Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912 by Atsuko Hirai

Abstract

Reviewed by: Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912 by Atsuko Hirai Michael Laver (bio) Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912. By Atsuko Hirai. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2014. xx, 433 pages. $49.95. Government by Mourning is an ambitious book that seeks to bring many different strands of Tokugawa historiography together through a detailed and far-reaching study of Tokugawa mourning edicts. Hirai’s book is primarily about Tokugawa edicts of sound abstention during times of mourning. These prohibitions mandated that the populace refrain from making sounds that accompany a variety of forms of entertainment, including musical instruments, theatrical performances, and dramatic recitations. However, on a deeper level the book seeks to make much more sweeping claims about the Tokugawa polity itself, including the nature of Tokugawa authority throughout premodern Japan as well as the role that both the shogun and the emperor played in the consciousness of commoners along the length and breadth of the archipelago. Hirai notes the contributions that sundry other scholars, both Japanese and Western, have made in the field of Tokugawa mourning rituals, including Kuroda Hideo, Nakagawa Manabu, Imano Makoto, and, most recently, Nam-lin Hur. What is missing from other scholars’ works, Hirai claims, is the recognition that Tokugawa mourning rituals, combined with sound prohibitions, created a Tokugawa neo-orthodoxy that was not necessarily based on neo-Confucian thought but on the mourning edicts that emanated [End Page 195] from Edo across the country. Other scholars have paid various degrees of attention to mourning edicts or sound prohibitions, but rarely have they woven these edicts together to form a coherent Tokugawa policy that served to entrench Tokugawa authority even in daimyō domains that were historically hostile to the shogunal family. While Hirai traces pre-Tokugawa mourning rituals in the opening chapters, it is with the shogunate of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi that she sees the ultimate codification of Tokugawa mourning policy. Hirai praises Beatrice Bodart-Bailey’s attempt to rehabilitate Tsunayoshi’s reputation but marvels that she ignores Tsunayoshi’s mourning edicts, which Hirai calls the most significant and enduring achievement of his shogunate. In 1684 Tsunayoshi, noting that the various mourning edicts were not systematized in any way, established a coherent Tokugawa edict on mourning and abstention that stood as a lasting achievement, even though the edicts were amended significantly under the shogunate of Tokugawa Yoshimune in 1736. In essence, Tsunayoshi’s code laid out in detail how long one was to mourn relatives of various degrees of proximity to the mourner: from one’s parents to one’s great-grandparents. The codes also spelled out mourning periods for the wild complexity of the families of Japanese political elites, including mourning for biological parents in the case where a child was an adopted heir of another family. Hirai notes that the Tokugawa mourning and abstention edicts served, as other scholars have noted, to reinforce the legitimacy of successors, especially given that the succession to shogun became so complex with multiple children born to wives and concubines, and, on several occasions, no children born to a shogun’s primary wife. Such abstention edicts included a variety of activities forbidden on the occasion of the death of an important personage; in particular, Hirai is concerned with “sound abstentions”: abstaining from playing musical instruments to be sure, but also staging theatrical productions, reciting dramatic performances, and the like. Hirai observes that Tsunayoshi himself was never “supposed” to become shogun, but that because of a series of unlikely events, he ascended to the shogunate with at least a modicum of doubt as to whether he was the legitimate heir. As Hirai states, “strict implementation of the mourning edict helped to ensure orderly succession, especially when the heirs were young at the time of their fathers’ deaths” (p. 122). Hirai turns from examining the Tokugawa mourning and abstention edicts themselves, as well as their political functions, toward the reach of the Tokugawa edicts. Here she uses the mourning and abstention edicts as a way to demonstrate that Tokugawa power was much more widely spread than has been recognized and that the beginnings of Japanese state formation lay not...