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Early Modern Japan 2010 EARLY MODERN JAPAN 2010 Nam-lin Hur. Death and Social Order in largely the Buddhist temples that actually provided Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christi- the rituals and services to create those ancestors. anity, and the Danka System The danka system really rose to prominence in Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, society with the Tokugawa policy of temple certification. This policy forced every family to 2007 obtain a certification from a Buddhist temple stating ©Michael Laver, Rochester Institute of Technology that they were not Christian. This was part of the severe persecution of Christianity that began in the Nam-lin Hur’s Death and Social Order in Toku- first half of the seventeenth century and continued, gawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the at least rhetorically, throughout the Tokugawa Danka System is full of interesting ironies and para- regime. Hur notes that even in the eighteenth and doxes concerning the Tokugawa state and its rela- nineteenth centuries, long after Christianity ceased tionship to Buddhism. Just as an introductory to be a real issue in Tokugawa society, these temple example, he notes that Buddhism was not a state certifications were required in order for individuals religion in the Edo period; indeed, the state took to be free from suspicion of being a Christian. It several measures to curb the influence of Buddhism was this requirement, in conjunction with the in society. At the same time, however, the state, funerary rites that were so important to Japanese through its anti-Christian policy, was eminently families, that allowed the danka system to flourish responsible for allowing Buddhist temples to and allowed Buddhist temples in the Edo period to flourish and even went so far as to make it be financially viable, even without explicit state extremely difficult for a family to remove itself support. from the temple registries. These types of Hur spends a great deal of the book explaining paradoxes are found throughout the book so that not in minute detail the workings of the temple only has Hur written a superb history of the Danka certification system, the rituals used in the various system in Edo Japan, he has also, as academics like funerary practices in Buddhist temples, the role of to say, problematized the role of Buddhism within ancestors in promoting the household in Tokugawa the Tokugawa state. society, and the legal ramifications of belonging to Hur recognizes that the term danka has the danka system. For example, Hur notes that it traditionally been translated as “temple parish was exceptionally difficult to leave the danka system,” but finds that translation unsatisfying. He relationship with a temple once that relationship had suggests instead “funerary patronage,” largely to been initiated. This was largely because the avoid the connotation that the relationship between original temple had to agree to provide its assent temple and families was based on geography. In when a family wanted to leave. Naturally, temples reality, the relationship was one that often were not always entirely obliging. Furthermore, crisscrossed a city or village, as each family chose there were instances in which Shinto priests wanted which temple it patronized. Furthermore, the to obtain permission to perform Shinto rituals rather relationship was largely based on what Hur calls than Buddhist ones, but this also proved difficult as “familial death rituals and ancestral rites of only Buddhist priests were authorized to inspect and oblation.” The relationship was very much based certify a death. Thus, as Hur notes, death was on the funerary rites as well as the subsequent really only “legal” in the danka system! While this rituals of commemoration that the temples provided amount of detail is quite impressive and to families. This had the interesting side effect of demonstrates an extraordinary amount of first-rate “creating” ancestors, rather than simply research, the depth of specificity can become commemorating their deaths. These ancestors tedious as one is treated to page after page of served the function of protecting the family and technical information. It is a credit to the author therefore the rituals became exceedingly important. that despite this detail, he never allows his reader to This leads to yet another paradox: Although it was a lose sight of the main thesis of the book. Shinto cosmology that provided the framework for Perhaps the most important contribution that ancestral spirits protecting the household, it was this book makes to the scholarship on early modern Japan is that it ties together seemingly disparate 136 EARLY MODERN JAPAN 2010 aspects of Tokugawa society into a coherent tion. “Why,” he asked, “are Japanese television narrative centered on the danka system. For dramas so sentimental?” The disparaging tone he example, the author connects the Tokugawa attempt added to that final word led to an immediate attack to eradicate Christianity with the flourishing of by several other students—j-drama fans—who Buddhist temples, even though Edo never actively launched their own melodramatic defense of the declared Buddhism to have any official status in genre. He eventually backed down, but the echoes society. Hur also relates the structure of the of that exchange continue to haunt me, especially in Japanese household to the danka system through his the context of the nineteenth century. discussion of “creating” the ancestors through the What, from our current realism-craving culture, rituals provided by the Buddhist temples. In this are we to make of all the excess, of all those swoon- respect, the Japanese notions of filial piety take on ing Victorian ladies and their resolute-yet-tearful special significance, and are directed not simply to suitors? Was it all an act, or an over-act, that some- one’s own parents and grandparents, as in China how we, in our progressively restrained world, have and Korea, but to the household in general. In (at long last) transcended? And, more to the point, another case of paradox, Hur notes that it was what of their Japanese equivalents: those flushed, possible for a son to remove his father from the weeping maidens and their uniformed, sometimes- head of the family, an eminently un-filial act in belligerent boyfriends? China, if it was for the good of the household. And This question is not mine alone. Peter Brooks finally, Hur is able to tie together institutional raised it in 1976 in reference to Western literature of Buddhism, as represented by the local temples that the nineteenth century, concluding that somehow performed funerary rites and religious certification, the histrionic language of the stage found its way with social and religious control by the state. It is into the writing style of Balzac and Henry James.1 perhaps the ultimate irony that Buddhist temples, More recently Ken Ito has addressed it in a late- which were not officially recognized as state Meiji Japanese context, seeing the flux of melo- institutions, should come to be such agents of state drama as a mirror reflecting the anxieties of a power. Hur points out that through the temple changing world, touchstones for real social prob- certification system, Edo came to exercise a much lems that emerged in family, gender, and hierarchi- greater amount of control in the various domains cal relationships.2 The book under review, Jonathan than has been previously recognized. In the end, Zwicker’s Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: despite the intricate and often mind-boggling Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in amount of detail presented in this study, Nam-lin Nineteenth-Century Japan, appeared two years be- Hur has managed to write a fascinating and far- fore Professor Ito’s work, and in some respects an- reaching study that does not simply relate the ticipates and buttresses Ito’s conclusions even as it “history” of Tokugawa period funerary Buddhism, broaches new possibilities, including an answer to but rather explains why (and how) Buddhism in the puzzle of sentimentality in literature. general, and the danka system in particular, was of It is an impressive, eclectic work that seeks to such vital importance in perpetuating Tokugawa reassess and reconfigure some of the major issues of control for more than two hundred and fifty years. literary modernity in Japan. Zwicker uses both close reading and broad surveys of literary success (in Jonathan E. Zwicker. Practices of the Sen- commercial terms) to challenge traditional notions timental Imagination: Melodrama, the of canon, tracing a genealogy of sentimen- Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nine- tal/melodramatic fiction across the “long nineteenth teenth-Century Japan 1 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: 2006 Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of ©J. Scott Miller, Brigham Young University Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 2 Ken K. Ito, An Age of Melodrama: Family, During a class discussion recently a student who Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the- had been in Japan during the summer raised a ques- Century Japanese Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 137 .
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