Bibliographic Data: Frühstück, Sabine. Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Main Argument: Frühstück is looking at the history of sexuality and sexual knowledge in modern Japan, the revolutions in which she sees as part of a process of colonization. She looks partly at "the obsession with the 'truth about sex' and the use of the phrase as a discursive tool" in contrast to other studies on similar topics, and argues that "as much as negotiations over a modern understanding of sexuality in Japan intersected with concepts of nation and empire building and overlapped with debates about the nature of Japanese culture and the project of modernity, they also functioned to increase the premium placed on scientific-mindedness" (5). Ultimately, this process of colonization produced modern subjects whose sexualities were regulated and disciplined via state power and who thus were proper constituents of the body politic.

Historiographical Engagement: Garon, Molding Japanese Minds

( Colonizing sex, somehow )

Critical assessment: This book is fine, but I actually disagree with Tom Laqueur that it is a better book than Pflugfelder's. Frühstück is bad at organizing her chapters and she never actually says what she means by the "colonization of sex." Moreover, unlike Pflugfelder, Frühstück lacks a theory of discourse through which to interpret her conclusions; she has Bourdieu and Foucault, but they are apparently not enough for her to talk about how sex was being constructed explicitly (which is not quite the same complaint as the preceding sentence? or possibly it is). I feel like a European blundering through premodern Cairo--there's no system, no place from which to secure a vantage point and observe.

Further reading: Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire; Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt; Masters of Sex

Bibliographic Data: Tonomura, Hitomi. “Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval Japan.” The American Historical Review 99:1 (February 1, 1994): 129–154.

Main Argument: Tonomura is looking at the Konjaku monogatari to provide "analysis of the kinds of social scripts that probably influenced the perceptions of gendered relations, especially in areas of sexual practices and sexuality" (132). In other words, she is reading these tales to detect traces of the process by which patriarchy was instantiated in Japan over the course of several centuries, in effect trying to diagnose where that process was at in the early (12thC) medieval period.

Argument, Sources, Examples Although the KM stories are more even-handed in their treatment of gender relations, gendered bodies, and sexual mores than might be thought, Tonomura notes that "the compiler's comments attached to the narratives frequently reduce women to an essentialized category and set up boundaries within which female sexuality must remain" (133). Marriage is still an amorphous institution, and was not necessarily male-centered; at this time there was also apparently no concept of rape as a crime, not even against a woman's male family members, let alone against the woman herself; when assaults occur, the crime is in how the victim's clothes (symbolic of her social position) are treated. Similarly, there is no concept of adultery, and the impropriety of men "taking" women is directly related to their class; "high-ranking aristocratic men seem incapable of violating women" (152). At the same time, patriarchy is visible in the fact that male characters' faults are theirs alone while the faults of female characters engender pontificating on the flawed nature of women. Even this is not a complete process, however, as Tonomura notes; "in these tales, 'the feminine' is problematized and sometimes negatively coded, but it is not yet established as a consistent, uniform, and stable category" (138). Although there is no discourse of virginity or purity, it is noteworthy that men are desirable in toto while the desirable female body is discussed in parts. Relatedly, Tonomura observes that "a sense of collective male identity is reinforced through the sharing of a common male culture centered on the penis," surely the ancestor of the phallocentric culture of the Edo period (144). Indeed, phallocentrism is already visible in the fact that "the text privileges the male sex organ and makes it the cornerstone of a sexual system for both sexes," meaning that "female desire and pleasure disconnected from men fall outside the range of epistemological possibilities" (148). And while men's bodies share in the collapse of power and vulnerability in the genitalia that female characters also experience, "female bodies are inscribed with clearly chaining values and significance according to their age," and they serve, when decomposing "as a pedagogical symbol, a medium through which to convey the Buddhist messages of impermanence" (144, 145). Similarly, female desires are internally generated while men are lured into desire by women; conveniently enough, desire for women "can be a gateway to greater achievement in the Way of the Buddha" (147). Tonomura concludes that

Women in the Konjaku, however, are burdened with the task of managing both their own sexuality and men's basic instincts, not because women are associated with reason but because they have the power to entice men. Consequently, cultural construction rests heavily on the female's shoulders, complicating the anthropological metanarrative that equates men with culture and women with nature. (154)

Bibliographic Data: Colcutt, Martin. “The Zen Monastery in Kamakura Society.” In Court and Bakufu in Japan: Essays in Kamakura History, ed. Jeffrey P. Mass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 [1982]: 191-220.

Main Argument: This paper attempts to elucidate the cause of Zen's meteoric rise in Japan in the Kamakura period "by focusing on the sponsorship of Rinzai Zen, especially the monasteries of Kenchôji and Engakuji" (192). That patronage was mainly from the warrior elite for several reasons relating to their new position vis-a-vis old power holders such as the temple complexes and the imperial court, but it is important to note that their interest was not purely in enlightenment: Zen was attractive partly because it was controllable, and warrior elites did not patronize it exclusively.

Argument, Sources, Examples In terms of the question of who patronized Zen in the Kamakura period, "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that its growth in Japan was due largely to sponsorship by the elite: the Hôjô and the powerful warriors heading the Kamakura Bakufu, the upper echelons of provincial warrior society, and emperors and members of the Imperial Court," partly because Zen studies demanded a high degree of education (199), especially initially. Why? Zen was socially stable (i.e. its adherents had no complaints against the current political order), and for the Hôjô and the warrior elite, its very newness (i.e. not entwined with older aristocratic power structures) was also favorable. It also offered greater chances for advancement to the scions of those warrior elite than did the established temple complexes. Finally, it was a conduit for the transmission of the culture of the Song literati, the mastery of which could also give warriors cultural cachet equal to the members of the aristocracy. And because the Zen monasteries adopted wholesale the highly developed administrative systems of Chan monasteries in China, they were able to make effective use of the rights within the shôen system that their official patrons procured for them.

Bibliographic Data: Mass, Jeffrey P. “Jitō Land Possession in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of Shitaji Chūbun.” In Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History, edited by John W. Hall and Jeffrey P. Mass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 [1974]: 157-83.

Main Argument: "…beginning in the 1180s the country's non-military absentee proprietors ere forced to absorb into their estates management-level warrior-officers over whom they had no direct control. It was this immunity of the jitô as a vassal of Kamakura that set the stage for the thirteenth century's endemic central-local struggles over land" (157).

Argument, Sources, Examples There were two types of jitô: "those who were longtime residents in their appointment areas, and those who were newly intruded from the outside" (157). Many "confirmatory" jitô were local myôshu who had been invested as "shôen officers" (shôshi); at the same time, most of the great warrior families of the East held their lands outside the shôen system of immunities and so were willing to participate in the bakufu's new system of stewardship, which did confer immunity. In the West, however, things were different; "the basic clash of interests that highlights the 13thC thus became one between Kantô-born jitô and central proprietors of western province estates" (160), often in the form of their personally appointed azukari dokoro, a kind of local deputy. This led to a situation in which "the traditional hierarchy of more or less vertical tenures had now flattened out and divided into two roughly parallel tracks of authority" (163). By the middle of the 13thC, the Kyoto proprietors were on the defensive, evolving such practices as wayo (compromise) and ukesho (receipt guarantees) to try to stanch the bleeding, with the ultimate effect that central powers of proprietorship began to devolve back to the land. Shitaji chûbun, estate division, was a last-ditch strategy to fend off jitô predations. When divisions did occur, moreover, they often did so synthetically rather than naturally, as the shôen as a unit was resistant to such easy territorial breakup. By the end of the 14thC, shugo had totally displaced proprietors and jitô as the final authority at the provincial level, rendering shitaji chûbun obsolete. Sources: Documents. All the documents.

Bibliographic Data: Shapinsky, Peter D. “With the Sea as Their Domain: Pirates and Maritime Lordship in Medieval Japan.” In Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed.y Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003: 221-38.

Main Argument: Shapinsky argues that the "sea lords" of the 15th and 16thC "became integral elements of the 16thC Japanese political and economic order and came to play a vital role in the functioning of the maritime networks of violence and exchange that connected Japan to the wider East Asian maritime world" (224). These sea lords did so by exercising "sea tenure," namely "control over access to the sea and the tools of maritime production such as ships, salterns, and fishing gear" (223). However, they did so in competition with traditional land-based authorities, with the result that "modes of sea tenure thus included both the regulations of state-level entities and the customary practices of local littoral inhabitants" (ibid).

Argument, Sources, Examples Shapinsky argues that the "terracentric" biases of historians and sources have heretofore masked the activity of sea lord-bands in lord-vassal binaries, but that a better rubric is patron-client relationships, which "allows the historian to represent both the autonomy and agency of the sea-lord bands and the land-based patrons' expectations for loyal service" (226). Sea lords thus appropriated and manipulated land-based discourse to gain recognition of their status as equal to that of warrior elites. It is important to recognize that the activities of sea lords were enabled by the disintegration of traditional political authority in the archipelago at the same time as a medieval commercial revolution occurred, rendering the sea a vastly faster and more reliable means of transporting goods and conducting commerce. Sea lords took advantage of this fact to profitably exercise sea tenure: among other activities, they set up fortified toll barriers at various maritime chokepoints and charged tolls to pass; they charged for escort by members of bands or by ships; they charged for safe passage; and in the final half of the 16thC, they sold safe passage flags outright, as their authority at sea eclipsed even that of the unifiers. These practices were productive for commerce as well as predatory. After 1600, however, the new national government brought them to heel, and their day passed.

Bibliographic Data: Nagahara Keiji. “Landownership under the Shōen-Kokugaryō System.” Journal of Japanese Studies 1:2 (April 1, 1975): 269–96.

Main Argument: The shôen-kokugaryô system began to emerge from the ritsuryô system in the 11thC as a multi-layered system of ownership over land. By the C13, difficulties in maintaining cadastral surveys meant that more and more "public" paddies fell into private hands, becoming the basis for peasant landownership. "The multi-layered shiki formed the basis of positions and of rights for both the higher level proprietary lords and the lower level proprietary lords in shôen and in kokugaryô" (287). Under this system, higher level proprietary lords received the lion's share of the profits. Shiki, however, were distributed geographically and did not confer the power to command persons, indicating their limited development. Under this system, however, peasants held cultivation rather than landowning rights, reflecting their underdevelopment, mirroring that of local lords; thus, the shiki were supported by the authority of the central government during this period. The system foundered because local proprietary lords grew in power, because peasant landholding rights strengthened, and the shiki system disintegrated.

Bibliographic Data: Hevia, James L. The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Main Argument: Hevia states at the beginning that "the Indian Army Intelligence Branch, and the forms of knowledge it produced, is the focus of this study. The records of the Branch, its library, archives and correspondence, make quite clear the scope and depth of the epistemological project at the core of British imperialism" (2). Hevia argues "that military intelligence was a product of the new mechanisms of state formation, the disciplinary and regulatory regimes, to use Michel Foucault's terms, that transformed European states in the second half of the nineteenth century into militarized polities" (5). Hevia argues that studying the imperial intelligence apparatus leads one to appreciate "the role of the military in initiation, influencing, and implementing policy" (16). Also, "military intelligence not only framed imperial strategies vis-a-vis colonized areas to the east, but produced the very object of intervention: Asia itself" (ibid).

( Imperial security )

Critical assessment: James Hevia's English Lessons is easily one of the best books I've read in graduate school, and I'm not surprised to be saying that this is another excellent study, although somewhat more restricted in scope. But the final chapter in particular brings it all home brilliantly--how empire perpetuates itself after its death, how colonial processes are turned on the metropole and vice versa, how no knowledge is ever neutral or apolitical and how history has real consequences. Brilliant.

Further reading: Hevia, English Lessons; Kipling, Kim; Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Charles Callwell, Small Wars

Meta notes: In the current phase of this story, we should all be very clear that we in the metropole are not the British Army intelligence officers, but rather the Chinese--and the subjects of these regimes in Asia and elsewhere are still subject to them, in an evolved form.

Bibliographic Data: Fan, Fa-Ti. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Main Argument: This book "attempts to explain how Western (especially British) naturalists in China and their Chinese 'associates' explored, studied, and represented China's natural world in both local and global contexts" (2), employing the concept of "contact zone" or "borderlands" to "denote the intersecting zone between the temporal and spatial trajectories of peoples of different geographic origins, cultures, and histories" (3).

Historiographical Engagement:  Empire theorists and historians, naturalists, historians of science

( British naturalists in Qing China )

Critical assessment: I wish this book were longer and went into more detail, and that some of my favorite books on the same general topic, such as Hevia's English Lessons, had been around for him to reference and dialogue with when he was writing. That said, it's excellent, both for the dimensions it illuminates and for his insistence that reading the process of empire as entirely one-sided is incorrect.

Further reading: Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons; James Hevia, The Imperial Security State

Meta notes: No man is an empire, entire of itself.

Bibliographic Data: Mullaney, Thomas S. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Main Argument:

These differences in ethnotaxonomy [from the Qing to the Republic to the PRC] cannot be accounted for at the level of the categorized. Rather, what changed over the course of this period were the ethnopolitical worldviews of the different Chinese regimes, the modes and methods of categorization they employed, and the political commitments that guided their respective efforts to reconceptualize China in the postimperial era. There was no single “search for a nation in modern Chinese nationalism”—rather, there were searches, in the plural. (3)

Historiographical Engagement: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State; others

( Finding the minzu in modern China )

Critical assessment: Mullaney is a really smart dude, and therefore it's doubly frustrating that this book is so short. I am reliably informed that he knows a lot more about this topic than he actually says in the book, and even aside from that, he gestures towards some really interesting ideas in his introduction that are never picked up again in the book--indeed, he never pursues most of the interesting implications of his ideas. So, I think he is substantially correct as far as he goes, but this is a short book, and if I were an editor, I would have asked him for the missing 1/3 of the manuscript before I published it.

Further reading: Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China

Bibliographic Data: Smith, Thomas C. The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.

Main Argument: In the Tokugawa period across Japan, cooperative farming was displaced by individual family arming, and the individual family "clearly emerged as the center of production organization and economic interest" (ix). The most important cause of this was the growth of the market, which was disruptive. In general, these changes show that Japanese agriculture is dynamic, not sempiternally fixed, and that changes in farming during the Tokugawa period were the very opposite of regressive.

( Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan )

Critical assessment: Tom Smith, ladies and gentlemen. Tom Smith. Fifty-five years on and this book has barely aged--some of the details are sketchy, and see my comments for the question of rural immiseration in the Meiji period and after, but all in all, working mostly from sketchy and unevenly published documents cited in other people's works, he laid it out, and got it right.

Further reading: Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan; Smith, Nakahara; Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization

Bibliographic Data: Noreña, Carlos F. Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Main Argument: This book argues that, in the period 69-235 CE, "the dissemination of specific imperial ideals was more pervasive than previously thought, and indicates a high degree of ideological unification amongst the aristocracies of the western provinces. The widespread circulation of a particular set of imperial ideals, and the particular form of ideological unification that this brought about, not only reinforced the power of the Roman imperial state, but also increased the authority of local aristocrats, thereby facilitating a general convergence of social power that defined the high Roman empire" (frontispiece).

( Ideals in circulation )

Critical assessment: It's useless to pretend that I am any kind of objective about this book, as Noreña is a professor of mine, and in my opinion one of the best in our department. So, both by training and inclination, I think he's largely right here, and I think it's interesting to see in particular, in the epigraphy/coinage divergence beginning with Commodus, some of the ancestry of the transformation of the emperorship after the 3rdC crisis.

Further reading: Syme, The Roman Revolution; Grey, Constructing Community in the Late Roman Countryside

Meta notes: "…systematic exploitation on the grand scale is consistent with the logic and normative claims of ideals and values to which many of us still subscribe" (324).

Bibliographic Data: Fagan, Garret. The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Main Argument: Any answer to the question of "why did the Romans watch the games?" "requires due consideration of human psychology, once it is properly set against the Romans' historical context" (2). Sociological explanations for the appeal of the Roman games are not enough, as the Romans were by no means the only people to enjoy this kind of spectacle. Fagan argues "that an explanation for the transcultural and transhistorical appeal of violent spectacle must be sought in human psychology and, on the other, that appreciation of the psychology in turn depends our understanding of the Roman experience" (ibid).

( Games and why people watched them )
Critical assessment: I really like Fagan's work in general, and this is an excellent book which I basically completely agree with.

Meta notes: "The nexus of patronage, indeed, was pretty much how everything got done in ancient Rome, and the ability to attend games was no exception" (115).

Bibliographic Data: Ravina, Mark. Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Main Argument: There was "a simple fact of early modern politics" in Japan: "the shogunate was peripheral to broad areas of political practice" (2). Furthermore, for a lord, "the moral and economic rejuvenation of his domain" were "the areas where shogunal control and oversight were weakest," at least in the case of the so-called "kunimochi" domains, which were granted a degree of autonomy and prestige not available to most of the 240-odd other daimyo. It is no coincidence that four kunimochi domains (Satsuma, Chôshû, Tosa, and Saga) overthrew the shogunate, but the fact that so many domains were passive in the Restoration points to the federal nature of the system: having ceded diplomatic and "foreign policy" prerogatives to Edo, "daimyo were both fiercely protective of local autonomy and dependent on their union [with Edo] for survival" (15). This "federal" union was the first and indeed the necessary casualty of the Meiji Restoration.

( Three domains, three stories )

Critical assessment: This is an excellent book, and I cannot overstate the degree to which I agree with Ravina's final conclusions.

Further reading: Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery

Meta notes: I cannot overstate the degree to which the United States are is weird historically. The proper comparands for Japan are not the United States but the countries of Europe.

Bibliographic Data: Bowen, Roger W. Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Main Argument: This study attempts to take the people who participated in the violent incidents (gekka jiken) of the Freedom & Popular Rights era seriously, arguing that they "were rebellions, not only in the sense that their goal was 'liberation' from certain economic and political injustices, but also in the sense that they were less than revolutionary in effect (as opposed to intent), or, from another perspective, they were revolutions which failed in the attempt to establish a 'foundation of freedom'" (5).

( Freedom & Popular Rights )

Critical assessment: This is a massive book, perhaps needlessly so, but it's quite good, particularly considering the period in which it was written. Bowen does an excellent job of restoring agency and intelligence to the farmers who rose up to demand their rights in the 1880s, whose actions should not be consigned to the category of "failure," or lightly forgotten.

Further reading: Gordon, Imperial Democracy; Kim Kyu Hyun, The Age of Visions and Arguments

Meta notes: But the human microphone will find a voice/And a change is gonna come/Said the signal to the–