Introduction / Martha Chaiklin -- Unexpected paths: gift giving and the Nara excursions of the Muromachi shoguns / Kaneko Hiraku, translated by Lee Butler -- Gifts for the emperor: signposts of continuity and change in Japan's fifteenth and sixteenth centuries / Lee Butler -- Physician Yamashina Tokitsune's healing gifts / Andrew Edmund Goble -- Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and the formation of Edo Castle: rituals of giving / Cecilia Segawa Seigle -- Mitsui Echigoya's gifts to the Tokugawa Shogunate / Ozawa Emiko, translated by Lee Butler -- Travel and gift exchange in nineteenth-century Japan / Laura Nenzi -- Gift exchange and reciprocity: understanding antiquarian/ethnographic communities within and beyond Tokugawa borders / Margarita Winkel.
Summary:
Mediated by Gifts' is a collection of essays by top scholars on gifts, giving and the social and political forces that shaped these practices in medieval and early modern Japan. The international assemblage of authors provides new insights into these deeply ingrained practices. The essays focus on topics such as shogunal visits to shrines and temples, exchanges between the imperial house and the shogun, a physician and his patients, the shogun, his vassals his and his ladies, the merchant class and the shogunal government, and between scholars and their cosmopolitan circle of contacts. This virtually unexplored view of Japanese history provides new tools to better elucidate both historical and modern Japan.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.