Mito And The Politics Of Reform In Early Modern Japan

Download or read book Mito and the Politics of Reform in Early Modern Japan written by Michael Alan Thornton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-01-28 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines early modern Mito, today an ordinary provincial capital on the outskirts of the Tokyo commuter belt, but once the headquarters of Mito Domain, one of the most consequential places in all of Japan. As one of just three senior branches of the Tokugawa family—which ruled over Japan for 260 years—Mito’s ruling family enjoyed unparalleled status and exerted enormous influence throughout its history. In the seventeenth century, its scholars produced some of early modern Japan’s most important historical scholarship. In the eighteenth century, it developed a robust and pragmatic program of reform to confront depopulation and foreign threats. In the nineteenth century, it became the birthplace of a revolutionary ideology that transformed Japan into a modern, imperial nation. The power of these ideas swept across Japan, inspiring activists everywhere to take up the cause of building a new nation—but they also devastated Mito, leading to a brutal civil war that scarred its people for generations. This book complements existing studies of Mito’s ideas by focusing on the history of Mito as a place and telling the stories of Mito’s politicians, reformers, and ordinary people from the beginning of the domain’s history to its end.

Download or read book Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-modern Japan written by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi and published by Harvard Univ Asia Center. This book was released on 1986 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ESSAYS ON THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF THE JAPANESE BETWEEN 1600-1870.

Download or read book Early Modern Japan written by Conrad Totman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995-08 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) that blends political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. It also introduces a fresh ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control.

Download or read book From Country to Nation written by Gideon Fujiwara and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Country to Nation tracks the emergence of the modern Japanese nation in the nineteenth century through the history of some of its local aspirants. It explores how kokugaku (Japan studies) scholars envisioned their place within Japan and the globe, while living in a castle town and domain far north of the political capital. Gideon Fujiwara follows the story of Hirao Rosen and fellow scholars in the northeastern domain of Tsugaru. On discovering a newly "opened" Japan facing the dominant Western powers and a defeated Qing China, Rosen and other Tsugaru intellectuals embraced kokugaku to secure a place for their local "country" within the broader nation and to reorient their native Tsugaru within the spiritual landscape of an Imperial Japan protected by the gods. Although Rosen and his fellows celebrated the rise of Imperial Japan, their resistance to the Western influence and modernity embraced by the Meiji state ultimately resulted in their own disorientation and estrangement. By analyzing their writings—treatises, travelogues, letters, poetry, liturgies, and diaries—alongside their artwork, Fujiwara reveals how this socially diverse group of scholars experienced the Meiji Restoration from the peripheries. Using compelling firsthand accounts, Fujiwara tells the story of the rise of modern Japan, from the perspective of local intellectuals who envisioned their local "country" within a nation that emerged as an empire of the modern world.

Download or read book The Mito Ideology written by J. Victor Koschmann and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Download or read book Women of the Mito Domain written by Kikue Yamakawa and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the recollection of the author's mother, other relatives, and family records, this is a vivid picture of the everyday life of a samurai household in the last years of the Tokugawa period.

Download or read book The Taming of the Samurai written by Eiko Ikegami and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates how Japan's so-called harmonious collective culture is paradoxically connected with a history of conflict. Ikegami contends that contemporary Japanese culture is based upon two remarkably complementary ingredients, honorable competition and honorable collaboration. The historical roots of this situation can be found in the process of state formation, along very different lines from that seen in Europe at around the same time. The solution that emerged out of the turbulent beginnings of the Tokugawa state was a transformation of the samurai into a hereditary class of vassal-bureaucrats, a solution that would have many unexpected ramifications for subsequent centuries.