Friends, Acquaintances, Pupils, and Patrons--Japanese Intellectual Life in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Prosopographical Approach (review)

Anna Beerens has produced an innovative study of Japanese intellectual life during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. She begins by pointing out that while scholars have studied the products of intellectual life extensively, these products were not intellectual life itself. Although most of us are likely to agree with Beerens's assertion that "we should not confound the character of the work with that of the artist" (p. 27), few studies of Tokugawa-period intellectual life have approached their topic in a way that permits setting aside the products and looking directly at the activities of their producers. For this reason, Beerens's prosopographical approach is a genuinely new examination of the otherwise well-studied realm of Tokugawa intellectuals. Prosopography is the collective study of the biographies of a group of historical agents. In this case, Beerens has selected every intellectual of the last quarter of the eighteenth century sufficiently active to meet two criteria: 1) to have left behind some concrete trace of their participation in intellectual discourse and 2) to have made contacts with other intellectuals. Tracing each person's contacts results in a network of 173 scholars and artists. Beerens appropriately resisted the temptation to narrow her focus by selecting a few "representative" individuals because, despite the many monographs on Tokugawa-period intellectual products, we do not really know what "representative" means with respect to the social life of the intellectuals themselves. Indeed, it is precisely this issue that Beerens investigates.

Early in the book, Beerens sets up a target that she will attack. Citing Conrad Totman, Herbert Passin, Marius Jansen, John Hall, and Susan Burns, Beerens describes an interpretation of Tokugawa society that regards vigorous intellectual and artistic activity during the eighteenth century as a sign of discontent, political discord, or even social decay. In the background, of course, is the old notion of Tokugawa Japan as a rigid, status-bound society, at least in theory. Although Beerens provides a few recent examples of this view, most of the works she cites are from the 1960s. Using the data from her prosopography, Beerens argues against the notion that intellectual and artistic growth was a sign of social problems or tensions straining or undermining the established order. I will return to this point at the end of the review.

Approximately one-third of the book consists of biographical sketches for each of the 173 members of the prosopography. Although most readers will likely skip this section, pulling all of this information together in one place is a valuable contribution. The core of the book is the analysis section, in which Beerens examines the data in detail in chapters entitled "Age," "Teachers and Pupils," "Sources of Income," and "Activities." With respect to age, Beerens finds that it "was not a decisive factor in the formation of the network" (p. 178). Her data also reveals that neither social nor geographical backgrounds were barriers to or shapers of the formation of intellectual networks. Moreover, "for a society in which so much is supposed to have been fixed, mobility (both in the social and in the geographical sense) is striking" (p. 195). Adoption was an important mechanism in facilitating this mobility: "Whereas no ambitious boy could possibly have fantasized about becoming Lord Mayor of Edo, he may have dreamed of being adopted by a rich and powerful person, or by his uncle or teacher for that matter" (p. 205). Employment played a significant role in the formation of the network, but few of its members had a "job" in the modern sense of the term. Instead, most of them derived income from a variety of intellectual and artistic pursuits amidst changing circumstances. This variety of sources of income contributed to the social and geographic mobility of network members. Their range of total activities was also wide, and the disciplinary boundaries and categories so dear to modern scholars (e...