For most of the twentieth century, geography has been pushed so far into the background in the English-language corpus on early modern Japan as to be rendered virtually invisible. To the extent that it has been noticed, geography is typically seen precisely as background: the passive (if sometimes predestining) stage on which the historical drama is acted out. While attention is ritually paid to Japan's location and topography, most historians' analyses of Tokugawa development have until recently been couched in essentially aspatial terms.

One afternoon in tokyo in the summer of 1921, ten Waseda University students visited the home of Gonda Yasunosuke, the critic of Japanese popular culture. Each was writing a dissertation on popular entertainment (minsbū goraku). Tell us, they asked Gonda, what were the authoritative texts they could find at Maruzen, the emporium specializing in foreign books? They wanted the real thing—Western language theoretical sources. “Forget it,” replied Gonda, “there aren't any in the Maruzen catalog. Go to Asakusa—Asakusa's your text.” The young men wanted an imported, printed master text, but Gonda would not comply. Instead, he demanded personal experience that would give them an understanding of cultural forms that a reading of printed texts (and, moreover, of imported printed texts) could not yield. He directed them to do on-site fieldwork in Asakusa Park where female and male laborers from large- and small-scale industries, artisans, and white-collar middleclass nouveaux riches mingled to play (Gonda 1922a [GYS 1:291–92]).

By the late ming (1573–1644), the values of frugality and spending had often gone to battle. Those who promoted frugality sometimes did so with specific goals in mind—the acquisition of a plot of land, or the stockpiling of resources to ride out a failed harvest—and other times with a social conscience that militated against indulging the self while others suffered from want. Others claimed that spending was acceptable if it did not deplete one's resources or would benefit people in the long run. Yuan Ts'ai, for example, instructed his family: “A degree of luxury in accord with your financial resources is not what I am calling wasteful” (cited in Ebrey 1984:265).

The mythologized past is the past that predominates in the minds of most people. Therefore, even as historians strive to counter it, it behooves us to study it with care. Although any aspect of the past has the potential to live on as myth in the present, certain events and persons, because they resonate with themes of broader historical scope and importance, have this potential to an especially high degree. Thus, in American history, where racism has been such a pervasive historical pattern, figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King who helped to ameliorate the condition of blacks are often treated in larger-than-life terms. To take a more complex case, in China in the twentieth century, where the West has been by turns hated as an imperialist aggressor and admired for its mastery of the secrets of wealth and power, the Boxers, because they attacked both the West and its modern secrets, have been alternately praised and reviled.