A review of “The Peony Lantern” and Fantastic Tales in Late Imperial China and Tokugawa Japan: Local History, Religion, and Gender, by Fumiko Jōo.

On a festival night one year in mid-fourteenth century Ningbo, a young student glimpses a beautiful woman walking along the street in the company of a girl bearing a peony-adorned lantern. He invites the woman to his home and a passionate relationship ensues, but not long thereafter, the woman is revealed to be a ghost. Though the student enlists the protective intervention of spiritual authorities, he remains inexorably drawn to the ghostly woman and eventually perishes in the temple where her tomb lies. From its appearance in Qu You’s Jiandeng xinhua (New Tales for the Trimmed Lampwick) collection, this story of “The Peony Lantern” (Mudandeng ji) spawned numerous retellings and adaptations not only in China but in early modern Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. The tale is at the center of Fumiko Jōo’s dissertation, which builds upon a large body of Chinese and Japanese scholarship that has investigated the text’s sources, traced its subsequent evolution, and clarified the lineage of its various adaptations. Yet rather than take up such questions of chronological development and textual origins, Jōo seeks to shift the focus to the specific historical and cultural contexts in which the readers and writers of these texts operated in both late imperial China and Tokugawa Japan. She argues that a reductively linear understanding of textual “influence” or “origin” can blind us to the active engagement of writers with a multiplicity of sources and that it can also prevent a full appreciation of their creative enterprise. Central to her analysis are the roles that local lore, religious beliefs, and gender have played in textual production. Challenging conventional assumptions about the primacy or presumed hierarchical supremacy of the source text, Jōo aims to show how “‘The Peony Lantern’ provokes readers’ perceptions about seductive revenants and drives them to rework those perceptions into their own versions of the tale” (p. 17).

After an Introduction that concisely outlines these objectives and situates her project in relation to existing scholarship, the first chapter of Jōo’s dissertation takes up Qu You’s “The Peony Lantern,” which she characterizes as the “flagship story” of New Tales (p. 24). Having located Qu You within the milieu of Jiangnan area literati and his collection (the first edition of which was completed in 1378) within the broader context of Ming literary history, Jōo directs our attention to the lamp that figures prominently in the titles of both the story and the collection itself. Seeking to explore the role that lamps and other illuminating devices play in the works of Qu You specifically and in the Ming literary imagination more broadly, she discusses a popular Song-Yuan cycle of “Mandarin-Duck Lantern stories,” noting several thematic links including the ornamental lantern, the desiring woman, and a sexual bond that leads to death. Her investigation of the figure of the lamp exposes a further connection between Qu You’s depiction of the return of the deceased in “The Peony Lantern” and his interest in dramatic performance and other forms of popular entertainment. Jōo identifies several features of narrative staging in “The Peony Lantern” that parallel theatrical conventions and argues that the lamp has a special role to play in this and other Qu You works as a device that reveals uncanny women, rendering the dead visible by theatricalization. To highlight this aspect of the lamp, Jōo concludes the chapter with a discussion of late Ming vernacular adaptations of “The Peony Lantern” in which the lamp is absent: “The Story of Kong Shufang’s Double-Fish Pendant” and its variants. She emphasizes the ways in which this story cycle, popular in the local taozhen storytelling repertoire, draws upon Hangzhou lore and also features a stronger affirmation of Confucian orthodoxy in its treatment of the revenant woman.

This attention to the specificity of local context and to the position of women in traditional society continues in Jōo’s second chapter, which focuses on the history of the Huxin temple in Ningbo: the site of the ghostly revenant Fu Liqing’s coffin in Qu You’s “The Peony Lantern.” Drawing upon local gazetteers, Jōo narrates the history of the Yuan sisters, unmarried Buddhist devotees who donated their dowry lands to this temple during the Southern Song. Praised for their pious charity, these lay women became objects of veneration after their deaths, but a greater emphasis on patrilineality in subsequent eras brought about a change in how they were regarded. Jōo’s analysis of documents pertaining to a 1600 lawsuit concerning the temple concludes that religious devotion by women in traditional China was praised only insofar as it did not conflict with their presumed domestic responsibilities. The Huxin temple was a site known for its connection to the historical Yuan sisters on the one hand and the fictional Fu Liqing from Qu You’s “The Peony Lantern” on the other. Yet as Jōo points out, these women were similar in that they remained unmarried and did not occupy the traditional social roles of wife and mother. Her chapter concludes with an examination of how such links between the temple and these historical and fictional women became further codified through poetic practices. Compositions in the zhuzhici (bamboo branch song) mode might allude to “The Peony Lantern” and its fictional heroine alongside the historical Yuan sisters: both as “historical ghosts who perpetually reside in the Huxin temple” (p. 95).

The second half of Jōo’s dissertation turns to Japanese intellectuals’ encounters with Qu You’s New Tales from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In her third chapter, she discusses how Qu You’s collection was first read by Buddhist scholar monks associated with the Gozan Zen temples (one of whom actually purchased a copy while traveling to Ningbo), an aspect of the text’s reception history in Japan that has been comparatively under-examined. One factor that came to stimulate the monks’ interest in the text is that it became connected in their minds with an important collection of Zen kōans, the Wumenguan, a text that had been imported to Japan in the mid-thirteenth century. In order to shed light on how this link was forged, Jōo turns our attention to contemporary reading and annotation practices, arguing that the commentary apparatus was an inseparable part of how readers encountered a given text and indeed that annotated texts were sometimes privileged above the presumed original. Both the kōan collection and Qu You’s work from over a century later make reference to a Tang dynasty tale called Lihunji or “The Story of the Separated Soul.” Qu You’s allusion is explained with quotation from the Tang source in a Korean annotated edition of Qu You’s collection, titled Jiandeng xinhua jujie (K. Chŏndŭng sinhwa kuhae), that was imported to Japan by the beginning of the seventeenth century and reprinted widely thereafter. Jōo’s analysis points out that Hayashi Razan, a Japanese scholar who read and commented upon this Korean annotated edition of New Tales in 1602, was one of the first to draw a connection between Qu You’s allusion to the Tang story and the Zen kōan, which also alluded to this Tang precedent. She argues that the establishment of a connection between Qu You’s fantastic collection and the Zen kōan gave the former legitimacy, preparing the way for Japanese seventeenth-century Buddhist commentaries on the kōan collection to refer to Qu You’s New Tales in their exegetical treatises and also to regard “New Tales as a textual authority that legitimated certain popular teachings” (p. 123). As a fictional text concerned with the supernatural, New Tales might seem an unlikely candidate for citation by Buddhist scholar monks, but Jōo argues that “It was precisely because New Tales was commonly discussed as the source text for the well-known kōan that the former text itself received some level of acclaim among Buddhist monks” (p. 131). By “source text,” Jōo has in mind not a chronologically antecedent origin (for as she notes, the kōan predated Qu You’s New Tales), but rather an authoritative work that was deemed worthy of reference. Her discussion of these connections aims to show the importance that annotated editions such as the Korean edition of New Tales played in contemporary reading practice, contributing to her larger argument that readers attached just as much importance to annotations as they did to the main text.

In Jōo’s fourth and final chapter, she turns to the work of Arakida Reijo (1732-1806), a woman who wrote several adaptations of Japanese and Chinese tales of the strange, imitating the language and sociocultural frames of Heian court fiction. Arakida was of course only one of several Tokugawa authors (including Asai Ryōi and, most famously, Ueda Akinari) to adapt “The Peony Lantern” and other stories from Qu You’s New Tales, but her work has so far received very little attention in English, with the notable exception of Atsuko Sakaki’s scholarship. Jōo’s analysis focuses on two stories of Arakida’s that feature supernatural women who have relations with human men. She notes that there is a greater sense of reciprocity and mutuality in Arakida’s depictions of these relationships and emphasizes the fact that in Arakida’s stories, the woman is not punished for her behavior nor is the supernatural ultimately banished from the human realm. Jōo attributes these narrative features to Arakida’s background as the daughter of a prominent Shinto priest and her “critical view about the mid-Tokugawa association of women’s carnal attachment with uncanny metamorphosis” (p. 142). She therefore sees in these works Arakida’s resistance to contemporary discourses that negated femininity or depicted women as sinful beings, concluding her chapter by discussing Arakida’s dispute with nativist scholar Motoori Norinaga, central to which was this question of normative gender roles.

Jōo’s work is a welcome contribution to the growing body of Anglophone scholarship on Sino-Japanese literary interaction. By directing our attention to local history, religious discourses and the role of gender, her readings shed light on several neglected aspects of a tremendously important transnational text in motion. Alongside her consideration of discrete Peony Lantern variants and adaptations, her attention to the role of annotated editions and commentary has much to tell us about reading and writing practices in the early modern East Asia region.

Matthew Fraleigh
Assistant Professor of East Asian Literature and Culture
Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature
Brandeis University
fraleigh@brandeis.edu

Primary Sources

Jiandeng xinhua 剪燈新話 and other works by Qu You 瞿佑
Local gazetteers including Si ming zhi 四明志, Ningbo jun zhi 寧波郡志, Ningbo fu zhi 寧波府志
Xi yuanshi jiasheng 西袁氏家乘
Qu You, with annotations by Im Ki and Yun Ch’un-yŏn, Jiandeng xinhua jujie 剪燈新話句解
Ayashi no yogatari 怪世談 and other works by Arakida Reijo 荒木田麗女

Dissertation Information

University of Chicago. 2011. vii, 212 pp. Primary Advisor: Judith Zeitlin.

Image: Yoshitoshi, “The Peony Lantern” (Botan dōrō).

It is with gratitude, and not a little sadness, that we bid a fond farewell to Dennis Frost, who has been editing the Japan Studies series here on Dissertation Reviews for more than two years. Dennis joined the editorial team when DR was just getting started, and on his watch, Japan Studies developed into one of our flagship series.

Dennis will be moving on to concentrate on his second book project on the Japanese Paralympics. For a preview of his work-in-progress, we encourage everyone to read his award-winning article in The International Journal of the History of Sport entitled “Tokyo’s Other Games: The Origins and Impact of the 1964 Paralympics” [link]. Thank you for all your fantastic work, Dennis, and you will be missed.

Will Fleming now becomes our senior Japan Studies Field Editor, and will be joined by two new Co-Editors who have just joined the DR Editorial Team. Please stay tuned for our announcement about these new members, and the future of Japan Studies Dissertation Reviews.

Image: Post image by Infrogmation, Wikimedia Commons.

We are very excited to welcome two new editors to “Japan Studies Dissertation Reviews,” Akiko Takenaka (University of Kentucky) and Niels van Steenpaal (University of Tokyo), as we bid a very fond farewell to our long-serving colleague Dennis Frost (Kalamazoo College). Our new triumvirate of editors — William Fleming (Yale University), Akiko and Niels — will continue to bring you friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in this dynamic field. If you are interested in having your dissertation reviewed, please fill out the Review Application Form. If you are interested in helping out in some other way, please contact info@dissertationreviews.org. Our Japan Studies Editors can be reached at will.fleming@dissertationreviews.org, akiko.takenaka@dissertationreviews.org and niels.van.steenpaal@dissertationreviews.org.

Introducing Our Field Editors

William Fleming is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Theater Studies at Yale. He specializes in the literature and cultural history of early modern Japan. His dissertation, entitled “The World Beyond the Walls: Morishima Chūryō (1756-1810) and the Development of Late Edo Fiction” (Harvard 2011), explores the rich interrelationship between early modern Japanese fiction and contemporary intellectual movements including nativist studies and inquiry into Dutch, vernacular Chinese, and Russian materials. The dissertation challenges the view of Edo fiction as largely isolated from outside influence and offers a new way of thinking about the transformation of gesaku, the period’s so-called “playful literature,” from a pastime of the intellectual elite into a form of true popular fiction. His current research interests include the representation of disease and the body in premodern Japanese literature and the reception of Chinese fiction in the late Edo period, with a particular focus on the case of Pu Songling’s celebrated collection of “strange” tales, Liaozhai zhiyi. [Website here]

Akiko Takenaka is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. She specializes in the cultural and social history of modern Japan with research focus on memory and historiography of the Asia-Pacific War. Trained as an architect and an architectural historian, she is particularly interested in the intersection between memory and space, and has examined a variety of memorial spaces broadly conceived, including memorials, museums and urban spaces, as well as virtual spaces of memory. She is the author of the book Memory and Spatial Practice: Yasukuni Shrine and Japan’s Unending Postwar, which will be published in the “Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute” series. The work examines Yasukuni Shrine — the contentious war memorial in Tokyo, Japan — as a physical space, object of visual and spatial representation, and site of spatial practice in order to highlight the complexity of Yasukuni’s past and critique the official narratives that postwar debates have responded to. She is currently working on a new project entitled War, Trauma and Postwar in Japan and East Asia in which she investigates the effect of trauma on war memory, as well as the influence of such representations on international relations in East Asia. She has published in journals such as The Pacific Historical Review, The Review of Japanese Culture and Society, and The Asia-Pacific Journal: The Japan Focus. She has received her PhD in Art History from Yale University, and a MS in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT.  Her undergraduate degree is BEng in architecture from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Prior to her appointment at the University of Kentucky, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Art of East Asia (University of Chicago), and the Michigan Society of Fellows (University of Michigan). [Website here]

Niels van Steenpaal is a research fellow at the University of Tokyo where he conducts research on various aspects of early modern Japanese “moral culture,” a term that he uses to describe the pathways, processes and media through which morality finds expression in material culture. Although he still has a soft spot for the subject of his dissertation, “The Celebration of Filial Children in Early Modern Japan: Towards a History of Moral Culture” (Kyoto University 2012), which explored the cultural patterns behind the “creation” of filial children, he has now turned his attention to developing a statistical methodology to harness collective biographical material in order to look at the long term development of moral vocabulary throughout the Edo, Meiji and Taisho period. [Website here]

Our Departing Editor

Dennis Frost is Wen Chao Chen Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Kalamazoo College. His first book, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan (Harvard Asia Center, 2011), traces the emergence and evolution of sports celebrity in Japan from the 1600s through the present, giving particular attention to the ways in which sports stars have both reflected and shaped society and body culture. He is currently working on two different projects. One is a study of sporting events for disabled athletes, which examines the different ways in which Japanese society has perceived and addressed disability in the postwar period, and the second is a comparative study examining the histories of several military “base towns” in Okinawa and other regions in Japan, which explores the US military’s ongoing influence on the people, society, culture, and environment of post-war Japan. [Website here]

Image: Ultraman.

A review of The Violent Virtue: First Narratives of the Ishii Brothers’ Late Genroku Katakiuchi, by Drake Langford.

Drake Langford’s dissertation examines multiple iterations of the story of the Ishii brothers’ extraordinary vendetta, executed in 1701, which involved the killing of a fellow samurai who had killed both their father and their older brother when they themselves were still small children. It provides valuable insights both into the process by which a historical anecdote was transformed as it was adapted to various fictional and non-fiction genres, and into what Langford posits as the invention of a samurai “tradition” of katakiuchi during the late seventeenth century in reaction to doubts regarding both the usefulness of a large warrior caste in a time of peace and its ability to remain warlike. When carried out to avenge the deaths of elder male relatives, these homicides were presented in texts from the period in question as evidence of the exceptional devotion to filial piety of the samurai, which in turn was cast as a component in an overall moral superiority also evinced, in stories like that of the Ishii brothers, by instances of extreme persistence and self-sacrifice in the violent pursuit of this Confucian virtue. This served to justify the powers and privileges of the samurai in an age when they were subject to criticism as decadent and obsolete. Langford’s examination of the role of katakiuchi narratives making such claims in early Tokugawa discourse on the samurai complements Eiko Ikegami’s study of the transformation of warriors into ink-brush-wielding bureaucrats in The Taming of the Samurai by persuasively portraying these texts as responses to anxieties regarding this process.

In his prologue, Langford jumps ahead to 1788 for a look at a hilarious travesty of katakiuchi narratives by Santō Kyōden published in that year, a text whose implied ideal reader is both well-versed in the tropes of a genre pioneered in the various versions of the Ishii brothers’ tale, and jaded enough to view them with ironic distance. Chapter 1 then shifts back in time to examine the ideology of katakiuchi in the years immediately preceding the denouement of the Ishii vendetta as constituted in a collection of narratives published in 1696, Shokoku katakiuchi: Kokon Nihon bushi kagami (Katakiuchi Across the Lands: A Mirror of Japanese Samurai Past and Present). The book’s preface posits katakiuchi as demonstrating samurai virtue and bravery and as an age-old samurai tradition, and promotes the stories that follow as strictly factual accounts that will help to maintain this tradition at a time when decades of peace threaten to chip away at both the martial spirit and moral superiority of the samurai, the latter consisting in part of greater loyalty and filial piety than that of the rest of the populace. The chapter then analyzes the ways in which a sampling of stories in the collection, the earliest set in the fifth century and the most recent in the late seventeenth, work to support the claims made in its preface.

Having thus elucidated the early history of katakiuchi narratives and established the immediate cultural context in which the Ishii brothers pursued their vendetta, in his second chapter Langford goes on to examine ostensibly factual accounts of the brothers’ feat, beginning with those produced by the brothers themselves. In describing their own actions and the reasons for them, the brothers follow the conventions of the katakiuchi narrative established by the texts treated in Chapter 1, as do later versions of their story. They also differentiate their own use of violence from the act they sought to redress, positing blood-revenge, Langford writes, as “the antithesis of petty quarrels and unannounced attacks, rather than a kindred phenomenon” (p. 78). The remainder of the chapter examines seven early historical accounts of the Ishii brothers’ katakiuchi written by third parties. Noteworthy among these is Kukugoshū’s Confucianistic description of the Ishii brothers and their actions as in “harmony with the cosmos” (p. 98), which is said to explain the spectacular success of their vendetta. Langford demonstrates that even though these accounts contain significant divergences from and amplifications and extensions of the Ishii brothers’ versions of the story, they follow the same four-part narrative structure set by the brothers, describing in sequence the murderous ambush of their father, the killing of their elder brother in the course of the resulting vendetta, the demeaning disguises assumed and deprivations suffered by the younger brothers, once grown, as they spend years stalking their prey, then their final act of vengeance and the relief this brings.

Langford’s third chapter focuses on Tōkaidō katakiuchi: Genroku Soga monogatari (Katakiuchi on the Tōkaidō Highway: A Genroku Soga [Brothers] Tale), a book-length, fictionalized version of the Ishii brothers’ vendetta written in 1702 by Shishidō Kōfū, a rōnin living in Osaka and using the penname of Miyako Nishiki. This ukiyozōshi gives the Ishii brothers and other figures in the story new names and significantly alters and expands on the brothers’ original accounts, adding, for example, plot elements drawn from a story in Ihara Saikaku’s collection of samurai vendetta tales Budō denraiki (1686). With its reference to the twelfth-century vendetta of the Soga brothers, the book’s title inscribes its narrative in a venerable tradition of katakiuchi, and its version of the Ishii brothers’ katakiuchi presents their actions as countering a process by which Genroku-period urbanity had undermined old-fashioned samurai virtues.

The final chapter of the dissertation examines a jōruri version of the Ishii brothers’ vendetta, Dōchū hyōban katakiuchi (Famed Highway Revenge-Killing [ca. 1702]), attributed to Takemoto Takumi Ridayū, which, like Genroku Soga monogatari, significantly alters the original story and gives its figures new names. Its most notable addition to the source narratives is a love affair between one of the avenging brothers and the daughter of their quarry, which threatens to divert the young man from his righteous quest.  But in the end, filial piety and samurai valor win out over erotic love, a finale that, Langford convincingly argues, evinces hope for “the transformative, redemptive power of valor in virtue.” The chapter is followed by an appendix comparing the versions of the Ishii brothers’ story contained in two collections of buhen-banashi (didactic tales of martial exploits): Meiryō kōhan (Enlightened and Excellent Exemplars) and Jōzan kidan (Jōzan’s Histories), both published in the mid-eighteenth century.

Langford’s study of the evolution of the Ishii brothers’ story contributes amply to our understanding of how vendetta narratives came to be invested with great moral significance in Japan, which in turn helps explain their enduring popularity. It also serves to contextualize the now better-known Akō vendetta and narratives based on it, such as Kanadehon Chūshingura; especially given that unlike the vendetta of the forty-seven loyal retainers, that of the Ishii brothers met with official approval. It thus expands readers’ knowledge of the accepted channels for private vengeance under the Tokugawa bakufu and thoroughly elucidates the various ways in which one striking example of authorized vengeance was represented across genres.

David Gundry
Assistant Professor
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of California, Davis
djgundry@ucdavis.edu

Primary Sources

Dōchū hyōban katakiuchi (Famed Highway Revenge-Killing)
Kukugoshū (The 995 Collection)
Shokoku katakiuchi: Kokon Nihon bushi kagami (Katakiuchi Across the Lands: A Mirror of Japanese Samurai Past and Present)
Tōkaidō katakiuchi: Genroku Soga monogatari (Katakiuchi on the Tōkaidō Highway)

Dissertation Information

Yale University. 2009. 283 pp. Primary Advisor: Edward Kamens.

Image: Ishii Genzō in an 1855 kabuki production, woodblock print from the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University.

A review of A Heteroglossic Theory of Proto-Genbun Itchi in Edo and Early Meiji Writings, by Kelly J. Hansen.

Historians and historiographers of modern Japanese literature have long debated the fraught relationship between “reality” and the language in which it is inevitably encoded and described. A teleological view of literary modernity often presumes a clean break between ossified tradition and modern innovation. Accordingly, analyses of the various calls for mimesis and linguistic transparency subsumed under the name genbun itchi have largely focused on the Meiji era as a period of such rupture — a time during which earlier views of language and representation were abandoned in favor of new (largely European-derived) theories of literary realism. Kelly Hansen’s 2009 dissertation challenges this reductive viewpoint by highlighting points of continuity and development across the perennially contested “early modern/modern” cultural divide. Through her theorization and discussion of “proto-genbun itchi,” Hansen deconstructs genbun itchi’s mystique as a privileged discourse standing distinct from earlier Japanese literary history and situates it in a larger context that acknowledges connections with Meiji Japan’s often suppressed literary past. Rather than search for a decisive origin or foundational work (such as the oft-celebrated Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei), Hansen’s theory of proto-genbun itchi explores the overlooked connections that are suppressed or effaced through the creation of such an origin. Her dissertation effectively traces a “growing awareness of the gap between the spoken and written languages” (p. 6) from the beginning of the Edo period through the early Meiji.

Hansen’s introduction begins with a re-examination of two works conventionally identified as starting points for discussion of the nascent genbun-itchi “movement”: Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (the first installment of which was published in 1887) and Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui of 1885. The former is particularly important to Hansen’s discussion as a “self-proclaimed attempt at a Western-style realist novel” (p. 3) — one held up by Meiji-era and contemporary critics alike as the decisive point of rupture between Edo-period belles-lettres and a new literature predicated on notions of bunmei kaika. Hansen challenges this characterization and introduces the theoretical constructs she will use to situate the work within a larger field of linguistic experimentation — much of which, she argues, built upon Edo-period observations about literature and language. Of particular importance to Hansen’s definition of “proto-genbun itchi” are a re-examination of the term “realism” as it was used by Meiji-era writers and literary theorists, and an important distinction between “transparency” and “opacity” as a way of considering linguistic discourse apart from questions of realism and literary mimesis.

Chapter 1 provides a thorough survey of secondary scholarship relating to Ukigumo and the critical corpus of both Futabatei Shimei and Tsubouchi Shōyō. Hansen demonstrates the degree to which recent scholarship on these writers has focused on these works within the paradigms of bunmei kaika and Japanese interest in Western literary models. She argues that this traditional interpretation obscures a far more complex discourse about language and representation in the early Meiji and mystifies Ukigumo as a sui generis progenitor of genbun itchi. Hansen suggests that this characterization ignores both alternate theoretical trajectories explored by the contemporaries of Futabatei and Shōyō, as well as the necessity of examining pre-Meiji discussions of the status of language in evaluating the historical significance of Futabatei and Shōyō’s corpus.

Chapter 2 challenges the paradigms presented earlier by focusing on Edo-period discussions of language, script, and linguistic diversity. Of particular importance to Hansen’s discussion is Edo-period Japanese scholars’ troubled and evolving relationship with the Chinese language in which the texts comprising a classical education were written. Hansen presents a number of philological challenges to “Chinese linguistic hegemony” (p. 78), including the work of Itō Jinsai, whose focus on “ancient meanings” (kogigaku) was related to his interest in applying the contents of texts to everyday (Japanese) life. The second section of the chapter analyzes the ideas of Ogyū Sorai, whose philological research highlighted the lexical, syntactic, and morphological differences between the Japanese and Chinese languages. Building upon the research of Yoshikawa Kōjirō and Emanuel Pastreich, Hansen argues that Sorai’s rejection of Japanese glosses (wakun) and insistence upon approaching Chinese texts as a foreign language created a foundation for later scholars to claim parity or even superiority for the Japanese language vis-à-vis Chinese. This idea is developed in Hansen’s subsequent discussion of the kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga.

Chapter 3 moves from the philological research of Edo-period classical scholars to the commercial sphere with an examination of heteroglossia and linguistic experimentation in popular literature. Hansen provides surveys of the print industry and trends in education and literacy, and connects these categories to the reading public’s increased (albeit often indirect) involvement in discussions about linguistic representation. She identifies dialogization and heteroglossia as defining features of Edo-period written production and emphasizes the increased awareness of a gap between archaic written forms and vernacular dialogue. In looking forward to the Meiji period, Hansen is particularly interested in the binary between transparency and opacity she described in her introduction. Interest in contemporary society and the increased use of vernacular-derived written language might be used to characterize writers on either side of the Edo-Meiji divide. However, Hansen’s discussion of popular literature in the Edo period demonstrates the degree to which authors were interested in the “opaque” polysemic effects of intertextuality, relationships between text and illustration, and humorous manipulation of kanji and kana glosses. Hansen concludes that an examination of these works reveals that the desire for “transparency” voiced by literary experimenters in the Meiji period cannot be understood as a question of using colloquial-based dialogue alone. On the contrary, authors of gesaku in particular were interested in the obfuscating or linguistically problematic (and therefore humorous) effects of colloquial language.

Hansen’s final chapter chronicles Meiji-period interest in transparency through an examination of the rise of the newspaper industry and the concomitant shift from woodblock printing to movable type. Engaging previous scholarship by Maeda Ai and Peter Kornicki, Hansen considers the effects the reformatting and realignments necessitated by transference to movable type would have on a reader accustomed to the gestalt relationship between image and text in woodblock prints. Her study returns to Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo with the primary intention of positioning the novel alongside the many experiments with voice, narration, and syntax carried out by Futabatei and his contemporaries — experiments whose critical intention or focus has largely been effaced by Ukigumo’s later canonization. The study concludes with a call for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between early Meiji-period experimentation and Edo-period discussions of language and literary representation. Kelly Hansen’s study fits in well with a growing body of scholarship devoted to the deconstruction or demystification of boundaries between the modern and premodern in Japanese cultural production, and her dissertation effectively and eloquently proposes a method for reconceptualizing these lines of demarcation.

William C. Hedberg
University of North Carolina-Wilmington
hedbergw@uncw.edu

Primary Sources

Futabatei Shimei, Ukigumo
Tsubouchi Shōyō, Shōsetsu shinzui
Itō Jinsai, Gomō jigi
Oygū Sorai zenshū
Kanagaki Robun, Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari

Dissertation Information

University of Hawai’i, 2009. 275 pp. Primary Advisor: Joel Cohn.

Image: From Shikitei Samba’s Ukiyoburo, Waseda University Library.

A review of Fragile Kinships: Family Ideologies and Child Welfare in Japan, by Kathryn Goldfarb.

It is to Kathryn Goldfarb’s credit that her dissertation includes a series of emotionally difficult stories nevertheless rendered immensely readable and analytically provocative. Fragile Kinships explores child welfare and adoption practices to describe how family is constructed and continues to matter in contemporary Japan. In Japan and Japanese Studies, the “family” has long been a key social category, through which researchers and everyday people alike imagine and organize the human condition. Goldfarb’s work begins by refusing to take such a category for granted, and instead she traces how kinship, families, and relationality come to be made and remade, often through interactions that seem unnecessarily painful for the children involved. Like child protective services in any country, the Japanese system for assisting children without dependable families often seems to be operating on theoretical premises that ignore actual children and their needs. Although Goldfarb’s work is not directed at reforming the system, many of her interlocutors are, and this dissertation traces their agreements and conflicts as they negotiate what should and can be done. The dissertation organizes itself around four key themes: first, the centrality of “family” in research and popular discourse in Japan; second, “care” being given and received; third, responsibility for self and others; and fourth, the ways that Japanese families are simultaneously described as “in crisis” but still uncritically represented as locations of nurturance.

Goldfarb’s descriptions of Japanese child welfare policies begin with the necessary disclaimer foreclosing any sense of Japanese exceptionalism. Certainly to some readers the Japanese system for child welfare will seem strange or even unfair, but Goldfarb is careful to refuse any simplistic arguments about Japanese uniqueness. With the zombie of such essentializing theories of Japaneseness (nihonjinron) slayed, she moves on to describe the basic tenants of the Japanese child welfare system. The first potentially surprising fact is that about 90 percent of Japanese children in protective services live in orphanages rather than in foster or adoptive families. Moreover, the majority of children living in such orphanages are not actually “able” to be adopted. Goldfarb allows these two surprising facts to motivate her dissertation research: why are so few children adopted in Japan, and why are most of the children living (for years) in orphanages legally unavailable for adoption?

It is her descriptions of the conditions of such orphanages or the damages they can cause that I found most difficult to read. Although there are many types of “children’s homes” in Japan, the majority of them are dormitory-like structures with large numbers of children, often of different ages, and relatively few adult supervisors.  In addition to the small number of supervisors, the few adults that do interact with the child residents are often state workers who are transferred to other jobs, meaning that most children rarely have the opportunity to build sustainable relationships with adults. Goldfarb delicately describes the social effects of such institutionalization with a story about a young boy who now lives with a foster family. When Goldfarb arrived to have a conversation with his foster mother, the young boy hid and acted shy. The foster mother suggested that such behavior was actually a positive mark of his emotional transition – children at “Children’s Homes” who are starved for adult attention often swarm any visitor, regardless of their connections. In addition to such behaviors, former residents of care facilities describe them as rife with bullying and abuse, and some of the most difficult to read sections of this dissertation occur as young adult relate how their instutionalized childhoods continue to create emotional and psychological problems for them.

By Goldfarb’s estimation, many people who work with or around children’s homes understand that they are fundamentally problematic. But they seem to last because the state, and many people within it, firmly imagine “biological” parents as being fundamentally preferable to any other kind of kinship. For instance, biological mothers, in particular, must relinquish parental rights for children to be “able” to be adopted. Even in cases of extreme abandonment, such a decision cannot be made implicitly – parents must pro-actively agree to put their children up for adoption, and such a status is never the default. Goldfarb narrates many painful stories of parents (often, but not always, mothers) who leave their children for years in “Children’s Homes” but maintain just enough bureaucratic contact that the children are never allowed to be considered for adoption. In many of these cases, the children stay in institutional care until they “age out” at 18, and then enter the labor market or, much less frequently, the educational system. To my utterly non-relativistic mind, a loving family unrelated by blood would be more emotionally and psychologically supportive than an extended childhood within an institution, but Goldfarb carefully explains why this is not the conclusion of many Japanese officials, care-givers, or potential family members.

One particular strength of this dissertation is its engagement with people’s imaginations surrounding parental love. Many of Goldfarb’s interlocutors reported that they found it hard to believe that anyone could love someone else’s child. Ideologically, real love and parental affection were limited, in these people’s worldviews, only to children within one’s “blood” family. Without space here to explain all their reasoning, I cannot relate all of Kathryn Goldfarb’s fascinating analysis of such statements, but can describe how such clear analysis of seeming “facts” illustrate this dissertation’s broad engagements with how people understand and build families in the contemporary moment.

Allison Alexy
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Virginia
alexy@virginia.edu

Sources

Ethnographic research in Japanese Children’s Homes, groups of advocates, and families considering adoption

Dissertation Information

University of Chicago. 2012. 266 pp. Primary Advisor: Judith Farquhar.

Image: Photograph by Kathryn Goldfarb, used with permission.

A review of Modern Japanese Political History Materials, National Diet Library, Tokyo and Special Collections Room, Waseda University Library, Tokyo.

The research I have been conducting in Tokyo for the past 2.5 years kept me busy in primarily two locations: the Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room in the National Diet Library at Tokyo (NDL) and the Special Collections Room in the Waseda University Library.

Ed. Note: Please also see Kelly Hammond’s “Reflections on 5 collections in Japan essential for China scholars” for discussions on the National Diet Library and the Waseda University Library.

Since I am affiliated with Waseda, I almost never encounter any difficulties or hurdles when trying to have access to or borrow any books. However, that is not the case in the National Diet Library. When you visit the NDL for the first time, prepare to be patient with all the bureaucracy that you have to get through. A young lady and a security guard practically pounce on all visitors and enquire if you have a library card. If the answer is not in the affirmative, they refer you to a neighbouring building where you need to register. Prepare to wait at least 20-30 minutes on busy days.

Once you have your NDL card, you still need to make sure to store most of your belongings in the lockers provided at the entrance. Be sure that you do not haul a lot of luggage with you as the lockers cannot fit anything bigger than a medium-size handbag. Also, the lockers are operated with 100 yen coins which are not available on site. （Although there are a very limited number of bigger lockers, those are operated with “medals” and the security guards seem irked when you ask them for one.）There are, however, transparent plastic bags for the items you wish to take with you. The list of prohibited articles is displayed in the locker area and they include cameras too. Thus, taking digital photographs of materials is not an option anywhere in the library.

I have mostly used the Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room on the 4th floor. Regardless of the fact that one has just received a library card, the attendant in the room will still ask for your card, read it digitally and ask you to fill out a paper form with your details to apply for another (paper) card that you need for that section of the NDL. On the form, they require a rather detailed description of what you are researching, so practice your kanji handwriting before you go. When you are done, you will again have to write your personal data, address and so forth on the paper library card handed to you. (“Issued” would not be a proper word here as you are practically issuing it to yourself, minus the official stamp.)

The list of materials in that room is not available online. You can look into the files on the shelf next to the counter and when you find something of interest, you have to file a written application form at the counter for permission to see them. You will need both your plastic and your paper library cards for the process. The materials will arrive from the archives in about 10-15 minutes and you can sit down in the room – no bigger than 20 square meters altogether – to read them. Beware of using your own pens or even pencils, you can only write with the sharp pencils provided by the Library. Should you need a copy of the list of materials, you can again file an application at the counter, upon which they will then direct you to a computer where you need to sign in with your plastic card, then rush with the same card to the nearby printer and place it in its reader. It will then print the application form which – yet again – you need to fill out by hand with more information on exactly what you want copied. (I wondered what was all the fuss with both the electronic application and the handwriting but in Japan the two tend to go hand-in-hand – deliciously impractical!) Then you take the entire package to the Copy Counter on the 2nd floor; the copying process usually takes 15-20 minutes for a 10-page request (15 yen per A4 page).

Please note that if you forgot your money in the entrance lockers, you cannot leave the library by touching your plastic card at the exit as the system will have you blocked. You need to leave all your belongings at the reception desk, get a “green number” which you can then again present upon re-entry. In this way they make sure that you do not run away with any materials that were meant for copying (and which do not have security strips or tags).

If you require a copy of the actual materials, the procedure is even more complicated. The pages are counted by “frame” which roughly refers to an A4 page. Anything beyond this is not doable (or so I have been told.) However, within this size limit all documents count as A4 even if they are not bigger than a tiny spec. Most pre-WWII materials can only be put on microfilm, but if you need paper prints from the microfilm, each page will set you back by 189 yen.

When you are done with your research in the room, you will have to voice your intention to leave the premises to the person at the desk. The staff will then return your paper library card and “release” you from the library lock-up by inserting the plastic card into the computer slot again. Without this procedure you might as well not make the trip to the exit as the system – yet again – will have you blocked.

With reference to the Waseda library I find that the ladies in the Special Collections Room section are really helpful, but they generally have no idea what materials there may be available in electronic format at various other portals. For example, several pre-WWII documents are accessible via the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (JACAR) website so you do not need to spend a hefty fee on the library copy service or even sit in the room to read the materials. Please note that the documents in the Special Collections Room can only be copied by library personnel and as such, cost much more than usual (40 yen per page).

The materials are searchable in the electronic database which is really convenient. However, sometimes the number of certain magazines and newspapers will be mixed up as I have found out during my research, so you will always have to double-check almost all the dates.

The opening hours for both library rooms are shorter compared to the rest of the establishment so check carefully before you visit.

Judit Erika Magyar
Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies
Waseda University
magyar.judit@fuji.waseda.jp

Image: National Diet Library in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan. Photograph by 663highland, Wikimedia Commons.

A review of Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko, by Angela Kristine Ahlgren.

Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko is an astute exploration of the interrelated discursive practices informing the performance and historical narrative of North American taiko.  Particularly as taiko expands beyond Japanese- and Asian-American communities, studies such as Angela Ahlgren’s dissertation are important for their recognition and investigation of the ever-expanding groups interested in the art form.  This work combines a deeply ethnographic approach with feminist, queer, and performance studies to present the ways taiko performers are multiply figured (race, sex, history, gender) as well as the diverse spectatorial perspectives of audiences.  Whatever tension there is in Ahlgren identifying as a white, female, queer Asian Americanist (as opposed to “being” Asian American) is used productively to examine how taiko affirms, challenges, and expands the Asian American subject position.  Her writing investigates the processes that “constitute and contest the category of Asian American performance” (p. 49), while tracking the shifting legibility (or illegibility) of an Asian American identity. Ahlgren highlights the multiple modes of engagement with taiko (for participants and audiences) that reveal common desires and, at its best, community building.

The writing is organized into an introduction and three chapters.  In addition to summarizing her ideas, the introduction includes a critical review of North American taiko history.  Each subsequent chapter concerns a specific group and subject matter.  Chapter 1 focuses on San Jose Taiko and the negotiation of an “authentic” Asian American identity; Chapter 2 addresses Minneapolis-based Mu Daiko, multiculturalism, and feminism; and Chapter 3 covers the performance of gender and queer spectatorship in Jodaiko and the work of Tiffany Tamaribuchi.

From the start, Angela Ahlgren positions herself as a non-Asian American taiko performer writing from “an Asian Americanist perspective… a fellow-traveler, both figuratively placing myself as witness and ally to Asian American communities, and literally riding alongside my group members on our way to countless festivals, school cafeterias, and concert halls to teach our audiences about Asian American performance” (p. 6).  She employs her “otherness” not as a simplistic essentialist bid for authenticity (i.e., Asian Americans are “others,” and I am too), but rather as a self-conscious, productive tension reminding her of the always incomplete nature of identity and the manifold influences upon it.

As a quick introduction to the art form, taiko is both the Japanese word for “drum,” as well as the name of a genre of “ensemble” drumming, also known as kumi daiko or wadaiko.  What distinguishes kumi daiko from traditional Japanese taiko drumming is a focus on the taiko as the primary instrument, as opposed to a background time keeper.  Most taiko ensembles tend to combine drums of various sizes and configurations (e.g., chu (“medium”) daiko and odaiko (“large” or “great” drum), and okedo taiko (lashed head drums) with other Japanese percussion (e.g., atarigane  or hand-held brass gong), chappa (small brass cymbals), and fue (flute).  Though taiko drums have been in Japan for centuries, kumi daiko began in 1951 with Daihachi Oguchi (1924-2008) and garnered international attention in the 70s and 80s through groups such as Ondekoza and Kodo.  The first three American taiko ensembles were the San Francisco Taiko Dojo (1968), founded by Seiichi Tanaka (1943- ), Kinnara Taiko (1969) in Los Angeles, and the San Jose Taiko Group (1973).  North American taiko initially developed in Japanese American and Japanese Canadian communities particularly among the younger Sansei, or third generation, many of whom were searching for ways to connect with their Japanese ancestry.  It has since spread beyond Japanese- and Asian-American communities, with particularly strong growth on college campuses.

Alhgren’s introduction clearly locates North American taiko within Asian America, and it is the Asian American movement that offers a context for understanding American and Canadian taiko practices.  This is noteworthy because it invokes a particular narrative about taiko as both political and artistic.  It is a narrative that shifts focus away from figures such as Seiichi Tanaka (founder of the San Francisco Taiko Dojo – SFTD – and widely recognized as the grandfather of American taiko), even while recognizing their immense contribution.  With this in mind, Ahlgren analyzes the construction of the mythos surrounding Seiichi Tanaka and the SFTD, one that venerates him as the archetype of Japanese authenticity in American taiko.  She offers an equally critical eye to the origin stories of Kinnara Taiko.  In the end, however, her goal is not to contest the significance of these groups in North American taiko’s development.  Rather, she uses her analysis to shift attention away from these oft-told and adulatory narratives to taiko’s more political elements.

The introduction positions taiko as a “multivalent performance form embraced by Japanese American audiences as a Japanese art form, and at the same time was a site of innovation that broke pervasive stereotypes of Japanese people as quiet and weak” (pp. 23-4, emphasis in original).   This is a common account of taiko as “authentically” Japanese, political, powerful, and agentic.  Using this as a starting point, Ahlgren moves beyond an analysis that assumes a direct connection between representation and political power.  While recognizing taiko’s roots as an “Asian American performance,” Ahlgren intentionally disrupts the fixity of this definition by attempting to locate “specific moments when taiko performances tug at the edges of that category, shaping it, questioning it, expanding it, and in general exposing the instability of such identity markers” (p. 37).  Citing Judith Hamera, Ahlgren’s work encompasses an attention not only to race but also to its interconnectivity with the discourses of gender, sexuality, class, and culture in understanding taiko as Asian American performance.

Orientalist imagery plagues perhaps every North American taiko ensemble.  Promoters might advertise taiko concerts as the “sounds of the Far East” even if the performing group is from Portland or New York.  And yet, taiko does originate from Japan, and many American and Canadian taiko performers look to Japan as the fount of “authentic” taiko.  For San Jose Taiko, the tension between these poles leads to the creation of “their own authentic practice” (p. 70), and this is the subject of Chapter 1.  Ahlgren explores not the category of authenticity, but the process by which an authenticity is constructed between performers and audience members.  Pointing to Joni L. Jones’ work, Ahlgren notes that authenticity is “something one does rather than something one is” (p. 68), and it is in performance that one can embody and forge a “new authenticity” in conjunction with audience members’ reactions or participation.  For San Jose Taiko, this meant creating a uniquely Asian American taiko.  Their piece “Ei Ja Nai Ka?” (Isn’t it good?) combines dance and music in a re-visioning of early Japanese immigrants as part and parcel of the American experience and American agricultural and industrial labor.  The choreography stylistically resembles the physical labor of farmers and people working on the railroad, and this is explained to audiences.  Depending on the venue, San Jose Taiko performers will invite audience members to dance along, thereby working collaboratively to re-envision and embody an Asian American identity.  These practices, in addition to school outreach and talking to audiences after a show, are how “SJT navigates as an Asian American, Japanese American, and multi-ethnic performance ensemble in the U.S.” (p. 103).

In Chapter 2, though Ahlgren critiques the missteps and misunderstandings that can arise from well-intentioned multiculturalist programs, she still identifies the possibility for positive effects in these contexts.  A concern for members of Mu Daiko, similar to SJT above, is that of being placed in multicultural celebratory situations where they are read as the “exotic other,” available for the Orientalist gaze and denuded of a history of protest, violence, and exclusion.  However, in that same show might be a Korean adoptee (maybe the only Asian in her class) who is encouraged by seeing another Korean adoptee perform this powerful music.  So, while an Orientalist misreading may arise, “the performance spaces also encourage multiple gazes and improvisatory responses to a range of spectators. Outreach audiences are never homogenous, and performers’ affective responses serve as evidence that outreach performance both is and is more than multicultural exchange” (p. 124).  It is, of course, obvious that audiences are heterogeneous.  Nevertheless, Ahlgren’s insight provides an important balance to scholarship that focuses too heavily on a simplistic one- or two-way quarrel between Orientalist and “Other” (notably my own work, Paul Jong-Chul Yoon, “’She’s Really Become Japanese Now!’: Taiko Drumming and Asian American Identifications.” American Music 19, 2001, pp. 417-438).

Women have a significant presence in North American taiko, and the impact of this fact has been a focus of past taiko scholarship (e.g., Deborah Wong, Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York and London: Routledge, 2004).  Part of Chapter 2 is also devoted to detailing the women of Mu Daiko who compose, perform, and teach taiko across racial boundaries.  These powerful performances complicate comfortable notions of femininity.  Rather than seeing a focus on women as an exclusionary move, Ahlgren explains how an all-female space within taiko can foster communitas.  This topic is more fully explored in Chapter 3, where Ahlgren considers the “homo-geneity” of the self-described queer Asian women members of the taiko group Jodaiko.  The ironic use of the term emphasizes their unity in sexual identity and plays on the stereotypes of Asian homogeneity.  Ahlgren states, “For Jodaiko — organized officially around gender, but unofficially around sexuality — ‘homo-geneity’ signals the political force of unity and strength, a type of ‘queer belonging,’ rather than the erasure of difference the term usually indicates” (p. 173).

The third and final chapter also locates “‘an erotics of taiko’ that subverts the Orientalist gaze, both through imagining alternative spectatorial positions and through analyzing a kinesthetic spectatorship that disrupts the one-way, objectifying gaze” (p. 182; and Deborah Wong, Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York and London: Routledge, 2004, p. 219).  As in Chapter 2, Ahlgren disrupts the Orientalist gaze, putting in its place the possibility of a positive, collective response to queer performance.  Such an interpretation does not necessitate an “all-queer” audience.  Rather, employing Jill Dolan’s work in theater, Ahlgren argues that an audience that allows for the possibility of queer performance might “be pulled into comfortable, more intimate proximity to each other” (Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, p. 31) through engagement with the body in performance.  Sonically, in the taiko context, it is the somatically enveloping sound that invites audience participation and desire.  Visually, it is the solo drummer, in this case Tiffany Tamaribuchi, whose “butchness” defies feminine stereotypes.  “Whether or not the audience members are queer, they move along with Tamaribuchi in this moment, move along with a woman whose body refuses normal femininity, in order to move along with each other in their seats” (p. 192).  Such an interpretation opens taiko to multiple explanatory possibilities beyond the Orientalist framework and into a space of myriad perspectives in community.

Using theories from theater, queer, feminist, and performance scholarship, Angela Ahlgren unveils new possibilities for politics, sexuality, and participation not only within taiko performance, but for the performative context generally.  Her work is important in as much as it opens taiko to the possibility of a utopic politics of inclusion and community rather than an oppositional one.  Certainly, this is a significant expansion of taiko scholarship.

Paul J. Yoon
Department of Music
University of Richmond
yooncho@comcast.net

Sources

Participant observation
Interviews conducted by author
Hirasaki National Resource Center, Japanese American National Museum
Interviews (conducted by Sojin Kim) for Big Drum: Taiko in the United States

Dissertation Information

University of Texas, Austin.  2011.  220 pp.  Primary Advisors: Jill Dolan and Charlotte Canning.

Image: Photograph by Angela Ahlgren.

A review of Another Tale of the Heike: An Examination of the Engyōbon Heike monogatari, by Amy Christine Franks.

Amy Franks’s meticulously researched and persuasively written dissertation is a study of the Engyōbon, a lesser-known but extremely important variant of the Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike, 13th century). Copied from a manuscript dated 1309 (the second year of the Engyō era), the Engyōbon Heike monogatari is widely regarded as the oldest existing Heike text. The manuscript was produced at Negoroji, a complex of Buddhist temples on Mt. Kōya, headquarters of the Shingon school, and was most likely used as an aid in Buddhist preaching (p. 4).

Franks’s dissertation fills a lacuna in providing the first English-language study of the Engyōbon text, examining its characteristics, the strategies it employs, and how it compares to the shorter, better-known Kakuichi variant, the version of Heike monogatari dictated in 1371 that in modern times has come to be referred to as a sort of canonic text. Franks also examines several Engyōbon sections, providing both an English translation of each section and the original Japanese text corresponding to key passages. In this way, she opens a window onto the very core of the Engyōbon. The reader has a chance to appreciate its amazing richness, while enjoying Franks’s to-the-point observations and clever insights.

Chapter 1 introduces the Engyōbon Heike monogatari and provides a review of existing work on this important text. Of particular interest is Franks’s discussion of the dichotomy between “oral” and “read” variants, a distinction that in the case of The Tale of the Heike should by no means be considered clear-cut. The Engyōbon, a text that was most likely read, is a great example of the overlapping of the two traditions, as it exhibits some of the features of oral formulaic poetry that we associate with oral variants such as Kakuichibon.

Unlike the polished, smooth-running, streamlined Kakuichibon, the Engyōbon is characterized by its rich, expansive nature and tendency to incorporate documents, tangential stories, local legends, poetry, and so forth. The lack of narrative unity resulting from the constant accumulation of these heterogeneous materials can be a challenge for the modern reader, and partly explains the lesser popularity of the Engyōbon. However, Franks argues that accumulation and digression should not be seen as “intellectual lassitude or carelessness” (p. 10), but as an efficient way to store and preserve knowledge in ways that made complete sense to medieval narrators and audiences. Drawing on French philologist Bernard Cerquiglini’s work on variance, Franks emphasizes that the Engyōbon should be seen as a veritable medieval literary work, best understood as the product of variable, continual rewriting, rather than the work of an individual author.

Having established the nature of the Engyōbon variant and elucidated its main characteristics, Franks proceeds to explore sections of this long literary work. The second chapter focuses on war narratives related to the battle at Uji Bridge and the battle of Ichinotani, both of which took place in 1184. Through careful analysis of the selected texts, Franks shows, among other things, that instances of idealization of warriors are relatively few in the Engyōbon, especially as compared to the Kakuichibon variant. Discrepancies among texts should remind us that, although based on a historical event (the Genpei War), the Heike monogatari, regardless of variant, inevitably belongs to the world of fiction. Franks writes: “The intricacy of its details, the psychological examinations of its characters; the descriptions of their thoughts, motives, and emotions—these features all signal that it is a work we would consider as primarily literary and fictional” (p. 40). For this reason, Franks argues, the stories narrated in Heike monogatari should not be taken at face value or used as “proof texts” of warrior behavior and samurai ethics. The war narratives examined in this chapter display another of the Engyōbon’s striking characteristics: a tendency to explain the cause-and-effect nature of reality, and to attach a Buddhist moral to most of the stories.

The third chapter examines the famous narrative recounting the events that led to the priest Mongaku’s decision to take Buddhist vows. The story, derived from a Chinese tale (also included in the Engyōbon), is an excellent example of how the Engyōbon transforms historical figures into literary characters by making use of previously existing legends from various traditions. The story of Moritō (Mongaku’s name as a layman) and the woman known in other sources as Kesa gozen, who sacrifices her life to save that of her husband, shows how the Engyōbon is capable of a higher level of psychological nuance. If in Genpei jōsuiki and the Nagatobon (the narrative does not exist in the Kakuichibon) Moritō is just a hostage taker, extortionist, and rapist, in the Engyōbon he is closer to a Greek tragic hero, a tormented soul who waits for three years before letting his passions overtake him.

The fourth chapter addresses one of the most important narratives of Heike monogatari, that of Kenreimon’in, mother of the child emperor Antoku and last Taira survivor, the woman who is left to make sense of the dramatic events of the Genpei War and pass them on to future generations. Similarly to the battle narratives and Mongaku’s story examined in previous chapters, Kenreimon’in’s section is longer and more detailed than the corresponding one in the Kakuichibon. This is particularly true for the talk of the Six Paths, in which the woman frames her experience of the war as a journey through the rokudō, the six states of Buddhist existence. Kenreimon’in’s story is also more heavily Buddhist, and makes reference to an enormous number of works, both religious and secular (an abbreviated list of these is given on p. 262).

Noticing the contrasting treatment of facts in different variants, Franks returns to the subject of fiction and history. She points out how the Engyōbon authors are not interested in presenting a single, authorized history of the Genpei conflict. In a medieval context, Franks argues, a

“variant’s legitimacy, or value, cannot come from any claims to historical and objective truth. Its authority lies elsewhere, in its comprehensiveness, its inclusiveness, its stockpiling of information and associations. In this way, the Engyōbon…acknowledges and values the multiple voices and views of history and the past, it acknowledges the debt that narratives owe to other narratives, and it eschews the idea of singular and unique experience” (p. 231).

Examining the far-from-idealized image of Kenreimon’in presented by the Engyōbon, Franks challenges the widespread assumption that her story (and Heike monogatari in general) must have necessarily served the purpose of pacifying the spirits of the dead. It is quite possible that the Kakuichibon had that placatory goal, but we should by no means attribute the same function to all variants, and certainly not to the Engyōbon Heike monogatari.

With its rigorous, in-depth analysis of the text, savvy use of Japanese secondary literature, and insightful observations, Amy Franks’s dissertation accurately portrays the amazing qualities of the Engyōbon Heike monogatari and lays a solid foundation for future scholarship on this variant.

Roberta Strippoli
Assistant Professor
Department of Asian and Asian American Studies
Binghamton University, SUNY
rstrippo@binghamton.edu

Primary Sources

Engyōbon Heike monogatari
Kakuichibon Heike monogatari
Genpei jōsuiki
Nagatobon Heike monogatari

Dissertation Information

Yale University. 2009. 315 pp. Primary Advisor: Edward Kamens.

Image: Poster from the 1953 film Jigokumon (“Gate of Hell” or “La puerta del infierno”).

A review of the Harvard Yenching Library Rare Books Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA.

The Harvard-Yenching Library holds more than 1.3 million volumes. This review won’t bore readers with the details of each collection, which are introduced on the library’s website. Instead, my aim is to convince the reader to consider a visit to the library and its world-class rare book collection. Although most of the library’s holdings are listed in fully searchable catalogs, there are many discoveries awaiting even cursory exploration. Our persisting ignorance of the Harvard-Yenching collection is best expressed anecdotally. I will briefly relate two tales of discovery enabled by the library’s eccentric collections before introducing relevant resources for visitors.

On February 27, Min Jung a Harvard Yenching fellow and professor of Korean literature at Hanyang University delivered a fascinating talk entitled, “Cultural Exchanges between Korean and Chinese Literati in the 18th and 19th Centuries: The Fujitsuka Chikashi (1879-1948) Collection in the Harvard-Yenching Library.” Dr. Min Jung arrived at Harvard with a different project, but he quickly discovered that the library had unintentionally bought a large part of the “lost” private collection of the famous Sinologist Fujitsuka Chikashi (1879-1948) during the 1950s. Fujitsuka, a specialist in Sino-Korean-Japanese exchange, bought over 10,000 books in Liulichang in the early 20th century. Although most of his collection burned during the allied bombings of Tokyo, his home collection (his most valued books) survived and was gradually auctioned off after his death.

Until Dr Min Jung’s visit to Harvard, the location of most of his collection remained a mystery. Min Jung began to realize the Yenching held a significant portion of his books when he recognized Fujitsuka’s seal on the inside of a book. Intrigued, he began to identify a significant number of Fujitsuka’s books. He discovered important items scattered through the stacks, the depository, and the rare book room. The most astonishing moment of his talk occurred when he showed us an image of a piece of calligraphy that fell out of a book from the depository. The calligraphy was written by a famous eighteenth century Korean scholar, and Min Jung stated, “This was in the depository. This scrap of paper is worth tens of thousands of dollars in Korea.”

My experiences in the rare book collection have been similarly illuminating. Recently, I discovered that a text ambiguously labeled “Manchu exercise book” was actually a section of Qiying’s previously unknown bilingual Manchu-Chinese diary. Moreover, books are often loaded with the paraphernalia of a book historian’s dreams: marginalia, notes, and unexpected calligraphic treasures. If you are still in doubt, please take a look at this entry I wrote after the Take Note conference held at Harvard last fall. To see more collection highlights presented at that conference you can also check out Kuniko McVey’s online exhibit from the Japanese collection.

If the Harvard-Yenching hold materials useful for your research, there are a few steps you should take before coming to Harvard. First, you should explore the online library catalogs. The library system currently maintains two such catalogs, HOLLIS and HOLLIS Classic. HOLLIS does not support searching in Asian scripts. In other words, you can search by means of romanization systems. HOLLIS Classic (hollisclassic.harvard.edu), which does support Asian script searching, is more useful. Note also that, once you do a few searches, you’ll find that the Harvard-Yenching has already digitized a large number of Asian language rare books, which are available for free through either Google Books or the library. The expanded search feature will allow you to better perform your search and to help you isolate materials in our rare book collection. Also useful are the numerous printed catalogs for the library’s rare book collection. These have the great benefit of holistic organization, allowing you to find materials that may have otherwise been overlooked. Finally, before your visit I recommend making contact with our research librarians. The materials you’d like to see may be unavailable due to digitization. The wonderful library staff will be able to let you know what collections are unavailable and to offer other assistance.

Getting to the library is fairly easy, and there are travel grants available for eligible scholars. While the Yenching is open to anyone holding a university ID (from any university), access to the rare book collection is more restricted. For access to any of the special collections at Harvard, you must register with the university and create a Special Collections Request account. After your account has been created, you’re ready for rare books. Request the materials you would like to see through the online system. You can make requests any time before going to the reading room. The reading room is located on the third floor of the Harvard-Yenching library. It is open from 9:30 am to 12:00 pm and reopens 1:30 pm to 4:00 pm, Monday through Friday. Unfortunately, the library seems to have meetings that regularly conflict with the afternoon opening hours, so don’t be surprised if you lose an afternoon or two. There are no bags allowed in the reading room. You can leave your bag in the rare books office.

Beyond the rare book room, the library has much more to offer. The official library website has information on digital collections as well as area specific research guides.

Devin Fitzgerald
PhD Candidate
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University
devinfitz@gmail.com

Image: Qing Han Hua Tiao 淸漢話條 (undated MS), and the Sanhe Bianlan 三合便览 (Manchu-Mongolian-Chinese Dictionary) published in 1792. Photograph by Devin Fitzgerald.

Important Note: Dissertation Reviews, its members, and affiliates assume no responsibility for the accuracy of this material. Access, location, times, and other data are subject to change, and readers assume all responsibility for making direct contact with the institutions in question and double-checking all information before any visit. If you discover errors in this description, or changes to the policies or relevant information in one of the sites featured on “Fresh from the Archives,” please contact us at archives@dissertationreviews.org

A review of Performing Embodied Histories: Colonialism, Gender, and Okinawa in Modern Japan, by Valerie Holshouser Barske. 

Divided into six chapters with an Epilogue and Appendix, Valerie Barske’s dissertation examines Okinawa’s postwar history, identity formation, and the politicization of culture and gender through the lens of Okinawan performance culture.

Providing a comprehensive historiography of both Japanese and English secondary sources, the first chapter emphasizes the methodological and theoretical dispositions of the dissertation. A hybridization of cultural history and historical anthropology, the dissertation’s post-colonial analytical framework challenges several orthodoxies. First, by combining archival research with embedded ethnography, where the researcher becomes an active participant, Barske asserts that a more nuanced understanding of Okinawa’s postwar social movements emerges. Taking issue with “objective” accounts based solely on archival research and an emphasis on a top-down political narrative, this dissertation offers a greater sense of agency and an improved understanding of Okinawan resistance and ethnic identity in all their deliberate subjectivity. Second, this approach highlights women’s central role in the anti-base movement and in promoting Okinawa’s pacifist message. Finally, with its “intellectual lineage” firmly rooted in post-colonial studies, the analysis of Okinawan performing arts uses a “semasiological framework for analyzing human movements and action sign systems” (p. 55) to show the extent of political protest and ethnic nationalism embedded in Okinawan cultural performances.

The second chapter covers Okinawa’s early modern and modern history, emphasizing Okinawa’s encounters with Japanese imperialism and challenging the orthodox view that Okinawa has always been an integral part of Japan. Analyzing Ryukyuan performance culture during Japan’s 1872-1945 period of rule, Barske shows how mainland authorities either censored or fully banned traditional performance because they were deemed too foreign and seditious. Japanese authorities imposed an aggressive assimilation program, an effort that found support among many Okinawan elite who equated assimilation with modernity. Despite Okinawans’ efforts to assimilate, Japan continued to view Okinawa as a primitive Other, as seen especially in the infamous 1902 Osaka exhibit depicting Okinawans in a racial hierarchy of Japanese colonial subjects. Yet Barske also highlights Japan’s contradictory understandings of Okinawa with analysis of ethnographers such as Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) who viewed Okinawa in a more positive fashion and argued for preserving Okinawa’s heritage. Such views represented a form of Japanese Orientalism where Okinawa was depicted nostalgically as a culture untainted by modernity.

The theme of colonization continues in Chapter 3 with examinations of how the US military replaced seventy years of Japanese rule by imposing a military occupation until 1972. While prewar Japanese rule tried to eradicate traditional performance, US officials pursued a policy of nation-building that promoted Ryukyuan performing arts, history, and heritage. American altruism, however, was not the motive for such Ryukyuanization, as military officials hoped to maintain control over the islands by promoting an identity gap with mainland Japan. To illustrate US colonial behavior, the chapter focuses on the 1953 film, Teahouse of the August Moon, which epitomized the Orientalist discourse found in US policies. Barkse argues that the film, based on a novel written by a US military officer stationed in Okinawa, represented Okinawans as the primitive and lazy Other in need of civilizing. The film’s racist undertones also revealed how the US feminized Okinawa, as the prominent role of a geisha reinforced existing Western stereotypes of an exotic and erotic Orient. The chapter concludes that Teahouse “is a collaborative effort between American and Japanese to produce a mocking, often degrading portrayal of Okinawans, a people colonized by both the US and Japan” (p. 166).

Switching from the theme of imperialism, Chapter 4 focuses on Okinawan agency during the US occupation. From the onset of the occupation, Okinawans used their performing arts as a means to resist military rule, to assert an anti-war sentiment, and to promote ethnic solidarity. Traditional dance in particular served as “cultural tools” to “grapple with past and present colonial realities” (p. 184). While the San Francisco Peace Treaty ended the occupation of Japan, the same treaty, with Japan’s support, allowed the US military to control Okinawa indefinitely. Okinawans’ frustrations over the US military takeover of Okinawan land for bases, the occupation’s inherent authoritarianism, and the separation from Japan led to massive resistance during the 1950s with calls for immediate reversion to Japan and just payment for land acquisition. Okinawan performing artists used their skills to add their voices in protest. A 1956 Eisa (a form of traditional Okinawan line dancing) competition held in Koza, Okinawa’s largest military camp town, became a site of contestation against US rule as the “intensification of the dancing… may be understood as an embodied engagement with the political realities of the Occupation in which many young Okinawans were disempowered and emasculated”  (p. 213). In addition, Okinawan artists performed acts that showed the innate cultural link between the Ryukyus and Japan, which, for the Reversion Movement, provided evidence of the occupation’s illegitimacy.

The final two chapters reflect the embedded and activist ethnography that delineates this scholarship from traditional archive-only research. Chapter 5 covers Kodama Kiyoko, an Okinawan performing artist, who consciously used culture and the performing arts to advocate a variety of political causes. After the war, Kodama founded the Okinawa Performing Arts Preservation Society. Performing traditional Okinawan dance in mainland Japan, Kodama and her fellow artists reminded audiences that they were “redefining traditional culture and cultural heritage in the reconstruction of postwar Japan” (p. 232). More importantly, they used culture as a potent political platform as the “preservation society reaffirmed Okinawa as part of Japan” (p. 231) in solidarity with the Okinawa reversion movement. While Kodama wanted to highlight Okinawa’s distinctive culture, she maintained that Okinawa’s folk traditions showed how “we are all Japanese, and all Japanese are the same” (p. 242). After Okinawa’s reversion, Kodama used performance to promote the idea that Okinawans, because of their horrific experience with war and US military occupation, were in a unique position to advocate for peace.

The final chapter brings Okinawa’s performance culture and social movements up to the present with an in-depth account of personal contacts with activist Ginoza Eiko and the Okinawa Women’s Association. Ginoza, a high school teacher, and other women activists use performance to promote a pacifist ideology and to critique the military base problem. After the rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by three US military personnel in 1995, Okinawa’s third wave of demonstrations confronted not only the military base industrial complex on Okinawa, but Tokyo’s complicity in maintaining this status quo for over fifty years. Ginoza and other women activists saw Okinawa’s performance culture as an effective means to promote an acute Okinawan identity, to reify Okinawa’s claim of possessing an intrinsic pacifist ethos, and to elevate women’s roles in the anti-base movement. The chapter ends with Ginoza’s 2005 group performance in New York to advocate for global peace during a time of US war preparation for the invasion of Iraq.

This dissertation is a welcome addition to the recent historiography on Okinawa, especially those works by Masamichi Inoue, Miyume Tanji, and Linda Isako Angst that combine ethnographic and historical analysis. All of these works have provided a much needed bottom-up and gendered perspective of Okinawa’s troubled modern experience.

David Tobaru Obermiller
History Department & Japanese Studies Program
Gustavus Adolphus College
dobermil@gustavus.edu

Primary Sources

Interviews with Ginoza Eiko and Kodama Kiyoko
Edward Freimuth Collection, Okinawa Prefectural Archives, Haebaru, Okinawa
George H. Kerr Collection, Okinawa Prefectural Archives, Haebaru, Okinawa
Nagako Hateruma, Motofumi Hattori, and Harumi Morishita, Movement Dictionary of Okinawan Dance as a Digital Database of Asia-Pacific Dance Research (2001).

Dissertation Information

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2009. 357 pp. Primary Advisor: Karen L. Kelsky.

Image: Esai troupe. Photograph by Kasanui, Wikimedia Commons.

A review of The Boundaries of the Interesting: Itineraries, Guidebooks, and Travel in Imperial Japan, by Kate L. McDonald.

In a beautifully written dissertation, Kate McDonald tells a story of Japanese colonial tourism in the aftermath of World War I. Interestingly, it turns out that it is a story less about defining colonized populations (as was the case with the British and French) and more about shaping perceptions of the colonized place. Taking for granted that colonial administrations used tourism for political purposes, McDonald focuses on how Japanese travelers and colonial residents used itineraries and sights to argue for a specific vision of Japan’s political, historical, and cultural boundaries. In so doing, she does not simply argue that place has politics, but shows how those politics varied in different parts of the empire and how this landscape changed over the first half of the twentieth century.

The dissertation starts with the establishment of the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR) in 1907 and its efforts to solidify its claims over Manchuria. This struggle took place, in part, in the context of Japan’s campaign, championed by Gotô Shimpei, to create “a geography of transportation in which Japan occupied the center position” (p. 34). In practice, this meant negotiating for Japan to be included in the newly established “Around the Eastern Hemisphere” and “Around the World” tickets, both of which could have easily bypassed Japan via Vladivostok or Shanghai. The SMR and the Japan Tourist Bureau (JTB) achieved this by coordinating train and ferry schedules, negotiating prices, and implementing “through passage” – a ticketing system that allowed the use of a single ticket for travel on lines owned by different companies. As McDonald notes, the irony here is that a story about thousands of metropolitan tourists discovering the colonies started, in fact, with Japanese bureaucrats’ desires to bring foreign tourists to (or at least through) Japan.

Based on an analysis of tourist guidebooks, as well as travel magazines, diaries, and other accounts, Chapters 2 through 5 examine the changing representations of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria in tourist literature. They show tourism to be an eminent arena for debates over inclusion, exclusion, racism, and the success or failure of the colonial project. Tourism also served as a mirror reflecting how that project changed, most notably in Korea (Chapters 3 and 4) and Taiwan (Chapter 5).

Chapter 2 deals with Manchuria, showing that emphasis in travel literature – before and after 1931– was fixed on Japanese efforts to industrialize and develop the territory. A fascinating map that accompanies this chapter makes it clear that what ought to be seen in Manchuria consisted mostly of wharves, factories, and mines. As such, tourism was to showcase the strength and promise of Japanese management in action. Chapters 3 and 4, in contrast, show that the framing of must-see sights in Korea changed along with the political climate on the peninsula. Chapter 3 reveals that in the 1910s, traveling in Korea was about seeing Japan in Korea or the modern civilization Japanese had brought in contrast to the uncivilized people who lived there. But as the political situation evolved in the 1920s, it became increasingly difficult to project a sense that Korea was on an inexorable march toward becoming Japan. Thus, in guidebooks and travel literature from the 1930s, the focus shifted to the exotic beauty and timeless customs of Koreans (Chapter 4). In the case of Taiwan, Japanese tourist literature at first divided the island into two places: the out-of-reach Savage Territory and the (real) Taiwan. There too, as the political situation changed, so did the tourist guidebooks. As the relationship between the colonial government and the “Savage Border” turned from oppositional to hierarchical, Japanese tourists were able to get a closer look at the “outside.” Consequently, guidebooks naturalized difference. Savages became Takasagozoku, or the tribal peoples of Taiwan, and “tamed” villages became prime tourist attractions.

The dissertation concludes with an epilogue that transcends World War II by briefly sketching the transformation of Japan from “the center of the Pacific” to a “peaceful Japan.” Now, the SMR is a vestige of the past, and the main role has been assumed by Japan Airlines (JAL), the country’s first postwar civil air carrier. McDonald reminds us that occupation authorities initially showed little interest in reviving Japan’s tourism industry, but eventually ended up championing it. Because they were caught between the need to cut Japanese industrial potential in half to diminish Japan’s military capacity and the need to boost the economy, the tourism industry offered a possible solution.

The principal originality of McDonald’s work lies in how it looks at Japanese colonial tourism as a whole. Certain aspects of her story have been subject to prior scrutiny, notably by Sonia Ryang and Gao Yuan, but previous studies have often offered compartmentalized narratives of Japanese tourism in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, as if they had a separate existence. After reading this dissertation, it becomes hard to make an argument for studying Japanese tourism in Manchuria (man) separately from that in Korea (sen). McDonald forcefully and elegantly shows that in the experience of Japanese travelers, the two hardly ever existed in isolation; they were coupled as a part of a single man-sen itinerary and connected symbolically and physically by the iconic bridge over the Yalu River. The iron bridge that now lies in ruins was not simply a technical feat, but also a reflection of the unity of the two territories despite their very different legal statuses and administrative structures. Such unity was a key element in building a “new Japan” as a unified, if diverse, geopolitical body.

McDonald’s dissertation is a carefully researched, in-depth study of Japanese colonial tourism which changes its readers mental map of the empire, in part, by making good use of cartographic tools that help the reader navigate not only the physical geography, but also its trilingual toponymy. McDonald is passionate about trains, but readers with an interest in the history of technology will appreciate how she does justice to the transportation culture as a whole, giving thoughtful play to the different norimono that tourists used along the way. Making a strong case for the necessity of looking at Japan’s colonial spaces together as a whole, this dissertation is poised to become an influential study in our field. In shifting the focus away from the politics of the representation of colonized peoples to the politics of the representation of colonized places, McDonald also contributes to the emerging field of tourism studies. This study puts Japan on the map of global colonial travel and engages with the emerging literature on the topic that is as global as the practice was at the time. Thus, McDonald succeeds in taking a much-needed step in bringing writing on the modern history of Japan into the larger intellectual debates of our day.

Aleksandra Majstorac-Kobiljski
D. Kim Postdoctoral Fellow
Needham Research Institute, Cambridge UK
amkaero@gmail.com

Primary Sources

Japan Travel Bureau Library, Tokyo, Japan
National Archives and Records Administration. Records of the General Headquarters Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ SCAP). RG 331. National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan
Tourist guidebooks from South Manchuria Railway Company, Chôsen Government Railways, Taiwan Government Railways, and Japanese Government Railways
Magazines such as Tabi; Chôsen oyobi Manshû; Heigen; and Taiwan gahô

Dissertation Information

University of California, San Diego. 2011. 255 pp. Primary Advisors: Tak Fujitani and Stefan Tanaka.

Image: “Newly built vessel Takasago Maru in service from Japan to Taiwan” (Boston Public Library, Prints Department)

A review of Eiko and Koma: Choreographing Spaces Apart in Asian America by Rosemary Candelario.

Rosemary Candelario’s dissertation, Eiko and Koma: Choreographing Spaces Apart in Asian America, considers the impact of the duo’s work on issues of identity, nationality, diaspora, and intercultural collaboration. The US-based Japanese artists have received critical acclaim (including two “Bessies,” Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellowships) for their choreography and are renowned for their Delicious Movement technique, a name which Candelario states heightens its sensory nature. In her dissertation, Rosemary Candelario employs interviews, archival research, and choreographic analysis to an impressive 24 stage, site, and video dances, dialoguing with dance studies, Asian American studies, Japanese Studies, and theories of space.

Critical to her argument is the term spaces apart, “spaces generated by Eiko and Koma’s choreography characterized by the conjunction of dancing bodies, sites, and technologies, where alternatives may be rehearsed” (p. 4). Drawing from geography, she offers an imaginary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, New York City, Naked Island, and Phnom Penh in relation to particular works in Eiko and Koma’s repertoire.

Mourning: “She lets out a curdling scream, which freezes them both in place – she in her death pose and he in shock” (p. 28).

The first chapter examines the duo’s corporeal engagement with mourning in connection to their cultural awareness of World War II and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, Eiko wrote her Master’s thesis on atomic bomb literature and now teaches an interdisciplinary college course entitled, “Delicious Movement for Forgetting, Remembering and Uncovering” (first at UCLA in 2006, and annually at Wesleyan University since 2007). Through beautifully written descriptions of Mourning (2007), Candelario elucidates a discussion of Eiko and Koma’s mourning as ongoing and public. According to the author, the pair physicalizes violence without cause and resolution; they blur the lines of victim and aggressor, just as Japan experienced in World War II. In conversation with perspectives on melancholia in addition to the rhetoric surrounding the peace parks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Candelario calls for the complex, prolonged mourning expressed by Eiko and Koma in many of their choreographic works. (Several more are described in the chapter.)

Offering: “The dirt still clinging to their skin is the only visible evidence of the grave from which they came” (p. 87).

Candelario’s second chapter illustrates Offering (2002), a site-work initially performed with a coffin-like set piece in New York City public parks one year after 9/11. Throughout the performance, three dancers enact images of death, burial, and survival by interacting with soil. Lakshmi Aysola, a west coast performer, joined Eiko and Koma; Candelario theorizes that Aysola’s participation in the performance links South Asian bodies to Eiko and Koma’s racially marked bodies and to the city, thereby protesting post-9/11 (and historical) racial profiling. This chapter speaks of transforming mourning in the face of American imperialism. Utilizing psychoanalysis and Asian American studies scholarship, Candelario posits that Offering is an act of reparation. To support this goal, she looks into public perception of the World Trade Center as a means for speaking about the co-existence of the global and local. In the case of Eiko and Koma, “The spatializing work of these dances opens up spaces that are transnational yet local and intimate where performers and audience members alike may work through these histories” (p. 99).

The chapter also addresses Event Fission, in which Eiko and Koma move with a white flag on a landfill site that, in fact, resulted from the construction of the World Trade Center, and Land, a collaboration with Native American musician Robert Mirabal. The author points out that the three met in New Mexico and traveled to Hiroshima, from nuclear test site to nuclear bombsite, recognizing the need for reparative acts for both Native Americans and Japanese Americans.

River: “Time does not drag, but is rather suspended, as she and the water seem to negotiate her presence there ” (p. 117).

Candelario views River (1995) as “dancing with” water, physically partnering it and playing with its reflections. The third chapter wonders at the relationship between space, technology, nature, and body in River and several other works by Eiko and Koma. The dissertation eloquently describes viewing from the edge of the water – a screen held by Koma, a video of two people dancing, Koma and the screen washing away, and Eiko in water up to her armpits. Candelario finds the piece intervenes in a technology/nature binary by relating it to the 1960 feature film, The Naked Island. She explores the notion of choreographic interface, a meeting of components that are inherently constructed and potentially connected. She suggests multiple relationships between technology and nature – locating embodied nature, constructed “nature,” and bodies both enabled and deconstructed via technology – represented in the repertoire of Eiko and Koma.

Cambodian Stories:  “The young painters are no longer specific entities with particular dreams and goals but indeterminate, bodies searching and yearning with outstretched arms and open chests” (p. 163).

The fourth chapter of this dissertation makes a strong case for conceiving Cambodian Stories (2006) as an intercultural alliance, rather than collaboration, as it disrupts existing power hierarchies. (Intercultural collaborations have often been critiqued for cultural misappropriation and misunderstanding.)  This alliance is between Eiko and Koma and Cambodian painters of the Reyum Painting Collective. Candelario examines the movement vocabulary, gender roles, and the role of the paintings in Cambodian Stories in order to explain that the interdisciplinarity of the performance exemplifies the intercultural relationship on stage. Moreover, all performers seemed invested in a similar goal of  “a representation of Cambodia that moves beyond fixed historical perceptions or images of disaster to a complex portrayal of what it means to be a young person in that country today” (p. 178). The author stresses the importance of the process of collaboration, not merely performance; the performers all contributed to the creation of the performance, and Eiko and Koma established fundraising efforts for the painters. This chapter’s conclusion mentions the three-year Eiko and Koma Restrospective Project (2009), which opened with an exhibition at Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery – a site of commitment to a younger generation.

The conclusion of this dissertation is entitled “Spaces Apart in Motion: Thinking About Asian American Spatial Formation.”  It questions the ability of Eiko and Koma’s spaces apart to build bridges between dance studies and Asian American studies. Notably, Candelario evokes Eiichiro Azuma’s concept of “immigrant transnationalism,” (Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) as well as Yutian Wong’s notion of the deracialized “international artist” (Choreographing Asian America, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010) as political contexts for understanding Eiko and Koma’s work and its potential to create change. Unlike biographical or chronological accounts of Eiko and Koma’s choreography, Candelario’s dissertation astutely offers the possibilities for performing bodies to re-imagine questions of place, identity, nation, and diaspora. Through rich movement description and vivid language that echoes the artistry of Eiko and Koma, this dissertation is a prime example of choreographic analysis that moves past the space of the body and into places of political shift.

Ellen Gerdes
Dance Program
Drexel University

Department of Dance
Temple University
ellen.gerdes@gmail.com

Sources

Ethnographic participant observation of workshops, rehearsals, and performances
Interviews with Eiko and Koma, and their presenters, critics, and collaborators
Photography and Video
Government Documents
Syllabi

Dissertation Information

University of California, Los Angeles. 2011. 239 pp. Primary Advisor: Susan Leigh Foster.

Image: Eiko & Koma 013, Eiko. Photograph by Rose Eichenbaum. Eiko & Koma Photos for Press.

The fourth season of Dissertation Reviews begins this Fall and, as always, we are bringing you plenty of fresh reviews of recently filed dissertations, latest updates on archives and libraries, and “Talking Shop” articles on Japan Studies. If you wish to participate in Dissertation Reviews, please click here to become a reviewer or to have your dissertation reviewed. You may also contact one of our three dedicated Japan Studies editors: William Fleming, Niels van Steenpaal, or Akiko Takenaka.

A taste of what’s to come on Japan Studies in the new season

William Hedberg, “Locating China in Time and Space: Engagement with Chinese Vernacular Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Japan” (Harvard University 2012), reviewed by Mari Nagase (Augustana College)

Birgit Tremml, “When Political Economies Meet: Spain, China and Japan in Manila, 1571-1644″ (University of Vienna 2013), reviewed by Ubaldo Iaccarino (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)

Susan Westhafer Furukawa, “The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: ‘Taikoki’ and the Reinterpretation of Japan’s Past” (Indiana University 2012), reviewed by David Spafford (University of Pennsylvania)

Sachi Schmidt-Hori, “Hyperfemininities, Hypermasculinities, and Hypersexualities in Classical Japanese Literature” (University of Washington 2012), reviewed by Gergana Ivanova (University of Cincinnati)

Yulia Frumer, “Clocks and time in Edo Japan” (Princeton University 2012), reviewed by Ruselle Meade (University of Manchester)

Eleanor Robinson, “Nakai Hiromu: Meiji Statesman and Hero of Anglo-Japanese Relations” (Kyoto University 2012), reviewed by Rustin Gates (Bradley University)

Kristin Williams, “Visualizing the Child: Japanese Children’s Literature in the Age of Woodblock Print, 1678-1888″ (Harvard University 2012), reviewed by Niels van Steenpaal (University of Tokyo)

Nathan Hopson, “Tōhoku as Postwar Thought: Regionalism, Nationalism, and Culturalism in Japan’s Northeast” (University of Pennsylvania 2012), reviewed by Noriaki Hoshino (Cornell University)

Plus 25 more… (and counting!)

Meet the editors

William Fleming (Japan Studies) is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Theater Studies at Yale University. He specializes in the literature and cultural history of early modern Japan. His dissertation, entitled “The World Beyond the Walls: Morishima Chūryō (1756-1810) and the Development of Late Edo Fiction” (Harvard 2011), explores the rich interrelationship between early modern Japanese fiction and contemporary intellectual movements including nativist studies and inquiry into Dutch, vernacular Chinese, and Russian materials. [Website here]

Niels van Steenpaal (Japan Studies) is a Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo where he conducts research on various aspects of early modern Japanese “moral culture,” a term that he uses to describe the pathways, processes and media through which morality finds expression in material culture. His dissertation, completed at Kyoto University in 2012, is entitled “The Celebration of Filial Children in Early Modern Japan: Towards a History of Moral Culture.” [Website here]

Akiko Takenaka (Japan Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. She specializes in the cultural and social history of modern Japan with research focus on memory and historiography of the Asia-Pacific War. She is the author of the book Memory and Spatial Practice: Yasukuni Shrine and Japan’s Unending Postwar, which will be published in the “Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute” series. [Website here]

Image: Aomori Nebuta Festival, Japan. Photograph by Diego Molla. Wikimedia Commons.

A review of Visualizing the Child: Japanese Children’s Literature in the Age of Woodblock Print, 1678-1888, by Kristin Holly Williams.

Although certainly not spoiled with attention, the early modern Japanese child has received the occasional academic cuddle. This attention, however, has been greeted with widely different results. Cradled in the hands of scholars of education, the Japanese child cheers happily; the informal environment of early modern terakoya (temple schools) seems like paradise when compared to the military strictness of the modern schooling system as it was created in the Meiji period. On the other hand, the research of demographers and anthropologists into the widespread custom of infanticide elicits tantrums and tears. The fact that this infanticide was phrased at the time as “returning the child [to the gods]” (kogaeshi) surely makes us reconsider whether this “paradise” was such a desirable place for children after all.

Despite a growing body of scholarship concerning the realities of early modern Japanese children’s lives, the early modern “child,” as concept and representation, remains in relative obscurity. We still lack a work equivalent in scope to Philippe Ariès’s classical exploration of childhood in France, or for that matter, similar studies in the cases of England, Germany, China, or any of the many other countries in which the history of the child has been pursued as an active field of study. The list is long enough to make one wonder what particular factors have prevented an exploration of the topic in the case of Japan. Whatever the reason, it cannot have been for lack of resources. Japan’s flourishing early modern print culture and literacy ratings have secured a legacy of vast documentary records concerning almost any subject, children among them. Luckily, we now have Kristin Williams’s dissertation, which engages with part of this fascinating material as she explores the early modern Japanese “child” through “children’s literature.” By examining “the child both as a subject and a consumer of literature” (p. 16), this dissertation demonstrates the existence of a vibrant children’s culture that reflected as well as helped shape and disseminate conceptions of the “child” in the eighteenth century.

The first hurdle to be surmounted in a project like this is, of course, a problem of definition; are we justified in even speaking of a “children’s literature” in early modern Japan? Prevailing scholarly consensus disagrees, locating the birth of children’s literature in the Meiji period with the advent of works like Koganemaru (1891) and Akai fune (1910). Williams’s first chapter is dedicated to challenging this consensus. After surveying previous scholarship on children’s literature, she follows Harvey Darton and Emer O’Sullivan in delineating these works as 1) “produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure,” 2) produced “habitually, in quantities and with a frequency which implied that they were meant for a known, considerable, permanent class of readers,” 3) “assigned by adults to the group of readers comprising children and young people,” and 4) “belonging to both the literary and educational realms” (pp. 39-42). The rest of the chapter then proceeds to show that early modern “picture books,” defined as small-format works with “a high ratio of illustration to verbal text and a simplified script” (p. 1), fulfill all of these conditions, thus effectively dragging the birth of children’s literature back in time over two centuries.

Especially refreshing in this chapter is Williams’s refusal to be pegged down by genre. Whereas most scholarship of Japanese literature is still very much structured according to genre schemes based on outward distinctions such as cover color, Williams argues that genre names such as “red book” or “patterned book” have obscured an enduring continuity in content that was aimed at children, i.e. children’s literature. This stance is reflected in the somewhat unusual scope of her dissertation, stretching from 1678, the year of the oldest known datable picture book published in Edo, to 1888, the year that marked the end of the “bean book.” This disregard for established genres is not only effective within the aims of the current dissertation, but also serves as a reminder that content/form relations in Japanese literature is a subject that deserves further examination.

The second chapter extends the argument by showing that early modern commercial products aimed at children were not limited to literature, but included other forms of amusement, such as board games, toys, dolls, and tops. By pointing out the existence of a commercial children’s culture, Williams strengthens her position against scholars who have regarded the rise of this kind of production as “a distinctive feature of Western modernity—something that one should not expect to see in Japan until the Meiji period” (pp. 75-76). Moreover, the chapter also examines the way in which this culture was intertwined with literature through the tropes of the reluctant student and the happy child reader, both of which depict the child as balancing between, on the one hand, avidly consuming children’s products, amusement, and play, and on the other, diligently progressing toward adult literacy. As Williams perceptively remarks: “Edo-period children’s literature not only introduced children to cultural literacy, but it also taught them about consumer behavior” (p. 113).

After these two long and broad-ranging chapters, the dissertation enters its second part, consisting of five annotated translations of early modern picture books. The translations use photo manipulation to insert English in place of Japanese into the original woodblock print, a method that retains the close relationship between word and image and thus works particularly well with the heavily illustrated picture books featured in the dissertation. Each translation is furthermore accompanied by an introduction that highlights one particular characteristic of each story. The first translation, of Tadatoru yama no hototogisu (Cuckoo of Mt. Gratis), is aimed at revealing how these works adapted older stories to match the interest of child readers. Williams then moves on to consider the girl as subject and as reader in Nezumi no yomeiri (The Rat Wedding), followed by Kaminari no shiki banashi (Stories of Thunder in Four Seasons), in which she highlights picture books’ centrality of theme, rather than plot or story. Terako tanka (Verses for Schoolchildren) is used to illustrate the commercial nature of these works, and finally, Kaitai tanjō raku (The Paradise of Gestation and Birth) serves as an example of how religious and medical knowledge were woven into these narratives as well.

Clearly written and coherently argued, Williams’s dissertation succeeds in its aim of showing that “Japanese woodblock-printed picture books of the late seventeenth century through the late nineteenth century were a form of children’s literature and that this children’s literature was an integral part of a commercial children’s culture in early modern Japan” (p. 115). Since this leads us to the conclusion that “Japan has one of the world’s oldest traditions of children’s literature for a mass audience” (p. 351), Williams’s work will not only appeal to scholars of early modern Japanese literature, education, or intellectual history, but also deserves to be read by historians interested in the child or childhood in general.

Niels van Steenpaal
JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Graduate School for Law and Politics
The University of Tokyo
nielsvansteenpaal@hotmail.com

Primary Sources

Edo no Ehon
Kinsei kodomo no ehon shū
Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei
Rare books collections including those of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Institute of Japanese Literature

Dissertation Information

Harvard University. 2012. 386 pp. Primary Advisor: Adam Kern.

Image: Torii Kiyonaga, Japanese, 1752–1815. Publisher: Tsutaya Jūzaburō (Kōshodō), Japanese. “The Tanabata Festival,” from the series “Precious Children’s Games of the Five Festivals (Kodakara gosetsu asobi).” Japanese, Edo period, about 1794–95 (Kansei 6–7). Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper. Vertical ōban; 39.3 x 26 cm (15 1/2 x 10 1/4 in.). William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 11.13935. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

A review of From the Brothel, to the Body: The Relocation of Male Sexuality in Japan’s Prostitution Debate, 1870-1920, by Craig Colbeck.

Craig Colbeck’s dissertation is an historical investigation of how discourses of male sexuality and sexual desire have been construed. Closely following Japan’s prostitution debates from 1870 to 1920, Colbeck examines the ways in which discourses of male sexuality and sexual desire were enabled and disenabled. Employing Foucauldian historiography, the author focuses on what was said and discussed regarding the sexualities of men who frequented licensed brothels, rather than detailing their actual sexual activities. Some of the vocal participants in the debates were protestant abolitionists, regulationists of the prostitution industry, and secular feminists.

Colbeck’s thesis is demonstrated with evidence and careful insight. Colbeck argues, in a nutshell, that what he terms as “male sexual-instinct theory” – the assumption that male sexual desire is always already innately residing within their bodies and minds – came to the fore in Japan only at the turn of the twentieth century. Before this sea change, at least within the prostitution debates, male sexuality was perceived as non-primordial – that is, something that comes into being by external stimulus, such as visiting pleasure industries.

What makes Colbeck’s thesis of interest to a relatively wide readership is his way of contextualizing his analysis within a larger historiography of prostitution regulation. Tracing this genealogy back to the early nineteenth century, when the regulation of prostitution was first introduced in France (and subsequently practiced in other parts of Europe), Colbeck details the developments of regulation discourse before it was introduced into Japan in the late nineteenth century. In contradistinction to European counterparts, whose regulationist discourses and policies quickly proved to be incongruent with public opinion and thus mostly repealed, Japan has provided, according to Colbeck, an alternative platform upon which the prolonged discussions on prostitution regulation could take place in the following decades. What separated Japan from their Euro-American counterparts derived from the fact that it was a much more difficult endeavor for abolitionists to repeal such regulations in Japan, where legally sanctioned brothel industries had already been in business and tightly linked with the government and economic structures for centuries.

Since the onset of debates over prostitution regulation in the late 1800s, both abolitionist and regulationist constituents shared – despite differences of ultimate objectives – the idea that male erotic desire was anything but innate. To many critics, male passions or physical urges were results of external stimulation. Colbeck consults and analyzes in detail a wide range of texts in order to support this observation, including The Complete Elimination of the Brothel, published in 1889 by a prominent protestant abolitionist Iwamoto Yoshiharu, and the regulationist counterpart text, On the Realities of Regulation and Abolition, published in 1890.

The second half of the dissertation delves into the core of Colbeck’s thesis. The turn of the century saw a sea change in the discourse of male sexuality in social policies, in that male erotic desire started to be understood as congenital – an essential quality that was always already within the male body. Colbeck attributes this shift to changes that occurred in the larger historical framework within which sexuality itself was understood in Japan. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals willingly adopted knowledge of western sexology. During the first decades of the twentieth century, those who aligned themselves with western sexology, including cultural figures such as Mori Ōgai, made frequent uses of the neologism seiyoku (sexual instinct) in order to transplant western knowledge of sexuality in Japanese soil. According to Colbeck, the birth of the concept seiyoku, coupled with rhetorical reasoning about the passion to mate – which was based on evolutional biology discourses, most notably that of Darwinist arrangements of sexual selection – turned male sexual desire into something natural and instinctive.

As a consequence, regulationist camps smoothly adopted this new instinctual narrative to advance their political agenda, linking sexual drive to natural appetite, and thereby legitimating the need for licensed brothels to deal with such “natural” male demands. In response, a somewhat desperate measure taken by abolitionists was – while overthrowing their previous contention that erotic desire was vice and addiction – to incorporate this theory of natural male sexual drive into the notion of romantic love. According to this viewpoint, male sexual desire was one of the positive elements required for cultivating healthy conjugal relationship between men and women. In this rhetoric, the custom of visiting brothels would intervene in normal pathways of romantic courtship. Although these diametrically parted goals were suggested by the two parties, Colbeck argues that the idea that innate male sexual desire came to be perceived as common sense in the early twentieth century.

Colbeck is careful in pointing out that male sexuality was not the only kind of sexuality in the early twentieth century to be defined along these lines of instinctive desire. Female sexuality had also been contemporaneously reconstructed. This reconstruction was undertaken, not by the hands of male critics, however, but by women themselves, most notably secular feminists. Japanese feminist organizations, such as Seitōsha (Bluestocking Society), and the New Women’s Association, were prominent constituents in the movement of redefining the notion of female sexuality. Colbeck identifies Hiratsuka Raichō, a leader of Seitōsha, as a representative of secular feminists who utilized a eugenic rhetoric of women’s health and sexuality. The purpose of this rhetorical deployment was to recognize female sexual desire as a legitimate element required for healthy womanhood, and also to protect women’s agency in deciding when to be sexually active and with whom to get married. Amidst the campaign of salvaging the self-autonomy of women, evolutionary and eugenic discourses, which were shared among both abolitionists and regulationists of prostitution at that time, came in handy, as it were, for secular feminists to advance their political agenda. Some secular feminists went as far as to petition the state to investigate whether men who intended to marry were not infected with venereal diseases. Albeit such a state regulation did not eventuate, the petition demanded compulsory health checks only for men, leaving women un-scrutinized. While Colbeck understood such a move by secular feminists to be largely strategic on their parts, their rhetorical maneuver was, in turn, complicit in constructing the essentialized ideology of male sexuality or desire, which was premised on the logic of instinct that Japanese society subsequently upheld for a long time.

All in all, primary historical texts are not only carefully surveyed and translated, but are also given appropriate contexts. In this approach, those texts under analysis have productive dialogues with relevant secondary material. Towards the end, Colbeck also elucidates how his work could potentially have critical exchange with contemporary polemics surrounding Japan’s involvement with wartime-institutionalized prostitution. When the issues of wartime-institutionalized prostitution are discussed in media, or among politicians and critics alike (the most salient of which is of course about what are called “Comfort Women”), relevant discourses more often than not revolve around moral concerns such as whether it was right or wrong, just or unjust, and even sanctioned by the military or not. At the same time, as Colbeck observes, the questions of how prostitution became necessary, what made it just, and in what ways it was called upon in the first place, are rarely asked. If we are to undo, or not to repeat such wrongdoings, it is imperative for us to learn where the patriarchal discourse of ‘male sexual instinct’ itself came about, which itself came to justify the existence of pleasure industries. Colbeck’s dissertation provides not the entire genealogy of the discourse, but identifies its dawn at the turn of the twentieth century in Japan.

Colbeck’s dissertation begins and ends with personal accounts, which provides a natural flow of logic for readers to follow. The structure also makes his dissertation almost like a well-organized book manuscript rather than an old-fashioned thesis. At the beginning, Colbeck notes that the idea of his thesis occurred to him when he was reading feminist writings in the 1970s and 1980s. Once groundbreaking, and now classic, “male gaze” theory, as Colbeck calls it, put forth by Laura Mulvey in particular, drew his attention (Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18.). Colbeck observes that “Mulvey’s particular contribution was to phrase male sexuality in terms of both psychoanalysis in its source and specifically linked to viewing in behavior, and many feminists have continued to do this under the broader rubric of ‘objectification’” (p. 2). While he does not question the validity of Mulvey’s claim in our present contexts, Colbeck as an historian nonetheless ponders where and when this underlying assumption of male sexuality – that men had a primordial drive to objectify or eroticize women – came into being. Colbeck concludes his dissertation with the following remark:

… if we stop accepting the notion that male sexual desire is a transhistorical, natural fact from the primordial age, … we can begin to see male sexual desire as a relatively-new, readily-dispensable institutional fact of social policy-making. Dissolving male sexual desire as a fact of politics from the feminist end could be the beginning of the end for the incumbency of male sexual desire in the politics of sexuality. It would further liberate us to envision a new feminist politics that neither privileges male sexual desire as a fact of life nor encourages others to do so. (Emphasis in original pp. 228–9)

Feminist theorists have already taken a key initiative to destabilize and deconstruct the myth of male sexuality and masculinity. Through his well-researched and skillfully presented thesis that critically analyzes a particular instance which saw the shaping of the discourse on male sexual desire in modern Japan, Colbeck makes an important contribution to the field by further highlighting the importance for “the destabilization of male sexual desire” (p. 228).

Katsuhiko Suganuma
Oita University
Assistant Professor
suganuma@oita-u.ac.jp

Primary Sources

Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Hinkō ron [On Morality]
Hiratsuka Raichō’s autobiography Genshi josei wa taiyō de atta [In the Beginning, Woman was the Sun]
Iwamoto Yoshiharu’s Girō zenpai [Complete Elimination of Brothels]
Mori Ōgai’s Wita sekusyuarisu [Vita Sexualis]
Prostitution regulationist text Sonpai jissairon [On the Realities of Regulation and Abolition]
Articles and essays published by Seitōsha [Bluestocking Society]
Numerous publications on prostitution regulation debates from 1870s to 1920s

Dissertation Information

Harvard University. 2012. 244 pp. Primary Advisor: Andrew Gordon.

Image: 吉原遊廓 （よしわらゆうかく）. http://tinyurl.com/k9rtrkc.

A review of Ōe no Masafusa and the Convergence of the “Ways”: The Twilight of Early Chinese Literary Studies and the Rise of Waka Studies, by Saeko Shibayama.

During the insei 院政 period (1086-1221) of Japanese history, abdicated emperors established “cloistered governments” through which they pursued cultural, religious, and political projects intended to restore royal authority after a century of domination by the Fujiwara 藤原 regency. But as Saeko Shibayama notes in her groundbreaking study of the intellectual and literary history of the period, the “age of retired emperors” actually witnessed a further decline in the royal household’s political clout, with Buddhist institutions and warrior clans such as the Taira 平 and Minamoto 源 becoming ever more powerful. And yet, far from being overturned or eroded, the symbolic centrality of the royal household only intensified, resulting in an efflorescence of “fundamentally neoclassical” (p. xiii) literary production. Shibayama explains:

[T]his period witnessed the compilation of numerous literary anthologies, sequences to the existing religious and historical texts, and treatises and commentaries on poetry from the past and the present. For courtiers, participation in imperial cultural enterprises became the only way to secure their families’ survival… (p. xiii)

Although Japanese scholarship on insei culture has thrived over the past several decades, Shibayama’s dissertation is the first English-language study to present a comprehensive examination of the intellectual trends of the “long twelfth century,” as she calls it. With the notable exception of studies of setsuwa 説話 (“anecdotal tales” in Shibayama’s translation), English-language scholarship on the insei period has been slow to develop. G. Cameron Hurst III’s political history, Insei: Abdicated Sovereigns in the Politics of Late Heian Japan, 1086-1185 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), remains the standard work in English. But since the 1970s Japanese scholars from a variety of fields have developed new approaches to insei history, literature, politics, and religion. Noteworthy studies include Gomi Fumihiko’s 五味文彦 Inseiki shakai no kenkyū 院政期社会の研究 (Research on Insei-Period Society, Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1984); the interdisciplinary five-volume series Inseiki bunka ronshū 院政期文化論集 (Essays on Insei-Period Culture, Shinwasha, 2001-5); and Komine Kazuaki’s 小峰和明 monumental Inseiki bungakuron 院政期文学論 (A Theory of Insei-Period Literature, Kasama Shoin, 2006).

Drawing on this more recent scholarship, Shibayama has produced an ambitious examination of the “convergence” of two broad currents in the intellectual history of classical and early-medieval Japan: the rise and fall of kangaku 漢学 (Chinese literary studies), as practiced by Kidendō 紀伝道 (history and literature) scholars in the State Academy; and the emergence of kagaku 歌学 (waka studies).

The dissertation consists of three parts. Part 1 examines the Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions before the twelfth century. In Chapter 1, Shibayama makes use of the historical tale Imakagami 今鏡 (Mirror of the Present, ca. 1170) to treat the nostalgic reconstruction of two reigns (those of emperors GoSanjō 後三条天皇 and Shirakawa 白河天皇) in which kangaku experienced a revival. She then turns to readings of several episodes in Konjaku monogatari shū 今昔物語集 (A Collection of Tales New and Old, ca. 1120) to confirm that waka was at this point thought of as a “custom” (fūzoku 風俗) and not yet a “Way” (michi 道). Chapter 2 consists of readings of several pieces from the literary anthology Honchō monzui 本朝文粋 (Literary Masterpieces of Japan, ca. 1058-65), especially kanshi prefaces (shijo 詩序), letters of proposal (sōjō 奏状), and Buddhist supplications (ganmon 願文). Shibayama argues that the displacement of scholar-officials, whose literary activities were traditionally deemed indispensable to the functioning of the state (a concept known as bunshō keikoku 文章経国), by the Fujiwara regency resulted in a range of new approaches to kangaku, from increased professionalization to a new emphasis on poetic refinement. Chapter 3 transitions to a discussion of wakajo 和歌序, Sino-Japanese prefaces to waka anthologies, as found in a variety of texts from the eighth through twelfth centuries. Shibayama characterizes these discussions as “self-reflective” (p. 103), placing them on a continuum which culminated in the later emergence of waka studies.

Part 2 examines the life and works of Ōe no Masafusa 大江匡房 (1041-1111), a prodigious scholar-official active at the beginning of the insei period. Chapter 4 provides an overview of English and Japanese scholarship on Masafusa’s life, as well as an analysis of his essay “Bonen no ki” 暮年記 (A Record of My Twilight Years, ca. 1099). Chapter 5 explores Masafusa’s diary (Gōki 江記) and his collection of biographies Zoku honchō ōjōden 続本朝往生伝 (More Biographies of Those Reborn in Paradise, ca. 1099-1104). Despite its ostensibly Buddhist orientation, in this latter text Masafusa glorifies the literary achievements of his ancestors and his patron, Emperor GoSanjō, and the work is interpreted by Shibayama as his “homage to the dying tradition of the household studies of the Ōe clan” (p. 244). Chapter 6 analyzes Gōdanshō 江談抄 (Notes on Dialogues with Masafusa, ca. 1107-11), a collection of setsuwa-esque “dialogues” between Masafusa and his disciple Fujiwara no Sanekane 藤原実兼. In addition to exploring several issues pertaining to its textual history, Shibayama also notes Masafusa’s repeated invocation of the Way of the Arts (suki no michi 数寄の道), a single-minded pursuit of artistic production that would become increasingly important in medieval society.

In Part 3, Shibayama develops novel arguments about shifts in waka studies that began in the early twelfth century. In Chapter 7 she examines Minamoto no Toshiyori’s 源俊頼 Toshiyori zuinō 俊頼髄脳 (Toshiyori’s Principles of Waka, ca. 1111-15), an enthusiastic and desultory text which explores numerous facets of waka history, lore, and practice. Toshiyori is one of the earliest figures to exhibit a passionate attachment (suki) to waka, in effect making “possible the evolution of waka from a casually practiced custom [fūzoku] to a profession, a respectable ‘Way’ [michi]” (p. 288). Chapter 8 explores this professionalization in greater depth, as embodied by the activities of poets belonging to the Rokujō 六条 and Mikohidari 御子左 houses. Whereas literary historians have traditionally dwelled on the competitive relationship between the two houses, Shibayama instead emphasizes “the significance of their common undertaking as leading ‘waka households’ (waka no ie [和歌の家])” (p. 331). She examines three stages in the institutionalization of these households: (1) the Rokujō house’s orchestration of the Hitomaro eigu 人麻呂影供 (Offerings to Hitomaro’s Portrait); (2) the Rokujō house’s collation of various canonical waka texts and Fujiwara no Kiyosuke’s 藤原清輔 creation of reference works on several aspects of waka; and (3) the eventual crystallization of an analytical kagaku discourse in Fujiwara no Shunzei’s 古来風体抄 (1197). Finally, Chapter 9 examines Koseki kasho mokuroku 古蹟歌書目録 (An Old Manuscript Catalogue of Books on Waka, late twelfth century), attributed to the princely monk Shukaku 守覚法親王. Shibayama interprets the existence of this meticulous catalogue of waka-related texts as further evidence that by the late twelfth century kagaku had become a “fully fledged, independent field of study” (p. 387). A translation of the catalogue, along with a series of modern references to it, is appended at the end of the dissertation.

Saeko Shibayama’s dissertation is a stimulating exploration of the intellectual and literary history of the insei period. Many of the texts she analyzes have received little attention in English-language scholarship, but her goal is not simply to introduce them to a new audience. Drawing on a range of contemporary Japanese scholarship, she fashions thoughtful and compelling arguments about the shifting status of kangaku and kagaku in early-medieval Japan. Although this dissertation will be of particular interest to scholars of premodern Japanese literature and intellectual history, especially those looking to better understand the transitional insei period, nonspecialists will also find much to admire in the way Shibayama constructs nuanced arguments from careful philological research.

Ashton Lazarus
East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
ashton.lazarus@yale.edu

Primary Sources

Konjaku monogatari shū 今昔物語集 (A Collection of Tales New and Old)
Jakuchō, Imakagami 今鏡 (Mirror of the Present)
Fujiwara no Akihira, ed., Honchō monzui 本朝文粋 (Literary Masterpieces of Japan)
Works by Ōe no Masafusa 大江匡房
Minamoto no Toshiyori, Toshiyori zuinō 俊頼髄脳 (Toshiyori’s Principles of Waka)

Dissertation Information

Columbia University. 2012. 510 pp. Primary Advisor: Haruo Shirane.

Image: Depiction of Ōe no Masafusa, from the Atomi University Library collection.

A review of Locating China in Time and Space: Engagement with Chinese Vernacular Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Japan, by William Christopher Hedberg.

William Hedberg’s dissertation considers a diverse array of eighteenth-century Japanese Sinologists’ responses to the emerging presence of Chinese vernacular literature. His research illuminates the genre’s effect on Japanese scholars’ perception of relations between China and Japan, the development of new modes of Sinological studies, and the formation of scholarly and literary communities concentrated on Chinese vernacular writings. In his introduction, Hedberg highlights an important Japanese cognitive transformation concerning “China.” Vernacular texts presented a different image of China that, to Japanese, appeared foreign, impenetrable, exotic, and “Other-ly.” The result was a three-pointed impression that included Japan, “China” of the past, and the newly apprehended contemporary China. The vernacular texts associated with contemporary China then evolved as a scholarly and literary domain distinct from traditional classical studies.

Chapter 1 overviews representative responses to vernacular texts by examining a wide range of texts, including scholarly essays and the prefaces and afterwards to dictionaries and literary works. Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666-1728), an authority in archaic studies, was keenly aware of the discrepancy between classical and contemporary Chinese language, yet promoted the study of spoken Chinese for its usefulness in reading classical texts. Cheng Shuze 程順則 (1663-1734), a scholar and diplomat of Ryukyu, a kingdom that had a direct political connection to Qing China, recognized the practical importance of vernacular texts for training students in spoken Chinese. Yanagisawa Kien 柳沢淇園 (1704-1758) highlighted the vernacular novel’s linguistic and pedagogical serviceability for students who hoped to be interpreters. Meanwhile, a scholar of the Tsushima domain, Amenomori Hōshū 雨森芳州 (1668-1755), who was well versed in Chinese and Korean, insightfully distinguished written texts from spoken language and downplayed the use of vernacular fiction for educational purposes.

The second half of Chapter 1 shifts its focus from scholarly views to those of professional interpreters, translators, and annotators of vernacular Chinese. As vernacular Chinese fiction such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Water Margin gained popularity in Japan, some of the professionals with facility in spoken Chinese capitalized on the emerging need for interpreting vernacular fiction. One representative is Okajima Kanzan 岡島冠山 (1674-1728), a reputable Nagasaki interpreter who later left for Kyoto and Edo to pursue classical studies. Kanzan edited reference books of Chinese terms and phrases; notably, these contain both classical and vernacular entries, with each entry indicating the contemporary Chinese pronunciation. The mixture of classical and vernacular language suggests Kanzan’s intention to maintain a tie to traditional scholarship while making use of his special knowledge of spoken Chinese. Suyama Nantō 陶山南濤 (1700-1766), who studied spoken Chinese in Kyoto, produced a competitive response. Nantō compiled the Chūgi Suikodenkai 忠義水滸伝解 (An Explication of the ‘The Water Margin,’ 1757), in which he explained difficult terms in Shuihu zhuan 水滸伝. He emphasized the illegitimacy of reading vernacular texts with reference to classical Chinese, often demonstrating the different meanings of a character in the two registers. He approached vernacular fiction with academic rigor and linguistic authenticity, aiming to establish vernacular studies as independent from classical studies.

Following the overview of representative responses, Chapter 2 pursues the evolving impact of vernacular texts in the latter half of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the century, Chinese vernacular fiction was deeply embedded in the Japanese literary imagination, even inspiring the formation of new genres such as the yomihon and sharebon. The major vernacular works, especially the Water Margin, were popularized through translations, adaptations, and ukiyoe prints. As the visibility of Chinese fiction increased, Japanese interests expanded beyond the philological to include aesthetic and narratological dimensions. The authors examined in this chapter include the scholar-writers Hattori Nankaku 服部南郭 (1683-1759), Seita Tansō 清田儋叟 (1719-1785), and Tsuga Teishō 都賀庭鐘 (1718-1894). While Nankaku’s teacher Sorai recognized the usefulness of learning contemporary Chinese pronunciations, the poet-scholar Nankaku rejected vernacular studies on the ground of its vulgarities. He defended the literary arena of classical Chinese as an appropriate preserve for the elite. In contrast, Tansō and Teishō advanced their engagement with vernacular literature. The examination of Tansō’s writings on vernacular literature includes his unpublished commentary on the Water Margin edited by Jin Shengtan and other works exhibiting Tansō’s digestion and application of theoretical terms and critical stances on narratives. Tansō valued history and historiography, and he read fiction as historical allegory. Reflecting his embrace of this stance, he occasionally rejected Jin Shengtan’s interpretations and developed his own criticism.

The last text examined in this chapter is a vernacular translation of selected Japanese plays into Chinese musical drama pieces (zaju 雑劇). This work, titled Shimeizen 四鳴蝉 (Four Cries of the Cicada), is attributed to Tsuga Teishō and includes translations of two nō plays and partial translations of two plays by Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Hedberg’s analysis centers on translations of the nō plays, Yuya 熊野 and Yorimasa 頼政. In his preface to the work, Teishō contrasts the elegant, lofty nō theater with the folksy, lively Chinese drama. In transforming the austere nō plays into popularized zaju form, Teishō strategically utilized both elegant and vulgar languages, collapsing the aesthetic polarities. Tansō and Teishō participated in the community of vernacular Chinese by autonomously analyzing the aesthetic and structural features of Chinese fiction and drama.

The final two chapters analyze Chinese vernacular translations of representative Japanese works. Chapter 3 discusses Okajima Kanzan’s translation of a widely read Japanese historical tale, the Taiheiki. The translator’s seriousness in this endeavor is demonstrated by his concern for historical accuracy and consultation of different versions of the Taiheiki. A preface by Kanzan’s student extols vernacular fiction as a genre of cultural prestige and compares Kanzan to Luo Guanzhong, the putative author of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Water Margin. Concluding his analyses, Hedberg argues that Kanzan’s Taiheiki engi suggests a desire to conceptualize Chinese vernacular writing as “an elite practice that both sets Kanzan apart from his Japanese contemporaries and establishes credentials for participation in a wider sphere of literary discourse” (p. 262).

The final chapter explores signs of Chinese interest in Japanese cultural products. The “China House” (Tōjin yashiki 唐人屋敷) in Nagasaki, accommodating approximately 2,000 Chinese visitors, presented an alluring environment for cross-cultural exchanges. A record evidences a few examples of Chinese merchants who learned to sing jōruri ballads or who studied the Japanese kana syllabary as they copied waka poems. The central texts examined are Chinese translations of Japanese popular drama by Shū Bunjiemon 周文次右衛門 (d. 1825), a descendant of a Chinese émigré and an official Nagasaki interpreter. Shū’s unpublished translations include a short excerpt of the third act of Chikamatsu’s Battles of Coxinga and an entire translation of the famous play Chūshingra. Although Shū’s translations are faulted with many errors, it is apparent that he intended to transform the jōruri plays into authentic yanyi narratives of the sort familiar to Chinese readership. Names and historical information that would be unfamiliar to non-Japanese are explained, and wordplay relying on Japanese linguistic features is annotated where necessary. Shū’s close attention to the texts’ legibility for the Chinese reader and the fact that they were produced in the vicinity of the China House imply the author’s assumption of Chinese readership.

Shū’s Chūshingura translation later took another turn. A new Chinese translation, titled Chūshinko 忠臣庫 and conspicuously based on Shū’s work, was published in 1815. Although the alleged Chinese authorship is denied in current scholarship, the preface claims that Hongmengzi 鴻濛子, a Chinese author who was fascinated by the story, aspired to make the Chūshingura translation more readable for wider circulation. While Chūshinko utilizes more features typical of the Chinese novel, it obviously targets Japanese readership, as illustrated by the heavily glossed colloquial expressions and the assumed familiarity with Japanese terms and culture. Hedberg evaluates different Chūshingura translations as “a body of work that playfully reconceptualizes and reformulates cultural boundaries and flows of information between China and Japan” (p. 324).

Hedberg’s dissertation impresses the reader with its breadth of examined texts, both published and unpublished, Chinese and Japanese. By conducting comprehensive research on diverse discourses on Chinese vernacular texts, Hedberg carefully maps eighteenth-century Japanese Sinologists’ diversified responses and evolving approaches to Chinese vernacular literature. Rather than investigating a unidirectional influence of Chinese vernacular fiction onto Edo-period Japanese literature, Hedberg focuses his attention on an active Japanese engagement with vernacular texts. The study provides a vision of the larger transcultural literary community in which a few qualified Japanese eagerly participated. While kanshi, or poetry in classical Chinese, constitutes a solid part of Edo-period literary scholarship, the Japanese intellectual commitment to and literary endeavor in vernacular Chinese has been little explored. Hedberg’s research illuminates the significance of the reverberant impact of a newly imported body of vernacular literature. Equipped only with vernacular Chinese and its associated fictional formats, Japanese writers were able to envision a transnational circulation of popular, contemporary Japanese texts such as jōruri plays. This dissertation freshly expands our insight into Sino-Japanese literature during the Edo period.

Mari Nagase
Asian Studies Program
Augustana College, Illinois
marinagase@augustana.edu

Primary Sources

Chūshingura engi 忠臣蔵演義, translated by Shū Bunjiemon 周文次右衛門
Shimeizen 四鳴蝉, by Tsuga Teishō 都賀庭鐘
Suikoden hihyōkai 水滸伝批評解, by Seita Tansō 清田儋叟
Taiheiki engi 太平記演義, by Okajima Kanzan 岡島冠山

Dissertation Information

Harvard University. 2012. 358 pp. Primary Advisor: Wilt L. Idema.

Image: Illustration from Shuihuzhuan, by Kuniyoshi.

A review of When Political Economies Meet: Spain, China and Japan in Manila, ca. 1571-1644, by Birgit Magdalena Tremml.

Birgit Magdalena Tremml’s study on the encounter between the “political economies” of Spain, China, and Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is an interesting and far-reaching analysis of Philippine pre-modern history, examining Manila as a crossroads between the East Asian, Southeast Asian, and American markets, as well as a multicultural city-port located in the centre of the so-called Asian or East Asian “Mediterranean” — i.e. the China Seas. The nature of this maritime macro-region, which was particularly favorable for the development of long-distance trade, provides the key for understanding the emergence of what she calls the “Manila system”: a system “characterized by multi-layered connections based on negotiations, a complex market torn between protectionism and free trade, triangular circulations and bi- or multilateral communication, involving different parties of the pre-modern states of Ming China, Azuchi-Momoyama/Tokugawa Japan and the Spanish Overseas Empire” (pp. 6-7). In other words, Tremml examines the cross-cultural trade between the three states in the city of Manila, considering it as a fulcrum of a regional “globalized” maritime area, with the surrounding ports of the Fujian province, the isle of Kyūshū, and the coasts of México as integral parts of it.

The work is divided into four parts and eight chapters. The first part is an accurate introduction that presents at length the state of the field and the aims of the dissertation (chap. 1) before making a comparison between the structures of the monarchy of Spain, China, and Japan. In Chapter 2, Tremml speaks about the differences between the economies of these three pre-modern states, the complex structure of the Spanish colonies and the particular situation of the Philippines. Then, she introduces the East Asian economic framework, presenting the Chinese Maritime prohibitions (haijin) of the Ming in the late-fourteenth century and the establishment of the Superintendencies of the Maritime Trade (shibosi), the opening of the port of Yuegang in 1567, and the Single Whip Tax Reform (yi tiao bian fa) of 1581, related to the influx of silver in China via Manila. On the Japanese side, she introduces the aftermath of the sengoku era (1477-1573) and the process of unification from the Azuchi-Momoyama period until the foundation of the Edo bakufu (1603). The maritime activities of the Sino-Japanese “pirates” — the so-called wakō, or wokou — are presented together with the implementation of the Red Seal Ships system (shuinsen), and the shogunate’s attempts to secure control of the Japanese private trade of Kyūshū and Kinai.

Chapter 3 opens the second part of the dissertation, dealing with the connections and interactions of the “Manila system.” It focuses on the structures of Spain’s administration in the Philippines and its overseas political economy, for example, integrating the transpacific voyages of the Manila Galleons into the framework of the East and Southeast Asian trade networks. Tremml analyses the triangular trade between China, Japan, and Spain in the China Seas and across the Pacific Ocean: arbitrage exchanges of Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese commodities, silver transhipments and other kinds of global connections (chap. 3 and 4). The third part concerns foreign relations and diplomacy, and examines the Chinese tributary system, the existing relations between the states of East Asia and Manila’s bilateral relations with China and Japan. Of particular interest is Tremml’s analysis of the various misunderstanding between the Spaniards, the Chinese, and the Japanese during official communication (chap. 6): problems of language — both written and oral — and gift exchange.

Part 4 proceeds to deal with the dualism between the global and the local, centre and periphery: e.g. Kantō/Kyūshū in Japan, Fujian/Beijing in China, and the role of Taiwan and the Ryūkyū archipelago (chap.7). In Chapter 8, Tremml shifts the focus to the impact of the socio-political aspects of the “Manila system,” speaking about the various communities that coexisted in Manila in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its multicultural aspects related to both conflict and cooperation. At least four different groups lived in the Philippine capital: there were Spaniards in the citadel of Intramuros, Chinese in the so-called “Parián” (alcaicería), Japanese in the villages of Dilao and San Miguel, and a vastly scattered Tagalog community all around the area of the city. Tremml asks whether the Spaniards thought of the merchants from China and Japan as subjects of the Spanish Crown — just like the Tagalogs — or as foreigners depending on the laws and regulations of their own countries. Juridical issues related to this unstable coexistence led to multicultural conflicts: the Chinese “Sangleys” rebelled in 1603, and the Japanese in 1606. Later, in the 1620s and 1630s, the Tokugawa bakufu evaluated the possibility of conquering the Philippines with the help of the Dutch, and in 1662 the Sino-Japanese “pirate” Zheng Chenggong, alias Koxinga, menaced Manila and the Spanish presence in Asia.

In conclusion, When Political Economies Meet is an in-depth analysis of the complex structures of the “Manila system,” shedding light on an important page of Asian maritime history, too often underestimated or simply separated from historical analyses of the East and Southeast Asian trade systems. Moreover, Tremml’s accurate use of European, Japanese, and Chinese sources, as well as the display of a rich and detailed bibliography, give validity to this important work, providing a solid foundation for future studies.

Ubaldo Iaccarino
PhD Candidate at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona
Teaching Assistant at the “L’Orientale” University of Naples
ubaldoiaccarino@gmail.com

Primary Sources

Archivo General de Indias, Seville
Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid
Archivium Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome
Tōyō Bunko, Tōkyō
Ikoku nikki 異国日記

Dissertation Information

University of Vienna. 2012. 377 pp. Primary Advisor: Peer Vries.

Image: Nicolo Bully, Engraving for Gaspar de San Agustín’s “Conquista de las Islas Philipinas” (Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel Ruiz de Murga, 1698): Madrid Biblioteca Nacional R 33057.

A review of Clocks and Time in Edo Japan, by Yulia Frumer.

The logic of mechanical clock faces is seemingly obvious. We look at them several times a day never questioning their rationality despite the mental gymnastics required to discern what the two, sometimes three, apparently uncoordinated hands indicate. So embedded is the clock in our daily life that we use it to describe other movements (e.g. clockwise, anticlockwise) or directions (ever told someone to head in the 3 o’clock direction?) Yet, when in 1551 Oda Nobunaga, arguably Japan’s then most powerful warlord, was presented with a clock by the Jesuit Louis Frois, he returned it saying that “it would be useless in his hands” (p. 53). In this dissertation Yulia Frumer shows that, despite Nobunaga’s assertions, Western time-pieces could be very useful indeed. However, their utility could only be achieved by integrating them into early modern Japanese time-keeping practices. In this fastidious deconstruction of technological determinism, Frumer shows that the adoption of Western time-keeping mechanisms led not to a transformation in Japanese time-keeping practices, but rather to a transformation of Western clocks to fit Japanese conceptions of time.

Chapter 1 provides an explanation of the differences between Western and early modern Japanese conceptions of time. The Western system of a 24-hour day and solar year had the benefit of seasons falling on roughly the same dates in each year, but the disadvantage of months of unequal lengths that started and ended on different days of the week. In contrast, Edo-period Japanese used a system of ‘variable hours’. In this convention inherited from China, the day was divided into 12 ‘hours’ (toki or koku), each designated by one of the twelve animal signs. Six of these ‘hours’ fell during daylight hours and the remaining six at night. Seasonal variations in daylight meant that an ‘hour’ could last anywhere from about 77 to 156 ‘minutes’ with daylight and night time ‘hours’ equal only during the equinoxes. Frumer also shows how time-consciousness was nurtured and regulated centrally through calendar making and locally through the ringing of bells and drums. Far from being at the mercy of climatic divination, Edo-period Japanese were bound by a shared notion of human-regulated time.

The second chapter looks at how Western mechanisms were adapted to measure Japanese time. This, first of all, required changes to the appearance of the clock. Roman numerals were replaced with digits representing the animal indications for the hours. Then, the mechanism had to be changed to cope with the variable hours system. There were many types of clocks in existence in early modern Europe, but the most common was one wherein the speed of rotating mechanism was regulated by weights attached to a rod emanating from a bell. The rotation of the bell could be speeded up by moving weights outward, and slowed down by moving them inward. This system was exploited in Japan to create longer and shorter hours. It however required daily adjustment and frequent maintenance. Convenience is shown not to be the driver of technological adoption it is often presumed to be. Long after the introduction of spring-driven clocks, which required much less adjustment, weight-driven systems continued to predominate.

Thereafter the focus shifts away from clocks as mechanisms for measuring time to consider how their uses instigated shifts in the perception of time and space. As Frumer points out, “time-measurement without purpose is meaningless” (p. 135). Thus, Chapter 3 looks at how the aims of its users – whether they sought to use them to measure the time between eclipses or as a means of calculating geographical distance – resulted in clocks with radically different appearances, characteristics and functions.

This segues nicely into the discussion in Chapter 4 on how the use of clocks enabled geographical space to be newly envisaged as a time-based continuum. The use of time-measuring devices enabled astronomers to measure latitude, and this new knowledge was appropriated by geographers for mapping. The political value of this new-found knowledge can be seen most clearly in the case of the mapping of Ezo (present-day Hokkaido), an act that enabled symbolic possession of the territory, and later its actual possession. The discovery, too, that Sakhalin (Karafuto) was in fact an island rather than a peninsula, meant that its status as Russian territory could be called into question. Frumer also shows that once highly guarded maps of Japan began to circulate in Europe, Japan became at the mercy of a European geographical system that pushed it to the periphery.

Chapter 5 explores the reasons behind the popularity of Western mechanical clocks. Despite being cumbersome and requiring almost constant maintenance, these objects were highly desired and were collected by some even outside the ruling elite for their own personal possession. Frumer contends that it was the mechanical nature of clocks that stoked this desire, and links their popularity to that of automata (karakuri dolls), which were often a public spectacle in Edo Japan. Although karakuri dolls were made to look and act as humanly as possible, no one could be under any impression that they were animate as their creators invariably ensured that their mechanical workings were rendered visible. Correspondingly, clockmakers would peel away any veneer of the occult or mysterious by adjusting time pieces to show their inner mechanisms, thereby providing an analogous, albeit less public, spectacle.

The final chapter looks at the calendrical reform of 1873, which imposed the Gregorian calendar and consigned the system of variable hours to history. Nothing reveals the contingency of time keeping conventions as much as the frustration of those who attempted to explain the new time-keeping practices to an often bewildered populace. Introduction of the new conventions stimulated a proliferation of tables to enable people to ‘translate’ the new time-keeping practices with the ones to which they were most accustomed. As Frumer shows, there was nothing at all obvious about the Western system. Its eventual acceptance was facilitated by machinations on the part of those who sought to heighten the links between these practices and Western numerical systems, which conjured associations with efficiency, sophistication and utility. There was nothing inherently ‘modern’ about the new time, “it was just the kind of time we use in the period we decided to call modernity” (p. 182).

Frumer is to be commended for this highly cogent work in which she calls upon a range of sources including physical objects themselves (many photographs of mechanical clocks and time keeping mechanisms are included in this richly illustrated study) as well as texts, such as manuals and novels from the entire Edo period. In doing so, she critiques the notion that time consciousness was a phenomenon novel to the Meiji period, and convincingly demonstrates that Edo-period Western clocks were not necessarily regarded merely as curios by their owners. However, the most compelling accomplishment of this study is the powerful reminder it provides of the benefit of integrating Western and non-Western histories of technology. Turning a mirror on many taken-for-granted, seemingly obvious practices illuminates their situatedness in the culture from which they emerge.

Ruselle Meade
Lecturer in Japanese Studies
University of Manchester
rusellemeade@gmail.com

Primary Sources

Seiko Horological Institute
National Science Museum (Tokyo)
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Tokyo National Museum
Waseda Online Collection of Chinese and Japanese Classics

Dissertation Information

Princeton University. 2012. 292 pp. Primary Advisor: Benjamin Elman.

Image: Mechanism of a Japanese Clock, from Hosokawa Hanzo’s 細川半蔵 Karakuri-Zui 機巧図彙 (1796). Wikimedia Commons.