Conclusion: Should Japanese Studies Be Disciplined?

Disciplines discipline. Undoubtedly, many of us who study Japanese society from discrete methodological perspectives have felt the weight of this simple yet stubborn axiom-at times in ways that sharpen the focus of our interpretation and, at others, in ways that may confine or even obstruct our scope of inquiry. This book, in sum, has sought to probe the merits and limits of disciplinarity in the study of early modern Japan, with full cognizance that the disciplines, both as a structuring apparatus in the university and as a useful toolkit for practitioners, are not going anywhere anytime soon-nor should they. By converging across the disciplining mechanisms of our respective training and looking between the gaps that they inevitably create (without dispensing with their revelatory power altogether), our contributors have offered an occasion to appreciate the degree to which Edo Japan really does look different through an interdisciplinary lens than it has in more conventionally structured scholarship. While we have left it to each chapter to make its own case for embracing multiple methodologies to better capture subjects that resist categorization, we hope to conclude the volume by reflecting on the value and potential of interdisciplinarity as a collective endeavor for our field.