Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan by Luke S. Roberts (review)

This is an exciting and original work. Performing the Great Peace analyzes a central tension within the Tokugawa political order: the balance of power between the shogun and the daimyo. The early Tokugawa shoguns were more powerful than any rulers since the apex of the imperial state in the 700s, yet they never exerted direct control over Japanese commoners who resided outside of direct Tokugawa holdings. Instead, they asserted authority over daimyo, who, in turn, ruled the samurai and commoners of their own domains. Daimyo were thus sovereigns who were subordinate to a superior sovereign. Historians have struggled to devise a language to describe that balance of power. In Japanese, historians commonly use terms such as bakuhan kokka to reflect how the bakufu and the domains (han) shared state power. In English, Philip Brown has coined the term “flamboyant state” to describe how the Tokugawa flaunted power without actually exercising it. I have employed the term “compound state” (fukugō kokka), inspired by the work of Mizubayashi Takeshi, to describe how the domains and the shogunate together constituted the sum total of state power. Roberts’s earlier work, inspired by the approach of Fujita Tei’ichirō, emphasized how in domains like Tosa, the words “country” (kuni) and “state” (kokka) normally referred to the domain rather than to Japan.

In Performing the Great Peace, Roberts enriches this debate by showing how, during the Tokugawa era, power was discussed in two parallel registers. Samurai officials referred to their own domains as the “state” for a local audience, but those same officials would recognize the superiority of the shogun when addressing Edo. There was, in essence, a double vocabulary that allowed two conflicting notions of power to coexist. The interests of the lord of Tosa, for example, were “public” (ōyake) in Tosa, but “private” (watakushi) in relation to the shogunate. Tosa itself was a “country” or “state” in Tosa, but a “holding” (ryōbun, shiryō) vis-à-vis the shogunate. Roberts distinguishes these through the Japanese terms omote, meaning “outside/public,” and naibun, meaning “inside/private.” These parallel omote and naibun discursive strategies were critical to the Tokugawa order. Domains did not contest Tokugawa power, because they could publicly accede but still secretly dissent. If domains “performed” obedience, then Tokugawa officials saw no need to crush their autonomy.

Roberts reveals how “performance” was critical to a number of political practices—Tokugawa inspection of domains, daimyo inheritance practices, border disputes, and local histories. Inspections, for example, were a combination of “performance” and information gathering. The shogunate wanted accurate information about domains, but it was also important that domains perform the ritual of submitting to shogunal inspection. Roberts rejects the notion that inspections constituted rigorous surveillance in the early seventeenth century but then atrophied into mere ritual and spectacle. Instead, he sees ritual as an inherent part of the system. If, for example, a domain scrambled to resolve commoners’ complaints over high taxation in anticipation of a Tokugawa inspection, then Tokugawa interests were served. Rather than formally citing a domain for violations, Tokugawa inspectors and local officials resolved problems off the record. At the same time, the shogunate cautioned domains against outright falsehood. It scolded Tosa, for example, when it suspected that samurai had posed as commoners during a shogunal inspection. Roberts convincingly argues that “to call these arrangements the production of ‘lies’ does not convey their integrating nature” (p. 63).

Like inspections, reports of daimyo succession were also negotiated fictions. Roberts examines in detail the case of Miyake Yasukuni, lord of Tahara domain. Yasukuni was childless, and on his deathbed in late 1792, it seems, he designated his younger brother as heir—at least as purportedly witnessed and approved by a high-ranking shogunal officer. But in point of fact, Roberts notes, it was an open secret that Yasukuni had actually died fifty-five days earlier. The story of his deathbed...