This is the first global history of dress regulation and its place in broader debates around how human life and societies should be visualised and materialised. Sumptuary laws were a tool on the part of states to regulate not only manufacturing systems and moral economies via the medium of expenditure and consumption of clothing but also banquets, festivities and funerals. Leading scholars on Asian, Latin American, Ottoman and European history shed new light on how and why items of dress became key aspirational goods across society, how they were lobbied for and marketed, and whether or not sumptuary laws were implemented by cities, states and empires to restrict or channel trade and consumption. Their findings reveal the significance of sumptuary laws in medieval and early modern societies as a site of contestation between individuals and states and how dress as an expression of identity developed as a modern 'human right'.
In this book social scientists scrutinize the middle decades of the nineteenth century in Japan. That scrutiny is important and overdue, for the period from the 1850s to the 1880s has usually been treated in terms of politics and foreign relations. Yet those decades were also of pivotal importance in Japan's institutional modernization. As the Japanese entered the world order, they experienced a massive introduction of Western-style organizations. Sweeping reforms, without the class violence or the Utopian appeal of revolution, created the foundation for a modern society. The Meiji Restoration introduced a political transformation, but these chapters address the more gradual social transition. Originally published in 1986. 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.
Doyen of demography studies in Japan at the University of Tokyo, this collection of Akira Hayami’s writings in English brings together for the first time an invaluable resource of comparative primary data on the demographic history of Japan. Containing twenty key essays, the volume is divided into five parts: Tokugawa Japan, Demography through Telescope, Demography through Microscope, Family and Household, Afterwards. It begins with Philip II of Spain and Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the sixteenth century and concludes with Koji Sugi and the emergence of modern population studies in the twentieth century.
A survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) that blends political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. It also introduces a fresh ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control.
Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.
Listen, Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan endeavors to elucidate the mechanisms by which a growing number of men and women of all social strata became involved in acquiring knowledge and skills during the Tokugawa period. It offers an overview of the communication media and tools that teachers, booksellers, and authors elaborated to make such knowledge more accessible to a large audience. Schools, public lectures, private academies or hand-copied or printed manuals devoted to a great variety of topics, from epistolary etiquette or personal ethics to calculation, divination or painting, are here invoked to illustrate the vitality of Tokugawa Japan’s ‘knowledge market’, and to show how popular learning relied on three types of activities: listening, copying and reading. With contributions by: W.J. Boot, Matthias Hayek, Annick Horiuchi, Michael Kinski, Koizumi Yoshinaga, Peter Kornicki, Machi Senjūrō, Christophe Marquet, Markus Rüttermann, Tsujimoto Masashi, and Wakao Masaki.
In The Politics of Dialogic Imagination, Katsuya Hirano seeks to understand why, with its seemingly unrivaled power, the Tokugawa shogunate of early modern Japan tried so hard to regulate the ostensibly unimportant popular culture of Edo (present-day Tokyo)—including fashion, leisure activities, prints, and theater. He does so by examining the works of writers and artists who depicted and celebrated the culture of play and pleasure associated with Edo’s street entertainers, vagrants, actors, and prostitutes, whom Tokugawa authorities condemned to be detrimental to public mores, social order, and political economy. Hirano uncovers a logic of politics within Edo’s cultural works that was extremely potent in exposing contradictions between the formal structure of the Tokugawa world and its rapidly changing realities. He goes on to look at the effects of this logic, examining policies enacted during the next era—the Meiji period—that mark a drastic reconfiguration of power and a new politics toward ordinary people under modernizing Japan. Deftly navigating Japan’s history and culture, The Politics of Dialogic Imaginationprovides a sophisticated account of a country in the process of radical transformation—and of the intensely creative culture that came out of it.
In this newly revised and updated 2nd edition of Voices of Early Modern Japan, Constantine Nomikos Vaporis offers an accessible collection of annotated historical documents of an extraordinary period in Japanese history, ranging from the unification of warring states under Tokugawa Ieyasu in the early seventeenth century to the overthrow of the shogunate just after the opening of Japan by the West in the mid- nineteenth century. Through close examination of primary sources from "The Great Peace," this fascinating textbook offers fresh insights into the Tokugawa era: its political institutions, rigid class hierarchy, artistic and material culture, religious life, and more, demonstrating what historians can uncover from the words of ordinary people. New features include: • An expanded section on religion, morality and ethics; • A new selection of maps and visual documents; • Sources from government documents and household records to diaries and personal correspondence, translated and examined in light of the latest scholarship; • Updated references for student projects and research assignments. The first edition of Voices of Early Modern Japan was the winner of the 2013 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize for Curricular Materials. This fully revised textbook will prove a comprehensive resource for teachers and students of East Asian Studies, history, culture, and anthropology.
This concise volume surveys three hundred years in the history of the lumber industry in early modern (Tokugawa) Japan. In earlier works, Conrad Totman examined environmental aspects of Japan's early modern forest history; here he guides readers through the inner workings of lumber provision for urban construction, providing a wealth of detail on commercial and technological systems of provision while focusing on the convoluted commercial arrangements that moved timber from forest to city despite exceptionally severe environmental and financial obstacles. Based on scrupulous scholarship in the vast Japanese secondary literature on forest history, The Lumber Industry in Early Modern Japan brings to light materials previously unavailable in English and synthesizes these within a thoughtful ecological framework. Its penetrating examination of the patterns of cooperation and conflict throughout the industry adds significantly to the scholarly corpus that challenges the stock image of Tokugawa rulers and merchants as social enemies. Instead it supports the view of those who have noted the interdependent character of political and economic elites and the long-term strengthening of rural sectors of society vis-a-vis urban sectors.