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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Nenzi, Laura. Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.
Main Argument: With the goal of examining the ways that moden travel intersected with "life in and around the floating world," Nenzi argues that travel in the early modern period became "an active stage" on which meaning could be produced, "in sharp contrast to the predominantly static spaces of the ordinary" (1, 2). In turn, the work of travelers on this stage created what Nenzi calls a "cartography of self-assertion on the part of the individual," noting that women travelers "seemed particularly devoted to the search for validation in preferred sites of lyrical authority and gendered power" (2, 4).
Historiographical Engagement: Nenzi's work explicitly engages with that of Marcia Yonemoto, Constantin Vaporis, and Jilly Traganou; Berry's Japan in Print is in her bibliography, but one suspects that she didn't have time to fully incorporate Berry's conclusions into her own work. Her departure point is explicitly the last chapter in Vaporis' Breaking Barriers, focusing on the view of travel from within (travelers) rather than from without. Additionally, Nenzi draws on the extensive literature about travel across academic disciplines at will.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The introduction begins by declaring that "the Edo Period (1600-1868) was the age of movement par excellence" (1) and then offers a brief overview of the argument before going on to note that her book offers a traveler-oriented study of travel that refuses to draw a line between tourism and pilgrimage (obverse and reverse of the same coin). Finally, Nenzi notes that her "map" (used in a very broad sense)-centered history makes it clear that "the open road offered travelers across the social spectrum a platform to re-create themselves through a variety of means, some elaborate and some quick and easy" (9).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples "The spatial interpretations and representations of religious and lyrical discourse more or less directly challenged the monopoly that the Tokugawa strove to enforce upon the landscape. By complicating the picture, they paved the way for alternative modes of engagement with the spaces of travel" (43). Intersecting and proliferating interpretive frames allowed travelers to choose how to perceive their surroundings, interacting with those surroundings personally. "The continuous remapping of space and redrawing of boundaries…made landscapes into multilayered entities" (45).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the intersection of travel and gender in the Edo period, arguing that "in its attempt to simultaneously regulate mobility, status, and gender [on inequalities of which the Tokugawa order rested], Edo officialdom erected barriers that, in the name of autonomy or of economic necessity, relgious discourse helped to topple" (66). Travelers included women learned to define their experience flexibly and pragmatically so as to be able to accomplish their own personal goals, "exploiting the polysemy of the landscape. The many disjunctions between theory and practice allowed them [women especially] to negotiate their position, while the competition between opposing logics empowered them to justify their mobility" (67).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter offers an overview of restrictions on and opportunities for mobility faced by women over the Heian and medieval periods before outlining some of the strategies Edo women used to make travel available to themselves: taking the tonsure, disguise (including cross-dressing), and subterfuge. Nenzi argues that "more and more women began to see their bodies and their movements as sites of contestation and as platforms for temporary liberation and even audacious acts of self-assertion" (91).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses on the travel diaries of women travelers in particular, arguing that the conjunction of non-quotidian circumstances and "a creative cultural act (the composition of the a diary) offered the possibility of modifying roles and identities by tweaking concepts of gender and status (in both the social and professional sense) that defined the individual at home" (92). Women travelers of different status used their diaries for different ends, the possibilities of which expanded by the end of the period to include merchant women as well.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Examining "such classics of travel fiction as Shank's Mare (Tôkaidôchû hizakurige)" (139), the boom in the commercial publishing industry in the Edo period "reconceptualized movements and spaces yet again, promoting old and new landscapes by virtue of their services and consumer-friendly standards. …the birth of a consumer culture allowed a number of locations to overcome their exclusion from the maps of legal, religious, and lyrical discourse" (140).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples By the late Edo period, the commercialization of travel and the rise of consumer culture had emerged such that money became a mediator between time and space, "defining and redefining the worth of sites while shaping the travelers' perception of, and engagement with, many a landscape" (163). Consequently, extensive cultural capital was no longer required to appreciate travel and the sites one visited on travel, only money, whether by travelers themselves or by people who did not travel at all.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples "As sites where renewal could be experienced at the immediate physical level and where re-creation could take the form of instant gratification, brothels and baths loomed large on the maps of Edo period travelers. Though frivolous on the surface, bodily engagements with the sites of travel in fact sustained new and complex ways of relating to, taming, and internalizing the unfamiliar. … Not only geographies and identities, but also bodies were re-created as a result of travel." (185, 168)
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In this rather brief conclusion, after taking a swipe at modern tourism ("redolent as it is of superficiality and conformisim, of shallow Kodak moments and obviouls crows corralled between one attraction and the next" (189)), Nenzi goes on to argue that "the many mutations of the spaces of travel tell the story of a fluid system of hierarchies developing against a political and ideological background that theoretically allowed little room for contestation. …if there is indeed an element of irony in making arguments about a society based on the stories of those who stepped out of it for a while, so be it. The travelers of the floating world would crack a smile and move on." (190)
Critical assessment: This is one of the stronger studies I read for my class on "the spatial turn" in Edo historiography last semester; one of the true virtues of Nenzi's book is her unabashed foregrounding of questions of gender and how it affected travelers and their experiences, as opposed to (as is so often the case) shoehorning it in at the end or not dealing with it systematically at all. I think she finds a reasonable middle ground between hyperbolic claims about the freedom travel afforded women and grim assessments of women's lack of freedom to travel or indeed to do anything in the Edo period, which have been rather the common assessment among interested historians.
That said, she does get carried away by her sources at times; travel simply cannot have been quite as subversive as she seems to think it was, if only because so many people indulged in it over the course of the period without the Tokugawa regime falling into ruin. There's a difference between escapism and subversion that Nenzi seems not to heed, and in addition, although I do think the Edo period was undoubtedly fairly fluid, particularly in terms of status distinctions, as time wore on, characterizing the entire Edo period (which, commendably, Nenzi does not collapse into one ahistorical moment) as "the floating world" is misrepresentative. It's modernity, after all, in which all that's solid melts into air, but there's little sense of that distinction in Nenzi's limpid writing.
Still, with these caveats, this is a very good book, peppered with very enjoyable accounts of and by women travelers throughout.
Further reading: Jilly Traganou, The Tôkaidô Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan; Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire
Meta notes: One gets the sense from reading this book, as well as Japan in Print, that aspects of the early modern Japanese city/informationscape may well have offered an experience that is the analog analogy to today's Google Maps. I'm not sure what to do with this insight, but it's definitely worth bearing in mind.
"Shank's mare" is a colloquialism meaning "on foot."
Main Argument: With the goal of examining the ways that moden travel intersected with "life in and around the floating world," Nenzi argues that travel in the early modern period became "an active stage" on which meaning could be produced, "in sharp contrast to the predominantly static spaces of the ordinary" (1, 2). In turn, the work of travelers on this stage created what Nenzi calls a "cartography of self-assertion on the part of the individual," noting that women travelers "seemed particularly devoted to the search for validation in preferred sites of lyrical authority and gendered power" (2, 4).
Historiographical Engagement: Nenzi's work explicitly engages with that of Marcia Yonemoto, Constantin Vaporis, and Jilly Traganou; Berry's Japan in Print is in her bibliography, but one suspects that she didn't have time to fully incorporate Berry's conclusions into her own work. Her departure point is explicitly the last chapter in Vaporis' Breaking Barriers, focusing on the view of travel from within (travelers) rather than from without. Additionally, Nenzi draws on the extensive literature about travel across academic disciplines at will.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The introduction begins by declaring that "the Edo Period (1600-1868) was the age of movement par excellence" (1) and then offers a brief overview of the argument before going on to note that her book offers a traveler-oriented study of travel that refuses to draw a line between tourism and pilgrimage (obverse and reverse of the same coin). Finally, Nenzi notes that her "map" (used in a very broad sense)-centered history makes it clear that "the open road offered travelers across the social spectrum a platform to re-create themselves through a variety of means, some elaborate and some quick and easy" (9).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples "The spatial interpretations and representations of religious and lyrical discourse more or less directly challenged the monopoly that the Tokugawa strove to enforce upon the landscape. By complicating the picture, they paved the way for alternative modes of engagement with the spaces of travel" (43). Intersecting and proliferating interpretive frames allowed travelers to choose how to perceive their surroundings, interacting with those surroundings personally. "The continuous remapping of space and redrawing of boundaries…made landscapes into multilayered entities" (45).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the intersection of travel and gender in the Edo period, arguing that "in its attempt to simultaneously regulate mobility, status, and gender [on inequalities of which the Tokugawa order rested], Edo officialdom erected barriers that, in the name of autonomy or of economic necessity, relgious discourse helped to topple" (66). Travelers included women learned to define their experience flexibly and pragmatically so as to be able to accomplish their own personal goals, "exploiting the polysemy of the landscape. The many disjunctions between theory and practice allowed them [women especially] to negotiate their position, while the competition between opposing logics empowered them to justify their mobility" (67).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter offers an overview of restrictions on and opportunities for mobility faced by women over the Heian and medieval periods before outlining some of the strategies Edo women used to make travel available to themselves: taking the tonsure, disguise (including cross-dressing), and subterfuge. Nenzi argues that "more and more women began to see their bodies and their movements as sites of contestation and as platforms for temporary liberation and even audacious acts of self-assertion" (91).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses on the travel diaries of women travelers in particular, arguing that the conjunction of non-quotidian circumstances and "a creative cultural act (the composition of the a diary) offered the possibility of modifying roles and identities by tweaking concepts of gender and status (in both the social and professional sense) that defined the individual at home" (92). Women travelers of different status used their diaries for different ends, the possibilities of which expanded by the end of the period to include merchant women as well.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Examining "such classics of travel fiction as Shank's Mare (Tôkaidôchû hizakurige)" (139), the boom in the commercial publishing industry in the Edo period "reconceptualized movements and spaces yet again, promoting old and new landscapes by virtue of their services and consumer-friendly standards. …the birth of a consumer culture allowed a number of locations to overcome their exclusion from the maps of legal, religious, and lyrical discourse" (140).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples By the late Edo period, the commercialization of travel and the rise of consumer culture had emerged such that money became a mediator between time and space, "defining and redefining the worth of sites while shaping the travelers' perception of, and engagement with, many a landscape" (163). Consequently, extensive cultural capital was no longer required to appreciate travel and the sites one visited on travel, only money, whether by travelers themselves or by people who did not travel at all.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples "As sites where renewal could be experienced at the immediate physical level and where re-creation could take the form of instant gratification, brothels and baths loomed large on the maps of Edo period travelers. Though frivolous on the surface, bodily engagements with the sites of travel in fact sustained new and complex ways of relating to, taming, and internalizing the unfamiliar. … Not only geographies and identities, but also bodies were re-created as a result of travel." (185, 168)
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In this rather brief conclusion, after taking a swipe at modern tourism ("redolent as it is of superficiality and conformisim, of shallow Kodak moments and obviouls crows corralled between one attraction and the next" (189)), Nenzi goes on to argue that "the many mutations of the spaces of travel tell the story of a fluid system of hierarchies developing against a political and ideological background that theoretically allowed little room for contestation. …if there is indeed an element of irony in making arguments about a society based on the stories of those who stepped out of it for a while, so be it. The travelers of the floating world would crack a smile and move on." (190)
Critical assessment: This is one of the stronger studies I read for my class on "the spatial turn" in Edo historiography last semester; one of the true virtues of Nenzi's book is her unabashed foregrounding of questions of gender and how it affected travelers and their experiences, as opposed to (as is so often the case) shoehorning it in at the end or not dealing with it systematically at all. I think she finds a reasonable middle ground between hyperbolic claims about the freedom travel afforded women and grim assessments of women's lack of freedom to travel or indeed to do anything in the Edo period, which have been rather the common assessment among interested historians.
That said, she does get carried away by her sources at times; travel simply cannot have been quite as subversive as she seems to think it was, if only because so many people indulged in it over the course of the period without the Tokugawa regime falling into ruin. There's a difference between escapism and subversion that Nenzi seems not to heed, and in addition, although I do think the Edo period was undoubtedly fairly fluid, particularly in terms of status distinctions, as time wore on, characterizing the entire Edo period (which, commendably, Nenzi does not collapse into one ahistorical moment) as "the floating world" is misrepresentative. It's modernity, after all, in which all that's solid melts into air, but there's little sense of that distinction in Nenzi's limpid writing.
Still, with these caveats, this is a very good book, peppered with very enjoyable accounts of and by women travelers throughout.
Further reading: Jilly Traganou, The Tôkaidô Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan; Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire
Meta notes: One gets the sense from reading this book, as well as Japan in Print, that aspects of the early modern Japanese city/informationscape may well have offered an experience that is the analog analogy to today's Google Maps. I'm not sure what to do with this insight, but it's definitely worth bearing in mind.
"Shank's mare" is a colloquialism meaning "on foot."