Institutional Osteoporosis in Late Tokugawa Japan

The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 25th John W. Hall Lecture in Japanese Studies.

A reception will follow the lecture in the Luce Common Room (2nd Floor).

In this talk, Professor David Howell will diagnose the late Tokugawa regime with institutional osteoporosis, a slow hollowing-out of structures not designed for the stresses of social and economic change. Such change did not kill the regime, but it did enfeeble it, so that when Western imperialism gave it a decisive shove, it suffered something like the broken hip that marks the beginning of the final decline for too many elderly patients. He will draw on several examples from the hinterland of Edo (modern Tokyo) to illustrate his argument.

David L. Howell is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History and Professor of History at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005), as well as numerous articles. He is editor of The New Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 2, Early Modern Japan in Asia and the World, c. 1580–1877 (2024). Howell’s research focuses on the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. He is particularly interested in the ways changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century.