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  • Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture
  • Gail Lee Bernstein
Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. By Eiko Ikegami (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005) 460 pp. $80.00 cloth $36.99 paper

In the early modern, or Tokugawa, era (1600–1868), many professional and serious amateur artists from all walks of life joined societies dedicated to practicing traditional Japanese art forms in the company of others through collaborative interaction. These voluntary associations cut across the government's rigidly assigned gender roles and hereditary class divisions and violated edicts prohibiting the formation of horizonal alliances among individuals. In Bonds of Civility, Ikegami argues that such "sites of aesthetic appreciation" in the otherwise highly stratified and segmented Tokugawa society became "enclaves of free socialization" in which artists "could temporarily suspend the application of feudal norms" and identities (4). With their voluntary mix of men and women, commoners and samurai, and, especially—in the case of haikai poetry groups—with their encouragement of subversive humor, networks of artistic associations formed a kind of "aesthetic public" functionally similar to civic networks in the West and potentially capable of slyly subverting the antiquated Tokugawa order.

This development, the author suggests, contributed to post-Tokugawa Japan's formation of a modern nation-state during the second half of the nineteenth century because it forged a psychological sense, at least among participants in aesthetic circles, of being "part of a universal fellowship rather than prisoners of a hierarchically segmented political structure" (368). Artistic networks, abetted by other developments in the realm of popular culture and the market economy—such as the spread of literacy, the rise of commercial publishing, the increase in domestic travel, and the growing audiences for theatrical performances (and the transgressive fantasies that they depicted)—created opportunities for temporary escape from formal feudal status into areas where the self was not defined and constrained by hereditary social roles. Consequently, individuals could recognize that social boundaries set by the Tokugawa order represented merely one of many possible "modes of sociability."

Cultural activities, however, with few exceptions, did not lead to oppositional political movements or even political discourse. The political implications of aesthetic life lie in the "sense of commonality" and civic space generated by freely chosen participation in artistic activities and further fueled by the growing popularity of other arenas for the expression of beauty in everyday life, such as fashion, manners, deportment, and food presentation. In other words, shared aesthetic values and cultural idioms, together with aesthetically pleasing and elaborate codes of etiquette (some of them reinforcing, rather than violating, observance of hierarchical relationships), produced a collective identity in uniquely aesthetic terms even before the rise of the modern nation-state.

There is much to admire in this richly detailed sociological examination [End Page 172] of early modern cultural life. On the conceptual level, however, a more explicit differentiation of gender might have been helpful. Also, inasmuch as the cultural identity forged around aesthetics did not feed into post-Tokugawa, emperor-centered nationalist ideology, and Meiji leaders themselves quickly dismantled divisive Tokugawa laws, customs, and institutions in their efforts to build modern citizenship, the overall political significance of aesthetic networks for the modern Japanese nation-state requires further elaboration, hopefully in a follow-up volume.

Gail Lee Bernstein
University of Arizona
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