Classical Japanese Literature Research Articles

A Robust Residual Shrinkage Balanced Network for Image Recognition from Japanese Historical Documents

Kuzushiji, as characters written in a cursive style, had been continuously used for both publishing and handwriting in Japan before the end of the 19th century. However, well into the twentieth century, most modern Japanese lost the ability to read Kuzushiji due to changes in writing systems. Therefore, how to develop advanced machine learning algorithms to identify Japanese historical characters has great significance in preserving cultural knowledge and promoting sustainable development in urban living. Unlike traditional digit image recognition, Kuzushiji image recognition is a more challenging task due to the complex script for cursive handwriting, multiple variations between characters, and imbalanced data. To address such issues, a novel deep learning-based character recognition method called residual shrinkage balanced network (RSBN) is developed for classifying Japanese historical characters. A novel residual shrinkage structure with a soft threshold function is constructed to reduce redundant features using specially designed skip-connected subnetworks. Then, multiple residual shrinkage modules are stacked together to learn hierarchical features from raw input. Furthermore, a novel class rebalancing strategy is further designed to improve learning performance from imbalanced data. The experiments are conducted on Japanese classical literature datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains more than 89.01% testing accuracy on Kuzushiji-MNIST dataset, which outperforms the existing deep learning-based character image recognition methods. Moreover, without additional data augmentation techniques, the proposed approach also achieves 97.16% balanced accuracy on Kuzushiji-49 dataset, which is the best one compared with existing published results. When considering the computational performance, the number of trainable parameters of the proposed method is competitive with that of the typical ResNet-18.

Aesthetic Ideas in Japanese Classical Literature in the New Media Era

With the rapid development of new media technology, people's reading and cultural consumption methods are also undergoing tremendous changes. However, under the background of this change, Japanese classical literature, as a traditional cultural form, still has rich aesthetic concepts and cultural values. From the perspective of aesthetics, this article discusses the aesthetic concepts in Japanese classical literature in the new media era, aiming to reveal its inspiration and value to contemporary culture.

한국에서의 일본고전문학교육의 의의에 관한 고찰 - 『만엽집』을 중심으로 -

As we have seen in this paper, Japanese classical education in Korea is in a serious crisis. Recognizing this reality, the professors of the Japanese classical literature major diagnosed that one of the main reasons was the existing teaching method used in the classical literature class. Therefore, we tried to overcome the crisis of Japanese classical literature education by introducing new teaching methods such as flipped learning, video, animation, etc. to classical literature education. It is true that such hard work has paid off. However, it is also true that the reality of Japanese classical literature education is becoming more difficult. In order to improve the reality of Japanese classical literature education even a little, this paper pointed out that ‘Why should we learn Japanese classical literature’, that is, the significance of Japanese classical literature education, is important. In other words, he said that it is important to share the significance of Japanese classical literature education between professors and students. And the relevance to Korea, which had been overlooked in the significance of Japanese classical literature education, was paid attention to. I think this paper is meaningful in that it re􋹲examined the significance of Japanese classical education to overcome the crisis of Japanese classical education, and raised the need to teach and learn Japanese classical literature in relation to Korea, which previous studies had not yet mentioned.

Some Perspectives of the Globes on the Classics：On the Synchronicity between Japanese Classics Literature Studies and Global Networking

In 2017, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, to which I belong, officially launched a project called “The Consortium for Global Japanese Studies”, of which I have been playing a small part. In this paper, I will introduce this project and discuss how the development of global and international Japanese studies as a public service will affect my personal research on classical Japanese literature. I will discuss and present the specific aspects of this project in the context of my recently published books and articles. I have come to the conclusion that, in addition to the direct impact of studies in this field, it is important to consider the possibility of indirect inspiration, or what might be called synchronicity, which could revitalize Japanese studies in a broader sense. I will discuss this issue while also introducing my own research.

Can the Periphery Speak: The Self-Representation of Tokugawa Japan’s Periphery in Suzuki Bokushi’s Hokuetsu Seppu

Suzuki Bokushi (1770–1842) was a peasant-entrepreneur, essayist and amateur haikai poet who lived in the Echigo province of Tokugawa period Japan, a region which gets the highest amount of snowfall in the world. Bokushi wrote about the people of his region, their customs, their lifestyle, their relationship with the natural world and the folklores of the region in a book entitled Hokuetsu Seppu (1837). This essay will examine the ways this book interrogated the dominant cultural discourse and offered new ways of thinking about centre and periphery, urban and rural. An analysis of the text and context of the book will show how ‘provinciality’ was deployed to question and de-centre prevailing cultural norms, and how a new aesthetic sense was developed that contrasted and questioned the urban sensibilities prevailing in the political centre. This essay will argue that Bokushi’s book articulates a significant critique of the urban-centric discourse of classical Japanese literature, while also offering an alternative rural aesthetic, thereby countering the hegemonic tendency to read the Japanese past through the lens of urban-centric literature. His writings are what Fredric Jameson would call a ‘nonhegemonic cultural voice’.

“Inexpressible” Conceptions about Disasters

In Japanese classical literature, there is almost no work which pays significant attention to disasters. However, the 13th century text Hojoki by Kamo no Chomei depicts five serious disasters which occurred in the last stage of the Heian period, and is therefore a form of disaster literature that was a departure in the Japanese tradition. Pre-modern people understood disaster as the result of an entity that exceeds human intelligence becoming angry and inflicting suffering on a mass scale. They engaged in fortune-telling in order to discover the cause of such disasters. They attempted to calm the superhuman entity, thereby ameliorating the effects of a given disaster. These are the core elements of the conception of disaster in Japanese classical literature. Hojoki however is different, as it does not understand disaster in terms of supernatural causality. Kamo no Chomei said that a disaster is “a Fushigi”, which is a mysterious phenomenon. People cannot explain “Fushigi” by means of language, but he made this attempt. Through his efforts, Hojoki became an iconic classical text, and the prototype of the more modern Japanese conception of disaster.

Cooperative E-learning Applications Based on HTML-5 Canvas for Japanese Classical Literature Education

Cooperative E-learning Applications Based on HTML-5 Canvas for Japanese Classical Literature Education

An Aversion to the Elderly in Classical Japanese Literature: Focusing on Senicide Tales and Humorous Depictions

본 논문에서는 일본 고전 문학에서 노인을 어떻게 묘사하고 있는지 분석하여 현대 일본의 노인 이미지의 원류를 밝히려 했다. 일본 고전문학에는 버려지는 노인을 다룬 기로설화가 다수 존재한다. 대표적인 오바스테(姨捨) 설화는 산속에 버려진 노녀에 대한 이야기이다. 『곤자쿠 모노가타리슈(今昔物語集)』 등에 전해지는 이야기 속에서 노녀는 노화에 따른 신체의 변화를 이유로 버려지게 된다. 기로는 보통 경제적인 원인이 거론되지만, 노화에 따른 신체변화에 대한 두려움과 기피는 가족(가정)내에서 노인을 고립시켰고, 이것이 기로의 한 원인이었다고 생각된다. 이는 이후 노녀가 인적이 드문 산 속에 사는 야마우바(山姥)라는 요괴 이미지로 정착되는 계기가 되었다. 나아가 야마우바는 이후 남성 중심의 가부장 사회에서 자녀나 배우자에게 부양받지 못하는 노녀와 연결되게 된다. 이하라 사이카쿠(井原西鶴)의 『사이카쿠 쇼코쿠바나시(西鶴諸国ばなし)』에는 재색을 겸비한 미녀가 홀로 노인이 되어 결국 야마우바가 되는 이야기가 실려있다. 가난하고 외모가 쇠퇴한 노인은 사회적으로 고립되고 배척되어 요괴라는 혐오의 대상이 되어 버린 것이다. 혐오 대상은 두렵거나 조롱의 대상이 되기도 한다. 노인은 에도시대(江戸時代)에 바달한 소화(笑話)에서는 가난으로 인해 재물에 집착하는 모습, 주변사람들의 기피로 인해 사랑하는 모습이 희화화 되어 묘사되고 있다. 재물과 사랑을 추구하는 인간적인 욕구조차 혐오의 대상인 노인에게는 허락되지 않는 것이다.

Songwriting and functional load in the “Diary of Ephemeral Life”

In the history of Japan, the Heian era is considered the golden age, the heyday of aristocratic literature. It was then that the aristocracy became the creator of literary works, which to this day are the masterpieces of world literature. One of the unique phenomena of Japanese classical literature is recognized diary, including female diary literature of the Heian era (IX-XII centuries). Diary literature differs from other genres in terms of presentation style, artistic language, plot and composition, figurative system, presentation methods. Mitsitsuno no haha (935-996), who enriched the Japanese medieval art tradition with an original literary style, a new theme, a new poetic vision, new sensuality, is recognized as the most striking representative of womens diary literature in Japan. In the Diary of Ephemeral Life, by Mitsitsu no haha the tradition of poetic inserts is widely embodied, a special layer of poetic material (three-part, five-part) is highlighted. They serve as a necessary attribute for conveying an emotional mood, creating an image, enhancing important moments of importance. Considering the artistic features of the diary, the author of the article makes an attempt to suggest that poems are additional material in the transfer of various emotional states of the heroine. Poetic insertions enhance one or another mood, establish an emotional connection between the external and internal world of the author. Analysis of poetic inserts makes it possible to determine their functional load.

The authority and female persecution in Japanese classical literature

The authority and female persecution in Japanese classical literature

THE EXTRALINGUISTIC FACTORS ON THE INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATIONS OF ‘PERSON REFERENT ELLIPSIS’ IN CLASSICAL JAPANESE

This study addressed the differences in ‘person referent’ ellipsis in four different intralingual translations of a classical Japanese text titled The Diary of Lady Murasaki (1008-1010), which date from 1918, 1933, 1954 and 1965 accordingly. This study aimed to reveal the extralinguistical factors that effected the changes seen in the different intralingual translations regarding the ‘person referent’ ellipsis. Firstly it is focused to the factors effected the changes in Japanese. Then the text analysis is applied. The data gathered from text analysis have been construed in the light of extralinguistical factors. The following results are reached: a)1918 translation reflects the influence of language polices such as standard language and unification of written and spoken language, while a close connection reflects with classical language, b)1933 translation is on the border line with previous language policies and militarist language policies, c)1954 translation shows a transition between militarist language policies to American occupation language policies in Japan, d)1965 translation is an example of the Western influence after the American occupation. This investigation not only contributes to translation studies in the context of Japanese and intralingual translations, but also to the studies on Lady Murasaki, her diary, and the studies on classical Japanese literature.

Influence of Ancient Chinese Literati’s Autumn Melancholy on the Tale of Genji Considering Computer Data Analysis Technology

As the most representative work of Japanese classical literature, the Tale of Genji can be referred to as a tragedy classic. Its description of the scene of “Things” is complex and vivid. The changes of external things induce fluctuation of subjective feelings and thoughts of people. To explore the autumn, one of the seasons in the Tale of Genji, the author exects to further understand how the main character’s deep sorrow and nostalgia are shown in the volume Emperor Kiritsubo through the depiction of autumn scenery.

Marion PoschmannThe Pine Islands by Jen Calleja

premise of a collegiate backpacker is given complexity and drama as Anna unexpectedly deviates from the typical European tourist cities to explore the Balkans in the summer of 1968. Even twenty years out from World War II, the persistence of anti-Semitism makes her mountain passage fraught with danger. The story slopes suddenly into one of political intrigue, cultural identity, and the fight to resist erasure by the dominant power structures. Levy has previously published nonfiction on the history and culture of the Balkans, and her expertise shines as Anna is pulled deeper into the world of underground political resistance. Anna’s Dance is sometimes surreal with its hairpin twists and turns and can feel breathless at times. It is difficult to say whether this is done purposefully, to mimic the tempestuous history of the Balkans and its shifting political allegiances, or whether the book could have used more time and space to foster a connection between its readers and the heroine. In many ways, Anna is not a heroine at all or even a true protagonist. The events of the story seem to just happen to her as she thumbs a ride on a half-hearted and fearful search for an identity she would often rather run from. The people she meets along the way, however, have a depth, strength, and deep devotion to their heritage that is compelling and engaging. The history as told by these rebels and resistance fighters is fascinating and personal, and where Levy comes into her own as a storyteller. The history of the Macedonian Question and the Balkan Wars, as told by freedom fighters Spiro and Kosta in the dim light of kitchens and dance halls, becomes as relevant as today’s social justice movements, a grim but hopeful reminder of the constancy of civil unrest and the fight of the underdog for a fairer world. Ultimately, their passion transforms Anna, who comes to a deeper understanding of the importance of her heritage and the preservation of the traditions of those that came before her, and those who will come after. Elizabeth Stevens University of Oklahoma Marion Poschmann The Pine Islands Trans. Jen Calleja. Toronto. Coach House Books. 2020. 160 pages. THE DELIGHT IN CLASSIFICATION in classical Japan, or perhaps the taste for precision, extended even to the aesthetic appearances of matsu, or pine trees, which could be divided according to their forms. Chokkan: upright trunk tapering off at the top. Mōyogi: the S-shape. Shakkan: trunk bent at a forty-five-degree angle. Fukinagashi : the windswept form. Kengai: the cascade. Bunjingi: the weathered, timeworn look, beloved of poets. Matsu were an important subject in classical Japanese literature, and none more so than the pine islands of Matsushima. “Matsushima, ah! / Aa-ah, Matsushima, ah! / Matsushima, ah!” wrote the haiku master Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), lost for words at the sight of them, in a famous but possibly apocryphal poem. His dream of seeing the moon rise over the pine islands was the impetus for the journey recounted in his classic Narrow Road to the Interior (1702). Gilbert Sullivan, the protagonist of German author Marion Poschmann’s first novel translated into English, The Pine Islands, travels to Japan on a whim, convinced by a dream that his wife is cheating on him. He is a middle-aged scholar, unsuccessful and disappointed with life, the foremost expert on a subject so ridiculous one can just imagine it as the fiercely defended turf of some embittered junior academic: beard styles or, to be precise, beard fashions and representations of the divine in art. A copy of Bashō’s Narrow Road, bought at the airport, convinces him to repeat the journey across the north of Japan, though instead of walking 2,400 kilometers to Matsushima and back, Sullivan travels mostly by bullet train. According to Sam Hamill, who translated Bashō’s Narrow Road, the haiku master ’s poem of wordless rapture in front of the famous pine islands reveals hints of mono no aware, an aesthetic category central to classical Japanese literature. Mono no aware—literally, the pathos of things—described a sense of rapture over the ephemeral, a perception of “natural poignancy in the beauty...

Classical Japanese Literature in the Global Context (on Genji monogatari )

Classical Japanese Literature in the Global Context (on Genji monogatari )

Representations of the Wutai Mountains in classical Japanese literature

ABSTRACTChina’s Wutai mountains make scattered appearances in classical Japanese literature, but mostly outside the conventional literary mainstream. In courtly literature, Wutai is mentioned occasionally in works both in the vernacular and in classical Chinese. Medieval war tales too allude to events at Wutai, occasionally in tangential episodes added to late versions of the texts. In collections of popular didactic anecdotes one can find, for example, miraculous stories concerning Japanese pilgrims who visited Wutai. Popular song collections also include lyrics mentioning Wutai, often in lists of noteworthy mountains. Poems in Chinese by medieval Zen monks mention Wutai, some of them paying homage to Mañjuśrī, others more directly tied to Zen lore. Finally, Wutai is mentioned in noh plays, most notably in a play about a Japanese pilgrim that features a lively dance. The dance later evolved into a genre of kabuki plays. Classical Japanese literature was strongly influenced by Buddhist ideas and Wutai was well known for its association with Mañjuśrī and as a pilgrimage destination. Although one finds references to Wutai throughout classical Japanese literature, it is not as conspicuous as one might expect.

Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children by Laura Moretti

Reviewed by: Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children by Laura Moretti Peter MacMillan Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children. By Laura Moretti. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 130 pages. Hardcover, €59.00/$65.00. Though written by multiple hands over a long time span, Tales of Ise (hereafter referred to as the Tales) is a work of great profundity, at once original, experimental, subversive, and filled with wit and humor as well as elegance and beauty. Along with The Tale of Genji, Hyakunin isshu, and the Kokin waka shū, the Tales is one of the four most important works in Japanese classical literature, and knowledge of it is a prerequisite for understanding Japanese cultural and literary history. Constructed as a series of poem tales (uta monagatari), the Tales comprises 125 short narratives that function as suitable contexts for the poems they incorporate, which are mostly love poems. The diverse episodes, many of which depict the famous real-life poet Ariwara no Narihira (825–880), together present a unified picture of the cultural mores, aesthetics, and “way of love” of aristocratic society in the early part of the Heian period. The Tales became a basic text in the éducation sentimentale of the Japanese and a fundamental part of the literary education of poets and other men and women of learning for a thousand years. Ever since it was written, it has influenced all aspects of art and literature, from waka poetry and noh theater to diaries and fiction. Indeed, without the Tales it is difficult to imagine the creation of the greatest novel of Japanese literature, the eleventh-century Tale of Genji. Over three hundred editions of the Tales were issued in the Edo period (1600–1868), making it an outstanding success and the best-selling book of that era. Unlike [End Page 258] the long chapters of The Tale of Genji, the episodes in the Tales are short and highly readable, and the work was often quoted in poetry, plays, and other literature, making it required reading for sophisticated Edoites who would have been expected to recognize such allusions. Much recent research on the Tales focuses on its reception, including its history of translation; on its inspiration of multiple works of art from paintings and screens to noh plays; and on gender issues. So broad was its readership that the Tales was even used as a textbook for teaching children, as revealed in Laura Moretti’s recent study Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children, a re-creation in image and text of the 1766 picture book Ise fūryū: Utagaruta no hajimari (The Fashionable Ise: The Origins of Utagaruta). Scholarship until now has not examined the reading age of the Tales, and Moretti makes an important contribution to filling this gap. Part 1 of the book reviews scholarship on chapbooks and the similar kusazōshi, discusses Utagaruta in relation to the reception history of the original Tales, and contextualizes the former work within children’s literature. It concludes with a coda that concisely summarizes the current state of research on Japanese children’s literature, pointing out that the field is still in its formative stage. Part 2, the heart of the book, consists of a diplomatic transcription and a translation of the Utagaruta, accompanied by extensive and informed annotations to each of the picture book’s images. These annotations explain the differences between the original Tales and this version for children and provide detailed analyses of the visual iconography and motifs. In this section Moretti allocates four pages to each two-page spread in the original. The first pair of pages reproduces the original illustration and text from the National Institute of Japanese Literature on the left with the transcription on the right. The next two pages provide the English translation of the text followed by commentary on the illustration. Some would surely have preferred an edited transcription (kōtei) that would have made the text more readable by substituting hiragana with kanji and adding punctuation. By choosing the diplomatic transcription, however, Moretti offers scholars of Japanese studies the opportunity to relish a text that approximates the...

Inferring meaning from words and phrases in classical Japanese literature

Inferring meaning from words and phrases in classical Japanese literature

KAWABATA AND NEO-SENSUALISM ON THE SILK ROAD

early twenties in Japanese literature and were marked by the rapid development of various modernist trends. There were many different literary movements in those years, but among them all, two groups of modernist views stood out: new art and the most interesting phenomenon in Japanese modernist literature of the time, so-called known as The Literature of Feelings. From the point of view of Japanese neo-sensualists, literature should not be merely a copy of objective reality; in their opinion, literature is always the fruit of subjective impressions, feelings, author’s doubts. One of the most significant representatives of neo-sensualism is Yasunari Kawabata, who has taken a special place in this group of young artists. Unlike the others, he did not abandon national artistic traditions, classical ideas, and images about beauty. Neo-sensualists have much in common with traditional Japanese aesthetics. characteristics of neosensualism, the freshness and expressiveness of metaphors, the focus on the nuances of human feelings and emotions are the hallmarks of classical Japanese literature, especially poetry, but they were proclaimed innovative at that time. This was the reason why Kawabata's novella The Dancing Girl of Izu published in 1926 was considered a typical work of neo-sensualism. A story of first love, in which the word love was never mentioned, but coloured by subtle nuances of feelings of joy, confusion, restlessness, pain, gratitude. Created in the tradition of classical Japanese literature, it was the first significant work in which the distinctive features of the artist Kawabata’s style – honesty, gentleness, delicacy and serenity – are manifested

The Poetics of Nativism: Motoori Norinaga and the Sacralization of Japanese Literature

Motoori Norinaga occupies an ambivalent place in the history of Japanese thought as at once a brilliant literary critic and a vociferous proponent of Japanese nativism. Most studies have tended to focus on one or the other facet of Norinaga's thought. Even when the two have been analyzed in relation to each other, attention has been paid to his nativism as the foundation of his intellectual project. This article, by contrast, argues that Norinaga's poetics, particularly his theory of mono no aware, or sensitivity to the emotive power of things, played a constitutive role in his articulation of a nativist politics. More specifically, it suggests that Norinaga's nativism was predicated on his construction of classical Japanese literature as a sacred Way and situates this sacralizing effort in the medieval tradition of Buddhist waka poetics founded by the poet Fujiwara no Shunzei.

Irogonomi and Kōshoku – Ideals of Sensual Love in Japanese Classical Literature

Irogonomi and Kōshoku – Ideals of Sensual Love in Japanese Classical Literature