Politics of the Living Dead: Lords, Adoption and Inheritance in Tokugawa Japan

Monday, November 3 / 12:00 PMHSSB 2252
Luke Roberts will speak on keeping the deaths of daimyo officially secret for days or months at a time so as to engineer adoptions in the Tokugawa period. Almost everyone is in the know but pretends the lord is alive. This study helped Roberts figure out the why of the topic of his book, which is to understand Tokugawa politics through Tokugawa-era concepts of omote (ritual performance of submission to hierarchy) and naishu (inside group-forming identity, informal relations across groups). Factions within lords’ households frequently competed over inheritance. Therefore in Tokugawa law daimyo lords had to be alive to personally name their heir or the house was forfeit. Still daimyo frequently died suddenly and heirless. The performance of submission to this rule and the civility necessary to engineer the inheritance of an officially alive but really dead daimyo lord helped prevent intra-house strife and warfare and helped maintain the Tokugawa great peace.
Sponsored by the IHC’s East Asian Cultures RFG.

hm 10/22