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.