Organizer: Robert A. Eskildsen, Stanford University
Chair and Discussant: Naoki Sakai, Cornell University
This panel explores conceptions of worlds and boundaries in Tokugawa Japan. The papers problematize the Tokugawa status system-the division of the populace into discrete social, economic and political worlds-and discuss how ritual, ideology and geography influenced how these worlds were construed.
In Tokugawa Japan, traditions of ascriptive status delimited social and economic practices. The most familiar articulation of this status system, shinokosho, divided Japan into four classes: samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants. Although commonly treated as the basis of society, this system was prescriptive, not descriptive, and conformed only loosely to social, economic or legal practices. What has been treated as the collapse of the status system was, on the contrary, part of Tokugawa political practice: the reproduction of status boundaries, and their constant conflict with social and economic practices, helped define the Tokugawa order. The papers in the panel thus engage the Tokugawa status system as a process that enabled specific social and political practices, not as a fixed or descriptive hierarchy.
The papers also examine amorphous visions of life and community that transcended the political needs and ideologies embedded in the Tokugawa order. Because these visions implicitly subverted official status, they existed in an uneasy equilibrium, subject at any moment to possible suppression but not easily suppressible. Tokugawa political practice, which relied on status in order to control culture, enabled the production of culture that constantly slipped beyond control by imagining boundaries unthinkable within the constraints of the official status system.
Centering the Lord's House: Ritual and Samurai Identity
Luke S. Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara
This paper explores the role that ritual played in creating samurai identity and political consciousness in the realm of Tosa in the late eighteenth century. The primary source material will be the personal and office diaries of the Tosa samurai, Mori Yoshiki (1768-1807). Yoshiki became an able administrator who served in the highest posts open to a samurai of his status (umamawari): magistrate of the coastal ports, chief inspector, junior administrator and, finally, guardian of the lord heir designate.
The higher Yoshiki rose in the domain administration the more domain rituals he was required to participate in. These rituals included frequent worship at the graves of members of the lord's family and of previous lords, ritual audiences with the lord (as opposed to functional meetings), and numerous roles in functions in which the lord served the shogun. All samurai were economically dependent upon the lord's house, and participated in rituals designed to center the lord and his household (and create a hierarchy of nearness-to-the-lord) in their political consciousness. The round of such rituals became even more intense for samurai entrusted with governing the domain. In the conflict of interest between the domain and its people (okuni) and the lord's household (oie) the household often won out because of a house-centered political consciousness fostered through ritual. This contrasts with a tendency for a domain-centered political consciousness among merchants, who were distanced not only from lord-centered ritual but also from political control.
Reproducing Resistance: Peasant Identities and Peasant Protest
Mark Ravina, Emory University
The notion that peasants and merchants were separate social categories is one of the strangest yet most pervasive aspects of the Tokugawa thought. Both the shogunate and domains repeatedly enjoined peasants from engaging in activities other than farming and looked askance at market activities. This farmer-merchant distinction grew increasingly odd as commercialization spread market activities throughout the countryside.
It is tempting to see this distinction as an elite ideological abstraction. We must note, however, that the very farmers whose activities violated the norms of non-market conduct participated in the construction of the subsistence peasant identity. Protest petitions commonly invoked the notion of the onbyakusho, or "honorable peasant," who seeks only to subsist and pay taxes to his lord. What is problematic is that many of these protesters were farmers whose risky, market-oriented activities, were inconsistent with the worldview of humble peasants.
This use of the tropes of obedience and subsistence can be seen, in part, as a ploy to manipulate ruling-class ideology. But a closer examination of the texts of peasant protests reveals that peasants invoked these tropes not only when presenting their case to samurai authorities but when discussing resistance among themselves. Peasants actively produced contradictory self-images.
Drawing on the work of Giddens and Bourdieu, I seek to treat Tokugawa commoners as active participants in the production and reproduction of class distinction. As keen strategists, commoners sought to exploit the rules of political conduct. But commoners did not stand outside Tokugawa ideology. Rather, in manipulating Tokugawa ideology they both changed it and reproduced its contradictions.
Nihonbashi in the Eighteenth Century: A Micro-Cultural Geography
Marcia A. Yonemoto, University of Colorado, Boulder
To a great degree, Edo's social and political relationships were mapped onto its topographic features. The socio-political geography which divided the capital roughly into the bushi-dominated "high city" and the commoner-inhabited flatlands aligned itself with "natural" boundaries, and neatly conformed to the Tokugawa class hierarchy. This model and subsequent interpretations of it have profoundly shaped our understanding of power relations within the city.
Cultural and intellectual relationships in the urban context, however, do not conform as easily to such broad configurations. I will discuss the "micro-culture" of Nihonbashi during the late eighteenth century as an example of how intellectual networks and cultural activity created an entirely different set of boundaries and coordinates within the urban geography of Edo, in which the ties between the scholarship, the arts, and commerce cut across class, occupational, and residential lines.
This was in great part due to the presence of the publishing industry in the area, which served as a magnet for creative minds in Edo. Scholars, writers, and artists congregated, and sometimes resided there, often gathering in unofficial "salons" associated with particular residences or publishing houses. The relationship between cultural life and commercial setting, far from being an antagonistic one, was necessary and became incorporated into the themes of fiction, woodblock prints, and guidebooks of the time. Nihonbashi came to be envisioned as the "origin" of Japan, wellspring of the creative and material energies which drove the nation. A study of the cultural geography of Nihonbashi thus offers a chance to rethink notions of space, power, and the centrality of Edo in the mid-Tokugawa period.
The Outside World Inside Tokugawa Japan
Robert A. Eskildsen, Stanford University
Commercial publishing brought knowledge of the outside world to a literate audience in Tokugawa Japan, informing multiple understandings of the geographical world. Diplomatic, trade and other relations connected Japan to the outside world, influencing what information made it into Japan and how it was understood, and information garnered in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries exerted an especially strong influence that continued long after the enactment of Tokugawa prohibitions on foreign travel and Christianity. In many respects, Japanese views of the world as late as the middle of the nineteenth century belonged to the early seventeenth century, providing insights into how foreign information was managed, construed, manipulated and rendered into a backdrop against which Japanese society as a whole could be made more comprehensible.
Woodblock prints provided Japanese readers a variety of visual representations of the world and Japan's place in it. These views involved conceptions of world spaces that included Japan but were more extensive than it. Some stressed physical geography on the European or Chinese model, some linked physical geography to the spiritual world, while others explained the world in terms of the people-"real" and mythical-who inhabited it. This paper traces a number of images found in commercially published maps and diagrams of peoples of the world as a way of examining how the outside world was delineated, and how the boundaries between the outside world and Japan, once they had been brought into the realm of Japanese commercial publishing, provided meaningful ways of asserting Japan's place in the world.