Punishment and power in the making of modern Japan /Daniel V. Botsman.
- Princeton : Princeton University Press, (c)2005.
- 1 online resource (xiv, 319 pages) : illustrations, maps.
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction -- Signs of order : punishment and power in the shogun's capital -- Bloody benevolence : punishment, ideology, and outcasts -- The power of status : KodenmachÅ jailhouse and the structures of Tokugawa society -- Discourse, dynamism, and disorder : the historical significance of the Edo stockade for laborers -- Punishment and the politics of civilization in Bakumatsu Japan -- Restoration and reform : the birth of the prison in Japan -- Punishment and prisons in the era of enlightenment -- Punishment, empire, and history in the making of modern Japan.
"The kinds of punishment used in a society have long been considered an important criterion in judging whether a society is civilized or barbaric, advanced or backward, modern or premodern. Focusing on Japan, and the dramatic revolution in punishments that occurred after the Meiji Restoration, Daniel Botsman asks how such distinctions have affected our understanding of the past and contributed, in turn, to the proliferation of new kinds of barbarity in the modern world." "The first English-language study of the history of punishment in Japan, the book concludes by examining how modern ideas about progress and civilization shaped penal practices in Japan's own colonial empire."--Jacket.