Luke Roberts: Lives of Samurai Women of the Edo Period — USC Project for Premodern Japan Studies

USC Meiji University Exchange

The Records of the Meiji University-USC Exchange

Since 2008, scholars and graduate students from Meiji University and throughout Southern California have met annually to share research on Premodern Japanese History at the University of Southern California . This is an archive of abstracts, papers, and materials presented at the exchanges.

2:45-3:15 Prof. Luke Roberts, University of California Santa Barbara

“Lives of Samurai Women of the Edo Period”

This talk will describe the lives of samurai women of the Mori house in Tosa domain in the Edo period. The Mori house was an average 200-koku house of the rank of mounted guard. Patterns of government documentation tend to erase the presence of samurai women and make it difficult to recover stories of their lives, yet the abundant Mori family records allow us to reconstruct stories of their lives while uncovering many of the untruths in daimyo government records that were created to preserve an image of stable patriarchy.