Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates travel in Tokugawa Japan, particularly in connection with notions of social identity and transformation. Primary sources from the John Rylands collection in Manchester will be investigated, through a theoretical framework combining social history and historical bibliography.

Paper long abstract:

Studies on Edo Japan have been shedding increasing light on the spaces of autonomy and flexibility granted by Tokugawa authorities, within the confines of social obligations (yaku), to the members of the different status groups constituting the mibun system. Historians agree that the traditional idea of Tokugawa "absolutism" needs to be revised, arguing that the system of power changed over time and space, and that socio-economic dynamics evolved outside of the boundaries of the institutional social system. However, as underlined by Tsutsui (2007) how and to what degree the different social classes asserted independence from the centralized system is still very much an object of debate. Such debate is also entwined in a fuller discussion of identity in pre-modern Japan encompassing

Travel studies may provide fresh insight into social and cultural transformation in Tokugawa Japan. Travel was a common practice within the bakuhan state and its context of economic growth. And travel is, as argued by sociologists such as Lean and Staiff (2016), strictly entwined with social mobility, in a way that alters and marks social and cultural landscapes. This process of transformation is reflected in travel literature, including disposable culture such as travel guides, brochures and commercial maps: these materials in fact, while seldom subjected to critical analysis, "mirror and reproduce a whole range of taken-for-granted notions […] about the nature of pleasure and desire, authenticity and artifice, understandings of history and culture." (Hogan, 2008, 169)

Building on this insight, and using the travel books and commercial maps included in the Japanese Collection at John Rylands Library (Manchester, UK) as a case study, my paper will try to explore the extent to which, in the changing socio-economic context of the Tokugawa period, travel as a practice subverted the social geography established by the mibun system; how the geographic consciousness connected to travel affected the different social estates and their perception of "Japan"; and whether and how, if identity in Tokugawa Japan was strictly linked to one's position in the mibun system, such consciousness developed for different social estates.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon historiography, folklore studies, and archeological data on prenatal deaths, this study explores the conceptualization of personhood and the beginning of life in the late Tokugawa period.

Paper long abstract:

Differentiation in treatment of the dead is one way in which people make distinctions between person and non-person. Only the deaths of socially recognized persons are given public recognition, and the structure of the burial, co-buried objects, and grave markers reflect people's views of the dead. This paper examines the social positions of the fetus and infant in the premodern Japan, by analyzing how people in the Tokugawa period reacted to and treated miscarriage and stillbirth. To decipher people's perception of the beginning of life, this study draws upon findings from multiple fields, including folklore studies, history, and archeology. Folklore scholars had been central in the studies of childhood as well as pregnancy and childbirth in premodern Japan, and argued that children under seven years old were seen as near-deities. They maintained that the bodies of the fetus and infants were buried within family property or special burial sites to wish for a quick return in the form of another child. Folklorists further considered that such view justified abortion and infanticide, common methods for controlling family size during the Tokugawa era. Archeological findings complicate such dominant understanding of the beginning of life in Japan, however. Archeologists found that there had been cases in which infants, and even the fetuses, received Buddhist funerals and were buried in cemeteries adjacent to temples. This research grapples with such seemingly contradicting dynamics and demonstrates that the practices surrounding perinatal deaths represented people's competing and changing views on the genesis of life. That is, while the small children's lives might have been seen as ephemeral, people came to have emotional investment to their children and many experienced great sense of loss in cases of their children's deaths, no matter how young they were.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the role of the Tokugawa judicature in the arbitration of local conflicts at Kōyasan temple in the seventeenth century. In so doing, I reassess state power and complicate the discussion of the medieval-early modern divide.

Paper long abstract:

Over three decades ago, the medieval and early modern historians who jointly produced a series of studies on ikki cautioned the emergent trend to conflate a theoretical division between the two eras with the actual ones (Minegishi Sumio et al, eds. Ikki, vol. 1. Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1981). Since, significant strides have been made in both medieval and early modern studies, the break between the two being hinged upon the state formation at the turn of the seventeenth century. However, the divide as reified by historians remains largely presupposed, while attempts to examine the logics and dynamics of society during and across the transition based on records from the time are rarely seen. Nowhere is this more prominent than in the treatment of temples and shrines, where analysis of policies that fit neatly into the overdetermined narrative of state domination is deemed sufficient to explain the epochal shift.

The premise of the paper is that established accounts are constrained by normative assumptions about state power and a lack of conceptual models to analyze the complex social tensions that are recorded in documents. Rather than predicating the analysis on a preconceived tension between the state and religion or society, we ought to confront the chaos of the social world and recover the ground-level struggles that shaped history. To deal squarely with those struggles and assess their historical significance, I suggest we focus on the territorial practices of diverse and at times competing groups dialectically with the schemes of power that institutionalized their social existence. The paper uses documents of Kōyasan temple to explore the relations between local territorial politics and the judicial system of the Tokugawa state in the seventeenth century. By shedding light on the processes by which diverse stakeholders of Kōyasan negotiated the boundaries of their rights and privileges, I discuss the role of the Tokugawa regime as the master of territorial allocations whose power structured the fraught space of the temple by resolving conflicts.