K.F. Friday
field had become dominated by a paradigm of mostly incremental—albeit sometimes sudden and
dramatic—innovation within enduring fundamental patterns. The image of decline and failure has
been superseded by one of resilience and innovation within prescribed limitations.
Robin Collingwood famously observed that “every present has a past of its own, and ... every
generation must rewrite history in its own way.”^18 This volume, then, is directed at current and
future historians. It is designed and intended not as a high- level textbook or introduction to pre-
modern Japanese history (or various topics thereon), but as a platform for future research—a
basecamp and a reconnoiter of ground covered thus far.
The volume features essays by leading historians on twenty- five topics critical to con-
temporary research interests and agendas, presented in four thematic Parts: “Geography and the
Environment,” “Political Events and Institutions,” “Society and Culture,” and “Economy and
Technology.” As is inevitably the case in anthologies of this sort, decisions about topical coverage
were guided in part by the interests and priorities of individual authors, and further shaped by
contributor attrition in the late stages of the project. And while the approaches taken by indi-
vidual authors vary considerably, each aims at equipping scholars seeking to conduct research on
these various subjects with a firm, foundational grasp of what historians are doing, what they
have done, and how. The challenge taken up by each contributor was to construct historio-
graphic surveys in the broadest sense, incorporating summaries of what has been written about
each topic and when, but going beyond that to discuss larger epistemological issues, including
available sources, the evolution of research methodologies, important debates among scholars in
the field, limits on what can be gleaned from known sources and methodologies, and key ques-
tions that need yet to be explored.
Notes
1 Robin Collingwood, The Idea of History, 249–280.
2 Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” 233, 234–235.
3 The Tokugawa period, which lies, for the most part, outside the scope of this volume, is also known as
the Edo period.
4 For an overview of modernization theory and critiques thereof, see Dean C. Tipps, “Modernization
Theory and the Comparative Study of National Societies: A Critical Perspective.”
5 These issues are discussed in more detail in Karl F. Friday, “Sorting the Past.”
6 The genshi era is commonly divided into three overlapping archeological epochs: the Jōmon (beginning
around 14,000 bce), Yayoi (from around 900 bce), and Kofun (beginning around 250 ce) ages.
7 For more on the construct of medievalism and the medieval, see Thomas Kierstead, “Medieval Japan:
Taking the Middle Ages Outside Europe”; and Andrew Edmund Goble, “Defining ‘Medieval’.”
8 See, for example, Gina Barnes, Protohistoric Yamato: Archaeology of the First Japanese State; Yūji Mizoguchi,
“Affinities of the Protohistoric Kofun People of Japan with Pre- and Proto- Historic Asian Popula-
tions”; or Joan R. Piggott, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship.
9 See, for example, Conrad Totman, Japan Before Perry: A Short History or Mikiso Hane, Premodern Japan:
A Historical Survey.
10 See, for example, Cornelius J. Kiley, “The Role of the Queen in the Archaic Japanese Dynasty,” or
“State and Dynasty in Archaic Yamato”; Meryll Dean, Japanese Legal System; Bradley Smith, Japan: A
History in Art; or Noritake Tsuda, A History of Japanese Art: From Prehistory to the Taisho Period. The term
“archaic” is, to be sure, no less loaded with antiquarian connotations and implications than “ancient.” It
does, however, avoid the confusion that otherwise results from the dual identity of “ancient” in the
English- language literature—that is, the fact that “ancient” has been used in some studies to describe the
period before the ritsuryō era, and in others to refer to the Nara and Heian periods, and not what came
before. There is, in fact, a rather extensive literature on the notion of “archaic states.” Among the most
important studies here are Gary M. Feinman and Joyce Marcus, Archaic States; and Norman Yoffee,
Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations.