ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 uses self-cultivation and personal betterment to show the radical epistemological shift from medieval to early modern times. The early modern focus on the self was already familiar to Japanese aristocrats and military elites, but in an age of sharply diminished levels of conflict, samurai recognized that the self of necessity had to be redefined and reconstituted. For non-samurai commoners, the social, cultural, and intellectual focus on self was fundamentally new. A salon culture akin to the coffee-house culture of early modern Europe developed in the last Tokugawa century, providing a liminal and essentially classless society much like that found within the confines of the private academy, and similarly predicated on the radical expansion of literacy. The chapter concludes with evidence of civil society in Tokugawa Japan.
