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REVIEWS
| Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. By Eiko Ikegami (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv plus 460 pp.).
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| Through an analysis of aesthetic networks in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867), Eiko Ikegami attacks "The stereotype of pre-modern Japanese people as submissive doormats trodden beneath the feet of militaristic despots" (p. 12). Unaware that this stereotype has any traction in academic circles (and Ikegami cites no examples), all I could imagine was Frank Capra's 1945 propaganda film, Know Your Enemy: Japan. Similar statements occur throughout the book: "If we summarize Tokugawa society dismissively as a feudal pre-modern society because it lacked civil society, while ignoring the widespread networks of voluntary associations and the freedom they offered to those who were disenchanted with the political status quo, we are making a serious mistake" (p. 201). Again, I am unaware of any recent scholar guilty of such malfeasance, and Ikegami cites no specific examples. |
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To correct this mistaken view and present a more accurate portrayal of Tokugawa society, Ikegami's argues that extensive horizontal social networks based on voluntary association in pursuit of the arts helped erode the official Tokugawa social order. The notion of a pervasive official social order is essential to this argument. Although it is rarely discussed in concrete terms and never systematically explained, we are told repeatedly that the Tokugawa bakufu institutionally segmented Japan's population into status hierarchies. Therefore, Ikegami argues, Tokugawa Japan was not a "civil society," which she defines as a "domain of private citizens that has a certain degree of autonomy from the state" (p. 19) and as "the democratic associational domain that reflected the rise of political power of the bourgeoisie" (p. 23). Nevertheless, Tokugawa society was imbued with civility as a result of the spread of "civilizing influences" across horizontal social networks of people from all walks of life engaged in artistic and aesthetic pursuits. Furthermore, people gradually came to derive a greater sense of identity from their network affiliations than from their "assigned," "feudal" status categories. In this way, horizontal artistic networks helped undermine the Tokugawa polity. Moreover, the existence of these networks undercuts the "submissive doormats" view of Japan's people mentioned above and, it qualifies Tokugawa Japan for proto-modern status: "having developed the domain of voluntary associational ties ... this society truly deserves the name of proto-modern as far as its civic culture is concerned" (p. 368). |
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