• BE ORGANIZED AROUND A SPECIFIC THESIS STATEMENT 
• INCORPORATE SPECIFIC ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES DRAWN FROM THE ASSOCIATED ASSIGNED READINGS
• INCLUDE APPROPRIATE ANNOTATION (AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES CITED) CREDITING THE SOURCES FOR YOUR ILLUSTRATIONS.

In her summary chapter from The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan, Eiko Ikegami writes "By the beginning of the Tokugawa period, the samurai culture of Japan had already reached its maturity as an established military culture." (page 356) With the inauguration of "centralized feudalism", however, that established military culture was significantly refocused both by the "status quo" oriented control needs of the Tokugawa state system and by the forces of modernization within the larger society. 

Discuss how and why the "honor culture" of the samurai was transformed ("modernized") both by the needs of the state for control on the one hand and by the emergence of "honorific individualism" on the other.  

Why wasn't the "honor culture" of the samurai simply abandoned altogether as Tokugawa society and culture matured, establishing a peaceful and stable social and political order? How did the tension involved between "control" and "change", between "past" and "present" needs, come instead to serve "as a dynamic source of cultural and intellectual creativity and development" (page 358)?  

Incorporate in your discussion a consideration of the tensions existing between "control" and "change" arising form such influencing factors as pre-existing patterns of political organization, religious value systems, social and economic autonomy based on land tenure, the emergence of multiple hierarchialy-organized layers of (public and private) social interaction and the individualized quest to maintain one's honor and a sense of personal dignity and self-worth.