Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book summarizes the history of attempts to reconstruct premodern Japan, defined here as the era before 1600. Historians have, accordingly, devised a number of overlapping systems through which to conceptualize "Japan before 1600". Western scholarship on premodern Japan has a much shorter history, and until just a few decades ago suffered from an appreciable gap in methodological sophistication. The real Anglophone pioneers of historical scholarship on premodern Japan were Asakawa Kan'ichi and Robert Karl Reischauer in the prewar era; and George Sansom, Delmer Brown, Minoru Shinoda, and Paul Varley in the 1950s and 1960s. The book features essays by leading historians on twenty-five topics critical to contemporary research interests and agendas, presented in four thematic Parts: "Geography and the Environment", "Political Events and Institutions", "Society and Culture", and "Economy and Technology".