Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity by Wei Yu Wayne Tan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity by Wei Yu Wayne Tan Gerald Groemer Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity. By Wei Yu Wayne Tan. University of Michigan Press, 2022. 266 pages. ISBN: 9780472075485 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). It will surprise few readers of this journal to hear that men and women with visual disabilities played a major role in the development of early modern Japanese culture. Visually impaired men recited Tale of the Heike and other narratives (as they had since medieval times); composed the bulk of the koto repertory; created countless songs with shamisen accompaniment; served as acupuncturists, masseurs, moneylenders, and scholars; and engaged in innumerable other professions. Especially in western and southern provinces, visually disabled biwa-playing priests or monks (mōsō) cultivated and performed their own genres of narrative and song. Visually disabled women worked as musicians (goze), folk-religious healers, and shamans and created and performed a variety of sung and narrative genres that they diffused to every region of the land. Excellent Japanese-language studies of the blind men's guild (tōdō), of goze and mōsō organizations, and of the arts and activities of visually disabled individuals have been available for decades. In Western languages, scholars including Susan Matisoff, Ingrid Fritsch, Hugh de Ferranti, Alison Tokita, Maren Ehlers, and myself have published many papers, book chapters, and monographs on the subject. In the study under review, based on a 2015 dissertation submitted to Harvard University, Wei Yu Wayne Tan sets out to present a more complete picture of visual disability in early modern Japan. This is a laudable effort, and several chapters of the book shed welcome light on regions that have not yet been adequately illuminated in Western-language research. [End Page 334] But first, who is to count as the subject of a book titled Blind in Early Modern Japan? Who in Edo-period Japan was considered blind? This cannot be determined outside of its specific historical and cultural context and requires examining the society within which the language and criteria for identification and categorization are situated. Tan is of course aware of this and assures the reader that his use of the term "blind people" foregrounds "the experience and identity of blind people and also reflects the references in historical sources" (p. xiv). Yet since Edo-period Japanese did not use English, the notion that certain persons considered themselves "blind people" thanks to their experience and self-identification as "blind people" is either false or tautological. Early modern Japanese with visual disabilities did not, in truth, identify or experience themselves as "blind people" at all. Rather, they described themselves as zatō, kengyō, goze, oyakata, zamoto, or the like when they spoke of their attributed social status or their position in an occupational collective; as mekura (dark-eyed—today a discriminatory term), me ga warui (eyes are bad), me ga mienai (eyes cannot see), or the like when explaining their impairment or disability; as "masseur" or "biwa player" when referring to their occupation; as "father" or "son" when relating their family situation; or as "poor" or "wealthy" when considering their economic position in society. This clutter of categories and self-identifications obviously presents a problem for a writer wishing to represent what being blind in early modern Japan was all about, and Tan wisely recognizes that "blind people," however defined, constitutes a crowd far too large and heterogeneous to be adequately covered in one monograph. Instead of seeking to include anyone and everyone who could be counted as somehow visually impaired, Tan focuses on the largely subjective claim of "disabled identity" (p. 5) and on the notion of "status identity," which seeks to combine the objectivity of social status—something Tan too simplistically maintains was "defined by occupation" (p. 7)—with a notion of identity that hovers between a social attribution and an individual choice. The two concepts are interrelated because Tan defines blind status identity as a "disabled identity tied to membership in the Kyoto guild" (p. 9). "Blind people" in early modern Japan cannot, however, be defined on the basis of guild membership, because such membership was...