The Tokugawa Period: The Modernization Of Japan

This article tackles the issues coming into play when trying to define what we put behind the terms “society” and “culture” when it comes to Japan. Modernization during the Tokugawa period brought its own problems: how to unify a country behind a common culture and language when each of the islands has its own particularities, including differences in the spoken languages? The author seem to poise that the actual “modern Japan” is the result of government led-policies dating back to this period, who meddled in everyday life occurrences to concoct a unified, policed Japan. Nevertheless, if the Tokugawa period more or less resolved the issue of unified institutions and bureaucracies, it did much less to create a culture common to each; the society stayed “highly fragmented”. Language, access to education, religion, stayed highly linked to a class system that preserved heterogeneity in regional cultures.

It's the Meiji government that achieved some form of unification in the culture, by creating a sense of nationalism focused on the personality of the Emperor, as well as a standardized language (kokugo) and a single religion. However, for many intellectuals, this was barely enough to constitute a shared national identity that would polarized a sense of belonging and strengthen the unified nation. Thus the hunt for shared

These Nihonjinron-styled observations ended-up at the forefront of Japanese studies, ignoring that most of the values describe here (lifetime employment, corporate warrior, middle class majority, etc…) where those of a self-serving powerful minority. This view was not only largely shared by foreign observants, but by the Japanese