TOKUGAWATRAVEL · Travel in Tokugawa Period Japan (1603-1868): Identity, Nationand Social Transformation
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-04-01 → 2021-08-29
- EU contribution
- €183,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Travel in Tokugawa Period Japan (1603-1868): Identity, Nationand Social Transformation
The EU-funded TOKUGAWATRAVEL project addressed the cultural and social meanings of travel in Edo or Tokugawa period (1603-1868) Japan. The Tokugawa period was a time of internal peace and economic growth in Japan, but also of strict political and social control: geographical and social mobility were limited to a minimum, as a way to ensure political stability. The project investigated the ways in which travel within Japan subverted this immobility. It also reviewed the ideological transformation connected with travel for different social classes and genders, and particularly how travel impacted the formation of national identity. These transformations are keys to understanding Japanese modernity and Japan’s place in “world society”. The project analysed travel not only as a physical practice, but also as a “virtual” experience. Assessing how travel tends to be interconnected with text, it focused on commercial travel literature, and particularly on the guidebooks and maps from the Japanese Collection of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library (JRRIL), University of Manchester (UoM), UK. The items were analysed combining the outlook of social history with the analytical approach of historical bibliography, focusing also on their editorial history and physical characteristics. The project’s main objectives were: 1) To undertake pioneering archival research in a collection which had previously only been examined in terms of scope and provenance. 2) To disseminate information about the contents of the collection and the research conducted in the context of the project both to a wide-range of scholarly communities and to an audience beyond the university. 3) To strengthen the researcher’s professional profile and the interdisciplinary value of her expertise. 4) To establish long-term international collaborations.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This research project investigates the practice of travel in Edo/Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), particularly in connection with notions of social identity, transformation, and nationhood. Through a theoretical framework that combines Social History and Historical Bibliography, primary sources will be investigated, including commercially “unofficial” and “popular” sources published and distributed, such as travel guides and commercial maps. In the analysis the material will be considered: a) as objects, viewed in the light of the cultural and economical processes that led to their production and circulation, in order to understand the “range” of the ideological impact of travel; and b) in terms of their contents, in order to assess how their “commercialized” narratives reflect popular notions of identity and nationhood. An interdisciplinary approach, based on Travel Studies, Japanese Historiography, and in particularly, World Society Theory, will be implemented to discuss the cultural and social meaningof travel in the context of Tokugawa “absolutism”. Travel tends to be entwined with social mobility, in a way that alters and marks social and cultural landscapes. The project will therefore investigate whether travel within Japan, becoming growingly commonin a context of economic growth, came to subvert the geographical and social immobility that characterized Tokugawa administrative system. Furthermore, the analysis will discuss the relationship between travel and the formation of a national identity, assessing whether the social and ideological transformation connected with travel worked in Japan as a prompt for “proto-national” identification,as opposed to forms of local nationalism.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER · ManchesterCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union