Based on the recollection of the author's mother, other relatives, and family records, this is a vivid picture of the everyday life of a samurai household in the last years of the Tokugawa period.

    Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. Lebra gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. She has woven together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world.As Lebra explores the culture of the kazoku, she places each subject in its historical context. She analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders.But this book is not simply about the elite. It is also about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.

    With the rapid increase in commercial activity, products previously restricted to use by the elite became commodities for mass consumption. Likewise, labor power became a commodity as hired laborers replaced traditional corv�e workers in the commercial realm and contracted servants supplanted lifetime, hereditary workers in households. Focusing on a class system mediated increasingly by money, Leupp explores the ways employers and employees dealt with each other and the steps taken by government officials to control rising hostilities.

    Following China's defeat by Japan in 1895, sending young Chinese to Japan for schooling seemed wise policy to leaders in both countries. To reform-minded pragmatists at the helm of Ch'ing government, study in Japan meant access to modern ideas and technology that would strengthen the state and their own power. To Japan's leaders, training thousands of young Chinese fit their objective of creating a strong China under Japanese tutelage; together, the two countries could form an Asian bulwark against the encroachments of the West. But this blueprint for study abroad failed to consider what the students' own goals might be for a modernizing China. For the Chinese students, exposure to an economically stronger, intellectually more open Japan inspired visions of a new China, free of Ch'ing mismanagement, more broadly representative politically, and capable of holding back imperialism in any form, Western or Japanese. Increasingly alienated from the Ch'ing state, Japan-educated activists boldly proclaimed their anti-authoritarian views and were a key force in the rising tide of dissidence propelling China to revolution in 1911. Among the topics the author considers are the emergence of official and popular support for study in Japan, the socio-economic background of the students, their psychological interaction with the Japanese, case studies of student protest movements, and the nature of students' intellectual and political concerns. In developing a new political outlook, the students grappled with many of the issues confronting China nearly a century later: how far to open the door to Western influence, how to relate to an economically strong Japan, how much political reform should accompany technological and economic change, and, above all, how to become mod