Book review: Tour of Duty

Bibliographic Data: Vaporis, Constantin Nomikos. Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.

Main Argument: Arguing hyperbolically that the alternate attendance (sankin kôtai) system was not only "the single greatest accomplishment of Japanese leaders, both of the Tokugawa period and of subsequent times" (4) (!) but that it "was without question the single most important institution affecting economic life in Tokugawa Japan" (2), Vaporis contends that besides all this alternate attendance was also instrumental in both the meteoric rise of Edo and in "the shaping of a national culture" (5) in early modern Japan.

( Assignment: Edo )

Critical assessment: This is an interesting book with a wealth of fascinating details that certainly repays reading, even though I definitely don't buy Vaporis' arguments that alternate attendance was the pivotal sociocultural/economic institution of the Tokugawa period. It's certainly worthwhile to consider, in an age in which travel was, if widespread, illicit, one of the few forms of mass travel that was licit, but I'm not sure what the payoff is, if we don't accept Vaporis' arguments, or we don't see why the purported shared culture alternate attendance purportedly enabled is important. Given that Vaporis himself admits that it's difficult to find evidence for circulation of periphery-center cultural diffusion, I'm not sure the study even succeeds in proving its main point--and Vaporis, frustratingly, leaves evidence on the table. The Tokugawa state had three major centers (Kyoto, Osaka, Edo), each specializing in different aspects of life, and there's plenty of evidence for, say, Kyoto==>Edo influence, but none of this is discussed (and indeed, the question of cultural diffusion is left until the final chapter).

The real problem is that, as in Breaking Barriers, Vaporis is far too fond of the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacy, resorting to it whenever he sees examples of co-incidence without ever actually trying to prove causal linkages. Moreover, I'm so over pussy-footing around calling the Tokugawa regime a federal state. It was! It just was. It was a federal state in which a central authority retained some powers for itself and authorized decentralized authorities to hold certain powers within limited areas, and calling it a "compound" or a "hybrid" state or whatever else needlessly obfuscates and I daresay orientalizes the issue. Given, however, that Vaporis denied any possibility of "nation" in the Tokugawa period in Breaking Barriers, perhaps we ought, historiographically speaking, to be glad to take what we can get from him in this regard. Finally, I wish Vaporis had included more comparisons dealing with power and pageantry in Japan to other early modern polities; that would have been incomparably more interesting, and useful, than an argument that he can't and doesn't try to prove. (NB: this is probably impossible because Vaporis can't see the daimyo for what they really were.)

Further reading: Peter Konicki, The Book in Japan; T. George Tsukahira, The Sankin Kotai System of Tokugawa Japan

Meta notes: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is not acceptable as a form of academic reasoning.