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Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan

Constantine Nomikos Vaporis

Alternate attendance (sankin kōtai) was one of the central institutions of Edo-period (1603–1868) Japan and one of the most unusual examples of a system of enforced elite mobility in world history. ... More

Alternate attendance (sankin kōtai) was one of the central institutions of Edo-period (1603–1868) Japan and one of the most unusual examples of a system of enforced elite mobility in world history. It required the daimyo to divide their time between their domains and the city of Edo, where they waited upon the Tokugawa shogun. This book argues against the view that cultural change simply emanated from the center (Edo) and reveals more complex patterns of cultural circulation and production taking place between the domains and Edo and among distant parts of Japan. The book begins by detailing the nature of the trip to and from the capital for one particular large-scale domain, Tosa, and its men and goes on to analyze the political and cultural meanings of the processions of the daimyo and their extensive entourages. These movements were replete with symbolic import for the nature of early modern governance. Later chapters are concerned with the physical and social environment experienced by the daimyo's retainers in Edo; they also address the question of who went to Edo and why, the network of physical spaces in which the domainal samurai lived, the issue of staffing, political power, and the daily lives and consumption habits of retainers. Finally, the book examines retainers as carriers of culture, both in a literal and a figurative sense. In doing so, it reveals the significance of travel for retainers and their identity as consumers and producers of culture, thus proposing a multivalent model of cultural change.Less

The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan

W. Puck Brecher

Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese ... More

Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan's modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance. This book corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600–1868). It explains how, throughout the period, eccentricity (ki) and madness (kyō) developed and proliferated as subcultural aesthetics, and it demonstrates that individualism and strangeness carried considerable moral and cultural value. The book concludes that a confluence of intellectual, aesthetic, and social conditions enabled multiple concurrent heterodoxies to crystallize around strangeness as a prominent cultural force in Japanese society. Its coverage of the entire Edo period and engagement with both Chinese and native Japanese traditions reinterprets Edo-period tastes and perceptions of normalcy.Less

Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater

This book presents eight seminal works from the seventeenth-century Japanese sekkyō and ko-jōruri puppet theaters, many translated into English for the first time. Both poignant and disturbing, they ... More

This book presents eight seminal works from the seventeenth-century Japanese sekkyō and ko-jōruri puppet theaters, many translated into English for the first time. Both poignant and disturbing, they range from stories of cruelty and brutality to tales of love, charity, and outstanding filial devotion, representing the best of early Edo-period literary and performance traditions and acting as important precursors to the Bunraku and Kabuki styles of theater. As works of Buddhist fiction, these texts relate the histories and miracles of particular buddhas, bodhisattvas, and local deities. Many of their protagonists are cultural icons, recognizable through their representation in later works of Japanese drama, fiction, and film. The collection includes such sekkyō “sermon-ballad” classics as Sanshō Dayū, Karukaya, and Oguri, as well as the “old jōruri” plays Goō-no-hime and Amida's Riven Breast. The book provides a critical introduction to these vibrant performance genres, emphasizing the role of seventeenth-century publishing in their spread. It also details six major sekkyō chanters and their playbooks, filling a crucial scholarly gap in early Edo-period theater. More than fifty reproductions of mostly seventeenth-century woodblock illustrations offer rich, visual foundations for the critical introduction and translated tales.Less

When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World

Wilburn Hansen

Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) has been the subject of numerous studies that focus on his importance to nationalist politics and Japanese intellectual and social history. Although well known as an ... More

Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) has been the subject of numerous studies that focus on his importance to nationalist politics and Japanese intellectual and social history. Although well known as an ideologue of Japanese National Learning (Kokugaku), Atsutane’s significance as a religious thinker has been largely overlooked. This book focuses on Senkyō ibun (1822), which centers on Atsutane’s interviews with a fourteen-year-old Edo street urchin named Kozo Torakichi who claimed to be an apprentice tengu, a supernatural creature of Japanese folklore. It uncovers how Atsutane employed a deliberate method of ethnographic inquiry that worked to manipulate and stimulate Torakichi’s surreal descriptions of everyday existence in a supernatural realm, what Atsutane termed the Other World. The book begins with the hypothesis that Atsutane’s project was an early attempt at ethnographic research. A rough sketch of the milieu of 1820s Edo Japan and Atsutane’s position within it provides the backdrop against which the drama of Senkyō ibun unfolds. There follow chapters explaining the relationship between the implied author and the outside narrator, the Other World that Atsutane helped Torakichi describe, and Atsutane’s nativist discourse concerning Torakichi’s fantastic claims of a newly discovered Shinto holy man called the sanjin. Sanjin were seen as holders of secret and powerful technologies previously thought to have come from or been perfected in the West, such as geography, astronomy, and military technology. Finally, the book addresses Atsutane’s contribution to the construction of modern Japanese identity. The book counters the image of Atsutane as a forerunner of the ultra-nationalism that ultimately was deployed in the service of empire.Less

Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan

Laura Nenzi

In the Edo period (1600–1868), status-and gender-based expectations largely defined a person’s place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the ... More

In the Edo period (1600–1868), status-and gender-based expectations largely defined a person’s place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to celebrate their profession as belle-lettrists. For women in particular the open road and the blank page offered an opportunity to create personal hierarchies defined less by gender and more by culture and refinement. After the mid-eighteenth century, textbooks, guides, comical fiction, and woodblock prints allowed commoners to acquaint themselves with the historical, lyrical, or artistic pedigree of Japan’s famous sites. By identifying themselves with famous literary and historical icons, some saw an opportunity to rewrite their lives and re-create their identities in their travel diaries. The book first introduces the notion that the spaces of travel were malleable, accommodating reconceptualization across interpretive frames. It shows that, far from being static backgrounds, these travelscapes proliferated in a myriad of loci where one person’s center was another’s periphery. The book continues that in the course of the Edo period, educated persons used travel to, or through, revered lyrical sites to assert and enhance their roles and identities. Finally, the book looks at the intersection between recreational travel and the rising commercial economy, which allowed visitors to appropriate landscapes through new means: monetary transactions, acquisition of tangible icons, or other forms of physical interaction.Less

Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake

Gregory Smits

What are we to make of contemporary newspapers in Japan speculating about the possible connection between aquatic creatures and earthquakes? Why, between 1977 and 1993, did Japan's government spend ... More

What are we to make of contemporary newspapers in Japan speculating about the possible connection between aquatic creatures and earthquakes? Why, between 1977 and 1993, did Japan's government spend taxpayer money to observe catfish in aquariums as part of its mandate to fund earthquake prediction research? These actions are direct legacies of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake, one of the major natural disasters of the period. This book examines this earthquake in a broad historical context. The Ansei Edo earthquake shook the shogun's capital during a year of special religious significance and at a time of particularly vigorous seismic activity. It was also a turning point because, according to the prevailing understanding of earthquakes at the time, it should never have happened. Many Japanese, therefore, became receptive to new ideas about the causes of earthquakes as well as to the notion that by observing some phenomena—for example, the behavior of catfish—one might determine when an earthquake would strike. All subsequent major earthquakes in Japan resulted in claims, always made after the fact, that certain phenomena had been signs of the impending catastrophe. Indeed, earthquake prediction in Japan from 1855 to the present has largely consisted of amassing collections of alleged or possible precursor phenomena. In addition, the Ansei Edo earthquake served as a catalyst accelerating socio-political trends already underway. It revealed bakufu military weaknesses and enhanced the prestige of the imperial deity Amaterasu at the expense of the bakufu deity Kashima.Less

Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution

Terrence Jackson

Network of Knowledge examines the development of Dutch studies (rangaku) during the crucial years of 1770-1830 as its scholars wove a network that stretched across Japan. Rangaku was the title given ... More

Network of Knowledge examines the development of Dutch studies (rangaku) during the crucial years of 1770-1830 as its scholars wove a network that stretched across Japan. Rangaku was the title given to the pursuit of Western science and medicine through the medium of Japan’s sole link to Europe, the Dutch East India Company. This books focuses on the scholar Ōtsuki Gentaku and his colleagues in Edo in order to explain how the community expanded across the whole of Japan. It investigates their cultural world of salon gatherings, private academies, study-travel, letter-correspondence, and book-circulation, and argues that it is impossible to assess rangaku without understanding the strength of its community formation within those spaces. The community’s social significance helped make rangaku one of the integral developments in a Tokugawa era (1600-1868) information revolution. This information revolution included an increase in information gathering among all classes and new methods for collecting and storing that information. Changes in information culture were intricately tied to social developments, and this book reveals how the history of rangaku reflects that. The book ends with a discussion of the longevity of the social and cultural values of the rangaku network as they influenced the Meiji period (1868-1912).Less

Partners in Print: Artistic Collaboration and the Ukiyo-e Market

Julie Nelson Davis

Through a discussion of collaboration in the genre of ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) this book offers a new approach to understanding the production and reception of print culture in early ... More

Through a discussion of collaboration in the genre of ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) this book offers a new approach to understanding the production and reception of print culture in early modern Japan. It demonstrates that this popular genre was the result of an exchange among publishers, designers, writers, carvers, printers, patrons, buyers, and readers. By recasting selected works from the later eighteenth century as examples of a network of commercial and artistic cooperation, Partners in Print expands our understanding of the dynamic processes of production, reception, and intention in floating world print culture. Through four case studies this book explores collaboration between a teacher and a student, two painters and their publishers, a designer and a publisher, and a writer and an illustrator. Each begins with a single work—a specially commissioned print, a lavishly illustrated album, a printed handscroll, and an inexpensive illustrated novel—to investigate these partnerships. These materials represent some of the diversity of printed things ranging from expensive works made for a select circle of connoisseurs to those sold at a modest price to a large audience. They take up subjects familiar from the floating world—connoisseurship, beauty, sex, and humor—and explore multiple dimensions of inquiry vital to that dynamic culture: the status of art, the evaluation of beauty, the representation of sexuality, and the tension between mind and body.Less

Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950

Gregory Pflugfelder

In this study of the mapping and remapping of male-male sexuality over four centuries of Japanese history, the book explores the languages of medicine, law, and popular culture from the seventeenth ... More

In this study of the mapping and remapping of male-male sexuality over four centuries of Japanese history, the book explores the languages of medicine, law, and popular culture from the seventeenth century through the American Occupation. The book opens with fascinating speculations about how an Edo translator might grapple with a twentieth-century text on homosexuality, then turns to law, literature, newspaper articles, medical tracts, and other sources to discover Japanese attitudes toward sexuality over the centuries. During each of three major eras, it argues, one field dominated discourse on male-male sexual relations: popular culture in the Edo period (1600–1868), jurisprudence in the Meiji period (1868–1912), and medicine in the twentieth century.Less