Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan

"This is about the same time period, the 17th through the 19th centuries. Like the first book by Luke Roberts, this book has a lot of wonderful detail. The ‘tour of duty’ in the title refers to one of the defining characteristics of this time period, which is that all these mini-lords (called ‘daimyō’ in Japanese) have to spend every other year living in a compound in the capital city of Edo. The other years, they live in their home domain. Their wives and the heirs to their domain live permanently in the city of Edo, which is why Edo becomes so huge. Daimyō have to maintain compounds with lots of servants and that costs money. But the key feature is that the daimyō have to travel back and forth every other year, with hundreds—and in some cases thousands—of warriors and servants. What was that like? What did that mean for the spread of food culture, fashion trends, dialects, popular culture? How did it actually function in terms of the political structure? “I tell my students, ‘If you want to understand samurai thought, you should read the seven military classics of China.” Specialists, students—in fact anyone who has a passing knowledge of Tokugawa Japan—knows about the tour of duty, this alternate attendance system, but no one had really gotten into the details of how it actually functioned. This is a book that gets into those details and again, for me, it’s a book where I can never go back. When I teach students, I take a lot of wonderful anecdotes from the book. For example, I say to them, ‘Imagine you’re the heir to a lord’s domain. You grew up in London or Manhattan, but the domain you’re going to take over some day is out in the boondocks. How excited would you be going to live out there in the middle of nowhere?’ That’s what happens in Tokugawa Japan. There are teenagers who refuse to go out with their fathers to visit the old homeland. Advisors are berating them saying, ‘If you don’t go out and visit the land that you’re one day going to be the lord of, it doesn’t look good.’ In the book, there are all kinds of tidbits like that that are just wonderful. When most people think of the samurai, it’s the Tokugawa period, also called the Edo period, or just early modern Japan. A lot of the sources are from this period, so we can get into the details. That’s not to say that in the medieval period or premodern Japan there weren’t sources. There were, but they tend not to give us a lot of insight into rank-and-file warriors. They tend to be top-heavy, a lot of institutional or political history. Most of the depictions of samurai that we see in popular culture are not from that earlier period, they’re from the Warring States period through the Tokugawa period. That’s also the field that I’m a specialist in. I chose books that were meaningful for me and I think would also be meaningful for people interested in learning more about the samurai in general."