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This highly readable book offers a rich narrative of Japan's early modern - or Tokugawa - period (1568-1868). Drawing on an extensive body of scholarship, Totman weaves together political, economic, intellectual, literary and cultural history with imagination and skill, making this the only truly comprehensive and up to date study in English of these three centuries of Japanese history. The author broadens the context still further by bringing a unique ecological perspective to his subject, examining such topics as natural disasters, resource use and depletion, demographics, and river control. The book begins with the story of a century and a half of extraordinary growth that culminated in the urban cultural blossoming of the Genroku period (roughly 1680 to 1710). It then traces the complex pattern of political, cultural, and more fundamental environmental developments that brought Japan through the harsh decades of the eighteenth century into a period of renewed social and cultural dynamism in the 1790s. Finally, it follows the growing entanglement of these domestic trends and surging Euro-American imperialist activity that led to the Meiji Restoration and Japan's move into an era of active global engagement. Recognizing that Eurasian political boundaries are again in flux, the author devotes considerable attention to Japan's international relations during the decades after 1792 when its boundaries with Russia were gradually clarified. Totman enlivens his book throughout with biographical detail, forthright interpretation, and frequent quotations from primary sources. The extraordinary breadth of his sources and his remarkable ability to bring them together in a clear and engagingnarrative promise to make Early Modern Japan the standard work on the subject for years to come.

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Early Modern Japan

University of California Press

Aspects of Geography
Aspects of Climate and Ocean Currents
The Environmental Setting in 1600

The fundamental rhythm of Japan's early modern history sprang from the interaction of the human populace and its environmental surroundings. The lay of the land, the climate, and the flora and fauna that flourished there gave shape and limits to that human experience. They influenced not only the temporal sequence of growth and stasis but also the regional relationships of center and periphery and, later in the Tokugawa period, tension between southwest and northeast.

Aspects of Geography

Since ancient times the heartland of Japanese civilization has been the Inland Sea region, particularly the rich Kinai basin at its eastern end. The Inland Sea permitted convenient, reasonably safe transportation and was lined with small but productive and comfortable sedimentary basins, supported by richly wooded hinterlands. As society grew during the centuries before 1600, the heartland was extended eastward along Honshu's southern littoral to the Kanto*

plain, the largest area of flat land in the country. This elongated strip of coastal plain retained its role as heartland because the Kinai, Nobi, and Kanto plains, all of which were attractive climatically, provided agricultural foundations large enough to support political organizations that ambitious leaders could employ to conquer outlying populations to the south and north.

During the early modern period, Japan consisted essentially of the

three major islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku, with a gross land area of about 295,000 square kilometers (113,500 square miles), making it about the size of Arizona or Italy.1 The three islands lie along the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent, extending from about 310 north latitude at the southern end of Kyushu to 420 at the northern tip of Honshu. The climate ranges from subtropical to cold temperate, roughly akin to the range between Georgia and New Hampshire on the east coast of North America. Natural forest vegetation ranges similarly from evergreen broadleaf in the south through deciduous broadleaf to coniferous boreal forest in the north and in higher mountain areas of central Honshu.

Japan's topography betrays its geologic youth. Mountain building in the region accelerated about 5 million years ago, becoming especially intense during the past 2 million years, so the archipelago's mountains are exceptionally young. As a corollary, they thrust skyward with exceeding abruptness, a characteristic unmodified by glacial activity, because Japan experienced little glaciation during the Pleistocene ice ages. Instead, the archipelago's mountains still culminate in sharp peaks and ridges, which are subject to uncommonly rapid erosion. Debris-laden streams and rivers rush precipitously down to the lowlands, where the detritus settles out to form alluvial fans and sedimentary flood plains.

The thrust-and-fold activity that formed the ranges proper has been supplemented by vulcanism, which has dotted the islands with volcanoes, lava and ash surfaces, and regions of continuing geothermal activity. Indeed, Japan's sixty-odd active volcanoes constitute about 10 percent of the total number of currently active volcanoes worldwide.2

The bedrock mountains produced by this tectonic activity constitute about 80 percent of Japan's modern land surface. The other 20 percent is sedimentary terrain of very recent provenance, situated in small basins, mostly fronting the sea and mostly giving way abruptly at their inland borders to acutely tilted mountain slopes. This means that easily manipulable surfaces are modest in scope and inelastic: when one reaches the edge of flatland, there is, except for fans and terrace deposits, very little in the way of gradually rising plains or hill country that can with somewhat more labor be turned to human use. Compared to most re-

As will be apparent in chapter 13, the island of Hokkaido, which was mostly populated by Ainu or other northern peoples, was a borderland, only its southern tip being subject to a sustained Japanese presence before the nineteenth century.

Yutaka Sakaguchi, "Characteristics of the Physical Nature of Japan with Special Reference to Landform," in Association of Japanese Geographers, ed., Geography of Japan (Tokyo: Teikoku-Shoin, 1980), p. 17.

gions of dense preindust population, this topography has helped make the transition from ampleness of land to ecological overload an exceptionally abrupt one.

On the other hand, because Japan was not subject to significant glaciation, its lowlands contain little glacial residue and their natural drainage systems have remained more regular in configuration and hydrologic behavior than in areas where glaciation has occurred. This more orderly lowland topography has fostered uniformity and regularity in land-use patterns?notably irrigated rice culture?and in the social arrangements that accompany them.

Pleistocene glacial cycles also shaped Japan's natural environment in another way that was consequential to early modern history. By dropping ocean levels substantially, the several epochs of glaciation periodically transformed Japan from an island chain into a mountainous northeastward extension of a vast coastal lowland that reached southward to Vietnam and westward to interior China. These events sustained Japan's association with the East Asian biome, enabling the archipelago to share in East Asia's extraordinary vegetational wealth. Whereas western Europe records about 80 species of indigenous trees and North America about 250, for example, East Asia, including Japan, numbers some 500.3

This richness of floral diversity has given the archipelago an extremely adaptable biosystem, which has offered humans a variety of resources and could make many responses to human encroachment. Unquestionably that biological diversity helped the island chain cope with the widespread deforestation, land reclamation, and population growth that marked the seventeenth century.

Aspects of Climate and Ocean Currents

Situated in the Earth's northern temperate zone, Japan experiences a regular seasonal pattern that assures the islands of ample precipitation, averaging 180 centimeters annually, ranging from more than 400 in the southwest to about 100 in the northeast. This moisture enables the island chain to convert its rich floral potential into uncommonly lush

Franz Heske, German Forestry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 52. Heske attributes Europe's silvic poverty to the region's east-west running mountains, which stymied Pleistocene plant migration. More recently, I. G. Simmons, Biogeography: Natural and Cultural (North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press, 1979), p. 114, has reported the maximum number of plant species at forty per hectare in North America and eight per hectare in Europe, a disproportion somewhat greater than Heske's.

forest cover. However, the combination of steep slopes and heavy rainfall gives the archipelago one of the world's highest rates of natural erosion, and that condition, which is sporadically intensified by the natural shocks of earthquake and vulcanism, can also be exacerbated by human activity, as we shall see. Climate thus complicates hillside tillage and reinforces the abruptness of transition from potentially arable to nonarable terrain.

The island chain's mountainous backbone and its...