1st Edition
Interdisciplinary Edo Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Modern Japan
Interdisciplinary Edo brings together scholars from across the methodological spectrum to explore new approaches to innovative humanistic research on early modern Japan (1603-1868). It makes an intervention in the field by thinking across conventional disciplinary boundaries toward a holistic and cohesive approach to Japan’s early modern period. By taking historical, religious, literary, and art historical analyses into account, the contributors hope to begin a new, transdisciplinary conversation on political formation, social interaction, and cultural proliferation under the “Great Peace” of the Tokugawa regime.
This book comprises fourteen essays by specialists of history, literature, religious studies, and art history. Major topics include Edo-period Japan’s cultural, intellectual, and economic connections to the early modern world; environmental humanities and material culture; popular culture and aesthetics; and the question of how contemporary academic demarcation lines impact the current study of Tokugawa Japan. Individual essays range in scale from individual paintings and works of prose fiction to the tectonic plates underlying the Yamashiro basin, and span topics from overseas medicinal exchange and premodern cartography to the history of intoxication.
Interdisciplinary Edo will be of immediate interest to all scholars focusing on the early modern period, as well as to researchers studying other periods of Japanese studies. As part of an ongoing and inclusive process of pluralizing and deprovincializing global conceptions of early modernity, this book will contribute to historiographical interventions outside Japan studies as well.
1. Introduction: Doing Interdisciplinary Edo
Joshua Schlachet and William C. Hedberg
Part I: Interconnected Edo—Global Roots and Routes of Early Modern Japan
2. The Buddhist World Map in Edo Print Culture:
Religious Vision in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
D. Max Moerman
3. What Was Dutch in Early Modern Japan?
Claire E. Cooper
4. Nonsense, Gibberish, and Scribble:
Playing with Foreign Languages and Re-Orienting Epistemic Regimes
Drisana Misra
5. Ocean Influences: Managing Risk in Coastal Shipping
Jakobina Arch
Part II: Objects and Ideas—Crosscurrents in Material and Intellectual Culture
6. The Environmental and Material Foundations of Kyoto
Morgan Pitelka
7. Seeing History: Warrior Images in Late Edo Popular Culture
Hilary K. Snow
8. Ninety-Nineteenth Bottles of Wine:
Objects, Affects, and Intoxication in Shikitei Sanba’s Namaei Katagi
Dylan McGee
Part III: Popular Culture and Aesthetics—How Serious Was Play in Edo Japan?
9. Poetry, Natural Wonders, and Changing Perception in Tokugawa Japan
Nobuko Toyosawa
10. New Bracken and Flying Hover Flies and the Expanding Universe of Painting in Late Eighteenth-Century Japan
Chelsea Foxwell
11. Against Popularization: Anti-Populist Currents in Edo-Period Literati Culture
Yoshitaka Yamamoto
Part IV: Edo After Edo— What is ‘Early Modern,’ ‘Japanese,’ and ‘Cultural’ About
Early Modern Japanese Culture?
12. The Modern Discovery of Fūryū in Twentieth Century Japan
Jingyi Li
13. Histories of Periodization: Demarcations, Blurred Boundaries, and New Perspectives
Christina Laffin
14. Modern Predicaments and Forgotten Enlightenment:
Towards a Post-Post-Colonial Humanity (In Honor of Tetsuo Najita)
Katsuya Hirano, Translated by N.H. Wimpey
15. The Always Already (But Maybe Not Quite) Pre-Postmodern Edo
Christopher Smith
16. Conclusion: Should Japanese Studies Be Disciplined?
Joshua Schlachet and William C. Hedberg
Biography
Joshua Schlachet is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, where he teaches courses on Japanese history, dietary cultures, and everyday life. He is a historian of early modern Japan, specializing in the cultural history of food and nourishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His monograph in progress, Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan, examines the emergence of dietary common knowledge and its engagement with social hierarchy, economic productivity, and moral cultivation.
William C. Hedberg is an Associate Professor of Japanese literature at Arizona State University. His primary focus is the Japanese reception of Chinese fiction and drama during the early modern period, and he is the author of The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon (2019). His current research project focuses on the literature and culture of travel in Edo-period Japan, with special emphasis on Japanese perceptions of the Manchu conquest of the Ming.
