Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture.

By Susan B. Hanley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xiv plus 213pp.).

The English-language bibliography on "everyday things" in Tokugawa Japan has until now been rather sparse. Charles J. Dunn's Everyday Life in Traditional Japan,(1) while useful, gives us a rather static view of early modern society; and the recently translated Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-1868,(2) is neither comprehensive nor organized around a particular thesis. Thus Susan B. Hanley's volume is especially welcome. Hanley not only covers, in colorful detail, topics key to our understanding of ordinary life in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868; with some discussion of earlier eras as well); but she develops an argument that daily life was improving during these centuries.

In her first chapter, Hanley distinguishes between "standard of living" and "level of physical well-being." The former is an economic category, while the latter embraces such factors as physical health, and might improve or decline regardless of changes in the creation and circulation of wealth. While Hanley opines that both living standards and the level of physical well-being got better during the Tokugawa period (arriving at near parity with European standards, and hence not "backward"), she is particularly concerned with establishing that the latter category was good relative to the West at the outset, and that it gradually improved.

Her pursuit of this argument takes Hanley down paths unfamiliar to most Tokugawa specialists - into the investigation of the minutiae of housing design and maintenance; diet, cuisine, and nutrition; bathing habits and hygiene in general; toilet design and upkeep; night-soil collection and sewage systems; clothing; bedding, etc. While she incorporates her research of nearly 15 years into the discussion, the present work effectively integrates her earlier and more recent scholarship into a dramatic statement about the meaning of Japan's early modern period in world-historical context. This ambitious scope, combined with fascinating detail that easily sustains interest throughout, makes this a gem of a book, surely a must for any graduate seminar on Tokugawa Japan.

Having said that, I must raise some questions about Hanley's thesis, her premises, and general approach. She repeatedly acknowledges the paucity of statistical evidence, which makes it especially hard to demonstrate improvements in standard of living, but also to establish a general elevation of physical well-being. Those who accept the postulate that a general increase in the production of wealth necessarily entails a rise in living standard will perhaps share Hanley's conviction that improvements, occurring in far-flung locales, in (say) housing design or bedding materials suggest, in themselves, a general rise in the level of physical well-being. But I have my doubts, which could only be satisfied by evidence concerning the social distribution of such advances. In the absence of such evidence, I find Hanley's argument as vulnerable as that rooted in the model of Tokugawa "backwardness" she seeks to debunk.

Conspicuously absent here is attention to class differences. The Tokugawa era witnessed the emergence of a vast labor-force, dependent on money wages, in agricultural and fishing villages, towns and cities. David Howell has argued that the transition to capitalistic wage-labor could entail the "relative immiseration" of workers, rooted in the loss of control over productive activities, outweighing any rise in the "standard of living."(3) The commodification of labor-power surely had enormous implications for the "level of physical well-being" of the laborers, but Hanley does not specifically examine them. She discusses in passing the nagaya, or tenements in which urban residents (often day laborers, peddlers, poor artisans, etc.) would live, paying monthly rents (p. 34, pp. 126-7). One might ask how the extremely narrow quarters (among the most cramped living arrangements ever recorded) affected "physical well-being;" but Hanley simply notes the positive: the fact that healthy architectural design innovations applied to larger residences were applied in the nagaya too.

As in her earlier works, Hanley criticizes those who habitually do apply class analysis - Marxist scholars - for depicting Tokugawa society as stagnant and backward (p. 36). But I think she constructs a straw man. Not only does she neglect to specifically cite the Marxist scholarship she proposes to refute by her more optimistic view; she also neglects to note that among Japanese Marxist historians specializing in the Tokugawa period, there exists a wide range of viewpoints. Indeed, many date the emergence of capitalism to the latter half (or even earlier half) of the period? The two scholars she most warmly credits in her Preface (Wakita Osamu and Wakita Haruko, who helped with the Japanese-language version of this work), have, as Hanley knows very well, always clearly and proudly identified themselves in the Marxist tradition.

Marxist historians will, and should, find tendentious Hanley's distinction between "Marxist scholars" on the one hand and "economists" on the other (to the implied exclusion of Marxist economists) (pp. 7-8); clearly she seeks to deploy the scholarship of the latter in support of her thesis, while dismissing the methodology of the former unproblematically. While conceding that "Marxists are correct in criticizing neoclassical economics for often ignoring the importance of income distribution" she rejects "analysis ... applied to what seem clear and rigid class lines that ... no longer reflect economic status" (p. 8). This is all too facile a dismissal of efforts to understand daily life as experienced, not by "the Japanese," to whom Hanley repeatedly refers in aggregate, but to individuals and groups in Tokugawa Japan touched very differently by changes in everyday things.

The prodigious scholarship of Everyday Things would have impressed the reader, without any"Marxist" straw man being posited to highlight the argument. Hanley is to be applauded for effectively arguing that numerous improvements in the lives of many people occurred in Tokugawa Japan; however, the question of their application to diverse sectors of the society remains open. No doubt scholars committed to various theoretical perspectives, and pursuing various methodogies, will contribute to the examination of that question.

Gary P. Leupp Tufts University 

ENDNOTES

1. (Tokyo and Rutland, VT, 1972).

2. Nishiyama Matsunosuke (Honolulu, 1997).

3. Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society and the State in a Japanese Fishery (Berkeley, 1995), p. 120.

4. Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development of Prewar Japan (Princeton, 1986), pp. 95-126.