Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan

"This is a book that came out in 2012 and in fact we just had a mini conference at Yale and the whole conference was based off of this book. We had some historians of Japan but then there were also scholars who were doing everything from Ptolemaic Egypt and the Holy Roman Empire to modern Chinese politics. We were looking at the phenomenon of having a surface truth in the political structure and then the way things might actually function behind that: is that something unique to Tokugawa Japan and the warrior regime, or is this something that we see in general, in other places and at other times? The whole purpose of the conference was to ask that question. So this book, Performing the Great Peace , was important. It’s also really entertaining. It shows us how the warrior regime is not so strict, it’s not so rigid, it’s not so fearful and that there’s a lot of negotiating among smaller warrior domains and the national warrior regime. The book has a lot of very interesting and humorous examples of how this plays out, which is why it’s assigned in a lot of courses. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter People often ask me, ‘What is my definition of a good book?’ I usually have two ways I define it. One is a book that changes the way I think about something in a large, conceptual way. Those tend to be books of philosophy or of critical theory that I like to read. They change how I think about the concept of ideology or politics or something like that. Another good book for me is one where, once I’ve read it, I can never go back to before having read that book. There’s no turning back. The way I lecture about something, the content of my lecture changes and I can’t unread what I’ve read. Luke Roberts’s book fits into that latter category. There are so many tidbits and ways of thinking about Japan that he articulates that are useful for teaching and thinking about Japan at that time period. It’s the Tokugawa period, which is the last warrior regime in Japan and lasts from the 17th through the 19th centuries. It’s about how the warrior regime is able to maintain relative peace in Japan, despite the fact that there’s some 260 relatively autonomous mini-domains throughout the country."