In Japan and the "Culture of the Four Seasons," Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery.Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing.Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

    Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of “selling women” transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes’ economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.

    This book offers a cultural approach to understanding the politics of the Tokugawa period at the same time deconstructing some of the assumptions of modern national historiographies.

    In parts of eighteenth-century Japan, couples raised only two or three children. As villages shrank and domain headcounts dwindled, posters of child-murdering she-devils began to appear, and governments offered to pay their subjects to have more children. In these pages, the long conflict over the meaning of infanticide comes to life once again. Those who killed babies saw themselves as responsible parents to their chosen children. Those who opposed infanticide redrew the boundaries of humanity so as to encompass newborn infants and exclude those who would not raise them. In Eastern Japan, the focus of this book, population growth resumed in the nineteenth century. According to its village registers, more and more parents reared all their children. Others persisted in the old ways, leaving traces of hundreds of thousands of infanticides in the statistics of the modern Japanese state. Nonetheless, by 1925, total fertility rates approached six children per women in the very lands where raising four had once been considered profligate. This reverse fertility transition suggests that the demographic history of the world is more interesting than paradigms of unidirectional change would have us believe, and that the future of fertility and population growth may yet hold many surprises.

    Less commonly recognized is the role played by the distinctly hybrid institution—at once museum, laboratory, and prison—of the zoological garden. In this eye-opening study of Japan’s first modern zoo, Tokyo’s Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882, Ian Jared Miller offers a refreshingly unconventional narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization and changing relationship with the natural world. As the first zoological garden in the world not built under the sway of a Western imperial regime, the Ueno Zoo served not only as a staple attraction in the nation’s capital—an institutional marker of national accomplishment—but also as a site for the propagation of a new “natural” order that was scientifically verifiable and evolutionarily foreordained. As the Japanese empire grew, Ueno became one of the primary sites of imperialist spectacle, a microcosm of the empire that could be traveled in the course of a single day. The meaning of the zoo would change over the course of Imperial Japan’s unraveling and subsequent Allied occupation. Today it remains one of Japan’s most frequently visited places. But instead of empire in its classic political sense, it now bespeaks the ambivalent dominion of the human species over the natural environment, harkening back to its imperial roots even as it asks us to question our exploitation of the planet’s resources.

    Serial killers stalked the streets of Kyoto at night, while noblemen and women mingled freely at the imperial palace, drinking saké and watching kabuki dancing in the presence of the emperor's principal consort. Among these noblewomen was an imperial concubine named Nakanoin Nakako, who in 1609 became embroiled in a sex scandal involving both courtiers and young women in the emperor's service. As punishment, Nakako was banished to an island in the Pacific Ocean, but she never reached her destination. Instead, she was shipwrecked and spent fourteen years in a remote village on the Izu Peninsula before she was finally allowed to return to Kyoto. In 1641, Nakako began a new adventure: she entered a convent and became a Buddhist nun.Recounting the remarkable story of this resilient woman and her war-torn world, G. G. Rowley investigates aristocratic family archives, village storehouses, and the records of imperial convents. She follows the banished concubine as she endures rural exile, receives an unexpected reprieve, and rediscovers herself as the abbess of a nunnery. While unraveling Nakako's unusual tale, Rowley also reveals the little-known lives of samurai women who sacrificed themselves on the fringes of the great battles that brought an end to more than a century of civil war. Written with keen insight and genuine affection, An Imperial Concubine's Tale tells the true story of a woman's extraordinary life in seventeenth-century Japan.

    Then comes a more detailed account of the transformation wrought by that contact and of the progress and problems of the new Japan. If the volume helps at all to a better, more sympathetic understanding of the island empire its purpose will have been amply fulfilled." - Kenneth Scott LatouretteContents: The Geographic Setting of Japan. The Effects of Geography upon the Japanese People and their History. From the Earliest Times to the Introduction of Buddhism. The Traditional Account of Japanese Origins. The Yamato State. Chinese Civilization: its Contact with Japan. From the Introduction of Buddhism, A.D. 552, to the Organization of the Shogunate, A.D. 1192. The Origin, Development, and Spread of Buddhism. Chinese and Other Continental Influences on Japan. The Political Changes Due to Contact with China and the Continent. Japanese Modifications of Foreign Culture. Supremacy and Decline of Fujiwara Family. Feudal Struggle for Control of the Empire. The Shogunate: From its Foundation (1192) to the Accession of Iyeyasu (1603). Organization of the Bakufu. The Hojo Era. The Ashikaga Period. Japan under Control of Military Leaders. The Shogunate: from the Accession of Iyeyasu (1603) to the Coming of Perry (1853). Iyeyasu Reorganizes the Shogunate. Impending Change in Nineteenth Century. The Civilization of the Old Japan. The Military Class. The Imperial Institution. Modern Outgrowths of Old Ideals. The Culture of Old Japan. Religion and Ethics of Old Japan. The Period of Internal Transformation (1853-1894). From the Coming of the Foreigner to the Restoration of Emperor (1853-1867). The Occidental Advance in the Nineteenth Century. The Perry Expedition and Results. Divergent Views on Admission of Foreigners. The Shogun's Difficult Position. The End of the Shogunate. The Reorganization of the Government from the Restoration of the Emperor to the War with China (1868-1894). The Centralization of the Administration. Opposition to the New Order. The Movement Toward Constitutional Government. Formation of Parties, Party Agitation. Changes Preparatory to the Constitution. The Framing and Promulgation of the Constitution, 1889. The Terms of the Constitution. Struggle Between the Parties and the Ministry. Temporary Party Truce During the War with China. Foreign Affairs, Economic, Educational, and Religious Changes from the Restoration to the War with China (1868-1894). The Establishment of Diplomatic Relations with the West. The Growing Spirit of Nationalism and Imperialism. Relations with Korea. Tarriff and Legal Readjustments. Economic Reorganization. Educational and Religious Transformation. Characteristics of the Transition Period. 1894 to 1917: Japan Takes her Place Among the Powers of the World. The War with China, the Boxer Uprising, and the War with Russia (1894-1905). Japan's Interest in Foreign Affairs after 1894. War with China over Korea, 1894-1895. Japan's Part in Repressing Boxer Outbreak. Events Preceding Russo-japanese War. The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905. Sequels to Russo-Japanese War. From the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) to 1918. Japan's Growing Interest and Power in Manchuria. Japan's Interest in China to 1914. Relations with China, 1914-1916. Chino-Japanese Relations in 1917. Relations Between the United States and Japan, 1894-1917. The Lansing-Ishii Agreement, November, 1917. Struggle between the Parties and the Ministry, 1894-1917. The Death of the Emperor Meiji and the Accession of Yoshihito, 1912. Economic Development and Problems, 1894-1917. Educational Development and Problems, 1894-1917. Literature, 1894-1917. Moral, Social, and Religious Conditions.

    This study provides new insights into the majority prejudices, social and political movements, and state policies that influenced not only their perceived positions as "others" on the margins of the Japanese empire, but also the minorities' views of themselves, their place in the nation, and the often strained relations between the two groups.

    In The Art of Censorship Kirsten Cather traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary "classics" by authors such as Nagai Kafu to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Oshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience.The work draws on diverse sources, including trial transcripts and verdicts, literary and film theory, legal scholarship, and surrounding debates in artistic journals and the press. By combining a careful analysis of the legal cases with a detailed rendering of cultural, historical, and political contexts, Cather demonstrates how legal arguments are enmeshed in a broader web of cultural forces. She offers an original, interdisciplinary analysis that shows how art and law nurtured one another even as they clashed and demonstrates the dynamic relationship between culture and law, society and politics in postwar Japan.The Art of Censorship will appeal to those interested in literary and visual studies, censorship, and the recent field of affect studies. It will also find a broad readership among cultural historians of the postwar period and fans of the works and genres discussed.

    Roughly corresponding to folklore studies or ethnography in the West, this social science was developed outside the academy over the first half of the twentieth century by a diverse group of intellectuals, local dignitaries, and hobbyists. Alan Christy traces the paths of the distinctive individuals who founded minzokugaku, how theory and practice developed, and how many previously unknown figures contributed to the growth of the discipline. Despite its humble beginnings, native ethnology today is a fixture in Japanese intellectual life, offering arguments and evidence about the popular, as opposed to elite, foundations of Japanese culture. Speaking directly to fundamental questions in anthropology, this authoritative and engaging book will become a standard not only for the field of native ethnology but also as a major work in broader modern Japanese cultural and intellectual history.

    From the seventeenth to the turn of the twentieth century, lawyers and their predecessors changed society in ways that first samurai and then the state could not. During the Edo period (1600-1868), they worked from the shadows to bend the shogun's law to suit the market needs of merchants and the justice concerns of peasants. Over the course of the nineteenth century, legal practitioners changed law from a tool for rule into a new epistemology and laid the foundation for parliamentary politics during the Meiji era (1868-1912).This social and political history argues that legal modernity sprouted from indigenous roots and helped delineate a budding nation's public and private spheres. Tracing the transition of law regimes from Edo to Meiji, Darryl E. Flaherty shows how the legal profession emerged as a force for change in modern Japan and highlights its lasting contributions in founding private universities, political parties, and a national association of lawyers that contributed to legal reform during the twentieth century.

    Using text and images, it is a collection of stories about how Canadians "found Japan," the first place they reached when travelling westward across the Pacific.These connections began as early as 1848, when the adventurous son of a Hudson's Bay Company trader tempted fate by smuggling himself, disguised as a shipwrecked sailor, into the closed and exotic land of the shoguns. He was followed by an intriguing cast of characters—missionaries, educators, businessmen, social activists, political figures, diplomats, soldiers and occasional misfits—who experienced a rapidly changing Japan as it underwent its remarkable transformation from a largely feudal society to a modern state.Now, when the world is becoming more Asia-centric, Finding Japan provides glimpses into an earlier era that challenged conventional perceptions about Canadian connections across the Pacific.

    This study investigates the Japanese experiment with financial imperialism--or "yen diplomacy"--at several key moments between the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Through authoritarian monetary reforms and lending schemes, government officials and financial middlemen served as "money doctors" who steered capital and expertise to Japanese official and semi-official colonies in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Manchuria.Michael Schiltz points to the paradox of acute capital shortages within the Japan's domestic economy and aggressive capital exports to its colonial possessions as the inevitable but ultimately disastrous outcome of the Japanese government's goal to exercise macroeconomic control over greater East Asia and establish a self-sufficient "yen bloc." Through their efforts to implement their policies and contribute to the expansion of the Japanese empire, the "money doctors" brought to the colonies a series of banking institutions and a corollary capitalist ethos, which would all have a formidable impact on the development of the receiving countries, eventually affecting their geopolitical position in the postcolonial world.