| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Eiko Ikegami. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 460. $36.99.
This book is an ambitious work in terms of its historical sweep and its theoretical claims. It will surely provoke challenges, as well as cheers, from readers in diverse disciplines. Scholars have long noted developments in the Tokugawa period that transformed Japan from a medieval society into a modern nation. These included decentralized but well-integrated political networks; extensive trade routes that fostered broad commodity markets and urbanization; and the rise of commercial publishing. However, Eiko Ikegami argues that scholars have largely overlooked the important role aesthetic associations played in (re)creating social identities and political culture.	1
Ikegami's thesis is that the systematic social connections established by persons involved in various aesthetic practices in proto-modern Japan created new spatial/cognitive spheres or "aesthetic publics." These aesthetic publics provided a place where, for a while, participants could shed their official social identities within the rigid hierarchical structure imposed by the Tokugawa regime. Largely unpoliced by the government, they provided a place where people could enjoy interaction with other social classes. Such "aesthetic socializing" required civility, which "flourishes best in an intermediate zone of social relationships that lies between the intimate and the hostile" and "govern[s] social relations across differences in rank and status" (p. 78).	. . .

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