Revisiting Japan’s Restoration: New Approaches to the Study of the Meiji Transformation(Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia)

This volume presents the reader with thirty-one short chapters that capture an exciting new moment in the study of the Meiji Restoration. The chapters offer a kaleidoscope of approaches and interpretations of the Restoration that showcase the strengths of the most recent interpretative trends in history writing on Japan while simultaneously offering new research pathways. On a scale probably never before seen in the study of the Restoration outside Japan, the short chapters in this volume reveal unique aspects of the transformative event and process not previously explored in previous research. They do this in three core ways: through selecting and deploying different time frames in their historical analysis; by creative experimentation with different spatial units through which to ascertain historical experience; and by innovative selection of unique and highly original topics for analysis. The volume offers students and teachers of Japanese history, modern history, and East Asian studies an important resource for coming to grips with the multifaceted nature of Japan’s nineteenth-century transformation. The volume will also have broader appeal to scholars working in fields such as early modern/modern world history, global history, Asian modernities, gender studies, economic history, and postcolonial studies.

Table of Contents:
IntroductionPart One: World1.The Meiji Restoration and the Long Nineteenth Century 2. Local Labour and the Trajectory of the Meiji Restoration 3. Freedom, Slavery and the Meiji Restoration, Revisiting the Maria Luz Incident Part Two: Governance4. The Meiji Restoration and Governmnetality 5.Rulings on Tokagawa Status Infringements and Local Governing Practices in Early Meiji Osaka Court Records Part Three: Asia6. From Boy Emperors to Business Opportunities: Glimpses of the Meiji Restoration from the China Coast Press c1868-70 7. Reformists and Revolutionaries: Filipinos View Meiji Japan, 1880s-2000s 8. Ealy 20th Century Vietnamese Intellectuals’ Perceptions of the Meiji Restoration and its Lessons for Manpower Cultivation Part Four: Ideas9. Questioning Modernity: A Historiographical Sketch of the Meiji Enlightenment 10. The “Meiji Restoration as Ideal and Failure: The Spectre of a Second Innovation Part Five: Nation-Empire11. Meiji and the Bonin Islands: Ambiguous Bodies and Ambivalent Borders 12. Reconstructing State-Formation and Empire-Building in Meiji Japan Part Six: Culture13. Inventing Ise in Meiji Japan 14. Haikai Time in Meiji Japan 15. Tokugawa v. Meiji: A Nocturnal Interpretation Part Seven: Medicine and Health16. Blood, Bandages, and Bickering: Doctors in the Boshin War 17. Toward Creating New Mind, New Body: Yojo as a Late Meiji Ideology Part Seven: Gender and Status18. The Meiji Restoration as Social History: With a Focus on Tokyo 19. Cattle Plague, Livestock Disposal, and the Dismantling of the Early Modern Status Order 20. Kaihōrei kara Suihei Sengen e -- From Emancipation by the State to Liberation by Our Own Efforts Part Eight: Production and Consumption21. From Ramune to Ryokucha: Continuities and Discontinuities in Japanese Beverage Consumption 22. Post-Restoration Transformations and Merchant Guilds: The Oil Seed Merchants of Osaka Part Nine: Region and Locality23. The Meiji Restoration and Local History: Reflections Based on Osaka’s Izumi Region 24. Traditional Culture and Modern Administration: The Meiji Government’s Hot Spring Policy and Local Community 25. Whose Restoration? Observations from a Study of the Kagoshima Teacher Training School, 1875-1877 Part Ten: Urban Space26. The World of the Pleasure Quarters in the Transitional Period from Early Modern to Modern Japan: Research on the Yokohama Pleasure Quarters 27. Changes in the Regulation of Unlicensed Prostitutes in the Ansei Period (1854-1860) and “Horie-Shinchi” Part Eleven: Modernity28. The Words of Modernity before Modernity 29.The Background of Japan’s Modernization: What made the Meiji Restoration Possible? Part Twelve:Politics30. February 11, 1889: The Birth of Modern Japan 31. From Shogunal Benevolence to Monarchial Compassion: The Shifting Status of “Voices from the Bottom” in the Meiji Restoration

About the Author :
Timothy D. Amos is Associate Professor in Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on marginality in Japan from the early modern period through to the present. He recently published Caste in Early Modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order in Eastern Japan (Routledge, 2020). Akiko Ishii is Research Fellow at the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the concepts of population and development in early modern and modern Japan.