Paper short abstract:

The paper introduces family records of the late Tokugawa period in which food and rituals play a significant role. By means of digital tools, the ample material is sorted and visualized to enhance the interpretation of the records’ original creation and purpose for the family.

Paper long abstract:

The paper introduces both the process and the results of collecting records kept by a household in the late Tokugawa period. Rai Shunsui (1746–1816) was able to establish a new household when he came into the employ of the Hiroshima domain as Confucian scholar. This also implied the rise from commoner to warrior status, and it is at this point when record keeping began in earnest.

For this presentation, I limit my focus on the large set of documents that describe the performances of Confucian Family Rites (karei) in the household. These Confucian rites are not commonly practiced in Japan, yet a small group of determined Confucian scholars put them into practice as part of their annual festivities, indicating with the performance their acceptance of Neo-Confucianism. Considering, in particular, the form and content of the more than 400 recorded menus, a manual, hundreds of diary entries, and letters gives us ample opportunity to understand the central function these rituals took in the Rai household. The specific timing—the formation of the domain scholar’s household—indicates the intentions by the household head to present the family in a concrete Confucian setting.

In the presentation I will further address how to document and preserve large data sets by means of digital tools and how they can be used, for instance, for the visualization of historical networks. I explain the feeding of the records that describe who participated in the rites, as well as who got to enjoy the results of the food offering, into the Japan Biographical Database (jbdb.jp), a relational database that manages large amounts of data on social interaction.

With these two approaches of investigating and analyzing the original context of the data of the family records, the presentation aims to offer a better understanding of associateship and consumption in a scholar’s household during the late Tokugawa period. Moreover, we learn through foodstuff, food preparation, procurement, and consumption about the household economy.