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

Eiko Ikegami's newest book, like her previous work The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (1995), is an innovative examination of a vital facet of Japan's cultural history that has been marginalized by scholars of political history: in this case, early modern cultural practices, networks, and identities. More so than was the case in The Taming of the Samurai, however, Ikegami in this study does not quite balance the twin duties of the historical sociologist. The historical chapters masterfully narrate the development of "aesthetic networks" from the medieval to the modern period, but the framework of sociological theory, which attempts to situate her analysis in larger social-scientific debates about organizations, the public sphere, and civil society, is less compelling. Particularly worrisome in a book that claims to make a substantial contribution to the theoretical literature in historical sociology—a field dominated by the likes of comparativists such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Mann, Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, and, more recently, Rogers Brubaker—is the lack of any meaningful comparative hermeneutics beyond the trope of Japan's similarity to Western Europe.

The meat of the book can be found in sections two and three, a series of seven chapters that chronologically explore the history of what the author labels "aesthetic publics" followed by three standalone essays that interrogate "cultural developments associated with the idiosyncratic relationships between the state and the economy of Tokugawa Japan" (p. 242). She begins with the medieval emergence of the "za arts," meaning linked verse, the tea ceremony, nō drama, and other artistic and literary practices "performed collectively within a group of seated (za) participants" (p. 76). Ikegami is interested both in the socializing, educational aspects of these arts and in the degree to which such practices led to the formation of new organizations, including aesthetic associations and occupational groups such as guilds. Particularly intriguing is her attempt to untangle the relationship between beauty, power, and the sacred in medieval institutions such as the court, marginal communities, and performance guilds. The ritual logic of za meetings "not only connected the self with other individuals but also conjoined this world and the other world" (p. 101).

The author engages in a remarkably original analysis of ikki, dengaku performance, and the politics of the tea ceremony in a chapter that could fruitfully be read alongside Mary Elizabeth Berry's The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (1994). Though only a prelude to Ikegami's main focus on Tokugawa developments, the two chapters on medieval Japan make a major contribution to the English-language scholarship. While Earl Miner, Steven Carter, and others have examined renga associations and other literary practices of medieval Japan, and Thomas Hare, J. Thomas Rimer, Eric Rath, and Shelley Fenno Quinn among others have explored the work of Zeami and the origins of nō theater, the broader social phenomenon of the za arts has gone largely unexamined in the English literature, except, of course, Paul Varley's brief treatment in his chapter in Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of Japan (1990).

The book's main course is Ikegami's examination of Tokugawa-period developments, which does not disappoint. After a brief consideration of changes in social relations related to state formation—including the establishment of the status system (mibun seido), a process she refers to as segmentation, and the hierarchical separation of "enclave publics" from more private spheres—the author looks at the rise of "aesthetic civility," the key concern of the book. Ikegami argues that people explored common aesthetic interests in varied and sometimes overlapping groupings that were, according to the logic of Tokugawa politics, private, but that became increasingly widespread and public in nature. The aesthetic knowledge and interpersonal skills learned in these contexts created a grammar of flexible and weak but still influential civility that defined Tokugawa social relations. She focuses...