Introduction
Karl F. Friday
History changes. And indeed, if it did not, there would be little point to historical research, for most
historians would be doing scarcely more than collecting and organizing tidbits of information—
and perhaps, very occasionally, discovering new bits in hitherto unknown archives and adding
them to the pile. This is the sort of endeavor that Robin Collingwood dismissed as “scissors- and-
paste history,” but it is most assuredly not what historians actually do with their time.^1 The
resulting stark contrast between The Past itself, which must be immutable, and historians’ decid-
edly mutable accounting of it seems puzzling at first blush; and has long served as fodder for wit,
ranging from Franklin P. Jones’ observation that, “Perhaps nobody has changed the course of
history as much as the historians,” to Pogo Possum’s (Walt Kelly’s sage- resident of Okefenokee
Swamp), lament that “The past ain’t what it used to be.”
But in truth there is no puzzle here. All history is a reconstruction of the past, one that is finite
and incomplete, circumscribed by both the capacity and the intent of its builders. And all history
is, as Carl Becker put it, “not part of the external world, but an imaginative reconstruction of
vanished events,” assembled to enrich a society’s understanding of itself, and always with an eye
toward the needs of the present. “It is,” Becker reminds us,
for this reason that the history of history is a record of the “new history” that every age rises
to confound and supplant the old ... every generation, our own included, must inevitably,
understand the past and anticipate the future in light of its own restricted experience.^2The essays that compose this volume summarize the history of attempts to reconstruct pre-
modern Japan, defined here as the era before 1600. The decision to end the book’s coverage with
the sixteenth century reflects prevailing conventions within the profession, which divide Jap-
anese history into either three major epochs (premodern, early modern, and modern) or two
(premodern and modern), with the break at or around 1600. This, in turn, echoes dominant
trends in scholarship, which emphasize the role of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-
century socio- economic developments—rather than thoroughgoing national reinvention in the
Western image—in shaping late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Japan. That is, most
historians today consider the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) to be more appropriately approached
as a preface to the modern age, than as a postscript to the medieval era.^3