Bereavement and Consolation: Testimonies from Tokugawa Japan (review)

Harold Bolitho's primary question posed in this study is an important one: "how did people in earlier times deal with the deaths of those around them?" (p. x). In many cases, some of the answers to this question are readily available to historians, such as the type of funerary rite that was performed, who attended, who presided, how the corpse was treated, the costs of funerals and memorial rites, and so forth. Similarly, comparing earlier accounts of visits to cemeteries with later ones can quickly disclose to the discerning eye the shifting styles of memorializing the dead. Yet these things are public expressions and objective facts. Bolitho's question, however, has a different thrust for he wants to know how people dealt emotionally with the deaths of loved ones or others close to them. For historians, this is, as he notes, a much harder nut to crack. Emotions are not quantifiable; to the horror of "hard" historians, they are subjective states.

So how does a historian go about seeking answers to how people in the past, say in Tokugawa Japan, dealt with bereavement? How, if at all, did they experience consolation? To these questions of Bolitho, we might add others: Should historians interest themselves in the history of emotions (or "emotionology," as some have termed it) at all? If so, how should they proceed methodologically? This reviewer would offer a resounding "Yes!" to the first question; the second one is the harder and more serious issue one must grapple with and it has no simple "one-size-fits-all" answer.

Early in his preface, Bolitho offers his readers a confession of sorts—his study did not begin with an initial research question, as is usually the case, but rather with an unplanned encounter with a set of documents that seemingly forced themselves into his attention:

Rather than having the question point the way to the material, the material came first, shouldering in to take immediate possession of the center stage....The questions that ambled in after it remain apologetically on the fringes, unanswered and, in any definitive sense, probably unanswerable.

(p. xi)

Having worked in and taught the history of emotions for a number of years, I am more optimistic than Bolitho about the ability of historians to answer the sticky methodological issues they face when dealing with emotional expressions. For his part, Bolitho has contented himself with translating a handful of documents and providing biographical contextualization for the authors of these, as well as more general historical context. Some readers will put down this volume wishing he had attempted more. Nevertheless, this volume is a valuable addition to studies of the Tokugawa period.

Here, in part, is Bolitho's account of how he "stumbled upon" one of his three documents:

I had been aimlessly flipping through a collection of Japanese essays when I stumbled upon a description, written some two hundred years earlier by a young Buddhist priest, of the brief life and sudden death of his firstborn child....Thirty years of acquaintance with materials from this period of Japanese history had left me unprepared for what I found. The account was so extraordinary, so personal, and so touching that I could not turn my back on it, and so the reading grew into a translation.

(p. xi)

Thus, one textual encounter led to an initial act of translation and this one translation soon led to three. Bolitho has translated Tokugawa texts by three men: a priest, a poet, and a scholar. These translations, along with a partial translation of a piece on the death of the scholar's baby daughter, occupy approximately one-half of this study. The other half of this volume consists of Bolitho's contextualization of each translated text as well as his musings on bereavement and consolation in the Tokugawa period. Each of the primary texts is different in its own way, yet they are linked together by Bolitho because each is a rare expression of...