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One notable characteristic of the Iwakura Mission was, in Tanaka Akira's words, its historical and cultural "continuity in discontinuity." While its leaders were mostly from the aristocracy and the powerful Satsuma and Chōshū domains with little experience in the West, the secretaries who assisted them were former Tokugawa retainers that were experts in foreign affairs. The ryūgakusei , or overseas students, who were in the United States or Europe prior to the mission's arrival and joined them on site, were another group that exemplified the "continuity." Reform-minded daimyo and the progressive members of the Tokugawa regime had dispatched many to the West during the Tokugawa period with the very purpose to become useful servants to assist Japan's quick and successful modernization. Once recruited to the mission, these ryūgakusei served as guides, interpreters, and investigators, collecting and compiling information on various institutions and policies in the respective countries. The knowledge, experience, and linguistic skills they had acquired and the network they created while abroad were vital in facilitating the Iwakura Mission and the new Meiji government's subsequent effort of modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the challenges and complexities of defining the terms "religion" and "esotericism" in the context of academic research. It highlights the lack of consensus among scholars and the motivations behind defining these terms. The authors argue that instead of seeking rigid definitions, it is more fruitful to explore the historical and cultural entanglements of these concepts. They emphasize the importance of context-dependent fluidity in understanding these terms and suggest that confusion can provide valuable insights. [Extracted from the article]

The English East India Company's (EIC) enterprise in Japan (1613–1623) is widely recognized as a failure. Scholars of the English-speaking world have emphasized the lack of vendible commodities, the EIC traders' mismanagement, and Japanese hostility towards Christianity. Nevertheless, these narratives often overlook the political and strategic interests of Japan, in the era of political uncertainty after the long warring-states period. This paper re-examines the EIC traders' records against recent studies on Japanese politics. The careful observations of political movements surrounding the Siege of Osaka (1614–1615) reveal how the EIC traders were involved in the dynamics of Japanese history. Within the framework of mercantile connections supported by "mutual benefits," the present study demonstrates how the EIC gradually faced difficulties as the Japanese interests shifted, thus arguing that not only European overseas activity but also the active endeavor of the Asian counterparts significantly influenced global interactions of the early seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early modern Japan, the Buddhist monopoly on death-related rituals eventually triggered a movement for the development of Shintō funerals. Based on an analysis of ritual texts produced by several Shintō groups—Yoshida Shintō, Yoshikawa Shintō, Suika Shintō, and Kokugaku Shintō—this study delineates how each group adopted and localized Confucian discourses to establish Shintō funerals during the Edo period. While there were Buddhist overtones in the practices of Yoshida Shintō, clergy from the other three groups frequently borrowed from Confucian rituals in their construction of Shintō-style funerals. Attempting to revive ancient Japanese funerary rites, scholars created Shintō versions of Confucian-style spirit tablets and justified Confucian rituals by invoking the practices of the kami. This study provides a deeper understanding of the history of Shintō funerals, and the inherent Shintōization of Confucian practices therein, while also exploring the relationship between Buddhist, Confucian, and Shintō thought in Edo-period Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts is the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States. It was established in 1799 by sea captains from Salem who wanted to educate their fellow citizens about navigation and trade in the East Indies. The museum's collection includes a variety of artifacts from cultures beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, including Japanese art. The recently installed permanent exhibition, Japanomania! Japanese Art Goes Global, explores the relationship between Japan and the West through objects made in Japan for foreign patrons. The exhibition covers a period beginning with the arrival of Portuguese traders in 1542 and continues until the end of the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1860s. The exhibition at the Peabody-Essex Museum showcases the influence of Japanese design on the West, highlighting the hybrid designs that emerged as a result of Japan's international trade. It explores the fascination with Japanese imagery in Europe and the United States, and the impact of Japanese design on the development of modernism. [Extracted from the article]

This paper investigates the changes in the uncanny expressed in historical examples of sumo wrestling. Various pre-modern instances show sumo as a wild and relentless combat, often resulting in the injury or death of one of the wrestlers. However, due to sociopolitical changes in the early Edo period (1600–1868), a new mode of conduct emerged at shrines and temples that complied with regulations in the urban space and forced wrestling to adapt and curtail the uncanny. Eventually, a further drastic image shift occurred when popular culture picked up sumo wrestling. Finally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, sumo wrestling turned into a "sport" while still retaining uncanny elements in its conduct. Thus, this paper concludes that religious institutions tamed sumo wrestling's classical uncanniness; at the same time, new conduct secured the integration of uncanny elements within modern sumo wrestling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 5 turns to the first woodblock-printed Japanese Buddhist world map, which was produced in 1709 - the same year as the second of the two maps discussed in Chapter 4 - and created by a prominent monk of the era, Hotan (1659-1738). Moerman does allude, particularly in Chapter 2, to the specific concerns of Nara monks, but does not, in my view, sufficiently address the vast gulf between the very genres of these maps and their sources, respectively, in competing institutions. The earliest Buddhist maps created in Japan were often inscribed with the movement of the well-known traveler-monk Xuanzang (600-664), who was also historically influential both as an importer-cum-translator of vast quantities of sutras and as a progenitor of what came to be called the Faxiang (Jp. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the history of a marine zoo-anthropomorphic hybrid, the human-fish (ningyo), within the socioreligious mindscape of Japan from the second half of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century. Because of the interspecific anatomy attributed to them, ningyo have always been addressed from heterogeneous perspectives (religious, literary, political, erotic, scientific) and have thus been subject to continuous hermeneutic oscillations between the fringes and the centers of human/nonhuman networks. Focusing on this bidirectional process, the present study aims to shed light on the phenomenon of the ningyo , taking into account the material culture (taxidermic items, printed talismans), practices (sideshows, public exhibitions), and social actors (itinerant ritualists, scientists, politicians) that conceptually informed and anatomically reified this liminal marine creature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For example, Umihara explains how the two doctors managed to obtain the I Fushi keiken ikun i ( I Practical Instructions of Mr. Fu i ), a partial Japanese translation based on a Dutch edition of the German doctor Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland's I Enchiridion medicum i , before it was published and made available to the general public. Edo jidai no ishi shugyo: gakumon, gakuto, yugaku : [Doctors' apprenticeships during the Edo period: Scholarship, lineage, and traveling for study], written by Umihara Ryo However, books related to Western medicine were expensive, and the two doctors from Fukui domain spent much of their time copying books they had borrowed from their network. [Extracted from the article]

This article traces the time practices relevant to Edo-period pleasure-quarter life and business in eighteenth and nineteenth century Japan, discussing two time patterns that appeared in pleasure-quarter directories at the time: more long-term, loosely circumscribed stays based around diurnal rhythms of light and darkness, as well as more short-term transactions centered on units of time measured with incense sticks--two aspects of time that were central to the trade plied in the quarters, as I show. I argue that the sex trade is significant in that it provided a rare example of a service "paid by the hour" in early modern Japan, thus crucially also calling us to (re-)consider larger issues regarding the economic value of time within the early modern Japanese world of work and especially also its relationship to modern time and labor. I demonstrate how the exigencies of a certain trade required the elaboration of a set of time units and, where necessary, a system to measure and co-ordinate them, which ultimately points towards the existence of an abstract notion of time that commanded a certain price in early modern Japan. As such, the present paper serves to qualify narratives that mainly identify the commodification of time with Japan's industrialization, modernization, and Westernization in the late nineteenth century, as well as with the dissemination of mechanical clock-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rice planting tradition began with Emperor Showa , and the empress's feeding of the silkworms with mulberry leaves was instituted following the precedent set by Empress Dowager Shoken (the consort of Emperor Meiji ) in 1871. From the end of the Edo period to the beginning of the Meiji era, there were varying views on the meaning of the emperor's existence, all of which had some influence on the changes to the imperial system; that is to say, the system was modified to fit the modern emperor system into the ancient system. Finally, chapter 6, "Imperial era names ", explains how and why "one era for one emperor " was adopted in the Meiji period and how Neo-Confucianism exerted its influence. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines how the Shanghanlun, translated as the Treatise on Cold Damage (i.e., the Treatise), one of the most revered Chinese medical texts of the Han dynasty, was used in Japanese traditional medicine (Kanpō ... and particularly how it was reconfigured to fit with the societal shifts of the Edo period in Japan. The versatility of the Treatise in the formation of Kanpo is exemplified by the medicine of Yoshimasu Todo, an innovative eighteenth-century Japanese doctor. In this analysis of Todo's unique interpretation of the Treatise, some of his transitional ideas about medicine, the human body, and illness, as well as the transcultural influence from China, will be elucidated. To this end, first Todo's application of the Treatise will be re-defined within the historical context of changing medical needs in the consumer society of the Edo period. Secondly, by focusing on the idea of poison that forms the core of Todo's theory and practice, I show how his pathology resonated with the period's popular notions of the human body and illness, although it was said at the time to be drawn from Chinese classics. Associating Todo's use of the Treatise with such phenomena as the commercialisation and popularisation of medical treatment and the popular imagination of illness, I show the applicability of the Treatise to the evolution of Kanpo in the context of the surrounding social structure and cross-cultural intellectual ebb and flow across East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the second half of the sixteenth century, Japan, and especially Kyushu, experienced a surge in maritime exchange that was unprecedented in Japanese history. Alongside the boom in trade, there was a concurrent swell in maritime violence as pirates and privateers militarized East Asian waters. During this period, the port of Hirado on Kyushu emerged as one of the most important and consistently active pirate hubs, becoming a base for Chinese, Dutch, English, and Japanese mariners. This article explores Hirado's long association with piracy and uses it to reflect on the changing nature of maritime violence in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of disease in the demographic history of early modern Japan, focusing particularly on the impact of sexually transmitted diseases and sexually transmitted infections. The author explores the sexual customs and practices of the period, examines the historiography of Japan, and considers the social stratification of Japanese society. He argues that gonorrhea and chlamydia infections helped maintain a stable population by reducing women's fertility rates, which in turn impacted economic development.

The article discusses the nation-wide cholera epidemic in Japan from 1858 until 1860 during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), focusing on how Japanese society conceptualized the epidemic based on accounts of the epidemic in print. An overview of the disease and its treatment in the nineteenth century is presented. Some other subjects considered include include death rates in Japan compared to that from similar outbreaks in European countries, reports of disasters occurring in Edo as written in the 1850s by author Kanagaki Rōbun, Japanese humor, and censorship policies of the period.

In 1549 the missionaries of the Society of Jesus established themselves in Japan ushering in a period of Catholic evangelization which lasted until the 1640s. Since the Japanese mission came to be very successful, Mendicants Orders went after Jesuits evangelization from 1590's onwards. By that time Tokugawa rulers were committed to structuring a centralized and authoritarian government. Missionaries' preaching and attitudes clashed with the new order established by Tokugawa, who ended up promoting an anti-Christian policy. The success of the evangelization gave rise to a martyred mission which fueled a large missionary printing press activity in Catholic Europe. This discourse on martyrdom in Japan fed into the then occurring Catholic renewal devotional trends and Baroque spirituality. This was the setting in which 17th century Catholic Europe learned about Japan. Those printed texts were not simply used for information purposes. Printing press activity, separately promoted by each missionary order, envisaged also their own exaltation in a competition to influence the European political and religious powers in the ongoing controversy on missionary rights in Japan. Martyrdom in Japan thus became as a weapon of propaganda for missionary orders in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]