From the Foreign Affairs review:

This is a pathbreaking study of how historically, Japanese personal networks, both vertical and horizontal, operated to establish powerful norms of beauty, propriety, and good manners, which in turn gave a distinctive dimension to Japanese political behavior. The powerful, and those aspiring to power, had to take seriously group participation in composing poems (haikai) according to rigorously defined standards; they had to display refinement in reacting to art and music, elegance in carrying out ordinary tasks such as pouring tea, and exact discipline in their dress and social manners. It is standard in most cultures to associate dignity with authority, but the Japanese carried the linkage of aesthetics and power well beyond mere dignity. Ikegami, a sociologist, traces the evolution of the various strands of Japanese aesthetic standards as they developed in the key cities where government officials and merchant leaders interacted. The result is a rich and detailed cultural history from medieval times to the Meiji period.

From the excerpt:

When networks based on aesthetic activities intersected the rapidly expanding social, political, and economic networks of the Tokugawa period, a set of unforeseen complex social and cultural dynamics emerged in Japanese society.

The rise of aesthetic Japan is not simply the story of elite intellectuals who created a national myth. Rather, it was the accumulative effect of largely unplanned actions of originally unrelated people who began to network with each other. They did this in order to search for ways of socializing with each other and, in doing so, to trespass feudal boundaries and limitations.

The central focus of this book is the fluid dynamics and unexpected consequences of what might be called “the Tokugawa network revolution.” As I see it, a critical moment of cultural history in any society occurs when communicative networks suddenly expand in scale, density, and complexity. The resulting patterns of communication influence both the form and the content of the discourse conveyed through the networks. The kinds of cultural resources that are available at the time of network expansion will determine the range of content in the resulting cultural identities of that society. Thus, the extension of a society’s communicative networks and the alteration of its cognitive maps are reciprocally influential.

Bonds of Civility