Anne Walthall

Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View

This is a synthesis of Japanese history, religion, culture and social organization. The book explores the Japanese historical legacy and its impact on the Japanese experience of modernity, eschewing the polemicism of structuralist or culturalist approaches in favour of a systematic, broadly comparative analysis. What emerges is a focus on the non-ideological character of Japanese civilization as well as its infinite capacity to recreate community through an ongoing past.

Japanese models of conflict resolution

The sumo wrestlers on the cover provide an interesting initial perspective. Social scientists examine various aspects of the subject in industrial relations, the labor market, religion, leisure, bureaucracy and government. Considers how Japanese capitalism differs from Western capitalism how Japanes

Peasant Uprisings in Japan: A Critical Anthology of Peasant Histories

Combining translations of five peasant narratives with critical commentary on their provenance and implications for historical study, this book illuminates the life of the peasantry in Tokugawa Japan.

Solitary Thoughts--A Translation of Tadano Makuzu's Hitori Kangae (2)

IHAVE written this entire text without any sense of modesty or concern about being unduly outspoken. Let me explain why. People customarily humble themselves and seek to avoid appearing overly assertive, but when I came to this place, I resigned myself to my life being over at the age of thirty-five and resolved to regard the move here as the road of death, the journey to hell. Since the world no longer exists for me, it is as though I am no longer the same person who lived through the past. However much people may censure and condemn me, it hurts me not at all. Besides, the sort of person who would censure and condemn this book is not worth fearing. With compassion filling my heart and tears of grief soaking my sleeves, I have written it lamenting the crazed behavior I see all around. Each person in our country strives to enrich him or herself alone without thinking of the foreign threat or begrudging the cost to the country. Mired in strife, people throw goods away and fight over money that comes and goes. With this in mind, I feel neither pain nor irritation at being criticized by others. Please read this with that understanding.

The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800: Walker, Brett L.: Berkeley: University of California Press, 344 pp., Publication Date: June 2001

gives a series of short sketches with photos, is incongruous and seems to be an afterthought. The book also has some serious factual errors: Ma Ri, in Ma Ri Shibian (24), is incorrectly identified as a local festival; but actually Ma wan customarily used to represent the twenty-first day, especially in telegraphy. Hence Mu Ri Shibian is the May 21 Incident. The First Soviet Congress is referred to erroneously an the “first Party Congress” (166). Overall, the book has little value for specialists in Chinese studies, but general readers may find the snippets on the lives of women in China interesting, especially those exposed to the subject for the first time. The book also has a short bibliography, mostly of books written in English, and a brief pronunciation guide.

Shipwreck! Akita's Local Initiative, Japan's Foreign Debt, 1869–72

Acting on their own initiative, junior staff members at a branch office for Akita domain bought a steamship on credit from a Dutch merchant in 1869. They then borrowed so much money that they left Akita with the single largest debt owed to foreigners of any domain in Japan. An analysis of how they did this and why exposes economic and political activity at the middle level of the domains, the difficulties faced by the new national government in gaining control over local administration, and the efforts made by descendants and disciples of Hirata Atsutane to develop Akita’s foreign trade.

Like No Other: Exceptionalism and Nativism in Early Modern Japan by Mark Thomas McNally (review)

East Asian relations accommodated the Chinese tribute system as well as an interstate system that favored ambiguity in order to enable the peaceful coexistence of contradictory hierarchies of legitimacy and power. Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai offers both fi rst-rate scholarship and the best outcome of academic collaboration. All entries consider the early modern maritime space of East Asia and tie their examinations to the Zheng family’s military and commercial regime. Together they employ multiple languages, archives, and methodologies to assess these core themes from a variety of viewpoints. Many of the chapters also make overt efforts to level the tenacious Eurocentric and national paradigms that have obscured exactly the kinds of reciprocal, transcultural, and interconnected relationships that are presented herein. Additionally, some of the authors directly reference one another and engage further topics of mutual interest, including technology, commercial practices, and military strategies. The result is a series of essays that build upon one another so that the whole volume serves to elucidate each of its parts. This book decisively shows that maritime East Asia was anything but secluded and remote in the early modern era. Instead, it was central to early globalization and proved to be a lively space of trade, statecraft, contestation, and piracy. Indeed, the wealth of evidence these essays provide suggests that more archival treasure is yet to be discovered.

Morgan Pitelka, Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability

here. Nor are there many details about informed consent policies – an issue that seems pressing given the fact that several of the authors are bound to have talked to their informants well before they officially decided to turn this into research. Nevertheless, it is in sum a coherent collection of engaging ethnographies that is a must-read for anyone interested in disaster anthropology, resilience and contemporary Japan.

Ōoku: The Secret World of the Shogun's Women by Cecilia Segawa Seigle and Linda H. Chance (review)

As a world of women hidden from the public gaze yet enclosed within the seat of the shogun’s power, the Ōoku (great interior) has fascinated purveyors of popular culture from the early eighteenth century to the present. In just the last ten years or so, a play, a movie, and a television series titled Ōoku have depicted this space as a site of competition, drama, and intrigue. In 2008, the NHK Sunday-night historical fiction series Taiga dorama, which presents a new year-long story annually, aired Atsuhime, featuring the woman from a collateral house of the Shimazu rulers of Satsuma who, after her adoption by the Konoe family of Kyoto aristocrats, became the wife of the thirteenth shogun Iesada. Known to history as Tenshō-in, she lived through the last days of the shogunate. With a script by Tabuchi Kumiko, the show proved so popular that NHK commissioned Tabuchi to craft a second script, that for Gō: Himetachi no sengoku, which aired in 2011 and featured the wife of the second shogun Hidetada. These dramas are far removed from any conceivable circumstance in today’s world. Prominently featured are the jingle of bells, the unlocking of a door, and the appearance of a single male figure, the shogun, at the head of a long hall lined with kneeling women dressed in gorgeous kimono. This scene signifies the entrance to an alien time and space. Yet beyond this outward show of difference, the scripts for these dramas depict women’s motivations and emotions in terms of today’s sensibilities. Either the women are just as conniving and catty as those portrayed in late-night television dramas that have modern settings, or they represent the idealized feminine virtues of self-sacrifice, obedience, and blind devotion to duty. In all cases, the message is that what women really want is love according to heterosexual norms. Even the recent innovative depiction of the “great interior,” the ten-volume manga Ōoku, by Yoshinaga Fumi, does not escape these conventions.1 Yoshinaga imagines a Japan in which disease has wiped out forty percent of the male population, including the shogun and most daimyo. From the third shogun Iemitsu to the tenth shogun Ieharu, all the shoguns are women, and the Ōoku is stocked with men; though they are female instead of male, the shoguns retain their historical names. Yoshinaga cleverly incorporates all of the era’s major figures and incidents, from the Meireki fire of 1657, to the fifth shogun Tsunayoshi’s laws of compassion, to the Akō incident (depicted in the fictionalized account Chūshingura), to the eighth shogun Yoshimune’s reforms. She

Cultivating Commons: Joint Ownership of Arable Land in Early Modern Japan (review)

Perhaps the most unusual of the Edo-period women described in this book is the writer Arakida Rei, subject of the essay by Atsuko Sakaki. Sakaki explores the way in which Arakida established her identity by writing not about matters familiar to her and to her readers, but about exotic locales and strange occurrences. Knowledgeable about China in matters beyond those explicated in classic texts, Arakida masks the value of this knowledge in a way that allows her to display it without seeming boastful. Her career suggests one strategy, though an unusual one, that a literate woman might use while negotiating her way through a male-dominated society. Two chapters bring the book into the Meiji period. One, by Mara Patessio, examines print outlets for women’s writing, while the other focuses on a well-known female activist and educator. For the authorities who were trying to establish the “good wife, wise mother” paradigm, publications for women were both a boon and a danger. While they could be used to promote state-supported ideals, they could also become an avenue for dangerous views. Patessio shows that despite such problems, publications such as Jogaku zasshi and Fujo shinbun successfully provided avenues for women to discuss even controversial issues. Advocating education for girls became the central purpose for activist Kishida Toshiko, the subject of Sugano Noriko’s contribution. While not entirely rejecting standard Confucian templates for female behavior such as Onna daigaku, she argued that they had been misinterpreted, focusing particularly on the notorious doctrine that women should obey men all their lives and on the tendency to honor men and despise women. Kishida’s embrace of Confucian principles, and her argument that the “way” of the wife was to manage the family, meant that she was no revolutionary feminist. Nevertheless, her encouragement of early childhood education was an important contribution to the advancement of women. Taken together, the essays show how women pursued education and cultivation despite serious limitations. In general, the essays that focus on the Edo period support Kornicki’s conclusion that the situation improved over time. Walthall’s chapter cautions against any facile celebration of state-sponsored education as an avenue of liberation for women. The separate chapters make up a multifaceted and nuanced whole, and the book is valuable not only for its depiction of literate women and what they read and wrote, but for its indication of the many ways in which they dealt with gender disparities in Edo and Meiji times.