Maren Ehlers

Click here to read an interview about my book. 

Publications

Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018. Honorable Mention, John Whitney Hall Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983878

“Benevolence, Charity, and Duty: Famine Relief and Domain Society During the Tenmei Famine.” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 69, no. 1 (2014): 55-101.

“Mountain Demons from Mito—The Arrival of Civil War in Echizen in 1864.“ In The Meiji Restoration in a Global Context, ed. Robert Hellyer, Steven Ivings, and Harald Fuess. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

“Outcastes and Ie: A Study of Two Beggar Boss Associations.“ In What is a Family? Answers from Early Modern Japan, ed. Marcia Yonemoto and Mary Elizabeth Berry, 126-145. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520316089/what-is-a-family

“Charity Reconstructed: The Transformation of Social Welfare in Rural Japan in the Nineteenth Century.” In Charities in the Non-Western World: The Development and Regulation of Indigenous and Islamic Charities, ed. Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown and Justin Pierce, pp. 88-111. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2013.

“Executing Duty: Ōno Domain and the Employment of Hinin in the Bakumatsu Period.” Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 18 (2010): 76-87.

“Kinsei Ōno-han ni okeru hinkon to kyūsai.” Buraku Mondai Kenkyū 221 (2017): 47-65.

“Echizen Ōno jōka no zatō to goze” (Blind Entertainers in the Castle Town of Ōno in Echizen). In Sekkyō—Hito wa shinbutsu ni nani o takusō to suru no ka (Sekkyō Storytelling—What did People Expect From the Gods and Buddhas?, ed. Kōbe Joshi Daigaku Koten Geinō Kenkyū Sentaa, pp. 229-242. Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 2017.

“Mibun shakai to jinsei: Bakumatsu Ono no biko chochiku“ (Status Society and Benevolent Rule: Emergency Reserves in Bakumatsu Ono). In Kinsei mibun shakai no hikakushi: Ho to shakai no shiten kara, ed. Tsukada Takashi, Saga Ashita, and Yagi Shigeru, pp. 345-375. Osaka: Seibundo, 2014.

“Mibun shakai no hinmin kyūsai – Tenmei kikin-chū no Echizen Ōno-han o rei ni” (Poor Relief Under the Status Order – the Case of Echizen Ōno Domain During the Tenmei Famine). In Mibunteki shūen no hikakushi – hō to shakai no shiten kara, ed. Tsukada Takashi, pp. 293-346. Osaka: Seibundō, 2010.

“Ōno-han no Koshirō – han shakai no naka no hinin shūdan” (The Koshirō of Ōno Domain – A Beggar Group Within Domain Society). In Toshi no shūen ni ikiru, ed. Tsukada Takashi, pp. 87-120. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2006 (Shiriizu mibunteki shūen, vol. 4).

“Das Utakichi kaikoku monogatari: Dokument eines Pilgerschicksals aus der späten Edo-Zeit.” In Sünden des Worts. Festschrift für Roland Schneider zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by Judit Árokay and Klaus Vollmer, pp. 597-624. Hamburg: Ges. für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, 2004.

Research Interests

History of early modern and modern Japan, history of East Asia, history of poverty and poor relief, social history, history of social class, local history

Education

M.A., Universität Hamburg, 2003

Ph.D., Princeton University, 2011

Current Project

I am working on a new book on domain reform in the final years of the Tokugawa period, focusing again on Ōno, the small domain in central Japan that was the subject of my first book. By looking at a small domain with a scattered territory, I hope to find new answers to the question of what constituted a domain in Bakumatsu-era Japan, considering factors such as commerce, knowledge production and Western Learning, as well as occupational and local identity. This time, I am following reform initiatives that connected Ōno to such places as Osaka, Edo, Tsuruga, Hakodate, and Karafuto (Sakhalin). I am currently examining how the domain, in the course of these reforms, relied on social groups that formed networks across domain borders: wholesalers, shipping agents, sailors, lacquer harvesters and -dealers, miners, non-Japanese people on Karafuto, and others.