Mediated by Gifts

Martha Chaiklin, received her Ph.D from Leiden University. She currently teaches at Zayed University. Author of books and articles on Japan and the East India Companies, her most recent book is Ivory and the Aesthetics of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Palgrave, 2014).

'Mediated by Gifts: Politics and Society in Japan, 1350–1850 provides a better understanding of gift-giving mechanisms. Indeed, the variety of essays and approaches found here should whet the appetite of scholars seeking to understand the full scope and significance of gift exchange in medieval and early modern Japanese society.'Charlotte Von Verschuer, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, Monumenta Nipponica, 72:2 (2017) 'Mediated by Gifts covers gift giving across a span of five hundred years in the most useful way possible: by focusing on the details extracted from primary sources through painstaking research. If the essays are sometimes short on analysis and contextualization, it is perhaps because they provide so much information that it is impossible to do justice to all of it in one chapter. The book provides an essential foundation for further research on a myriad of questions, many of them relevant to studies of gender, economics, and politics.'Karen M. Gerhart, Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 34 (2019) 'In summary, Mediated by Gifts is a coherent, insightful, thoroughly researched, and highly original collection of essays. It makes for excellent reading. Most important, it shows how gifts mattered to a broad range of premodern Japanese, occupying quite different stations in society, and how the practice of gift exchange must feature in our efforts to understand their motivations, lives, and relationships.' Jeroen Lamers, The Journal of Japanese Studies, 46:1 (2020).

• PrefaceList of ContributorsChronologies Introduction - Martha Chaiklin1 Unexpected Paths: Gift Giving and the Nara Excursions of the Muromachi Shoguns - Kaneko Hiraku. Translated by Lee Butler2 Gifts for the Emperor: Signposts of Continuity and Change in Japan’s Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries - Lee Butler3 Physician Yamashina Tokitsune’s Healing Gifts - Andrew Edmund Goble4 Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and the Formation of Edo Castle Rituals of Giving - Cecilia Segawa Seigle5 Mitsui Echigoya’s Gifts to the Tokugawa Shogunate - Ozawa Emiko. Translated by Lee Butler6 Travel and Gift Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Japan - Laura Nenzi7 Gift Exchange and Reciprocity: Understanding Antiquarian/Ethnographic Communities Within and Beyond Tokugawa Borders - Margarita WinkelIndex