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  • Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603–1912 by Atsuko Hirai
  • Luke Roberts
Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603–1912 by Atsuko Hirai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp. xviii + 433. $49.95.

This very interesting monograph explores the place of rituals of public mourning in Tokugawa- and Meiji-era Japan. Rulers issued orders and laws that specified behaviors related to mourning and preventing transmission of pollution, called bukkiryō 服忌令 and narumono chōjirei 鳴物停止令, respectively. As Hirai notes, scholarly attention to this topic in Japan is relatively recent, and it has been all but absent from English-language research. That there is only one monograph in Japanese devoted to the subject might even suggest that it is an arcane subject of narrow significance.1 But Hirai's claim, as the title of her monograph suggests, is that public mourning is key to understanding [End Page 231] the sociopolitical order of Tokugawa Japan and that it had a large influence on Meiji Japan as well. After reading this work I am inclined to agree and I think that this book should be considered essential reading for all scholars working to understand the social and political order of Tokugawa Japan.

Hirai shows that a number of different threads of meaning were historically attached to these rituals. The rituals themselves involved dress codes and displays of abstinence from pleasures that indicated proper respect for deceased family members or rulers; they stipulated avoidance of carrying pollution into the sacred territory of government or shrine/temple areas. Rules for mourning family members derived from ancient Chinese models specifying how many days a person should variously mourn parents, adoptive parents, a wife or husband, brothers, sisters, half-siblings, heirs, and so forth. Hierarchical power arrangements in gender and familial relations determined the amount of mourning and abstention in precise detail, the practice of which ritually tamed people into playing their social identities. These practices were not merely the subject of social control but also of government control. Government offices, as well as shrine or temple areas, applied mourning requirements and abstention practices to their associates and visitors. It was, for example, deemed punishable for a government worker to show up for duty too soon after the death of a family member (p. 125). This example reminds us that one powerful dimension of Edo-era politics was its use of the metaphor of the household (ie 家) to organize governmental authority, and it helps us understand how control of private households' mourning and abstention rituals inculcated generalized acquiescence to the activity of government itself.

Each chapter has specific topics and goals. Part 1 of the book focuses on the ritualized mourning of relatives. Chapter 1 presents the history of these laws, from their origins in early China to the laws of the ancient Japanese imperial court. It touches on the influential eighth-century Yōrō Code (Yōrō ritsuryō 養老律令) and its influence in court and shrine mourning and abstention practices. Hirai goes to lengths to identify a Shinto tradition in her exploration of shrines, but there is an absence of attention to temples and identifiably Buddhist influences, which is a bit regrettable in light of the highly integrated nature of religious institutions, philosophy, and ritual in premodern times. Although I have no problem with teasing out Shinto and Buddhist and [End Page 232] Confucian discourses per se, I sense here—and in a few other places in the book—a projection into the past of post-Meiji discourses on Japanese national identity.

Chapter 2 introduces the mourning edicts of the Tokugawa house and government. The desultory interest shown by the first four Tokugawa rulers in using mourning and abstention politically is deeply striking. Control began in earnest with an edict issued by Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646–1709) in 1684, which Hirai calls "the most lasting accomplishment of Tsunayoshi's rule" (p. 56)—because it became the foundation of laws that were elaborated on by later generations, it clearly continued to increase in influence as the Tokugawa period progressed. Chapter 3 further explores Tsunayoshi biographically in relation to this edict and mourning practices, exposing the roles played by his interest...

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