| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Daniel V. Botsman. Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 319. $35.00.
Daniel V. Botsman's vivid account of the development of the Japanese penal system makes a lasting contribution to understanding a subject that many historians of Japan have talked about but few have explored. With notable economy, his work traverses three centuries in the development of official punishments in less than 230 pages. According to Botsman, the direction of change over that long duration should not be confused with progress. To be sure, bloody public executions, which varied little from 1650 to 1850, did suddenly give way to regimented incarceration and forced labor thereafter. But Botsman argues that these modern Meiji forms of punishment were even less humane than the old unenlightened Tokugawa system. In a concluding chapter, he argues that Japan's entrance into the comity of modern nations and its emergence as an imperial power allowed for punishments that were categorically even crueler than the occasional public crucifixion. The new system reached an apex (or nadir?) in special refinements reserved for external use in the Japanese empire. Eradication campaigns waged against indigenous groups resisting colonization and flogging imposed on the subjugated, purportedly less civilized populations in Asian and Pacific possessions are but two outstanding examples.	1
Botsman's description of the development of official punishments and the penal system is not taxonomic or static but depicts the interplay of larger political and social forces that shaped both gradual and sudden changes. The domestic transformation was incremental before the onset of relations with major European and American national powers. Tokugawa officials now and again reformed punishments and experimented with incarceration, but these changes were merely responses to a specific crisis, such as famines and the floating refugee populations they engendered, and not wide-ranging or systemic.	. . .

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