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The Sense of History in 18th Century Jōruri Drama

The long Tokugawa era, though extremely rich in documentary sources, remains frustrating for historians. Simply too little seems to have happened: the first half of the 1600s may have been relatively action-packed with wars, grand shifts of power and nation-building, but from the 1660s to the 1850s we find few major events-no wars, only minor though persistent squabbles or uprisings-amid continuing peace and relative prosperity. A general view remains that Tokugawa society changed little during these 200 years. Our view of the present and the immediate past tends to determine the questions we ask of more distant history. Our particular interests lead us to seek specific answers. We can see now that the widespread European theory of modernization was the decisive influence on a whole generation of historians who sought to explain the Meiji Restoration and Japan's consequent rise as a world power. We cannot help but see Tokugawa society through the Meiji lens. What was the state of consciousness, the intellectual baggage among the populace as they reacted to Commodore Perry's 'black ships' arrival on Juli 8th, 1853? For, though the subsequent half century was filled with action and events, it was the contours and structures of the collective ideals and imagination that determined the response. It has become increasingly clear to Japanese and foreign scholars that certain fundamental epistemological attitudes, common both to Japan and to the West, developed during the 18th century. One may ask, however, are these historians simply looking for explanations or causes for Japan's rapid modernization and finding the answers they hoped for? We have seen radical changes in the discipline of history in the last few decades, generally in the direction of social history. Though current critical theory tends to be focused more on literature and philosophy, one only has to go back to the 19th and early 20th century famous historians such as Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), Carl Becker (1873-1945), Charles Beard (1876-1948) and R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) to see a continuing and lively, self-conscious debate on history as 'commonsensical' empirical science or as rhetorical art. One of the most influential current writers on the philosophy of history, Hayden White, has pushed historians to see themselves as essentially in the same camp as novelists,