Bibliographic Essay
Among the few works primarily on violence in early modern japan, that of Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), stands out for its focus on the changing nature of the samurai and the role of violence in samurai masculine behaviour.
Ritual suicide, or seppuku, on the other hand, has gained considerable attention, with several useful studies, including Andrew Rankin, Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2011); Jack Seward, Hara-kiri: Japanese Ritual Suicide (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1968); Fumio Kakubayashi, ‘An Historical Study of Harakiri', Australian Journal of Politics and History 39.2 (1993), 217-25; and Toyamasa Fuse, ‘Seppuku: An Institutionalized Form of Suicide in Japan', Journal of Intercultural Studies 5 (1978), 48-66.Several autobiographies of Tokugawa samurai have been translated into English, some of which include material on violence. These include Teruko Craig, Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), and Mark Teeuwen and Kate Wildman Nakai (eds.), Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Important biographies of late-Tokugawa samurai are Marius B. Jansen, Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saiga Takamori (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004); and Charles L. Yates, Saigo Takamori: The Man behind the Myth (London: Kegan Paul, 1995).
A considerable number of contemporary works on the ‘way of the samurai' during the Tokugawa era have been translated into English, among them Alexander Bennett's Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai (Tokyo and Rutland: Tuttle Publishing, 2014). Academic studies include Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism and Bushido in Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); G.
Cameron Hurst III, ‘Death, Honor, and Loyalty: The Bushido Ideal', Philosophy East and West 40.4 (1990), 511-27; and Karl Friday, ‘Bushido or Bull? A Medieval Historian's Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese Warrior Tradition', The History Teacher 27.3 (1994), 339-49.On swordsmen, see William de Lange, Famous Japanese Swordsmen of the Period of Unification (Warren, CT: Floating World Editions, 2008), and Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai Swordsman: Master of War (Tokyo and Rutland: Tuttle Publishing, 2008). The focus of both books is on the more violent times before the Tokugawa era, but the second title includes material on the turbulent final years of the period. The book authored by Miyamoto Musashi, perhaps the most famous swordsman of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, has been translated numerous times - see for example The Book of the Five Rings, trans. William Scott Wilson (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2012).
Studies of the Japanese martial tradition and the development of the martial arts during the Tokugawa period include Cameron Hurst, The Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Karl Friday and Seki Fumitake, Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima Shinryu and Samurai Martial Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997); and John M. Rogers, ‘Art of War in Times of Peace: Archery', in Honcho Bugei Shoden, Monumenta Nipponica 45.3 (1990), 253-60.
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