The Taming of the Samurai

Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan

Eiko Ikegami

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780674868090, 9780674868083
• eBook ISBN: 9780674254664
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern Japan offers us a view of a highly developed society with its own internal logic. Eiko Ikegami makes this logic accessible to us through a sweeping investigation into the roots of Japanese organizational structures. She accomplishes this by focusing on the diverse roles that the samurai have played in Japanese history. From their rise in ancient Japan, through their dominance as warrior lords in the medieval period, and their subsequent transformation to quasi-bureaucrats at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, the samurai held center stage in Japan until their abolishment after the opening up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century.

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.

Ikegami's approach, while sociological, draws on anthropological and historical methods to provide an answer to the question of how the Japanese managed to achieve modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries. The result is a work of enormous depth and sensitivity that will facilitate a better understanding of, and appreciation for, Japanese society.

Index

Absolutism, 177, 180, 181–186

Ainu, 59

Akabori Mizunosuke, 249

Akebono soga no youchi (kabuki theater production), 225

Akō gijinroku (The History of the Men of Moral Principle in Akō), 234

Amino Yoshihiko, 113

Anderson, Perry, 13, 338; Lineages of the Absolutist State, 180, 181, 185

Aoki Kōji, 174

Arai Hakuseki, 316–317; Told Round a Brushwood Fire (Oritaku shiba no ki), 317–319

Asahi Bunzaemon, 261–263, 264

Asano Daigaku, 224–225, 231, 232, 233, 240

Asano Naganori, 223–225, 227, 229, 230, 234, 287

Ashikaga Takauji, 108, 109

Autonomy, 34, 82–86, 94, 108, 109, 113, 123, 141, 144, 208, 211; development of village, 129–132, 171; and dignity, 329; honorific, 25, 117; moral, 108, 110, 220; and neo-Confucianism, 316; political, 30; restriction of, 142, 143, 145, 154, 166, 214; social, 30, 35, 36, 142; of women, 124, 127

Azuma kagami (The Mirror of the East), 83, 84, 100

azuma (the east), 59, 104

bakufu (shogunate), 48, 185, 300

bakuhan system, 152, 157, 160, 303; formation of, 181, 356; organization of, 165–166, 170, 172; and samurai, 212–213, 226, 252, 289, 293, 297

Battle of Nagashino, 139

Battle of Sekigahara, 102, 151, 204

Battle of the Uji River, 76–77

Battles of Osaka, 151, 210, 282

Bellah, Robert: Tokugawa Religion, 9–10, 13

Benedict, Ruth, 17–18, 23, 323; The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 373–376

benkyō (learning), 314

Berger, Peter, 372

Berman, Harold, 20, 35, 187

bimoku (honor), 83

Bloch, Marc, 179

Blok, Anton, 19

Boli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Illustrations
• I. A Sociological Approach
• II Origins in Violence
• III Disintegration and Reorganization
• IV The Paradoxical Nature of Tokugawa State Formation
• V Honor and Violence in Transformation
• VI Honor Polarization in Vassalic Bureaucracy
• VII Honorific Individualism and Honorific Collectivism
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index