birth to the concept say something along the lines of, “I am a special- of early modernity in the political sphere in ist in early modern Japanese history. I’m work- European history. The loss of this intellectual ing on Meiji popular movements,” or “I special- handle has made it more difficult to draw useful ize in early modern literature and I’m working on parallels to the historical experiences of other late nineteenth century novels.” Often graduate regions that form the point of reference for histo- students or recent Ph.D.s author these notes, sug- rians who study Western nations/regions gener- gesting a consciousness of periodization that is ally. While some interdisciplinary conceptuali- different from that seen twenty years ago. Have zations have been introduced into the study of the they quietly rejected the old periodization as in- late-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth century institu- tellectually vapid or have the just never engaged tional and political history of Japan, none has yet this issue directly during their careers? Regard- proven satisfactory, perhaps because we present less of the answer to this question, their state- the terms – federalism, compound state, etc. – ments suggest a definition of “early modern” that without much discussion of the model we have in extends well into Meiji at the least. mind and without sustained efforts to place them Periodization helps us organize our understand- in broad conceptual and comparative context.176 ing of history and it should be more than a rigid I have suggested that (mostly) English lan- formula: periodization may legitimately be dif- guage literature presents us with the image of a ferent when history is viewed from different per- period often referred to by its ruling house’s spectives. An institutional historian need not names (Oda, Toyotomi, and Tokugawa) but that employ the same scale in dividing a history as a lacks a strong identity in its entirety and lacks ties social historian concerned with Braudelian under- that link its beginning to its end in the political lying structures. No scheme is cast in stone. sphere. Indeed, the period’s personality is rather We need not treat pre-Meiji Japan back to the late split. The story of Tokugawa political history sixteenth century as a single unit of historical appears to move directly from robust youth in the time. We can re-construct our standard models. early seventeenth century to doddering old age The question is how the profession and its indi- without the benefit of a period of maturity in be- vidual members go about this process of creating tween. and defining periods, and whether it is under- The structure of the Cambridge History of Ja- taken self-consciously. pan appears to have codified the split. The The discussion here raises two fundamental structure of the volumes treats the late sixteenth questions regarding our periodization of “early modern Japan.” The first, of course, is whether treating the period from the rise of Oda Nobu- 176 See, e.g., Philip Brown, review of Ravina’s naga. Toyotomi Hideyoshi or Tokugawa Ieyasu to Land and Lordship in the HJAS 61:2 (December 2001), 428-29. the Restoration’s eve as a unit of analysis retains

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any utility, at least in the context of political and ers? This story not only involves the degree of institutional history. Despite the fact that hege- samurai submission to daimyo control, it also monic rule and domain structures share some must include study of the relationship of samurai broad characteristics, a number of treatments of to commoners, study of their role as administra- the period do not create a very unified picture. tors and managers and as fief holders as well as Instead, they create a rather segmented one. their role, heretofore neglected, as a standing Can a period that has a scholarly image that lacks military force. a connecting middle stand? The second ques- Sometimes intimately related to the houshold tion is who is going to control the definition of disturbances is an equally important issue, that of appropriate historical periods? Will it be our how domains adjusted to a stable relationship colleagues in other fields, or will we find ways to with the bakufu. Some factions in Kaga, for define periods based on the trajectory of Japanese example, continued to push for more autonomy history and then make the efforts needed to de- from the Shogun into the fourth decade of the fend that conceptualization to our non-Japan col- seventeenth century. In other domains, too, the leagues? degree to which different factions were willing to sit in quiet submission is open to question. Were such tensions dealt with only in the context Unfinished Business of domain politics, or did the Shogun play an The problem of the balance between central active role? If so, in what ways? and local influences (seen in both local studies Oie sōdō were also bound up with another and the discussion of how to characterize the To- source of seventeenth century tension, the dispo- kugawa state), in combination with the pattern of sition of retainer fiefs. While we have gotten chronological emphases in our studies to date comfortable with the image of retainer fiefs being suggests areas in which additional research may effectively confiscated or controlled by daimyo, 177 be useful. I believe two areas in particular de- work by John Morris (1980, 1988, 1999 ), Rav- serve more of our attention. ina (1999), and Brown (1993) show this process to have been more complicated. The movement In the Beginning. First, the period from the was not always a one-way street (Ravina), and rise of Oda Nobunaga through the end of the sev- even when it was, it might be highly contested enteenth century begs for further investigation. (e.g., Kaga), at least in the short run. The de- Within this period we have very little study of the gree to which fief-holders retained autonomous adaptation of samurai to the emerging conditions powers also varied substantially. All this hints of peace. We have materials that touch on the at a dynamic story that remains to be told. formal ideological statements of how samurai Further, institutional history of the late six- should act in the new age, but little that deals di- teenth and early seventeenth centuries assumes rectly with how the adjustment was made. that a largely homogeneous pattern of district and Analysis of domain house disorders (oie sōdō) local administration along with institutions of would help to tell this story, but the issue is land rights, corvee and the like were quickly es- broader, involving rōnin, factions within domains tablished and changed little. However, this is that were dissatisfied with the limitations the To- clearly not the case. In Kaga, village boundaries kugawa tried to impose on domains, and the like. were redrawn for many villages; district organiza- We have studies of the formation of large do- tion and the role of commoners in it changed mains, Satsuma, Kaga, Tosa, Bizen, Hirosaki, Tokushima, Sendai, and even to some degree the 177 John Morris, “Some Problems Concerning Shogun’s domains, but most domains were con- Fiefs in the Edo period,” Transactions of the Inter- siderably smaller than these. Do we see some- national Conference of Orientalists in Japan (To- what different processes at work in their early kyo) 25 (1980) 60-73; “Kinsei ryōshusei shikiron: institutional and political development? Did ka-i ryōshu wo chūshin ni,” in J.F. Morris, Shira- they generally have an easier or more difficult kawabe Tatsuo and Takano Nobuharu, eds. Kinsei time exercising control over their landed retain- shakai to chigyōsei. Shibunkaku 1999, 3-38.

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radically from the early years of the domain sponses to these pressures led to efforts to radi- through mid-century. In areas such as Echigo, cally modify existing institutions, once again in- evidence indicates that land surveys were con- cluding the legal structure of landholding rights ducted in the classic manner and according to (Tōdō and Kaga domain come to mind: both standard interpretations these same documents toyed with and began policies of a wealth- should have created a direct tie between cultiva- redistributing land reform). Luke Roberts tor and specific plots of land. Yet within a year (1998) has raised the specter of Osaka merchants or two villagers were reallocating land under sys- being able to keep even a large daimyo like the tems that clearly show that such a direct tie was Yamauchi under their thumbs even though dai- being ignored – if surveyors had attempted to myo renunciation of indebtedness to Osaka mer- establish it at all. chants has been widely recognized. How much did merchant power compromise the financial At the End. To date, our studies of the Resto- and fiscal flexibility of domains in dealing with ration and the movement towards it have focused budgetary red ink? How effective in relieving on the disruption of domain – bakufu relations budget pressures were domain monopolies and created by Perry and the “opening” of Japan in how did they interact with non-monopoly enter- elite circles. But the impact of that arrival had a prises as the economy diversified in the eight- far greater reach. There is, of course, the sense eenth century? One eighteenth-century bakufu of curiosity and wonder that commoners experi- response to budget problems was to reduce ex- enced in regions where foreigners were housed penditures by having villagers foot the bill for and traveled, but there is also something quite officials who came to their villages on official different: The arrival of unwanted Western business. While we can sympathize with that ships stimulated an institutional response that motivation, it also seems to open the door to reached into many towns and villages across the bribery by villagers and extortion by officials. land, the strengthening of coastal defenses. At Did the quality and effectiveness of rural admini- the pinnacle of power strengthening defenses stration decline with this reform? required policy decisions and an element of coor- In addition to issues associated with the grow- dination that the Shogunate had not been required ing tension between population, resources, and to exercise since the mid-seventeenth century. the costs of domain administration, a variety of Did the experience reinforce dissatisfaction with problems, most common in the seventeenth and the Shogunate, or do we find fairly effective in- eighteenth centuries, revolve around domain- ter-domain cooperation alongside a dissatisfac- bakufu and domain-subject relationships. tion that grows for other reasons? At the local Scholars have long assumed that the ability of the level, in the coastal regions that were the first line hegemons to shift domains like potted plants of defense, districts and villages had to be mobi- meant that Shogunal laws could be enforced lized to provide materials and create or refurbish through fief confiscation and transfer, yet exami- defense infrastructure. Were local resources nation of fief confiscation (kaieki) and transfer strained and hostilities generated by this process? (tenpu) data suggests a much less clear-cut pic- How did local populations respond? Do we see ture (Brown 1993; Ravina 1999). Evidence for evidence of an emerging nationalism or simply a the effectiveness of the bakufu inspectors conservative nativism at the local level? (junkenshi) as an enforcement tool is also very limited. Especially in the seventeenth century, In the Middle: The middle years of the To- supposition of its effectiveness seems to super- kugawa institutional setting also deserve much sede actual analysis of more than an anecdotal more attention, as I have already noted. The nature. How did the bakufu employ these tools? response of domains (including the bakufu), dis- Were they really used to ensure enforcement of tricts and villages to increased demand, dwin- Shogunal edicts? Were they used for some other dling supplies of natural resources, and slowing purpose? Were fief transfers considered by ei- increases in per hectare crop output form one ther Shogunal officials or the transferred daimyo significant area of concern. Some of the re- to be punishment, even when the new fief was the

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same size or only somewhat larger than the old? levels (the estates of the nobility) leaders con- What impact did fief transfers have on adminis- fronted the challenge of squeezing revenues from trative control over commoners? Did villagers their subjects sufficient to meet the expenditures and townsmen have more latitude in practice to they felt essential. Challenged by new market develop and elaborate their own institutions and forces, local populations engaged in increased to thwart the will of their overlords in regions levels of political protest. In the Americas, where transfers were relatively common? Europe and Japan, this century (especially con- Both from the standpoint of academic interest sidered as a “long” century) combines “feudal” and for its potential to put a human face on the elements from the past, with elements that lay a era, works that focus on major figures (whether foundation for nineteenth-century transformations formally cast as biographies or not), would be and shifting balances among them over time, useful. Tokugawa Yoshimune is an obvious even when they are not directly linked to “mod- candidate, but one who, to date, has not been the ernization.” sole focus of even one study. As noted above, A “long” eighteenth century has been some- Tsunayoshi has been the subject of several arti- thing of a center of gravity for two recent com- cles, but we have no comprehensive effort. As- parative experiments in which Japan plays a role. pects of the careers of such figures have a bearing The first, directly derived from a transformation on a number of the issues we have raised above of “modernization theory,” one that conceives of (e.g., bakufu - domain relations, reform eras). multiple “modernities,” asks if Japan, along with The careers of early daimyo have only been en- China, Europe and South Asia, shared in the compassed by studies devoted to other subjects growth of some sort of “public sphere,” an arena (e.g., castle-town development and rural control), in which private and official realms meet, giving but more direct approaches might reveal a good the non-official realm some influence on the offi- deal about the stability or instability of their rela- cial in some way that was acknowledged by the tionship to the Shoguns in the middle to late sev- members of these societies.178 Answers to this enteenth century. overall question and related issues are not pre- Mid-period domain reforms touched on by sumed, and there is not any consensus, but as a Ravina and Roberts raise the question of how focus for investigation and discussion, this prob- representative bakufu reforms are, but in so doing, lem offers possibilities for constructive engage- also encourage us to ask what the pattern of dif- ment of Japan specialists with those who study fusion of institutional innovation actually was. other regions of the early modern world. The Was the bakufu actually the innovator of reforms, second thrust springs from Southeast Asian spe- an image with which we are left largely by de- cialists’ efforts re-envision the development of fault? Or was it a gatherer and re-transmitter of pre-colonial societies in the region and has been information about policies and institutions from brought into explicit focus by Victor Lieber- across the land? Or perhaps the mechanisms of man.179 Like the old “modernization theory” of transmission involved contact among daimyo and the fifties and sixties, the issues of increasing their subordinates in Edo or the national kitchen, “convergence” and “uniformity” are present here, Osaka, while visiting or resident on other busi- but treatments are much more sensitive to the ness? ways in which the two tendencies may co-exist One way, perhaps, to tie these political ques- rather than result in the extinction of one by the tions and a number of other non-political phe- nomena together might be to follow the current 178 practice in Western studies and treat the “long” See the essays in Deadalus 127:3 (Summer 1998), “Early Modernities.” eighteenth century as a unit of analysis. In the 179 political realm there are a number of direct paral- Victor Lieberman, ed., Beyond Binary Histo- lels. As in eighteenth century France, the cen- ries: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, tury was one of experimentation with efforts at 1999, with an essay on Japan by Mary Elizabeth centralization that often failed. Like many Berry, “Was Early Modern Japan Culturally Inte- European nations, at both the national and local grated?” 103-37.

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other. There is also a distinct effort to avoid the well as a movement toward Meiji, a foundation essentializing that many find in the early mod- for recognizing the retention of significant “tradi- ernization studies. Although concerned with tional” or even “new-but-not-modern” elements issues of proto-nationalism, international connec- within the Tokugawa polity. Our sensitivity to tivity, and government policy, the issues that the complexity of Tokugawa political and institu- spring from Lieberman’s to give this comparative tional history is enhanced by the better prepara- approach a focus extend well beyond the sphere tion of scholars and their increased willingness to of the political and institutional. exploit manuscript documents and other non- These approaches do not resolve the problems traditional materials that scholars heretofore have associated with comparative studies of history, shunned as too arcane or difficult. All of this is but they represent a more nuanced approach than very promising. that witnessed by some of the mid-twentieth cen- tury practitioners of the genre. These efforts are subject to much debate and their potential to draw meaningful cross-cultural conclusions are subject to considerable question. Nonetheless, to the degree early modern specialists in political and institutional history engage these discussions, we take advantage of opportunities to re-consider the nature of Japan’s historical experience while si- multaneously building bridges to non-Japan col- leagues that can help demonstrate to them the intellectual value of our work. Considered in this light, study of mid-period “early modern” Japan may lead to a more robust, more unified scholarly image of the period as a whole than we have had heretofore.180

Concluding Remarks Any suggestions for further investigation such as these necessarily reflect personal experience and preferences and this list is only intended to be suggestive. The expansion of the field, both in terms of the number of scholars and the volume of publica- tions over the past quarter century are very excit- ing to see. We may now have a critical mass of scholars to generate perspectives independent of the “modernization” orientation that has been so prominent to date. We may have a foundation for thinking about the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on their own terms as

180 At least in adopting such a focus the Japan field would join the growing ranks of participants in the internationally affiliated scholarly societies that focus specifically on the eighteenth century (e.g., the American Society for Eighteenth Century Stud- ies, International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies).

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The People of Tokugawa Japan: does one assess the relative balance between breaking points and discontinuities as we move The State of the Field in Early from “early-modern” to “modern” Japan? For a Modern Social/Economic History long time, post-war scholarship in English joined ©Selcuk Esenbel, Department of History, the two periods so much so that it seemed as if Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey the Tokugawa age was in a “Catholic marriage,” not only with the Meiji developments as its origin, preparation, and transition, but also with post-

1945, contemporary Japan. The major contro- Early Modern Social and Economic His- versy that underlines post-war research on socio- tory of Japan: The Tokugawa Legacy economic history has been whether the Tokugawa Post war historians of Japanese socio-eco- legacy acted as a critical factor causing the “fail- nomic history argued extensively in favor of a ure” of modernity in Japan or as a positive factor Japanese version of the Whig perspective on his- that illuminates the “successes” of a Japanese tory in which practically everything in the Toku- style of modernity. gawa early modern leads to the modern age of My generally chronological overview of the Japan as an indigenous and stable evolution. major issues and interpretations in the field of Many of us in the field who are dealing with the socio-economic history will assess studies that Tokugawa period have also been greatly intrigued focus primarily on the commoner population of by the politicized question of Japanese global Tokugawa Japan. Ever since the nineteen fifties power or at least its dramatic beginnings with the scholars have allocated special weight to the his- 1868 Meiji Restoration, a kind of a revolution tory of peasants and landlords in rural Japan for it that catapulted Japan alone among the countries is in this rural setting that the major conceptual of Asia into the company of the great powers of arguments about Japan’s Tokugawa experience the West. It is therefore not surprising that in her have developed in a comparative framework, jux- recent accomplished geo-historical study of the taposed with the history of the West as a diver- social and economic processes of proto-industry gent form of feudalism or as the early foundation in early modern Japan, Kären Wigen begins with of the “modern.” Beginning in the eighties, the similar concerns in her recent book, The Making field has advanced our understanding of the lives of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920, (1995). In of ordinary people beyond the rice fields. The discussing the peripheralization of the Ina Valley history of merchants and artisans in urban every- in South Shinano an arena that links the Toku- day life, the understanding of the culture of sexu- gawa and post Meiji periods through the perspec- ality and gender, the social and economic world tive of global market forces, Wigen comments of the forest and the seas in the Japanese archi- aptly, “Japanese development poses one of the pelago have followed en suite to enrich our more insistent puzzles of modern history: how knowledge of the variety and complexity of To- an isolated and decentralized state, far from the kugawa society. European heartland, managed to metamorphose Scholars agree that Tokugawa people had to in a few short decades into a formidable global operate within well-defined boundaries of class, 1 power.” While the Whig interpretation sug- status, and power, partly because of the relative gests continuity and a smooth transition, Wigen constancy of Japan’s geographic borders and the suggests a sharp break. dearth of serious violent challenge to the order Here I treat the socio-economic history of the for some 250 years. The main outline of the “early modern,” covering roughly the years 1600- socio-economic history of the population living 1868, the Tokugawa period through the Meiji under a feudal ethos has been described quite Restoration, but the broad question remains, how aptly since Sir George Sansom’s History of Japan. But post-war research in English has become in- creasingly capable of presenting the complex 1 Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese inner workings of how people lived, and the pro- Periphery 1750-1920, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. xiii. cedures they activated within the institutions of

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the Tokugawa body politic. century, the Tokugawa Shoguns and local daimyo The question of what constitutes the social and domain lords completed the establishment of the economic “early modern “ in Japanese history is kokudaka total yield and tax allotment registers problematic as “early modern” is a term that, in and the shūmon aratame chō registers of religious common usage, assumes the history of Europe as affiliation for each village. For historians dealing the underlying determinant of the concept. What with the Tokugawa period as “early modern,” historians recognize as “early modern” in world both developments form the basic indicators of history covers the period from about the fifteenth “early modernity” by identifying procedures with century to the eighteenth century and invariably which the social and the economic processes of takes developments in Europe from the Renais- Japanese history were closely connected to politi- sance through the Enlightenment, and the early cal authority until the end of the Tokugawa period. Industrial and Scientific Revolutions as the pri- What especially marks the Japanese experience mary mover in the generation of early modern in this narrative as reflective of early modern conditions. There is a continuous debate in processes is that governmental measures to con- world history about whether episodes comparable trol the population and regular inflow of tax went to the historical experience of Europe took place hand in hand with social measures to establish in other parts of the world. Common denomina- hereditary status distinctions that divided the tors used by historians in general (including those population into the politically privileged ruling who study Japan) as indicative of the early mod- class of samurai, and the commoner population ern temper of any society include the following: who were sub-divided into peasants, artisans, and First, historians indicate that an the increasing merchants. Hideyoshi’s Sword Hunt (1588), concentration of political power in a centralized which banned the use of arms by the commoners form of government (European “absolutism”) and relegated that privilege to the warrior class, is tended to replace the grass-roots hereditary power taken as the seminal event in this freezing of the of local magnates who were typically connected classes. The edict was followed by the Tokugawa to central authority in a federative framework that removal of samurai from the countryside into was dependent upon feudal ties of vassalage or urban centers, where they became the standing some other form of reciprocal dependency. Sec- armies and bureaucratic personnel of the Toku- ond, the same early modern process is generally gawa and daimyo governments. held to be in line with the more widespread circu- Second World War scholarship had been criti- lation of goods and services seen in Europe, the cal of the Japanese experience as a negative, di- emergence of a “commercialized market econ- vergent process filled with hallmarks of her fail- omy” domestically, and “mercantilism” in inter- ure to become truly early modern in the idealized national contexts. Finally, the early modern era European historical narrative of a politically lib- also witnesses increasing numbers of towns and eral process that was economically nurtured by cities that reflect a social and economic culture of the emergence of free market “capitalism” and urbanity. In European history, the free towns socially determined by the rise of the urban bour- and townsmen of the early modern era in Euro- geoisie and the rights and a free citizenry. This pean states are seen to be source for the political negative view of Tokugawa Japan was best repre- and social evolution of civil society and our no- sented in E. H. Norman’s classic study of the ori- tions and traditions of freedom and liberty. gins of the modern state. Norman argued that In Japanese history, the English literature sug- the combination of centralized power with a rigid gests the early modern begins politically when social hierarchy under a military class was a spe- the national rulers of the country beginning with cial problem of Japanese early modernity that Hideyoshi in the sixteenth century started to take diverged from the European experience. For direct measures to exercise the authority to tax those such as Norman who saw Japan in light of and oversee the village administration of the Pearl Harbor, the Tokugawa experience created a peasants. Centralization in Japan took place as legacy of feudal elements in political organiza- establishing domain government authority over tion and social rigidities that originated with the all of the population. By the early seventeenth Sword Hunt and similar measures under “central-

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ised feudalism.” These legacies were incorpo- the later sixteenth century to about thirty million rated in the new political organization and were by 1700. This permitted the increased market the basis for Meiji state formation. The persis- orientation of the economy (the second hallmark tence of Japanese centralized feudalism into the of “early modernity”) with all its positive and nineteenth century was the basis for the authori- negative components. Historians have viewed tarian character of modern Japan that led to mili- this development as a generally “positive” factor tarism and imperialism; the distortion of the early that helped dismantle the grip of centralized feu- modern in Japanese history explained the failure dalism on the society and economy. of democracy and the rise of fascism. Even re- A related issue that attracted significant atten- cently, the doyen of Japanese history, William G. tion has been the sixteenth-century emergence of Beasley commented that the authoritarian social castle towns that provided the initial urban setting and economic measures which we have described which encouraged the expansion of commercial as the mark of the “early modern” in Japanese activities within and beyond domain borders. history, “tried to stop the clock of history” and Whether or not these castle-towns “could” be- that the feudal ethos of government continued come the bastions of political liberty and civil throughout the era, implying that Japan’s early society (as in the European experience) while modern experience was unlike the European one under the firm control of the military ruling class, that charts the “clock of history” in our minds.2 for example, constituted one of the major ques- This was the standard view of Tokugawa his- tions concerning the character of early modern tory for a long time, particularly until the advent Japanese history. of post-war research that re-evaluated the whole Finally, it is difficult to decide which events phenomena in a more positive light. Post war end the “early modern” era in Japanese history scholarship has countered the Norman view first given the selective definition given above. A per- by a conceptualization of Japanese social and sonal interpretation suggests that certainly the economic history that ascribes a special, privi- institution of the Meiji land survey in 1869, and leged and positive role to the emergence of the the new Land Tax of 1872, in addition to the peasant village community and its economic abolishing of the feudal laws concerning the so- growth. With the dissolution of the ancient cial status traditions of the Tokugawa era during shōen (manorial estates), increases in agricultural the same years, stand out as dramatic events productivity came about through the application which end the “early modern” in legal and insti- of improved irrigation and better methods of cul- tutional terms in Japanese history. Yet, research tivation that can be traced back to the 13th century, also indicates that the social and economic dy- but it is really from the sixteenth century on that namics of everyday life and production appear to autonomous village communities become the have lasted well beyond the 1868 Meiji Restora- basis of agrarian social and economic life. En- tion. couraged by the Pax Tokugawa, peasants regu- larly produced, generation after generation, an increase in yields and undertook significant ex- Rural History: The Peasant Village and pansion in the acreage under cultivation (paddy Agrarian Origins fields under cultivation increased from around Early post-war research produced excellent 946,000 chō in 1450, to 2,970,000 chō around 3 works that treated the history of peasants, mer- 1720. This increased output underlay population chants, or local history with an emphasis on trac- growth from an estimated ten to twelve million in ing Japan’s rocky road to modernity beneath the samurai world of governmental institutions and 2 W. G. Beasley, The Japanese Experience: A political power. The regional study of Bizen by Short History of Japan, London: Phoenix Press, John W. Hall portrayed the local conditions in the 1999, p. 152. context of regional power from early times 3 One chō is about one hectare. Conrad Totman, A History of Japan, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000, p. 233.

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through the early Tokugawa period.4 William University Press in six volumes from 1965-1971) Chambliss’s Chiaraijima village study brought to represents the parameters of the argument. The life for the first time the everyday in a peasant series incorporates the scholarly research of a community – the intricacies of the social, eco- whole generation of Japan scholars: John W. nomic, and inner-village institutional worlds. 5 Hall, Donald Shively, Marius B. Jansen, William James Nakamura revealed the concealed Toku- Lockwood, Ronald P. Dore, Robert E. Ward, gawa production that underlay the Meiji econ- James W. Morley, Edwin Reichauer, and others. omy.6 For the earlier period, Charles Sheldon The scholarship evaluated the scope of Japanese traced the “Rise of the Merchant Class” in his history from the Tokugawa to the post-war era study of the Tokugawa period, a study that re- from the vantage point of modernization theory mained for a long time the only major work that and stood in critical opposition to contemporary addressed the problematic impact of the mer- Japanese scholars such as Maruyama Masao, To- chants in Japan’s early modern and modern de- yama Shigeki and Kawashima Takeyoshi. velopment. Tetsuo Najita’s seminal article on Within this context, the Tokugawa tradition Oshio Heihachirō in the Craig and Shively vol- and its legacy in the modern era emerged in a ume, Personality in Japanese History, stands as better light during the nineteen sixties and early the singular case of a study of an individual rebel nineteen seventies than that in which it had been who was not a peasant.7 These were milestones cast by historians such as Norman. One has to in the scholarship of early-modern/modern Japan note that this was primarily reflective of the post- that shifted our focus to the world below the sea war scholarship of the United States. This per- of a dominant concern for the modernist impetus spective was part of a larger debate in the States scholars located in the hands of the samurai po- that constructed a positive image of Japan as a litical leadership. successful model of modernization for the “free However, most post war English-language world,” one where native tradition gave birth to scholarship consisted of studies on the samurai European-like processes without the need for aristocracy, and the modernist agenda was as- imitation. Donald Shively commented, “On the cribed to the “positive” role of elite institutions in surface Japan appears to have turned away from Tokugawa history. This story painted a Japan able her past traditions to follow Western models. But to modernize in a way that was a model of stabil- a close examination of the individual cases dealt ity and evolution, one that was comparable to with here reveals that the general product owed Europe, viable and constructive rather than de- more than might be suspected to the quality of structively revolutionary. This was a sharp con- Japanese tradition.”8 The publication of Robert trast to the critical appraisal of the Norman gen- Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion, traced a Japanese eration. The classic series produced by the Con- form of Protestant ethic in Tokugawa Japan. Sub- ference on Modern Japan (published by Princeton sequently, Albert M. Craig’s seminal work on Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration pointed out the strength of the samurai feudal elements that en- 4 John Whitney Hall, Government and Local abled the “power of the Meiji state to respond Power in Japan 500-1700: A Study Based on Bizen successfully to the challenge of the West.”9 Her- Province, Princeton: Princeton University Press, bert Bix reminds us astutely of the atmosphere 1996 (reprint). back then with his opening line in Peasant Pro- 5 William Chambliss, Chiaraijima Village: Land test in Japan 1590-1884 (1986), that just after Tenure, Taxation, and Local Trade, 1811-1884, World War II, “scholarly writing by Westerners Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1964. 6 James Nakamura, Agricultural Production and the Economic Development of Japan 1873-1922, 8 Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Modernization in Japanese Culture, Princeton: 7 Tetsuo Najita, “Oshio Heihachirō (1793-1837)” Princeton University Press, 1971, p. xiii. in Albert M. Craig, and Donald Shively, eds. 9 Albert M. Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Personality in Japanese History, Berkeley and Los Restoration, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Angeles: University of California Press, 1970. 1967, p. 353.

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on Japan centered largely on its great tradition of arguments of Thomas Smith and James Naka- elite politics and high culture. Interest in the mura. These studies mapped out a Tokugawa his- vast majority who were peasants and workers was tory of agrarian growth, commercialization, and slow to develop.”10 the accumulation of surplus in a concealed econ- There were significant exceptions. Thomas omy. Kozo Yamamura outlined the decline in Smith, whose seminal Agrarian Origins of Mod- samurai income, a trend that led many to join ern Japan (1959), is the first postwar study which commoners and engage in cottage industry and looked at the people, translated mostly at this other kinds of employment.12 Hanley has fur- stage as the peasantry, on their own terms, argu- thered the “rising living standards” perspective in ing that peasants contributed to modernity not Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (1997), by just in terms of surplus and economic value, but arguing that standards of physical well being – also socially. The Tokugawa peasants of Smith’s sanitary conditions and efficient use of resources study adapted themselves to the dictates of the – in a material culture that created a general qual- market and proceeded to construct a productive ity of life for Tokugawa peasants on a par with agrarian economy and rural industry through im- that of the English workers during the industrial provements in technology and methods of culti- revolution.13 She argues against the formal esti- vation. Most significant is his argument about mates of Japan’s per capita income on the eve of social change. The social mode of production pre-war industrialization, and is critical of the shifted from the extended family cooperative to crude measurement of per capita income used by the individual nuclear family. Smith’s emphasis mainstream economic analysis. She argues that on the break-up of the old and the consequent it is an inappropriate standard, pointing to the release of energies afforded by high social mobil- absence of goods traded in the international mar- ity in the countryside, also provided the source of ket and, more importantly, cultural preferences political conflict that challenged the traditional and changing tastes within Japan’s pre-modern village power structure. Smith concludes with an culture. image of rural Japan that serves as the training The argument of those in the accumulation-of- ground for the modern laborer, entrepreneur, and surplus-and growth camp stresses the statistical politician in the new Japan. The village is the revelation of a concealed surplus resulting from progenitor of the social and economic dynamic in agrarian growth and the inability of the early the modern era.11 modern state to revise the tax structure to capture gains from the growing economy – an act accom- plished later in draconian fashion under the Meiji Studies of Rebellion and Conflict Restoration. If we accept this premise, the Toku- The larger paradigm of Tokugawa socio- gawa people achieved an improvement in living economic history is the continuing debates over conditions through an “Industrious Revolution,” the relative prominence of poverty and subsis- to adopt Hayami Akira’s well-known terminology. tence-level existence versus rising standards of All these factors are seen to have sustained a living and economic growth in the villages, and growing population until the end of the eight- over the role of demographic patterns which can eenth century, and increases in commoners’ be interpreted differently depending on which wealth continued, albeit on uneven terms, with interpretation a scholar follows. The debate broke out with the major studies of Susan Hanley and 12 Kozo Yamamura, which followed the significant Kozo Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974; Susan B. Hanley and Kozo 10 Herbert P. Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in 1590-1884, New Haven: Yale University Press, Preindustrial Japan 1600-1868. Princeton: 1986, p. xiii. Princeton University Press, 1977. 11 Thomas C. Smith, Agrarian Origins of Mod- 13 Susan Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern ern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. 1997, p. 21.

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the very well off coexisting with those clearly rising-expectations-and-growth model by firmly impoverished.14 pointing his finger at the increase in self- Given the “attraction” of discovering a gradual exploitation of human labor. In his critical review tax decline relative to the increased agrarian pro- of studies of Tokugawa peasants, he reacts to the duction in addition to rising commercial and in- use of the language of extreme rationalization of dustrial income, the growth argument has still free-market economism employed by some needed to acknowledge the fragility of conditions scholars who interpret infanticide as voluntary for most and the class differences between land- birth control.16 In his study of Akita forestry, lords/wealthy peasants and tenants, as well as the Totman also points to the fundamental question poverty of significant sections of the peasant of what prompts humans to act at all, and what population and the vulnerability of the bulk of the level of ecological disaster must befall a society producers and city dwellers to fluctuating eco- before it is moved to confront its problems. The logical and market conditions. The debate reflects depletion of the Akita forest in northwest Honshu issues beyond Tokugawa history, e.g., whether resulting from population pressure and the need the Industrial Revolution, starting with the West, for timber to support urban growth could be re- has brought with it an immediate rise in the stan- versed only after the trauma of the Temmei fam- dard of living or any benefits at all for the major- ine (1781-88) forced commoners and authorities ity of the people. to take significant reforestation measures during The two opposing views, one stressing growth- the nineteenth century.17 Such analyses provide oriented Tokugawa social behaviour, the other further evidence of the subsistence-level exis- poverty, often emphasize different aspects of the tence of many Japanese peasants who frequently same phenomenon – market fluctuations. In succumbed to the forces of nature in famines, Takaino, the very same peasants who presumably earthquakes, floods, and epidemics as well as were making tidy sums in the eighteen sixties fluctuations of a commercialised economy. In producing silkworm egg cards for the interna- such conditions, even small shifts made the dif- tional market were listed as destitute on the eve ference between survival and death. of the 1871 Nakano uprising because of a col- None of the scholars working in the field have lapse in the export market. As Edward Pratt solved the issues of growth, poverty, conflict, and indicates, this volatility was typical, even for vil- their mutual relationship to perfect satisfaction, lagers who engaged only in domestic commerce nor has either side, although opinion appears to before the opening of international trade.15 lean toward acknowledgment of the primacy of For critics of the growth perspective, the im- growth in the market economy. So the question poverished members of a Tokugawa society riven remains: Does the growth in the market economy by class contradictions and increasing tenantiza- engender an improvement in the conditions of tion become the exploited base of cheap labor commoners, albeit at unequal levels, or is it the that marks the crisis-ridden body politic of early actual cause of increased poverty and class con- modern Japan. Those who assume this perspec- tradictions. I find that in the case of Takaino, tive point to the practice of mabiki (infanticide) economic shifts helped the traditionally poor as a sign of the inability of the average peasant mountain peasants attain a degree of independ- family to survive the market forces and the wid- ence as taxpayers. I also think that the of poor ening, glaring gap between the rich and poor. Totman projects a significant challenge to the 16 Conrad Totman, “Tokugawa Peasants: Win, Loose, Draw?” Monumenta Nipponica 41:4 (1986): 14 On demographic issues, see Satomi Kurosu’s 457-476. review of recent literature in Early Modern Japan: 17 Conrad Totman, The Origins of Japan’s An Interdisciplinary Journal, 10:1 (Spring 2002), Modern Forests: The Case of Akita, Honolulu: pp. 3-21. University of Hawaii Press, 1984; Conrad Totman, 15 Japan’s Proto-industrial Elite: The Economic The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-industrial Foundations of the Gōnō, Cambridge, Massa- Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, chusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999. 1989.

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tenant and mizunomi (“landless”) peasants in ment where, with some exceptions, social mobil- many Shinano villages who are frequently seen as ity between the classes through wealth, marriage, the product of recent social and economic contra- or merit was no longer possible. For the histori- dictions, were not the social products of late To- ans it is the inner village contradictions that ap- kugawa market forces but had been there from pear to be the only source for mobility and con- the beginning as part of an old-fashioned mode of flict, representing the “catalyst” of “historical land tenure. At least in Takaino, most nauke action”. (peasants who received “names” and were listed This was also a remarkably non-violent society in village land registers) had been mizunomi in contrast to its contemporaries in Europe or originally and had gained sufficient “status” over Asia. After all, there were no wars. The re- time by expanding their economic assets to be- moval of the samurai from land, and their trans- come registered peasants. formation into an urban military-bureaucratic Some consensual points emerge from the de- class in service of the domain and Tokugawa bate about the nature of the socio-economic governments, and the demilitarization of the change in the Tokugawa society. First, I think all peasantry resulted in the elimination of armed would agree that the formation of a new socio- warfare and a stable political and military envi- economic order was “married” to the move to- ronment. This state of affairs was one major rea- ward political centralization and the foundations son for the inability of the Tokugawa peasants to of both the national government, the Tokugawa win dramatic victories against the ruling class. bakufu, and the domain polities in the early six- Nor were they the subjects or the objects of ex- teenth century. Hence, a study of the socio- treme bloodshed and “religious/ethnic clean- economic layer in Tokugawa Japan cannot be sing” such as the armed warfare during the Peas- divorced from the political history of the coun- ant War in Germany or the Taiping Rebellion in try.18 Second, the fundamental structure of the China. Finally, we must note that the samurai Tokugawa modus vivendi with the people regard- constituted an unusually high proportion of the ing taxes and the implementation of social con- total population, close to 10 percent, which im- trols may have been shaken by conflict at times, plies that no matter how flexible the praxis of law but the institutions themselves remained intact. and authority may be, Tokugawa subjects were If the special form of centralization in the federa- under the control of a very large armed military tive framework of the Baku-han order is the the- power. matic concern of the debate on early modern po- There were further constraints in the socio- litical history, how people operated within its economic sphere. The mode of production of the remarkably “frozen” structure of de facto and de Tokugawa producer was determined, constrained jure boundaries constitute the foundation within if you will, by “self-exploitation” of the human which scholars debate in the socio-economic body and the collective solidarity of the family- realm. community network. Tokugawa peasants and la- There are also some agreed-upon “building borers did not have available to them extensive blocks” of the debate. We know that the land sur- labor-energy of draft animals for farm work, nor veys and kenchi-chō cadastral registers of koku- the low cost camel or donkey for transportation daka, total yield, and shumon aratame-chō regis- (although the horse was used for transporting ters of religious affiliation established a stable goods in some regions). This meant that in- system of controls over a taxpayer peasantry. The creases in productivity depended upon better use registration of the total population in a closed of resources, innovations in technology (limited) system of class and status between the samurai, and dissemination of existing know-how. But it peasant, artisan, merchant, and subgroups such as also meant that producers had to increase work- the outcastes constituted a static social environ- ing hours and concentrate on close regulation of the individual and the collective to get the maxi- 18 James White, Ikki: Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 63.

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mum results.19 ods.21 Philip Brown outlines the practical con- Nonetheless, the society also faced several cri- straints on early Tokugawa land taxation in his ses: three major famines, the Kyōhō famine article on annual versus fixed assessments in the (1732-33), the Temmei famine (1783-87), and the Kaga domain. In another article, he introduces Tempō famine (1832-36). Induced by years of discussion of the mismeasure of land in land sur- adverse climatic conditions and natural disasters veying in the Tokugawa period.22 such as volcanic eruptions, floods, earthquakes, Seen in a cumulative manner, starting with the the Temmei and Tempō especially were periods discussion of a gradual decline in taxation by of widespread social upheaval. And hundreds of Smith and a similar but less obvious surmise by thousands, possibly a million died of starvation Chambliss about Chiaraijima, the study of the around the 1788 famine. These crises became structure of tax payment and its time-series still arenas of violent confrontation between the coun- constitute the single available tool with which to tryside and the cities with their commoner and grasp the nature of early modern exploitation of samurai elites.20 producers.23 The fight over taxes between those Recent studies of early modern social and who pay and those who collect is a litmus test of economic history explore the history of the praxis how much political power from the center was within the above “building blocks “ of the de- capable of grasping the resources of the economy. bate, and we are now able to see better the proce- Most would therefore agree by now that the de dural manner in which the population acted facto tax rate of the Tokugawa bakufu tenryō in within the limits of the system. The emphasis an average year was only 20 percent of the total now is on seeing not just how the Tokugawa yield (and maybe lower). That the additional bur- population increased their labors' output, but also den was placed on the population through how they manipulated the existing customs of goyōkin (“thank you money”, the term used for taxation, and put into practice the written and extraordinary levies, nominally loans) transport unwritten body of customary law. costs, and so on is all the more understandable in As elsewhere, holders of political power in view of the limitation on raising land taxes to any Japan never “intended” to give up the existing significant degree. This situation also explains the exploitative structure, but in the case of the To- stiff opposition to these extra levies especially in kugawa bakufu, recent research confirms its in- times of distress. But there were limits to how ability to radically change the tax customs to much the bakufu could extract through extra lev- benefit the center. By its very terms of power, the ies as well. Furushima, who actually does not bakufu in Shinano for example, had to be some- take the Tokugawa period overall yield increase what lax and in the long run incapable of signifi- into consideration in his article in the early mod- cantly increasing governmental exploitation of ern Japan volume of the Cambridge history, still the producers no matter how draconian the meth- provides a good example of the Tokugawa gov-

21 Selcuk Esenbel, Even the Gods Rebel: The 19 Some authors declare that this displaced Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising, leisure time, but I am not sure that we can trace the Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies notion of leisure that is specific to our age back to Monographs 57, 1998. the early modern age so easily. 22 Philip C. Brown,” The Mismeasure of Land: 20 On the other hand Satomi Kurosu, in her Land Surveying in the Tokugawa Period” bibliographic essay cited above, has shown us that Monumenta Nipponica. 42:2 (1987): 115-155; contemporary research in the history of Tokugawa “Practical Constraints on Early Tokugawa Land demographic trends has a “nuanced approach” Taxation: Annual Versus Fixed Assessments in which detects regional differences, followed by Kaga Domain” Journal of Japanese Studies 14:2 sustainable population growth that starts again in (1988): 369-401. the nineteenth century in regions, especially in 23 Thomas C. Smith, “The Land Tax in the central Japan, with “advanced” commercialization Tokugawa Period” Journal of Asian Studies 18:1 and relatively higher living standards. (1958): 3-19.

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ernment’s tax dilemma. Furushima provides the cally all are dealing with the conflict issue of the 1844 bakufu budget revenue figure of a total of Tokugawa-Meiji transition. It indicates what I 4,011, 760 ryō (the rice price was roughly l koku/ think has been the underlying agenda of the con- 1 ryō for that year); the major portion was pro- flict scholarship: to present a critical perspective vided by the land tax 1,660.000 ryō, and most of on the question of modern Japan rather than just the rest of the revenue provided by 583,000 ryō examining uprisings or revolts: to challenge that loan-repayments plus profits from recoinage of “rosy picture” of modernization. 839,000 ryō. The 1844 budget indicated that the The path breaking articles were those of Irwin official goyōkin that would be collected from the Scheiner on “The Mindful Peasant” (1973) and wealthy producers and merchants was a minor “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants” in 23,629 ryō. Mining provided 62,000 ryō, and Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period transportation fees 71,000 ryō, both again not (1978).26 The first of these was followed by close to revenues coming from taxes, loan re- Patricia Sippel, “The Bushū Outburst” (1977) and payments, and recoinage. The budget also reflects Donald W. Burton on “Peasant Struggle”(1978).27 why the government resorted to tinkering with The provocation for the burst of interest that fol- the fiscal system through periodic recoinage, a lowed probably came (among other sources) from familiar method of early modern governments the revival of Norman’s works on Japan (spurred elsewhere.24 by John Dower) that brought back criticism of Finally, when we leap to 1868, the Meiji gov- Japan as an absolutist semi-feudal entity. Then ernment collected 2 million ryō, which was os- the edited volume by Najita and Koschmann with tensibly in accordance with the formal kokudaka the splendid title, Conflict in Modern Japanese obligation of all tenryō lands, but the sum was History; The Neglected Tradition (1982) with worth only 300,000 koku of rice in the market (l contributions from Harootunian, Vlastos, Wilson, koku was worth 8 ryō in 1868), only a quarter of and others opened up the conflict debate in a full the value in kind of the 1844 tax revenue, reveal- fledged manner. The book’s critical perspective ing the dire straits of the new regime in graphic places the Meiji Restoration in a setting of dis- terms.25 senting voices from all classes, including the The above may be a somewhat “lean and peasant, merchant, and samurai, and – in the mean” way to explain our understanding of the Meiji period – labor, intellectuals, and scien- taxation framework of the contest between samu- tists. 28 Mikiso Hane’s Peasants, Rebels, and rai power and the tenryō peasantry. In sum, the Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan recent discussions of the peasants’ side of the story of Tokugawa Japan have shown an aware- ness of the limitations of Tokugawa power, espe- 26 Irwin Scheiner, “The Mindful Peasant: cially in the bakufu environment. Sketches for a Study of Rebellion,” Journal of The late nineteen eighties and the nineteen Asian Studies. 32:4 (August 1973): 579-91; nineties saw the fruits of what I call the Mar- “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants: cusian generation’s earlier interest in ordinary Rebellion and Peasant Consciousness in Tokugawa people that revived the “tension-ridden” issues of Japan” in Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds. class conflict in order to highlight the nature of Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period 1600- inequity and peasant defiance in Tokugawa soci- 1868, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 27 ety. The list is surprisingly extensive and rather Patricia Sippel, “Popular Protest in Early concentrated when one remembers that practi- Modern Japan: The Bushu Outburst,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37 (December 1977): 273-322; Donald W. Burton, “Peasant Struggle in 24 Furushima Toshio. 1991 “The Village and Japan, 1590-1760,” Journal of Peasant Studies 5:2 Agriculture During the Edo Period” in John (1978): 135-171 Whitney Hall ed., The Cambridge History of Japan: 28 Tetsuo Najita and Victor Koschmann, Conflict Volume 4, Early Modern Japan, New York: in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 492. Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 25 Esenbel, Gods, p.148. 1982.

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(1982) strongly criticizes the rosy picture of Ja- role of exploitation and injustice that enflamed pan’s modernization by shifting attention to the the Tokugawa peasants to protest. misery, suffering, and exploitation of the popula- In a different vein, James White, in his book tion, peasant conflict, dissenting voices, and so- Ikki (1995), covers the whole period of peasant cial discrimination against the outcastes: the conflict by developing a model of popular con- “dark picture” that also went into the making of tention through statistical analysis of Aoki Koji’s modern Japan.29 data supplemented by his own extensive addi- The subject of Tokugawa-Meiji peasant con- tions of data. He emphasizes the importance of flict has inspired a sizable number of general context in explaining conflict and contends that studies and monographs that used narrative conflict successfully brought benefits protestors. sources on Tokugawa uprisings and village White’s innovative methodology represents a new documentation. Initially, the question that in- dimension in the explanation of conflict and trigued scholars such as Herbert Bix was whether brought forth themes that are relatively unfamil- the Tokugawa uprisings were revolutionary, fol- iar in peasant uprisings research: self-interest, lowing the classic debate on the subject in Japan opportunity, success and reasonable if not “ra- since the pre-war era. The issue was difficult to tional” behavior. pose for it had a tenuous historical base – no Whereas White explains peasant conflict in peasant-engineered revolution took place in Japan contemporary social science terms, in Social Pro- on a par with the revolutions in China and Mex- test and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century ico. Hence, in the Japanese case, the search has Japan (1979), and Peasant Uprisings in Japan: A been more to decipher revolutionary action or Critical Anthology of Peasant Histories, (1991), revolutionary discourse that acted as an “energy” Anne Walthall exposes the mentalité of the late or as a force of “progress” in the words of Marx- eighteenth century Temmei famine period up- ist historian Toyama Shigeki. The social force heavals. In her path-breaking studies of Toku- of peasant conflict is seen to have induced the gawa narratives and sources on peasant conflict, Meiji Restoration, but the peasant movement re- Walthall stresses the cultural and ideological mained “strapped” to the reins of power in the components of the subject. Introducing the An- hands of the new samurai strata that came to nales perspective on social history, Walthall’s power. works decipher the commoner’s critical view of Herbert Bix, whose work on Peasant Protest in their Tokugawa betters. In peasant narratives, Japan 1590-1884 (1986) introduced a sweeping people such as Tanuma Okitsugu, the bakufu offi- panorama of the history of Tokugawa uprisings cial who has been seen as an early modernizer in written from a dynamic and energetic perspective contemporary research, now surfaces as the ex- contrasts sharply with the single early study by ploiting evil culprit of the peasant. These ap- Hugh Borton, Peasant Uprisings in Japan (1938), proaches extend our perception of Tokugawa Ja- in which he saw uprisings as the “static” reflec- pan beyond the twentieth-century modernist tions of typical peasant revolts born of agrarian agenda, which disregards the critical perspective crisis within a feudal order. Bix projects a of the contemporaries of Tanuma.31 firmly Marxian view that infuses linearity into social history: the Tokugawa phenomenon plays out as the progressive struggles of the peasant the Tokugawa Period. Tokyo: Transactions of the against a corrupt feudal order.30 He stresses the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1938. 31 James White, Ikki Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 8-24 for the model; Ann 29 Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcasts: Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture in the Underside of Modern Japan, New York: Eighteenth Century Japan, Tucson: University of Pantheon, 1982. Arizona Press, 1986; Ann Walthall, Ed. and tr., 30 Herbert P. Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan Peasant Uprisings in Japan: A Critical Anthology 1590-1884, New Haven: Yale University Press, of Peasant Histories, Chicago: University of 1986; Hugh Borton, Peasant Uprisings in Japan of Chicago Press, 1991.

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Stephen Vlastos presents a regional study of its ordinary communal praxis, circumstances the Aizu and Shindatsu uprisings in central Japan quite different from that of a village under com- in Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa munal crisis and dissolution we customarily see Japan (1986) with special emphasis on the late in studies of uprisings based on government Tokugawa yonaoshi (“world renewal”) rebellions documents and village data that is immediate to that carried the promise of a new revolutionary the event. Compared to the general tenor of con- vision contemporary with the quagmire of the flict literature, the Takaino study focuses more on Meiji Restoration. Much debated as a representa- the internal dynamics of the Takaino community, tion of revolutionary aspirations by the peasants, a solidarity reconstructed through conflict. It the yonaoshi uprisings are seen to have been a questions the assumptions we have about long- by-product of the effects of international trade, term community dissolution from the outward which activated the political role of the small behaviour of rebels typically described in upris- peasant producers of sericulture products for ex- ing accounts.33 port. Positing the issue within the theoretical From the perspective of a growth-oriented debate on peasant conflict between E. P. Thomp- view, the rising level of conflict in late Tokugawa son (moral economy demands of peasants in a society needed a new explanation and both White subsistence economy) and Samuel Popkin (rising and Esenbel present a growth-oriented explana- expectations of rational peasants in a market tion for the conflict. White points out the insuffi- economy), Vlastos distinguishes the Shindatsu ciency of the familiar explanation of conflict as uprisings from the “moral Economy” perspective the result of poverty and thankless exploitation. of E. P. Thompson and the development of that Conflict is not necessarily due to poverty and perspective by James C. Scott’s analysis of Viet- oppression per se but can also be due to competi- namese peasant revolts: the Tokugawa peasants tion among producers for more profit and to pro- were part of the market forces of international ducer vulnerability coupled with the insistence of trade and their circumstances could not be ex- rural producers on further inroads into the market plained sufficiently with a moral economy para- and tax system.34 Esenbel deciphers the overall digm – one which assumes a subsistence econ- concealed production in the economy and esti- omy. However, he considers the late Tokugawa mates a gradual decline in the value of taxes in peasant to be extremely vulnerable within a mar- proportion to total production, coming up with an ket that entailed a “crisis of subsistence”. Vlastos evaluation similar to White’s.35 projects the late Tokugawa period as one of in- Many of the conflict studies cover both the tense conflict within the villages, between the early modern and the modern periods in a con- rich and poor, that superseded the conflicts be- tinuous manner that carries a risk of finding too tween the ruler and the ruled.32 many links between the Tokugawa and the Meiji While the field of peasant protest is dominated history of conflict. The case study of the peasants by macro-studies, the study of the peasants of of Takaino is a good example of a study of socio- Takaino and the 1871 Nakano uprisings, Even the economic forces looking “backwards” into the Gods Rebel: The Peasants of Takaino and the Tokugawa period from an event that actually took 1871 Nakano Uprising (1998), is a micro-study place in 1871. William Kelly’s study of the of an uprising that deals with village dynamics in Shōnai region in the Northwest, Deference and the Takaino area (which organized the Nakano Defiance in Nineteenth Century Japan (1986), uprising) prior to and during the event. Similar to the Vlastos Shindatsu rising, the Nakano uprising 33 was a yonaoshi in the northeast Shinano bakufu Selcuk Esenbel, Even the Gods Rebel: The tenryō. The study looks at everyday village Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising. documents that reveal an image of the village in Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies Mono- graphs 57, (1998): see pp. 17-20 for the concept of community resilience to social dissolution. 32 Stephen Vlastos, Peasant Protests and 34 White, Ikki, pp. 293-303 for overall argument. Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan, Berkeley: University 35 Esenbel, Even the Gods, contrast between of California Press, 1986, pp. 156-167. Chart 1 on p.124 and Chart 2 on p. 128.

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focuses on four cases of collective protest in the the terms for a social contract with power. Con- period 1840-1870, again crossing the Meiji Res- flict literature has helped liberate the Tokugawa toration into the late Tokugawa with a discrete period from such perspectives by empowering the vision toward the future. Finally, Roger Bo- commoner, perhaps initially with a degree of over wen’s Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: correction, and liberated the period from being A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights the “obedient” servant who provides support and Movement (1980) links popular protests in the preparation for the modern future. Meiji period to the popular rights movement.36 The debate has been varied, the arguments hav- ing their Western counterparts – primarily be- Limits of Modernity: Proto-Industry cause of the eclectic use of the paradigms in simi- lar Western studies – ranging from a retake of the and Village Praxis classic Marxist paradigm to Tilly’s focus on coer- Interest in the subject of conflict and popular cive states and communal conflict. Sometimes the dissent has not disappeared; there is much room English language scholarship on the Tokugawa for further research especially at the mi- disturbances risks facilely applying the debates in cro/regional level and through anthropologi- cal/historical study of the role of religion in con- European history to Japanese data, perhaps an 37 unavoidable deficiency of comparative history. flict. However, contemporary research in early- This issue aside, Scott’s weapons of the weak, modern studies has moved beyond the limits of Ladurie’s history of ordinary people, the men- debates on surplus and peasants per se, and has talité focus of the Annales school, Thompson’s unveiled in depth the complexity of early-modern perception of a moral economy and Popkin’s ra- Japan. New studies of the social and economic tional peasant perspectives are among the impor- terrain have increasingly blurred the line between tant sources of inspiration. the early modern and the modern by setting limits The issue of conflict has, I believe, redirected to the search for modernity in Tokugawa the study of Tokugawa Japan, infusing it with the “sources.” necessary tension to deconstruct the widely held Recent studies by Edward Pratt, Kären Wigen, rosy image of modern Japan. The ideology of and Herman Ooms present rich, detailed portraits modernism had largely removed the conflictual that enable us to understand the inner workings of side of human nature, and the modernist descrip- some of the elements in early modern society tion of the Japanese persona had portrayed the previously revealed only in general terms in the average Japanese as devoid of the ability to set English literature. In Japan’s Proto-industrial Elite; The Economic Foundation of the Gōnō, Pratt analyzes the wealthy peasants, wealthy 36 peasant cultivator/landlords who also engaged in Roger W. Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in multiple money-generating commercial pursuits. Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular They were also the rural political and social elite. Rights Movement, Berkeley: University of Much admired as the rural entrepreneurs of early California Press, 1980; William W. Kelly, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth Century modern Japan, the gōnō constituted a unique Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. class which combined the roles of landlord, in- Studies by Richard Smethurst on tenancy disputes dustrialist, financier, and merchant in one class, a that took place after the Meiji Restoration into the role that differed from the experience of Europe twentieth century in, Agricultural Development during the industrial age when the commercial and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940 (1986); by Michael Lewis on the famous rice riots of 1918, Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial 37 I have noticed that there are some very Japan (1990); Nimura Kazuo on The Ashio Riot of interesting dissertations (e.g. Elson Eugen Boles, 1907 A Social History of Mining in Japan (1998) Rebels, Gamblers and Silk 1860-1890, Ph.D. 1998 focus on conflict as a means of understanding pre- SUNY), and recently the publication of an English war Modern Japan, but tangentially also provide translation of Nimura’s Ashio Riot of 1907 reflect insights into the previous Tokugawa period as well. the continuous “pull” of the subject.

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and industrial classes tended to be different strata Pratt’s evaluation of the rural elites differs de- and mostly urban. But in other respects the po- pending on regional characteristics. In some, litical economy of the gōnō is seen to have been they acted as leaders in generating wealth that similar to the earlier proto-industrial develop- also benefited the poor of the community. In ments in Europe. Pratt looks at gōnō activities other areas the gōnō projects for new industries across time in the critical industries of tea, sake, created impoverishment because peasants were and textiles in central and eastern Japan. Rather subject to the volatile character of the economy. than firmly situating them as the direct ancestors An accomplished study of an elite across a wide of the modern entrepreneurs of Japan, in the regional spectrum, Pratt’s study raises the ques- manner of Shibusawa Eiichi as Smith and others tion of what consequences followed from the argued, Pratt sees them as the products of a proto- gradual disappearance of the rural elite starting industrial transitional economy.38 during the nineteenth century and its almost total The book complements a line of studies on dissolution with World War I and the Great De- proto-industryry starting with Hauser’s on the pression. As an intermediate elite, the gōnō had Osaka Kinai region cotton trade (1974), David provided an element of stability to the community. Howell’s study of Hokkaido fishing and fertilizer One can surmise from Pratt’s analysis that with- industries (1995), and Kären Wigen’s exploration out the presence of the gōnō to provide a source of the proto-industrial economy in the Shimoina of local income and play some kind of a diffu- Valley of Shinano (1995). 39 The perspective sionist role, the impoverished peasants fell victim shared by Pratt and Wigen is that there were lim- to an agrarian crisis which goaded the young its to the modernity of the Tokugawa legacy, thus army officers of peasant stock to consider them- moving them away from earlier scholarship that selves, ironically, the patrimonial saviours of the placed so much emphasis on the causal links of village bent on uplifting the peasantry with a Japan’s Tokugawa tradition to modernization. militarist strategy of violence.40 Pratt argues that the rural entrepreneurs of Japan The interesting work of Brian W. Platt on the had a limited life in the history of industrializa- three generations of the Ozawa family, a member tion. Proto-industry came to a close with the of the village elite, is especially successful in maturation of modern industry in the first decades constructing a sense of the individual in the midst of the twentieth century. Even if they were not of historic changes that are usually analyzed only completely swept away by Japan’s industrial in abstract structuralist terminology. Platt’s article revolution, by the nineteen twenties the wealthy “inverts” the approach of most modern scholar- landlords gave up direct cultivation and were re- ship which focuses of different aspects of the placed in their traditional role as diffusers of class and status roles of people in Tokugawa his- know-how in agriculture by state-run institutions. tory, and explores the multiple roles performed Many became absentee landlords or continued by a single family – a significant step illuminat- their economic role as bankers. ing the complex interlacing between class, family, status, culture in traditional societies that is fre- quently artificially severed in order to fit the his- torical data into assumed categories of social 38 Edward Pratt, Japan’s Proto-industrial Elite; analysis.41 The Economic Foundation of the Gōnō, Cambridge Kären Wigen’s study of Shimoina valley again Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1999. takes us across the boundaries of the early mod- 39 William B. Hauser, Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade, Cambridge: Cambridge University 40 This surmise can be linked to the work of Ann Press, 1974; David L. Howell, Capitalism from Waswo, Japanese Landlords: The Decline of a Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Rural Elite, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University Japanese Fishery, Berkeley: University of of California Press, 1977. California Press, 1995; Kären Wigen, The Making 41 Brian W. Platt, “Elegance, Prosperity, Crisis: of a Japanese Periphery 1750-1920, Berkeley: Three Generations of Tokugawa Village Elites,” University of California Press, 1995. Monumenta Nipponica 55:1 (2000): 45-81.

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ern and the modern as she applies a geographic of outcaste discrimination in Tokugawa Japan. perspective to the historical development of the Outcast discrimination is also probably the only silk industry after the opening of Japan to interna- single research subject of the early modern period tional trade. Looking at a sericulture environ- that is still politically and socially sensitive in ment similar to that of Vlastos’s study of the present day Japanese society, so that the re- Shindatsu, she links the local and the global, searcher faces special difficulties in gaining ac- economy and polity, geography and history in a cess to unpublished sources in many regions.42 complex web that again shows that it is not pos- Ooms’ work creates an image of political au- sible to separate the social and economic entities thority firmly intact, much more so than the peas- from the political and the international, especially ant-conflict literature, and political power could in Japan. She negotiates a passage between the successfully control the people through the fine- production of an integral economic complex in tuning of the symbolic value of status, thereby the Ina Valley from 1750 to 1860 and the process co-opting class-consciousness to put it in bluntly by which Japan emerged as an industrial power in Marxist terms. From our perspective of preferred East Asia in the last half of the nineteenth century. notions of universal law, the praxis of the Toku- In the transformation, Shimoina silk production gawa customary arrangement of law seems to was subordinated to a single national center con- have been particularly situational and unilateral trolled by the metropol, Tokyo. in the hands of the “secular” political forces. Herman Ooms’s challenging study of Toku- While Tokugawa “secularism” has been much gawa village affairs, Tokugawa Village Practice; admired in the secularist vision of modernism Class, Status, Power, Law (1996), engages us in a back in the nineteen sixties (in such works as Bel- new look at the inter- and intra-village documents lah’s Tokugawa Religion), at the same time, as of litigation from a revised Weberian perspective, Ooms notes, when looked at close up, Tokugawa one we might call the political economy of law. law resembles martial law, which is interested in Ooms is inspired by the writings of Pierre order more than justice. Bourdieu on early modern France and he con- An interesting outcome of recent publications structs an engaging picture of the praxis of Toku- on Tokugawa socio-economic history is that we gawa law at the village and community levels. have now a concentration of English studies on Reworking the categories of class, status, and the Shinano-Nagano region: my study of the power through a model of convertible capital Kami-Takai gun in the northeast, Kären Wigen’s (economic, social and symbolic), he deciphers the study on Shimoina in the south, Herman Ooms on inner workings of the village and its relation to Kita-Saku district below Takai-gun, Ronald power. Using tax documents, shumon aratame Toby’s study of rural financial networks, and now chō, petitions, and court documents, Ooms re- the recent research of Brian Platt on a Shinshū veals a macro image of the juridical field and the family.43 Surely, this must be coincidental one specific power generated by laws. In this respect, first surmises, but perhaps not. I think that the we learn of the actual procedure of the distribu- role of the remarkably advanced level of local tion of the tax burden within the village collectiv- history in Japan and particularly the leadership of ity that lay at the base of village autonomy under samurai rule and other procedures of actual litiga- tion. The “mountains of resentment” chapter con- 42 Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice: cerning the woman Ken, who persistently liti- Class, Status, Power, Law, Berkeley: University of gated against her community in order that it re- California Press, 1996. 43 dress their complicity in the murder of her brother, Ronald P. Toby, “Both a Borrower and a gives hitherto uncharted detail about the proc- Lender Be: From Village Moneylender to Rural esses of litigious contestation and the conditions Banker in the Tempō Era,” Monumental Nipponica. of peasant women. His treatment of the outcaste 46: 4 (1991): 483-513. In addition, a number of the works by Laurel Cornell, Anne Jannetta (cited community under the aegis of the state and com- below), Hayami Akira, Saitō Osamu and others pared to racism is significant because it is one of cited in Kurosu Satomi’s review of demographic the few studies in English of the social structure history also focus on this same region.

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the accomplished historians of the local school the “Japanese “ model with the “progressive- system and prefectural historical institutes of Na- ness” of the “Euro-Western “ model of economic gano have played a decisive role in why so many growth which was seen as having had primarily English-language authors chose to look at Japan urban origins. Norman had been sharply critical through a Shinano lens. Similar to the com- of the feudal origins of Japan’s pre-war authori- mendable French tradition of combining the role tarian polity that derived its conservatism from of the research-historian with that of the high the rural character of Japan’s bourgeois develop- school teacher, the modern Japanese network of ment. Both views saw a sharp contrast between local historian-teachers is still alive in Nagano the Japanese and the European experiences that and must be credited with having developed the resulted in divergent political paths (however, field of socio-economic history at the local level Smith’s analysis searched for a balanced analysis to such a high degree that it has had ramifications that did not see Japanese rurality as a negative in the work of non-Japanese scholars as well. political factor). Both views saw European eco- nomic growth as rooted in commercialized towns and cities that gave birth to civil society and lib- Beyond the Rice Fields: History of Ur- eral thought. In contrast, Japan’s economic ban Life, Fishing, and Forestry growth took place in the rural communities that In contrast to the village and rural world in were bastions of peasant conservatism. While general, the world of the town and the city has much less so for Smith, the implication of this remained until recently a relatively unstudied assumption has been that Tokugawa Japan lacked subject as a social and economic history. James parallel social and political currents that encour- McClain’s Kanazawa: A Seventeenth Century aged the development of civil society. Castle Town (1982) and Gary Leupp on Servants The recent volume of James McClain and Shop Hands, and Laborers in the Cities of Toku- Wakita Osamu, Osaka: The Merchants’ Capital of gawa Japan (1992) are pioneer works in this Early Modern Japan (1999), is path breaking in field.44 Heretofore, the Tokugawa city is over- putting the city on the map of Tokugawa Japan, whelmingly the entertaining world of eighteenth therefore, challenging the sharp delineation of century Genroku Japan, but not a socio-economic differences between the Japanese and the Euro- structure or praxis in the manner of the Tokugawa pean early modern experience. This collection of village. The only major exceptions that come to interesting articles by Japanese and Western mind are the earlier works such as William scholars describes the layers of social and eco- Hauser on Osaka cited above, and the unique re- nomic scenery, an autonomous administration in search of Gilbert Rozman on Edo and Japanese the hands of a merchant elite cooperating with urban networks; for a long time it was the village samurai authority, urban communities and gangs, rather than the city that represented the social and a pulsating commercial life, all as part of urban economic character of Tokugawa Japan. 45 Tokugawa Japan with the implications that there Smith’s view of early modern Japanese economic was quite a lively autonomy of the “city” as an growth as primarily of commercialized rural ori- early modern environment. The work gives us gins had contrasted the “rural conservatism” of the energy of urban Osaka including its history, local inari worship, jōruri entertainment, the life of mendicant monks, protests and so on. 46 44 James McClain, Kanazawa: A Seventeenth Cities may be centers of liberty and autonomy Century Japanese Castle Town, New Haven: Yale for the individual who is distanced from social University Press, 1982; Garry P. Leupp, Servants constraints of the village, but they also have an Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa underside that is more dangerous than the image Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. of village communities of prudent hard working 45 Gilbert Rozman, Urban Networks in Ch’ing China and Tokugawa Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974; Gilbert Rozman, “Edo’s 46 James McClain and Wakita Osamu, eds., Importance in a Changing Tokugawa Society,” Osaka: The Merchants' Capital of Early Modern Journal of Japanese Studies 1:1 (1974): 113-126. Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

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peasants. The new work of Phillippe Pons ex- an argument that brings back the role of govern- poses the structures of poverty and crime in ur- ment regulation of the village as a significant banity of Tokugawa Japan and today’s Tokyo. In component in the modernization of Japan after his book on misery and crime in Japan, Pons has the Meiji Restoration. a sweeping vision of the past and present in urban In this context, the study of man’s exploitation Japan wherein also dwell the underworld of pov- and contestation of nature has gained new light. erty and crime in liminal spaces of criminal sub- William W. Kelly’s earlier work, Water Controls cultures of the yakuza-the familiar “mafia” un- in Tokugawa Japan, Constantine Nomikos Va- derworld of Japan.47 Similarly, Nam-lin Hur de- poris’s recent work on overland communication, scribes the social scene of prayer and play in the Ann B. Janetta’s study of epidemics and finally, Asakusa Sensoji temple district of Edo that sur- Conrad Totman’s The Green Archipelago: For- vived as a small niche of Tokugawa urban popu- estry in Pre-industrial Japan all expose the issue lar religion.48 The Tokugawa city is finally being of man’s manipulation of the environment that put on the map of an early modernity that, while entailed the destruction of nature with all of its not identical with the European scene, appears in negative consequences for Japan.50 step with the standard view of early modernity for Europe. Pioneer works in their field such as those of The Unregistered Lives of Men and Wo- David Howell and Arne Kalland on the study of men: Studies of Sexuality and Gender the sea, shift our obsession with the landlocked A number of innovative, richly textured discus- image of village Japan to its coastal environment. sions of sexuality and gender identity have These studies offer an alternative image of Japan opened new windows to understanding the public as a sea-fearing and fishing nation since the mid- 49 and private lives of men and women. These re- dle ages. Despite the importance of the sea in cent publications show us that the field has at- the Japanese diet and traditional economic activ- tained an exciting complexity in terms of meth- ity, little research has been done on the history of odology and conceptualization, in tune with Japan’s fishing industry. Arne Kalland’s work is a widespread contemporary trends in historiogra- landmark approach that has opened a new path to phy. understanding early modern Japan. Kalland’s In comparison to the subjects of political econ- study analyzes how fishing villages were inte- omy such as proto-industry and village elites, grated into larger regions and thereby simultane- recent discussions of the history of gender roles ously breaks the scholarly isolation of Tokugawa and the regulation of sexuality present an image villages from the outside world. In his words, the of Tokugawa Japan that is the most “severed” study of fishing villages constructs the bridge from the post-Meiji history of modern Japan. between the city and the farming villages and One comes away with the impression that al- unveils the regional economy of Tokugawa soci- though social and economic processes and prac- ety. Combining anthropology, economic history tices continued into the post-1868 era for some and the methods of resource management, the time, the modern state was more effective in study also re-examines late Tokugawa reforms to modifying, eradicating, or mutating the Toku- solve the famine and economic crises as part of gawa legacy of gender and sexuality and replac-

47 Phillippe Pons. Misere et crime au Japon du XVIIe siecle a nos jours. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. 50 Vaporis, Breaking Barriers; William W. Kelly, 48 Nam-lin Hur. Prayer and Play in Late Water Control in Tokugawa Japan: Irrigation Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society. Organization in a Japanese River Basin, 1600-1870, Cambridge Massachusetts.: Harvard University Ithaca: Cornell China-Japan Program, 1982; Ann Asia Center, 2000. Bowman Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in 49 David Howell, Capitalism From Within; Arne Early Modern Japan, Princeton: Princeton Kalland, Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Japan, University Press, 1997; Totman, The Green Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. Archipelago.

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ing it with the “modern” Japanese images of man On the other hand, Yokota Fuyuhiko’s article and woman/male and female, and that this was on rethinking the Greater Learning for Women not necessarily a positive development. In the (Onna daigaku of Kaibara Ekken) sees it as the study of gender and sexuality, the Meiji/modern precursor of the Meiji ideology that defined Japanese state does not seem to have played a women’s work largely in terms of maintaining the liberating role. The modern state appears to have household and reproducing heirs at home. Yokota sacrificed an early modern sexual culture of argues that the Onna Daigaku was the first step flexibility for the sake of the civilizing process. toward the establishment of the post-Meiji ideol- The volumes edited by Gail Bernstein and ogy of the good wife, wise mother and modern Tonomura, Walthall, and Wakita have established professional housewife.53 Similarly, the Toku- the study of gender and the history of women as a gawa legacy of the authorized prostitution is also significant new field in early modern studies.51 seen to have survived into the modern period in The study of women as labor in the family-based various forms, leading to the “comfort women” proto-industries of sericulture, textile, and in rare of the Pacific War. instances even in the male domain of sake brew- Both volumes attest long years of study on the eries underscores the importance of female labor history of women in Japan. These scholars bring in upholding the household and providing crucial forth new approaches to the history of women labor for by-employments. Read together with and promise an interdisciplinary breakthrough. the Pratt and Wigen studies of late Tokugawa and The research is revisionist in that it aims to break post-Meiji proto-industry processes, these essays through the prevalent Marxian tradition in Japan of rural and urban working women illuminate the that emphasizes the areas of production domi- way gender roles and reproductive roles were nated by men. integral to the successful functioning of broad Ann Walthall’s biography of Matsuo Taseko, a socio-economic processes. The overall tone of the peasant woman from the Ina valley who was in- rich array of studies on Tokugawa women, espe- volved in loyalist anti-Tokugawa activities, cially the farmwomen of the countryside, stresses brings to life the revolutionary environment in the the relatively flexible division of gender roles last decades of the bakufu regime. Taseko between in the family, one where parents shared emerges as a vibrant example of many women the chores of cultivation and child rearing. Re- who step into an unusual role in a revolutionary cent studies describe a relatively greater freedom environment. Walthall’s excellent study is a sig- for females in the villages compared to the nificant achievement in the writing of historical stricter social controls and confinement of upper- biography in Japanese history: It treats Japanese class samurai women and compared to Meiji historical actors as complex individuals who rep- women who were “reconstructed” under modern resent the “not so famous and illustrious” and reforms. Interestingly, westerner visitors to Japan allows the reader to penetrate into the social his- appear to have noticed the relative freedom and tory of the general population.54 ease of the village women of Japan in previous The study of Japanese women has been times as well. Leupp cites Jesuit missionaries of launched with the close reading of the Japanese the sixteenth century who remarked on women’s context through the theoretical and historical ability “ to go hither and thither as they list.”52 evaluation of women and gender pioneered in the scholarship on women in the West. The approach

51 Gail Lee Bernstein, Recreating Japanese 1603-1868, Berkeley: University of California Press, Women 1600-1945. Berkeley: University of Califor- 1995, p. 186. nia Press, 1991, p. 2; Tonomura Hitomi, Ann 53 “Imagining Working Women in Early Modern Walthall, and Wakita Haruko, Women and Class in Japan,” Tonomura et. al., eds. Women and Class, Japanese History. Ann Arbor: University of Michi- p. 166. gan, 1999. 54 Ann Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless 52 Garry P. Leupp, Male Colors: The Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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brings a significant comparative advantage to similar to that of the Eastern Mediterranean per- analysis of the subject, but there is much room ception of male sexuality as naturally bi-sexual. for biography, such as Walthall’s. On the other In contrast to the segregation of categories of hand, that the belated publication of Ella Wis- sexual and gender identities in modern societies, well’s work on Suyemura (1982) remains the best the Tokugawa praxis of sexuality in both the male account of women in pre-war rural Japan sug- and female worlds carried a greater degree of gests the need for greater efforts to penetrate the ambivalence about sexuality in general. Beneath communal and family activities of everyday the regime’s disapproval of sexual conduct as Japanese women in the Tokugawa period.55 unbecoming by Confucian norms, Tokugawa so- Other scholars have focused on construction of ciety widely tolerated behaviour that allowed the sexual in the male and female worlds. Begin- crossing into other sexual identities. The public’s ning with Gary Leupp’s Male Colors and Sumie admiration of androgyny and the floating world Jones’s edited volume (both 1995) that brought of the courtesans attest to the combination of the together studies by numerous scholars on sexual- sexual with the aesthetic and the artistic in early ity and Edo culture have exposed the connection modern urban culture. The only subject in the of the institutions of the public realm with the field of sexual and gender identity studies that intimate world of sexuality in its various forms.56 remains to be studied is the social and psycho- The recent study of Gregory Pflugfelder on the logical history of romantic love between men and subject of male-male sexuality (a term that both women, which is still frequently handled only Leupp and Pflugfelder explain is historically within the framework of the shinju monogatari, more accurate than the European term, homo- or love suicide tales of Tokugawa literature. As sexuality) covering the period from the early To- Leupp notes, Tokugawa Japan had a profound kugawa to the contemporary age, maps in dis- distrust of intense romantic love relationships course analysis the praxis of sexuality in men, between men and women. Their legacy seems to and as a by-product, that in women.57 have also influenced the historical study of the In his study of nanshoku, or, “male-colors,” subject as well since there is still relatively less Leupp shows how male/male sexuality was intri- knowledge on the operation of the culture of het- cately linked to the all-male monastic culture that erosexuality in Japanese culture. arrived from China in the ninth century: the aco- Plugfelder provides a complex analysis of the lyte boys took the place of women because Bud- discourse on male/male sexuality down to the dhism did not condone heterosexual desire. The post-WW II era where the legacy of Tokugawa Japanese perception of homosexuality was quite sexual culture (primarily among men) is relegated to the shadowy marginal quarters of society. Set- ting his debate within the ars erotica and scienti- 55 Robert J. Smith and Ella Lury Wiswell, The fia sexualis distinction of Michel Foucault, and Women of Suye Mura, Chicago: The University of between the sexual culture of the classical world Chicago Press, 1982. and the orient versus that of the post-classical 56 Sumie Jones, ed., Sexuality and Edo Culture West, Plugfelder presents a “western” reading of 1750-1850, Bloomington: Indiana University, 1995; the shifts in sexual culture in Japan. The empha- Garry P. Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of sis is on the active encounter of the Japanese pub- Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan 1603-1868, lic with new notions/strictures about sexuality Berkeley; University of California Press, 1995. both within popular culture and within profes- 57 Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of De- sional circles that have accepted the western legal sire: Male-male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse and medical knowledge. Plugfelder avoids the 1600-1950, Berkeley: University of California Press, usual Orient/Occident or East/West pitfalls of 1999; Selcuk Esenbel, “The Anguish of Civilized interpretation. The delicate way in which Plug- Behavior: The Use of Western Cultural Forms in the felder weaves French legal concepts and German Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ot- medical discourse into the Japanese environment toman Turks During the Nineteenth Century,” Japan by showing their complex interaction with Japa- Review 5, (1994): 145-185. nese critical discourse is an excellent example of

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a realistic assessment of how Japan and the West, economic terms beneath the tatemae, the outward in this case Europe, fuse into a joint historical principle of feudal power. The Tokugawa village fate. for example is no longer the oppressed commu- Such studies show us that the psychological nity of feudal peasants that had been prevalent in history of westernization is yet to be written. the early stages of Japanese studies, nor is it like Plugfelder’s account of sexuality represents a Tolstoy’s idyllic rural utopia that was the precur- good example of what I call the “anguish of civi- sor of modernity. The early modern village is lized behavior.” Here, the civilizing process of instead the environment where conflict and con- constructing a modern persona out of an interac- sensus among peasants of varied classes, wealth, tion of oriental and occidental social and cultural and status developed through their own proce- environments creates the “double” tension of bi- dures. In sum, the Tokugawa historical arena is culturally determined spheres of the rational and now a stage where there is a significant degree of the emotive for the psychology of the individual. fine-tuning, the term that best describes our new approach to the early modern today. The early modern state was concerned about retaining their Summary and General Observations overall authority, but they were not that interested in penetrating into the details of community man- Interpretive Trends. A review of the litera- agement or the personal lives of individuals in the ture on the Tokugawa people for the last two dec- way that the modern state can be; Tokugawa so- ades leaves one with the impression that there is a ciety is a world where urban authoritarian power new image of Tokugawa society: these men and could or had to be negotiated at the grassroots women were different from the modern people of level. Japan who are more like us, products of a ho- Therefore, the Tokugawa age sometimes ap- mogenizing, assimilating modern state. Recent pears as a collection of admirable qualities that studies not only expose Tokugawa people as ac- were lost along the way to Japan Inc. Govern- tors in a social and economic terrain, but reflect ment was autocratic but flexible; law was not how their activities were irrevocably connected to democratic but answered to the needs of the day the exigency of power and could in some meas- with a complex situationality; culture was re- ure manipulate it as well. gional but appears “authentic” in the sense that it One can summarize the new image of the To- was not dictated from the metropolitan center; kugawa “early modern” in social and economic there was exploitation of the producers, but peas- history as the following. Rather than the formal ants negotiated their taxes and, if pushed, put up a contours of the character of Tokugawa society, good fight against the wealthy landlords and mer- our new emphasis is on the dynamic interaction chants as well as the governmental authorities in between the de jure and the de facto of historical seeking justice; there was poverty but proto- behaviour; we are more attentive to deciphering industry as well. It meant that some were rich the “due process” of the social-economic praxis. among the many poor, but proto-industry was the We now have multiple photographs that illustrate basis for the circulation of capital and the founda- various sections of human behavior ranging from tion of a rurally based production. In sum, the the construction of gender and sexual identities to Tokugawa age rested on a modus vivendi between the way the peasantry activated the institutions of central power and local interest. samurai hegemony to make inroads in the system. At the personal level, the decentralized quality Today, the Tokugawa body politic can be inter- of Tokugawa life also suggests the “advantage” preted as an arena of negotiation and litigation. of a presumed absence of regulation over sexual We notice the situationality and flexibility that desire and a balanced gender self-image at the accompanied the oppressive coercive power of a commoner level compared to the highly regulated Tokugawa military which in some measure suc- breeding required of the military aristocracy. Le- cessfully co-opted local interests. To put it in upp notes, “Although the regime attempted to Japanese terms, we now see more of the honne, freeze class distinctions and regulate the minutiae the real intention of Tokugawa society in socio- of its subjects’ lives, it made little effort to police

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individuals’ sex lives.”58 ence and an interaction with contemporary re- In the newer literature the Tokugawa experi- search on the history of Europe. Hence, recent ence, in both its positive and negative aspects, publications show sophistication in making com- emerges as quite distinct from the super-structure parisons with the Western experiences, by using of the post 1868 modern sectors and this “early contemporary research on various regions of modern” legacy disappears by the Great Depres- Europe rather than a monolithic, idealized “West” sion. Unlike the standard modernist view of the as in the past. Research on the early modern his- post-war period that interpreted the Tokugawa era tory of France and England appears to be the as preparation for the future, new scholarship in primary choice of comparison. I would add, how- some ways is again ambivalent about seeing the ever, that research on Germany, which is less Tokugawa legacy as directly antecedent to the used, can provide useful insight into the history modern, especially in terms of its psychological of Tokugawa Japan. On the other hand, the pri- history and economic history. The “Tokugawa mary comparative concern of the scholarship is Early-modern and the post-Meiji early-Modern,” still with the historical environment of the First to use Wigen’s words, combine within the preva- World; while understandable, that focus creates lent form of a rural proto-industrial-commercial the danger of a special form of datsu-a, where the network in the Shimoina region of central Japan Asian environment to which Japan undeniably in a Tokugawa-style geo-topographic-social set- belongs receives less attention. ting that, however, is temporary, vanishing during Methods and Materials. This survey of re- the Taishō period.59 The imposition of modern cent publications on socio-economic history of values through education, nationalist ideology, Japan shows the rich variety of topics and meth- and so on molds the men and women with odology in the field. The cross-fertilization of “loose” habits into modern images of male and history with social science theory stands out, with female behavior. “theory” ranging from the classic Marxist para- The new writing has made us more conscious digm to post-structuralist approaches. The stud- of the breaks and discontinuities of the early ies of growth, conflict, proto-industry, village law modern era before later times brought about total and society are reflective of structuralist ap- centralization, total industry, total war, and total proaches but there is great variety among them. empire. Our sympathy for the early modern age Whereas Hanley and Yamamura used historical seems to play a role in this new image of the To- demography and economic history to describe kugawa age. The recent studies, especially of the Tokugawa economic growth, Wigen applies the period from the seventeenth to the early nine- geographer’s methodology to portray the devel- teenth century, depict a lively proto-industry in opment of proto-industry on a regional scale. the villages and flourishing bourgeois culture in White’s analysis stands out for his application of the cities. In some respects this “liveliness” com- quantitative methods to a whole series of data on pares well with similar developments in France the Tokugawa period. before the French Revolution. The customs of In village studies, the use of theory contributed the early modern era in Japan still seem admira- to a new sensitivity to the meaning of village ble in some respects, especially in how the indi- documents such as the taka shirabe chō, shumon vidual man and woman fared under the early aratame chō, kenchi chō and the language of peti- modern regime, before the “guillotine” of mod- tions. Scholars now understand them as texts ernism struck Japan just as it did Europe. beyond their formal content. We are now much The strong points of the field are obvious. The more aware of the need to recognize that docu- study of early modern Japan has become sensi- ments such as the takashirabechō, tax documents, tized to the use of comparative approaches kaisai chō, tax collection documents, shumon through both theoretical constructs of social sci- aratame chō, and the temple population registers, while they say something about the numerical framework of Tokugawa communal life are fre- 58 quently more important as expressions of the so- Garry P. Leupp, Male Colors, p. 61. 59 The Making of a Japanese Periphery, p. 293. cial and political distribution of power than of

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economic reality as such.60 For Ooms, the rich and crime in the liminal spaces of Tokugawa (and variety of village documents are the means to a modern) criminal subculture but it is not widely structuralist and functionalist interpretation of known beyond France. The Internet and web Tokugawa village praxis of class, status, power, pages of the Japanese studies research centres and law. The new historical research on gender composed in many European languages, promises and sexuality also creatively employs a range of better access to the international world of Toku- materials, from the familiar documentation cre- gawa Japanese studies. ated by the Tokugawa authorities to private dia- Recent research has the advantage of being ries, woodblock prints, literature, and medical able to rely upon the strong tradition of historical treatises. research in Japan. Sometimes unduly criticized English-language scholarship in Tokugawa in the past for being Marxist, there is now a economic and social history is largely oblivious healthy and balanced dialogue within the Japa- of the excellent research in European languages nese research on the village, conflict, gender and other than English. Recent European publica- other topics. This situation facilitates interaction tions now get more regular reviews in English with our Japanese colleagues. publications, especially in Monumenta Nipponica However, it is also incumbent upon the student with the contributions of Peter Kornicki and in the field of socio-economic history to develop Herman Ooms, but the field of English language the necessary skills and “patience” to experience studies on Japan has had difficulty incorporating direct engagement with the rich sources of Toku- new research from these languages. Research gawa manuscripts in the archives and research on Tokugawa social and economic history in centres in Japan. Some of the work reviewed German by Klaus Muller, the expert on pre- here (e.g., Kalland, Walthall) would either have Tokugawa and Tokugawa economic history, stud- been impossible without engagement with hand- ies by Regine Mathias Pauer, Erich Pauer and written documents or it would have been far less Reinhard Zőllner remain known primarily to the successful scholarship. We can expect that the German-speaking academy except when these need to use manuscript materials will increase as authors choose to write something in English.61 socio-economic historians address issues (e.g., The study in French by Philippe Pons offers a gender) for which our Japanese colleagues have fascinating entry into the underworld of poverty not created compendia of transcribed sources. Issues for Future Research. Those of us who focus on the Tokugawa social-economic 60 For me, the village land and population re- field have pretty much kept our gaze on the realm gisters, although they provided numerical infor- of the commoners: this made sense in the initial mation, also represented the state of social status stages of transforming a field that needed to “lib- and power within the Takaino village that provided erate” the Tokugawa people from the hegemony a better understanding of the political leadership of of modernity. But such an emphasis leaves much the 1871 Nakano uprising. room for additional research. The following 61 See, for example, Klaus Muller, Wirtschafts- appear to be some of the fundamental problems und Technikgeschicht Japans. (The history of that remain to be addressed. economy and technology in Japan). Leiden: E.J. While we have gained a better understanding Brill, 1988; Klaus Muller, Agrarproduktion und of the inner reality of the village, the study of the Agrarschrifttum im Japan des 17 Jahrhunderts socio-economic world of the samurai and the ur- (Agrarian production and Agrarian writings in ban environment remains foggy despite a handful seventeenth century Japan). Bochum: Hab.-Schr., of excellent works. For example, we know little 1976; Ulrich Pauly, “ Ikkō-ikki. Die Ikkō Aufstande about the inner praxis of a daimyo residence in u. ihre Entwicklung aus d. Aufstanden d. Edo. Also at the high end of the social scale, we bundischen Bauern u. Provinzialen d. Japan. could use further work to supplement the recent Mittelalters.” (“Ikkō ikki. The Ikkō uprising and its publication of Lee Butler’s study of the kuge, the development among the association of peasants and civilian nobility of Kyoto, whose eighteenth and provincials of Japan during the middle ages.”) Ph.D. dissertation. Bonn: 1985. nineteenth century history in particular remains

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largely unstudied.62 Prior to Butler’s study, our On the economic side of the picture, the social general impression of Tokugawa history sug- and economic history of money and the role of gested that the kuge lived a restricted life in the Tokugawa bakufu as a fiscal power offers the Kyoto. Nothing prepares us for their sudden promise of learning how recoinage and currency Bakumatsu arrival on the political scene as loyal- manipulation interacted with social and political ists with a distinct dislike of the bakufu. concerns (this is a new subject in European his- A similar problem exists at the other end of the tory which may offer methodological hints for social scale, the bottom of Tokugawa society. Japanese historians). The outcastes (eta, hinin, etc.) rarely figure in Concluding Remarks. The socio-economic historical studies outside of Japan. While Ooms studies in early modern Japanese history reflect (Tokugawa Village Practice) has recently delved the flourishing of early-modern socio-economic into aspects of this subject, we still have no clear history in the historiography of Europe and other idea of their communal life under the discrimina- regions. After a prolonged obsession with the tory customs of the Tokugawa regime. nineteenth and the twentieth centuries – the rise There is also no study of the history of child- of the modern state and the industrial revolution – hood to parallel the very significant contribution savants like the Annales historians Braudel and of French historiography to our understanding of Ladurie helped us discover the period between the shift between the pre-modern and the modern. the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Aca- Changing conceptions of infancy, childhood, and demia has also benefited from the liberal atmos- adulthood might offer insights and a path to re- phere in recent years that is more tolerant of per- solve the debate on mabiki and other social issues sonal agendas of identity and choice. Subjects as well. such as homosexuality, and sexuality per se Another uncharted subject is the connection would have been difficult to write and publish between the perception of the foreigner and the about a generation ago. In recent years many of custom of using women as agents of diplomacy the new studies on sexuality, proto-industry, law by the Tokugawa authorities, an interesting aspect and society – again the history of Europe – ap- of contemporary gender issues. I am thinking pear to have been a significant inspiration for the here of the late Tokugawa – early Meiji phenom- comparative framework of the historians of early ena, the “Okichi” syndrome: the Tokugawa au- modern Japan. thorities assigned women to take care of the pri- vate and public needs of new male foreign resi- dents as a kind of diplomatic ploy to placate the “barbarian.” (Okichi was assigned to serve refuse the dance proposal of a foreign guest during Townsend Harris in Shimoda; her service and the Rokumeikan galas, part of the diplomacy of later suicide became the object of nationalist ide- treaty revision in the late nineteenth century – a 63 ology.) sacrifice they were encouraged to make as a patri- otic duty. This strategy, too, represents the use of the female to “pacify” the foreigner. Yoshiko Furuki, 62 Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, ed., The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence 1467-1680: Resilience and Renewal, Cambridge, to Her American Mother, New York: Weatherhill, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Harvard 1991; Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Above the Clouds: East Asian Monographs, 2002. Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility, 63 Although the Rokumeikan experiment of the Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, late Meiji years has nothing to do with the poor ser- p.189, for discussion of women and diplomacy. vant girl Okichi’s service, or that of other women of Finally, in my visit to Shimoda a number of years the lower classes who were assigned to take care of ago, I was surprised to discover a scroll in the mu- Westerners without families, there are some seum that depicts Okichi as a Chinese princess sent thought-provoking similarities. According to the to the barbarian nomad rulers of the steppes to pla- Attic Letters of Tsuda Ume and Takie Lebra’s study cate the threatening foe, a story that adds another of Meiji aristocratic women, Above the Clouds, fascinating twist to the use of women in the world Japanese aristocratic ladies were instructed never to of diplomacy.

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Ultimately, Tokugawa social and economic his- tory or women’s history per se. As John Breen tory now impels us to come to terms with the noted in a review, it is an outstanding biography early modern character of governance over a pop- of this politically engaged woman who was a ulation that was unquestionably subject to the disciple of the late Tokugawa nativist, Hirata At- supreme authority of its various rulers; however, sutane and brings to our immediate “gaze” a liv- within this framework the implementation of po- ing individual of the era.64 Platt’s recent article litical power at the grass roots level was based on on three generations of Tokugawa village elites seasonal and cyclical negotiation with local pow- brings home the cultural, social and economic er, the village elite-landlords and/or the broader environments as they affected the lives of persons community. Recent early modern Tokugawa so- and generations, rather than exploring class or cial and economic history focuses on detecting strata structures.65 In sum, the study of the peo- the processes by which written and customary ple of Tokugawa Japan now prefers nuanced em- law were implemented by the bakufu and the lo- phasis on the human element rather than analysis cal domain governments, polities whose absolute of social structures as fundamental category with authority remained unquestioned. The contrast which to interpret documents from the age. The between the flexible nature of negotiation within bold analytical conceptualisations of the Norman the Tokugawa social scene and that of the draco- and Smith generation of historians derived their nian hand of the modern state in the form of the precision from the discourse of the great nine- Meiji regime, however, should not lead to the teenth-century theoretical tradition in the social idealization of one era over the other. The differ- sciences. Today, neither Marxian theory and ap- ence between the early modern and the modern in proaches nor Modernist agendas derived from state - society relations actually illustrates a shift Parsons or Weber survive in the same convincing in the niches of tension, moving from the local form. Regardless of the differences of opinion level to the national. One can also suggest that among the early post-war generation, their com- the fight between the ruling strata and the ruled mon purpose was to explain the problematic rela- turned from a contest over how to implement tionship of late feudal society to modern Japan. power under a classic set of documents to a con- Compared to that older generation, new social test over the construction of new documents that and economic research takes the Tokugawa age defined new roles for state and society. and its processes into the future in a relatively Tokugawa people as we seen them in the noncommittal manner vis-a-vis problems of mod- documents and as we narrate them in our imagi- ernity. Yet, while the bold analytical debate about nation are “dead”; however, recent studies imply the past and the present of modern Japan appears that the Tokugawa era was an entity unto itself to have receded, the people of Tokugawa Japan that was doomed to “die” once the political will have begun to have a history of their own. We expressed through the Meiji Restoration began to can confidently state that the “People” of Toku- construct a modern Japanese state and society. gawa Japan are being “empowered” as actors by Many of the recent studies on Tokugawa social today’s scholars. They now are perceived to be- and economic history acknowledge this loss. have autonomously of a Whig role, if not inde- The capital that is presumed to have been born of pendent of it. We have just begun to see them on the Tokugawa proto-industrialization may have their own terms, acting on the historical environ- remained, and the know-how of community or- ment of early modernity in a way that has a dis- ganization may have survived into the post Meiji tinct character of its own, and is not intentionally era, but the human persona of the Tokugawa age a preparation for a future “modern.” (i.e., the gōnō) is lost forever. Recent research has demonstrated the signifi- cance of a dynamic approach in constructing the 64 Tokugawa individual amidst the restraints of the John Breen, “Nativism Restored,” Monumenta Nipponica 55:3 (2000): 438. geo-political situation in which they functioned. 65 Brian W. Platt, “Elegance, Prosperity, Crisis: Ann Walthall’s excellent biography of Matsuo Three Generations of Tokugawa Village Elites,” Taseko goes beyond the definition of gender his- Monumenta Nipponica 55:1 (2000): 45-82.

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Summary of Discussions: 3) to suggest possible directions for future re- search in and development of the field, all con- The State of the Field in Early cerns that lie at the heart of this essay. Modern Japanese Studies Major Cross-cutting Issues ©Philip C. Brown, Ohio State University* 1. Different disciplines in “Early Modern At some point during the Hōei era (1704-1710), (kinsei) Japan” do not share chronological a low-ranking samurai (ashigaru) of Kaga do- bounds and publishing practice can further main, Yamada Jirōemon, edited a collection of exacerbate differences by narrowing discipli- materials that various people had been collecting nary focus considerably. While the terms of since the mid-seventeenth century. The materi- political history often provide the broad frame- als focused largely on the formative years of work for much political, diplomatic, intellectual Kaga domain. In accord with common practice, and socio-economic history, historians typically Yamada gave his work the self-deprecatory title, recognize that within large periods, non-political Mitsubo kikigaki, loosely translated as “Three developments might mark important subdivisions. Jars of Jottings on Hearsay.” In part, the inspi- The Tokugawa era lies at the heart of this period ration for his choice of title may have been his on which our essays focused, giving a nod to the sensitivity to the unoriginal nature of his work. groundwork laid during the late sixteenth century. He was, after all, collecting, editing and transmit- From the historian’s perspective, the designa- ting materials that others had researched or that tion of the period as “early modern” began with they had written based on their own personal ex- the publication of Studies in the Institutional His- perience. tory of Early Modern Japan.1 There is a certain This essay, based on discussions at the confer- irony in the fact that, despite the title, the essay- ence on the state of early modern Japanese stud- ists' conceptual discussions, when they character- ies has some of this same character. I wish to ized the period at all, focused on “feudalism” – stress that this is a summary of the discussions, “early modern” was not directly defined or dis- and eschews any effort to summarize the ten pa- cussed and does not even appear in the index to pers that formed the basis for them. Nonethe- the book.2 (There can be little doubt that the less, a number of the themes noted here also ap- title of the volume reflects the heavy involvement peared in some form in the essays themselves. of the editors and many of its contributors to the Furthermore, the title of Yamada’s collection conceptualization underlying the conferences and suggests a metaphor for the major tasks of the essay collections associated with the Princeton conference: 1) to review recent trends in the series on Japan’s modernization. In this series, scholarship, 2) to discuss methodological and treatment of Tokugawa as an “early modern” pre- theoretical problems of the field at this time and cursor to a modern Meiji extended beyond politi- cal, social and economic history into the realms of cultural history, too.) * I have attempted to draw examples and illus- trations from all of the fields represented at the conference and in the essays EMJ has published 1 Edited by John W. Hall and Marius B. Jansen, since, but I have made no effort to discuss each in Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. relationship to the various points that constitute this 2 The volume’s heavy emphasis on the summary. limitations of characterizing Tokugawa Japan as I would especially like to thank Patricia Graham “feudal” combined with current academic interests for her comments on the manuscript version of this in “pre-modern” precursors to Japan’s late essay. I have also benefited from an extended nineteenth century rapid economic development and discussion with her regarding a number of specific political, social and cultural transformation led most issues touched on in discussions at the conference. scholars in the U.S. to substitute “early modern” for Brett Walker also made helpful comments on an “feudal” as the standard characterization of earlier draft. Tokugawa Japan.

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Historians also widely recognize that if one good sense of what appealed to this foreign audi- takes a broadly social or economic historical per- ence, the tendency was to focus on what was fa- spective, a completely different scheme for peri- miliar to or resonated with "us" rather than to odization might result. Indeed, several alterna- place principal emphasis on understanding Ja- tives were briefly mentioned during the discus- pan's past on its own terms.3 sions, including some that clearly violated the Even if scholars today have an awareness of un- standard schemes of periodization beloved by explored vistas, what is published, especially in political historians. book form, has often remained quite narrowly Yet nothing in this general set of expectations focused. In the field of literature, English lan- could have prepared the historians in our group guage publication is trained heavily on Genroku (and perhaps others) for the arguments made in and largely avoids anything else before or after the fields of art history and literature. For ex- that. The styles of literary expression dominant ample, noting the emphasis in art history on the in the medieval era are treated as though they study of individual artists (despite the emergence continued to dominate literary production through of post-modernist theory as an important element most of the seventeenth century. The period in the field), Patricia Graham argued that in the after Genroku has largely been ignored, Haruo major fields of art history, the period would have Shirane argued, because it seems to have little to begin with the late Muromachi era (mid- connection to the emergence of “modern” forms sixteenth century, with the flourishing of urban of literary expression, notably the novel. From merchant classes) and would not end until well this perspective, “early modern Japan” is, in pub- into the late nineteenth century. This is partly lishing practice, comprised of just a few decades because styles change more gradually, without and the objects of investigation are quite limited. the sharp demarcations based on pivotal events 2. The field is young and relatively small; such as those that are commonly invoked by po- publications in many areas are spotty. A litical historians. common thread running through much of our The different definitions of the period are inevi- discussion, that there are yet big projects or prob- tably linked to the differing definitions of “mod- lems that remain to be undertaken, can in part be ern” applied within disciplines in the U.S. and traced to the fact that the ranks of laborers in the Western Europe. For political history, the key early modern field are still rather thin. Pre- lies in the emergence of more effective, centrally modern Japan’s role as backdrop to Japan’s late controlled state apparatus, largely in the eight- nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformation eenth and nineteenth century. In the field of provided the major justification for the expansion diplomatic relations, the definition is generally of the Japan field into the Tokugawa era in the tied to the emergence of a system of diplomatic United States. The influence of the moderniza- relations based on equality of states as expressed tion problematic – at least in the sense of the To- in treaties and an emerging diplomatic protocol in kugawa–Meiji links in politics, society, econom- the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In ics, literature, religion and thought, if not in the prose literature, the issue is linked to the devel- modernization paradigm of the nineteen fifties opment of the novel. These different definitions and nineteen-sixties – remain influential, even if are further linked to the historical circumstances they may be undergoing transformation. Now, in which the Western intellectual traditions began for example, in political and social history these to think of the “modern” as a distinct historical days, work bridging the Tokugawa-Meiji divide break. is more likely to trace the ill effects of the Toku- These differences of definition have had conse- gawa connection than would once have been the quences that extend back in time, beyond the de- velopment of the field in the latter half of the 3 twentieth century. Given the fact that many of Recall that many Japanese were trying to prove that they were "civilized" and "sophisticated" like the early European and North American scholars the West, and were assiduously striving to re- worked with Japanese intellectual guides who, by fashion themselves to demonstrate the validity of the twentieth century, had developed a pretty that claim.

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case. Links between Tokugawa and Meiji may North America and Western Europe); we also not be chronologically direct but nonetheless, the tend to anticipate that the first studies of political old ties still bind. In art history, ukiyoe prints of history and foreign relations focus on elite poli- the eighteenth century were of particular interest tics. in the West, and associated with the Japonisme The realm of art history, however, introduces and Impressionist movements of the late nine- other powerful forces in deciding what gets stud- teenth century, both reflected the nature of West- ied: the connoisseur, the major art collector, the ern interest in Japanese art. That interest re- consumer. Exhibition catalogs, one of the major mains highly prominent today, to the exclusion of publication venues in the field of art history, are many other styles and art forms. built around the display of exhibitions that often This leaves relatively large areas of research feature the holdings of a single collector. Col- virtually or completely untouched. This is true lectors’ tastes come to define the subjects in art not only for fields that have been in vogue re- history that get broad exposure here. (There is cently (e.g., women’s history), but also for older something of a parallel to this phenomenon in the “established” fields such the study of as upper field of literature where, Shirane noted, transla- class literary genres in which we might typically tions have a fundamental role to play in stimulat- imagine attention to have been concentrated here- ing interest in one aspect of the field or another. tofore, simply by virtue of the fact that a heavy If the translations are found appealing, they are emphasis on high culture characterized literary likely to spark scholarly interest.) In addition, studies until the mid-twentieth century. the Bunkachō (Japanese Ministry of Culture), as 3. Major influences shaping the early de- partner with foreign institutions, has frequently velopment of the field continue to affect our overseen the conception and planning of interna- image of early modern Japan. Intriguing ob- tional exhibitions featuring Japanese art from servations regarding the forces shaping the differ- major Japanese collections. In this way, they ex- ent fields emerged in the course of discussions. ert profound influence on the conceptualization In some cases, a field has been shaped largely by of Japanese art for foreigners as well as control a single individual. For example, historical de- the canon of art objects deemed worthy of study mography, in its current form, owes everything to and display. the work of Hayami Akira and people he has 4. Scholars generally presume that the era trained. Literary studies of the period, espe- is marked by a sameness despite the fact that cially the broad overviews, are overwhelmingly notable potential turning points have not yet informed by the perspectives of Donald Keene. been examined. For example, noticeably ab- In literature, art, religion, and intellectual his- sent from the English-language repertoire is a full tory, the initial models of academic research ap- study of that dynamic Shogun, Tokugawa Yoshi- plied in the post-war era stressed the creation of a mune. While participants first raised the exam- canon to match that of the Western world, and ple of Yoshimune and their belief that his reign focused on the accomplishments of the great men marked a substantial breaking point in the context who produced that work. That approach shaped of political history, participants working in other the selection of subjects even when, as in litera- fields quickly identified the same era as marking ture, the focus was on the literature of the a major shift in the cultural, intellectual and so- townsmen rather than the samurai elites. Indeed, cial spheres as well. That such a consensus de- that the bourgeois taste seemed to produce a veloped quickly and spontaneously reinforces the product that paralleled expected literary devel- impression that periodizations that divide the To- opments (the novel) and reinforced the similari- kugawa are conceivable and worthy of considera- ties with European literary history. tion; the possibility even exists that breaks are Of course, upon even slight reflection, we are sufficiently great that they should be treated as not surprised at the dominance of a few energetic marking a shift in era, not just sub-periods within and very productive individuals and the tendency the early modern era. to mimic existing academic models (especially A roughly parallel situation can be found in the during the early years of the Japan field in the realm of Japanese literature, although there are

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differences. Political history often focused on in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, have rein- the samurai elites (creation of the Tokugawa ba- forced early orthodox images of thematic unity to kufu, formation of castle towns and domains, land the period in each of its major sub-fields. In taxation and the like) and gave short shrift to politics and foreign relations, the rise of a fairly lower levels of political activity; however, the centralized government under the Tokugawa sho- case is reversed in important respects in studies gun and the image of a “closed country” (sakoku) of literature. Our discussion of Japanese literary provided the major themes through the early works after Genroku revealed a rich body of ma- nineteen-sixties. In the world of art, ukiyoe terial not yet exploited by English-language dominated our view. The rise of urban literary scholars. Among the Tokugawa corpus, the traditions in prose, theater, and poetry marked the works of authors such as Saikaku and Chika- period as distinctive. Almost simultaneously, matsu, which are seen to presage the emergence the emergence of national learning (kokugaku) of modern literature, do not come from the elite and Confucian rationalism marked distinctive literary traditions. They represent an important trends in religious and intellectual history. Eco- part of the literary culture of townsmen and nomic growth, diversification and (more recently) commoners, certainly not the only group to create a rising standard of living were treated as the literature in the Edo period. The absence of atten- general trend line in economic history. All were tion given to the literary traditions of other Edo viewed as making major contributions to the period social groups, such as that created by elite emergence of a “modern” Japan. Yet most of samurai, Buddhists, and intellectuals in the stud- these developments occupied relatively short ies our specialists surveyed represents a large spans of time within the Tokugawa era or charac- void, and failure to treat these genres may create terized a relatively limited geographic reach, and a false impression of uniformity in literary forms the heavy focus on them ignores not only other and evolution. The omissions included some gen- chronological eras within the period but topics, res, such as gesaku, which are now drawing some too. attention, but also Chinese-style prose and poetry, The late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen- Buddhist literature (仏教説話), travel literature seventies generated tremors of discontent with (紀行文), essays and miscellanies (随筆), fantas- attempts to draw a straight line from Tokugawa to tic tales (怪談、奇怪小説), and women writers a “successfully modernized” Japan, but the new and poets (all genres). As these attract our at- scholarship that undermines the old images and tention, we can expect (at the least) that we will complicates our understanding of the Meiji trans- have a new vision of the development of litera- formation came in publications of the nineteen- ture in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. eighties and nineties. This concern may be most 5. The defining characteristics of the pe- significant in the fields of diplomatic, political, riod within each discipline are not clear. At social and economic history. To briefly note the least, scholars have become aware of a broad several examples: Sakoku is now widely seen as range of subjects that complicate past characteri- a Euro-centric interpretation and while the issue zations and hint at the need for something new. is hardly settled, there is now also much greater Despite this, no one expressed confidence that we stress on the limitations of shogunal authority and currently have sufficient grasp of the overall de- domain autonomy of action. Some participants velopment within the various areas which com- argued that scholars too readily abandoned the prise the field of early modern Japanese studies to utility of “feudalism” as an attribute of the age. be able to identify distinctive colorings that pro- A half-dozen monographs in the late nineteen- vide a sense of thematic unity to the period. If eighties and early nineteen-nineties used com- this is true within major fields, it is all the more moner protests (ikki) to argue that farmers still the case if we think about characterizations that had it rough, a claim reinforced by some demog- cut across fields. raphers who took effective potshots at early sug- The small number of scholars in the field and gestions that birth patterns showed conscious the fact that Japanese studies is still rather young family planning rather than response to a Malthu- sian vise. As noted above, the world of arts and

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letters is now known to have been far richer and that a review of recent doctoral theses suggested more complicated than previous treatments sug- not only that were people choosing (and being gested. allowed to choose) dull topics of limited interest; Participants generally agreed that no widely further, they were also writing in opaque and agreed upon unifying paradigm and charac- spiritless idiom. terization of the era is likely to emerge until Participants agreed that this issue could be more of the Tokugawa heritage has been explored, solved partly by exploring subjects that personal- and explored in new ways. Art history, intel- ize and humanize our writings on this period. lectual history and religious studies of the period, This suggests a need to create less purely schol- for example, have been dominated by those in arly publications (especially those in which which a scholar analyzes a single, prominent scholars of each of the respective sub-fields write figure; however, that approach has begun to lose mainly for each other) and more attractive mate- its luster and workshop participants across all rials for classroom use. However, these forms disciplines have expressed interest in moving of professional activity tend to be under-rewarded away from that model to study the religious in the institutions whose faculty author most of practices and intellectual-cultural lives of more the publications in the field. ordinary folk. (The discussion below regarding A hopeful note regarding this theme lay in the the need to accommodate the multifaceted, acute awareness of dynamic stories of change at syncretic character of artists, intellectuals and the family and individual level even in the religious figures also implies approaches that framework of substantial social and institutional move beyond traditional practice.) stability. There are at least a few examples of 6. Regardless of discipline, there was a scholarly publication that suggest the feasibility sense that the field needs to make our work of of generating interesting personal detail in the broader interest. There was general agree- context of scholarly work. Recent work by Ed ment that early modern Japan specialists talk Pratt in social history, and Melinda Takeuchi in largely with and to each other or (sometimes only art history come to mind.4 implicitly) to our modern Japan counterparts. Nonetheless, even the inclusion of personal de- To those outside the field, the period is seen as tail does not obviate the challenge of describing potentially interesting largely in its relationship to social settings, practices, religious concepts, of- characteristics identified as precursors to the fice titles and functions for non-Japanese in a “modern” rather than holding attractiveness when way that is consonant with an engaging and well- treated on its own terms and defined by internal written story.5 Quick shorthands such as de- developments rather than its teleological links to scribing a bugyō as a “magistrate” often fail be- Meiji Japan. This appears to be true across all cause the contemporary Japanese office has con- of the disciplines we surveyed. Counter- siderably different duties than a court magistrate examples might be offered to suggest interest in Japan from outside the field (sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt and Southeast Asian historian Victor 4 Edward E. Pratt, Japan’s Proto-Industrial Lieberman come to mind), but these examples are Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gōnō. sufficiently rare that they highlight the problem Harvard East Asian Monographs 179, Cambridge, rather than inspire confidence that others take Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, interest in the work of early modern Japan spe- 1999, and Melinda Takeuchi, Taiga’s True Views: cialists. The Language of Landscape Painting in Eighteenth- Beyond this, however, lies a broader question Century Japan, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, are suggestive. of how scholars can make this field interesting to 5 people in other professional contexts, and to The world of Tokugawa Japan is sufficiently students and the broader public. While not the removed from that of today’s Japan to pose a similar challenge even within the Japanese market. subject of extensive discussion, there was general One can find a variety of examples, some more agreement that the latter part of this problem was successful than others, every Sunday evening on significant. Indeed, one participant commented NHK’s Taiga dorama series.

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at the same time in England or France. The of employing, for example, Weberian theory to challenge of basic translation of Japanese con- study Japan are by now well known, the issue cepts becomes even greater in realms beyond the arises in post-structuralist theory as well. As political. one example, a participant raised the controver- 7. The polymath quality of many figures in sial proposal of one scholar that Edo period lit- the cultural, intellectual and political world, erature might reasonably be characterized as and the varied economic bases from which “post-modern.” The question remains as to they operated strongly suggest the need for whether use of post-structuralist theory commits cross-disciplinary perspectives if we are to un- the same errors that brought criticism to the use derstand influences shaping developments in of other social science theory in Japanese studies: the late sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Are the concepts and theories being coarsely im- Thinkers, preachers, artists and craftsmen, poets, posed on the data without looking carefully at the and authors functioned in many contexts. Like fit between data and concept?7 their contemporaneous European and Chinese In this vein, some participants questioned the counterparts, they aspired to accomplishment in degree to which heavy focus on theory sometimes many fields. The practice of licensure in became a substitute for analysis of data. In this mathematics and other realms of learning played regard, the area of sharpest contention to date has to the desire of ambitious villagers as well as po- concerned charges, levelled in the pages of jour- litical and cultural elites who sought to demon- nals such as Monumenta Nipponica or Positions, strate their multi-faceted prowess. The time is of sacrificing accuracy in translation in the name ripe to exploit this circumstance through both of developing or applying theoretical approaches cross-disciplinary cooperation by several scholars derived from the work of Western scholars. and through the efforts of individual scholars to Participants who were critical of some of the apply multi-disciplinary perspectives and tools in trends they identified or of specific examples of their research. what they saw as “abuse” of theory were not 8. “Theory” represents one means to cross crying, “Abandon theory!” and to take that as the the divide between Japan scholars and col- thrust of their arguments would be a serious leagues with other regional – national focus; distortion. There was a widespread sense that however, use of “theory” raises questions theory (of the post-structuralist, literary criticism about 1) the applicability of largely Western type) was inescapable and that it had yielded conceptual schemes to Japan and 2) the way some productive results; the concern was how to Japan scholars have used “theory” in their use it in a responsible and productive way to 1) studies. I place the word “theory” in quotation learn more about Japan and 2) to find ways to marks here because current use is typically very communicate with non-Japan colleagues. Similar narrow. Unmodified, the term these days is of- issues can be raised in regard to the use of social ten simply shorthand for the theory of literary science theory in, e.g., the study of political, criticism and post-structuralist conceptualizations. social or religious history, whether that of grand We occasionally find reference to other forms of theorists such as Weber and Durkheim, or that of theory, derived from political science, sociology, modern “rational choice” partisans. or economics, but on the whole, there is a ten- Although the above comments reflect the em- dency to treat all social science theory as bound phasis in this facet of our discussion, a persistent up with a discredited “modernization theory” and set of additional questions arose regarding an it is extensively ignored.6 While early problems

two exceptions that specifically employ social 6 Chapters of J. Mark Ramseyer, Odd Markets in science perspectives that are not associated with Japanese History: Law and Economic Growth, post-structuralism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 7 It remains to be seen what reactions will be to 1996, and James W. White, Ikki: Social Conflict the continued efforts of S. N. Eisenstadt and his and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan, more theoretically-oriented colleagues. See “Early Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, represent Modernities,” Daedalus 127:3 (Summer 1998).

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alternate means of expanding our audience: the strong sense that links with continental culture degree to which late-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth- merit fuller consideration. century Japanese practice was influenced by and 10. Despite the expansion of many cultural could be properly analyzed through contemporary fields (literature, art, religion), history, and or classical Chinese conceptualizations and prac- even social sciences into non-elite subjects tice of literature, art, religion and thought. A among our non-Japan colleagues, the impact consensus emerged that in such fields familiarity of such trends in the Enlgish-language litera- with Chinese practices was essential for appraisal ture are recent (dating largely from the 1980s) of developments in Japan, and fundamental for and still under-developed relative to other re- understanding the degree to which such practices gional-national fields. Among many factors were modified or employed selectively by Japa- that lead to this end, three stand out. First, the nese artists, thinkers, and religious groups. 8 field is still very small and those already estab- These concerns suggest the possibility of treating lished scholars have invested so much in master- Japan as part of the Chinese cultural sphere – ing the techniques, conceptual apparatus and vo- stressing the distinctive features of Japan’s use of cabulary of their original area of interest that they continental patterns not just their commonality. are unlikely to make a major shift to those re- 9. Western Europe and the United States search interests that reflect current American and may not be the appropriate comparative European academic trends. Second, while our spheres through which we can reach out to a students at both the undergraduate and graduate broader range of scholars. Implicit in much of level may get excited about topics and problems the preceding discussion is the expectation that that are au courant, Japanese language prepara- “The West” (western Europe and North America) tion of most of these students is still typically set the standard for international comparisons to inadequate for them to immediately begin re- developments in early modern Japan. While not search in pursuit of their intellectual interests. denying that there is merit in some such compari- The time lag between the generation of their in- son and for some projects, the question repeat- terest and their ability to act on that impulse is edly arose, “Why are developments in Japan so quite long even in the area of modern Japanese seldom compared to those of contemporary China, studies. The language demands of earlier his- Korea or India, for example?” Family demo- torical periods require still greater investments of graphic patterns in Japan are clearly distinct from time. Third, in many areas of art, literature, re- those in Western Europe; might we not learn ligion and intellectual history, one must under- more about the sources of difference if we also stand the practices of earlier eras (and perhaps of compared Japan’s patterns to those of some other China and Korea as well) in order to have an ap- non-European society? While the choice of preciation of developments in the early modern comparison in the case of demographic history era, adding to the body of preparatory material may result from lingering influences of the mod- that one must master before actually undertaking ernization perspective, comparison of artistic and research. literary practice with that of China, for example, Regardless of the source, the consequences of might yield an entirely different appreciation of this situation are clear and suggest some general the “non-standard” literary genre that professors realms for future research. Shirane and Marceau discussed in their argu- ments. Such studies have appeared in art history 1) Investigation of the workings of lower lev- and literature in the past fifteen years – e.g., work els of society, including popular religious by David Pollack, Melinda Takeuchi, and Patricia practices, factors affecting family planning Graham – but even in these fields there was a such as nutrition and religious belief, popu- lar education and literacy and aspects of material culture. 8 One of the most readable and effective demonstrations of the modification of Chinese 2) Exploration of explicitly religious topics practice and its naturalization in Japan is Melinda Takeuchi’s Taiga’s True Views. that go beyond the secularized treatments

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of “Confucian” or “National Learning” divide, the underlying assumption has been that scholars and treat their subjects in the intel- the quality of the divide was generally uniform lectual context of the times rather than as throughout the land and other regional differences stages in the development of autonomous were relatively unimportant. The general pat- intellectual and religious history. tern of scholarship was to downplay the role of regional differences or dismiss them as excep- 3) Exploration of the links between religion tions that did not undermine accepted images. and politics (e.g., the efforts of Matsudaira That picture has now begun to change. For exam- Sadanobu to use Shingaku for political ple, literary studies have made something of a ends). kowtow in the direction of regional variation by noting differences between Kansai-based tradi- 4) Re-evaluation of the boundaries of, and tions and those of the Kanto; art history has fo- within Japan during the early modern era cused a lot on contrasting Kansai and Kanto artis- (status, class, village, domain, frontiers and tic traditions as well as connections between them, international, gender) regarding which par- without actually making that difference the object ticipants sense a far greater permeability of study. That focus, and the interrelationship than had generally been acknowledged. between the two earn greater attention these days, Do boundaries of this sort become more as does the active interaction of rural and urban elaborate over time? Do they become writers of poetry. In the realm of socio- more rigid? Or do they weaken over economic and political history, erstwhile national time? narratives are under attack and, in the extreme, domains are treated as nearly independent states. 5) Re-assessment of the degree of political Scholars today are more aware of the strong re- control of the Shogun over domains, do- gional variation in the incidence and impact of mains over villages and towns, and villages, famines, variation domain responses to economic families and towns over their constituents and population crises, variations in institutional and changing patterns of different groups’ development and domain autonomy. The im- participation in the political and economic pact of regionalism can no longer simply be ig- world. nored, no matter how much the relative balance of central authority and local autonomy might be 6) Rather than looking at the large urban areas debated in specific contexts or overall. In the as autonomous centers of economic and realm of art history, scholars are increasingly ex- cultural development, exploring changing ploring regional differences in craft traditions, patterns of social, economic and cultural especially ceramics. interaction between urb, suburb and coun- This consciousness underlay several broader tryside as geographic mobility (migration, themes that engaged participants. Can we speak dekasegi, pilgrimage), economic diversity, of a truly national culture at this point in Japan’s and trade increased during the period. history, one that extends beyond the capital and castle towns throughout the provinces? When 7) Examination of the role of gender and the do we get a self-conscious sense of national iden- appropriateness of our current understand- tity and under what circumstances? Is it largely ings of the role of gender. A number of a “positive” identification or created by a “nega- recent works clearly undermine the rigid tive” contrast with some “other,” initially situated gender boundaries that are often presumed in East Asia, later identified as the West? to have been operative. 12. Participants widely expressed a con- tinued interest in exploring more aspects of everyday society and culture. Some of the 11. Recent scholarship in most fields cre- comments above suggest this concern, but it is ates a heightened awareness of regional diver- worth repeating here for emphasis. Examined sity. While scholars presume an urban – rural more closely, this interest is not just a simple wish

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for more study of ordinary people. To state par- Summary ticipant interest in this way excludes concern with The preceding observations suggest a number the everyday life of elites, also a matter of inter- of common issues that cross disciplinary boun- est: What was life like at court? For residents daries in the field of early modern Japanese of castles? For women of all classes? Just as studies. The field is still relatively young, we asked above, “Can we speak of a truly national certainly still limited in numbers, and reflects culture at this point in Japan’s history?” in regard current Western academic fashions at a rather to the regional integration of Japan, we can extend slow pace. The challenges of integrating theo- that query across the social strata. Do we have a retical perspectives from literary theory, anthro- culture that extends beyond the elites and well pology and other social sciences loom as large into the middle and lower levels of society? If today as they did thirty years or more ago, both we have evidence that some people thought that from the standpoint of the applicability of a they shared a national culture, in what contexts particular theory and our ability to use it sen- did they sense it, and who within Japan was likely sitively with Japanese data. to have this sense? How far down the social A major trend in the field is the de-centering of ladder does this sense extend? our attention. We are more concerned with non- 13. Interest in new areas of research that elite groups and behavior and more aware of di- moves away from the political and cultural verse regional patterns of social, political and center toward the influences of regionalism, cultural development and interaction than twenty lower socio-economic strata, and everyday years ago. 9 Participants clearly embraced the practice encourage greater emphasis on the intellectual challenge of coping with the aware- ability to use manuscript materials. The ness of greater diversity and complexity that ac- themes which many scholars now wish to explore company this multi-faceted de-centering. One and for which conference participants expressed task for the field is to determine to what degree the most interest – greater understanding of the such diversity can be used to create new narra- lives of commoners and further exploration of the tives at the pan-Japan level. sources and consequences of regional variation, This challenge is matched by that of trying to to name just two – call for work in sources that create problem foci that are not slavishly tied to may not have been transcribed, edited and pub- the “the modern” and providing a strong positive lished in printed form. In contrast to studies of identity for the era on its own terms. While mod- the collected works of famous authors or analysis ernization theory typically was thought of as ap- of top-level domain and shogunal policy-making, plying to political, economic and social concerns, the documents that require exploration are in- our discussions made it clear that this approach completely available in printed form, not avail- affected the choice of topics for study in art and able at all in printed form, or, in some cases when literature as well. Discussions clearly indicated available, subject to error. A number of scholars the limiting our focus to the era’s link to post – Ronald Toby, Anne Walthall, Janine Sawada, and Lawrence Marceau to name but a few – have already plunged into the world of manuscript 9 While discussion above concentrated on the sources in order to explore subjects where printed role of literary/post-structuralist theory, theory materials presented only a limited opportunity to alone can not explain the range of interests that have explore questions of interest. This trend is been affected by this de-centering. Two alter- likely to continue and suggests a clear need to native examples: In historical demography, it is consider how best to fill this need in training the very application of statistical methodology, graduate students. approaches to sampling of data and the like that increased scholars’ desire to explore the influences of regional differences. Political science methodology has played a similar role in

encouraging recent scholars to think about the

distribution of power throughout Japan as well as the activities of state-building.

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Meiji Restoration developments distracts us from If the field(s) of early modern Japanese study a variety of significant developments that depart face large challenges, our discussions also re- from current emphases. vealed a great optimism and excitement. The In some instances phenomena heretofore ig- current state of the field provides a tremendous nored directly bear on our assessment of how stimulus to undertake interdisciplinary study. “modern” early modern Japan was. In the field The importance of thinking about the era from an of literature, popular genre of elite literature have interdisciplinary perspective was highlighted at a been given rather short shrift in Western studies follow up meeting the group had in conjunction in favor of those that seem to presage the arrival with the annual meeting of AAS the year follow- of more “modern” forms of literature such as the ing our conference. Participants then noted that novel. In the area of institutional history at the often change within their particular disciplines local level, the rather widespread existence of was motivated by external factors. For example, corporate forms of owning and managing arable art was motivated to change by an increase in and land tends to contradict the image of near-modern changing distribution of wealth as well as new property rights that dominates the field. In other developments in technology. Religion was influ- realms, such as the continuing conflicts and ten- enced by economics, literature by changes to sions between the Shogun and the daimyo and demographics (audience) also technology (i.e. between daimyo and retainers in the seventeenth development of printing). Indeed, one of the and eighteenth centuries, we have a different ap- most exciting elements of the conference was the preciation for the nature of the state even if this is opportunity it gave us all to learn about develop- treated separately from the question of its contri- ments and issues facing fields other than our own bution to the “modernization” of Japan. From and to explore the possibility of using data that is either perspective, we have much to gain by mov- not traditionally employed in one field in a new ing beyond investigations of problems that focus intellectual arena. This stimulus to interdisci- on the links between Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. plinary work comes not only in our concern for Both of these concerns underlie one broad the polymaths of the age, but also from the in- question for the field: Wherein lies the dynamic creased awareness of the importance of regional- story of the era? The answer to such a broad ism in socio-economic and political history. question will undoubtedly differ with each spe- One suggestion for multi-disciplinary study of a cialization, as it does today. It is likely to lead single region was especially well received – the to continued variation in the way in which people Shinano region – because there is already a sub- define the chronological boundaries of the field stantial clutch of studies that touch on this re- and its subspecialties.10 gion.11 In the future, interdisciplinary work may help to provide a deeper understanding of early modern Japan, a fuller awareness of characteris- 10 These issues of characterization and definition tics that usefully define a distinctive era of Japa- of the period extend beyond simple academic nese history, and provide a firm basis for integrat- debates. How they are resolved involves power ing a study of early modern Japan with historical relationships within the profession. Underlying and cultural developments in other parts of the many of the issues we identified looms the big world. question of who should or will have the principal role in defining the field. Western theorists? Classical or modern Japanese literature specialists? Comparable Chinese specialists? Our Japan schol- ar colleagues who focus on other eras? The people in the field? Non-Japanese practitioners in compa- primary role, especially in the area of faculty hiring rable American or European fields who make the decisions. hiring decisions in departments of history, religion, 11 There is already a core of people who have comparative literature, and art (especially in smaller published on at least some aspect of Shinshu: programs)? To some degree all play a role, but Laurel Cornell, Selcuk Esenbel, Anne Janetta, one hopes that those in the field will have the Herman Ooms, Ronald Toby, and Karen Wigen.

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A Postscript Howard Hibbett, The Chrysanthemum Authors of the various essays that have ap- and the Fish: Japanese Humor Since the peared in the last several issues of EMJ have en- Age of the Shoguns. Kodansha Interna- deavored to incorporate in their essays the publi- tional, Tokyo, 2002. 208 pages. $28.00, cations that appeared between the conference and cloth. the time of publication; of these, I would like to take special note of Marcia Yonemoto’s Mapping © Cheryl Crowley, Emory University Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period, 1603-1868. 12 Her In The Chrysanthemum and the Fish, Howard work clearly moves in a number of intellectual Hibbett argues that the Japanese sense of humor directions that reflect the desiderata of conference has been unappreciated by both Japanese and participants. To cite only some of the larger Westerners, citing authorities as disparate as Ar- elements: She takes the era on its own terms, thur Koestler, who described Japanese humor as liberated from subservience to Tokugawa links to "astonishingly mild and poetical, like weak, mint- post-Restoration Japan. Comparison with the flavored tea" (p. 11) and Inoue Hisashi, who West plays a role in the study, but it does not be- claimed that "on the whole Japanese people are come one-sided; it is balanced by comparison serious" (p. 13). Hibbett challenges this assess- with those societies closest to Japan. Yonemoto ment, arguing that Japan actually possesses a rich creatively exploits materials (literary sources and and varied comic tradition, making "the enor- maps most heavily) that have not been widely mous corpus of Japanese literary humor, and of used by American scholars and, more importantly, jokes, comic poetry, [and] recorded vestiges of often uses them in ways that Japanese scholars oral storytelling" (p. 13) the subject of a book have not, expanding their utility beyond the which is both amusing and informative. boundaries of the disciplines that typically use The title is a parody of Ruth Benedict's famous these sources. (Literary sources are used to ex- 1946 study of Japanese cultural patterns, The plore mental maps of Japan; maps are explored Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Here, Hibbett for what they reveal of elite conceptions of Ja- pairs the chrysanthemum – Benedict's emblem of pan’s place in the world as well as in the context elite, aristocratic culture – with the fish, which he of scientific and technical development.) While uses as an emblem of earthy, low culture, or in not a biographical study, descriptions of her ac- other words the comic. (The joke works in Japa- tors’ reveal their polymath intellectual and pro- nese too: sakana [fish], though different semanti- fessional lives. Their activities, and the broader cally, has the same vowels as katana [sword], and description of her subject heighten awareness of hence is worth a bit of a chuckle.) He notes that regional and class variation in the way people the comic side of Japanese literary culture has perceived the Japan in which they lived. The been largely overlooked by scholars and excluded highly literate (and even artistic) individuals Yo- from the canon as well. Without attempting to nemoto analyzes clearly rank as members of the offer a complex theoretical conceptualization of elite, yet the study focuses on their more every- "humor" or facile generalizations about the Japa- day perceptions of their world, not their role in nese "national character," Hibbett observes that governance and generation of artifacts of “high” the comic tradition in Japan is diverse and shaped culture. by many forces, including regional and class dif- ferences, the interaction of literacy and orality, and changing social mores. His purpose is not to define Japanese humor, but to give readers some sense of its variety. While he does make frequent reference to humor in drama, rakugo storytelling, and other forms of performance, most of the dis- cussion focuses on literary humor. 12 Berkeley: University of California Press, The first chapter presents an overview of Japa- 2003. nese humor from its earliest sources to its pre-

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sent-day forms, making brief reference to major The Chrysanthemum and the Fish is most no- developments in the historical and social back- table for its comprehensiveness. It covers a wide ground of the periods it covers. This chapter is range of genres over four centuries of develop- useful is a foundation for the more in-depth dis- ment, and manages to accomplish this in a way cussion that follows in later chapters, but it could that informs as well as entertains. Broad descrip- also stand on its own as an introduction to the tions of historical context and biographical details varieties of Japanese humor. Hibbett traces the of individual authors mesh neatly with literary earliest origins of literary humor to Kojiki, and analysis. Best of all, Hibbett is able to convey a takes note of the comic aspects of Genji monoga- sense of the variety of the works he discusses by tari and Makura no sōshi. Reference to the humor including a generous amount of translations. That of the medieval period includes mention of kyō- most of these succeed in being funny is a testi- gen and popular tales. These early sources are mony to the skill of the translator. discussed briefly, prefatory to the more detailed Still, the book leaves some questions open. introduction that follows to the cultural landscape Given the its impressive range of coverage, more of the early modern period. Here he lists the ma- thorough exploration of the Japanese concepts of jor forms and genres of early modern humor, both humor would have been useful, especially as they written and oral, some of its celebrities and their were framed by terms such as kokkei (滑稽), works: Anrakuan Sakuden's Seisuishō (Laughs to warai (笑い), okashimi (おかしみ), and so on. Banish Sleep), Hokusai, Hiraga Gennai, and Jip- Also, there is no discussion of the role of women pensha Ikku all put in brief appearances. The last in the history of humor's development in the early two are discussed more deeply in later chapters. modern and modern periods. With the exception The balance of the book is a generally chrono- of some kyōka poets and rakugo performers, it logical survey: Chapter 2 has as its primary topic appears that women were never the creators of Saikaku's haikai and fiction but also discusses the humor in the centuries following the Heian period, cultural environment of Osaka in the Genroku only its object. The reason for this is worth dis- period. Chapter 3 centers its discussion on eight- cussing. Another concern is that the prose style eenth century Edo. It sifts through the varieties of might sometimes present problems for non- fictional works and joke books that emerged from specialist readers, especially in the opening chap- the milieu of the Yoshiwara quarter, highlighting ter. While its casual tone is inviting, in places it the work of Gennai, Ōta Nanpo, and Santō Kyō- veers so rapidly through historical periods, names, den as well as some lesser-known "wits." Chapter and terms that it occasionally becomes hard to 4 explores the interaction between bakumatsu- follow. Elsewhere, the specialist might be frus- period fiction and rakugo anchored around sev- trated in the few places where the English titles of eral major figures, Shikitei Samba and Ikku. tales are given, but not the Japanese. Chapter 5 describes the developments of comic On the whole, however, the book is very read- literature in the Meiji period as it confronted im- able and will be valuable for both non-specialists ported ideas of propriety, especially in literature. and specialists, particularly those interested in the It explores Fukuzawa Yukichi's views on humor, literary and cultural history of early modern Ja- the remarkable success of the British rakugo en- pan. Erudite yet accessible, The Chrysanthemum tertainer Henry Black, and offers a detailed and the Fish is a study of Japanese humor that is analysis of humor in the work of Natsume Sōseki. not merely finny, but funny. The last chapter discusses the uneasy position of humor in the modern period – unacceptable as "pure literature" but nevertheless irresistible to writers such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, and Inoue Hisashi, as well as stars of stage and screen like Kitano Takeshi and Tamori. The book also features a large number of images, including many illustrations from early modern fictional works.

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Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in nies, Butler writes, partly to put on a show of Japan, 1467-1680: Resilience and Renew- normalcy, but also to demonstrate a continued al. Harvard East Asian Monograph, 209. Cam- relevance and "adherence to precedent" (p. 97). bridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002. Members of the court were poor, however, and the show required some improvisation to keep up. © , University of Carol Richmond Tsang Few, if any, courtiers owned all the necessary Illinois, Chicago. clothing for the various observances, for example, and Butler shows us networks of courtiers sharing The medieval imperial court was both stronger clothes in order to be properly outfitted. and more resilient than is usually thought, argues In Chapter 3, we see the impact of sengoku on Lee Butler in his new book, Emperor and Aris- the court most clearly, as many courtiers formed tocracy in Japan, 1467-1680. According to Butler, relationships with warriors and promoted their the emperor and aristocrats knew their strengths, interests at court and elsewhere. Oda Nobunaga's and used them to their own advantage. The sen- triumphal entrance into Kyoto resulted in a num- goku court survived primarily because warriors ber of changes, but not right away. Only gradu- found it useful, but he contends that courtiers ally did courtiers begin to prefer residence in the worked tirelessly to keep the warriors convinced capital, and took up again the pursuit of court of the court's importance. It functioned as a reli- rank and titles, which had become somewhat un- gious symbol, and as the "arbitrator of religious attractive because of how liberally the court had matters" (p. 104), but even more importantly it awarded them to warriors. was a source of artistic culture, a connection with The next chapter continues the discussion of the past, and "the only institution in the country the court and its relationships with Nobunaga, that enjoyed . . . overarching authority" (p. 58). Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. One Divided into eight chapters, plus introduction, of the more intriguing sections deals with the conclusion and three appendices, the book is or- court's efforts at mediation, particularly those ganized chronologically, but often thematically times it ordered Nobunaga to make peace with an within each period, which sounds more unwieldy enemy, as it did, for example, with Honganji. than it is. Butler's topic is complex, and the Butler sees this as a way the court increased its book's organization reflects that complexity. The capital, as it were, because in negotiating for the text itself is absorbing and readable, and most of two sides, the court also "laid claim to a position the time the structure works well. of authority . . . a position recognized as supe- Chapter 1 discusses the challenges faced by the rior . . . to the antagonists" (p. 132). Hideyoshi court in the course of the Ōnin/Bunmei war, as made special efforts to bolster the court and show many, probably most, aristocrats found them- respect to the emperor, partly because he relied selves homeless in the charred city of Kyoto. But- on court rank to maintain his own authority. In ler describes the court at its nadir, with its mem- spite of his troubles, Hideyoshi remained a war- bers largely dispersed and its income disappear- rior, considered a barbarian by the courtiers, and ing. In an especially welcome section, he also never became an insider at court. One usually describes the women who were engaged in the thinks of Ieyasu as more distant from the court court's administration, and how sengoku provided than Hideyoshi, though Butler argues that Ieyasu them with the extended opportunities that al- was more capable than his predecessor to interact lowed them to become involved. with the court as a courtier. Arguably he identi- The second chapter treats aspects of the court's fied himself more closely with the court than the life that made it distinctive and important: the arts, other unifiers. He hired aristocratic diviners, for ceremonies, scholarship, and so on. Many courti- instance, and used rites for the shogunal investi- ers had fled to the protection of daimyo in the ture ceremonies that mirrored those for imperial various provinces and made their livings by investitures. teaching traditional arts like poetry and calligra- The last four chapters go over the changing re- phy to the new elite. The court continued to hold lationship of the court with the Tokugawa bakufu. artistic gatherings, and perform annual ceremo- Chapter 5 deals with the Court Lady Scandal,

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interpreting it as an incident that sorted out the to rule" (p. 209). Furthermore, many of the provi- roles of court and bakufu. After 1603, Butler says, sions were simply restating practices that had the authorities of court and bakufu were not been introduced earlier, such as separate ranks for clearly delineated, and the possibility existed that courtiers and warriors. What actually redefined the court might be involved in political matters. the court's position was subtler: Ieyasu took it This question was settled mostly through two upon himself to dictate to the court the even in incidents that pitted the emperor against the ba- matters within the scope of the court's own busi- kufu. ness. He even regulated proper dress. Merely the In 1609, it became clear that a number of the issuance of the regulations, then, constituted the emperor's consorts had taken lovers from the restrictions on the court. ranks of the nobility, and in two cases, from the Butler summarizes his conclusions on this is- lower nobility. No one disputed that the consorts sue at the beginning of Chapter 7. He argues that and their lovers had acted reprehensibly, or quar- the regulations were "a powerful pronouncement reled with the decision to relieve them of their of the need for the emperor . . . [but also] dis- court ranks. The question of further punishment abling", going on to observe that "politically, [the created a problem, however. The emperor, Go- court] held no mandate to act" (p. 225). The court Yōzei, supposedly had the authority to decide was not so much told to stay out of government, matters within his own court, though he was re- as it was not given a basis for becoming involved. quired to notify the bakufu. When he did so, The bulk of the chapter, however, deals with Ieyasu at first responded that the matter should be changes that occurred with relation to particular settled by the emperor, which itself implied that individuals in the court and bakufu. the permission was his to give. Trouble arose, The final chapter deals with the court after however, when Go-Yōzei insisted on severe pun- Iemitsu, when all understood it as set apart from ishment: the execution of all involved (five government. The court settled down to concen- women and seven men). The rest of the court ar- trate on the arts and scholarship. By the second gued that the penalty was too severe, and Ieyasu half of the seventeenth century, Butler declares, put pressure on Go-Yōzei to mitigate it. In the the position of the court and emperor had been end, Ieyasu (and the court) prevailed, and all redefined. He insists, however, that the court had were exiled except for the two lowest-ranking a continuing and important role as the center of men, who were executed. A similar struggle oc- high culture, at least until the Genroku era when curred a year later over Go-Yōzei's desire to ab- the culture of the commoners blossomed. By then, dicate. Again, the bakufu prevailed, and so the the world of the court "lacked political and social court had no choice but to recognize the bakufu's vitality" (p. 286), and so was outstripped by the dominance. townspeople. In Chapter 6, Butler advances what may be his In the conclusion, Butler moves to the question most controversial finding, a reconsideration of of ideology, arguing that its main value was its the Kuge shohatto, "Regulations for the Emperor history, not its mythical origins, which courtiers and the Nobility". Thus far, the rules have been never mentioned. Ultimately, the warriors wanted interpreted as a radical redefining of the purview to imitate the court: "they adopted its culture and of the court and of its ties with the bakufu, setting emulated its ways" (p. 296), both enhancing and limits on the court. The first article is seen as an relying on the court's prestige. Finally, the court order to the emperor to concentrate on the arts survived because of its history, and "its ability to and scholarship, and leave politics to the bakufu. keep that past alive in the present" (p. 296). Butler dismisses this interpretation. "Nothing The three appendices are lists, the first two es- about them is revolutionary, and nowhere do they sentially glossaries. The first records, in Japanese significantly constrict the court or its activities" characters, the books Ieyasu collected while do- he insists (p. 209). He points out as an example ing background research for the Regulations of that the first article recommends several specific the Court and Nobility. The second provides works for the emperor to study, and that they are characters for the bulk of Japanese words used in "political works that offer concrete advice on how the text. The third, however, is an annotated bib-

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liography of the most important courtier diaries warriors would want to continue it. used for the study. The question of the court's appeal is, however, There is a list of works cited as well as the very complex, and one suspects that it will take endnotes, and an index. This reviewer did not another book (or more) to address it. Emperor find the index to be wholly satisfactory, as its and Aristocracy takes up new issues of real im- coverage is spotty. Sections include listings for portance to understanding fifteenth- to seven- such items as "fishmongers", "flower-viewing" teenth-century Japan, and handles them with clar- and "kickball". One searches in vain, however, ity and insight. It is welcome indeed. for "precedence", although its importance is dis- cussed repeatedly in the text. Similarly, "scholar- ship" lists only two pages in the first chapter, though it also figures in, for example, Butler's discussion of the Kuge shohatto. Most of the in- dex consists of proper names and Japanese terms. A more thoughtful index would have been helpful. Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467-1680 is the first major work in English that takes the late medieval court as its subject. Mary Elizabeth Berry's excellent Culture of Civil War in Kyoto makes use of many courtier diaries, and gives us the texture of mid-fifteenth century Kyoto, but the court is not her focus, and Butler's book cov- ers a much longer period of time. For that reason alone, it is valuable. It's a cliché, but this study truly does take its subject out of the shadows and into the light, allowing us to see much that had been dim. Butler's research is thorough, and he has used an appropriate variety of sources. He takes virtu- ally no interpretation for granted, and this is one of the book's major strengths. In addition, he ex- poses much of the inner workings of the court, from the ceremonial observances to the women who found a place in court administration in the late fifteenth century. Some of his arguments will be controversial, especially his re-assessment of the interactions between Ieyasu and the court. The book's weakest part comes in connecting the court and its con- cerns with the warriors. One gets a detailed un- derstanding of what the court did, and how its members used its various tools to attract the war- riors' attention. What remains less clear, however, is precisely why the warriors found the court, its ceremonies and its arts appealing. Adherence to precedent was certainly important to members of the aristocracy, but why would it be important to the tradition-breaking daimyo? In the end, we are told that warriors had always supported the court, and that the relationship had worked, so naturally

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Political-Institutional History implications for other subjects even within the realm of politics. of Early Modern Japan: A Bibliography SURVEY STUDIES ©Philip C. Brown, Ohio State University Beasley, W.G. The Modern History of Japan. New York: Praeger, 1974. Contents: ______, The Rise of Modern Japan. New York: St. Martin's, 1990 (Revision of The Modern Survey Studies History of Japan). Comparative Perspectives Beasley, W.G. The Modern History of Japan. New York: Praeger, 1974. Politics Berry, Mary Elizabeth. “Was Early Modern Japan Whole Period Culturally Integrated?” Modern Asian Studies th th 31:3 (1992): 547-58. The Late 16 To 17 Century Transition Borton Hugh. Japan`s Modern Century. New Mid-Period York; Ronald Press, 1973. Crawcour Sydney. "The Tokugawa Period and Meiji Restoration Movement Japan's Preparation for Modern Economic Institutional/Government Structures Growth," Journal of Japanese Studies 1:1 (Winter 1974): 113-125. Overviews And Nation-Wide Structures Crowley, James B., ed. Modern East Asia: Essays Daimyo, Domain and Region in Interpretation. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1970. Village, Town and City Duus, Peter. Feudalism in Japan. New York: Law Knopf 1969. ______, The Rise of Modern Japan. New York; Military Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Policy Fairbank John K., Edwin 0. Reischauer & Albert M. Craig. East Asia: Tradition and Transfor- Biographical Studies mation. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Revised and abridged version of two earlier I have reserved the heading “Politics” for stud- works. ies that deal with major, far-reaching political ______, East Asia: The Modern Transformation. trends and the events associated with them and I New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965 (with sev- have used the “Policy” section to deal with more eral later editions). temporally and spatially limited studies. Thus, Fedoseyev, Pyotr. “The Significance of Revolu- events leading to the establishment of the Toku- tionary Transformations,” in Nagai Michio & gawa bakufu are treated in the “Politics” section, Miguel Urrutia, eds., Meiji Ishin: Restoration while studies of government relations with mer- and Revolution. Tokyo: United Nations Uni- chants (domain or bakufu) are treated in the “Pol- versity Press, 1985, 52-7. icy” section. “Institutional/Government Struc- Hall, John Whitney, “Introduction [early modern tures” has been reserved for studies of the long- Japan],” In: John Whitney Hall, and James L. lasting arrangements through which political McClain, eds., The Cambridge History of Ja- power was distributed throughout the late six- pan, Vo l u me 4 : Early Modern Japan. Cam- teenth to mid-nineteenth centuries rather than bridge, UK and New York: Cambridge Univer- studies that focus on specific events or policies. I sity Press, 1991, 1-39. classified materials based on my understanding of ______, Japan: From Pre-History to Modern where the major emphasis of each book or essay Times. New York: Delacorte, 1970. lies, even when the work may have substantial

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Sippel, Patricia. “Popular Protest in Early Mod- Limits of Modernity: Proto-Industry ern Japan: The Bushu Outburst,” Harvard and Village Praxis Journal of Asiatic Studies 37 (December 1977): 273-322. Brown, Philip C. “The Mismeasure of Land: Smethurst, Richard J. Agricultural Develop- Land Surveying in the Tokugawa Period,” ment and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870- Monumenta Nipponica 42:2 (1987): 115-155. 1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press, ______. “Practical Constraints on Early Toku- 1986. gawa Land Taxation: Annual Versus Fixed As- Steensgaard, Niels. “The Seventeenth Century sessments in Kaga Domain,” Journal of Japa- Crisis and the Unity of Eurasian History,” nese Studies 14:2 (1988): 369-401. Modern Asian Studies 24: 4 (1990): 683-697. Ooms, Herman, Tokugawa Village Practice: Vlastos, Stephen. Peasant Protests and Uprisings Class, Status, Power, Law, Berkeley: Univer- in Tokugawa Japan, Berkeley: University of sity of California Press, 1996. California Press, 1986. Platt, Brian W. “Elegance, Prosperity, Crisis: Walthall, Anne. “Narratives of Peasant Uprising Three Generations of Tokugawa Village El- in Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 43: 3 (May ites,” Monumenta Nipponica 55: 1 (2000): 45- 1983): 571-588. 74. ______. “Japanese Gimin: Peasant Martyrs in Pratt, Edward. Japan’s Proto-industrial Elite: Popular Memory,” American Historical Review The Economic Foundation of the Gōnō, Cam- 91: 5 (1986): 1076-1102. bridge Massachusetts: Harvard University, ______. Social Protest and Popular Culture in 1999. Eighteenth Century Japan, University of Ari- Totman, Conrad. “Tokugawa Peasants: Win, zona Press, 1986. Lose, or Draw?” Monumenta Nipponica 41:4 ______, ed. and translator. Peasant Uprisings (1986): 457-476. in Japan: A Critical Anthology of Peasant His- Waswo, Ann. The Decline of a Rural Elite, tories, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. 1991. ______. The Soil: A Portrait of rural Life in White, James W. Ikki: Social Conflict and Po- Meiji Japan, Nagatsuka Takashi 1879-1915, litical Protest in Early Modern Japan, Ithaca: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Cornell University Press, 1995. Wigen, Kären. “The Geographic Imagination in ______. The Demography of Sociopolitical Early Modern Japanese History: Retrospect Conflict in Japan, 1721-1846. Berkeley: In- and Prospect,” Journal of Asian Studies 51:1 stitute of East Asian Studies, University of (1992): 3-29. California, Berkeley, Center for Japanese Stud- ______. The Making of a Japanese Periphery ies, 1992. 1750-1920, Berkeley: University of California ______. “Rational Rioters: Leaders, Followers, Press, 1995. and Popular Protest in Early Modern Japan,” Politics and Society 16: 1 (1988): 35-69. ______. “State Growth and Popular Protest in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 14: Beyond the Rice Fields: History of Ur- 1 (1988): 1-25. ban Life, Fishing, and Forestry Yasumaru, Yoshio. 1984. “Rebellion and Peas- ant Consciousness in the Edo Period,” in An- Crawcour, Sydney. “Some Observations on drew Turton and Shigeharu Tanabe eds., His- Merchants,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society tory and Peasant Consciousness in Southeast of Japan. Tokyo, 1961, 1-139. Asia, Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, Gerstle, Andrew C. Eighteenth Century Japan: 1984, 401-420. Culture and Society, Sydney, Boston: Allen and Unwin, Reprint Curzon Press, 1999. Hauser, William B. Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the

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Kinai Cotton Trade, Cambridge: Cambridge Sheldon, Charles D. The Rise of the Merchant University Press, 1974. Class in Tokugawa Japan 1600-1868, New ______. “Hard Times in the Kanto: Economic York: Augustin, 1958. Change and Village Life in Late Tokugawa Ja- Totman, Conrad. The Origins of Japan’s Mod- pan,” Modern Asian Studies 23: 2 (1989): 349- ern Forests: The Case of Akita, Honolulu: 371. University of Hawaii Press, 1984. Howell, David L. Capitalism from Within: Econ- ______. “Land-Use Patterns and Afforestation omy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fish- in the Edo Period,” Monumenta Nipponica ery, Berkeley: University of California Press, 39:1 (1984): 1-10. 1995. ______. The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Hur, Nam-lin. Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Preindustrial Japan, Berkeley: University of Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society, California Press, 1989. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, ______. “Preindustrial River Conservancy,” 2000. Monumenta Nipponica 47:1 (1992): 59-79. Jannetta, Ann Bowman. Epidemics and Mortality Toyoda, Takeshi. A History of Pre-Meiji Com- in Early Modern Japan, Princeton: Princeton merce in Japan, Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shin- University Press, 1997. kōkai, 1969. Kalland, Arne. Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Vaporis, Constantine Nomikos. Breaking Barri- Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Ja- 1995. pan, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on Kelly, William W. Water Control in Tokugawa East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, Japan: Irrigation Organization in a Japanese 1994. River Basin, 1600-1870, Ithaca, New York: Cornell China-Japan Program, 1982. Leupp, Gary P. Servants Shophands, and Labor- The Unregistered Lives of Men and ers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan, Princeton: Women: Studies of Sexuality and Gen- Princeton University Press, 1992. der McClain, James. Kanazawa: A Seventeenth Century Japanese Castle Town, New Haven: Ackroyd, Joyce. “Women in Feudal Japan,” Yale University Press, 1982 Transactions, Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Ja- ______, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru, pan, 1959, 31-68. eds. Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State Bernstein, Gail Lee. Haruko’s World: A Japa- in the Early Modern Era. Ithaca: Cornell nese Farm Woman and Her Community, Stan- University Press, 1994. ford: Stanford University Press, 1983. ______, and Wakita Osamu, eds. Osaka: The ______. Recreating Japanese Women 1600- Merchants’ Capital of Early Modern Japan, 1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. 1999. Jones, Sumie ed. Sexuality and Edo Culture Ramseyer, Mark J. “Thrift and Diligence: Home 1750-1850, Bloomington: Indiana University, Codes of Tokugawa Merchant Families,” 1995. Monumenta Nipponica 34: 2 (1979): 209-230. Kondo Kazumi. “A Case Study of the Outcaste Roberts, John G. Mitsui: Three Centuries of Problem in Contemporary Japan,” M.A. the- Japanese Business, New York: Weatherhill, sis, California State University, Long Beach, 1973. 1993. Rozman, Gilbert. Urban Networks in Ch’ing Leupp, Garry P. Male Colors; The Construction China and Tokugawa Japan, Princeton: Prince- of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan 1603- ton University Press, 1974. 1868, Berkeley: University of California Press, ______. “Edo’s Importance in a Changing 1995. Tokugawa Society,” Journal Japanese Studies 1: 1 (1974): 113-126.

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Mulhern-Irie, Chieko ed., Heroic with Grace: Legendary Women of Japan, Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1991. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire: Male-male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse 1600-1950, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pons, Phillippe. Misere et crime au Japon du XVIIe siecle a nos jours, Paris: Bibliotheque des Sciences Humaines, 1999. Smith, Robert J. and Ella Lury Wiswell. The Women of Suye Mura, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Stanley, Amy Beth. “Adultery and Punishment in Tokugawa Japan,” B.A. Thesis, Honors. Har- vard University, 1999. Tonomura, Hitomi, Ann Walthall, and Wakita Haruko, eds. Women and Class in Japanese History, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999. Walthall, Ann. The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restora- tion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Watanabe, Tsuneo, and Junichi Iwata, translated by D. R. Roberts. Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, London: Gay Men’s Press, 1989. Yamakawa, Kikue. Buke no Josei (Samurai Women), translated by Kate Wildman Nakai as The Women of Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life, Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1992.

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Basic Style Guidelines for Timothy H. Barrett, "Tominaga Our Con- temporary," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Final Manuscripts Society, Third Series 3, no. 2 (1993): 245- Early Modern Japan: An Interdiscipli- 52. Bitō Masahide. "Thought and Religion: nary Journal 1550-1700," in The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume Four: Early Modern Japan, Please use Times New Roman 10.5 point font for edited by John W. Hall (Cambridge: the main text, Times New Roman 14 point font Cambridge University Press, 1991): 373- bolded for the main title, and Times New Roman 424. 12 point font bolded for the author’s name, followed by the author’s institutional affiliation Thesis citations: in normal Times New Roman 10.5 font, e.g., Willem Jan Boot, "The Adoption and Adap- tation of Neo-Confucianism in Japan: The Early Modern Japanese Art His- Role of Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi Razan" (D. Lit., University of Leiden, tory ©Patricia J. Graham, University of Kan- 1983). sas Adriana Delprat, "Forms of Dissent in the Gesaku Literature of Hiraga Gennai Subheadings should be Times New Roman 12 (1728-1780)" (unpublished Ph.D. disser- point font bold, and flush left. tation, Princeton University, 1985)

Italicize Japanese words in the text. Do not italicize Book citation: Japanese words that commonly appear in English language publications such as samurai, shogun, ba- Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Over- kufu, haiku, noh/nō, etc. sights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton If possible, produce macrons over vowels; if you University Press, 1993). can not produce macrons over vowels, choose a Helen Hardacre, ed., The Postwar Develop- consistent, distinctive (e.g., not used for any ment, 205. Cf., however, Mark Teeuwen, other purpose in your essay text, notes, or Watarai Shintō: An Intellectual History of the Outer Shrine in Ise (Leiden: Research citations) symbol, e.g., circum-flex or umlaut, School CNWS, 1996). and clearly note on the title page what convention you are following so our search-and-replace EMJ can use black and white illustrations. Please routines can quickly make the substitutions. submit these in a standard format (e.g., jpg, gif, tiff, or pdf; however, we can handle anything that Adobe EMJ employs footnotes, not endnotes. Please fol- th Photoshop version 6.01 can edit.). Originals may be low the Chicago Manual of Style, 13 edition. We submitted in color, but you should test to see how use the same font and size for notes and the main well they convert to grayscale before you decide to text. Italicize the names of books, newspapers, include them. Clearly label illustrations in sequence journals, etc. and provide captions clearly associated with each illustration. Article citations: Gregory Schopen, “Archaeology and Protes- In composing charts and tables, bear in mind that tant Presuppositions in the Study of In- we employ two columns per page and, with our dian Buddhism,” History of Religions 31 software, mixing a large table or chart (one larger (1991): 1-23. than a single column) with the two-column format W. J. Boot, “Approaches to Ogyū Sorai: can sometimes fail. Specially formatted text can Translation and Transculturalization,” present the same challenge. For reference, each col- Monumenta Nipponica 54, no. 2 (1999): umn is 20.03 characters wide with the font setting 247-258. as noted above.

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