TOKUGAWA JAPAN Tokugawa Change |
Robert Oxnam :: Anyone who seeks to understand Tokugawa Japan must recognize that, whatever the methods designed to perpetuate order, enormous changes were occurring inside the system. Carol Gluck :: The second theme that goes along with order is that there is no way for any system, even one that works with mirrors like the Tokugawa shogunate may be said to have done, to maintain an idealized order that probably never even existed in that form. And so, the second theme is change. And what one has to look for are the changes that take place. Because it is the changes in this system that have to account, or help us to account, for the form that modernization took in Japan and for, indeed, the contents of political, social, economic, and international relations in the period that followed, which is to say modern Japan. So you have a theme of order, constantly reemphasized, and constant change, but change within the institutional structure which says it's not changing. |
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