Networking for Pleasure and Profit

That Japanese people aspire to a high level of cooperation in many avenues of life is not just a truism based on national stereotypes. After all, from the spread of intensive agriculture beginning in the thirteenth century until its mechanization following World War II, transplanting rice from seedbeds to paddies was the quintessential communal activity, regardless however much attention each family might lavish on its fields the rest of the year. In terms of aesthetic practices, poetry-writing competitions and collections have punctuated Japan's literary history since the Man'yōshū. The problem is to understand where and when this tendency arises historically, the conditions under which it obtains in past and present, and where it stops. The books under consideration here focus primarily on the second set of issues.

Generally speaking, cooperation takes one of two forms. The first presumes the existence of a specified and often sacrosanct place set aside for the purpose of a group activity. The second does not require, although it does not preclude, that the participants meet face to face. Instead, they exchange information and ideas through a variety of networks. Some of these may be structured hierarchically as in the schools that teach tea ceremony or flower arranging; others are more flexible and egalitarian. The study of networking and collaboration in Japanese history has already enriched our understanding of literary practice and economic behavior. In a book published a decade ago Miyachi Masato analyzed the way people collected information in the pursuit of their everyday lives. In their more recent studies Eiko Ikegami and C. Andrew Gerstle focus on records of performance.

Surely it is unusual for a sociologist to investigate the aesthetic dimensions to poetry-writing circles, tea ceremony, and the performing arts. More typical is an analysis of their function in social integration, a topic also not neglected by Ikegami. But throughout this lengthy study, she emphasizes that the history of aesthetics, for all of its social, economic, and political implications, has to be understood as driven by the desire of ordinary people for beauty and freedom.

Ikegami seeks to complicate our understanding of Japanese politics, social integration, economic development, and aesthetic traditions from the Muromachi period to the Meiji Restoration by employing sociological theories drawn from studies of Europe. Her goal is multifaceted-to maintain a tension between her evidence and her theories productive of new insights into both Japanese and European societies and to demonstrate the interplay of horizontal alliances versus vertical status hierarchies, public duties versus private pleasures, and political segmentation versus cultural boundary crossing. The crux of her argument revolves around the interconnectedness of four transformations in what she calls "the Tokugawa network revolution" (p. 10): the establishment at the beginning of the Tokugawa period of a decentralized yet highly articulated polity, the growth of a commercial economy, the spread of circles and groups for aesthetic practices, and the elaboration of communications infrastructures through trade routes and commercial publishing. The network revolution provided places where people from daimyo to townspeople could come together to develop shared cultural understandings. Based on classical literary and polite arts transmuted through the marginal people and spaces (muen) that existed during the Muromachi period and were then disseminated more widely during the Tokugawa period, these cultural understandings underpinned Japanese identities before the advent of the modern nation-state. For that reason, Ikegami calls the consequences of this network revolution, especially its effect on aesthetic practices, "proto-modernity."

Much of the evidence Ikegami adduces will be familiar to historians and...