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167 6 Histories [This lineage of the Hisamatsu clan] is largely based on the lineage of the Bunka era [1818–1829]. However, as the Bunka-era lineage was submitted to the Tokugawa government, it contains not a few matters involving discretion. Regarding some of these I have written the truth. —From the preface of a daimyo lineage composed by Tsuda Masatada in 18441 A school of historiography called Mitogaku flourished in the castle town of Mito, the heart of a daimyo realm ruled by one of the three main collateral houses of the Tokugawa clan. Mitogaku is best known for crafting a history of Japan, the Dai Nihon shi. Modeled on Chinese imperial dynastic histories, the Dai Nihon shi’s narrative centered on the Japanese imperial line. Its vision of the place of the emperor and the warrior governments of Japan was not created with any revolutionary intent, but because it made the imperial line the organizing principle of the history, it became highly influential among the activists of the 1860s who emphasized the ideal of service to the imperial line in their vision of a new Japan. They propounded the notion that warrior government , then represented by the Tokugawa clan, had usurped the authority of the emperor, and they used this idea to justify the overthrow of the Tokugawa and to “restore” the emperor as the rightful center and ruler of the country of Japan. This political movement became the nationalist revolution known as the Meiji Restoration, and its leaders immediately began rewriting the past of the archipelago. They reinvented the Tokugawa past so that it could be duly discarded (The Tokugawa failed to carry out their duty to serve the emperor’s histories 168 will!) and narratives for future action could be created (Serve the emperor!). This influential vision made the emperors’ will over a unified and expanding Japan the prime context in which to organize the narration of the entire past of the archipelago.2 The historian Watanabe Hiroshi has critically discussed the importance of Mitogaku’s role in popularizing a broad slate of modern Japanese historiographical terms to describe the Edo period. He has advanced the argument that the terms bakufu, tennō, chōtei, and han have been commonly used by modern historians in ways that do not accurately reflect the Edo-period past.3 Watanabe notes that Mitogaku scholars encouraged the popularization of the first three of these terms, and this practice became normalized by the history writing produced under the ideology of the Meiji Restoration. He questions whether historians should continue to use them to describe the Edo past. He himself made a decision to rewrite most of the previously published chapters of his 1997 book, Higashi Ajia no ōken to shisō (East Asian kingly authority and ideologies), changing the terminology to be, as he argues, more faithful to the Edo past, using such Edo-period terms as kōgi (government) for bakufu (military government), tenshi (child of heaven) for tennō (heavenly sovereign ), and kinri (forbidden quarter) for chōtei (court). There is much truth to his stimulating argument, and although it is not entirely without problems in the context of omote and uchi politics, it has been a prime inspiration for my current analysis. Using the actual Edo-period terms raises the prestige of the Tokugawa vis- à-vis the imperial clan, which is more true to the era than is represented in modern narratives. Watanabe’s method allows more sensitive exploration of Edo-era history because he employs narratives emanating from Tokugawa authority , but I suggest that because this uses the space of Japan as an unspoken frame of reference, the replacement of terms alone does not provide a method for understanding the feudal arrangement of political space into omote and uchi and its political culture. Feudal spaces become translated into “regions” of the nation, rather than spaces with naibun identities.4 This chapter analyzes a variety of official histories composed by samurai in the Tokugawa period for what they tell us about how the politics of omote and uchi shaped their narratives. As was discussed in earlier chapters, many “facts” recorded in past history are not easily translated into present standards of “fact” and can inadvertently be misread as modern-style history. This chapter explores some of the intentions embedded in many types of Edo-era history writings and suggests some guidelines for interpreting their information for present uses. Another particular interest of this chapter is to consider [3.17.150.89...

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