Who wouldn't want to be a samurai? Many people in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) indeed coveted samurai status, but there were also good reasons not to be a warrior. Professor Howell (Harvard University) will introduce some of these reasons, and along the way, address the surprisingly difficult problem of pinning down the definition of “samurai”: who was a “real” samurai, and who was a pretender? Thinking about the nature of the samurai will help to explain how the Tokugawa status order maintained its integrity over time.
Bio
David L. Howell is Professor of Japanese History at Harvard University and Editor of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. He received his B.A. from the University of Hawai’i at Hilo and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton before joining the Harvard faculty in 2010. Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005) as well as numerous articles.
Howell's research focuses on the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. He is particularly interested in the ways changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century. His current projects include a short survey of the Meiji Restoration period and a history of human waste and garbage in the cities of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. He is also a co-editor of a new edition of the Cambridge History of Japan, which is scheduled for publication in three volumes in 2020.