Tour Of Duty Constantine Nomikos Vapos: An Analysis

During the Tokugawa period of Japan a singular map consisted of numerous feudal towns and villages each ruled by individual daimyo lords. The list of individual domains was enormous, so too was the list of cultures, traditions, and material goods specific to the domains and feudal families that lived within the domain’s borders. The right to govern each domain was given to a daimyo lord by the Tokugawa Shogunate; in return, each ruling vassal was required to complete a “form of feudal service.” Known as alternate attendance the Shogun imposed this requirement as a means of political and economic control which restricted individual daimyo rule and reinforced the overall power of the Shogunate. While alternate attendance was a mechanism of political control that promoted peace throughout Japan, Constantine Nomikos Vaporis illustrated the unintentional effects of the hegemon’s policy in Tour of Duty. Vaporis argued that alternate attendance, while considered a “disciplinary institution” by other Japanese scholars, was nevertheless “instrumental in producing a population with a high level of shared culture and experience.”
Furthermore, alternate attendance not only offset local cultural fragmentation but also helped neutralize the isolating propensities of individual domains. Through the influence of foreign and Western theologies, the spread of material culture by the practice of giving gifts, and the development of a shared economic and visual experience throughout the population; Vaporis argued that alternate attendance “demolished social and cultural boundaries, so that by the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth, there was an integrated or ‘national culture’ in