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.

This chapter describes the development of the Tokugawa economy, illustrating how its patterns and shifts were experienced by producers and consumers in a particular place and time. In outlining the framing features of the Tokugawa economic world, we draw attention to how the proportion occupied by manufacturing industries and distribution mechanisms increased steadily in tandem with expansion of the economy’s overall volume. Diverse factors accompanied and further spurred these trends: urbanization (in cities and country towns), greater social mobility, expanding trade and communication networks, rising income, the labor of women as producers for the market, and a popular consciousness increasingly oriented toward ordinary consumption. This economic development can be described in either positive or negative terms. Economic historians in recent decades have pointed more to the positive aspects that raised the standard of living for many, whereas many social historians note the groups who lost out in the commercialization process, such as low-ranking samurai and landless commoners. Evidence can be given for both perspectives, underlining the complexity of what we call economy.

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.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

This chapter studies medical midwifery in Japan, which developed in the 1860s–1890s in parallel with the management of vital statistics within the Meiji government. The chapter describes that the profile of midwives was significantly transformed in the Meiji period, from regionally diverse birth attendants, often implicated in abortion and infanticide, to medically informed and licensed healthcare practitioners, defined by their role in enhancing – yet simultaneously monitoring – people’s everyday reproductive experiences. At the same time, it also shows how this transformation of midwives was intimately tied to the public health officers’ desire to collect and manage more “accurate” data about infant births and deaths, which they judged would be essential to construct a genuinely “modern” public health system. In this context, the medical midwife was an invaluable local point from which statistical data on infant health entered into the state administrative system. By juxtaposing the history of the professionalization of midwives with that of the establishment of vital statistics in public health, this chapter shows how the burgeoning statistical rationale acted as a pivotal background for the making of medical midwifery in modern Japan.

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.