The chapters in this volume use diverse methodologies to challenge a number of long-standing assumptions regarding the principal contours of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese society, especially regarding values, social hierarchy, state authority, and the construction and spread of identity.

Peter Nosco is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of the companion volume Thinking for Oneself: Identity and Individuality in Early Modern Japan (forthcoming), and co-editor (with Simone Chambers) of Dissent on Core Beliefs: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).
James E. Ketelaar is a Professor at the University of Chicago in the Departments of History, and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, as well as the Divinity School. He works on religious and intellectual history, peripheral studies and recently has been working on emotion as a historical category.
Yasunori Kojima is Professor in the Faculty of Education at International Christian University (Mitaka, Tokyo). His specialty is the intellectual history of the Edo period, and most recently he has expanded his interests to include social history and the gap between it and intellectual history; erotic thought and parody; and Japan as a knowledge-based society.