Since perhaps the mid-to-late 1960s, it has become standard in English-language scholarship on Japan to term the Edo period (or Tokugawa period), or roughly the 17th to 19th centuries, as "early modern Japan." Scholarly works differ on the precise dates and criteria, but most begin the "early modern" period around 1603 with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate and end it around 1868 with the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and establishment of the Meiji government, identifying the intervening period as one marked by a variety of notable developments in urbanization; proto-industrialization; a money economy; publishing, literacy, and the development of an archipelago-wide information network; shared notions of "Japan" and "Japanese" identity that some describe as "proto-nationalism"; and intellectual and cultural flourishing.
For much of the late 20th century, debates as to the applicability and validity of the term "early modern" for this period of Japanese history took place largely within a historiographical context of the predominance of modernization theory, and focused heavily on what was or was not "modern" about particular economic and structural developments of the period, for Japan specifically. The early 21st century, however, has seen a notable shift away from such debates and towards wide agreement on the term "early modern" as a standard identifier for this period of time in world history, thus making it easily understandable for scholarly and general audiences that "early modern" Japan points to roughly the same historical period as "early modern" China, Korea, Spain, or the "early modern world."
"Early Modern Japan"
David Howell identifies the 1968 volume Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan co-edited by John Whitney Hall and Marius Jansen as the first academic book in English to use the term "early modern Japan" in the title, and the 1973 book Deus Destroyed by Jurgis Elisonas as the second. Howell writes, however, that it was not until Hall's 1991 introduction to the fourth volume of The Cambridge History of Japan that an essay was published explicitly dedicated to discussing the concept of "early modernity" as it applies to Japan.[1]
Tokugawa Japan: the social and economic antecedents of modern Japan, a volume edited by Chie Nakane and Shinzaburo Oishi and published in 1990, is perhaps one of the key publications in this historiography. Consisting of English translations of papers by Japanese scholars from a series of 1980s symposia including chapters on "The Development of Rural Industry" (by Nakamura Satoru) and "Urban Networks and Information Networks" (by Moriya Katsuhisa), it describes the developments in proto-industrialization, cottage industry, and publishing, widespread literacy, and information networks, that are at the core of the argument for characterizing Tokugawa period Japan as "early modern."[2]
Kinsei
Howell identifies Uchida Ginzô, author of the 1903 book Nihon kinseishi, as the first to propose the term kinsei 近世, today widely translated as "early modern," as a distinct historical period. Up until then, when the term was used, it was used in a more general sense to mean "recent times" or "current times." Uchida proposed defining the kinsei period as beginning with the death of Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1616 and ending with the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853, marking these as the end, and beginning, respectively, of periods of transition. In other words, he saw 1616 as marking, very roughly, the beginning of a period when the many changes of the 1570s to 1610s (i.e. unification of Japan by Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, the end of the violence and disunity of the Sengoku period, and the establishment of a new status quo under the Tokugawa shogunate) were largely over and settled. Similarly, like many scholars today, Uchida used 1853 as a rough dividing point to mark the beginning of a period of significant changes, beginning around 1853 and ending with - or continuing through - the abolition of the domains in 1871. Though it would not be until the 1950s that historians began using the term kindai 近代 to identify a specific, defined, "modern" historical period following kinsei, Uchida nevertheless drew this same distinction of periodization, albeit with different terminology. He termed what was then his contemporary period saikinsei 最近世, i.e. categorizing the two periods as "recent times" and "the most recent times," or "modern times" and "the most modern times."[3]
References
- David Howell, "Introduction: Genealogies of Japanese Early Modernity," in Howell (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Japan, vol 2, Cambridge University Press (2024), pp1-12.