There were two forms of nativism1 during the Tokugawa period. The first was literary in orientation. Literary nativists undertook exhaustive and comprehensive studies of Japan’s classical literature, and both poetry and prose works were central to their scholarship. An array of luminary intellects mostly from the eighteenth century made their mark on this form of nativism, including Keichū (164...

Renewed interest in the collaborative form haikai no renga 誹諧の連歌 was an integral part of the mid-eighteenth century "Back to Bashō" movement, in which Yosa Buson 与謝蕪村 (1716-1783) and his associates condemned the commercialized practices that characterized contemporary haikai and argued for a return to the ideals of Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 (1644-1694). After the death of Bashō, who had made ga 雅, or e...

Perceptions of the emergence and spread of modern humans have changed recently through the reanalysis of fossils, an improved geochronological framework, and the discovery of a few specimens. Early modern humans in various portions of the Old World exhibit complex and varying mosaics of archaic, modern, and regional morphological characteristics. On the basis of this pattern, in conjunction wit...

In an essay on kingship and charisma, Clifford Geertz once likened the use of fêtes, bestowals of gifts, processions, and other public acts associated with royal accession ceremonies to the “spreading of scent” by widely ranging wolves and tigers. While perhaps a crude equation of culturally and religiously inspired human rituals with the socio-biology of animals, Geertz drew upon this juxtapos...

62 foreign contact wiped clean from the deck (although, as the case of Kaempfer shows, certain important issues clearly have yet to be swept away), Japan specialists have started to navigate entirely new waters. For this reason, some of the most interesting work in early modern Japanese studies relates to the subfield of foreign affairs and frontiers. At the same time, however, so much still co...

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 Toku...

Though not unfamiliar to scholarship on premodern Japan, the concept of patronage has been treated unevenly and unsystematically. The term is most commonly found in studies by art historians, but even they have frequently dealt with it indirectly or tangentially. The same is true of the study of the history of religion, despite the fact that patronage was fundamental to the establishment and gr...

Although haikai no renga was central to the poetic practice of haikai poets throughout the Edo period, its status within the canon of Japanese literature has been problematic since Masaoka Shiki declared that it was not bungaku. 3 Although Shiki admitted that haikai no renga texts had “literary” elements, linked verse values change over unity so his final judgment was that it could not be consi...

The poetic salons in Kyoto during the early Tokugawa period were vivified by the simmering tension between the factions of Matsunaga Teitoku 松 永貞徳 (1571-1654) and Kinoshita Chōshōshi 木 下長嘯子 (1569-1649). These two poets hailed from fundamentally different socio-economic backgrounds, displayed contrasting personalities, developed diametrically opposed views on the proper decorum for composing wak...