Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 456,

Stranger in the Shogun City.

You may have noticed that our subjects the last two weeks have both been aristocrats, and there's a reason for that. For a very long time, literacy in Japan was confined to the elite, the old aristocracy of Kyoto, the upper levels of the samurai class, those sort of people.

But one of the big shifts that took place during the Edo period when Japan was ruled by the

shoguns of the Tokugawa family from 1600 to 1868 was a massive rise in literacy.

Admittedly, you don't see anything like modern literacy rates, but by any measure, more people

were reading and writing in Japan than ever before, particularly by the 1800s.

And one of the great things about this is that it means, for the first time, we start to get

written records from people outside of the social

elite. I can't stress how huge that is for historians enough. The written word is such a big

part of what lets us attempt to reconstruct the past. Today is all about one of the best attempts

I've ever seen to take advantage of this change and reconstruct

the life of the sort of person who would not traditionally get the attention of professional

historians. Dr. Amy Stanley's book, Stranger in the Shogun's City. I'll just go ahead and say

now that if you are at all interested in the Edo period or Japanese history in general,

I can't recommend this book enough. I think it is excellent, accessible nonfiction,

written by a very talented historian, and represents a good model of the kind of writing,

more historians should aspire to. So, let's get to it, and just to note, there is no way I will ever be able to cover anything

near what Dr. Stanley did in her book, naturally enough, given the disparity in length, and so,

again, if you're at all interested in the subject, grab a copy.

With that said, Dr. Stanley focused her efforts on the life of a woman named Tsunano, born

in the spring of 1804 in Ishigami, a small village in what was then Etigo province, but

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