[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on "Everyday Things in Pre-modern Japan"
In this book, the writer adopts a question that has been argued for over 4 decades: How did Japan come out from almost three centuries of feudal isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1867) to turn into a contemporary industrial power, rivaling its Western mentors by the closing stages of the Meiji period (1868-1912)? Susan Hanley's convincingly disputed thesis is not prone to finish that debate, as it shares a similarity with a previous body of work and is affected by modernization theory, which first came under attack more than 2 decades ago. Nonetheless, it makes a notable involvement to the debate by presenting a novel and engaging representation of Tokugawa society, based on a detailed description as well as analysis of its material culture. The motion for this study is enlightened in chapter 1, where Hanley examines,
“In light of all that has been written on the constructive growths during the Tokugawa era, it is mystifying that some economists believe the standard of livelihood to have been low, for the most part since they have found that other requirements for industrialization existed preceding to the re-establishment”.
This irregularity is due to their dependence on the "standard of livelihood" as the main indicator of a society's welfare. To cure this, she tried to review the "stage of physical welfare" in order to "answer the query of how well the Japanese lived in a broader sense, counting phases other than income, so that we will have better knowledge of the quality of Japan's labor force at the start and during the early years of its industrialization". Those "other phases," explored in enthralling detail in chapters 2 through 6 (with considerable help from research published before by Japanese scholars), range from housing, furnishing, as well as clothing, to diet, sanitation, and population-control practices....
