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Nihonbashi: Edo's Contested Center Marcia Yonemoto

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Nihonbashi: Edo's Contested Center Marcia Yonemoto , East Asian History NUMBERS 17/18· JUNE/DECEMBER 1999 Institute of Advanced Studies Australian National University 1 Editor Geremie R. Barme Assistant Editor Helen Lo Editorial Board Mark Elvin (Convenor) John Clark Andrew Fraser Helen Hardacre Colin Jeffcott W. ]. F. Jenner Lo Hui-min Gavan McCormack David Marr Tessa Morris-Suzuki Michael Underdown Design and Production Helen Lo Business Manager Marion Weeks Printed by Goanna Print, Fyshwick, ACT This double issue of East Asian History, 17/18, was printed in FebrualY 2000. Contributions to The Editor, East Asian History Division of Pacific and Asian History Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Phone +61 26249 3140 Fax +61 26249 5525 email [email protected] Subscription Enquiries to Subscriptions, East Asian History, at the above address Annual Subscription Australia A$45 Overseas US$45 (for two issues) iii CONTENTS 1 Whose Strange Stories? P'u Sung-ling (1640-1715), Herbert Giles (1845- 1935), and the Liao-chai chih-yi John Minford and To ng Man 49 Nihonbashi: Edo's Contested Center Marcia Yonemoto 71 Was Toregene Qatun Ogodei's "Sixth Empress"? 1. de Rachewiltz 77 Photography and Portraiture in Nineteenth-Century China Regine Thiriez 103 Sapajou Richard Rigby 131 Overcoming Risk: a Chinese Mining Company during the Nanjing Decade Ti m Wright 169 Garden and Museum: Shadows of Memory at Peking University Vera Schwarcz iv Cover calligraphy Yan Zhenqing M.c�J�n, Tang calligrapher and statesman Cover illustration Talisman-"Passport for wandering souls on the way to Hades," from Henri Dore, Researches into Chinese superstitions (Shanghai: T'usewei Printing Press, 1914-38) NIHONBASHI: EDO'S CONTESTED CENTER � Marcia Yonemoto As the Tokugawa 11&)II regime consolidated its military and political conquest Izushi [Pictorial sources from the Edo period] of Japan around the turn of the seventeenth century, it began the enormous (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1975), vol.4; project of remaking Edo rI p as its capital city. In transforming a small Takahashi Yasuo and Yoshida Nobuyuki, ed., Nihon toshi-shi nyumon [Introduction to fishingvillage into the headquarters of a new government, the Tokugawa the urban history of Japan], 3 vols (Tokyo: were constructing the nucleus of a new political and geographical order. Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1989); Yoshida Building what would become, in one century's time, one of the world's largest Nobuyuki, Kinsei kyodai toshi no shakai kozo cities was a significantaccomplishment in urban planning and administration [The social stmcture of the early modern metropolis] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan­ on the part of the bakufu, one that scholars have addressed in considerable kai, 1991); Wakita Osamu, Nihon kinsei toshi depth.l But re-creating Edo also involved re-configuringthe cultural landscape shi kenkyu [Studies in the urban history of of the new capital, and creating for it an identity that was particular to the city. early modern Japan] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1994); Tsukamoto Akira, "Toshi This latter process was guided not only by bakufu officials,but also by writers, kozo no tenkO" [Changes in urban stmcture] artists, intellectuals, and publishers who resided in Edo and who created and and Nakano Mitsutoshi, "Toshi bunka no circulated new images of life in the "eastern capital" in the eighteenth and ranjuku" [The maturation of urban culture], early nineteenth centuries.2 The relationship-sometimes conflictual, some- both in Asao Naohiro et aI., eds, Iwanami kOza Nihon tSllShi[The lwanami lecture [series] survey history of Japan], vo1.14: Kinsei [Early modern] 4 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), The author would like to thank the following IEdo history: in English, see in particular the pp.69-106, 255-302; for a recent overview of people for their comments and advice on essays collected in James L. McClain, John scholarship on urban history see Murakami earlier drafts of this article: Mary Elizabeth M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru, eds, Edo and Tadashi, Nihon kinsei shi kenkyu jiten Beny, Bruce Coates, Jay Dautcher, Robert Paris: urban life and the state in the early [Dictionary for the study of early modern Eskildsen, Matthi Forrer, Thomas Harper, David modern era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Japanese history] (Tokyo: Tokyodo Shuppan, Pollack, Luke Roberts, Naoki Sakai, Tvo Smits, Press, 1994); see also the writings on Edo 1995), pp.120-7. Stephen Snyder, Rickie Solinger, Watanabe culture and polities by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Kenji, Karen Wigen, Samuel Yamashita, the whose work has been translated in Edo culture: 2 As Edo developed its own regional and two anonymous readers for East Asian History, daily lifeand diversions in urbanJapan, 1600- urban identity in the mid-Tokugawa period, and members of the Department of History at 1868, tr. and ed. Gerald Groemer (Honolulu: various terms roughly translatable as "eastern the University of Colorado at Boulder, especial­ University of Hawaii Press, 1997). TheJapanese capital" were devised or adapted by Edo­ ly Julie Greene, James Jankowski, Edward scholarship on Edo history is far too voluminous based writers to distinguish their city from Ruestow, and Timothy Weston. to cite here, but some recent summary studies the imperial capital of Kyoto. One of the first 1 The references immediately following and include: Naito Akira, Edo no toshi kozo [The such references can be found in the preface in the footnotes for the remainder of the article urban structure ofEdo], in Nishiyama Matsuno­ ofFurai Sanjin's )!l*Ll1 (HiragaA Gennai's constitute only a partial list of scholarship on suke and Yoshiwara Ken'ichiro, eds, Edo jidai SJE-M$(f*]) Nenashigusa kohen lOVER 49 50 MARCLA YONEMOTO /[Rootless grass, part 2], in which the author times cooperative-between the building of the new capital by the bakufu writes: '''Putting up the miso' means 'to brag' as a public political space and the cultural construction of the city as a "lived in the parlance of the eastern capital [t6to space" by its residents is the subject of this study.3 m:tIH"See Nakamura Yukihiko, ed., Fiirai The spatial history of Edo can be assessed in microcosm in Nihonbashi Sanjin shu [The collected works of Furai Sanjin], Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol.55 B *m , the officialgeographic center of the city. As the point of origin of all (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961), p.99. Other Japan's major roads, Nihonbashi-the "Bridge of Japan"-was the central such terms for Edo included kOto lIt!), crossroads not only of Edo, but of the entire country. Originally conceived of buk6 Ji!;lI, and k6j6 ¥I�; see Yoshida as a public space in which the bakufu could display its authority, by the end Togo, (Z6M) Dai Nihon chimei jiten of the Tokugawa period the inventiveness of Edo-based writers, artists, and [(Revised) geographical dictionary ofJapan] (Tokyo: Fukuyamabo, 1970), vol.6, p.254, publishers had transformed Nihonbashi and the neighborhood immediately and Nihon Kokugo Daijiten Kankokai, ed., surrounding it into a "famous place" (meisho �?JT), whose importance Nihon kokugo daijiten [Comprehensive stemmed not from official status, but from the economic and cultural vitality dictionary of theJapanese language] (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1975), vo1.14. of urban commoner life. The concepts of "space" and "place" are not mutually exclusive, and the transformation of Nihonbashi from a public space defined 3 For a concise discussion of the need for analyses of "lived space" Cikirareta kukan by the bakufu to a famous place definedby commoners was not a linear shift 1t\� Gntc�r",') in historical scholar­ over time from authority to autonomy, nor a move from "high" to "low" ship, see Mizumoto Kazuhiko, "Kinsei no culture 4 Rather, Nihonbashi reflected the ways in which centrality, within the keikan" [The early modern landscape], in "integrated yet decentralized state structure" of Tokugawa Japan, was a Asao Naohiro et aI., Nihon Isushi, vo1.12: Kinsei 2 (1994), pp.189-224. fundamentally relational spatio-political concept that emerged out of the 5 4 As the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues, interactions between central authority and shifting fo rms of local power. space tends to be undifferentiated and The first partof this study examines the bakufu's construction of Nihon­ determined by distant and impersonal forces, bashi and its immediate environs as a central space, and the contests over while place is specific and knowable, its authority that process engendered from within the commoner community. meanings determined by those who inhabit and use it. See Yi-Fu Tuan, Sp ace andplace: The second part fo cuses specificallyon the role of literature, the arts, and the the perspective oj experience (Minneapolis, publishing industry in transforming Nihonbashi into a famous place. In both Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), cases, a plurality of cultural and political forces in Edo combined to determine p.6. both the form and fu nction of centrality in Nihonbashi. 5 The term "integrated yet decentralized state" is from Eiko Ikegami, The laming oj the samurai: honorific individualism and the making oj early modem Japan (Cam­ Nihonbashi as Public Space, 1590-1657 bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp.164-76. The rebuilding of Edo began in 1590, after Tokugawa Ieyasu �) II*,* 6 See Naito Akira, Edo no toshi k6z6, esp. (1542-1616) designated the remote castle town the military headquarters pp.160-6. from which he would, at the behest of Toyotomi Hideyoshi fH2:'*2f 7 Naito Kiyoshige, Te nsh6 nikki 0536-98), govern the eight Kanto �* provinces. The construction process 7\:1£�2., B quoted in Nishiyama required a massive mobilization of labor, engineering skills, and raw materials, Matsunosuke et aI., eds, Edogaku jiten [Dictionary of Edo studies] (Tokyo: Kobundo, and it wrought vast changes in the physical landscape that are visible to this 1994), p.27. The term "city of water" (mizu day.
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