Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan (review)

In recent decades, scholars have increasingly shifted from the study of institutions to the study of movement—of ideas, of goods, and of people. One would think that the alternate-attendance or hostage system (sankin kōtai), which required daimyo to travel to and reside in Edo every other year from 1635 to 1862, would have been one of the first topics to which new questions about movement would have been applied. But the persuasiveness of the political explanations for the system, combined with a scattered, uneven source base, has discouraged scholars from attempting more socially based studies of this state-mandated travel as it affected domains throughout the land.

With Tour of Duty, therefore, Constantine Nomikos Vaporis has become the first scholar—in English or any other language— to explore the alternate-attendance system as a whole in terms of the movement of real people and things. Focusing not on the people who designed the system, but rather on those who traveled at its behest, Vaporis highlights the fact that daimyo and their immediate families and advisors made up a small minority of those involved in this repeated travel. Looking beyond the lords' domainal records to pictorial representations and, especially, the manuscript diaries left by the daimyo's retainers, Vaporis asks questions to which we long assumed we knew the answers. In doing so, he reveals details of the process that, while only occasionally overturning received wisdom, frequently lead him to additional insights into important processes of status differentiation and cultural exchange.

Vaporis uses his emphasis on the "lived experience" (p. 5) of travelers to structure this beautifully written and copiously researched book. After a chapter on both the origins of the alternate-attendance system in general and the beginning of a trip to Edo in particular, he addresses in succession the routes to Edo, the pageantry of formal daimyo processions, and the retainers' stay in Edo—discussing their work, residence, and free time there—before considering the importance of such movement to the development of a shared culture throughout the Japanese islands.

The book begins with the familiar story of the institutional origins of sankin kōtai. Vaporis situates the daimyo's planning for each trip within the historical context of political control, reiterating the well-established observation that the alternate-attendance system served as a heavy tax on daimyo, severely limiting their financial and political independence. But Vaporis also highlights the ways in which shoguns used the system to orchestrate interactions among daimyo, their heirs, and their retainers. In an important corrective to Marius Jansen and later scholars, he demonstrates the inaccuracy of the notion that daimyo heirs were born in Edo and only went home after becoming daimyo in their own right.1 In actuality, he points out, the alternate-attendance system required the movement of heirs as well as daimyo, sending heirs back to the domain whenever the lord came to Edo and ensuring that if they ever overlapped, they did so in Edo, not in the home domain. This indicates that daimyo heirs, whether born or adopted into their positions, typically spent significant amounts of time both in the domain and on the road (pp. 17-18), and suggests that they acquired greater familiarity with their home domains than frequently assumed.

In Chapter 2, "The Road to Edo (and Back)," Vaporis retains his focus on the highest elite: the shogun and daimyo. Correcting the image of alternate attendance as a rigid, static institution, Vaporis argues not only that the daimyo's performance of sankin kōtai changed over time (when, for instance, the daimyo's use of sea routes declined), but also that "no two cycles of alternate attendance were ever the same" (p. 36). Shoguns, for example, occasionally permitted daimyo to delay their trips on the pretext of being ill, even when everyone knew that the maladies affected the lord...