The Poetics of Place: Travel in Premodern Japan

Mike Sugimoto

doi:10.18573/alt.33

Abstract

The study of Asian cultures from the Western academy has been characterized as Orientalism, the ‘goods’ in knowledge a cultural parallel to the territorial gains won in the heyday of Western colonialism. For some key Euro-Americans, knowing the foreign Other was an antidote to a perceived dead end of Western science and rationalism. Simply put, Asia resonated as social and philosophic plenitude. In this regard, premodern Japanese poetry, with its 1300 year-old, lyrical tradition, was seen as a tradition of immanence and, therefore, as a welcomed alternative to Western philosophic abstraction. Countering this, I suggest that utamakura (canonized, poetic place names) as a regulative, interpretive category from the earliest 7th century anthology of the Manyoshu on through the medieval period ending in the 17th century suggests a formidable idealist tradition, which regulated expectations and experience of travel in the premodern period.

Highlights

The study of Asian cultures from the Western academy has been characterized as Orientalism, the ‘goods’ in knowledge a cultural parallel to the territorial gains won in the heyday of Western colonialism
The contention is that postmodernism universally applies notions of pluralism that requires an Oriental ‘straw man’ to situate the Western experience of cultural and philosophic fragmentation; postmodern pluralism can never be a clear break from its own past
Postmodernist pluralism may be better seen as a radical, nostalgic4 gesture that redefines, renames and recategorizes 'the present' narrative of Others 'a past' that is the Western rationalist project

Summary

Introduction

The study of Asian cultures from the Western academy has been characterized as Orientalism, the ‘goods’ in knowledge a cultural parallel to the territorial gains won in the heyday of Western colonialism. There are numerous examples of codification in literary narrative, but I will focus in on utamakura, "poetic place names," to illustrate the way transcendent idealism dictates the expression of the subject/poet, creating an elaborate aestheticization of language to register meaning within a self-referential language system.

Results

Conclusion