Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan: Materials, Makers, and Mastery by Christine M. E. Guth (review)

As I put down Horton’s work, I could not help but wonder if the structure of this study and its self-imposed limitations, replicating studies first produced by his predecessors at Berkeley, might not constitute an academic form of mourning and homage to deceased masters? Horton’s dedication of the book to his teachers—John Rosenfield, William H. and Helen Craig McCullough, and Kaneko Kinjirō—suggests as much, as does his fidelity to their form of scholarship in his own scholarly practices. Moreover, is not the dust jacket’s presentation of this work to readers as “a model of what an annotated translation should be” itself part of the process of legitimating succession in the academy? Yet, as history shows, succession need not entail simple reproduction. The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan is, indeed, a model of a certain kind of annotated translation. It is not, I hope, a model for emulation by the next generation of scholars.