Beyond the surface of discourse
As a society ruled by status, life in Tokugawa Japan was highly compartmentalized. People, food, clothing, books, everything was organized into discrete hierarchal categories. Even though research has already shown that in practice these categories were more fluid than previously assumed, rigid compartmentalization continued to be at the core of political discourse throughout the period. What should we make of this discrepancy between reality and discourse? who are? If the rulers were simply incompetent, and fooling themselves, it becomes hard to explain how they then somehow managed to squeeze out more than 250 years of enduring peace. In Roberts’ new monograph, we are presented with a compelling answer to this conundrum as he sets out the ‘cultural logic’ through which apparent contradictions between political reality and discourse were reconciled and, in fact, made perfect sense to contemporaries.
Roberts discerns this ‘cultural logic’ in the distinction made between omote (outside) and uchi (inside) spaces. By delegating the authority over domains to warlords, the Tokugawa government had created a feudal system; a polity of “sealed-off spaces” that “permitted interiors and exteriors to be incongruent” (p.5). Whereas previous research, influenced by modern conceptions and expectations of a penetrating and all powerful state, have interpreted this incongruence as a sign of weakness on part of the bakufu (shogunate; military government) to enforce its policies, Roberts argues that to contemporaries it constituted an “ideal form of politics” (p.196). As long as domains showed subservience in the omote adherence to official regulations, the bakufu was not concerned with the details of its uchi politics. Any incongruence between the two was simply acknowledged as an “open secret”, a “mutually arranged management” of disobedience (p.7).
Open secrets
The image that Roberts paints is that of a performed political order. “The ability to command performance of duty – in the thespian sense when actual performance of duty might be lacking – was a crucial tool of Tokugawa power that effectively worked toward preserving the peace in the realm” (p.3). Each of the chapters in this book is a case study of one particular occasion in which this performance is used to negotiate discrepancies between omote and uchi. Although some of these performances might already be familiar to specialists of premodern Japanese politics, Roberts’ treatment brings much added value; his extensive use of original archival sources has resulted in vivid narratives brimming with detail. The glimpses that these narratives offer into the “open secrets” of the day are as entertaining as they are enlightening. We learn for example that the daimyo (lord) of Tosa, in order to prepare for the bakufu Touring Inspectors, ordered that where rest houses should be built for the convenience of the Inspectors “old wood should be used so that they look like they have been there a long time” (p.62). Similarly, the domain officials of Tahara “had the roads swept but made sure that the broom marks were erased” (p.66). The (mal?)practices of adoptions provide yet another example of the same kind of apparent idiosyncrasies. One of the Grand Inspectors, responsible for making sure the lord was alive while making his adoption request, all too frankly admits that “usually they were all dead and cold, but the family would lay him out on a futon behind a folding screen just as if he were alive. I act as if he is alive…Some relative from behind the screen presses the lord’s seal to a document as if he did it himself” (p.79). By demonstrating that these open secrets only make sense when filtered through the ‘cultural logic’ of the omote/uchi dichotomy, and furthermore, by doing so through case studies from the early Tokugawa period when the power of the bakufu was at its prime, Roberts convincingly makes his case that the discrepancy between reality and discourse was at the heart of Tokugawa political culture, and did not necessarily signify waning authority.
Shared knowledge
As Roberts certainly succeeds in his aim to “create a space of acceptance for a certain cultural approach to interpreting the politics of the Tokugawa world” (p.198), it will be up to others to explore the details and limitations of this approach. Perhaps the most pressing issue in that regard is the question of formation. In contrast to the ‘sealed-off’ nature of uchi space, omote space requires a pool of shared knowledge amongst multiple ’Others’, the formation of which, in a period of still immense cultural differences amongst geographical regions, poses a problem; who decided on the shape and content of omote, and how did people come to share these conceptions? Previous scholarship has already demonstrated that these conceptions certainly were not created unilaterally by the bakufu at the start of the Tokugawa period. The omote identity of meikun (benevolent ruler), for example, came into being only in the specific socio-political conditions of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and only as the result of a dynamic discourse between bakufu, regional lords, and carriers of literary/philosophical tradition. Although Roberts has highlighted the omote ’performance’ of regional lords vis-à-vis the bakufu, the origin of the script, as well as the roles of the other actors still remain to be clarified. In that sense, Roberts’ work is one small piece in the puzzle of Tokugawa political culture, but it certainly is an important one, and will undoubtedly cause many of us to tread more carefully when dealing with the ‘deceptive’ nature of omote sources.
Comparative approach
Roberts has delivered an outstanding work. The research is thorough, the thesis is compelling, and the writing is clear. Add to that the variety of topics handled in the case studies, and one must conclude that this is a work that deserves to be read not only by specialists of political culture, but everyone with an interest in premodern Japanese culture and society. Roberts’ emphasis, that although the omote/uchi dichotomy is appropriate to the Tokugawa setting, it “easily could be used to analyze and create a dialogue with the premodern histories of some non-Japanese places” (p. 197), is surely an invitation to scholars of other cultures to engage in a comparative approach as well.