![]() ![]() HUMANITIES: In Perspectives on History, the magazine of the American Historical Association, you described how your own views of Tsuneno, in one key respect, changed over time. The archive said that they had dozens more letters to and from her in their collection, so I felt compelled to find out more about her. “Everything here is delicious,” she wrote, and she sounded just like me writing home from my first trip to Tokyo in 1997. One document was a letter from Tsuneno to her mother, describing her new life in Edo. I ended up on the web page of the Niigata Prefectural Archives, looking at their “Internet Document Reading Course,” which was a series of posts meant to introduce the public to some of the interesting materials in their collection. I discovered Tsuneno’s story while I was searching online archives, looking for materials to translate and assign to my students. She did something unusual for a woman in that time and place: She took some control over her life and changed her fate. But she lived in the theater district and bought bowls of noodles on the street she worked for a famous Edo city magistrate and married a down-and-out samurai. She ended up losing everything-her money, her family, and her village. Instead, after three divorces, she ran away to the great city of Edo (now Tokyo) in pursuit of a different kind of future. She wasn’t uniquely talented or accomplished, but she did have a strong personality, and she was never content to live a conventional life in the countryside. Who is she and how did you find her?ĪMY STANLEY: Tsuneno was an ordinary woman who was born into a Buddhist priest’s family in a tiny village in Japan’s snow country in 1804. HUMANITIES: In Stranger in the Shogun’s City you have written an extraordinary history of a single not-famous individual. ![]()
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