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HISTORICALLY, TOKUGAWA SAMURAI WERE A LEGAL creation that grew out of the landed warriors of the medieval age; they came to be defined by the Tokugawa shogunate in terms of hereditary status, a right to hold public office, a right to bear arms, and a "cultural superiority" upheld through educational preferment (Smith 1988, 134). With the prominent exception of Eiko Ikegami's recent The Taming of the Samurai (1995), little has been written in English in the past two decades regarding the sociopolitical history of the samurai in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. E. H. Norman's seminal work, Japan's Emergence as a Modern State, established the parameters of debate among American historians of Japan from the 1950s through the 1970s. Drawing on the Marxist historiography of prewar Japan, Norman interpreted the Meiji Restoration in terms of class conflict: a modified bourgeois revolution directed against a feudal Tokugawa regime, led by a coalition of lower samurai and merchants, and supported by a peasant militia (Norman [1940] 1975). Subsequent opponents of Norman's work took issue with several components of his analysis: Was the Tokugawa regime an example of feudalism? Was there fragmentation among the samurai class? Did, in fact, a "lower" class of samurai exist, and were samurai at all motivated by economic considerations? Given the dominant tenor of modernization theory and Parsonian sociology in the 1960s, Norman's opponents stressed political motivation, group formation, the growth of participatory politics, and styles of samurai leadership. Subsequently, other scholars have reconfirmed and expanded upon key points in support of Norman's monumental interpretation.1
Today, however, few scholars would support the whole of Norman's analysis. Few of us seek to discover the degree to which Japan confirms a European pattern, and the bourgeois revolution as a historical type now appears overly deterministic and too reductive in the face of a variety of national and sectarian revolts against aristocratic, colonial, and other "premodern" states. But I am struck by two fundamental points shared by both Norman's opponents and his supporters, which, I believe, are integral to our descriptions of human societies. First, nearly everyone assumes that Japanese society consists of groups described as classes, in the most general sense noted by philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood or philosopher of language W. V. Quine:...