Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (review)

In this well-written and meticulously researched work, Daniel V. Botsman makes an important contribution to the growing number of histories of penal methods and institutions published in the wake of the rise of the Foucauldian paradigm in the 1980s. Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan will be of interest not only to Japan specialists, but also to researchers working on other societies and those doing comparative work. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is the author's careful attention to comparative issues and his recognition that the history of punishments in the modern period cannot be understood as a problem of national history but must be viewed from the perspective of an international order shaped by the circulation of ideas about civilization, race, and empire.

At the outset of this study, Botsman explicitly rejects the Whiggish narrative of progress that held that Japan's reliance on "barbarous" methods of punishment gave way to a humane and civilized approach as a result of the intervention of Western modernity. He also takes issue with more recent Japanese historiography that has attempted to counter this narrative by identifying indigenous precursors to a modern penal system, so that, for example, the Edo Stockade (ninsoku yoseba) is explained as a point of origin for the modern penitentiary. Botsman argues instead for an historicist approach in which penal practices are analyzed as "one part of a complex set of strategies for ordering society and exercising power" (p. 10). To this end, he devotes the first half of his book (chapters 1-4) to a careful exploration of the penal practices of the Tokugawa period and demonstrates that, their obvious cruelty notwithstanding, Tokugawa penal practices were part of a sophisticated system for maintaining social and political order. Crucifixion, the public display of severed heads, and the tattooing of criminals all aimed to make use of the "body-as-sign" in order to convey warrior authority, while the threat of brutal punishment was always tempered by lax enforcement and the possibility of official "benevolence" that was enacted through acts of leniency and regular issuance of amnesties. Equally intertwined with general Tokugawa approaches to governance were the practice of differential punishment, in which punishment was based upon the social status of the perpetrator and victim, the use of inmates to police other inmates within the Edo jailhouse, and the reliance on outcasts to carry out punishments. These policies had the aim of enforcing the divisions of status that Botsman, following David Howell, asserts were the foundation of the Tokugawa state.

Chapter 4 examines the Edo Stockade, which has received much attention from Japanese historians of penal institutions. Botsman takes up this institution within the context of reformist writings by Ogyū Sorai, Dazai Shundai, and Nakai Riken, all of whom argued for reform of penal practices as a response to what they perceived to be the rising threat of social disorder. Ultimately, it was Riken's advocacy of the creation of a long-term jail for purposes of moral reform that influenced Matsudaira Sadanobu, who ordered the construction of the stockade. Botsman, however, cautions against the view that this institution was a precursor of the modern prison and argues that the bakufu's aim was neither the moral reform nor the punishment of criminals but rather the maintenance of social order in the capital. One result was that vagrants and unregistered people were housed together with criminals in the stockade. In fact, according to Botsman, the stockade was never intended to replace the older "body-as-sign" regime of punishments, but rather to supplement it, and thus did not reflect the transformation of Tokugawa conceptions of political authority.

These four chapters are the strongest in the book, offering a remarkably lucid account of the relation between penal practices and the social and political order of the Tokugawa period that demonstrates Botsman's mastery of the secondary literature and the depth of his archival research. In...