The Tokugawa World ed. by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Tokugawa World ed. by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao Laura Nenzi The Tokugawa World. Edited by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2021. 1198 pages. ISBN: 9781138936850 (hardcover; also available as e-book). What did the shogun do during a solar eclipse? Was smoking tobacco commonplace in Edo? How did the experience of a female hairdresser differ from that of her male counterparts? How did urban dwellers dispose of human excrement, and how did rural theater producers obtain costumes for their plays? The answers to these questions are all included in this extensive examination of the Tokugawa world—its cities, villages, and oceanic spaces; its samurai and commoners; its men, women, and children; its hegemons, weavers, performers, propertyless urban workforce, and outcastes; its tea masters, haiku poets, and Confucian scholars; its pilgrims, teachers, and seafaring merchants. The Tokugawa World, edited by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao, includes contributions by a combination of emerging and established scholars hailing from Europe, North America, East Asia, Australia, and Israel. A very short introduction (four pages) outlines the basic features of the Tokugawa era—the Great Peace, controlled interactions with the outside world, the status system, and urbanization. The sixty-four chapters that follow are organized in eleven thematic parts: "National Reunification, 1563–1603," "The Physical Landscape," "Tokugawa Society," "Family, Gender, Sexuality, and Reproduction," "Tokugawa Economy," "Tokugawa Japan in the World," "The Performing Arts and Sport," "Art and Literature," "Religion and Thought," "Education and Science," and an epilogue on bakumatsu. The topics within each section offer a very rich picture of life in Tokugawa Japan. In what other edited volume will one find as many as three chapters on music culture and two on shunga? Not all aspects of the Tokugawa world are given equal attention, which is to be expected. As the editors admit, institutional history is out, and studies of peasant resistance are now on life support. Interest in gender and women's history, while far from new, remains strong. Anything related to globalization, popular culture, and "the commodification of everything" is currently trending (p. 4). With no fewer than ten chapters, the "Tokugawa Japan in the World" section is tellingly the longest [End Page 330] in the book, a sign not only of welcome new directions within the field but also of broader trends in historical research. The chapters in each section are not in any particular order—certainly not chronological—although those in part 1, "National Reunification, 1563–1603," are an obvious exception. "Tokugawa Japan in the World," for example, opens with Kären Wigen's beautiful chapter on nineteenth-century maps, followed by Travis Seifman's compelling and enjoyable examination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century diasporic settler communities in Southeast Asia. The historiographical debate on the "closed country" is introduced in the third chapter, Noémi Godefroy's excellent study of Ezo-chi from a global and very, very longue durée perspective, and returns again six chapters later in the equally strong contribution by Xing Hang, "Selective Sakoku?" (note the question mark). While the size of the volume is intimidating at over 1,100 pages, its content is in fact a surprisingly fast and easy read thanks to the editors' choice to include many short chapters, varying in length between ten and thirty pages, that inform without overwhelming. The book, of course, is not meant to be read sequentially cover to cover, although that is certainly an option. There is, in this volume, a little bit for everyone, true to the editors' promise to make it appealing to "a wide spectrum of readers" (p. xxv). Some contributors revisit familiar arguments by summarizing their monographs; some narrate their intellectual, and often literal, journeys in search of source material (Shing-Ching Shyu on seventeenth-century Chinese émigrés and Wang Min on the cult of King Yu, for example). Others provide textbook-like synopses that will appeal to those new to the field (note the abundance of descriptive titles in the index), while others yet promote fresh perspectives and relatively new areas of inquiry (chapters on race and food come to mind). The shogunal capital of Edo...