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Lust, Commerce, and Corruption
By 1816, Japan had recovered from the famines of the 1780s and moved beyond the political reforms of the 1790s. Despite persistent economic and social stresses, the country seemed headed for a new period of growth. The idea that the shogunate would not last forever was far from anyone's mind. Yet, in that year, an anonymous samurai produced a scathing critique of Edo society. Writing as Buyo Inshi, "a retired gentleman of Edo," he expressed in An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard a profound despair with the state of the realm. Seeing decay wherever he turned, Buyo feared the world would soon descend into war. In his anecdotes, Buyo shows a sometimes surprising familiarity with the shadie...
Women of the Mito Domain
Based on the recollection of the author's mother, other relatives, and family records, this is a vivid picture of the everyday life of a samurai household in the last years of the Tokugawa period.
Shogunal Politics
Arai Hakuseki, advisor to the sixth and seventh Tokugawa shogun, played an important role in Japanese politics between 1709 and 1716, during an era of large changes in the bakufu. He participated in major policy decisions on currency, foreign trade, and local administration, while simultaneously trying to enhance the shogun's authority both within the bakufu and as a national ruler. The following shogun retained Hakuseki's fiscal and trade policies, but promptly reversed those measures designed to make the shogun a king-like figure. Nakai examines these successes and failures against the background of the time, especially the bifurcated and ambiguous distribution of authority between the Tok...
The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion
The Japanese Middle Ages were a period when forms of secrecy dominated religious practice. This fascinating collection traces out the secret characteristics and practices in Japanese religion, as well as analyzing the decline of religious esotericism in Japan. The essays in this impressive work refer to Esoteric Buddhism as the core of Japan’s "culture of secrecy". Esoteric Buddhism developed in almost all Buddhist countries of Asia, but it was of particular importance in Japan where its impact went far beyond the borders of Buddhism, also affecting Shinto as well as non-religious forms of discourse. The contributors focus on the impact of Esoteric Buddhism on Japanese culture, and also include comparative chapters on India and China. Whilst concentrating on the Japanese medieval period, this book will give readers familiar with present day Japan, many explanations for the still visible remnants of Japan’s medieval culture of secrecy.
Peasant Uprisings in Japan
Combining translations of five peasant narratives with critical commentary on their provenance and implications for historical study, this book illuminates the life of the peasantry in Tokugawa Japan.
Kami Ways in Nationalist Territory
English summary: Shinto is often regarded as Japan's indigenous religion retaining archaic elements of animism and nature worship. At the same time, Shinto is sometimes seen as nothing else than a nationalistic political ideology. After all, in 1868 Japan turned into a modern nation state and worship at Shinto shrines became a national cult. This so-called State Shinto was eventually abolished under the Allied Occupation in 1946 but the historical links between Shinto and Japanese nationalism led to an ambiguous evaluation of Shinto not only at the popular level but also at the level of scientific research. The present volume comprises eight essays by leading experts of Japanese intellectual...
Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600-1950
This volume explores the process of carving out, in discourse and in practice, the boundaries delineating the state, the civil sphere, and the family in Japan from 1600 to 1950. One of the central themes is the demarcation of relations between the central political authorities and local communities.
Statecraft and Classical Learning
Statecraft and Classical Learning is devoted to the Rituals of Zhou, one of the ancient Chinese Classics. In addition to its canonical stature in classical learning, the massive text was of unique significance to the pre-modern statecraft of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam where it served as the classical paradigm for government structure and was often invoked in movements of political reform. The present volume, with contributions from twelve leading North American, European, and East Asian scholars, is the first in any language to illuminate the Rituals in both dimensions. It presents a multi-faceted and fascinating picture of the life of the text from its inception some two millennia ago to its modern political and scholarly discourse.
Tetsugaku Companion to Ogyu Sorai
This book contains short analyses (kaidai) of Ogyū Sorai’s (1666-1728) most important works, as well as a biography and a number of essays. The essays explore various aspects of his teachings, of the origins of his thought, and of the reception of his ideas in Japan, China, and Korea before and after "modernization" struck in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ogyū Sorai has come to be considered the pivotal thinker in the intellectual history of Early Modern Japan. More research has been done on Sorai than on any other Confucian thinker of this period. This book disentangles the modern reception from the way in which Sorai's ideas were understood and evaluated in Japan and China...
China in the Tokugawa World
This engaging book challenges the traditional notion that Japan was an isolated nation cut off from the outside world in the early modern era. This familiar story of seclusion, argues master historian Marius B. Jansen, results from viewing the period solely in terms of Japan's ties with the West, at the expense of its relationship with closer Asian neighbors. Taking as his focus the port of Nagasaki and its thriving trade with China in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Jansen not only corrects this misperception but offers an important analysis of the impact of the China trade on Japan's cultural, economic, and political life. Creating a vivid portrait of a city that lived on a...
