I introduce this volume of the New Cambridge History of Japan with two questions: How is it that Anglophone scholars have come to refer to the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and immediately surrounding years as Japan’s “early modern” period? And does calling the period early modern suggest something fundamentally different from the term used in Japanese, kinsei? When the first Cambridge History of Japan was published, in 1991, the answer to the latter question was yes: the kinsei of “the Japanese” was “more feudal than modern,” whereas the early modernity of “Western historians” was “more modern than feudal.” As this introduction demonstrates, however, the term kinsei has nothing to do with feudalism. The evolution of the terms of periodization used to refer to the Tokugawa era tell us something important about the global history of conceptualizing historical time, particularly the surprising career of modernity.

Any national history project faces the dilemma of what to include when current national boundaries do not coincide with historical ones. In Japan, the identity of the nation with its dominant ethnic group in the modern period has turned every discussion of “Japanese” history into an implicit comment on what and who is meant by “Japanese.” This chapter surveys the histories of Ryukyu and Hokkaido through the premodern and early modern periods. It discusses both regions’ close ties to the Japanese polity, while also highlighting their autonomous histories. At the same time, it reveals how situating places like Ryukyu and Hokkaido inside or outside the early modern polity shapes our understanding of their status during the modern era as colonial possessions or integral parts of the Japanese nation. This situating in turn affects understandings of the Indigeneity of the Ainu people and the status of Okinawan language and culture.

This chapter examines the structure of regional authority in early modern Japan. Its aim is to clarify the nature of the early modern Japanese state. The shogunate delegated authority to autonomous daimyo domains, and both shogunate and domains delegated authority to village heads, who managed their communities with little direct oversight. The system worked well enough to keep the realm generally peaceful and prosperous for 265 years. The chapter begins with a top-down taxonomy of the daimyo domains and other, lesser jurisdictions under the authority of the Tokugawa shogunate. It then moves onto a discussion of village rule, framed in terms of governmentality – that is, the structures through which villagers participated in their own subjecthood to the shogunate and domains. The chapter concludes with a discussion of shared-revenue villages (aikyū mura), which were divided among multiple overlords while retaining a character as singular communities.