Nishiyama Matsunosuke is one of the most important historians of Tokugawa (Edo) popular culture, yet until now his work has never been translated into a Western language. Edo Culture presents a selection of Nishiyama’s writings that serves not only to provide an excellent introduction to Tokugawa cultural history but also to fill many gaps in our knowledge of the daily life and diversions of the urban populace of the time. Many essays focus on the most important theme of Nishiyama’s work: the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries as a time of appropriation and development of Japan’s culture by its urban commoners. In the first of three main sections, Nishiyama outlines the history of Edo (Tokyo) during the city’s formative years, showing how it was shaped by the constant interaction between its warrior and commoner classes. Next, he discusses the spirit and aesthetic of the Edo native and traces the woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e to the communal activities of the city’s commoners. Section two focuses on the interaction of urban and rural culture during the nineteenth century and on the unprecedented cultural diffusion that occurred with the help of itinerant performers, pilgrims, and touring actors. Among the essays is a delightful and detailed discourse on Tokugawa cuisine. The third section is dedicated to music and theatre, beginning with a study of no, which was patronized mainly by the aristocracy but surprisingly by commoners as well. In separate chapters, Nishiyama analyzes the relation of social classes to musical genres and the aesthetics of kabuki. The final chapter focuses on vaudeville houses supported by the urban masses.

Edo Culture

This volume presents a series of five portraits of Edo, the central region of urban space today known as Tokyo, from the great fire of 1657 to the devastating earthquake of 1855. This book endeavors to allow Edo, or at least some of the voices that constituted Edo, to do most of the speaking. These voices become audible in the work of five Japanese eye-witness observers, who notated what they saw, heard, felt, tasted, experienced, and remembered. “An Eastern Stirrup,” presents a vivid portrait of the great conflagration of 1657 that nearly wiped out the city. “Tales of Long Long Ago,” details seventeenth-century warrior-class ways as depicted by a particularly conservative samurai. “The River of Time,” describes the city and its flourishing cultural and economic development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “The Spider’s Reel” looks back at both the attainments and calamities of Edo in the 1780s. Finally, “Disaster Days,” offers a meticulous account of Edo life among the ruins of the catastrophic 1855 tremor. Read in sequence, these five pieces offer a unique “insider’s perspective” on the city of Edo and early modern Japan.

Portraits of Edo and Early Modern Japan

Largely ignored hitherto by Western scholars, Plutschow’s Edo Period Travel provides the first in-depth study of the subject which is centred on fifteen of the period’s most notable travellers. This important research on how the Japanese discovered their own country and cultural identity has considerable interdisciplinary appeal.

A Reader in Edo Period Travel

Intellectual life in Edo-period Japan was sometimes harmoniously productive, sometimes destructively vicious, but never stagnant. This volume, compiled in honour of Prof. W.J. Boot, offers eleven essays that explore the intellectual scene of Edo-period Japan from a variety of perspectives.

Uncharted Waters: Intellectual Life in the Edo Period

This survey examines the art and artists of the Edo period, one of the great epochs in Japanese art. The author focuses on the urban aspects of Edo art, including discussions of many of Japan's most popular artists - Korin, Utamaro and Hiroshige, among others.

Art of Edo Japan

Offers a comparative study of representations of the Tôkaidô road, the most important route of Japan during the Edo (1600-1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) eras.

The Tōkaidō Road

Everyday Life in Traditional Japan paints a vivid portrait of Tokugawa Japan, a time when contact with the outside world was deliberately avoided and the daily life of the different classes consolidated the traditions that shaped modern Japan. With detailed descriptions and over 100 illustrations, authentic samurai, farmers, craftsmen, merchants, courtiers, priests, entertainers and outcasts come to life in this magnificently illustrated portrait of a colorful society. Most works of Japanese history fail to provide enough details about the lives of the people who lived during the time. The level of detail in Everyday Life in Traditional Japan allows for a more complete picture of the history of Japan. In fascinating detail, Charles J. Dunn, describes how each class lived: their food, clothing, and houses; their their beliefs and their fears. At the same time he takes account of certain important groups that fell outside the formal class structure, such as the courtiers in the emperor's palace at Kyoto, the Shinto and Buddhist priests, and the other extreme, the actors and the outcasts. he concludes with a lively account of everyday life in the capital city of Edo, the present–day Tokyo.

Everyday Life in Traditional Japan

The Edo period saw the growth of an urban culture of extraordinary richness, sophistication and cultural diversity, and an unprecendented flowering of the arts, in painting, woodblock prints, ceramics, laquer and textiles. This text offers an overview of the arts of the Edo period as they developed in Kyoto, Edo, Osaka and Nagasaki, illustrated with the work of artists such as Korin, Utamaro and Hokusai, as well as with lesser-known artists of the time.

Japanese Art of the Edo Period

This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes—including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias—to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.

Mapping Early Modern Japan

This book demonstrates that during Japan’s early modern Edo period (1603–1868) an ethical code existed among the merchant class comparable to that of the well-known Bushido. There is compelling evidence that contemporary merchants, who were widely and openly despised as immoral by the samurai, in fact acted in highly ethical ways in accordance with a well-articulated moral code. Japanese society was strictly stratified into four distinct and formally recognized classes: warrior, farmer, craftsman and merchant. From the warriors’ perspective, the merchants, at the base of the social order, had no virtue, and existed only to skim profits as middlemen between producers and consumers. But were these accusations correct? Were the merchants really unethical beings who engaged in unfair business practices? There is ample evidence that negates the ubiquitous slanders of the warrior class and suggests that merchants – no less than the warriors – possessed and acted in accordance with a well-developed ethical code, a spirit that may be called shonindo or “The Way of the Merchant.” This book examines whether a comparison of shonindo, depicting the ethical point of view of the merchant class, and Bushido, embodying that of the warrior class, reveals that shonindo may have in fact surpassed Bushido in some aspects. Comparing contemporarily published historical documents concerning both shonindo and Bushido, as well as Inazo Nitobe’s classic work Bushido: The Soul of Japan, published in 1900, the author examines how Bushido surpassed shonindo in that warriors were willing to die for their strict ethical code. Shonindo, however, may have surpassed Bushido in that merchants were liberal, willing to expand and extend application of their ethical beliefs into all aspects of everyday life for the overall benefit of society. This ethical code is compared with that of the conservative Bushido, which demonstrably proved not up to the task for the modernization and improved well-being of Japan. Ichiro Horide is professor emeritus of Reitaku University. Edward Yagi (Reitaku University) and Stanley J. Ziobro II (Trident Technical College) collaborated in the translation of the original Japanese manuscript into English.

The Mercantile Ethical Tradition in Edo Period Japan

Potters and Patrons in Edo Period Japan: Takatori Ware and the Kuroda Domain traces the development of one of Japan's best-documented ceramic types, from its beginnings around 1600 until the abolition of the domain system in 1871. Using historical records, archaeological material from early kilns and consumer sites, and the results of comparative chemical analysis, this study explores the operation of Takatori as the official ceramic workshop of the Kuroda, lords of one of the largest domains in Japan. Spanning cultural, aesthetic, economic and practical aspects, this book presents Takatori ware as an ideal archetype with which to compare developments in elite ceramics in other parts of Japan throughout the Edo period. In addition to its scholarly examination of the operation of a domain-sponsored ceramics workshop over more than 250 years, the book includes illustrations of examples from each of the seven Takatori workshop locations, including beautiful pieces that have never before appeared in print.

Potters and Patrons in Edo Period Japan

Tokugawa Japan

The Japanese peasant has been thought of as an obedient and passive subject of the feudal ruling class. Yet Tokugawa villagers frequently engaged in unlawful and disruptive protests. Moreover, the frequency and intensity of the peasants' collective action increased markedly at the end of the Tokugawa period. Stephen Vlastos's examination of the changing patterns of peasant protest in the Fukushima area shows that peasant mobilization was restricted both ideologically and organizationally and that peasants did not become a prime moving force in the Meiji Restoration.

Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan

The good society for Japan may consist of emulating the Edo period. This was a creative, self-sufficient period in Japanese history and the population at that time was approximately 30 million. A reduction in population should alleviate environmental concerns and reduce the possible negative effects of climate change. Many traditional folk tales of Japan such as 'The Tongue-Cut Sparrow', 'The Farmer and The Badger', 'The Adventures of Kintaro, the Golden Boy', 'The Bamboo-Cutter and the Moon-Child', 'The Mirror of Matsuyama' and several others describe parents with one or no children. While some of these parents were disappointed with their fate, they all lived interesting lives that are still transmitted from generation to generation. One of the few mothers with many children was the evil Yuki-onna who remained beautiful in middle age because she was not human. Japan has a very high population density and fewer people would provide more space for gardens, wildlife and agriculture. Japan should increase the labor force participation of women, which would mean having a more flexible workplace but not exploitative labor practices. Child and elder care could be combined at special facilities since old people often love to tell stories. Older children could form apprenticeship relationships with these older adults and engage in hands-on activities that pass on cultural traditions or indigenous knowledge. Men should be encouraged to take parental leave and work shorter hours. Japan has already existing, but underused public buildings, museums and concert halls that could be used in the provision of this cultural training. There are many articles in the US and UK media that encourage higher fertility, more immigration, increased retirement age and reduced public pension benefits as a way to solve the increased demand for pension support. In reality these suggestions come from conservative policy makers who do not want to pay higher taxes and have kept much of their profits overseas to the detriment of their own fellow citizens. Japanese companies should be encouraged to work together to hire more workers who could buy their goods and to pay higher salaries. Japanese capitalism has a history of loyalty between the employee and employer that kept poverty levels low. Japanese culture also treats the elderly with respect. Japan should spend more money on education and pensions and less money on large-scale construction projects. Japan can save money by shortening the time frame before more alternative energy projects become viable.

The Edo Period and Japan's Fables Provide a Model for a Sustainable Japan

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

The Japanese Economy in the Tokugawa Era, 1600-1868

In Zen Buddhism, the concept of freedom is of profound importance. And yet, until now there has been no in-depth study of the manifestation of this liberated attitude in the lives and artwork of Edo period Zen monk-painters. This book explores the playfulness and free-spirited attitude reflected in the artwork of two prominent Japanese Zen monk-painters: Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768) and Sengai Gibon (1750-1837). The free attitude emanating from their paintings is one of the qualities which distinguish Edo period Zen paintings from those of earlier periods. These paintings are part of a Zen ink painting tradition that began following the importation of Zen Buddhism from China at the beginning of the Kamakura period (1185-1333). In this study, Aviman elaborates on the nature of this particular artistic expression and identifies its sources, focusing on the lives of the monk-painters and their artwork. The author applies a multifaceted approach, combining a holistic analysis of the paintings, i.e. as interrelated combination of text and image, with a contextualization of the works within the specific historical, art historical, cultural, social and political environments in which they were created.

Zen Paintings in Edo Japan (1600-1868)

Ukiyo-e are paintings and prints of 'the floating world' of Edo (Tokyo), which had transformed itself in just a century from a swampy village to a metropolis of about a million people. This book offers a glimpse of a vanished world that is fresh and visually rewarding to modern eyes.

Floating World

Originally published: London: British Museum Press, c2010.

Japanese Prints

This volume showcases the recently donated Japanese paintings in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, comprising works of 46 Japanese artists, including master painters Buson, Jakuchu, Sotatsu and Shohaku.

Painters of Edo Japan, 1615-1868

Cultural Identity in the Edo Period

Ukiyo-e Explained is the first integrated study to show how ukiyo-e is art but also social history, culture and craft. This study illuminates new pathways to a greater appreciation of ukiyo-e by addressing the environments and conditions under which the artists worked, together with the factors that determined or conditioned the peculiar stylistic character of ukiyo-e.

Ukiyo-e Explained

With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope. In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced "opening" in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan’s early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers. Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.

The Tokugawa World

Performing the Great Peace 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—Luke Roberts explores how daimyo and the Tokugawa government understood political relations and managed politics in terms of spatial autonomy, ritual submission, and informal negotiation. Roberts 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. He analyzes in one chapter 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: For example, a large domain might be identified as a“country” by insiders and as a “private territory” in external discourse. In another chapter he 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. Performing the Great Peace’s convincing analyses and insightful conceptual framework will benefit historians of not only the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, but Japan in general and others seeking innovative approaches to premodern history.

Performing the Great Peace

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A comprehensive study of changing political thought during the Tokugawa period, the book traces the philosophical roots of Japanese modernization. Professor Maruyama describes the role of Sorai Confucianism and Norinaga Shintoism in breaking the stagnant confines of Chu Hsi Confucianism, the underlying political philosophy of the Tokugawa feudal state. He shows how the new schools of thought created an intellectual climate in which the ideas and practices of modernization could thrive. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Studies in Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan

"Buddhism was a fact of life and death during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868): every household was expected to be affiliated with a Buddhist temple, and every citizen had to be given a Buddhist funeral. The enduring relationship between temples and their affiliated households gave rise to the danka system of funerary patronage.This private custom became a public institution when the Tokugawa shogunate discovered an effective means by which to control the populace and prevent the spread of ideologies potentially dangerous to its power—especially Christianity. Despite its lack of legal status, the danka system was applied to the entire population without exception; it became for the government a potent tool of social order and for the Buddhist establishment a practical way to ensure its survival within the socioeconomic context of early modern Japan.In this study, Nam-lin Hur follows the historical development of the danka system and details the intricate interplay of social forces, political concerns, and religious beliefs that drove this “economy of death” and buttressed the Tokugawa governing system. With meticulous research and careful analysis, Hur demonstrates how Buddhist death left its mark firmly upon the world of the Tokugawa Japanese."

Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan

The Dutch East India Company was a unique, hybrid organization acting as both company and state, aggressively intervening in Asian political matters in which it had no place. This study focuses on the company’s clashes with Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century, particularly in the areas of diplomacy, sovereignty, and violence. In each encounter, the Dutch were forced to abandon claims to sovereign powers and refashion themselves—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial rule to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company as more than a commercial enterprise, this text offers unprecedented perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting unions between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise and the surprisingly limited influence of Europeans operating in early-modern Asia.

The Company and the Shogun

The Dutch Director or "Opperhoofd" of Deshima was required to make an annual journey to the shogunâ€™s court in Edo (present-day Tokyo). Opperhoofd Jan Cock Blomhoff (1779-1853) made his first journey to Edo in 1818. In addition to the official diary he kept during this journey, Blomhoff also maintained correspondence with his wife Titia in Holland. This hitherto unpublished material is a major source of knowledge on Tokugawa Japan. It offers details about Blomhoff's travels and contains numerous references to the objects he acquired. Many of these pieces are reproduced in the book, along with other documents, such as maps. (See also the publication "Titia - The First Western Woman in Japan")

The Court Journey to the Shōgun of Japan

This book explains compellingly that, despite common belief, in the early modern period, the intra-East Asian commercial network still functioned sustainably, and within that network, the Sino-Japanese trade can be seen as the most significant part which not only connected the Chinese and Japanese domestic markets but also was linked to the global economy. It is commonly thought that East Asian countries like China and Japan maintained a stance of so-called national isolation during the period from the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that diplomatic relations between Qing China and Tokugawa Japan could have not been established for reasons such as guarantees of security; however, every year merchants in junks voyaged to Nagasaki and carried out transactions with Japanese merchants or business agents. How this kind of trade relation was maintained stably without any diplomatic guarantees and in which way the governments of the two sides edged into the trade and accommodated the trade conflicts and institutional frictions are essential but seldom-emphasized topics. This book aims to shed light on these issues and thereby examine the character of the unique trade order in early modern East Asia as well, by analyzing a large quantity of the seldom-used and unpublished Chinese and Japanese primary and secondary sources.

Trade Relations between Qing China and Tokugawa Japan

The classic study of seventeenth-century Japan.

Tokugawa Ideology

This book presents the world of Hirose Tansō, a late Tokugawa period (1603-1868) educator whose goal was to train men of talent in practical learning for the benefit of the country. Tansō founded a private academy called Kangien in Hita City of present-day Oita prefecture. Some 3,000 young men from 64 of the then total 68 provinces of Japan were educated at Kangien during Tansō's 50-year career as educator and administrator. Firm in his conviction that the problems he and others faced in contemporary society would be solved by setting right the moral priorities of the people, Tansō established an educational program at Kangien based on the Neo-Confucian philosophical construct of reverence for Heaven. Tansō's educational program taught students reverence for Heaven by engaging in moral self-cultivation in the practice of actions of day-to-day behavior. Students were required to adhere to stringent school regulations governing every aspect of daily life at the school and to engage in a systematic study of a Confucian educational curriculum with concomitant, rigorous testing exercises. Tansō believed that an educational program supported by the twin pillars of regulations and curriculum would, by its very nature, accomplish social reform. The microcosm of society Tansō created at Kangien provides a window through which the reader can glimpse the confluence of three important components of late Tokugawa society, institutional development; philosophical trends; and social structure. The values that Tansō stressed, study; hard work; frugality; and promotion based on merit, were, in many ways, responsible for the relative ease with which Japan emerged from hundreds of years of self-imposed isolation and became a powerful modern nation.

Tokugawa Confucian Education

Law and Justice in Tokugawa Japan

The Rise of the Merchant Class in Tokugawa, Japan, 1600-1868

The Edo Period, lasting from 1603 to 1868 in Japan, marked a transformative era characterized by political stability under the Tokugawa shogunate, which centralized power in Edo (modern-day Tokyo). This period witnessed significant social, cultural, and economic developments, as strict social hierarchies and isolationist policies shaped Japan's identity. While the samurai class held sway, urbanization and economic growth thrived, resulting in a flourishing merchant class and the emergence of Edo as a cultural hub. Cultural achievements like ukiyo-e art and kabuki theater are enduring legacies of this period. The Edo Period ended with the Meiji Restoration, which initiated Japan's rapid modernization and opened it to the world, leaving an indelible mark on the nation's history.

HistoryShelf

Edo Period

Visit Shop