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In 1895, the newly formed Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association (Dainippon Butokukai) held its first annual Martial Virtue Festival (butokusai) in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The Festival marked the arrival of a new iteration of modern Japan, as the Butokukai's efforts to define and popularise Japanese martial arts became an important medium through which the bodies of millions of Japanese citizens would experience, draw on, and even shape the Japanese nation and state. This book shows how the notion and practice of Japanese martial arts in the late Meiji period brought Japanese bodies, Japanese nationalisms, and the Japanese state into sustained contact and dynamic engagement with one another. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, Denis Gainty shows how the metaphor of a national body and the cultural and historical meanings of martial arts were celebrated and appropriated by modern Japanese at all levels of society, allowing them to participate powerfully in shaping the modern Japanese nation and state. While recent works have cast modern Japanese and their bodies as subject to state domination and elite control, this book argues that having a body - being a body, and through that body experiencing and shaping social, political, and even cosmic realities - is an important and underexamined aspect of the late Meiji period.  Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan is an important contribution to debates in Japanese and Asian social sciences, theories of the body and its role in modern historiography, and related questions of power and agency by suggesting a new and dramatic role for human bodies in the shaping of modern states and societies. As such, it will be valuable to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese history, modern nations and nationalisms, and sport and leisure studies, as well as those interested in the body more broadly.

Recasts the commonly dismissed colonial project pursued in Hokkaido during the Meiji era (1868-1912) as a major force in the production of modern Japan's national identity, imperial ideology, and empire.

New Times in Modern Japanconcerns the transformation of time--the reckoning of time--during Japan's Meiji period, specifically from around 1870 to 1900. Time literally changed as the archipelago synchronized with the Western imperialists' reckoning of time. The solar calendar and clock became standard timekeeping devices, and society adapted to the abstractions inherent in modern notions of time. This set off a cascade of changes that completely reconfigured how humans interacted with each other and with their environment--a process whose analysis carries implications for other non-Western societies as well. By examining topics ranging from geology, ghosts, childhood, art history, and architecture to nature as a whole, Stefan Tanaka explores how changing conceptions of time destabilized inherited knowledge and practices and ultimately facilitated the reconfiguration of the archipelago's heterogeneous communities into the liberal-capitalist nation-state, Japan. However, this revolutionary transformation--where, in the words of Lewis Mumford, \"the clock, not the steam engine,\" is the key mechanism of the industrial age--has received little more than a footnote in the history of Japan. This book's innovative focus on time not only shifts attention away from debates about the failure (or success) of \"modernization\" toward how individuals interact with the overlay of abstract concepts upon their lives; it also illuminates the roles of history as discourse and as practice in this reconfiguration of society. In doing so, it will influence discussions about modernity well beyond the borders of Japan.

By examining chanoyu – the custom of consuming matcha tea – in the Meiji period, Gathering for Tea in Modern Japan investigates the interactions between intellectual and cultural legacies of the Tokugawa period and the incoming influences of Western ideas, material cultures and institutions. It explores the construction of Japan’s modern cultural identity, highlighting the development of new social classes, and the transformation of cultural practices and production-consumption networks of the modern era. Taka Oshikri uses a wealth of Japanese source material – including diaries, newspaper, journal articles, maps, exhibition catalogues and official records – to explore the intricate relationships between the practice and practitioners of different social groups such as the old aristocracy, the emerging industrial elite, the local elite and government officials. She argues that the fabrication of a cultural identity during modernisation was influenced by various interest groups, such as the private commercial sector and foreign ambassadors. Although much is written on the practice of chanoyu in the pre-Tokugawa period and present-day Japan, there are few historical studies focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gathering for Tea in Modern Japan thus makes a significant contribution to its field, and will be of great value to students and scholars of modern Japanese social and cultural history.

The Tokugawa Shogunate, which governed Japan for two and a half centuries until the mid-1860s, classed people into hierarchically ranked status groups (mibun). The early Tokugawa rulers legally established these status groups through the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, adapting and clarifying existing customary divisions between warriors, peasants, artisans, and merchants. Subsequently, during the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule, status laws backed by coercive force worked to limit social mobility between groups and regulate relations between people of different status. This book begins by examining the origins and evolution of the outcaste groups within the Tokugawa status order. It then looks into the complex processes leading up to the abolition of outcaste status and the institution of legal equality in 1871 under the Meiji regime, and analyzes subsequent practices and theories of social discrimination against firstly 'former outcastes' and 'New Commoners' and then 'Burakumin'. Finally, it analyses the tactics and strategies of liberation adopted at local and national levels by anti-discrimination movements in Meiji Japan. Detailing the history of early-modern Japanese outcastes into the post-abolition era, Japan's Outcaste Abolition explores the dynamics of national inclusion, social exclusion, and the making of disciplined modern subjects. It will therefore be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese history, culture and society, social history and Asian studies.

How did ordinary people experience Japan's modern transformation? What role did people in local areas play in the making of modern Japan? How do studies of local politics help explain national events?The dominant account of modern Japanese history focuses on the nation-building that brought Japan into the modern world. After centuries of isolation, American warships forced Japan to open its doors to the West and a group of tough new leaders transformed the country into one of the great military and economic powers of the world. But different perspectives need to be examined. Alternative Narratives introduces other actors, other places and other dimensions of social and political activity in an attempt to construct a broader and more complex account of modern Japanese history.Focusing on the initial years of Japan's modern transformation, from the 1850s to the 1890s, Steele explores responses of commoners to the arrival of American warships in 1853; the growth of popular political consciousness; reactions of the residents of Edo in 1868 on the deposition of the shogun; responses of the village elite to the fall of the old regime; and established frameworks of historical narration - including American attempts to understand Japan's 1868 civil war.The author draws upon a wealth of documents, including broadsheets, woodblock prints, political cartoons and local campaign literature, as well as more conventional material in an endeavour to find new and different ways to examine the past. This book forms an important resource to students of Japanese history and culture while simultaneously appealing to scholars interested in the general problem of history and history-writing.

Unique among foreigners in nineteenthcentury Japan, Australianborn professional storyteller (rakugoka) Henry Black (1858-1923) enthralled audiences with his adaptations of novels by Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon and Fortuné de Boisgobey.These tales, later produced as books, brought notions of European modernity to many ordinary Japanese.

This is the first study of its kind to trace the history of what was to become one of Japan's major resources and a model of conservation and forestry management. Central to the planning of the Meiji reformers was securing the long-term financial stability of the Imperial household that would not leave it exposed to future political and economic change.