Blind in Early Modern Japan

"A thoughtful, deeply researched contribution to disability studies."

-- Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the 2023 Patricia Buckley Ebrey Prize in East Asian History prior to 1800

-- American Historical Association

Winner of the 2023 Outstanding Book Award

-- Disability History Association

"...Tan’s book is an excellent opening for the history of blindness in Japan during its early modern period. Its theoretical frameworks, the power of lineages, and the background of consumer culture are excellent jumping-off points for historians of Japanese disabilities and non-European scholars who might follow."

-- Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society

Winner of the Honorable Mention for the President's Book Award

-- Social Science History Association

"Highly recommended."

-- CHOICE Reviews

"The book is written in an engaging manner and is wonderfully illustrated with contemporary paintings, prints and photographs. . . . this is a book I will certainly revisit and recommend to anyone with an interest in the history of disability and Japanese society or the ways in which disability studies approaches have the potential to shed new light on experiences of disability beyond the global North and the present day."

-- LSE Review of Books

"Tan takes care to describe and transcribe the images in the captions below them, a necessary and very welcome accessibility feature...The focus on electronic resources especially adds to the accessibility of Tan's research and its utility to anyone who wants a deeper look at Tokugawa medical and social practices around blindness."

-- Canadian Journal of Disability Studies

"Ably and admirably striding several disciplinary boundaries, Tan's book is an empirically rich and straightforward account of blindness during the Edo period. More than simply presenting Tokugawa Japan as a case study in the larger corpus of the history of disability, it encourages scholars to reconsider approaches to writing about blindness and visual impairment."

-- Social History of Medicine

"The book will reward a variety of readers, from those looking to understand general aspects of how Tokugawa society functioned, to those seeking information on blindness and blind people in Japanese history, to those interested in non-Western histories and views on disability, and many more."

-- Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

"By drawing from a rich source base and employing new analytical frameworks, Tan takes topics familiar to Japan scholars--blind bards performing Heike, traveling blind female musicians, and the guild for blind men--and turns them into a bevy of new perspectives on what it meant to be blind in Tokugawa Japan."

-- Journal of Japanese Studies

"Blind in Early Modern Japan is an important contribution to the recent historiography of disability and the nascent 'Blindness Studies.' The author's choice to address a topic outside of the 'Global North' demonstrates the scholarly value of studies of blindness from a global historical perspective."

-- Canadian Journal of Health History

"Tan's work powerfully and insightfully documents the convergence of growing national and medical incentives that intersect in the early modern administration of blind-specific institutions of vocational rehabilitation."

-- Asian Journal of Law and Soc