FEW TROPES HAVE been used more widely by interpreters of early modern Japan than the “four Confucian classes” or status groups: the samurai-officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants who dominated society. Though this work will not erase images of those “four estates” from Tokugawa era [1603–1868] interpretations, it should keep serious scholars from ever again referring to them glibly.

Intending to discover why modern Japanese have put such emphasis on homogeneity, David L. Howell has worked through an impressive array of Japanese scholarship and ended up constructing instead an analysis of “the way social groups were constituted and reconstituted over the course of the nineteenth century” (2). He concludes that the military Tokugawa government ensured security by creating status groups that centered in, but were not wholly identical to, the proverbial four estates, while the Meiji government [1868–1912], faced with foreign challenges, constructed a system based on subjecthood and nationalism.

The dominant characteristic of the Tokugawa system, says Howell, was its universality; everyone, including reformers, accepted “the legitimacy of the status order as the basis of political economy” (49). Rooted in functionality, the system eschewed hierarchy, even as it differentiated between occupations and livelihoods, with outcastes, for example, allowed to “pursue wealth” from a variety of practical jobs, as long as they continued the status-demanded work of guarding prisons or tanning animals (61). It also meant that even despised groups, such as the blind, experienced considerable autonomy within their groups.

With the coming of the Western threat and the rise of the Meiji regime after the mid-1800s, Howell argues, the utility of status groups declined and individual productivity became crucial. Status groups were eliminated; people became “subjects,” directly responsible to the state; and everyone had to become “modern,” patriotic taxpayers. The result was liberating for some but tragic for others, removed as they now were from status-group buffers.

Howell's writing is often ponderous, full of academic jargon, and nuanced to the point of occasional confusion.