Organizers: David L. Howell, Princeton University; James Ketelaar, Stanford University
Chair: Ronald P. Toby, University of Illinois
Discussants: H. D. Harootunian, University of Chicago; Marius B. Jansen, Princeton
University
Western studies of Japan during the early modern period (conventionally equated with the Tokugawa era, 1603-1868) have developed impressively in recent years. Yet the field suffers from the widespread perception that it is bifurcated into bitterly opposed camps of theoreticians who eschew the archives and traditionalists averse to all theory. This back to back panel is intended to overcome this impression by exploring new directions in the field with papers that cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries. The papers will problematize the notion of the "early modern" as a mere prelude to the "modern" period, and question the concept of "Japan" as a self evident geographical, political, social, and discursive entity. Further, by demonstrating the interrelated nature of common disciplinary strategies such as those found in history, literature, geography, religion, art, and anthropology, the panelists hope to constitute a sense of the interconnectedness among studies of Tokugawa Japan that has been lost as the numbers of specialists and methodologies have multiplied. At the same time, however, the very diversity of outlooks and methodologies represented on the panel will highlight the rich multiplicity of possibilities in the field.
Each of the papers addresses the two questions posed in the panel's title. Karen Wigen and Ikumi Kaminishi use geography and art history, respectively, to challenge conventional understandings of the temporal boundaries of the early modern in Japan; David Howell, James Ketelaar, Hitomi Tonomura, and Paul Schalow examine features of Tokugawa Japan that set it apart from the medieval society that preceded it and the modern one that followed. Moreover, taken together the papers call for a rearticulation of the universality of conceptions of gender, religion, nation, region, and modernity. Their point in using such concepts is not to test Japan against some ideal (i.e., Western) standard, or to sound warnings about the orientalizing hazards inherent in their use, but rather to present their early modern Japanese manifestations in all their complexity and peculiarity.
Karen Wigen, University of Wisconsin, Madison
In Western works on Japan, the label "early modern" is used as a synonym for the years of Tokugawa rule: years long symbolized in spatial terms by Japan's virtual isolation from the wider world. But for students of world history, the early modern rubric calls to mind a very different set of geographical images, dominated by global interaction. What marks off the early modern from the medieval age is precisely the penetration of regional economies over much of the globe, and their gradual incorporation into an expanding trade and communications network-one initiated, but not yet dominated, by Europeans.
What, then, does the "early modern" concept actually offer to would be comparative historians of Japan? To the extent that the Tokugawa managed to erect substantial barriers between themselves and the rest of an increasingly interactive world, what is gained by applying this label to Japanese history at all? Much, I would argue-particularly if we are willing to correct for the idiosyncrasies in our field's temporal application of the term. Whereas for historians of Japan the early modern period does not begin until the early seventeenth century, most European and world historians apply the term a full century earlier, often starting with 1492. The choice of this date underscores the significance of the new technologies that defined the age: improvements in ship design and navigation techniques, and above all a new mastery of winds and currents, that for the first time permitted the circumvention of Africa and the crossing of the Atlantic. To be sure (as Janet Abu Lughod has recently reminded us), widespread integration was not new; much of Eurasia and North Africa had been periodically linked before through a chain of trade diasporas and military empires. But the fifteenth century marked the start of a new kind and level of interaction, one based not on the transference of goods from one local circuit to the next but on direct trans oceanic contacts. If early modernity denotes a problematic of genuinely comparative interest to Japanese historians, it must, I believe, be one that takes as its premise the new problems-and opportunities-presented by this novel circumstance.
My project in this essay is accordingly to undertake a thought experiment of sorts: to see what might be gained by reconceiving Japanese early modernity in both temporal and spatial terms. Adopting as my time frame the period from 1500 to the late 1700s, and working with a specifically geographical definition of early modernity, I will attempt to sketch some of the ways in which the social transformations of Japan during this period both shaped and were shaped by the new global integration. From the supranational to the local level, the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw major reworkings of Japan's socio spatial structures. Without claiming to map out these complex transformations in any definitive or novel way, this paper will nonetheless attempt to suggest new ways to think about them as responses to the global condition of early modernity.
David L. Howell, Princeton University
In this paper I will examine what might be termed the prehistory of Japanese nationalism. My concern here is not so much with nationalism in modern Japan, but rather with the preconditions for its emergence, particularly the delineation of Japanese ethnicity under the Tokugawa state. Only by studying the political and economic role of ethnicity in Tokugawa Japan can we understand how ethnic and cultural homogeneity came to be the defining characteristic of the modern Japanese polity and, when harnessed to the emperor system ideology, the driving force behind Japanese nationalism. In short, I will look at state and ethnicity without nationalism to see how the development of politically significant ethnicity in the early modern period fostered the rise of ethnically based nationalism in contemporary Japan.
Although its history since 1853 has been defined by its relations with the West, Japan-unlike most contemporary nation states-neither emerged out of the old universalist empires of Europe nor was it created directly or indirectly by Europeans as a result of war, empire, or colonization. With the exception of groups like the Ainu and Ryukyuans (Okinawans), the Japanese people already knew that they were "Japanese" when the country reopened itself to international commerce and diplomacy in the 1850s. Given Japan's present and supposed past homogeneity, this may seem an unremarkable statement, but it would not always have been true. As I shall demonstrate, an important part of the process of state formation in early modern Japan was the delineation of "Japan" and the definition of the "Japanese." In both instances the terms had meanings very different from their medieval and modern senses.
The status (mibun) system that ordered early modern society was the link between state and ethnicity. I will argue that a by product of the creation of a Japan centered world order during the Tokugawa period-in which peoples on the physical peripheries of the bakuhan state were understood in terms of bifurcated realms of "civilization" (ka) and "barbarism" (i)-was the incorporation of ethnicity into the status system. The Tokugawa state in effect appropriated Japanese ethnic identity, with the result that the political boundaries of the Tokugawa state coincided with the ethnic boundaries of Japan.
James E. Ketelaar, Stanford University
Almost thirty years have passed since Robert Bellah published his classic study, Tokugawa Religion. While this work was without question integral to the advancement of modernization theory and the interpretation of culture, values, and ethics in pre modern societies, time has shown it to be a limited and flawed "classic." Indeed, one might even say that Bellah's Tokugawa Religion tells us much more about 1950s American conceptions of social order and ideas of the "good society" than it does of the religious world of Tokugawa Japan. Bellah himself notes something of the work's limitations in his frank assessment of the book found in his introduction to the 1985 edition. This edition was also, appropriately, newly subtitled "The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan."
Perhaps it goes without saying that in the decades since the publication of Bellah's study, our collective understanding of religion in the Tokugawa period has deepened and broadened significantly. The study of this field is, however, still limited by several problems that appear with such regularity that they have taken on normative status. Here let me mention but three concerns that will inform my work: the practice of reductionism, charges of decadence, and claims of centrism.
First, even some of the more iconoclastic studies of the Tokugawa period cannot resist using the Tokugawa to explain either why Japan entered into World War II or why and how the rapid post war modernization was possible. In Bellah's words, these studies use religion, culture, and the like as a means to explain the "cultural roots of modern Japan." To explain contemporary issues by drawing upon the past is certainly both effective and important. My concern here is that too often the only use of pre modern studies is to demonstrate aspects of the modern. The result for cultural and religious studies is frequently a narrowness of interpretation or a reductionism that cannot allow for the complexity and diversity of Tokugawa period world views.
A second concern of mine is the widely held conception that Buddhism during the Tokugawa period was a moribund and decadent institution made up of uninspired, greedy, and lascivious priests and as such warrants neither extended nor serious consideration. This decadent (daraku) theory of Tokugawa Buddhism enjoys currency in spite of many contrary examples. Moreover, even in cases where such "decadent" practices can by demonstrated, this should not remove the practitioners nor the institution from the realm of the historically important and the critically significant. A comprehensive rethinking of Tokugawa Buddhism is long overdue.
Related to this second concern is my third point, which addresses the tendency to read "the Tokugawa" as a centralized nation state with a ruling ideological system and unified national character. As has been amply demonstrated over the last decade, the Tokugawa political, intellectual, legal, economic, and commercial worlds were exceedingly complicated, enjoying a diversity of regional differences and numerous contestations found between varieties of thought over several centuries. To assume a static or constant religious world view during this clearly dynamic if not volatile period simply does not make sense. Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism, as well as Taoism and the wide array of popular practices, were certainly not monolithic traditions lacking regional variation or theological and sectarian differences. Claims of ideological hegemony by any one of these traditions (or combinations thereof) are, I feel, exaggerations with decided historical interest but lacking in political actuality.
In this paper I hope to present not so much a comprehensive description of the various religious components of the Tokugawa period, but rather provide a series of interpretive possibilities useful to a rethinking of the period and its thought. With an eye to the importance of an integrated use of historical, religious, cultural, and political materials I hope to both build upon and depart from the received wisdom regarding the religion of "early modern Japan."
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