Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan by Hi-raku Shimoda (review)

This book contributes to a growing body of English-language historical scholarship on the function and identity of regions in Japan. The focus on subnational units itself is not what distinguishes this body of scholarship, for historians have long chosen such a focus as a means of narrowing their bodies of evidence and conducting fine-grained studies of local dynamics. Rather, what defines this scholarship is that the region is the telos of the analysis, even if broader issues are also in play. Hiraku Shimoda’s book is on regional identity in Japan and its place within the larger narrative of the modern nation-state. His choice of Aizu as his geographic focus is compelling, owing to the fact that it played the role of enemy to the cause of imperial restoration and thus served as an antithesis to the emerging national narrative in the decades following the Meiji Restoration. The question of how Aizu was rehabilitated within that narrative forms the analytical thrust of the book.

Two of the five main chapters of Shimoda’s book focus on the Tokugawa period. During this time Aizu was a distinct political unit: a geographically contiguous domain, headed by a single political authority. It therefore stood in contrast to many other regions of Tokugawa Japan that were divided into multiple political jurisdictions and whose geography created great diversity within the region—a notable example of this being Shinano, which was the subject of another recent book on regional identity by Kären Wigen.¹ For most of the Tokugawa era, Aizu was headed by the Matsudaira house, and under its headship the domain came to play an important geopolitical role as a loyal military ally of the Tokugawa.

After the Matsudaira were appointed in the mid-seventeenth century to govern Aizu—they were a transplant from Shinano, in fact—they set about the task of familiarizing themselves with the land and people they governed. Often at the bakufu’s behest, they generated maps, population registers, and cadastral surveys, which charted out the physical landscape of the domain. They also compiled gazetteers and domainal histories that filled the physical landscape with cultural information and narrated its historical development—as one might expect, in a way that bolstered the legitimacy of the Matsudaira’s claims to domainal rulership. The domainal government also actively propagated the notion of domainal service (kokueki), which provided moral justification for policies prohibiting farmers from absconding and preventing the export of certain goods. And the domainal government was not the only source of knowledge production about Aizu or rhetoric about domainal identity. Local intellectuals wrote gazetteers and travel literature; privately produced (though sometimes officially endorsed) agricultural handbooks took Aizu residents as their imagined audience; and merchants appropriated the language of domainal loyalty when advocating for protectionist economic measures.

While all of this activity provided potential grist for the making of a domainal identity, in his next chapter Shimoda cautions against jumping to anachronistic claims of proto-nationalism on a regional scale. He argues, first, that the rhetoric of domainal service was, by and large, targeted to the limited audience of the samurai. He also emphasizes that the domainal government lacked the institutional reach to actually instill domainal identity in the population—and indeed, it lacked the inclination to do so, since it did not see the need to secure an active political commitment from the general population. In the eyes of domainal authorities, the people were “less the inkling of a nation, or even a distinctly regional people, than a tellingly premodern, uneven collectivity” (p. 35).

The defining moment of Aizu’s history came at the end of the Tokugawa era, when it defended the bakufu against the imperial forces from Satsuma and Chōshū in the Boshin War. Shimoda describes Aizu’s experience in the aftermath of its defeat, which was not unlike that of defeated nations in international warfare. The...