The Politics of Culture and the Art of Dissent in Early Modern Japan
Social Justice › Vol. 33 Nbr. 2, April 2006
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Summary
Farge explores the legacy of Baba Bunko, an important critic of the Japanese military government who confronted the centralized power of the state apparatus by strategically maneuvering between censorship laws through the public presentations of satirical literature. He notes that because these public expressions of opposition, saturated with elements of humor and satire, threatened the stability of the military government, the authorities responded with increased arts censorship, surveillance, and punishment of dissent.
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The Politics of Culture and the Art of Dissent in Early Modern Japan
(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
IT WOULD BE NO EXAGGERATION TO SAY THAT THE SATIRICAL WRITINGS AND LECTURES OF Baba Bunko (born 1718), which ended abruptly with his arrest and execution in 1759, set the stage for the Meiji Restoration that would occur in Japan one hundred years later. Official government documents and public records show that Bunko's defiance kept officials on the lookout for public dissent. The government of the Tokugawa shoguns, the feudal commanders-in-chief and de facto rulers of Japan from 1600, continued to be vigilant even after Bunko's death and until the Tokugawa bakufu (military government) collapsed in 1868 and the emperor was restored to power.As the 17th century drew to a close, the government of Japanese Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (who reigned from 1680 to 1709) steadily deteriorated. The country suffered from extreme inflation, the result of wasteful spending and misguided economic policies. Japan's capital, Edo (present-day Tokyo), had recently experienced a phase of cultural exuberance during the Genroku period (1688 to 1704), but the cultural vitality and economic prosperity of those years was rapidly coming to an end. Following the death of the child Shogun Ietsugu (1709 to 1716), the administration of Tokugawa Yoshimune (who reigned from 1716 to 1745) took various emergency economic measures that were intended to ameliorate the disparity between the growing power and prestige of the merchant class and the social and economic decline of the samurai, but conditions in rural and urban areas continued to worsen in the early decades of the 18th century.The successful use of satire occurs in such an atmosphere, where social instability...See the full content of this document
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