Mediated by Gifts

Mediated by Gifts is a collection of essays by top scholars on gifts, giving and the social and political forces that shaped these practices in medieval and early modern Japan. The international assemblage of authors provides new insights into these deeply ingrained practices. The essays focus on topics such as shogunal visits to shrines and temples, exchanges between the imperial house and the shogun, a physician and his patients, the shogun, his vassals his and his ladies, the merchant class and the shogunal government, and between scholars and their cosmopolitan circle of contacts. This virtually unexplored view of Japanese history provides new tools to better elucidate both historical and modern Japan. Contributors are Lee Butler, Andrew Goble, Kaneko Hiraku, Laura Nenzi, Ozawa Emiko, Cecilia Segawa Siegle, and Margarita Winkel.

Martha Chaiklin, received her Ph.D from Leiden University. She currently teaches at Zayed University. Author of books and articles on Japan and the East India Companies, her most recent book is Ivory and the Aesthetics of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Palgrave, 2014).

'Mediated by Gifts: Politics and Society in Japan, 1350–1850 provides a better understanding of gift-giving mechanisms. Indeed, the variety of essays and approaches found here should whet the appetite of scholars seeking to understand the full scope and significance of gift exchange in medieval and early modern Japanese society.'
Charlotte Von Verschuer, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, Monumenta Nipponica, 72:2 (2017)
'Mediated by Gifts covers gift giving across a span of five hundred years in the most useful way possible: by focusing on the details extracted from primary sources through painstaking research. If the essays are sometimes short on analysis and contextualization, it is perhaps because they provide so much information that it is impossible to do justice to all of it in one chapter. The book provides an essential foundation for further research on a myriad of questions, many of them relevant to studies of gender, economics, and politics.'
Karen M. Gerhart, Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 34 (2019)

'In summary, Mediated by Gifts is a coherent, insightful, thoroughly researched, and highly original collection of essays. It makes for excellent reading. Most important, it shows how gifts mattered to a broad range of premodern Japanese, occupying quite different stations in society, and how the practice of gift exchange must feature in our efforts to understand their motivations, lives, and relationships.'
Jeroen Lamers, The Journal of Japanese Studies, 46:1 (2020).