Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book represents the rival salon of Empress Teishi. Like many of the other diaries by court women, the Pillow Book can be seen as a memorial to the author's patron, specifically a homage to the Naka no Kanpaku family and a literary prayer to the spirit of the deceased empress Teishi. The roughly three hundred discrete sections of the Pillow Book can be divided into three types such as list, essay, and diary, which sometimes overlap. The Pillow Book is now considered one of the pillars of Heian vernacular court literature, but unlike the Kokinshu, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji, which had been canonized by the thirteenth century, the Pillow Book was not a required text for waka poets and was neglected in the Heian and medieval periods. But it became popular with the new commoner audience in the Tokugawa period, and it has been read for its style, humor, and interesting lists.

Meiji Japan may be described, in both instrumental and metaphorical senses, as a translation culture. Almost all the oligarchy's policies aimed at modernizing the state were dependent to some degree on the translation of Western political, legal, and technological knowledge. It was politically advantageous for modernizers to disparage the Tokugawa period as frivolous and backward, and even conservative intellectuals saw popular forms of pre-Meiji literature and storytelling as old-fashioned. The hybridity of the political novel is apparent in two of the popular and influential works: Setchu bai by Suehiro Tetcho, which is marked by the intrusions of political dialogues into a love-romance narrative; and Kajin no kigu by Shiba Shiro, a romance centered around stories about the struggle for freedom and national independence. The important achievement of translations and political fiction was in taking advantage of new media to establish the novel as the artistic medium of modern culture that represented the sensibilities of an emerging middle-class readership.

The han, or daimyo domains, covered some three-quarters of the total area of the Japanese islands. The han have been restored to their rightful place in the history of the Tokugawa period. Many han were already in existence well before the bakufu was established in 1603; for that matter, almost all of them, in one form or another, were to survive its fall, lingering on uneasily into the Meiji world. The role of the han was defined by the bakufu, for it was the Tokugawa government that confirmed their existence and prescribed the extent of their responsibilities and the limits of their jurisdiction. Tokugawa rule had effectively released all han from the need for constant vigilance against each other. Equally, it had done much to enhance their internal stability by making it clear that it would countenance no usurpers from among the han vassals.

Of all the years that spanned the Tokugawa period, the middle years, Tokugawa chūki, called the eighteenth-century, are distinguished by the creative achievements realized along a broad front. Important innovations were introduced in theater, literature, and printmaking in the arts and, more pertinent to this chapter, into reflections on history, nature, and political economy. As a cosmological system authorized by a transcendent moral absolute, the "Great Ultimate" or taikyoku, Neo-Confucianism articulated a sharp division between the Tokugawa era of peace and tranquility and the immediately preceding Sengoku period of constant warfare. The interplay between principle and play provides people with a key perspective into late-eighteenth-century syncretism. From Ogyū Sorai and Dazai Shundai on down through the Nakai brothers, Seiryo, Toshiaki, and Daini, there is a consistent theme of skepticism regarding the validity of the aristocracy that was contained in general discussions about history and nature.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the government of Japan in many important respects had assumed the shape it was thereafter to maintain for the next two hundred years. The imposition of the shogun's authority over the other power centers, however, did not bring a halt to political transformations during the Tokugawa period. The politics of the eighteenth century were lively and significant in their own right. Political life in the eighteenth century was also affected by the increases in agricultural productivity. The first great reformer was Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. Politically, Tsunayoshi's attempt to strengthen the shogunal prerogative had a profound impact on the bakufu's faltering administrative machinery. It is claimed that the Kyoho Reforms began only in 1722, the year in which the shogunate set about rearranging its finances, and that the first six years of Tokugawa Yoshimune's regime were merely a time of preparation.

Until the 1970s, few professional Japanese historians regarded material culture and lifestyles as subjects of serious inquiry. The civil wars of the sixteenth century and the concurrent social and economic developments were catalysts in the transformation of the material culture and lifestyles of the common folk. During the Tokugawa period, patterns of income distribution in city and countryside alike changed as a result of economic growth, led by continued growth in the agricultural sector and the accelerated growth of commerce. Premodern Japanese buildings were built of tensile materials such as wood, bamboo, and thatch. The new foods introduced during the late medieval period, rises in agricultural productivity during the Tokugawa period. The Tokugawa period saw a distinct rise in the quality of life, owing to the introduction of a new fiber for cloth. The rising standard of living both brought the Japanese more goods and some luxuries and also improved the quality of their life.