With over 60 contributions, The Tokugawa World presents the latest scholarship on early modern Japan from an international team of specialists in a volume that is unmatched in its breadth and scope. In its early modern period, under the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a world apart. For over two centuries the shogun’s subjects were forbidden to travel abroad and few outsiders were admitted. Yet in this period, Japan evolved as a nascent capitalist society that could rapidly adjust to its incorporation into the world system after its forced "opening" in the 1850s. The Tokugawa World demonstrates how Japan’s early modern society took shape and evolved: a world of low and high cultures, comic books and Confucian academies, soba restaurants and imperial music recitals, rigid enforcement of social hierarchy yet also ongoing resistance to class oppression. A world of outcasts, puppeteers, herbal doctors, samurai officials, businesswomen, scientists, scholars, blind lutenists, peasant rebels, tea-masters, sumo wrestlers, and wage workers. Covering a variety of features of the Tokugawa world including the physical landscape, economy, art and literature, religion and thought, and education and science, this volume is essential reading for all students and scholars of early modern Japan.

This volume explores major developments in Japanese law over the latter half of the twentieth century and looks ahead to the future. Modeled on the classic work Law in Japan: The Legal Order in a Changing Society (1963), edited by Arthur Taylor von Mehren, it features the work of thirty-five leading legal experts on most of the major fields of Japanese law, with special attention to the increasingly important areas of environmental law, health law, intellectual property, and insolvency. The contributors adopt a variety of theoretical approaches, including legal, economic, historical, and socio-legal. As Law and Japan: A Turning Point is the only volume to take inventory of the key areas of Japanese law and their development since the 1960s, it will be an important reference tool and starting point for research on the Japanese legal system. Topics addressed include the legal system (with chapters on legal history, the legal profession, the judiciary, the legislative and political process, and legal education); the individual and the state (with chapters on constitutional law, administrative law, criminal justice, environmental law, and health law); and the economy (with chapters on corporate law, contracts, labor and employment law, antimonopoly law, intellectual property, taxation, and insolvency). Japanese law is in the midst of a watershed period. This book captures the major trends by presenting views on important changes in the field and identifying catalysts for change in the twenty-first century.

In a variety of interesting dimensions in both historical and contemporary Japanese culture, this exciting new book examines pilgrimages in Japan, including the meanings of travel, transformation, and the discovery of identity through encounters with the sacred.

Includes section "Reviews".

"This book is a cultural history on the role of icons in the development and dissemination of the worship of a Buddhist deity in Japan from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth." --author-supplied description

Books and book illustrations in early modern Japan / Ekkehard May -- The illustrated household encyclopedias that once civilized Japan / Yokoyama Toshio -- The 'spectacle' of womanhood: new types in texts and pictures on pictorial Sugoroku games of the late Edo period / Susanne Formanek -- The Tokaido woodblock print series as an example of intertextuality in the fine arts / Franziska Ehmcke -- Culinary culture and its transmission in the late Edo period / Harada Nobua -- The hidden heritage : books, prints, printed toys and other publications for young people in Tokugawa Japan / Ann Herring -- The printing of illustrated travelogues in 18th-century Japan / Shirahata Yozaburo -- Illustrated Kabuki texts / Martina Schoenbein -- Kawaraban : enjoying the news when news was forbidden / Sepp Linhart -- Illness illustrated. Socio-historical dimensions of late Edo measles pictures (Hashika-e) / Hartmut O. Rotermund -- Between fiction and non-fiction : documentary literature in the late Edo period / Stephan Kohn -- Publishing Ejanaika : popular religion as media event / Reinhard Zollner -- Shinbun nishiki-e, Nishiki-e shinbut: news and new sensations in old garb at the beginning of a new era / Sepp Linhart.