In this article, the book review editor of Monumenta Nipponica, a Japanese studies journal based in Tokyo, describes the satisfactions and frustrations of the job and provides a nuts-and-bolts view of how he does it.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews Humanity and Nature in the Japanese Archipelago. Edited by Daniel Niles and Abe Ken-ichi. Kyoto: Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, 2015. 57 pp. Illustrations and source materials. Paper, by request.Bruce L. BattenBruce L. Batten J. F. Oberlin University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 21, Number 3July 2016 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 10Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emw023 Views: 10Total views on this site HistoryPublished online April 28, 2016 © 2016 The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviewed by: The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan by Adam Clulow Bruce L. Batten The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan. By Adam Clulow. Columbia University Press, 2014. x, 352 pages. Hardcover $55.00/£38.00. Adam Clulow’s book on Dutch-Japanese relations in the seventeenth century is an important study that deserves a wide audience. It is original, well written, and provocative in the best sense of the word, and it has made me rethink some of my cherished beliefs about foreign relations in early modern Japan. The book also raises more questions than it answers (not a bad thing) and suffers from a few flaws, none serious enough to detract from its overall value. Fundamental to a proper understanding of The Company and the Shogun is that it is not a book about Japanese history: it is a work of global history that happens to be about events in Japan. This may seem a minor distinction, but it makes an important difference in how one evaluates the book, a point to which I shall return. The intellectual background to the study is spelled out in Clulow’s lucid introduction. Ultimately, the author is interested in why European expansion in Asia was slower and less successful than scholars formerly believed. Following Sanjay Subrahmanyam, he sees the early modern period as an “age of contained conflict” between Europeans and indigenous societies, in which “accommodation was reached more often because the weaker side retreated than because the two parties met in the middle” (p. 9). The Company and the Shogun is a case study of one such encounter, with the Dutch—more accurately, the Dutch East India Company, or VOC—playing the role of the weaker party. Clulow, following the lead of Jurrien van Goor, sees the VOC as “a hybrid organization that successfully combined the attributes of both corporation and state.” Its state-like features consisted of “three wide-ranging powers: the right to conduct direct diplomacy with any ruler it might encounter, the right to maintain (and of course deploy) military forces, and the right to seize control of territory (by building fortresses and strongholds)” (p. 12). These are, respectively, the subjects of parts one, two, and three of Clulow’s well-organized study. Part 1, “Diplomacy,” consists of three chapters that chart the inglorious trajectory of the VOC’s official relations with Japan during the first four decades of the seventeenth [End Page 132] century. The first Dutch mission to Japan, in 1609, was an ill-prepared, ad hoc affair sent in the name of a largely fictive “king of Holland.” It was nonetheless accepted at face value by Japanese authorities because it came during a brief period when the newly established bakufu was eager for diplomatic partners, no matter how unlikely or unprepossessing. After the VOC became better established in Asia, the company abandoned the pretense of representing the “king,” and in 1627 it dispatched a mission in the name of the Batavia governor-general. Despite the planning and preparation put into it, this embassy was rejected by the bakufu on grounds that the governor-general was unqualified to engage in diplomacy, which was the prerogative of sovereigns. Finally, in the 1630s, the VOC “crafted a new diplomatic strategy that saw its agents in Japan repackaged not as representatives of the ‘king of Holland’ or a sovereign lord of Batavia but as loyal vassals of the Tokugawa shogun” (p. 96). The head of the Dutch factory in Japan took part in hofreis, an annual court visit symbolizing submission to the shogun that was seemingly modeled on the sankin kōtai system of “alternate attendance” for daimyo. Dutch “service” to the bakufu also included the provision of intelligence reports (Oranda fūsetsugaki) and, on one occasion, actual military aid: the Dutch were active participants in suppressing the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638. Part 1, taken as a whole, constitutes a frontal assault upon the idea that Dutch activities in Japan were purely mercantile, or, more generally, that Tokugawa foreign relations can be neatly divided into “diplomatic” (tsūshin) and “commercial” (tsūshō) categories. A stronger case could not...

Over the long course of Japan's history, its rich natural environment simultaneously supported its human inhabitants and created significant hazards and challenges. The Japanese have also influenced nature in numerous ways, from landscape modification to industrial pollution. How has the human-nature relationship changed over time in Japan? How does Japan's environmental history compare with that of other countries, or that of the world as a whole? Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands attempts to answer these questions through a series of case studies by leading Japanese and Western historians, geographers, archaeologists, and climatologists. These essays, on diverse topics from all periods of Japanese history and prehistory, are unified by their focus on the key concepts of resilience and risk mitigation. Taken as a whole, they place Japan's experience in global context and call into question the commonly presumed division between premodern and modern environmental history. Primarily intended for scholars and students in fields related to Japan or environmental history, these accessibly written essays will be valuable to anyone wishing to learn about the historical roots of today's environmental issues or the complex relationship between human society and the natural environment.

Reviewed by: Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yōshū Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla in 736–737 by H. Mack Horton Bruce L. Batten (bio) Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yōshū Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla in 736–737. By H. Mack Horton. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2012. xvii, 628 pages. $59.95. Traversing the Frontier is not quite what I expected when I agreed to review it based on the title. As a student of premodern Japanese frontiers and foreign relations, I was eager to read an entire book about Japanese envoys to the Korean kingdom of Silla. As I soon discovered, however, Traversing the Frontier is not about diplomacy. Diplomats do make an appearance, but Horton’s book is really about poetry, specifically the sequence of verses in Book 15 of Man’yōshū that commemorate Japan’s 736–37 embassy to Silla. And the frontier in question is not the geopolitical one I had imagined but what Horton, following Seamus Heaney, calls the “frontier of writing” (p. 2): the line between our daily lives and literature, between what happened and how it is represented in the written word. It turns out that the “frontier of writing,” like some geopolitical frontiers, is multivalent, contested, and ultimately elusive. Not even the painstaking “literary archaeology” (p. 9) employed by Horton in Traversing the Frontier can fully excavate the relationship between the 736–37 mission and its representation in Man’yōshū. Following a refreshingly brief and cogent introduction, the author presents a full translation of the 145 poems and accompanying notes that constitute the sequence. The verses appear in three versions: in man’yōgana, in romanized Old Japanese, and in Horton’s English translation. This format makes it easy to compare the translations with the originals, a touch that readers are likely to appreciate. The translations appear to be spot on, and what is more, they are surprisingly graceful—quite an accomplishment in view of the vast differences between Old Japanese and modern English. Even phrases containing virtually untranslatable makurakotoba are rendered [End Page 379] more or less naturally, for example, “Awa, that well-met island” for myimu to omopyisi apasima. At first I read the translation as a historian, enjoying the poems and admiring the skill of the translator, but mostly trying to learn what I could about the embassy. The results were disappointing. The authors of some poems are identified by name or title, so (assuming the attributions are based in fact) we get a sense of the embassy’s composition. Place names abound, allowing us to reconstruct the route of its outward journey (again, assuming the veracity of the material). On the other hand, the sequence tells us nothing about the purpose of the mission, and to make matters worse, it comes to an abrupt stop when the envoys arrive at Tsushima. There is no hint as to what happened in Silla, and only five verses depict the return trip. So for the purposes of diplomatic history, this sequence is at best frustrating. What I did not immediately realize, but learned from Horton’s subsequent analysis, is that it tells us quite a bit about literary history. The body of Traversing the Frontier consists of five chapters; the first, somewhat repetitively called “Traversing the Frontier,” lays out the basic facts. Horton begins with a summary of the “plot” of the Silla sequence. This is followed by a description of what we know of the mission from entries in Shoku Nihongi, which provide historical context missing from Man’yōshū. Next, Horton introduces the structure of the sequence, which is “an organized narrative of lyrical longing for home, depicted against a background of seasonal and scenic change” (pp. 49–50) that “foreshadows the dominant strain of Japanese vernacular travel literature for the next ten centuries” (p. 50). Chapter 2, “Internal Contexts,” explores the sequence’s “internal operations and how its meaning is generated in part through its own internal structure” (p. 2). Horton’s analysis focuses on the recurring themes of longing for spouse and home and for an autumn return to Nara. “In the Silla sequence,” he argues, “the...

Reviewed by: Japoniæ Insvlæ: The Mapping of Japan; Historical Introduction and Cartobibliography of European Printed Maps of Japan to 1800 by Jason C. Hubbard Bruce L. Batten Japoniæ Insvlæ: The Mapping of Japan; Historical Introduction and Cartobibliography of European Printed Maps of Japan to 1800. By Jason C. Hubbard. Houten: Hes & De Graaf Publishers, 2012444. pages. Hardcover €196.10. I must confess that the moment I laid eyes on this sumptuous volume, I knew that I had to have my own copy. After nefariously obtaining one for purposes of review, I began to read and soon discovered that Japoniæ Insvlæ is itself the result of a similar acquisitive urge. The author, Jason C. Hubbard, is not a professional scholar but rather a retired international businessman whose passion is collecting old maps. Hubbard’s interest in Japan stems from a 1977–1980 work assignment in that country. After acquiring some loose-sheet maps of the Japanese islands, he began to wonder, “What was their origin? Who had engraved them? To what atlas or travel account did they belong? Could a map be precisely dated? Why were the maps so different (and some almost identical?” (p. 12). Using a 1967 monograph by Tony Campbell as his guide, Hubbard began to assemble a representative collection. In the process of doing so, he discovered that Campbell’s list was by no means complete. In order to bring it up to date, Hubbard and fellow collector Lutz Walter compiled a revised “cartobibliography” in 1994. That too, however, was soon rendered obsolete as new maps (and different versions of previously known ones) continued to turn up in the marketplace. Ever the completist, Hubbard began work on the present volume, whose purpose is “to identify and classify all known printed single-sheet maps and charts, first issued in Europe before the year 1800, which concentrated on the Japanese islands” (p. 25). Japoniæ Insvlæ presents 125 original printed maps, together with many subsequent “states” and “varieties,” resulting in a total of 203. This compares with 149 maps in the 1994 list by Hubbard and Walter and 77 in the original work by Campbell. No doubt, as Hubbard suggests, the future holds still more discoveries, but for now Japoniæ Insvlæ represents the state of the art in our knowledge of early European maps of Japan. Although not part of Japoniæ Insvlæ’s cartobibliographic “lineage,” one book to which it will inevitably be compared is Hugh Cortazzi’s Isles of Gold: Antique Maps of Japan, which was published in 1983.1 Both are lavish coffee-table volumes, begging [End Page 289] to be savored one page at a time for their rich information content and sheer beauty. Both consist of a lengthy introductory essay followed by reproductions and descriptions of old maps (92 in the case of Cortazzi’s book). Both were written by “amateurs” who collected maps in their spare time while occupying nonacademic day jobs. (The distinguished Sir Arthur Henry Hugh Cortazzi was British ambassador to Japan at the time of Isles of Gold’s publication.) The study of old maps is evidently one area where some of the best research is still done not by credentialed scholars in ivory towers but by well-rounded “Renaissance men” (pardon the sexism) with a bit of extra time, and money, on their hands. In addition to these similarities, there are also some differences between the two volumes. To start with a minor note on production, Japoniæ Insvlæ makes use of glossy paper (allowing better reproduction of detail), whereas Isles of Gold is printed on uncoated stock (allowing the reader to examine maps without distracting reflections). I prefer the latter, although this is admittedly a matter of taste. Regarding the more important differences of content, Japoniæ Insvlæ has many more maps than Isles of Gold, but the coverage is much narrower. Whereas Cortazzi gives equal treatment to Japanese and Western maps, Hubbard’s focus is squarely on the latter. (He does discuss indigenous maps in the introduction, but the content is derivative—particularly of Cortazzi and of Kazutaka Unno’s definitive 1994 contribution to the Chicago History of Cartography.)2 Chronologically, too, the maps reproduced in Japoniæ Insvlæ all come from...

During Japan's Nara and Heian periods, northern Kyushu played a historical role second in importance only to that of the Kinai region of west-central Honshu. Northern Kyushu was the gateway where Japan came into direct contact with foreign countries. Kyushu's gateway region centred on Dazaifu, an administrative headquarters located in modern Fukuoka. This chapter describes the larger significance of Dazaifu and the Tsukushi Lodge or Korokan, as it came to be known in the Heian period and will attempt to do so by employing the following three concepts: 'crossroads', 'boundaries', and 'identity'. Hakata's history provides an opportunity to think outside the box of 'Japanese history' and re-examine what we think we know about Japan as a country and its place in the world. The author argues, the early history of this region lends itself to a discussion of important world historical themes such as 'crossroads', 'boundaries', and 'identity'. Keywords:Dazaifu; Hakata; Heian period; Kōrokan; Kyushu; Tsukushi Lodge

Reviewed by: War and State Building in Medieval Japan Bruce L. Batten War and State Building in Medieval Japan. Edited by John A. Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth. Stanford University Press, 2010. 192 pages. Hardcover $60.00; softcover $19.95. Among the many conference volumes on Japanese history, this one stands out for its brevity and coherence. Perhaps not coincidentally, the two editors are political economists, not historians. Although one of them (Rosenbluth) has published widely on modern Japan, neither editor can claim prior expertise on the subject of this book, which is aptly summarized by its title, War and State Building in Medieval Japan. War and State Building owes its origins to a workshop held in Kyoto in March 2004, which the editors organized to "bridge the divide between history and social science" (p. v). To that end, they invited six historians of medieval Japan: three Americans (Karl Friday, Carol Richmond Tsang, and Thomas Conlan), one Frenchman (Pierre Souyri), and two Japanese (Susumu Ike and Tsuguharu Inaba), each of whom contributes a chapter to the present volume. In this volume, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth apply recent (and not-so-recent) theorizing on state formation to the case of late medieval Japan. The basic argument, à la Charles Tilly, is that in Japan, as in Europe, warfare played a crucial role in the emergence of the modern, territorial state. This will hardly come as a surprise to most readers of this journal; it would be difficult, I think, to find a specialist who disagrees with the notion that warfare was a catalyst to state building in late medieval and early modern Japan. That said, this volume does present a refreshing take on the matter. The editors and several of the contributors (particularly Inaba, Tsang, and Souryi) favor a "bottom-up" approach, focusing on popular movements and resistance rather than the exploits and accomplishments of "great men" such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. According to the editors, peasants' "willingness to supply resources for large armies lies at the root of Japan's political unification in the sixteenth century" (p. 4). More generally, "the main story of the emergence of the modern territorial state is a Hobbesian one of distraught peasants exchanging financial and labor resources for military protection" (pp. 3-4). Although this perspective does not deny the role of military elites, it certainly gives commoners an agency lacking in many older accounts of the state-building process. Unfortunately, but perhaps unavoidably, the assertion that commoners submitted to higher authority in exchange for protection remains just that—an assertion. The case studies provide much information about community resistance to daimyo rule, but little evidence of how local actors actually viewed their final submission to military authority. So whether they were "rational peasants" making a conscious choice, as the editors imply, or were simply overpowered, as I would guess, is not clear from the material presented in this book. To be fair, however, it may well be that the historical record is silent on the motivation of non-elites, rendering this point moot. One great strength of War and State Building is its explicitly comparative, multidisciplinary framework. In a sense, one wishes that the editors had gone even further in this regard. For example, the comparisons that Ferejohn and Rosenbluth make with European history are interesting and insightful, but other regions of the world are wholly ignored. The editors also seem to conflate the notion of the "modern, territorial state" with that of the state itself; [End Page 154] there is little recognition that other types of state have existed in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere, often well before the period covered by this book. However, these weaknesses are also strengths, because the focus on modern, territorial state building in Japan and Europe contributes to the book's overall coherence and readability. In any case, the editors are to be congratulated for their bold application of theoretical and comparative perspectives to the study of premodern Japanese history—a field badly in need of such outside stimuli, as I will argue below. This brings me to the six specialized chapters by historians, which can be summarized roughly as follows: Karl Friday, in "They...

Chapter 5 explores the various ways NGOs and local governments have forged working relationships with each other. In many parts of the world, the neoliberal state has farmed out to NGOs work that had previously been carried out by a more expansive welfare state, but Shipper suggests that local governments in Japan often tapped foreign worker support groups to provide expertise and services that local governments had never offered before. Finally, chapter 6 explores how NGOs have contested negative images of foreign workers in the media and put forward a much more sympathetic understanding of these workers’ circumstances. These NGOs circulate monthly newsletters, and their activities have been intensively covered in the major newspapers. Throughout the book, Shipper provides a wealth of documentation in support of his points, and by the end he convinces us that Japanese civil society is vigorous, not anemic, and that it has positively shaped public policy, making it more humane toward Japanese society’s least powerful members—undocumented foreign workers. Shipper’s book came out in November 2008, just as the world plunged into fi nancial crisis. Japan’s export-oriented economy went into free fall and many foreign workers have been laid off. These conditions will test the “associative activism” Shipper argues is an important part of Japanese democracy today. When even the relatively high-status Japanese Brazilians are being encouraged to go back to Brazil, one may wonder whether the informal networks, associations, and discourse that Shipper highlights as important elements of vital democracy can effectively protect fundamental human rights. Nevertheless, Fighting for Foreigners is a meticulously researched and well-argued study of activist networks and their substantial impact on policy in contemporary Japan.

simply not comprehensive enough (music and dance hardly receive mention), and the lopsided emphasis on modern Japanese culture dictated by his teleology means that many of the glories of premodern Japanese culture are neglected. As an interpretation of Japanese culture, however, the book is superb. Deeply personal and burning with a moral fervor that much contemporary scholarship lacks (Inouye’s strictures against war are couched in rhetoric worthy of an Old Testament prophet), Inouye’s ultimate telos, his vision of a culture that acknowledges the mutability of life, that embraces Earth’s fragile ecology, and that tackles the really big questions of the meaning of life, and the signifi cance of death, deserves to be read. His moving prose ranges far beyond Japan to grapple with the problems faced by his students in daily life. Charles Inouye has written a book that seeks to bind culture and history together, with culture the mistress, not the handmaiden, of history. His argument, his telos, does not convince me that he is right, but he has striven mightily and passionately to make his case, which certainly needs to be heard.

Reviewed by: Across the Perilous Sea: Japanese Trade with China and Korea from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries Bruce L. Batten Across the Perilous Sea: Japanese Trade with China and Korea from the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries. By Charlotte von Verschuer. Translated by Kristen Lee Hunter. Cornell East Asia Series, 2006. 244 pages. Hardcover $54.00; softcover $25.00. It is the rare academic book these days that merits rereading, much less republication, nearly two decades after its initial release. Charlotte von Verschuer's Across the Perilous Sea is one such book. Originally published in French in 1988 as Le commerce extérieur du Japon des origines au XVIe siècle, this work is now available in revised form in English. Although the original edition was warmly reviewed by Andrew Goble in MN 45:3 (1990), the book failed to receive the attention it deserved, particularly from American scholars, because of the language in which it was written. The appearance of Across the Perilous Sea is thus a welcome event that more than justifies, I believe, the publication of a second review of essentially the same book in the same academic journal. Across the Perilous Sea begins with a new preface, in which Verschuer situates the work in its historiographical context so as to explain why it remains relevant. (Although she is too modest to say so, the book remains relevant largely because it has no serious rival in a Western language.) The preface is followed by five substantive chapters, which describe, in more-or-less chronological order, the development of Japanese trade with China and Korea over the millennium from roughly 600 to 1600 CE. Rounding out the book are a number of useful (although not particularly well-produced) appendices; a pleasingly full, up-to-date bibliography; and an index that doubles as a glossary thanks to its inclusion of Chinese characters. For those not familiar with the original work, Across the Perilous Sea can be roughly summarized as follows: During the seventh through ninth centuries, Japan's external trade took place mostly within the political framework of tributary relations, whether with China, to which Japan played a subordinate role, or with Korean kingdoms, which it attempted to subordinate (chapter 1). Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, private (albeit regulated) trade, largely mediated by Chinese merchants, came to the fore (chapter 2). Whether trade was conducted through political or commercial channels, Japan's imports typically consisted of perfumes, medicines, fabrics, ceramics, and Chinese books, and its exports of gold dust, mercury, sulfur, and high-end Japanese manufactures (chapter 3). Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, Japanese merchants gradually replaced their Chinese counterparts; trade missions were sponsored [End Page 378] by an increasingly diverse cast of institutions and individuals ranging from the Kamakura bakufu, to Buddhist temples, to local leaders in Kyushu; and Chinese coins became a major item of import (chapter 4). Finally, from the fifteenth century, trade became highly commercialized, with imported goods sold on the domestic market for profit and large quantities of Japanese manufactured goods successfully exported to China and Korea (chapter 5). As noted above, there is really nothing like this book in English. Although more detailed studies of specific topics exist, no other publication, to my knowledge, presents such a coherent, concise, and readable overview of pre-Tokugawa Japanese trade with the Asian continent. (On the topic of readability, let me here congratulate the translator, Kristen Lee Hunter, for her superb work, which cannot have been easy given the many difficult terms.) Across the Perilous Sea benefits from a particularly strong grounding in primary sources, which are quoted liberally throughout. The book has a refreshingly concrete tone, exemplified by its loving treatment of the nature and uses of specific items of trade—an approach that will remind older readers of Edward Schafer's immortal studies of Tang exotics. As a result of these obvious strengths, Across the Perilous Sea should find (or perhaps has already found) a ready home in many undergraduate and graduate course syllabi, as well as on the bookshelves of researchers seeking a handy one-volume reference. Of course, what from one perspective is a strength may be...

Reviewed by: Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age Bruce L. Batten Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age. By William Wayne Farris. University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. x + 372 pages. Hardcover $48.00. William Wayne Farris began his academic career just over two decades ago with an innovative book on the demography of Nara-early Heian Japan (Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645-900; Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1985). After forays into military history (Heavenly Warriors; Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992) and historical archaeology (Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures; University of Hawai'i Press, 1998), Farris has returned to demography with a vengeance. In addition to the volume presently under review, he is also the author of The Population of Ancient Japan, a monograph listed in the bibliography as forthcoming from the University of Michigan. In Population, Disease, and Land, Farris argued that the period from 645 through 900 was one of demographic stasis caused by economic backwardness and the effects of epidemic disease. He hinted, however, that this vicious cycle was overcome in the late Heian and Kamakura periods as diseases became endemic and Japan underwent a "medieval agricultural revolution." Japan's Medieval Population, which covers the period 1150-1600, revises some of these earlier views, in effect postponing the onset of the medieval revolution (both economic and demographic) by up to a couple of centuries. Presumably Farris's forthcoming book on ancient Japan also supports this new analysis. In Japan's Medieval Population, Farris divides Japan's medieval centuries into three subperiods, 1150-1280, 1280-1450, and 1450-1600, devoting a pair of chapters to each: the first on population and mortality factors such as disease, famine, and war, and the second on indirect variables such as agriculture and settlement; industry, commerce, and urbanization; family life; and material well-being. To briefly summarize, he finds that during the first subperiod, 1150-1280, Japan's population remained in stasis (at around 6 million people) because positive developments such as increased immunity to disease were balanced by negative ones such as increased famine and war (chapters 1 and 2). The second subperiod, 1280-1450, saw the beginnings of rapid population growth, particularly during what the author calls the "Muromachi Optimum" of 1370-1450. Growth resulted from reduced losses from famine (but not war) combined with the operation of various background factors (improvements in agriculture, social organization, material well-being, and so on) that otherwise decreased mortality or increased fertility (chapters 3 and 4). According to Farris, population growth continued apace during the third subperiod, 1450-1600, despite social problems, including renewed outbreaks of disease, famine, and war (chapters 5 and 6). [End Page 107] In a nutshell, then, Japan's Medieval Population presents a sustained argument that the country's "population expanded on the order of 300 percent, from about 5.5-6.3 million in 1150 to 15-17 million in 1600, with almost all the growth coming after 1280" (p. 5). Put another way, the medieval economic and demographic revolution began not in late Heian times but a century or two later-a conclusion that dovetails nicely with other recent assessments, both Western and Japanese, of the importance of the Muromachi period, and particularly the fourteenth century. Unfortunately (to my mind), Farris offers no root cause for the timing of this transition, arguing instead that "[p]opulation change in medieval Japan . . . was synergistic, the action of multiple variables, which in turn led to a major transformation that none of the factors could have accomplished individually" (p. 5). I find this explanation somehow unsatisfying, although I also suppose that it is true. Of the two groups of chapters, those on population and mortality are generally less convincing than those on background factors, not through any fault of the author's but because of the relative lack of solid historical evidence. Although Farris gamely contends that "the overall population record for medieval Japan is surprisingly good-equal to or better than any other place in the world" (p. 264), he is still forced to go through various convoluted arguments to...

Reviewed by: Ambassadors from the Islands of Immortals: China-Japan Relations in the Han-Tang Period Bruce L. Batten (bio) Wang Zhenping . Ambassadors from the Islands of Immortals: China-Japan Relations in the Han-Tang Period. Asian Interactions and Comparisons. Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and University of Hawai'i Press, 2005. xiii, 387 pp. Hardcover $53.00, ISBN 0-8248-2871-2. Ambassadors from the Islands of Immortals is a gem of good, old-fashioned historical scholarship: somewhat narrow in scope; exhaustive in its use of primary sources; well-grounded in previous studies; balanced in its conclusions; and beautifully written. In his preface to the book, series editor Joshua A. Fogel notes that studies of premodern Sino-Japanese relations have been few and far between for the past half-century, adding his hope that it will not be "another fifty years...before other works on this topic appear in English" (p. x). I share Fogel's hope, but predict that even should further studies appear, Wang's book will more than hold its own against the competition. Ambassadors is simply one of the best monographs I have read in years. As the subtitle indicates, Wang's book is a study of Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations from the (later) Han to Tang dynasties, specifically from the first through early tenth centuries C.E. Although loosely based on the author's 1989 Princeton dissertation, the present work contains much new material and has been entirely rewritten. Before going on to a discussion of the book's (many) strengths and (relatively few) weaknesses, let me attempt to summarize its content. Ambassadors' brief but cogent introduction is followed by a two-chapter overview of pre-Tang relations between China and Japan (strictly speaking, Wo). Chapter 1, "The Islands of Immortals," describes the earliest historical contacts, borrowing heavily from the Weizhi's famous account of Queen Himiko and the land of Yamatai. Chapter 2, "Chinese Insignia in East Asia Politics," is an analysis of the "investiture system" as it applied to Wo in the early centuries C.E. It shows how Japanese rulers sought Chinese titles and prestige goods in support of their claims to legitimacy, both within the islands themselves and vis-à-vis peer polities in Korea. The next few chapters provide a fascinatingly detailed account of the organization and function of Japanese tributary missions to China during the Tang period. Chapter 3, "The Messenger of the Emperor," presents a general discussion of the "tasks, qualities, and criteria for selecting ambassadors" (p. 33), going on to provide specifics about one particularly well-documented Japanese mission to China (that of 834) as well as biographical details regarding several virtuous, amorous, or otherwise accomplished Japanese ambassadors. Chapter 4, "The Voyage to China," focuses on details of shipbuilding and navigation and paints a rather bleak picture (evidenced by frequent shipwrecks) of Japanese skills, or [End Page 278] lack thereof, in these areas. Chapter 5, "The Journey to Changan," provides useful information about Tang's overland relay and transportation systems, while chapter 6, "Diplomacy in the Tang Capital," is on court ceremonial, specifically the "Tang Guest Protocol" that governed the reception of foreign envoys. Among other things, we learn in chapter 6 how ceremonial arrangements reflected the perceived status of visiting envoys (or, more precisely, their countries); how Japanese and Chinese perceptions of diplomatic relationships might sometimes differ; and how adjustments to protocol were made (or not) in such difficult cases. The next group of chapters focuses in turn on diplomatic communications, information gathering, and the recruitment of Chinese "talent." Chapter 7, "Weight and Nuance in State Letters," argues that, contrary to the received academic wisdom, Japanese ambassadors did in fact carry state letters on their missions to Tang. Wang also presents a convincing (if hypothetical) reconstruction of such a communication, showing how by an ingenious trick of wording the Japanese authors were able to make their letter mean two mutually exclusive things: both an acknowledgment of Tang's sinocentric world view (when read in Chinese), and an assertion of the Japanese ruler's divine, imperial status (when read by the kundoku method in Japanese). Chapter 8, "Information Gathering", provides an introduction to "intelligence work" (broadly defined...