Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan [antikvár]

FOREWORD This volume had its origins in a panel organized for die annual meeting of the Associadon for Asian Studies in 1964 and chaired by President Hugh Borton of Haverford College. Parallel papers treating the development of daimyo rule in three provinces of seventeenth-century Japan were discussed in relation to the institutional development of medieval Europe by Professor Joseph R. Strayer. A number of our colleagues encouraged us to publish those papers together. As we prepared to do so, we became aware of the need to add to them further discussions of the institutional history of early modern Japan in order to provide an adequate base for comparison and coverage. Some of these have been written specifically for this volume, and others have been gathered from writings previously published by our colleagues and ourselves. Few fields of study have undergone more dramatic change and development than that of Tokugawa Japan. It has been a center of activity and controversy in Japan since the 1930's. At that time the overwhelming emphasis was on social and economic trends. This has begun to give way, in more recent years, to a focus on insdtudonal developments of shogun and daimyo rule. The interrelationships of poHtical, institutional, and cultural history are only now beginning to come into view. Among Western historians in the past two decades work has been pardcularly stimulated by the abundance of data that Japanese specialists in local history have made available. This work has remained largely free from the controversies that continue to mark the field in Japan, but its reappraisals of Tokugawa institutions, often in the light of Japan's subsequent modernization, have frequently led to new areas of interest and contention among scholars. Since much of the best work has appeared in a variety of journals which are often difficult to obtain, it seemed to us important to add to our papers others that would be representative of the strength and coverage of current scholarship in the West. This volume thus indicates the present state of our understanding of the institutional life of Tokugawa Japan, and it is meant to serve the needs of students of Japan as well as those concerned with parallel or contrasting patterns of institutional development elsewhere. Of the twenty-one selections which follow, eight appear here for the first time. Eleven are by the editors and reflect, in their emphasis on the provinces of Bizen and Tosa, the impressive body of materials that have been made available by energetic local historians in Okayama and Kochi. We have made no effort to change articles that appeared earlier. Such diversity in terminology as occurs is met by cross-indexing and occasional footnotes. We have also felt it necessary to limit our coverage to institutional history, and we have therefore vii