Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (review)

Through an analysis of aesthetic networks in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1867), Eiko Ikegami attacks "The stereotype of pre-modern Japanese people as submissive doormats trodden beneath the feet of militaristic despots" (p. 12). Unaware that this stereotype has any traction in academic circles (and Ikegami cites no examples), all I could imagine was Frank Capra's 1945 propaganda film, Know Your Enemy: Japan. Similar statements occur throughout the book: "If we summarize Tokugawa society dismissively as a feudal pre-modern society because it lacked civil society, while ignoring the widespread networks of voluntary associations and the freedom they offered to those who were disenchanted with the political status quo, we are making a serious mistake" (p. 201). Again, I am unaware of any recent scholar guilty of such malfeasance, and Ikegami cites no specific examples.

To correct this mistaken view and present a more accurate portrayal of Tokugawa society, Ikegami's argues that extensive horizontal social networks based on voluntary association in pursuit of the arts helped erode the official Tokugawa social order. The notion of a pervasive official social order is essential to this argument. Although it is rarely discussed in concrete terms and never systematically explained, we are told repeatedly that the Tokugawa bakufu institutionally segmented Japan's population into status hierarchies. Therefore, Ikegami argues, Tokugawa Japan was not a "civil society," which she defines as a "domain of private citizens that has a certain degree of autonomy from the state" (p. 19) and as "the democratic associational domain that reflected the rise of political power of the bourgeoisie" (p. 23). Nevertheless, Tokugawa society was imbued with civility as a result of the spread of "civilizing influences" across horizontal social networks of people from all walks of life engaged in artistic and aesthetic pursuits. Furthermore, people gradually came to derive a greater sense of identity from their network affiliations than from their "assigned," "feudal" status categories. In this way, horizontal artistic networks helped undermine the Tokugawa polity. Moreover, the existence of these networks undercuts the "submissive doormats" view of Japan's people mentioned above and, it qualifies Tokugawa Japan for proto-modern status: "having developed the domain of voluntary associational ties... this society truly deserves the name of proto-modern as far as its civic culture is concerned" (p. 368).

The topic of horizontal social networks in Tokugawa Japan is undoubtedly worthy of a book. Moreover, Ikegami's analysis of the medieval roots of these networks, their connections with the growing market economy, their role in fostering the beginnings of a self-conscious national identity among Japanese, and the rise of mass media is clear and insightful. The discussion of the various art forms as social practice is similarly excellent. Scholars of Japan will find much of value in this book. The main argument, however, often struck me as unconvincing in particular cases, owing to questionable premises plus a tendency to push beyond the evidence and to generalize from exceptional cases.

The bakufu and domains were military organizations at their core, designed to regulate samurai warriors. Ikegami sees commoners in Tokugawa Japan as subject to a degree of social control similar to that of samurai. While she repeatedly acknowledges that the Tokugawa state generally ruled the broader society in a decentralized, indirect manner, she seems nevertheless to regard village councils, neighborhood associations, trade associations, and other organizations that regulated commoner society as de facto extensions of the bakufu or the bakuhan state. Furthermore, these entities were hierarchical in nature and isolated major social groups from one another. Such a portrait of commoner society is required to set up the claim that the formation of organizations based on a radically different logic—horizontal, artistic ties—functioned in part to undermine the bakufu, or at least the social order it supposedly enforced. The Tokugawa state, however, was not omnipresent in society. It was an important background agent, to be sure, but there were vast areas of...