The Second Life Of Tokugawa: How The Metaverse Resembles Japan's Transformational Era

As it turns out, Second Life culture is not a uniquely odd society with no real world analogues.  Instead, it's useful to compare SL to the Tokugawa/Edo period of Japan, which ushered that country into the modern era, preparing it to become the global power it is today.

That's the revolutionary thesis of "Avatars Are For Real: Virtual Communities and Public Spheres", a groundbreaking academic paper by Eiko Ikegami and Piet Hut, recently published in the first volume of The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, a peer-reviewed publication.  Pictured at left, Ikegami is a Sociology professor and Department chair at Manhattan's esteemed New School, and the paper is based on her experiences in Second Life as Kiremimi Tigerpaw, at right.  (Hut is the Princeton astrophysicist whose work simulating Newtonian mechanics in SL and OpenSim was featured here; he also happens to be Eiko's husband.)  Through their in-world Second Life activity, they began noticing commonalites to a period in Japan that emphasized culture, the arts, and the sensuality of Ukiyo lifestyle-- literally, "floating world."

So how does the culture of 16th-19th century Japan resemble Second Life?  How about Tokugawa activity that eerily resembles avatar-based roleplay, virtual world construction, and communities based on creativity, not social barriers?

In Tokugawa, Ikegami notes, haiku poetry was so highly valued, it offered temporary transcendence across traditional boundaries:

[O]nce a person had become seriously involved in this form of poetry in their home town, he or she enjoyed automatic entry into other poetry networks anywhere in Japan, given the existence of numerous loosely connected poetry circles all over the country. Even women poets could travel easily and extensively by utilizing these poetry networks. They mingled and communicated addressing each other solely by their poet names. These pen names signified an alternative rule of sociability that made feudal status distinction temporarily null and void.

Speaking of pen names and fanciful pseudonyms, the authors cite a samurai of the period complaining about how common and prevalent they'd become within informal arts communities:

When these men are able to sing popular songs (jōruri) well enough, they are given artist names by their teachers. The students feel honored by this treatment. Within their own circle, they address each other only by ‘—tayū’, these fake names. Their samurai names are deemed appropriate only for official public matters. In their private life, they use only their ‘—tayū’ names. How deplorable!

Apparently, that's the feudal Japanese version of "Get a first life!"  But these second lives persisted and took on many forms:

Through tea ceremony and flower arrangement to haiku and the game of Go, Tokugawa citizens could escape political pressure and meet each other freely in the safe realms of the virtual worlds of art. In big cities as well as in the provinces—or even in small villages— numerous hobby circles emerged, which allowed people to experience alternative realities.... Just like contemporary Second Life, numerous loose groups showed up, combining voluntarism and commercialism in a fluid mix of shifting forms.   

How is all this important?  Here's the paper's clincher:

In the middle of stifling feudal social structures, networks of people who engaged in interactive artistic and literary pursuits could provide much more freedom than "€œreal life"€ could possibly offer, in a totally immersive and hence very "€œreal"€ way. The result was an emerging cultural condition that prepared the population of premodern Japan for moving toward political modernity once the country opened up after the late nineteenth century.

This happened during a time of strict samurai-borne hierarchies and class divisions.  Given that, the authors marvel,

[I]t was almost a miracle that Japan built a modern nationhood with modern political institutions so quickly. One of the main ingredients for this outcome, in our view, is Japan's early form of a second life in the form of participatory art circles... In only half a century, Japan succeeded in building a modern state with a constitution, parliamentary politics, meritocratic bureaucracy, and universal public education. At the dawn of the 20th century, Japan found itself to be the first non-western industrialized nation: a dramatic success story of a real world transformed through roots in virtual worlds.

In other words, modern Japan in all its endlessly inventive grandeur was made possible by what was effectively a kind of nascent Second Life community experience.  If SL becomes pervasive enough through our era, a virtual society spread out across the entire Net-connected world, what global transformations are to come?   

These are only excerpts to an inspiring (and for an academic work, highly readable) paper.  Here's the abstract, and here's the direct .pdf link.  In my view, it's mandatory reading for understanding Second Life's full potential.

Image credit: Ikegami photo by Piet Hut/Pema Pera, Tigerpaw screenshot by Sylectra Darwin.  Second image is from Kenroku, a Japanese historical sim in SL.

Comments

[Alberik Rotaru]

Sorry, but I have rarely read such a nonsensical metaphor, even in as bad metaphor rich an environment as this, in either my first or second lives. Meiji/Showa Japan was not a modern state, except in the sense that say, Iraq before the First Gulf War was a modern state. Let us turn to the shopping list of modernity: 'constitution, parliamentary politics, meritocratic bureaucracy, and universal public education'.

The Meiji constitution was a personal grant by the emperor (actually by the coalition of feudal and court elites around the throne) and revocable by him at will. The parliamentary politics of the Diet were at all times under control of the elites who actually controlled the throne and were easily shunted aside by the militarists in the 1930s without the slightest difficulty. The meritocratic bureaucracy was a patronage system for the same elites that controlled the emperor and bureaucratic inputs into state policy were invariably overruled by those elites. Universal public education was an achievement of sorts, one also shared with Saddam, that served to inculcate the ideology of the ruling elites as much as anything else.

Finally, this allegedly modern state managed to provoke one of the most spectacular military defeats in human history by assuming the image of modernity it presented to the world was a reality.

The thesis of this paper is amazing. It sets up an entirely ahistroric claim that the Meiji Restoration created a modern state and fails to address the sad fact that it is precisely the cultivation of the 'artistic second life' that led to the supreme moment of folly in Japan's history. The people who launched the Pacific War spent their spare time happily producing haiku and participating in tea ceremonies, indeed the production of a last haiku was a required duty of pilots about to fly kamikaze missions.

Second Life is an admirable and brilliant space. Any resemblance to a modernised Japan that did not exist before 1945 is accidental at best.

[Hamlet Au]

I'm not sure if I see the relationship between Tokugawa arts culture and the rise of belligerent Japanese nationalism 100-200 later, which seems to be more attributable to a perverted, reactionary restoration of Bushido codes and Shinto beliefs that are contrary to what she's describing in this paper.

[Talia Tokugawa]

Wow a whole post all about me :D
(or possibly the other 48 Tokugawa in Secondlife http://slnamewatch.com/last_name_Tokugawa.html }

[Zaphod]

I found this article quite upsetting, and after thinking about why I felt that way, I have decided because it is another self-serving rewriting of the history books.

While there is much to admire about Japan and the Japanese people - there is also much to be wary of. In particular their constant attempts to rewrite modern history in their favour and to ignore or refuse to face up to anything dark or unpleasant in their recent past.

My grandfather fought against them in the second world war and as he used to tell me: "the difference between the Germans and the Japanese is that every German knows about Auswitch but no Japanese knows about Nanking".

I think modern Japan owes more to the American administration (after the war) than anything else. While the subculture of poets described do appear to have some similarities with our virtual worlds, to then go on and say that it then influenced the rise of modern peaceful Japan is (another) appalling rewriting of the history books.

[Argent Bury]

Interesting thesis, and I can see where one could draw parallels. Edo period Japan had a huge participatory arts culture, as well as a more conventional entertainment industry. This is what happens when you have lots of idle samurai drawing stipends and working pointless bureaucratic jobs - all that cognitive surplus either goes into partying, whoring in the Yoshiwara, dueling in the street, watching kabuki, and reading novels, or it goes into the creation of art. Sounds familiar.

Now I won't deny the power art holds to inspire and broaden our horizons. The Shogunate certainly didn't, nor did post-Meiji governments. Edo period ukiyo-e prints had to be approved by censors (look in the corner of a lot of prints and you'll see their approval stamps along with the artists seal). Certain Kabuki and Bunraku plays were forbidden from being performed for fear of upsetting public morals. Some of Chikamatsu Monzaemon's plays about love suicides were followed by waves of - surprise surprise - love suicides. So, no doubt that art influenced people's daily lives.

However I'm not so sure about this participatory art culture easing the transition into the Meiji period. That was more a matter of a few high-level people getting some crazy new ideas from overseas, implementing them, and most of the people below them simply doing what they were told. A *lot* of these changes were "top-down", and I don't think it really mattered whether the people below composed haiku or not, it mattered that they followed orders from above.

There *was* a fascination with new things and new fads at least as strong as the fear of the foreign, though. Once Western dress became available, you had guys wearing bowlers together with their hakama. So, rather than a desire to create I think simple faddishness and a craving for "the new" was a big part of the acceptance of cultural changes you see as you move into the modern age.

So, I guess while I agree with her initial observations I'm wary of her conclusions. Very enlightening though, and thanks for posting about it.

[Alberik Rotaru]

The Tokugawa period moved directly and somewhat bloodily into the Meiji Restoration. There was no 100-200 year gap. The Meiji Restoration happened in 1868 and the Pacific War began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937.

The Pacific War, was at least in part, a result of the kind of political structures adopted at the time of the Meij Restoration, a constitution based on that of Prussia which left the emperor a free hand in military decisions, an extraordinarily weak parliament, and entrenched aristocracy that merged some elements of the Tokugawa military aristocracy with the old court nobility. Moreover, the advocates of the Pacific War were themselves deeply involved in the same secondary arts culture as their Tokugawa predecessors.

However, the real weakness in the paper, is its central thesis and that does not rise or fall on the Pacific War. Quite simply the icons of modernity identified in the paper, did not happen or were purely formal. Moreover, an oppositional arts culture was also prevalent thought the Qing period in China, and does not seem to have given rise to even the limited indices of modernity described by the paper. Ditto British India where India did go onto develop the same list and Pakistan did not. Ditto the former Soviet Union. It would seem possessing an oppositional arts culture or a secondary arts culture, may effect many things but it certainly does not guarantee the creation of modernity.