Materials for the Study of Local History in Japan: Pre-Meiji Daimyo Records

Abstract

The history of Japan during the two and a half centuries prior to the opening of the country in 1854 has traditionally been told as a story of the rise and fall of the Tokugawa central government. It is natural, of course, for historians to view a national history in this fashion, that is, in terms of the political and cultural center of affairs. Yet in the case of Tokugawa Japan, this approach has certain serious shortcomings. We have only to follow the course of events which transpired after 1854 and culminated in the downfall of the shogunate to see that they were shaped in large part by forces originating outside of the political center of Japan. The men who emerged to lead the modern Japanese state were, for the most part, products of the daimy5 domains, or han, which existed as semi-independent entities within the Tokugawa system. To gain a balanced picture of the Tokugawa period, therefore, it is imperative that the historian bring into his view the local areas represented by the daimyo domains. The study of Tokugawa local history, especially if concentrated upon the domains, can reveal much that would escape the attention of the historian preoccupied with the problems of the center alone. In a very real sense the han constituted the basic unit of Tokugawa political, social, and economic life. Numbering some two hundred and sixty-five at the conclusion of the Tokugawa period, each was a microcosm, its structure mirroring in miniature the institutions of the national macrocosm. For this reason the daimy6 domain offers to the historian a convenient example of Tokugawa society, small enough to be studied as a complete entity, yet large enough to retain the features of the whole. Despite the importance of the han in early modern Japanese