ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the boundaries of the early modern Japanese state, and examines the social status. Inner boundaries separated the core polity from the dependent yet autonomous peripheries of Japan, while less well-defined outer boundaries set the peripheries apart from the non-Japanese world. The core polity's inner boundaries linked the overlapping internal geographies of shogunate, domains, temple grounds, and outcaste territories into a coherent institutional whole. Some violations of status boundaries challenged the premises of Tokugawa social hierarchy and therefore attracted official concern. Status as an institutional structure, and the boundaries of polity and identity predicated upon it, collapsed with the downfall of the feudal polity, yet it took decades for status to be translated into the idiom of the nation-state with its modern citizenry. The institutionalization of status resonated with yet another sort of boundary, that separating the "civilized" and "barbarian" realms of the Confucian world view.
