Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853
This month we are looking at Japanese history, making this weeks book Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853 by Haga Toru. So let’s do this!
In my review of last weeks book, The Battle of Sekigahara by Chris Glenn, I include Glenn’s brief description of the fallout of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the 260 years of peace that Sekigahara ushered in, the isolationist and how culture flowered.
This book goes into the details of that flowering. Because really, once peace has been obtained, what does a country do? Some cultures, pursue aggressive expansion. Like the Mongols, the British, the Spanish, the Americans, the Portuguese, the Persians, the Egyptians, Carthage, Sahelian empires.... Like….history is fucking FULL of expansionist empires that brutally expand until the death of one or more key leaders before slowly contracting.
The Japanese...turned inwards. Just prior to Sekigahara, they had TRIED to expand out. They did invade the Korean peninsula, where they lost. Badly.
But now, the country itself was at peace. 30,000 died in a brutal civil war battle, and the country was fucking tired. And while it healed, it became uniquely artistic.
It had had artistic elements before. The whole book is basically a series of essays the author had written about various aspects of Japanese culture during the Tokugawa shoganate, exploring art, theater, humor, scientific exploration, and literature. But the art styles he discusses started well before Tokugawa ascended, they were merely elevated during this period.
A period he calls Pax Tokugawana, a term the author coined “in reference to the total peace that Japan built, maintained, and enjoyed both at home and vis-a-vis other countries under the Tokugawa shogunate.” He deliberately modeled the idea after the Pax Romana, the period of time when culture and sciences flowered in ancient Rome.
The first piece he describes is Scenes in and Around Kyoto, which is a very specific painting style, with the earliest example he mentions being from 1521...a full 100 years before Tokugawa. This style of painting is exactly that...an artist captures a moment in time. And it continues with examples from 1565, and 1616….little snapshots of life.
Haga takes us through how, while the country was 99% isolationist, the Dutch managed to retain a toe hold, sending yearly tributes to the Shogun. And it was through these tributes, that Japanese medicine actually advanced, thanks largely to the extreme fascination Dutch medicine had for one Sugita Genpaku, who pushed hard for the ability to study and translate Dutch works to advance science in Japan.
In discussing the importance of literature, I found this absolutely amazing quote “Students around the age of twenty invariably want to read Max Weber or Karl Marx (or more recently, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida), and when they have finished, they imagine that they now understand society and the life of the mind. That is an empty delusion. Reading crude translations of dry-as-dust treatises on sociological methodology or philosophy only dulls the brain and the senses.”
I ADORE this quote. While Haga goes on to recommend Japanese works, because of course this entire book is a love letter to an era Japanese leftists consider the dark ages of Japan, the above statement is true of ALL 20 year olds, high on the smell of their own farts and sure they have life figured out. Read a book, ANY book, that is NOT required reading for your college class. Especially read classics in literature. Because they will teach you how to think, rather than what to think. You’ll learn more about who you are.
Going on a small soapbox here, two Instagrammers I follow who have amazing insights and recommendations of classical literature are Pensandpoison and Chrisfizer_ Both of them have made me realize my own classics reading is...sparse.
Ok, off the soapbox.
Oh, speaking of farts...He includes a large and delightfully witty section on a sketch called Fart Wars by Ogawa Usen, which is technically outside the Pax Tokugawana but pulls back to a two part essay by Hiraga Gennai, On Farting, and On Farting, Part II. While he does not mention it in this book, I cannot help but feel Haga would enjoy Benjamin Franklin’s contribution to the genre of farting, Fart Proudly.
Almost every chapter includes artwork from the period, stunningly beautiful and detailed images of nature, of home life, of street scenes in Kyoto, scenes of love, of reposing at home with the family...of farting.
This book drove home for me how very little I know about Japan. I think I always thought of Japan as cultured, but that was probably my own ignorance on the matter. Which is not to say they are not, this book definitively PROVES the culture. But in Japan, China was considered high culture, for much of this period. And before that even, it was a desire to invade China that led to the disastrous run on the Korean peninsula in the 16th century. And it wasn’t until Tokugawa took over, that Japan had the chance to define what her own culture is.
And it IS cultured. Very much so. While intellectual elitists in Japan may have considered the Tokugawa shogunate a dark age, probably because of the isolationism, Haga makes a very strong case for this being an Age of Enlightenment in Japan. Much as it was in Europe. Because there were great strides in art, music, theater, science, and medicine in Japan. And yes, some of that was through Dutch contacts. But without the long standing peace provided by the Tokugawa shogunate, the great thinkers of the day would not have had time to devote to such passions. And Japan would have missed out on so much of what makes her culture today so admired in other parts of the globe.
