| 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

David L. Howell. Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. x, 261. $55.00.

In this important book David L. Howell reexamines the whole notion of the early modern state in Japan and presents us with a number of profound insights into the way in which the feudal Tokugawa polity was transformed into the modern state in Meiji Japan. Howell starts by analyzing what he has called the "geographies of identity" in early modern Japan and then follows these identities into the period of Japan's transformation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Using his extensive readings in Japanese and Western sources, Howell delineates three features of these "geographies." The first, which he terms the "geography of polity," examines the Shogunal and Daimyo domains, as well as the subordinated peripheral areas, within the structure of the Tokugawa system as we largely understand it today. This is perhaps closest to our previous readings of the Tokugawa order. The second he terms the "geography of status." This is where the book makes its greatest contribution. It is precisely by bringing status configurations and their meanings back into consideration (and for some this will be entirely new) that Howell adds a great deal to our understanding of both traditional and modern Japan. Howell argues effectively that status represents the central institution of the early modern political order in Japan. As the author notes, no work to date has attempted to link the connections between status and nation-building in Japan. The third geography is that of "civilization," which initially functioned under Chinese influence to distinguish civilized subjects of the Shoguns from barbarians, and was later further transformed by the arrival of the West and Western notions of civilization.

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