A Lady's Life in Tokugawa Japan

In this four-part series, we're time traveling back to Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) to find out what life was like there for the ladies. If you've been binging Shogun lately, then this one's for you!

To access a full transcript of this episode, become a patron.

selected bibliography

Books & Academic Journals

  • Charles J. Dunn, Everyday Life in Imperial Japan, New York: Dorset Press, 1969.

  • Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Voices of Early Modern Japan: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life During the Age of the Shoguns, Westport: Greenwood Press, 2012.

  • Heather H. Kobayashi, “The Miko and the Itako: The Role of Women in Contemporary Shinto Ritual,” Senior Capstone, Vassar College, 2013. https://core.ac.uk/download/10673319.pdf

  • Gerald Groemer, “Female Shamans in Eastern Japan during the Edo Period,” Asian Folklore Studies 66, no ½ (2007): 27-53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030449

  • Kunimitsu Kawamura, “A Female Shaman’s Mind and Body, and Possession,” Asian Folklore Studies 62, no. 2 (2003): 257-289. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030289

  • Marcia Yonemoto, The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan, Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 

  • Rebecca Corbett, Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018. 

  • Charles J. Dunn, Everyday Life in Imperial Japan, New York: Dorset Press, 1969.

  • Marcia Yonemoto, “The Perils of the ‘Unpolished Jewel’: Defining Women’s Roles in Household Management in Early Modern Japan,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 39, (2010): 38-62.

  • Satomi Kurosu, “Divorce in Early Modern Rural Japan: Household and Individual Life Course in Northeastern Villages, 1716–1870,” Journal of Family History 36, (2011): 118-141.

  • Lesley Downer, Women of the Pleasure Quarters: A Secret History of the Geisha, New York: Broadway Books, 2001. 

  • Mineko Iwasaki with Rande Brown, Geisha: A Life, New York: Atria Books, 2002. 

  • Kathryn Rebecca Marr, “Mirrors of Modernity, Repositories of Tradition: Conceptions of Japanese Feminine Beauty from the 17th Century to the Early 20th Century,” University of Canterbury Master’s Thesis, 2015. 

  • Stephen Turnbull, Samurai Women 1184-1877, New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.

  • Erin Trumble, “Women Warriors: Defending Aizu During the Boshin War (1868-1869),” Florida State University Thesis: Summer 2017.

  • Joel Cohn, “Where Two Ways Meet: Women/Warriors in Edo-Period Japan,” in Significant Others: Gender and Culture in Film and Literature, East and West: Selected Conference Papers, ed. William Burgwinkle, Glenn Man, Valerie Wayne, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.

  • Diana E. Wright, “Female Combatants and Japan’s Meiji Restoration: the Case of Aizu,” War in History 8, no. 4 (November 2001): 396-417.

  • Eiko Ikegami, “Shame and the Samurai: Institutions, Trustworthiness, and Autonomy in the Elite Honor Culture,” Social Research 70, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 1351-1378.

  • Pamela D. Toler, Women Warriors: An Unexpected History, Boston: Beacon Press, 2019.

Online Sources

Kate J. ArmstrongJapan, everyday lives of women