Category Archive

Harvard University’s Law Library has put 22 Heian, Kamakura and Muromachi period documents online. The online exhibit includes a discussion by Professor Mikael Adolphson [pdf] about how to read and interpret these materials.

There’s a review in the NYTimes about an exhibit at the Met: arms and armor of the samurai. For some commentary and criticism of a similar exhibit from San Francisco, see here

Joe Jones at MutantFrog Travelogue (don’t let the name fool you, it’s a fantastic blog about Japanese culture, politics and history) has an excellent overview of the law and demographics of divorce and child custody in Japan,  especially when foreigners are involved. Jones is a lawyer, with extensive international experience. The topic has come up because of a fairly prominent ongoing dispute between a Japanese woman and her dual-citizenship former husband over child custody, involving both US and Japanese law. You can find details in the links of Jones’ post.

One of the beautiful things about the internet is that if you ask for help, often you can get it. I posed the question about the mysterious circular gear on the medieval samurai to my blog audience, and got an answer very quickly: they are  spare bow string spools. The best picture I’ve been able to find of a “tsurumaki” online is this ebay auction, where you can clearly see the groove around the edge which holds the string.

In the Amaterasu eclipse story, the gods use a rope to draw her out of the cave. Ropes have a long tradition in Shinto as symbols of divinity and authority. Often you see ropes as part of Shinto shrines, as in this sacred tree:

You see a similar rope as part of the ceremonial garb worn by Sumo Yokozuna — the title is usually translated “Grand Champion” but literally means “horizontal rope”!

There are some truly extraordinary shrine ropes, though, created as part of massive community festivals:

The answer to a question we had about drinking habits. According to the WHO, the US and Japan are roughly equal in per capita alcohol consumption.

Japan Focus has a long discussion of differing views of the Japanese economic slowdown and our own. My own, shorter, take on this from a year ago is here.

Japan Focus also has a long discussion of Japanese discourses on WWII and the US-Japan relationship. It’s fairly raw stuff, and very long. If you do read it, make sure you get through the whole thing: just reading the first parts without the rest would be too depressing (also a false impression).

NYTimes has a report on a government program to encourage underemployed urban young adults to get involved in farming

NYT review of the autobiography of a pioneering Japanese comic artist: note the influence of American culture, and the nativization of it which then influences American culture…..

Turns out that I was wrong: I’d heard reports of Japanese soldiers in the 80s and 90s, but none of them have turned out to be authentic. The last confirmed surrenders were in 1974 and 1980.

Albert Craig, my Ph.D. advisor, has a brand new book coming out about the thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi. You can see it here, including a PDF Excerpt of the introduction and first chapter.

The latest issue of the journal Early Modern Japan has been released and is available on the web for free. This issue includes a four-article set on samurai life and culture in the Tokugawa:

The Early Modern Warrior: Three Explorations of Samurai Life
Pitelka, Morgan  pp. 33-42
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (977.23 kB)

Banquets Against Boredom: Towards Understanding (Samurai) Cuisine in Early Modern Japan
Rath, Eric C.  pp. 43-55
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (537.34 kB)

Samurai and the World of Goods: the Diaries of the Toyama Family of Hachinohe
Vaporis, Constantine N.  pp. 56-67
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (476.05 kB)

Encountering the World: Kawai Tsugunosuke’s 1859 Journey to Yokohama and Nagasaki
Nenzi, Laura  pp. 68-83
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (631.69 kB)

NYT article on a prominent Japanese politician of buraku (outcaste) origin and a little history of the class. The article suggests that the class goes back a thousand years, and in some places that may be true, but there is actually very little evidence from before about 1500. There’s been some very interesting scholarship in the last few years on the way in which outcaste groups could leverage their social utility — being the people responsible for executions and law enforcement meant that they were government functionaries — to greater status, though they were never able to actually leave their caste behind.

The New York Times is reporting on tensions between the Dojinkai and the civilians living in the neighborhood of their headquarters. Two features of this are worth noting in the context of the Samurai course. First, the Yakuza are widely acknowledged to be one of the last, greatest bastions of feudal samurai concepts of honor and the utility of violence; comparing the modern yakuza to medieval samurai is shockingly fruitful. Second, the social order represented by the neighborhood association is a modern incarnation of the horizontal alliances described by Berry in The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto, the ikki as described by Ikegami, and the goningumi of the great Tokugawa order.

Even the appeal to law, civil authorities, is quite traditional: though the Japanese are considered “non-litigious” it’s really not true of the present or the past. In the present, a lot of disputes are dealt with through arbitration systems that aren’t that different from small-claims courts. In the past, of course, the petition to authority and the lawsuit were common enough to be one of our best historical sources. [crossposted to Frog in A Well: Japan]

Japan has been taking on some of the Western holidays as fun traditions — Valentine’s Day and Christmas being the obvious ones — and there’s now some movement on Halloween, as well. (Link Fixed!)