Finding Japan, through its past
Studying early modern Japanese history may not sound like a delight. After all, you have to learn the language, along with several archaic variants. But David Luke Howell, Harvard’s newest professor of Japanese history, not only has made Japan’s Tokugawa period (1603-1868) a life’s work, he has managed to use it to explore some offbeat cultural sidelights. Those include night soil, matchlock firearms, disgruntled samurai, and 19th century hairstyle reform. Regarding that last item, Howell — a writer of uncommonly witty and clear academic prose — recently penned an essay called “The Girl with the Horse-Dung Hairdo.” (The dung was what the piled-up hairstyle resembled.) Within a couple of years, Howell promises a slim, playful volume on the subject of night soil, a human fertilizer no longer in favor, but which in premodern Japan was a powerful economic and even scientific preoccupation. (He has read — yes — many 19th century books on...