Ah so specialized, this delineation of customs and currents in the class hierarchies of the Japan that was completely isolated from 1600 to 1850 by order of the reigning Tokugawa shoguns. C. J. Dunn postulates that this isolationism bred an internal stability in which national characteristics intensified and flourished; hence his designation of this period as ""traditional."" The book in its thorough descriptive detail might be deemed ""inner-directed""--the most minute facets of each mode of existence are elaborated (complete with transliterations of Japanese words): recreation and education, clothes, prisons, the administration of justice, tortures and suicide regulations, etiquette, weaponry, the sexes separately and together, ad almost infinitum. But no substantive historical concepts admitting of reapplication are developed; in that respect this is an unmeaningful though quite professional distillation.