Women in Huang Zunxian's Riben zashi shi (Poems On Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan)

Abstract

Poems about women from the Riben zashi shi (Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan) by Huang Zunxian constitute about ten per cent of the collection as a whole; most are translated and annotated here. These poems and Huang's own attached commentaries create a fascinating mixture of fact, sensibility, and interest that attempts both to describe Japanese women in terms of variations on the traditional cultural roles and characteristics of Chinese women and to account for who they then were and how they behaved in terms of the general process of modernisation/westernisation, which then, during the early Meiji era, was transforming practically all aspects of Japanese life. As with other subjects, a strong sense of the tension between tradition and modernity underlies such poems, leaving the reader at times with a suspension of resolution between them and at others with the hope that the present could lead to a more hopeful future. In either case, the relationship between the sexes is examined with wit and insight, and the changes that this relationship were then undergoing are treated as an integral and inevitable dimension of the modernisation process.