Laura Nenzi. The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko: One Woman’s Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan focuses on Kurosawa Tokiko (1806–1890), an “unimportant” and “ordinary person” (5). However, as Laura Nenzi shows, she is not an uninteresting one. A commoner born in a village in Mito domain, she was educated in a private temple school run by her family, taught there, and eventually inherited it. After her husband died, to support herself and two children she worked as a peddler, traveling to other domains and expanding her range of contacts. She was also a poet who socialized with other poets. Daughter of a yamabushi, a mystical mountain hermit, she was part of a Shugendō ascetic community and professed prophetic abilities. This set of features was not so unusual among rural female commoners in Tokiko’s time. What distinguished Tokiko was her political activism, in particular, an abortive effort in 1859 to deliver to the emperor a message protesting the shogunate’s punishment of Mito daimyo Tokugawa Nariaki for his opposition to the senior minister Ii Naosuke and to the opening of the Treaty Ports (2).

Ancient history · Art · Asceticism · Emperor · Genealogy · Literature · Meiji Restoration · Mysticism · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Theology · Treaty · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy