Pre-Industrial Urbanism in Japan: A Consideration of Multiple Traditions in a Feudal (original) (raw)
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The Social Structure of Commoners in Tokugawa Japan
The Tokugawa Shogunate enacted far reaching and comprehensive changes upon the social fabric of Japan. These broad changes are fairly well known. Examples would include the division of society into four main castes: Samurai, Peasant, Artisan, and Merchant. Others policies were the restrictions on outside contact, the subjugation of the warrior lords (daimyos) to the central Tokugawa authority, and the imposition of neo-Confucian ideals. While these are familiar to anyone with a passing interest in Tokugawa era Japan, the depth of this social re-organization and its ramifications on social interactions is not understood to the same degree.
Cultural Developments in Tokugawa Japan
A Companion to Japanese History, 2007
S Su ub bjje ec ctt P Plla ac ce e D DO OII:: C CH HA AP PT TE ER R S SE EV VE EN N. . C Cu ul lt tu ur ra al l D De ev ve el lo op pm me en nt ts s i in n T To ok ku ug ga aw wa a J Ja ap pa an n
A Short History of the Gannin: Popular Religious Performers In Tokugawa Japan
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 2000
This paper traces the emergence and development of the gannin or gannin bozu, a group of religious performer-practitioners. The gannin, who were active in Kyoto, Osaka, Edo, as well as many rural areas, had their headquarters at the Kurama temple. Throughout the Tokugawa period, gannin engaged in proxy pilgrimages and provided the public with rites, exorcisms, and entertaining performances. Although the gannin are often portrayed in contemporaneous documents as “disorderly，” the gannin maintained a nationwide administrative apparatus supported by the bakufu. To the rank-and-file gannin, this hierarchical organization, which at first may have served the interests of the gannin themselves, appears to have become something of a burden. As a result, gannin continued to seek independence in order to better their lot, thereby irritating their social superiors.
2004
Early Modern Social and Economic History of Japan: The Tokugawa Legacy Post war historians of Japanese socio-economic history argued extensively in favor of a Japanese version of the Whig perspective on history in which practically everything in the Tokugawa early modern leads to the modern age of Japan as an indigenous and stable evolution. Many of us in the field who are dealing with the Tokugawa period have also been greatly intrigued by the politicized question of Japanese global power or at least its dramatic beginnings with the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a kind of a revolution that catapulted Japan alone among the countries of Asia into the company of the great powers of the West. It is therefore not surprising that in her recent accomplished geo-historical study of the social and economic processes of proto-industry in early modern Japan, Kären Wigen begins with similar concerns in her recent book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920, (1995). In discussing the peripher...
The Absence of the Private: The Jion-e and Public Ritual in Pre-modern Japan
Kōfukuji (興福寺), one of pre-modern Japan’s main monastic complexes and center of the Hossō school (法相) located in present-day Nara, was home to a wide variety of rituals, the most famous ones being undoubtedly the Vimalakīrti Assembly or Yuima-e (維摩会) and the Jion-e (慈恩会). For centuries these rituals had an enormous religious, political, and social impact on society, showing that Nara and Heian period Buddhism was not confined to the internal sphere of the temple. While the monastic elite and representatives of the court were present at the ritual, the temple and its surroundings attracted crowds of monks and commoners during the days of the ritual. Documents and visual representations show us that these rituals took place in a specific delineated space (in case of the Yuima-e the lecture hall), included a selected audience, were held during a specific timeframe, featured specific ritual positions, included restricted forms of communication, and featured a preparation period demanding rigorous doctrinal study.2 In addition, these rituals’ official audience consisted of the most powerful, witnesses of “the symbolic connection between acts of ritual and ruling.”