Travel can be frustrating, difficult, and tedious. As least, that is the conclusion I have reached after a few bad flights out of O'Hare airport, and I suspect that many Tokugawa-era travelers, who were familiar with tedious weather-related delays and inconsistent security procedures at government checkpoints, would have agreed with me. Travel diarists often reflected on the hardships they experienced on their journeys, complaining of everything from seasickness to terrible food to depressing encounters with local people, and warning readers that their own excursions could be dangerous or unpleasant. Yet over the course of the Tokugawa period, men and women from all walks of life took to the roads in ever-increasing numbers, culminating in the famous “travel boom” of the early nineteenth century. Moreover, they traveled not only out of necessity, but voluntarily: they pursued mobility as a form of entertainment.
Laura Nenzi's lively and important new book investigates this phenomenon. While historians such as Constantine Vaporis and Kodama Kōta have examined the physical and political infrastructure of travel, addressing the control of movement as a component of the relationship between state and society, Nenzi analyzes the meanings and motivations attached to mobility. She argues that travel was not only a form of recreation, but of “re-creation”: by taking to the open road, men and women escaped from the mundane and found spaces in which to challenge convention, not only through the act of movement itself, but also through intellectual and bodily engagement with the sites they visited. Her narrative spans the entire Tokugawa period, relating a story about the commodification and, to some extent, democratization of recreational travel.
Nenzi begins in the first decades of the era, when high-status men and women wrote erudite travel diaries in order to confirm their places within their social milieus, and ends in the mid-nineteenth century, when a more heterogeneous group of wayfarers set out to famous places in search of food specialties and knickknacks. Throughout, she emphasizes the role of gender in shaping how people experienced and related their journeys. While the culture of travel changed, she argues, male and female diarists continued to invest their excursions with specifically gendered meanings.
The study opens with a provocative analysis of how spaces were mapped differently in political, religious, and lyrical discourse, thus creating a variety of interpretive frames that travelers could use to order their journeys. Women, in particular, realized that “the closed doors of one discourse were the open gates of another” (p. 66), and they became adept at exploiting disjunctions between competing geographies in order to justify their mobility. This was critical because, as Nenzi argues in the second section, travel represented the possibility for escape and even liberation from the limitations imposed by status and gender. Female travelers engaged in “audacious acts of self-assertion” (p. 91) by defying official edicts that would render them immobile, and a surprising number even cross-dressed in order to evade detection at checkpoints. They also engaged in quieter acts of rebellion: by filling the pages of their travel diaries with allusions from the classical period, they identified with literary heroes and heroines and challenged the relatively rigid social framework that defined their era.
Low-status men could also take advantage of this opportunity, but they did so less often, perhaps because their everyday lives already allowed them a degree of flexibility and agency denied to women. Instead, men tended to seek out novelty, commenting on what was unfamiliar or surprising about their new surroundings. They also pursued erotic pleasure, a major theme of the final section, which concentrates on the nineteenth century, when experience itself became a type of commodity available for purchase. Cultural references once available only to a privileged few were compiled and put on sale at bookstores, where they were accessible to a much broader population. Meanwhile, merchants, bathhouse proprietors, and innkeepers located in popular destinations found ways to package their locales—in the form of snack foods, bath salts, or even prostitutes—and market them to visitors. Though travelers never tired of the gloss of sophistication imparted by well-placed references to ancient poetry, they also learned to appreciate “famous” rice jelly cakes and “Atsumori noodles” (p. 154).
Nenzi concedes that travelers' opportunities for self-discovery were sometimes furnished at the expense of exploited laborers in brothels, bathhouses, and inns. Ultimately, however, she regards the burgeoning culture of travel as a positive development: “Mobility equals power,” she writes, “the power to experience novelty, the power to question, the power to envision and effect change” (p. 188). Throughout the book, particularly in sections relating to women's journeys, she uses the words “liberation” and “freedom” to describe the transformations effected when people stepped outside their everyday lives. Though Nenzi deliberately limits her study to recreational travel, I could not help wondering whether her characterization of mobility (and the increasingly mobile Tokugawa period) would have changed if she had addressed people for whom travel was everyday life: kitamaebune sailors, child actors, sumo wrestlers, peddlers, or even samurai assigned to the Kantō Regulatory Patrol. Their Tokugawa-era cultures of movement remain largely unstudied, and investigating them might elicit a darker view of the period, suggesting that mobility could be oppressive as well as liberatory.
This book is beautifully written, and its insights into the complex interplay of gender, mobility, and status are uniquely valuable; they shed light on the status system as it was experienced by those who lived within (and occasionally escaped) its strictures, not only as it was imagined by those who wrote shogunal edicts. In addition, the author's keen sense of humor enlivens her descriptions of travelers as diverse as the refined and unabashedly snobbish Lady Nakagawa and the boisterous and often vulgar clothing wholesaler Hishiya Heishichi. While this book will be welcomed by specialists interested in early modern Japan or the history of travel, it is also appropriate for assigning to undergraduates, who should appreciate its witty descriptions of everyday (and non-everyday) life in the Tokugawa period.
