Some research is startling, and some research confirms what we already guessed or assumed, but there’s some research which falls between these categories: research which reveals things that should have been obvious, if we’d been thinking about it clearly, or asked the right questions earlier. Siniawer’s argument about the consistency of violence in Imperial Japanese politics falls into that category, as does the new transnational migration scholarship that sees migration as a multi-directional, multi-generational process. I’m sure you have other examples

In the same vein, there’s new archaelogical research from Kitakyushu, announced on LiveScience with the headline “Lead Poisoning in Samurai Kids Linked to Mom’s Makeup.” A study of 70 sets of samurai class remains included several of children:

Children under age 3 were the worst off, with a median level of 1,241 micrograms of lead per gram of dry bone. That’s more than 120 times the level thought to cause neurological and behavioral problems today and as much as 50 times higher than levels the team found in samurai adults. Older kids’ levels were lower, but still very high.

What’s more, five of the children had unusual bone enlargements, and X-rays revealed banding that only turns up in children with at least 70 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.

The study also found, confirming earlier findings, that samurai women had higher levels of lead exposure than men by a very high degree, suggesting that the lead-based makeup of upper-class women was the primary environmental source, and that the women were exposing the children to lead both through contact and through breast milk. Obviously, there’s a slight sample bias in the study, as the highest levels of lead exposure seem to have resulted in the youngest deaths, and children who were not heavily exposed seem to have survived longer. Other studies of adult remains suggest “that samurai and merchants living in Kokura had much higher lead levels in their bones than did farmers and fishermen living nearby” which may be a result of childhood exposure or may be the result of continued contact.¹ This is interesting, no question, and I’ve never heard anyone actually suggest before that the use of lead — which we routinely point out is quite unhealthy for the women involved — would almost certainly have effects on children as well.

The article then does something which drives me a bit crazy, and illustrates how zombie ideas work, not to mention the journalistic tendency to escalate findings into “smoking gun” monocausal historical narratives. The very next sentence, after the quotation above, is “They also point to individual shoguns known to have suffered from intellectual and health problems associated with lead poisoning.”

In case you don’t get it, there’s a direct invocation of the Lead Poisoning Fall of Rome hypothesis:

It wouldn’t be the first time lead poisoning rang in the end of an era. Others have suggested that “plumbism” among the Roman elite — whose fancy food and wine was laced with lead leached from cooking equipment — contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

This is an old zombie chestnut, one that has been slain and risen again and been slain again many times.² I particularly like the “others have suggested” phrase, a journalistic standby for taking a position in a debate, especially a false position, without having to take responsibility for the error.

The assumption that shogunal intelligence and temperment — the aspects most affected by lead toxicity — were the cause of the end of the Tokugawa regime is clearly a gross misreading of the history. There are structural issues which are quite independent of personalities, issues which often have their origins in the earliest — and least likely to be lead-poisoned — policies of the bakuhan system. The archeologists seem to be arguing in this direction, though:

Nakashima and his team think a ruling class addled by lead poisoning may have contributed to political instability, and ultimately to the collapse of the seven-century-old shogun system in 1867, when power shifted cataclysmically from the shogun to the emperor, and life in Japan changed for good.

I don’t see how this can possibly stand up to serious scrutiny: the main problem of the Tokugawa regime wasn’t constant political instability, but excessive political stability in the face of a need for sustained reform. Instability in the bakumatsu comes from a clash of intelligent capable leaders with strong personalities and dramatically different ideas about core issues, differences that are largely ideological, and entirely comprehensible in the long-term context of Tokugawa ideologies. It doesn’t require an epidemic of induced cognitive dysfunction to explain the behavior of the samurai or merchant classes of late Tokugawa Japan.³ And “contributing factor” is such weak sauce, a phrase which is too-often used to describe plausible theories lacking evidentiary support, when it should really be limited to aspects that are documented but whose degree of influence are somehow indeterminate.⁴

I understand the desire to inflate findings, to make one’s own research the causal center of events, to see through one lens. And I understand how that’s exacerbated by journalistic writing, which wants to draw attention to itself. But perpetuating zombie errors and the stereotype of the monocausal smoking gun method of historical storytelling is inexcusable, no matter how interesting the actual findings.

1. as an aside, I don’t recall ever reading that adult males outside of the theater trades used makeup routinely, as this article seems to suggest.
2. Wikipedia currently hedges, but seems to come down on the side that the hypothesis is plausible. As I tell my students, “plausible” does not imply “true” in historical argumentation.
3. the ee ja nai ka religious movements, on the other hand, and the rising tide of peasant protests, are too episodic and entirely based in the wrong classes.
4. as they often are in historical hindsight, once we eschew monocausal simplicity

Michelle Damian, who I met at ASPAC, has a new post up in her project journal with an intriguing mystery:

One type of vessel that has intrigued me is the massive yakatabune, boats used for pleasure gatherings on the river. They have a solid superstructure with heavy supporting posts and cross timbers, usually decorated with lanterns bearing the names of the restaurants that had dispatched them, and are often shown with smaller craft alongside used to ferry patrons or cook the food. … What is unusual, though, is the notch at the tip of the stempost. These vessels almost always have an extra protrusion at the end.

If the mystery ended there I could chalk it up to simply the convention for the yakatabune – perhaps just aesthetic, perhaps for whatever reason just an additional visual cue to the boat’s purpose. On a model of a similar ship in Tokyo’s maritime museum (Fune no Kagakukan), though, the stempost is apparently made of two separate pieces of wood scarfed together with a notch exactly like the tip of the stemposts in the prints. It is as though the boats shown in the prints had removed that extra piece of wood, leaving the uneven notch exposed. … If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions to help solve this mystery, I would be most grateful to hear them!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jetalone/ / CC BY 2.0

Go to her project journal for the proper illustrations (the ones here are just some that I found on Flickr) and more detail.

My theory? I think the stem, because of its size, was removable. So when it might block the view of patrons, as in a fireworks-viewing trip, it was taken off the vessel, but when it was a pleasure cruise in which the patrons were more focused on the activity inside, it was left on for elegance.

Am I the only person who had a bad reaction to the Tomb of legendary Japanese Queen Himiko found headlines I’ve been seeing?

The article says

Archaeologists had previously claimed that the tomb, built in the traditional keyhole-shape design, was built in the fourth century and therefore too modern for Queen Himiko.

But a team led by Professor Hideki Harunari has discovered new clay artefacts close to the site, which radiocarbon dating indicates were made between 240AD and 260AD. According to records from the Chinese court, with which the Yamatai kingdom had links, Queen Himiko died around 250 AD.

The evidence seems quite circumstantial to me, from the oddly specific radio-carbon dating to the fact that they haven’t studied the tomb itself, to the treatment of Himiko and Yamatai as unequivocally Nara-centered.

I was just commenting on Jonathan Jarrett’s article about rehdroxylation rate dating that it would be nice to have better dating technology, as a safeguard against wishful thinking and distortions of the archaeological record.

Walter Edwards of Tenri University reported in a message to H-Japan that the newest issue of “Noteworthy Archaeological Sites” is online. The report consists of a selection of items from 『発掘された日本列島２００８』, translated into English. The members of the Committee for International Relations of the Japanese Archaeological Association (JAA), who translate these and other materials on the JAA website, have carefully chosen at least one site from each major period in Japanese archaeological studies: paleolithic, Jomon, Yayoi, Kofun, antiquity, medieval, and “modern” (which seems to begin in the 16th century).

Ginzan Silver Mine

One site introduced in this issue is Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine, which was incribed on the UNESCO role of World Heritage Sites in 2007. Anyone who has followed the literature in Japanese on 16th- and 17th-century silver production, or for that matter the discussion of the role of Japanese silver in the Asian-centered global trade before the 18th century (Andre Gunder Frank’s ReORIENT has a whole chapter on the subject), will find this brief summary–which includes historical and contemporary maps, photos of the mine, and photos of excavatated objects–to be an extremely useful source.

As a historian of the 16th century who is particularly interested in material culture, I was also excited to read about the excavation of a refuse pit in the Osaka Castle site, one of the most important active sites for this period. I visited the site and saw some materials related to my previous research project, Raku ceramics, in 1997, but haven’t kept up with excavation reports. This particular pit has yielded a range of food remains, including abalone, deer, chicken, fowl, sea bream, cod, clam, oysters, and many others. What a meal! The discovery of pufferfish remains made me wonder; maybe it was badly cut Tetraodontidae sushi that killed Hideyoshi?

Excavated Osaka Castle Chopsticks

Anyway, the pit even included chopsticks and ceramic vessles from Karatsu, Mino, and Tamba. This brief discussion only skims the surface of the sites described in this and the previous four issues.

Professor Matthew Stavros of the University of Sydney (seen in the third photo below) wrote in response to my post on the discovery of roof tiles from Honnôji at an excavation site in Kyoto. Matthew, who is a specialist in medieval Kyoto and has participated in archaeological digs in the city, reports that archaeologists have been excavating this site, which they were almost certain was Honnôji, for some time, but lacked definitive proof. The significance of this recent find is that the roof tiles are marked with a symbol that was only used at Honnôji.

Matthew kindly provided some images from the excavation which illustrate something of the excavation process and results (after the break).