BiblioVault - Books about 1600-1868

A Christian Samurai

William J. Farge

Catholic University of America Press, 2016

Through a close critical analysis of Baba Bunko's often humorous, but always biting, satirical essays a new picture of the hidden world of Christianity in eighteenth-century Japan emerges - a picture that contradicts the generally-held belief among Western historians that the Catholic mission in Japan ended in failure. A Christian Samurai will surprise many readers when they discover that Christian moral teachings not only survived the long period of persecution but influenced Japanese society throughout the Tokugawa period.

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Education in Tokugawa Japan

R. P. Dore

University of Michigan Press, 1992

“This careful and important study of the development of the varied types of education in the last two and a half centuries of feudalism in Japan under the Tokugawa dictatorship (1600–1868) is more than a history of premodern education. It is also an intellectual history and a history of the educational philosophy of the writers of that period. Basing his work on extensive Japanese primary sources, the author has selected and organized his material well; thus his study fills an important gap in our knowledge of Japanese history.” —Hugh Borton, Haverford College, American Historical Review 71, no. 4 (July 1966): 1410–11.

“There is no other book like it. . . . Readers already familiar with earlier books by Ronald Dore will rightly have guessed that we have been given yet another tour de force. Utilizing a remarkable amount of primary source material and discussing its implications with his customary grace and clarity, the author deals with the educational institutions for both samurai and commoner and the curricula of the bewildering variety of schools of Japan from the beginning of the 17th century through the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Yet this is in no sense a book of restricted interest, for it has as much to say to the student of sociocultural change as to the Japan specialist.” —R. J. Smith, Cornell University, American Anthropologist 68, no. 4 (August 1966), 1086–87.

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Musui's Story

The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai

Kokichi Katsu; Translated by Teruko Craig

University of Arizona Press, 1988

A series of picaresque adventures set against the backdrop of a Japan still closed off from the rest of the world, Musui's Story recounts the escapades of samurai Katsu Kokichi. As it depicts Katsu stealing, brawling, indulging in the pleasure quarters, and getting the better of authorities, it also provides a refreshing perspective on Japanese society, customs, economy, and human relationships.

From childhood, Katsu was given to mischief. He ran away from home, once at thirteen, making his way as a beggar on the great trunk road between Edo and Kyoto, and again at twenty, posing as the emissary of a feudal lord. He eventually married and had children but never obtained official preferment and was forced to supplement a meager stipend by dealing in swords, selling protection to shopkeepers, and generally using his muscle and wits.

Katsu's descriptions of loyalty and kindness, greed and deception, vanity and superstition offer an intimate view of daily life in nineteenth-century Japan unavailable in standard history books. Musui's Story will delight not only students of Japan's past but also general readers who will be entranced by Katsu's candor and boundless zest for life.

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The Politics of Dialogic Imagination

Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan

Katsuya Hirano

University of Chicago Press, 2013

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.

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Things Seen and Unseen

Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism

Harry D. Harootunian

University of Chicago Press, 1988

This long-awaited work explores the place of kokugaku (rendered here as "nativism") during Japan's Tokugawa period. Kokugaku, the sense of a distinct and sacred Japanese identity, appeared in the eighteenth century in reaction to the pervasive influence of Chinese culture on Japan. Against this influence, nativists sought a Japanese sense of difference grounded in folk tradition, agricultural values, and ancient Japanese religion. H. D. Harootunian treats nativism as a discourse and shows how it functioned ideologically in Tokugawa Japan.

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