Early Modern Japan

Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Conrad Totman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520203569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
This thoughtfully organized survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) is a remarkable blend of political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. The only truly comprehensive study in English of the Tokugawa period, it also introduces a new ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control.

Early Modern Japan

Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Conrad Totman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520203569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Get Book

Book Description
This thoughtfully organized survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) is a remarkable blend of political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. The only truly comprehensive study in English of the Tokugawa period, it also introduces a new ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control.

A Concise History of Japan

A Concise History of Japan PDF Author: Brett L. Walker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239691
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. In this engaging new history, Brett L. Walker tackles key themes regarding Japan's relationships with its minorities, state and economic development, and the uses of science and medicine. The book begins by tracing the country's early history through archaeological remains, before proceeding to explore life in the imperial court, the rise of the samurai, civil conflict, encounters with Europe, and the advent of modernity and empire. Integrating the pageantry of a unique nation's history with today's environmental concerns, Walker's vibrant and accessible new narrative then follows Japan's ascension from the ashes of World War II into the thriving nation of today. It is a history for our times, posing important questions regarding how we should situate a nation's history in an age of environmental and climatological uncertainties.

Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan

Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Mark Ravina
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804763860
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Examining local politics in three Japanese domains (Yonezawa, Tokushima, and Hirosaki), this book shows how warlords (daimyo) and their samurai adapted the theory and practice of warrior rule to the peacetime challenges of demographic change and rapid economic growth in the mid-Tokugawa period. The author has a dual purpose. The first is to examine the impact of shogunate/domain relations on warlord legitimacy. Although the shogunate had supreme power in foreign and military affairs, it left much of civil law in the hands of warlords. In this civil realm, Japan resembled a federal union (or "compound state"), with the warlords as semi-independent sovereigns, rather than a unified kingdom with the shogunate as sovereign. The warlords were thus both vassals of the shogun and independent lords. In the process of his analysis, the author puts forward a new theory of warlord legitimacy in order to explain the persistence of their autonomy in civil affairs. The second purpose is to examine the quantitative dimension of warlord rule. Daimyo, the author argues, struggled against both economic and demographic pressures. It is in these struggles that domains manifested most clearly their autonomy, developing distinctive regional solutions to the problems of protoindustrialization and peasant depopulation. In formulating strategies to promote and control economic growth and to increase the peasant population, domains drew heavily on their claims to semisovereign authority and developed policies that anticipated practices of the Meiji state.

Blind in Early Modern Japan

Blind in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Wei Yu Wayne Tan
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472220438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment. The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability.

Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan

Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Richard Rubinger
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824863976
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The focus of Richard Rubinger’s study of Japanese literacy is the least-studied (yet overwhelming majority) of the premodern population: the rural farming class. In this book-length historical exploration of the topic, the first in any language, Rubinger dispels the misconception that there are few materials available for the study of popular literacy in Japan. He analyzes a rich variety of untapped sources from the sixteenth century onward, drawing for the first time on material that allows him to measure literacy: signatures on apostasy oaths, diaries, agricultural manuals, home encyclopedias, rural poetry-contest entries, village election ballots, literacy surveys, and family account books. The book begins by tracing the origins of popular literacy up to the Tokugawa period and goes on to discuss the pivotal roles of village headmen during the early sixteenth century, a group extraordinarily skilled in administrative literacy using the Sino-Japanese hybrid language favored by their warrior overlords. In time literacy began to spread beyond the leadership class to household heads, particularly those in towns and farming communities involved in commerce, and eventually to women, employees, and servants. Rubinger identifies substantial and enduring differences in the ability to read and write between commoners in the cities and those in the country until the eighteenth century, when the vigorous popular culture of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo (Tokyo) attracted village leaders and caused them to extend their capabilities. Later chapters focus on the nineteenth-century expansion of literacy to wider constituencies of farmers and townspeople. Using direct measures of literacy attainment such as village surveys, election ballots, diaries, and letters, Rubinger demonstrates the spread of basic reading and writing skills into virually every corner of Japanese society. The book ends by examining data on illiteracy generated from conscription examinations given by the Japanese army during the Meiji period, bringing the discussion into the twentieth century. Rubinger’s analysis of this information suggests that geographical factors and local traditions of learning and culture may have been more important than school attendance in explaining why illiteracy continued to persist in some areas.

Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan

Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan PDF Author: William E. Deal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195331265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
This book is an introduction the Japanese history, culture, and society from 1185 - the beginning of the Kamakura period - through the end of the Edo period in 1868.

Voices of Early Modern Japan

Voices of Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Constantine Nomikos Vaporis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000280950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
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.

Tour of Duty

Tour of Duty PDF Author: Constantine Nomikos Vaporis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824834704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title Alternate attendance (sankin kotai) was one of the central institutions of Edo-period (1603-1868) Japan and one of the most unusual examples of a system of enforced elite mobility in world history. It required the daimyo to divide their time between their domains and the city of Edo, where they waited upon the Tokugawa shogun. Based on a prodigious amount of research in both published and archival primary sources, Tour of Duty renders alternate attendance as a lived experience, for not only the daimyo but also the samurai retainers who accompanied them. Beyond exploring the nature of travel to and from the capital as well as the period of enforced bachelorhood there, Constantine Vaporis elucidates-for the first time-the significance of alternate attendance as an engine of cultural, intellectual, material, and technological exchange. Vaporis argues against the view that cultural change simply emanated from the center (Edo) and reveals more complex patterns of cultural circulation and production taking place between the domains and Edo and among distant parts of Japan. What is generally known as "Edo culture" in fact incorporated elements from the localities. In some cases, Edo acted as a nexus for exchange; at other times, culture traveled from one area to another without passing through the capital. As a result, even those who did not directly participate in alternate attendance experienced a world much larger than their own. Vaporis begins by detailing the nature of the trip to and from the capital for one particular large-scale domain, Tosa, and its men and goes on to analyze the political and cultural meanings of the processions of the daimyo and their extensive entourages up and down the highways. These parade-like movements were replete with symbolic import for the nature of early modern governance. Later chapters are concerned with the physical and social environment experienced by the daimyo's retainers in Edo; they also address the question of who went to Edo and why, the network of physical spaces in which the domainal samurai lived, the issue of staffing, political power, and the daily lives and consumption habits of retainers. Finally, Vaporis examines retainers as carriers of culture, both in a literal and a figurative sense. In doing so, he reveals the significance of travel for retainers and their identity as consumers and producers of culture, thus proposing a multivalent model of cultural change.

The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan

The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Federico Marcon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625190X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or "honzogaku." Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by "honzogaku" practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the study of nature. In this pioneering social history of knowledge in Japan, Marcon shows how scholars developed a sophisticated discipline that was analogous to European natural history but formed independently. He also argues that when contacts with Western scholars, traders, and diplomats intensified in the nineteenth century, the previously dominant paradigm of "honzogaku "slowly succumbed to modern Western natural science not by suppression and substitution, as was previously thought, but by creative adaptation and transformation.

Voices of Early Modern Japan

Voices of Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Constantine Nomikos Vaporis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000280918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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.