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This chapter explores the realm of legal discourse — the framework of pronouncements and silences by means of which political authorities of the Edo-period sought to establish and maintain control over the significance of male-male sexuality. Through the codification and enforcement of various types of legislation, the era's warriors-turned-bureaucrats attempted to limit shudō within parameters that would serve their own interests and secure the functioning of the communities in their charge. In contrast to the profit motive of the publishing industry, the concerns of legislators were centered on hierarchy and stability. As with popular discourse, the legal construction of male-male sexuality was by no means uniform, varying significantly with geographic locale and chronological era, as the subsequent discussion should sufficiently illustrate.

In the Edo-period, for the Japanese, “homosexuality” was an unfamiliar and unimaginable concept. People of this era never engaged in sexual practices with nor experienced erotic desires toward individuals of the same sex. This period's sexual vocabulary offered various expressions that could be used to refer to erotic activities between males or females so that even finding an appropriate name for it would pose a considerable challenge. Writings on male-male sexuality possessed an indigenous textual tradition, with its own vocabulary and commercial market. The “sexuality” of “homosexuality” was quite the same as the “love” of “male love”

The Southern Barbarians' Cookbook is a culinary text that speaks to important changes in Japan's foodways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Written in the seventeenth century, if not earlier, the book is a collection of Portuguese and Spanish recipes, making it unique among premodern culinary writings in Japan. Accordingly, it offers insight into historical developments outside of cooking and is the missing link in the transition from culinary texts to culinary books. The Barbarians' Cookbook also reveals broader developments in foodways in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It describes the introduction of new food ingredients, cooking techniques, and dishes that would reshape the Japanese cuisine. The book may not have been widely circulated until modern times, but it offers a chance to examine the links and the gaps between the elite medieval culinary world and the developing popular trends in the Edo period in terms of ingredients (food) and thinking about food (fantasy).

This volume contains the translation of Matters of the World: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard (Seji kenbunroku or Seji kenmonroku), which examines Japanese society critically in its entirety, from shogunal worthies at the top to outcasts of various kinds at the bottom, during the Edo period. Written by a samurai author who uses the pseudonym Buyō Inshi, “a retired gentleman of Edo,” the work provides a firsthand compelling account of the social and economic contradictions of late Edo life as well as Edo Japan's financial and legal doings. This section examines the historical context in which Matters of the World was written by taking a closer look at the larger structures of society in mid-Edo, with particular emphasis on warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants as well as clergy, the imperial court, townspeople, outcasts, and idlers. It also describes some of the events in the period that must have formed Buyō's worldview: the decades around 1800. Finally, it traces Buyō's major concepts and categories and outlines the intellectual landscape that informed his outlook.

The rise of the publishing business has been called the most important cultural development in early modern Japan. The mid-seventeenth century saw the rise of a new form of culinary writing, the printed culinary book (ryōribon). Hōchōnin, the knife specialists serving high-ranking samurai and aristocrats, continued to write culinary texts (ryōrisho) in the Edo period, but as in previous centuries these works were privately disseminated manuscripts not widely read and, before the twentieth century, seldom published. This makes the published culinary books, beginning with the 1643 work Tales of Cookery, the first popular media for information about cooking and dining. This chapter offers some general comments on what culinary books reveal about the interplay between food and fantasy that constitutes the definition of Japanese cuisine in the early modern period. Culinary books popularized ideal forms of cooking and dining premised on the idea that these could be enjoyed as forms of vicarious pleasure in the same way in which popular literature and guidebooks offered readers descriptions of exotic locations they might never travel to in real life.

Menu collections, one of the major categories of published culinary books in the Edo period, included complex meals that most of their readers could not create because of the menus' expense and complexity, and the existence of sumptuary laws which prohibited the use of key ingredients and elaborate methods of serving. This chapter explores menu collections that vary in their treatment of their subject, but share the fact that they are less like shopping lists and guides for actual meals and more like poems written to evoke other things: the dining habits of the elite, the change of seasons, or Noh drama. The menus demonstrate ways that those who wrote about food borrowed from and participated in larger cultural trends ranging from the elite tea ceremony to popular pastimes such as shrine pilgrimage and the puppet theater. Medieval rules for cooking and dining became the guidelines for a literary genre in the Edo period, allowing readers to conceive of entire banquets as abstract meditations on food.

This chapter offers a historical reconstruction of how play was given a founding role in the lifestyles of three different social cohorts that have greatly influenced the molding of the cultural images and self-perception of Japanese culture to this day: the female court aristocracy of the Heian period (794–1185) who idealized play to the point that it is described in many of the period’s women-oriented literary works as the spiritual highlight of daily activities and of the annual calendar; Edo-period's (1603–1868) urbanites for whom play became an emancipating space from political oppression; and urban youth in Japan during the 1970s for whom play became a means of protest and of affirmative self-definition. This chapter criticizes the overidealization of play by many twentieth-century scholars, arguing instead that play may also induce dysfunctional and negative behaviors. What can be said, however, is that under certain sociocultural conditions play is attributed such a favored cultural position that it becomes a powerful civilizing force.

This chapter laments how the townspeople in Japan during the Edo period grew conceited, with particular emphasis on two tendencies among them, one that inspires abhorrence and another that arouses pity; the latter is the imbalance between the poor and the rich. It begins with a rough description of the matters that are to be abhorred by focusing on shogunal purveyors and wholesalers, domainal purveyors and storehouse agents, profligates and hoarders. It then takes a look at the wealth and arrogance of the Kuramae rice agents in Asakusa, the extravagance of Edo merchants, the townspeople's custom of having many concubines and kept women, and the practice of wives and concubines as well as clerks of townsmen to move around in palanquins. It also describes townspeople's ceremonies and the advantages enjoyed by townspeople, and how the pricing of goods gave rise to loss and gain, wealth and poverty. Finally, it discusses townspeople's freedom as compared with warriors and farmers, along with their money lending activities and other problems such as city crime and serious riots.

This chapter discusses how printed culture became commercialized and popularized. Sustained by a general economic and cultural growth and a sharp rise in literacy rates, the commercial print industry boomed in the course of the Edo period. While advertising the historical, literary, or religious pedigree of famous sites, works printed for popular consumption also contributed to the creation of new spatial hierarchies based on services and amenities. Indeed, wayfarers and armchair travelers alike were exposed to and bombarded by more or less direct forms of commercial advertising. As such, market-based standards for the evaluation of space emerged, enabling prospective travelers to redraw the map once again.

This chapter explores the Edo period (1603–1868), which eclipsed the imperial capital at Kyoto in cultural production over the course of the era. It examines the centrality of soba, or buckwheat noodles, in the culinary identity of Edo commoners who idealized iki, an attitude and aesthetic of “cool chic.” Deriving popular cultural references to soba from kabuki theater, literature, and rakugo storytellers, the chapter demonstrates how soba helped dispel culinary inferiority in relation to the imperial capital and became an important symbol of Edo identity. It also provides insights on the activities and preferred criteria of soba connoisseurs today.

By the mid-eighteenth century, published recipe books focused increasingly on the intellectual appreciation of Japanese cuisine. Culinary historian Harada Nobuo describes these works as full of “amusements,” exemplified by the abundance of puns and wordplay in the names of recipes, particularly in the recipe collections Delicacies from the Mountains and Seas (1750) and Anthology of Special Delicacies (1764). These “amusing” cookbooks of the late Edo period did not represent a radical departure from earlier culinary writings. The novelty of the late eighteenth-century cookbooks rests less in their playful use of abstract qualities associated with certain foods and more in the fact that their authors, recognizing the capacity of existing culinary rules to make food signify other things, incorporated new references into the culinary code, including poetry, natural phenomena, and geography. Delicacies from the Mountains and Seas, for example, contains recipes for fantasy foods ranging from fried wheat gluten to sushi, pickles, sake, sweets, fish salads, and soups. Secret Digest of Exceptional Radish Dishes throughout the Land features recipes for daikon.

This chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine aesthetic eccentricity as an emergent feature of identity formation during this new age and traces its trajectory throughout the Edo period (1600–1868). Aesthetic eccentricity refers not only to deviant cultural forms—mainly within the visual arts—but also to subjectivities that privilege individuality, emotion, and intuition over conventional behavior. It tends toward egocentrism and often conveys a subject's desire for detachment from occupational responsibilities, ideological constraints, or commercial pressures. The remainder of this chapter first situates the topic within existing English and Japanese scholarship by examining how others have approached eccentricity as a field of study. It then offers a genealogy of the terms commonly used to signify aesthetic eccentricity in the Edo period. Next, it introduces some of the historiographical issues that have guided inquiry into aesthetic eccentricity in early modern Japan, including the favored tendency to equate it with later avant-garde movements. The chapter concludes by advancing several counterintuitive arguments that collectively demonstrate how strangeness, particularly during the last century of the Edo period, permeated mainstream ethical values to assume an inviolable position within mainstream culture.

This new translation of the Linjilu (LJL) attempts something different from other translations: to embrace the traditional Japanese Zen commentarial tradition and to embed many of its exegeses directly into the translation. It also attempts to capture the vernacular (baihua) flavor of the text. The introduction provides a brief history of the LJL itself and Zen commentaries upon it in Japan. Ten commentaries are selected and described in some detail. It then lays out what sorts of material have been selected for use from these commentaries (with examples). A description of postwar Japanese “commentators” on the LJL follows. It concludes by stating that the LJL, despite its vernacular language, is not a demotic text, and, despite its anti-scholastic rhetoric, is not anti-sutra. It is actually an erudite distillation of classical Buddhism but in a compelling vernacular format.

This chapter discusses the history of Japanese painting from Edo to Meiji by focusing on the career of more than a dozen artists regarded as the leading painters of the period. It begins by providing a background on painting and prints during the Edo period and goes on to examine the transition in Japanese painting from Edo to the Meiji period. It then considers the Japanese government’s support of Western art before turning to the activities of the first generation of Meiji artists. It also analyzes the rhetoric of Ernest F. Fenollosa and his former pupil and colleague, Okakura Kakuzō regarding the development of modern Japanese art. It argues that the new generation of painters and their pupils successfully negotiated the Meiji Restoration and that it was they, not the iconic painters and disciples of Fenollosa and Okakura, who were responsible for what is generally regarded as the later efflorescence of modern Japanese painting.

This chapter takes stock of the preceding chapters with a view toward revisiting and revising certain faulty assumptions that have surrounded eccentric art in the Edo period. It revisits structures (ga and zoku) that have generated historiographical biases against the playful nature of late Edo urban culture, as well as reevaluates vestiges of modernization theory—specifically, the view that eccentric art drives historical change. It finds, first, that kijin not only opened up liberated spaces in which the amateur arts could function separately from officialdom, but that they expanded public faith in and tolerance for strangeness, which in turn acquired considerable cultural capital. Second, it shows that strangeness, which had long occupied a niche in premodern Japanese culture, rejected wanton wildness in favor of shrewd—not timid—experimentation positioned between the acceptable and unacceptable. That is, aesthetic eccentricity tended to be an inwardly directed interrogation of self rather than an externalized form of sociopolitical dissent. Implementation of a prudent “best practice,” then, fostered a discovery and celebration of strangeness that indeed exerted lasting impacts on Japanese culture. Finally, an examination of self-portraiture in the Edo period serves as a retrospective, a means of reviewing some of the artists and themes showcased in this study.

This chapter focuses on the proliferation of pariahs, outcasts, and others of their ilk, such as those known as hut dwellers and watchmen, who lived lives of comfort in Edo Japan and suggests that it was a sign of the decline of the age. It explains how these pariahs and outcasts contributed to the increased consumption of rice, grains, and other products, and how extravagance and greed drove people to destroy mountains and forests. It also comments on the opinion that Japan was (and still is) a Divine Land and discusses how the military Way was undermined by Buddhism and the Way of yin and yang. Finally, it considers the Divine Lord's restoration of the military Way, the onset of decline in Japanese society during the Edo period as reflected by the ascendancy of evil ways, greed and occultism, war, competing interests in a world of fixed limits, and a loss of control. The chapter argues for a change in the Way of man: to act before Heaven does and in place of Heaven.

This chapter examines how strangeness was received in the early Edo period and how three key tropes of eccentric behavior—reclusion (insei; inton), madness (kyō), and uselessness (muyō)—were successfully inserted into this culture of intolerance and came to infiltrate the arts. It shows that as urbanization, economic prosperity, and cultural liberalism generated an explosion of popular cultural forms, a nascent bunjin ethos struggled to preserve amateurism and artistic purity. Detached, aesthetically minded individuals like Jōzan, Bashō, and Hyōta negotiated a culture of intolerance by turning to fūryū, kyō, and muyō as tried-and-true aesthetic principles. In this sense, aesthetic eccentricity was a consciously adopted taste, a set of conventions that established strangeness as a recognized style. This convergence of developments helped permanently to anchor individuality, originality, and emotion as aesthetic ideals within Edo culture.