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Reviewed by:
  • Values, Identity, and Equality in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japan ed. by Peter Nosco, James E. Ketelaar, and Yasunori Kojima
  • Federico Marcon (bio)
Values, Identity, and Equality in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Japan. Edited by Peter Nosco, James E. Ketelaar, and Yasunori Kojima. Brill, Leiden, 2015. xiv, 376 pages. €121.00, cloth; €118.00, E-book.

The collection of essays that Peter Nosco, James Ketelaar, and Yasunori Kojima have assembled in this volume will disorient most, surprise many, [End Page 139] and hopefully inspire a few. For what it's worth, the editors and authors can surely count me among those who read this volume with mounting excitement. The reason for my enthusiasm would be utterly uninteresting if it ensued from a personal quirk. Quite the contrary, the most exciting aspect of this project is how poorly it fits the recent trends in Japan studies. In a field that—except for a handful of exceptions (some outstanding, others enraging)—has eagerly embraced the injunctions of antitheory and has thus transformed the project of understanding the past "in its own terms" into a poor rendition of a Rankean "wie es eigentlich gewesen," this volume explicitly abandons the temptation of antiquarianism and uncritical archival reproduction and boldly addresses very big questions: How can we understand "values," "identity," "equality," and—absent from the title but the real thread linking all essays—"individualism," as well as the constellations of concepts and practices these notions mobilized in early modern Japan?

In the introduction, editors Nosco and Ketelaar draw attention to the eclecticism of styles, approaches, and methods to avoid suspicion of imposing "any kind of interpretive orthodoxy on the contributors" (p. 1). As if to emphasize the heterogeneity of this anthology, the cover of the volume displays a painting by Itō Jakuchū which portrays seven cranes (tsuru; Grus japonensis) that, while standing close together, look in different directions. The result is a rich mosaic of micro reconstructions of decision making, expectations, modes of sociation (Formen der Vergesellschaftung), self-fashioning, and values.

This unaffordable volume in Brill's Japanese Studies Library is the offspring of a symposium held in late August 2013 at the University of British Columbia (UBC) titled "Early Modern Japanese Values and Individuality." The goal was not the development of a new manifesto or historiographical norm, but the creation of a space for experimenting and thinking about value, identity, equality, and individuality as they were "actually practiced" in Tokugawa Japan.

"Values in Practice" is the title of the first of the four parts into which the book is divided: Eiko Ikegami (who gave the keynote speech at the symposium), Anne Walthall, and W. Puck Brecher authored the essays in it. It is followed by "The Construction of Identity," with essays by Peter Nosco, Gideon Fujiwara, and Gregory Smits. In part 3, James Ketelaar and Kojima Yasunori focus on "Erotic Emotionality and Parody." Part 4 is dedicated to "Equality and Modernity," with essays by M. William Steele, Dani Botsman, and Naoki Sakai. Isomae Jun'ichi's essay closes the volume with a survey of "The Historiographical Issues" this collection aims to address. Each essay, distinct in style and method, deserves more careful attention than this review can offer.

"Value" is a term that in English has a large semantic capacity: in its axiological usage, it aims to classify things according to their perceived or [End Page 140] objective goodness—in a moral, social, aesthetic, and political sense; but in its looser sense, it refers to the stakes around which society organizes itself hierarchically or according to principles of inclusion/exclusion. In this last sense, "[v]alues are ubiquitous and fluid," Ikegami tells us. Rather than in thinkers' speculations, it is in people's practices that they can be better understood: "[t]he question for historians, then, is how to capture revealing moments of enactment in order to describe the values, sentiments, and emotions of Tokugawa people as they are practiced" (p. 31). Eiko Ikegami's opening contribution sets up the questions all these essays are called to pursue, but it reads rather as a manifesto of the sociologist's contribution to our understanding of Tokugawa society. Indeed, her presentation of the "lived...

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