James L. McClain

Christianity and the daimyo

Japan passed from a state of extreme political dissolution and social upheaval to a new era of unity and peace, it also turned inward and away from the relative cosmopolitanism of the Christian Centurys first half. From sengoku, Japan was transformed into sakoku, a closed country. For the daimyo, the establishment of a new order meant a reduction to fealty under the Tokugawa shogunate. For the Christian missionaries and their converts, it meant a bitter persecution and the nearly total eradication of their religion in Japan. For the country at large, it was the beginning of more than two centuries of national seclusion. The daimyo Shimazu Takahisa, Ōuchi Yoshitaka, and Ōtomo Yoshishige, who were the most important political personages of western Japan, were also the Christian missionary Francis Xaviers most important collocutors in the country. Christianity had been the objects of suspicion, denigration, and occasional persecution in various parts of Japan from the day of Xaviers arrival in the country.

The bakuhan system

This chapter traces the formation and the evolution of the bakuhan structure of government from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. The political and social institutions that underlay the bakuhan polity had their origins in the unification movement of the last half of the sixteenth century, especially in the great feats of military consolidation and social engineering achieved by Toyotomi Hideyoshi during the last two decades of the century. The story of the rise of the Tokugawa family to become the foremost military house of Japan follows a pattern common among a whole class of active regional military families who competed for local dominion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The structure of power over which the Tokugawa shogun ultimately presided was conceived as a balance among several classes of daimyo and the interests of the shogun.

The village and agriculture during the Edo period

This chapter provides an overview of the evolving agricultural community and to elaborate on the relationship between the transformations in village life and the changes in the mode of agricultural production. During the Edo period, agriculture passed through three technological stages of varying degrees of complexity: the slash and burn technique, the self-contained village economy, and the commercialized cash crop economy and the shift from one stage to another lay at the bottom of three different life styles. The rise of the samurai marked an important stage in the transition from the increasingly ineffectual shoen system to the social institutions of Tokugawa society. The gap between the upper-class farmers and the rest of the farming population was both a product of traditional social custom and a consequence of economic privileges and laws favorable to the elite rural families. Fertilization with night soil has often been viewed as a hallmark of Japanese agriculture.

The social and economic consequences of unification

Japan underwent a major transformation in its social organization and economic capacity during the latter half of the sixteenth century. The three hegemonic leaders, such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who forged the military unification of Japan during the latter half of the sixteenth century. This chapter focuses on the events of the late sixteenth century, the pivotal transitional years that separated the chūsei from the kinsei epoch. The expansion of the productive capacity of agriculture was the keystone supporting the economic foundations of Japans early modern society. Commerce and urban centers grew together during the sixteenth century. At this time Kyoto was still Japans most important political city, as well as a center of a superlative tradition of craft and artisan production. The specific characteristics of the early modern social system were also closely associated with the requirements of the commercial economy.

Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–1950 by Fabian Drixler (review)

modern Fukuoka. Here, “coast,” “offi ng,” or at most “cove” might be more appropriate. (However, kudos to the author for getting the pronunciation of Shika right; others writing in English have lazily assumed that the characters are read “Shiga.”) In the body of the book, bankoku means “vassal state,” not “barbarian country” (p. 136), in the context under discussion. But these are trivial points; signifi cant errors of fact or interpretation are notable only for their absence. I am not certain that Man’yōshū “was compiled during the period of greatest social change in premodern Japanese history, an upheaval not to be rivaled again in intensity until the decades surrounding the Meiji Restoration of 1868” (p. 433); other candidates in my book (so to speak) would be the seventh century and the sixteenth. But the point is arguable, so I will let it rest. In sum, Traversing the Frontier is a magnifi cent achievement, and the author and Harvard University Asia Center deserve hearty congratulations on its publication. Although the book is not what I naïvely expected, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from it. I presume the intended audience is graduate students and professional scholars in Japanese literature, but the book can be profi tably read by anyone with an interest in ancient Japan or in the history of poetry. Traversing the Frontier embodies timeless scholarly values without pandering to fads, and I expect it to enjoy an unusually long shelf life—perhaps not as long as Man’yōshū itself, but certainly to be measured in decades.

Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System (review)

In Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan, Nam-lin Hur takes his readers through an extensive investigation of the danka (or patron household, to use the author’s terminology) system of funerary Buddhism in that country’s early modern epoch. As Hur points out in the introduction, Buddhism permeated Japanese daily life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when perhaps as many as 250,000 temples and subtemples constituted the predominant established religion for a population of approximately 30 million persons. How, Hur asks in the fi rst of many intriguing questions that provide the analytical scaffolding for his monograph, did the Buddhist institutions manage to penetrate every corner of the country, and where did so many temples fi nd the fi nancial resources necessary to support themselves? Moreover, he inquires, why did ordinary Japanese respond so enthusiastically to the astonishing expansion of Buddhism in the early seventeenth century (nearly half of all temples were newly erected between 1600 and 1631) and then remain dedicated temple-goers for generation upon generation thereafter? And given the explosive growth in religious fervor, how did the newly emerging shogunal and domain governments view the Buddhist establishment and attempt to articulate state and religious interests? Not surprisingly, Hur locates the genesis of Buddhism’s spectacular growth in the anti-Christian sentiment that took hold among shogunal offi cials in the early seventeenth century. Although Tokugawa Ieyasu initially was neither anti-Christian nor pro-Buddhist, according to Hur, a series of highly visible incidents persuaded the overlord and his successors that Christianity potentially was a seditious doctrine, “an evil force that would destroy political stability and social harmony” (p. 47). In counterbalancing reaction, governing authorities launched “bold and ambitious” policies designed to harness the power of Buddhist deities both “in defending the divine country [and] in providing religious well-being to the Japanese” (p. 45). The ultimate outcome was the establishment of all those temples and the requirement that each Japanese household maintain a family registry at one of them as a means of certifying that its members were not Christians. That is, a representative of each household annually had to appear at the family’s temple of record and receive a certifi cate of affi liation. Local offi cials then compiled registers of sectarian inspection for submission to higher government offi ce. For all the shogunate’s efforts, however, Buddhism never become a

Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo (review)

Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective includes nine papers originally presented at the triennial meeting of the European Association of Japanese Studies convened in Budapest in 1997 and five additional essays solicited after that gathering. The editors divide the 14 chapters into three parts. Historical chronology drives the arrangement so that the volume begins with the construction of castles in Kyoto during the Age of Warring States and concludes with contemporary efforts to preserve urban landscapes and historic buildings. In addition, Nicholas Fiévé and Paul Waley jointly have written an introduction that provides a historical overview of Kyoto and Edo-Tokyo, and Waley comments on several of the book’s main themes in a brief conclusion. Despite the book’s title and the arrangement of its parts and chapters, the volume is not intended to be a systematic or conventional history of the two cities. As the editors themselves point out, the contributors include five architectural historians, a practicing architect, a geographer, a literary historian, an anthropologist, a historian of planning, a planner, a professor of engineering, and, indeed, even a historian or two. What pulls this assorted body of specialists together, according to the editors, is a shared appreciation “of the spatial composition of cities and the intricate interplay between power as the arbiter of spatial forms, between memory and the representa-