Title: Recovering Japan’s urban past: Yoshida Nobuyuki, Tsukada Takashi, and the cities of the Tokugawa period
Abstract: This article offers some personal reflections on important recent work that has been done in the field of Japanese urban social history. It focuses particularly on the contributions of Yoshida Nobuyuki and Tsukada Takashi to our understanding of key aspects of urban society during the “early modern” Tokugawa period. It also aims to provide some initial thoughts about the intellectual milieu in which these two scholars’ interest in urban history began to develop in the 1970s. Specifically it considers the role of Yamaguchi Keiji in encouraging the study of Tokugawa period cities, in large part as a response to Hani Gorō’s provocative suggestion in 1968 that Japan had no significant urban tradition of its own. The article concludes by suggesting that, in contrast to Japan in recent decades, the assumption that cities were of relatively little importance for the development of Japanese society before 1868 has gone largely unchallenged in the English-language historiography on the period. For this reason, scholars working in English have a great deal to learn from the work that Yoshida, Tsukada and their extensive network of colleagues in Japan, have done over the past three decades.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 4
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