Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 562.

You got a fight for your right to party, part one.

It has been my experience as a teacher of history that one of the hardest concepts to get

students to grasp is that, given the inherent messiness of the human condition, two things

that seem contradictory can actually both be true.

Put another way, so much of how we view the past is a matter of framing. For example, from one

perspective, Japan's Edo period, the period from 1600 to 1868, the final age of pre-modern Japan, the curtain call of the feudal system,

both the height and the end of samurai domination under the rule of the Tokugawa Shoguns,

was a golden age for Japan.

As we've discussed many times before, it was a period that saw incredible economic growth, cultural

flourishing, rising standards of living, and in the offing helped give rise to the vast

majority of what we now think of as traditional Japanese culture.

Because yes, there are elements of that culture that are much older than the Edo period,

but so much else, from the tea ceremony to the

shoji screen to Haiku and Kabuki either came about during the Edo period or became part

of the wider culture and not just the provenance of a small elite.

But on the other hand, you could also focus on the strict system of controls created by the

Shogun and his advisors to maintain order.

Everything from passes that were the only legal way to travel across the country, to barrier

checkpoints intended to enforce those rules, to sumptuary laws, banning people of certain

social stations from wearing certain types of clothing to strict

systems of censorship. In so many ways, the Tokugawa system was deeply authoritarian,

...