A comprehensive study of changing political thought during the Tokugawa period, the book traces the philosophical roots of Japanese modernization. Professor Maruyama describes the role of Sorai Confucianism and Norinaga Shintoism in breaking the stagnant confines of Chu Hsi Confucianism, the underlying political philosophy of the Tokugawa feudal state. He shows how the new schools of thought created an intellectual climate in which the ideas and practices of modernization could thrive. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

H. D. Harootunian has provided a new preface for the paperback edition of his classic study Toward Restoration, the first intellectual history of the Meiji Restoration in English. Book jacket.

While current scholarship on Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) tends to see China as either a model or "the Other," Wai-ming Ng's pioneering and ambitious study offers a new perspective by suggesting that Chinese culture also functioned as a collection of "cultural building blocks" that were selectively introduced and then modified to fit into the Japanese tradition. Chinese terms and forms survived, but the substance and the spirit were made Japanese. This borrowing of Chinese terms and forms to express Japanese ideas and feelings could result in the same things having different meanings in China and Japan, and this process can be observed in the ways in which Tokugawa Japanese reinterpreted Chinese legends, Confucian classics, and historical terms. Ng breaks down the longstanding dichotomies between model and "the other," civilization and barbarism, as well as center and periphery that have been used to define Sino-Japanese cultural exchange. He argues that Japanese culture was by no means merely an extended version of Chinese culture, and Japan's uses and interpretations of Chinese elements were not simply deviations from the original teachings. By replacing a Sinocentric perspective with a cross-cultural one, Ng's study represents a step forward in the study of Tokugawa intellectual history.

Listen, Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan endeavors to elucidate the mechanisms by which a growing number of men and women of all social strata became involved in acquiring knowledge and skills during the Tokugawa period. It offers an overview of the communication media and tools that teachers, booksellers, and authors elaborated to make such knowledge more accessible to a large audience. Schools, public lectures, private academies or hand-copied or printed manuals devoted to a great variety of topics, from epistolary etiquette or personal ethics to calculation, divination or painting, are here invoked to illustrate the vitality of Tokugawa Japan’s ‘knowledge market’, and to show how popular learning relied on three types of activities: listening, copying and reading. With contributions by: W.J. Boot, Matthias Hayek, Annick Horiuchi, Michael Kinski, Koizumi Yoshinaga, Peter Kornicki, Machi Senjūrō, Christophe Marquet, Markus Rüttermann, Tsujimoto Masashi, and Wakao Masaki.

Landscape has always played a vital role in shaping Japan’s cultural identity. Imaginative Mapping analyzes how intellectuals of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras used specific features and aspects of the landscape to represent their idea of Japan and produce a narrative of Japan as a cultural community. These scholars saw landscapes as repositories of local history and identity, stressing Japan’s differences from the models of China and the West. By detailing the continuities and ruptures between a sense of shared cultural community that emerged in the seventeenth century and the modern nation state of the late nineteenth century, this study sheds new light on the significance of early modernity, one defined not by temporal order but rather by spatial diffusion of the concept of Japan. More precisely, Nobuko Toyosawa argues that the circulation of guidebooks and other spatial narratives not only promoted further movement but also contributed to the formation of subjectivity by allowing readers to imagine the broader conceptual space of Japan. The recurring claims to the landscape are evidence that it was the medium for the construction of Japan as a unified cultural body.