The span of time embraced by this volume is short. Some who could recall personal memories of its beginnings - perhaps the news of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, or of the disaster at Cannae - witnessed events not far from its close; such people witnessed also an astonishingly rapid and dramatic sequence of developments which gave Rome the visible and effective political mastery of the Mediterranean lands. The beginnings of this change lie far back in the history of the Romans and of other peoples, in events and institutions which are examined in other volumes in this series (especially in Volume vn.2); but the critical period of transition, profoundly affecting vast territories and numerous peoples, lasted little more than half a century. In one sense a single episode, it nonetheless comprised a multiplicity of episodes which varied greatly in scale and character and in the diversity of those who, whether by conflict, by alliance, or by the passive acceptance of new circumstances, passed under Roman domination. Furthermore, the Romans themselves experienced change, and not merely in the degree of power and surpemacy which they enjoyed. That power, along with the material fruits and practical demands of empire, brought consequences of great moment to their own internal political affairs, to relationships within their society and between them and their Italian neighbours, to their cultural life and to the physical expressions of that life.

Japan's nineteenth-century history is the crossroads for three overlapping, but normally distinct, perspectives on social change. Each perspective constitutes a search, respectively, (1) for the origins of rapid modernization, (2) for the unraveling of the premodern social order, and (3) for the consequences of sweeping reforms. No one of these searches is yet near completion, but together they already offer convincing evidence of far-reaching changes in social structure. When bolstered by information from abundant materials such as local histories, which are rich in detail but eschew broad generalizations, the scholarship associated with these three perspectives provides an unusually strong historical foundation for attempts to summarize the main lines of social change in a nineteenth-century, still little modernized country.

Exploration of the origins of rapid modernization derives from questions about contemporary Japan. In search of the fundamental and distinctive qualities of Japan's “economic miracle,” a number of social scientists have turned back to the organizational characteristics, the work attitudes, and the general social structure that immediately preceded the modern era. Historically based catchphrases such as Chie Nakane's “vertical society” (tate shakai) and Hayami Akira's “industrious revolution” (kimben kakumei) are suggestive of the results of this retrospective inquiry, conveying the impression of a people prepared even before modern reforms were initiated for directed, concerted, and diligent action. In like manner, others eager to discover the roots of Japan's unusual modern development continue to find evidence for extraordinary qualities already widely dispersed among the Japanese people in the nineteenth century.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Japan was a preindustrial agricultural economy with technology and living standards not greatly different from those of other preindustrial areas of Asia. If a Frenchman of 1600 had been able to see the Japan of 1800, he would have been impressed by obvious differences in dress, manners, and architecture, but most features of economic life would have been readily understandable to him. Had the same Frenchman visited Japan a century later, he would have been bewildered. By the end of the century, the nation's output of goods and services had increased fourfold, and the proportion contributed by industry had at least doubled, whereas the contribution of agriculture had declined to less than half the total output. Much of the infrastructure necessary for the development of an industrial economy, such as transport, communications, ports, and financial institutions, had been created, and a modest but crucial nucleus of modern factory industry was becoming a viable growth sector. This was a century of economic change, and the change was at an increasing rate.

Explanations for this change represent both a variety of ideologies and a variety of views of the facts. Most Japanese historians have viewed it as a transition from a feudal to a capitalist society within the framework of the Marxian theory of stages of economic development. Even granted that a relative latecomer such as Japan might be able to take advantage of some shortcuts, it was not easy to see how such a change, which took centuries in Europe, could occur within a few decades in Japan.

THE CULTURE OF PLAY

Japanese historiography has conventionally located the beginning of the end of the Tokugawa (bakumatsu) in the decade of the 1830s, when the regime and the several domains embarked on a series of reforms aimed at arresting economic failure and restoring public confidence. Historians who have concentrated on making sense of the signs of financial failure point to the implementation of the Tempō reforms as recognition of a gathering crisis. Some have established the revolt of Ōshio Heihachirō in Osaka in 1837 as the turning point in Tokugawa history. But regardless of the many opinions concerning the beginning of the end, most discussions of the end of the shogunate have used economic signs, political events, or a combination of both as criteria for periodization. Yet to establish the beginning of the end in the 1830s obliges us to accept a concomitant assumption that cultural events constitute a second order of activity; one that avoids organizing the world in terms of a base-superstructure dyad but still sees culture and ideas as determined by material forces. Culture is then made to appear as a dependent variable of economic and political processes, and the observer is diverted from recognizing that the production of culture may in fact possess a logic of its own, one that seeks to resolve problems belonging to an entirely different class of events and facts.

If we regard culture as something more than a pale reflection of changes detected earlier in the material realm, we will be persuaded to propose that the special culture of late Tokugawa culture did not begin in the 1830s, or even later, but probably in the late eighteenth century or the early 1800s.