Organizer: Luke S. Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chair: Ronald Toby, University of Illinois
Discussant: Karen Wigen, Duke University
No one commonly denied that the Tokugawa shogun had the right to assert authority throughout Japan, yet many groups asserted traditional rights and privileges to limit the actually expressed range of Tokugawa power. This panel explores perceptions of political spaces in early modern Japan. The papers raise debate concerning the notion of Japan and its boundaries, and question assumptions about the nature of governance within its boundaries. Toby’s paper analyses Tokugawa authority to map and define a Japanese space, yet territorial boundaries remain oddly ambiguous. Howell’s paper focuses on authority as a non-territorial matter of controlling status groups through relationships of duty and obligation. Ravina’s paper argues that domainal samurai loyalty to the lord did not necessarily mean obedience, and that samurai identity contained notions of traditional privileges which transformed into political rights in the modern period. Roberts argues that we should not highlight "Japan" more than contemporaries did, and that we should utilize their own rhetoric to analyze their politics.
How does the political space of "Japan" relate to the political space of a household, a domainal country, a village, or a corporate status group such as the outcastes? Does what we say about one group say anything about how "Japan" was ruled or recognized? These papers are not in agreement on these issues and promise to create lively debate concerning the nature of Edo period politics. Our discussant, Karen Wigen, a geographer, should provide keen commentary on our notions of territorially and non-territorially defined polity.
David L. Howell, Princeton University
This paper has two goals: first, to offer a defense of the admittedly unfashionable notion that the early modern Japanese state was a "feudal" regime by virtue of the structure of its political economy, and second, to illustrate this assertion with an examination of the relationship between the status system (mibunsei) and economic change in the hinterland of Edo during the first half of the nineteenth century.
I shall argue that the status system provided the institutional framework for Japanese feudalism in the early modern period. Status groups—most notably the samurai, commoners and outcastes—fulfilled feudal obligations (yaku) to the bakufu and its domainal proxies in exchange for a measure of internal autonomy. Status-based obligations included military and administrative service for samurai, the payment of land taxes and the provision of other goods and services for commoners, and the performance of police functions for outcastes.
The site of my empirical examination of the operation of the status system will be the eastern Kanto plain (modern Chiba, Saitama, and Ibaragi prefectures) during the period between the Tenpo famine of the 1830s and the collapse of the Tokugawa regime in the 1860s. This area is ideally suited to my study because, first, it was divided into a number of administrative units, including bakufu territories and a variety of domains both large and small; second, it experienced both significant economic growth and widespread social disorder during the early nineteenth century, and finally, the activities of its outcaste community are relatively well-documented.
Luke Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara
There are ideological and institutional pressures making "Japan" an incessantly recurring frame of reference for our interpretations of the early modern past (Hobsbawn, Anderson, Duara). Yet the box of a unitary Japan is not the proper category for understanding the vast majority of political consciousness, motivation and behavior in this time.
The political language of the day suggests a new method of inquiry. Although Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa it was not politically unitary. The rhetoric of each corporate group (households, domainal countries, villages, status groups etc.) must be treated separately. Furthermore, each corporate group related to its higher authority according to a rhetoric quite different from its internal rhetoric. The widely practiced distinction between omote (interface) and uchi (internal) made the borders of a corporate group opaque to the gaze of higher authorities, who demanded only that internal peace be preserved and prescribed duties be fulfilled. Many large domains developed a rhetoric of nationalism (kokka, kokusei, kokueki, etc.) for internal consumption, but were merely households (ie) and territories (ryobun) when interfacing with shogunal authority. Villages had tax documents to satisfy the rulers and different documents to guide the internal distribution of taxes.
There is a relationship between this kind of corporate politics and a common acceptance of a dual structure of knowledge and experience, an interfacing truth (tatemae) and an internal truth (naijitsu), which I see expressed widely in Edo period documents. The Meiji state destroyed opaque political borders within the territory of Japan, making it a unitary national community.
Mark Ravina, Emory University
The Freedom and Popular Rights Movement (Jiyû minken undo) of the 1870s and 1880s has commonly been treated as a result of Western influences. In this paper I would like to argue that key ideas of the movement were rooted in Edo period thought.
In the Tokugawa era the notion of absolute loyalty dominated formal discourse on samurai conduct: early modern samurai cultivated an image of supreme and selfless loyalty. The logical counterpart to absolute samurai loyalty was absolute daimyo power. Yet, as Kasaya Kazuhiko has observed, there were strikingly few dictatorial daimyo in the early modern era. In practice, samurai exerted considerable control over their lord’s behavior and retained the power to oppose and depose their daimyo.
Samurai resistance was supported by two main ideas. First, Edo period retainers drew on the classical Chinese concept that a loyal retainer must criticize his lord’s actions when they are immoral or run contrary to the lord’s best interests. As in ancient Chinese tradition, such formal remonstrations were risky: retainers who openly challenged their lord often committed seppuku as part of the process. Second, Tokugawa retainers drew on a notion of samurai rights. When daimyo infringed on retainer power, retainers fought back in the name of tradition, meaning traditional rights and privileges. In modified form, these two notions formed a cornerstone of Jiyu minken thought.
Drawing on early modern precedents, samurai opposed Meiji foreign policy in the name of the state’s best interests and of the nation’s honor. Their demand for consultative assemblies was rooted in the Edo period tradition of samurai privilege, not merely Western political thought.