This volume deals with nineteenth-century Japan. The century is usually broken in its third quarter by historians who treat the Meiji Restoration as a watershed in Japanese history, but we shall treat it as a whole. The Restoration surely marked an important divide in Japanese social history, but it is impossible to analyze its elements without a perspective of what preceded and what followed it.

The nineteenth century saw Japan transformed from a society that was divided territorially, politically, socially, and internationally. Japan's borders were still unclear, for its sovereignty over Okinawa, the Kurils, and Hokkaido was not established. Politically, Japan was still structured in the territorial divisions that had been worked out in the early seventeenth century. The Tokugawa shogun held dominion over lands that produced about one-quarter of the national agricultural yield of rice, which was the sole measure of productivity, but although he retained about half of that for his own house as tenryō, the rest he allocated to his vassals. The balance of the country was divided among some 260 feudal lords, who in turn allocated part of their holdings to their retainers. The domains were substantially autonomous in internal administration; each had its own army, its own administrative system, and its own capital city, which had grown, in the larger domains, around the daimyo's castle. The lords and their domains were not taxed by the shogun, who, as primus inter pares, was restricted to the revenue of his own holdings.

The daimyo were, however, expected to perform acts of fealty to their overlord, and in the absence of warfare, that service had become ritualized in the procedures of alternate attendance whereby they spent half their time in residence at the shogunal capital of Edo.