This dissertation is a history of the Aizu region in Japan from the mid seventeenth-century into the early twentieth-century. The project is concerned with how a region came to be constructed in Japanese history. It traces Aizu as it evolved from a distinct domain in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), through its destruction in the Restoration war of 1868, into a region within modern imperial Japan (1868–1945). I identify the political, economic, and cultural forces that transformed what was once a discrete sovereign polity into a nebulous and problematic space, thus offering a comprehensive view that reinterprets a region not simply as an administrative unit or a political-economy but a cultural product. In particular, I examine: the nature and limits of Aizu as a domainal polity in the early modern period; Meiji state policies that recast Aizu as a socially troublesome and economically backward place in the modern period; new ideas that stigmatized certain social practices in Aizu, namely its speech, which was problematized as a “dialect”; and the struggle over historical memory and Aizu's status as an “enemy of the court”, and how remembrance shaped regional identity. The dissertation argues that Aizu regionalism was a byproduct of modern nation-state formation, and is best understood not as a pre-modern legacy but a political and cultural expedient that emerged from the dialectic interplay between region and nationhood.
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