If there is one important and largely unexplored topic in Japanese history, it is the sankin kōtai or ‘alternate attendance’ system of the country's early modern period. In spite of being a staple in all kinds of courses on Asian history in general or Japanese history in particular, all we had in the way of English language scholarship has been Toshio Tsukahira's study Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Research Center, 1966). One of the problems with taking on this topic is the overwhelming amount of materials available in the form of official Tokugawa records spanning more than two hundred years, as well as documentation preserved by the domains over the same time span, individual samurai diaries, and a large number of picture scrolls and accounts by all kinds of eyewitnesses, among whom foreigners figure prominently. It therefore takes an intrepid researcher undaunted by mountains of documents, more than can be read in a lifetime.

Constantine Vaporis’ predilection is for such topics. This new book grew out of his earlier project Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), in which he mainly focused on early modern travel by Japan's chōnin (townsmen) class. Tour of Duty takes on samurai travel to Edo and back, and, in the book's lengthier second half, their stay in what had become de facto the nation's capital. In the first chapter, Vaporis describes the alternate attendance system in general terms. This is followed by a chapter that focuses on the routes and roads taken to reach Edo. The third chapter deals with the composition of the daimyo-processions while on the road, while the fourth chapter analyzes the duties of the participating samurai during their absence from their home domain.

The fifth chapter concentrates on the location, layout, and composition of the daimyo residences in Edo. One way to understand how the alternate attendance system left its stamp on the character of the city is through an analysis of the use of space. In Edo, in contrast to the rest of Japan, samurai and commoners coexisted in roughly equal numbers, but the samurai occupied all the high ground and commanded four times the amount of space available to their social inferiors (p. 155). The sixth chapter describes the opportunities and temptations available in the capital to the samurai from all over Japan. The books ends with a chapter in which Vaporis argues that the samurai of these daimyo processions were not just the recipients of an Edo culture ready-made to be taken back to their home domains. Instead, they were active creators of this culture as each domain contributed its particular elements to the Edo melting pot.

Much of this process, of course, has already been documented, by Donald Keene in the case of rangaku, Timon Screech, and others scholars working on early modern Japan not cited in this book. In large part, the vitality of the city of Edo was due to the presence of the daimyo and their retainers, and the funds they spent during their stay in the city. This is clear from reports describing the city as “a desert” just after the system had been greatly reduced in scope in 1862. In other words, but for the sankin kōtai system, Edo would not have been the metropolis it became during the seventeenth century. It is this mutual dependence between center and periphery that makes the study of the system such a challenging and rewarding way to analyze early modern Japan. After Tsukahira's general introduction to the system, which stressed the coercive aspects imposed by the center, one would expect a follow-up study to be more sensitive to the contributions of the periphery.

Indeed, Vaporis has written a study based mainly on archival material left behind by the Tosa domain. The particular strength of this book lies in its presentation of information from unpublished diaries of earnest Tosa samurai who noted down what they heard and saw during their trips and stay in Edo. Nevertheless, Tour of Duty is still conceived as another general study of the system, albeit one with an eye for social detail about the participants and their environment that sometimes is rather demanding of the patience of the reader. The successive chapters remain, however, separate essays. The interaction between the center and the domains, the economic importance of the system, or the influence it may have had on Tokugawa society may occasionally be mentioned, but the book as a whole does not present a sustained argument on any of these (or other) topics. Thus, Tour of Duty falls short of offering the new analytical approach of which this immense and fascinating field of inquiry is in urgent need. Instead, Professor Vaporis has given us a survey, which surely advances in many ways our knowledge of the sankin kōtai system in particular and early modern Japan in general.