BiblioVault - Books about Tokugawa Japan

Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan

Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System

Nam-lin Hur

Harvard University Press, 2007

Buddhism was a fact of life and death during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868): every household was expected to be affiliated with a Buddhist temple, and every citizen had to be given a Buddhist funeral. The enduring relationship between temples and their affiliated households gave rise to the danka system of funerary patronage.

This private custom became a public institution when the Tokugawa shogunate discovered an effective means by which to control the populace and prevent the spread of ideologies potentially dangerous to its power—especially Christianity. Despite its lack of legal status, the danka system was applied to the entire population without exception; it became for the government a potent tool of social order and for the Buddhist establishment a practical way to ensure its survival within the socioeconomic context of early modern Japan.

In this study, Nam-lin Hur follows the historical development of the danka system and details the intricate interplay of social forces, political concerns, and religious beliefs that drove this “economy of death” and buttressed the Tokugawa governing system. With meticulous research and careful analysis, Hur demonstrates how Buddhist death left its mark firmly upon the world of the Tokugawa Japanese.

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Defensive Positions

The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan

Noell Wilson

Harvard University Press

Defensive Positions focuses on the role of regional domains in early modern Japan’s coastal defense, shedding new light on this system’s development. This examination, in turn, has significant long-term political implications for the involvement of those domains in Tokugawa state formation. Noell Wilson argues that domainal autonomy in executing maritime defense slowly escalated over the course of the Tokugawa period to the point where the daimyo ultimately challenged Tokugawa authorities as the primary military interface with the outside world. By first exploring localized maritime defense at Nagasaki and then comparing its organization with those of the Yokohama and Hakodate harbors during the treaty port era, Wilson identifies new, core systemic sources for the collapse of the shogunate’s control of the monopoly on violence. Her insightful analysis reveals how the previously unexamined system of domain-managed coastal defense comprised a critical third element—in addition to trade and diplomacy—of Tokugawa external relations. Domainal control of coastal defense exacerbated the shogunate’s inability to respond to important military and political challenges as Japan transitioned from an early modern system of parcelized, local maritime defense to one of centralized, national security as embraced by world powers in the nineteenth century.

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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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Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan

The Sankin Kōtai System

Toshio G. Tsukahira

Harvard University Press

Making Time

Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan

Yulia Frumer

University of Chicago Press, 2017

What is time made of? We might balk at such a question, and reply that time is not made of anything—it is an abstract and universal phenomenon. In Making Time, Yulia Frumer upends this assumption, using changes in the conceptualization of time in Japan to show that humans perceive time as constructed and concrete.

In the mid-sixteenth century, when the first mechanical clocks arrived in Japan from Europe, the Japanese found them interesting but useless, because they failed to display time in units that changed their length with the seasons, as was customary in Japan at the time. In 1873, however, the Japanese government adopted the Western equal-hour system as well as Western clocks. Given that Japan carried out this reform during a period of rapid industrial development, it would be easy to assume that time consciousness is inherent to the equal-hour system and a modern lifestyle, but Making Time suggests that punctuality and time-consciousness are equally possible in a society regulated by a variable-hour system, arguing that this reform occurred because the equal-hour system better reflected a new conception of time — as abstract and universal—which had been developed in Japan by a narrow circle of astronomers, who began seeing time differently as a result of their measurement and calculation practices. Over the course of a few short decades this new way of conceptualizing time spread, gradually becoming the only recognized way of treating time.

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Northern Frontiers of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan

A Comparative Study of Frontier Policy

Richard Louis Edmonds

University of Chicago Press, 1985