Editorial Preface

Abstract

Editorial Preface David L. Howell One of my side projects is editing one volume of a new edition of The Cambridge History of Japan (CHJ). Depending on what one thinks of it and its predecessor, the new edition’s three volumes will supersede, complement, or perhaps just pale in comparison with the six volumes of the original CHJ, published between 1988 and 1999. Reading Pamela Crossley’s review essay of The Cambridge History of China (CHC) in this issue of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies has me thinking about the nature and purpose of the Cambridge histories. I spent my academic adolescence in the shadow of the Cambridge histories of both Japan and China. I did my graduate studies at Princeton University, home to the CHC and its lead editor, Denis Twitchett, as well as many contributors, including Willard Peterson, Twitchett’s de facto successor as head of the project. My PhD adviser, Marius Jansen, was both a general editor of the CHJ and the editor of the volume on the nineteenth century.1 I played a small supporting role in the editing of that volume: I helped to compile the index, caught a major gaffe in the proofs, and voted for “bakufu” 幕府 (over Bakufu or bakufu) to refer to what I now always call the Tokugawa shogunate. I was a compliant adolescent, more inclined to revere the Founding Fathers of Japanese Studies than pull them down off their plinths. Even during my occasional sullen-teenager moments, when I launched into marxisant rants about methods and presumptions, I overlooked omissions that jump out at even my greenest graduate students when they look at CHJ today. And some of the omissions I did notice— the failure to treat gender as a useful category of historical analysis, for example—were just making the transition from niche concern to common sense as the first CHJ volumes appeared.2 Given that the CHJ essays were all commissioned before 1978, I suppose it is no surprise that women wrote only five of the seventy-seven chapters in the [End Page 303] entire CHJ series—none in the volume I worked on. The long gestation period meant, moreover, that many of the essays were stale or even downright outdated at the time of publication, the important perspectives of scholars a generation or two removed from the Founding Fathers’ disregarded entirely. My fellow editors and I hope that our diverse group of current contributors, writing on a tight schedule, will help us avoid some of the problems that plagued the first iteration of the CHJ. I must confess, however, that we continue to wrestle with a question at the core of Crossley’s critique of the CHC: What is the point of a Cambridge history? Is “the primary objective of the present series . . . to put before the English-reading audience as complete a record of Japanese history as possible,” as the general editors of the first CHJ put it?3 I doubt that any of my collaborators would think to put it that way. So what do we as authors and editors hope our readers will get out of the books? Who are our readers, anyway? Many authors of the first CHJ seem to imagine the reader as an outsider to the field in need of a quick (well, not too quick—some of the chapters are close to a hundred pages long!) and intelligent overview of a period or a topic. Their deeply embedded arguments are clearest to those who already know the field well and can read between the lines of their just-the-facts-ma’am prose. I suppose we imagine a similar reader—a colleague in another field or a graduate student trying to contextualize a monograph—but I hope the new CHJ chapters will put their arguments closer to the fore and aim explicitly to point scholarship in new directions, even as they remain as readable and reasonably comprehensive as their predecessors. Footnotes 1. The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91.5 (1986): 1053...