With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope.
In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun's subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced opening in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan's early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers.
Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.
About the Author: Gary P. Leupp is Professor of History, Tufts University, author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan (1989); Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (1993); Interracial Intimacy: Japanese Women and Western Men, 1543-1900 (2001), and other works on class, gender, and ethnicity in Japanese history.
De-min Tao is Professor Emeritus at Kansai University, Japan, author of A Study of the Kaitokudō Neo-Confucianism (J. 1994); Yoshida Shōin and Commodore Perry: A Multilingual Study of the 1854 Shimoda Incident (2020); and An Alternative Image of Naitō Konan: 20 Years of Research about the Naitō Collection at Kansai University Library (J. 2021).
