If there is one important and largely unexplored topic in Japanese history, it is the sankin kōtai or ‘alternate attendance’ system of the country's early modern period. In spite of being a staple in all kinds of courses on Asian history in general or Japanese history in particular, all we had in the way of English language scholarship has been Toshio Tsukahira's study Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Research Center, 1966). One of the problems with taking on this topic is the overwhelming amount of materials available in the form of official Tokugawa records spanning more than two hundred years, as well as documentation preserved by the domains over the same time span, individual samurai diaries, and a large number of picture scrolls and accounts by all kinds of eyewitnesses, among whom foreigners figure prominently. It therefore takes an intrepid researcher undaunted by mountains of...

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