Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan

Abstract

In the Edo period (1600–1868), status-and gender-based expectations largely defined a person’s place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to celebrate their profession as belle-lettrists. For women in particular the open road and the blank page offered an opportunity to create personal hierarchies defined less by gender and more by culture and refinement. After the mid-eighteenth century, textbooks, guides, comical fiction, and woodblock prints allowed commoners to acquaint themselves with the historical, lyrical, or artistic pedigree of Japan’s famous sites. By identifying themselves with famous literary and historical icons, some saw an opportunity to rewrite their lives and re-create their identities in their travel diaries. The book first introduces the notion that the spaces of travel were malleable, accommodating reconceptualization across interpretive frames. It shows that, far from being static backgrounds, these travelscapes proliferated in a myriad of loci where one person’s center was another’s periphery. The book continues that in the course of the Edo period, educated persons used travel to, or through, revered lyrical sites to assert and enhance their roles and identities. Finally, the book looks at the intersection between recreational travel and the rising commercial economy, which allowed visitors to appropriate landscapes through new means: monetary transactions, acquisition of tangible icons, or other forms of physical interaction.