Our knowledge of Japanese sexuality from the tenth to the twelfth centuries is limited chiefly to the imperial court. Sexuality was constructed textually through key concepts from Chinese culture and the globally unprecedented rise of writing by women in Japanese. Emperors, princes, and high-ranking aristocratic men were often polygynous and marriage was not controlled by either law or religion. Virginity was rarely valued and there was no primogeniture. ‘Divorce’ and ‘remarriage’ were frequent. Incest taboos were limited, applying to full siblings and parents and their biological offspring. While most aristocratic women were to be seen only by their fathers, husbands, or sons among men, women and men serving at court might have multiple sexual partners and social hierarchy played a dominant role in men’s access to women’s bodies; legal prosecutions for rape were nil. There is evidence of pederasty both at court and in temple complexes by the late tenth and the early eleventh centuries, respectively. Non-pederastic homosexuality seems to have had a sudden efflorescence at the end of the period. Definitive evidence for female homosexuality does not appear until the thirteenth century, but probably existed earlier.

Japan between 1573 and 1651 underwent massive political and social transformation. The warlord Oda Nobunaga began the process of reunifying the archipelago after nearly a century of civil war, a process that was completed by his junior ally Toyotomi Hideyoshi. More conflict, both domestic and international, led to a third warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, positioning himself and his family as the new dynasty of military leaders who ruled a thoroughly pacified Japan beginning in 1603. His son, the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, and grandson, the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, successively overcame diverse barriers to Tokugawa hegemony and incrementally established the early modern system that is often anachronistically assumed to have begun with Ieyasu. Their emphasis on pageantry, political immobility, strict control of borders, persecution of independent religion, and the constant threat of violence defined Tokugawa rule and allowed a fragile peace to persist until the mid-nineteenth century.

The early modern Japanese city, in the paradigmatic form of the castle town (jōkamachi), gave spatial form to the social distinctions of status group (mibun), and it evolved through complex negotiations between multiple status communities, each with its own social logics and visions of urban life. This chapter sketches these spatial structures and social processes through a study of the shogunal capital of Edo, focusing on the triangular negotiation between three sets of agents: the shogunal administration, the propertied townspeople, and the diffuse occupational collectives of the unpropertied urban margins. This triangular negotiation is illuminated through a historical survey of the Edo firefighting system, revealing the ways in which the early modern city was shaped by competing interests and claims over space. Particular attention is given to the diverse forms of social agency that interacted in the urban process, complicating a binary model of governmental authority and popular subversion.

Despite the restrictions that had been imposed on domestic travel since the early seventeenth century – which included checkpoints and the need for travel permits – in early modern Japan people traveled, merchandise moved, and ideas circulated. Commercial publishers played a key role in promoting the flows of people and things, not only with guidebooks and travel itineraries, as one would expect, but also in unusual places, such as board games and parodies of sumo rankings. Their output illuminates the democratization of knowledge and the creation of an interconnected archipelago in early modern Japan. More broadly, it reflects the global expansion of the information industry and the rise of tourism in the nineteenth century, linking Tokugawa Japan to dynamics at play the world over.

Chapter 11 takes a closer look at the surprising role of former president Herbert Hoover’s efforts to press for a negotiated settlement with Japan. Collaborating with Stimson, the two elder statesmen sought to influence Truman away from an invasion. They did this in part by attempting to frighten Truman with the prospect of extremely high casualties that might accompany an invasion. The chapter posits that Stimson may have encouraged Hoover to influence Truman because Stimson himself found it difficult to contradict his generals.

Chapter 1 provides a framework in which to consider Kamigata rakugo. Kamigata has been portrayed as practically opposite to Edo since the latter was established as the seat of the shogunate in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and this only intensified after the center of cultural production shifted there in the 1780s. The modern outcome of the longstanding east–west binarism is that Kamigata has been rendered substandard and therefore of less consequence than Edo/Tokyo, the center of power. Chapter 1 reviews Kamigata and Osaka history with a special focus on the early modern era, Osaka chōnin identity, and a brief discussion of traditional performing arts that share qualities with Kamigata rakugo. It will be through a discussion of these subjects that one will be able to gain a clearer understanding of what Kamigata rakugo is and why it differs from Tokyo rakugo. Reconfirming Kamigata and Osaka’s historical and cultural heritage will help one see that Kamigata rakugo is a product of its environment.

For the Japanese nation-state to acquire first-class status following the Meiji Restoration, it required more than the establishment of modern, civilized, universal institutions like the army, constitution, and parliament. During the 1880s when the constitution was being prepared, there emerged a new emphasis on Japan’s own distinctive history, tradition, and myth, and their transmission across Japan and overseas. This was the context in which, under the tutelage of Ernest Fenellosa and Okakura Tenshin, Nara was compared to ancient Greece, and the ancient Buddhist statues of its temples, Hōryūji and Tōdaiji, were preserved; Nara became Japan’s “ancient capital,” and the source of ancient Japanese civilization. At the same time, Kyoto acquired new meaning as an ancient capital that had given rise to so-called “kokufū culture” in which the Japanese nobility owed nothing to China. In the midst of Meiji period nationalism, the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto acquired unprecedented significance, revealed in policies to preserve old shrines, temples, and the Kyoto palace, as well as in the revival of such Heian period rites as the Kasuga and Kamo festivals.