This chapter explores Japan’s environmental history within the context of the Pacific world and its natural and human-fashioned features. Japan’s history is intertwined with the rhythms of its Pacific environment in physical and cultural ways. In this manner, the Pacific Ocean serves as a “connective force,” as one historian has described it, with far more tensile strength than the brittle cultural coherency of East Asian or Western civilization. The Pacific world provides coherency to Japanese history in ways that are often neglected but that relate to Japan’s modern industrial successes and its likely Anthropocene tragedies. By analyzing Pacific tectonics, Pacific highlands and lowlands, Pacific hydrography, Pacific climates, and Pacific politics and culture, this chapter demonstrates that the Pacific Ocean is not only a “connective force” of Japan’s history but also the energy source that powers much of it as well.

Rising literacy, urbanization, and leisure time in early modern Japan led to increasing popular interaction with politics. This chapter, after confirming the basic political apparatus of the Tokugawa state, demonstrates how the governance carried out within that apparatus interacted with increasingly vibrant expressions of political opinion from outside the state. From erudite Confucian analysis to popular riot and lewd graffiti, this chapter argues that public political opinion and action both influenced and at times was courted by the shogunal government. Political discussions in salon and popular culture outside the state introduced key new political ideas which transformed the ideal of governance in Japan from a minimalist concept of military domination and agricultural facilitation to a much more comprehensive vision of general welfare and development.

I introduce this volume of the New Cambridge History of Japan with two questions: How is it that Anglophone scholars have come to refer to the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and immediately surrounding years as Japan’s “early modern” period? And does calling the period early modern suggest something fundamentally different from the term used in Japanese, kinsei? When the first Cambridge History of Japan was published, in 1991, the answer to the latter question was yes: the kinsei of “the Japanese” was “more feudal than modern,” whereas the early modernity of “Western historians” was “more modern than feudal.” As this introduction demonstrates, however, the term kinsei has nothing to do with feudalism. The evolution of the terms of periodization used to refer to the Tokugawa era tell us something important about the global history of conceptualizing historical time, particularly the surprising career of modernity.

This chapter outlines how from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century a mature Tokugawa shogunate recast the Japanese realm’s structures of trade, diplomacy, and maritime defense. It details the ways in which the Tokugawa regime, despite being Japan’s central authority, could not act unilaterally but had to recognize the agency held by the Satsuma and Tsushima domains in their relations with foreign states. In addition, the chapter explains the monopolistic and market tools employed by the shogunate to control key sectors of Japan’s foreign trade. It also explores the broader Pacific contexts – notably a common desire among participants to limit the use of silver in trade with China – that shaped the Japanese state’s foreign trade. Finally, it details the diversity in imported products that emerged by the early nineteenth century, reflected in the variety of goods in demand by both male and female Japanese consumers.

This chapter explores the “medical revolution” of Tokugawa Japan. At the beginning of this period, medical care by physicians was largely an urban phenomenon, but over the course of some 200 years, medicine became an integral part of everyday life in towns and villages all around Japan. The political authorities had little involvement in the expansion of the medical profession, which instead was driven by commercial and social factors. The development of print culture made medical knowledge more widely available, both to physicians and the larger public, while the tensions of the status system made the medical profession desirable to many, from low-ranking members of the warrior status group to the ambitious sons of villager families. Medical academies established by prominent doctors in cities such as Kyoto, Edo, Osaka, and Nagasaki made it possible for would-be doctors to acquire training in a variety of new medical fields, from obstetrics to so-called Dutch medicine. However, by the early nineteenth century, the proliferation of doctors with varying degrees of training and skill and the increasingly intense competition among them led some localities to adopt new licensing measures designed to weed out “quacks” and ensure the livelihood of established doctors.

Any national history project faces the dilemma of what to include when current national boundaries do not coincide with historical ones. In Japan, the identity of the nation with its dominant ethnic group in the modern period has turned every discussion of “Japanese” history into an implicit comment on what and who is meant by “Japanese.” This chapter surveys the histories of Ryukyu and Hokkaido through the premodern and early modern periods. It discusses both regions’ close ties to the Japanese polity, while also highlighting their autonomous histories. At the same time, it reveals how situating places like Ryukyu and Hokkaido inside or outside the early modern polity shapes our understanding of their status during the modern era as colonial possessions or integral parts of the Japanese nation. This situating in turn affects understandings of the Indigeneity of the Ainu people and the status of Okinawan language and culture.

The collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the subsequent rise of the Meiji government were accompanied by the Japanese archipelago’s first large-scale conflict in two centuries. Warfare was not merely a consequence of the social and political upheaval of the restoration era. Rather, organizational reforms and the adoption of new technologies helped accelerate the collapse of the shogunate and shaped the manner of the modern state’s consolidation. Rather than recounting campaigns and battles, this chapter focuses on three interlocking sets of themes: technology, social change, and gender. Each theme relates to a particular story of the restoration era: the replacement of traditional Japanese arms by gunpowder weapons; the decline of the samurai and the rise of the conscript soldier; and the effacement of warrior masculinity by the ideal of the patriotically subservient “serviceman” (gunjin).

During the Tokugawa period, commoners developed increasingly sophisticated methods of challenging what they perceived as unjust government policies or unethical behavior by the wealthy. Popular movements coalesced around petitions that stated grievances. They typically took the form of mass demonstrations that required preparation, organization, and leadership. Even urban food riots had a logic to them. In many cases, they erupted after women had called on merchants to feed the poor, and they followed a code for conduct that cautioned against stealing. In the early nineteenth century, farmers created village leagues that employed representatives to manage issues with regional implications and make their case for commercial policies. In some instances, they argued that all human beings are equal, an argument made unsuccessfully by outcaste villagers. Villagers commemorated popular movements in chronicles and tales, mixing fact and fiction in the interests of a good story, and they remembered their fallen leaders in memorial services.

Despite the restrictions that had been imposed on domestic travel since the early seventeenth century – which included checkpoints and the need for travel permits – in early modern Japan people traveled, merchandise moved, and ideas circulated. Commercial publishers played a key role in promoting the flows of people and things, not only with guidebooks and travel itineraries, as one would expect, but also in unusual places, such as board games and parodies of sumo rankings. Their output illuminates the democratization of knowledge and the creation of an interconnected archipelago in early modern Japan. More broadly, it reflects the global expansion of the information industry and the rise of tourism in the nineteenth century, linking Tokugawa Japan to dynamics at play the world over.

Considered in a global context, the Meiji Restoration was a nationalist, bourgeoise revolution. At the heart of many Meiji reforms was the creation of a new national identity. The Meiji government abolished hereditary status distinctions, replaced regional institutions with a powerful central administration, and promoted the cultural and political unity of the Japanese people. The government also advanced the core institutions and mechanisms of capitalism: the alienation and partibility of land, tax collection in cash rather than kind, stock markets, bond markets, and public banking. The Meiji Restoration also needs to be considered in the context of imperialism. The Meiji leadership confronted an international order bifurcated between an elite tier of nation-states with colonial holdings and a subordinate class of subjugated colonial possessions. That context made imperialism a logical component of the Meiji state-building project. As a nascent world power, Japan required its own colonial empire.

This chapter describes the Tokugawa status order and its change over time by highlighting its constituent groups and their status-mediating functions. The Tokugawa state relied on locally specific status groups to govern the population. These groups were defined by land and occupation and possessed a high degree of autonomy in regulating their own affairs. The chapter characterizes the most common types of groups – retainer bands, villages, block associations (chō), monastic communities, guilds, and outcaste associations – and explains how status was assigned, expressed, and negotiated between the state and these groups, drawing on notions of occupation, privilege, duty, and household as well as on a system of household registration. The chapter surveys the development of the status order in three stages: the formative period of pacification in the sixteenth and seventeenth century; its maturation under Tokugawa rule; and the conditions and process of its dismantling around the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

In the early modern period, Japan emerged as a key node in global trading networks. While a vast range of goods were traded, Japan’s position was underpinned by the silk-for-silver exchange that acted as a powerful magnet for foreign merchants. This chapter aims to situate Japan within global trade by exploring the underlying commercial dynamic that drove engagement and the crowded commercial landscape that emerged as a result. The focus is, first, on successive challengers including the Portuguese, shuinsen merchants, the Dutch, the English, and the Chinese and, second, on Tokugawa attempts to channel trade through sanctioned pathways while cutting links with any group that might inject volatility into a precariously balanced system. The chapter concludes by examining the Zheng maritime organization, which emerged to challenge the Dutch East India Company for control over trade routes in East and Southeast Asia.

This chapter examines the structure of regional authority in early modern Japan. Its aim is to clarify the nature of the early modern Japanese state. The shogunate delegated authority to autonomous daimyo domains, and both shogunate and domains delegated authority to village heads, who managed their communities with little direct oversight. The system worked well enough to keep the realm generally peaceful and prosperous for 265 years. The chapter begins with a top-down taxonomy of the daimyo domains and other, lesser jurisdictions under the authority of the Tokugawa shogunate. It then moves onto a discussion of village rule, framed in terms of governmentality – that is, the structures through which villagers participated in their own subjecthood to the shogunate and domains. The chapter concludes with a discussion of shared-revenue villages (aikyū mura), which were divided among multiple overlords while retaining a character as singular communities.

The acquisition of “Western knowledge” in late Tokugawa Japan, particularly in fields of science, technology, and medicine, has functioned as a central resource not only in modernization narratives but in the legitimization of imperial geographies that situate Japan as Asia’s rightful hegemon. This chapter brings together emerging research that decenters and pluralizes existing understandings of “Western knowledge,” placing “Western knowledge” instead within broader flows of global modernity. Specifically, by examining how a “transimperial educational commons” rendered diverse new texts and resources available to late Tokugawa scholars, this chapter argues that “Western knowledge” was in fact the product of networks of mediation across South, Southeast, and East Asia. Particular sites considered include circulation and brokerage through Dutch Indonesia and Qing China. The sum of these studies indicates that the problem of late Tokugawa engagements with Western knowledge can only be solved by examining sites both beyond the West and beyond Japan.