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This pioneering study looks beneath the surface structures of the Japanese state to reveal the mechanism by which markers of polity, status, and civilization came together over the divide of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The book illustrates how a short roster of malleable, explicitly superficial customs—hairstyle, clothing, and personal names—served to distinguish the “civilized” realm of the Japanese from the “barbarian” realm of the Ainu in the Tokugawa era. Within the core polity, moreover, these same customs distinguished members of different social status groups from one another, such as samurai warriors from commoners, and commoners from outcasts.

This book offers a cultural approach to understanding the politics of the Tokugawa period, at the same time deconstructing some of the assumptions of modern national historiographies. Deploying the political terms uchi (inside), omote (ritual interface), and naisho (informal negotiation)–all commonly used in the Tokugawa period—the book explores how daimyo and the Tokugawa government understood political relations and managed politics in terms of spatial autonomy, ritual submission, and informal negotiation. It suggests as well that a layered hierarchy of omote and uchi relations strongly influenced politics down to the village and household level, a method that clarifies many seeming anomalies in the Tokugawa order. The book analyzes how the identities of daimyo and domains differed according to whether they were facing the Tokugawa or speaking to members of the domain and daimyo household. It further investigates the common occurrence of daimyo who remained formally alive to the government months or even years after they had died in order that inheritance issues could be managed peacefully within their households. The operation of the court system in boundary disputes is analyzed as are the “illegal” enshrinements of daimyo inside domains that were sometimes used to construct forms of domain-state Shinto.

Takuan Sōho's (1573–1645) two works on Zen and swordsmanship are among the most straightforward and lively presentations of Zen ever written and have enjoyed great popularity in both premodern and modern Japan. Although dealing ostensibly with the art of the sword, Record of Immovable Wisdom and On the Sword Taie are basic guides to Zen. Along with translations of Record of Immovable Wisdom andOn the Sword Taie, this book includes an introduction to Takuan's distinctive approach to Zen, drawing on excerpts from the master's other writings. It also offers an overview of the actual role of the sword in Takuan's day, a period that witnessed both a bloody age of civil warfare and Japan's final unification under the Tokugawa shoguns. Takuan was arguably the most famous Zen priest of his time, and as a pivotal figure, bridging the Zen of the late medieval and early modern periods, his story offers a rare picture of Japanese Zen in transition. For modern readers, whether practitioners of Zen or the martial arts, Takuan's emphasis on freedom of mind as the crux of his teaching resonates as powerfully as it did with the samurai and swordsmen of Tokugawa Japan.

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is the story of a rural Mito woman – a political activist, oracle, poet, and teacher – whose life coincided with the late-Tokugawa crisis, the collapse of the shogunate, and the rise of the modern Meiji state. Tokiko’s political activism combines focus and visionary flights of the imagination, nuancing our understanding of political consciousness among the non-elites in nineteenth-century Japan by blurring the line between rational and irrational and between discourse and action. Her use of prognostication, her appeals to the cosmic forces, and her conversations with ghosts illuminate original paths to female participation in the political debate of the late Tokugawa on one side, and resourceful ways to preserve identity in the face of modernity, science, and the onset of historical amnesia on the other. Tokiko’s story places the ordinary individual within the frame of large-scale history, squaring well-known historical moments with the private microcosm of a self-described “nobody.” By putting an extra in the spotlight, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko offers a new script for the drama that unfolded on the stage of late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji history.

The Dutch East India Company was a hybrid organization combining the characteristics of both corporation and state that attempted to thrust itself aggressively into an Asian political order in which it possessed no obvious place and was transformed in the process. This book focuses on the company's clashes with Tokugawa, Japan, over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty. In each encounter the Dutch were forced to retreat, compelled to abandon their claims to sovereign powers, and to refashion themselves again and again—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial sovereignty to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. Within the confines of these conflicts, the terms of the relationship between the company and the shogun first took shape and were subsequently set into what would become their permanent form. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company in Japan as something more than just a commercial organization, it presents new perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting relationships to develop between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise.

Contrary to popular perceptions of premodern Japanese women as oppressed and subjugated by patriarchal norms, this book contends that when we read texts by and about women written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, we see a broad and complex picture of women’s lives, one in which women were far from passive or powerless. Instead, women were seen as active participants in society who could effect both positive and negative change. This book explores the tension inherent in women’s roles and lives through close readings of two types of primary sources: the first includes prescriptive literature and instructional manuals for women, as well as fiction, drama, woodblock prints and book illustrations, all of which were produced and circulated in considerable number throughout the Tokugawa period. The second body of sources the book examines consists of narratives of women’s lives, including diaries and memoirs written by women or their family members, primarily those of the samurai class, whose lives spanned the entirety of the Tokugawa period. These personal narratives reveal how individual women grappled throughout their lives with the challenges presented by social, political, and legal norms for gendered behavior, the very norms reinforced in the aforementioned prescriptive literature. The book combines elements of cultural and social history, balancing close readings of primary sources with investigation of trends, patterns, and data that reflect the growth and change in key social institutions such as marriage, reproduction, family structure, and life course. The result is a study that captures both the representation and the lived experience of women’s lives across the span of the Tokugawa period.

This book investigates the significance of material culture and sociability in Japan’s sixteenth century, focusing in particular on the career and afterlife of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. Using letters, diaries, and historical chronicles, as well as a wide range of visual and material evidence, the book links the extreme violence of this age of civil and international war to the increasing significance of samurai social rituals and cultural practices. It argues that warlords accrued power and reinforced hierarchy both in tea houses and on the battlefield, and that the resulting logic of “spectacular accumulation” had a profound effect on the creation and character of Japan’s early modern polity. Moving from the Ashikaga palaces of Kyoto to warlord collections of tea utensils, to the hostage exchanges of internecine military conflicts, to the tea gatherings and gift rituals of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, Spectacular Accumulation traces the growing power of Japan’s military rulers over famous artworks as well as objectified human bodies. This innovative and eloquent history of a transitional age in Japan’s premodern past reframes the relationship between art and politics, between culture and war, in a readable and thoroughly-researched narrative.

This book surveys Japanese historical development from the first evidence of human habitation in the archipelago to the consolidation of political power under the Tokugawa shogunate at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its focus is on developments that impacted all social classes rather than the privileged and powerful few. The book weaves together major economic and social themes. It focuses on continuity and change in social and economic structures and experiences, but it by no means ignores the political and cultural. Most chapters begin with an outline of political developments, and cultural phenomena—particularly religious beliefs—are also taken into account. In addition, it addresses the growing connectedness between residents of the archipelago and the rest of the world. The book describes how the early inhabitants of the islands moved from a forager mode of subsistence to a more predominantly agrarian base, supplemented by sophisticated industries and an advanced commercial economy. It reveals how the transition to farming took place over many centuries as people moved back and forth from settled agriculture to older forager-collector regimes in response to ecological, political, and personal factors. Economics influenced demographics, and, as the population expanded, the class structure became increasingly complex and occupational specialization and status divisions more intricate. Along with this came trends toward more tightly knit corporate organizations (village, city, market, family), and classes of servants, slaves, and outcasts formed.

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.

We tend to think of time as an abstract and universal phenomenon that is independent of human activity. Making Time challenges this view, claiming that humans construct their own time, including the very idea that time exists outside of the human realm. The book does so by documenting the emergence of conceptions of time in Japan. Before 1872, the Japanese used a variable hour time-measurement system in which hours changed their durations according to the seasons. In 1872, however, the Japanese government carried out a reform that adopted the Western-style 24 equal-hour system. Rather than seeing this reform as a response to the rapid industrial development and modernization of the Meiji period (1868-1912), Making Time proposes that the 1872 reform occurred because the equal-hour system better reflected a new conception of time — as abstract and universal—which had been developed earlier, during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). The book shows how the notion of time as universal and mathematical first emerged among a narrow circle of astronomers, for whom initially it was a kind of time that best suited their measurement and calculation practices. As this notion of time spread however, scholars —and future policy-makers—gradually stopped treating it as a time, suitable to a particular situation, and instead came to see it as the Time that would set the standard for all possible uses of time.

This book turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity. The author shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress and competitive struggle, to a celebration of Japan as a nation uniquely in harmony with nature. The so-called traditional “Japanese love of nature” masks modern state power. The book rejects the supposition that modernity is the ideological antithesis of nature, overcoming the determinism of the physical environment through technology and liberating denatured subjects from the chains of biology and tradition. In making “nature” available as a critical term for political analysis, this book yields new insights into prewar Japan's failure to achieve liberal democracy, as well as an alternative means of understanding modernity and the position of non-Western nations within it.