Karl F Friday (ed) - Japan Emerging, Premodern History to 1850

Japan Emerging

Japan Emerging

Premodern History to 1850

EDITED BY

Karl F. Friday

IES Abroad Tokyo Center

A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Japan emerging : premodern history to 1850 / edited by Karl F. Friday.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8133-4483-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8133-4561-1 (e-book) 1. JapanHistoryTo 1868. 2. JapanHistoryTo 1868Historiography. 3. JapanCivilizationTo 1868. 4. JapanCivilizationTo 1868Historiography. I. Friday, Karl F.

DS850.J37 2012

952dc23

2011037797

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For G. Cameron (Cappy) Hurst, III
A pioneer in the field, and
Our mentor, colleague and friend

Contents

LANDMARKS, ERAS, AND
APPELLATION IN JAPANESE HISTORY

Gina L. Barnes

Karl F. Friday

Joan R. Piggott

Andrew Edmund Goble

Mary Elizabeth Berry

Timeline

C. Melvin Aikens

Mark Teeuwen

Gina L. Barnes

Bruce L. Batten

Douglas Fuqua

Timeline

Ross Bender

Mikael S. Adolphson

Mikael S. Adolphson

Robert Borgen and Joseph T. Sorensen

Charlotte von Verschuer

Ethan Segal

Karl F. Friday

Andrew Edmund Goble

Timeline

Ethan Segal

Andrew Edmund Goble

William M. Bodiford

David Eason

Thomas D. Conlan

Linda H. Chance

Hitomi Tonomura

Thomas Keirstead

Ethan Segal

Michael Laver

Timeline

Lee Butler

Philip Brown

Michael Laver

Denis Gainty

David L. Howell

Frank Chance

Barbara Ambros

Anne Walthall

Denis Gainty

Richard Rubinger

FIGURES

TABLE

Scholarship on traditional Japan has grown spectacularly over the past four decades in both sophistication and volume. Historians in Japan have continued to be prolific, while in the West an unprecedented number of researchers specializing in the premodern (preseventeenth century) and early modern (seventeenth to nineteenth century) periods have entered the field. The new scholarship is marked by a shift in methodology from dependence on literary and narrative sources to reliance on documents, archeology, artwork, and other physical evidence of the past; by a shift in focus from the political and cultural history of elites to a broader examination of social structures; and by a reexaminationand rejectiontenet-by-tenet of what was once the received wisdom. As a result, the picture of the Japanese past now taught by specialists differs radically from the one current in the 1960s and early 1970s, when most of the textbooks still currently in use were written.

For early generations of historians, the story of premodern Japan was a quaint, romantic, but mostly inconsequential prelude to the appearanceas the result of thoroughgoing national reinvention in the Western imageof the twentieth-century military and economic superpower that more appropriately commanded scholarly attention. And in this version, the landscape of Japans past was littered with failed regimes and radical breaks with what had gone before.

An emergent tribal confederation was transformedvery nearly at a stroke, in the wake of a spectacular coup dtat in 645into a centralized imperial regime slavishly copied and shaped by reformers in awe of the splendor of Tang China. But this overly ambitious attempt to force Japanese square pegs into Chinese round holes was doomed from the start. Within decades of their inception, the organs and procedures of the system were abandoned as the ruling class became preoccupied with cultural affairs and divorced itself from concerns of governance, particularly outside the capital city. The imperial state was soon naught but a hollow shell: the effete, idyllic court aristocracy lost control over the political and economic life of the nation, while a stalwart and practical warrior class arose and took over the countryside.

In the mid-twelfth century (to continue this scenario), a series of events in the capital at last awakened provincial warriors to the fact that they, not the court nobility, had become the real figures of power in Japan. This discovery culminated in a great civil war and the founding of a new military government (the Kamakura Shogunate), which signaled the demise of the classical age and the onset of the medieval era and a feudal world ruled by warriors. Once loosed, however, the dogs of war were not easily restrained, and, like its European namesake, Japans medieval period was a dark age of chaos and struggle as scores of regional warrior barons contested with one another for power. At last, in 1600, one of these warlords (Tokugawa Ieyasu) triumphed over his rivals and imposed a new countrywide orderbut only by freezing society, stifling change, and hermetically sealing Japan off from contact with the outside worldthat endured until the arrival of American gunboats brought it down in the late nineteenth century.