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History of Japan

Episode 565 - Riot Girls

History of Japan

Isaac Meyer

Japan, History, Japanese

4.8744 Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week: what do we know about women and the wrong end of the law during the Tokugawa Period? Given the male-dominated nature of the feudal social order and the historical written record, what can we figure out? And what are the limits of that knowledge?

Show notes here.

 

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 565, Riot Girls.

0:20.5

There's a bit of a coda, a related but distinct story to rioting in the Edo period that I want to touch on before we leave this subject behind.

0:29.3

I'd initially planned to incorporate it into the previous episodes, but on balance felt there just wasn't enough space to do that productively, and besides,

0:38.1

it's a pretty interesting story and deserves airtime in its own right.

0:42.3

You see, keen-eared listeners will note that in the last three weeks, one part of the Edo period

0:47.2

social order has been conspicuously absent in our discussion of social disruption.

0:53.1

We haven't really talked about the role of women in street riots or any sort of social

0:57.9

disruption, which is conspicuous to say the least, given that, you know, they make up half

1:02.7

of any given society.

1:05.0

Of course, during the Edo period, women did operate under pretty strict rules that limited

1:09.6

their access to the public sphere.

1:12.1

In the sphere of women's history, the age of the Tokugawa Shoguns from 1600 to the mid-1800s,

1:18.7

was defined by the philosophy of Neo-Confucianism.

1:23.0

This was a philosophy originating during the Song Dynasty of Imperial China, created by scholars

1:28.8

looking to systematize Confucianism into a sort of all-encompassing philosophy.

1:34.6

They wanted to create a worldview that didn't just provide thoughts on Confucius' primary interests,

1:40.5

morality, family, government, the relationship between the three, but which would give

1:45.1

answers for other questions ranging from the religious to the aesthetic to the social.

1:51.2

The closest comparison, if you're familiar with European history, would probably be the scholastic

1:56.8

philosophy of the medieval Catholic Church, with its fusion of Aristotelian Greek philosophy

2:02.1

and Christian doctrine, created by Thomas Aquinas and refined by his successors, into a consistent

2:08.5

worldview.

...

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