Early Modern Japanese Research Articles

근세일본의 남만무역과 예수회 선교사추방령에 대한 연구

Purpose: This paper is an investigative study of the process from the introduction of flintlock guns by Polpogal trading ships in 1543, to Francisco Xavier's arrival in Japan six years later, to the edict expelling Jesuit missionaries in 1587. Research design, data, and methodology: This was the period when Nobunaga of Japan appeared and ruled the country, and Nobunaga committed suicide due to the Honno-ji incident and Hideyoshi Toyotomo became his successor. Then came the Azuchi-Momoyama period, when Hideyoshi unified Japan and there was serious conflict between trade with Portugal and Christian missionary work. Results: During the early modern Japanese Christian century (1549-1650), Christianity experienced an initial missionary period, a period of growth and development, and finally the appearance of martyrs. Nobunaga embraced Christianity to get rid of Buddhism, and Hideyoshi distributed an edict expelling Jesuit missionary Christianity to protect trade. During the Kirishitan century (1549-1650) in early modern Japan, Christianity went through a period of growth, a period of secrecy, and ultimately the emergence of martyrs. Nobunaga accepts Christianity to eliminate Buddhism, and Hideyoshi to promulgate an edict expelling Jesuit missionarie Christianity to protect trade. Implications: Starting with Sumitada Omura in 1563, Yoshitaka Kuroda in 1577, Sorin Otomo in 1578, Harunobu Arima in 1580, Yukinaga Konishi in 1584, and others were baptized and a group of so-called Christian daimyo emerged. They burn down Japan's shrines and Buddhism, dedicate Nagasaki as an ecclesiastical ordinance, and Hideyoshi expresses his disquiet and promulgates an expulsion order for the Jesuit missionaries.

중일(中日) 근대문예론의 형성과 그 이동(異同)에 관한 소고(小考)

This paper attempts to compare the literary theory of Tsubouchi Shoyo(坪內逍遙), which was developed from the 'arts-the arts' examined throughout Wang Guowei's(王國維) literary theory, and Wang Guei's literary theory, which was established as the early modern Japanese literary theory. As Tsubouchi Shoyo's first statement, 'Novels are art(美術)' in 『Shosetsu Shinzui(小說神髓)』 opened the chapter of modern Japanese literary theory, this paper aims to explore Wang Guowei's literary theories in relation to the formation of modern literary theory in China. Therefore, in the case of the formation of Japanese modern art theory, Tsubouchi Shoyo's use of Western literary theory and logic in his own way within the magnetic field of pragmatic thought and literary dance theory that spread throughout Japanese society in the 1880s, while building a literary theory that incorporated the discourse of the Japanese art world at the time, was used as a guide to examine the formation of Chinese modern art theory and Wang Guowei's literary theory treatise. This was further utilized to examine the shifts in the theses that were common to their literary theories. In fact, the formation environment of Sino-Japanese modern literary theory was different in terms of its reception and paragraph situation according to the way the two countries experienced modern East Asia, but there are also similar points. It is also true that Wang Guowei's and Tsubouchi Shoyo's views and arguments on the literary arts developed in very different ways after they published their literary theory works and related papers, depending on their respective life trajectories and the circumstances of their respective countries. Nevertheless, neither Tsubouchi Shoyo nor Wang Guowei built a separate literary theory that completely excluded the dominant discourse in the academic and literary circles of their time. Rather, Wang Guowei, who studied a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics and natural sciences, could be said to have been more attuned to and thought about the axioms of modern China's time and built his literary theories in response to them.

The Flowing Chō : Cart Transportation and the Redefinition of Japan's Early Modern Urban Space

Abstract: This article proposes a reinterpretation of the meaning and function of the basic sociospatial unit of the early modern Japanese city, the chō . It argues that chō is best understood not as a fixed unit of space but as a conception that could expand, change, and even move. Takanawa-chō, a peripheral area south of Edo, was transformed into the gateway to the city by its association with the transportation industry. The dynamic movement of this particular "flowing chō " not only reflected but also drove the socioeconomic transformation of the city throughout the Tokugawa period and into the early Meiji era.

Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan: Materials, Makers, and Mastery, by Christine M.E. Guth

Any new publication by the senior Japanese art scholar Christine Guth is on my must-read list as she is such an original thinker and fine writer. This deceptively small book does not disappoint. It focuses on ‘craft culture’ (the author’s term) in Japan between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Guth draws upon recent scholarship in material culture studies and craft production of early modern Europe to bring new understanding not only to early modern Japanese art studies but also to the fields of material culture and early modern studies globally. She takes as a starting point for thinking about the topic the premisses that Japanese crafts are exceptional, highly regarded worldwide; that early modern society developed in Japan differently than elsewhere in the world; and that crafts production in Japan is distinguished and best understood by discussing the inter-related and co-operative networks of creators, distributors and consumers which enabled it to flourish.

A Star God Is Born: Chintaku Reifujin Talismans in Japanese Religions

This article examines a talismanic culture in Japanese religions through the case of the Chintaku reifu 鎮宅霊符 (“numinous talismans for the stabilization of residences”). Whereas previous scholarship viewed the set of seventy-two talismans as having an ancient Korean origin or connection to the Onmyōdō 陰陽道 tradition in Japan, my analysis of the talismans suggests that they arrived in Japan directly from Ming China around the late Muromachi period. Once introduced, the talismans were widely adopted across different religious traditions such as Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, and Shugendō under the name Chintaku reifujin 鎮宅霊符神 (the god of Chintaku reifu talismans) in Japan. Locating the talismans as a major force that shaped the medieval and early modern Japanese religious landscape, this article argues that the worship was not an extension or variation of Chinese Big Dipper worship but a sophisticated form of religious mosaic, which allowed an array of different forms of doctrinal thinking, cosmological knowledge, and ritual logics to coexist.

Puppy Love: The Legacy of Yi Am’s Paintings in Edo-Period Japan

This essay examines the Japanese reception of the Korean painter Yi Am 李巌(b. 1499), and by extension considers the relationship between ink painting technique and pictorial meaning. In particular, it examines how Yi Am’s unique approach to the painting of puppies with blended washes of ink opened up new interpretive possibilities among Japanese viewers. Although Yi Am’s puppy paintings appear to have been circulating in Japan as early as the seventeenth century, they were misattributed to Chinese painters such as Mao Yi, and Yi Am’s seal was mistaken as belonging to a Japanese monk-painter of the Muromachi period. The monochrome ink puppy paintings of the Kyoto artist Tawaraya Sōtatsu 俵屋宗達(ca. 1600-1640), however, depict the bodies of their canine protagonists with the same wash-based approach found in Yi Am’s works, and appear to have been catalyzed in some way by an encounter with the Korean artist’s paintings. In the case of Sōtatsu, this approach eventually came to be known as tarashikomi, a signature technique of the Rinpa School, and therefore it is no exaggeration to state that Yi Am’s works played a role in inspiring one of the most recognizable techniques of early modern Japanese painting. Although dog and puppy paintings are traditionally linked to auspicious meanings, Sōtatsu’s puppy paintings appear to have been associated within a Zen Buddhist themes, in particular the koan “A Dog Has No Buddha-Nature.” This Zen Buddhist framework of meaning can be gleaned from inscriptions on his paintings by Zen monks such as Isshi Bunshu 一絲文守(1608-1646) and Tangai Musen 丹崖無染(1693-1763). I would propose that the particular wash-based approach of Yi Am and Sōtatsu to this subject was particularly significant in generating this association. The eighteenth-century painter-poet Yosa Buson 与謝蕪村(1716-1784) also based his puppy paintings upon models derived from Yi Am. In the case of Buson, however, the cultural meaning of these works can be gleaned from his haikai poetry, in particular a poem accompanying a Maruyama Okyo 円山応挙(1733-1795) painting of a puppy that associates its inky body with the interiority of a poetic subject. The final case study examined in this essay is Itō Jakuchū 伊藤若冲(1716-1800). Jakuchū left a number of puppy paintings that embody Zen Buddhist themes in highly sophisticated ways. Because he was close to Tangai Musen, it is likely that he was aware of Sōtatsu’s puppy paintings, and indirectly familiar with those of Yi Am. Thus the case could be made that Yi Am’s wash-based technique opened up a new horizon of interpretive possibility among Japanese painters extending from Sōtatsu to Jakuchū.

A Short Visual History of Abstraction in Early Modern Japanese Karuta: Simplification, Reinterpretation, and Localization

A Short Visual History of Abstraction in Early Modern Japanese Karuta: Simplification, Reinterpretation, and Localization

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

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...

Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest by Kyokutei Bakin

Reviewed by: Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest by Kyokutei Bakin William C. Hedberg Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest. By Kyokutei Bakin. Translated by Glynne Walley. Cornell University Press, 2021. 348 pages. ISBN: 9781501755170 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Pity the scholar of early modern Japanese narrative with proselytizing ambitions. While our colleagues researching Renaissance England or Golden Age Spain can be reasonably confident that a mixed audience at a Modern Language Association convention is at least passingly familiar with the historical context and plotline of, say, Macbeth or Don Quixote, those in our field are afforded no such luxury. When presenting our research to nonspecialists at conferences, we reluctantly become participants in Monty Python's All-England Summarize Proust Competition, racing our way through tedious but necessary summary in the hope of securing a few short minutes for explication and analysis before we end. Even among peers, the twists and turns, concealed identities, and multigenerational vendettas central to genres such as yomihon, jōruri, and kabuki defy easy summary and require valuable space in our conference talks and publications to adequately contextualize. Confronted with the relentless avalanche of names, titles, battles, and historical allusions found in a baggy monster like Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden, one is initially [End Page 344] tempted to sympathize with the novelist Martin Amis, who in describing Quixote wrote, "The question 'What happens next?' has no meaning, because there is no next … there is only more."1 Or is there? Among scholars of Edo-period literature, one of the most welcome critical interventions of the past thirty years has been the insistent and long-overdue argument that the texts we study are undergirded by a rigorous system of narrative logic that is readily discernible to any reader willing to pay attention to the author's (often heavy-handed) hints about how to read the work. Seminal scholarship by, most recently, Peter Kornicki, Jonathan Zwicker, Satoko Shimazaki, Patrick Caddeau, and Rebekah Clements has directed our attention away from the narrative proper and toward the prefaces, interlineal commentary, illustrations, maps, charts, lists of characters, commemorative poems, postfaces, and advertisements that explained how texts like Hakkenden were meant to be interpreted and that were, for early modern readers, inseparable from the narrative itself. Most of these paratextual features were excised in modern typeset editions of the works, and despite our frequent reliance upon these modern editions, it is a useful exercise to think of them as butterfly specimens that have been pithed and mounted in a display case: readily visible and easily legible, but wholly shorn of the life, movement, and context that gave them meaning as social beings. It is to Glynne Walley's immense credit that he brings the materiality of early modern Japanese fiction to the forefront of his translation of Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Fusa; 1814–1842) and, in so doing, gives us a keen sense of the paratextual density and cosmopolitan dimensions of this text. Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest contains the inaugural volume (shū) of Hakkenden and four chapters of the second volume, sensibly concluding at a natural break in the narrative with the canine Yatsufusa's immaculate impregnation of Satomi Yoshizane's daughter, Fusehime; the release of the embryonic spirits of the eponymous dog-knights; and the beginning of the warrior-monk Chudai's quest to locate and gather the warriors. As Bakin himself reminds the reader in a postface to the final chapter included in the translation, "everything from the 1st Book of the Inaugural Volume through to the end of the present Book constitutes but the opening stage of the whole" (p. 292), and as Walley notes in the translator's introduction, An Ill-Considered Jest comprises less than one-tenth of the complete Hakkenden. Before discussing the translation itself, I must give due praise to its translator for his Yoshizane-esque ambitions in embarking on such a venture, and to Cornell University Press for supporting an epic project and ensuring that the job is done well. An Ill-Considered...

Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and "Meisho Zue" in Late Tokugawa Japan by Robert Goree

Reviewed by: Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and "Meisho Zue" in Late Tokugawa Japan by Robert Goree R. Keller Kimbrough Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and "Meisho Zue" in Late Tokugawa Japan. By Robert Goree. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. 400 pages. ISBN: 9780674247871 (hardcover). Collectors, bibliographers, and even amateur aficionados of early modern Japanese woodblock-printed books tend to be familiar with the vast and varied genre of illustrated meisho zue "gazetteers," a distinctive type of popular publication that took the Japanese book market by storm from around the end of the eighteenth century. Indeed, meisho zue were printed in such great numbers that the shelves and catalogues of antiquarian book dealers today can be hard to peruse without encountering multiple examples from the genre. Nevertheless, until now there has been no book-length English-language study of these works, largely because of the confining nature of our own disciplinary boundaries and the difficulty of categorizing meisho zue—as literature, art, cartography, or some other publishing genre. Robert Goree's Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and "Meisho Zue" in Late Tokugawa Japan remedies this omission by addressing the history and conventions of meisho zue from the eighteenth century through the early Meiji period (1868–1912). Goree's work is methodologically rigorous, insightful, and well researched in English and Japanese, and Goree rightly maintains that meisho zue, which he describes as a kind of "nonfictional fantasy geography," belongs to "the history of Japanese literature and cartography" (p. 67, emphasis in original). To make sense of an enormous and relatively diverse corpus of texts, Goree focuses on two foundational works: Akisato Ritō's Miyako meisho zue (Illustrated Collection of Famous Places in the Capital; 1780) and its sequel, Shūi Miyako meisho zue (More Famous Places in the Capital; 1787). Over the course of his introduction and five subsequent chapters, Goree discusses dozens of other contemporaneous works as well, providing a rich historical context for the principal objects of his study. The book presents a focused and clear central argument—that "the popularity of meisho zue lasted for decades because they were innovative maps of landmarks that advanced a convincing vision of abundance, experienced virtually by readers, in a format established by Ritō and sustained by others linked to him" (p. 7). The monograph's written style is scholarly, sophisticated, and engagingly journalistic, and for those with an interest in the history of Japanese books, it will be a pleasure to read. Better still, Printing Landmarks contains 125 mostly monochrome images of maps, meisho zue, and a wide variety of other woodblock-printed works (artistic prints, travel guides, picture books, and the like), providing a great visual depth to Goree's study and allowing readers to see and learn about a plethora of relatively obscure publications that they might have otherwise never encountered. In chapter 1, "The Reader as Virtual Traveler," Goree explores the concept of gayū (imaginary/dream travel; literally to "lie down and go" [p. 12]), which the [End Page 341] court noble Fujiwara no Takasuke (1741–1804) invoked in a preface to Shūi miyako meisho zue to articulate the work's appeal for contemporaneous audiences. Gayū is a key concept for Goree (as well as for the editors and consumers of meisho zue, he argues), and he pursues it throughout his study. As Goree explains, gayū "might be considered the equivalent to armchair travel in Western cultures, insofar as it rhetorically describes the power of books and other media to enable discovery of a place without visiting it" (p. 41). He further argues that Ritō and some of his successors promoted gayū as a clever "marketing strategy" to encourage "reading as a form of virtual travel" (p. 35). Goree associates gayū with a particular "mode of reading" (p. 66), and he attributes it—or the marketing of it—with the success of Miyako meisho zue and subsequent meisho zue in the marketplace of books. In chapter 2, "The Documentation and Display of Place," Goree focuses on editors, artists, and the editorial processes behind the compilation of meisho zue. Taking Miyako meisho zue again as his exemplary case, he argues that "meisho zue resonated with readers because they were compiled according...

Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century: Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context by Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai

Reviewed by: Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century: Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context by Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai Satoko Shimazaki Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century: Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context. By Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021. 246 pages. ISBN: 9780367150624 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai's Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century: Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context is a welcome addition to the small library of monographs on early modern Japanese theater and, specifically, studies of bunraku. Focusing their attention on historical and political plays, the authors discuss various bunraku period pieces (jidaimono) beginning with Chikamatsu Monzaemon's Kokusen'ya kassen (The Battles of Coxinga), first staged in 1715, and ending with Igagoe dōchū sugoroku (Travel Game while Crossing Iga) by Chikamatsu Hanji, which was first staged in 1783. Along the way, they cover plays by Takeda Izumo I; collaborations between Takeda Izumo II, Miyoshi Shōraku, and Namiki Senryū (Sōsuke); as well as earlier plays by Hanji. They trace the trajectory of the [End Page 130] puppet theater from its golden age to the beginning of its decline in Osaka as kabuki came to dominate. The study of bunraku period plays has seen renewed interest in Japan in the last decade with the publication of several monographs wholly or partially devoted to the topic, including Itō Risa's Ningyō jōruri no doramatsurugī (The Dramaturgy of Bunraku; 2012); Hara Michio's Chikamatsu jōruri no sakugekihō (Dramaturgy in Chikamatsu's Bunraku; 2013); and Han Kyoung Ja's Chikamatsu jidai jōruri no sekai (The World of Chikamatsu's Bunraku History Plays; 2019)—all of which build on Uchiyama Mikiko's seminal Jōrurishi no jūhasseiki (The Eighteenth Century in the History of Bunraku) from 1989. The focus of Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century on period plays gives sustained attention in English to works that have been taken up only now and then in translation and critical studies by authors such as Donald Keene, James Brandon, C. Andrew Gerstle, and Stanleigh H. Jones. The meanings of bunraku that the authors explore are distinct from those we might find in Chikamatsu's domestic dramas (sewamono), which still play an outsize role in shaping the image of the art in English-language contexts, perhaps partly because their concise, tightly structured, and poetic nature makes them more accessible and thus a familiar feature in surveys of early modern literature. Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century discusses well-known plays such as Kanadehon chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers; 1748), but also plays that are less familiar in English such as Ashiya Dōman ōuchi kagami (A Courtly Mirror of Ashiya Dōman; 1734) and Ōmi Genji senjin yakata (The Genji Vanguard in Ōmi Province; 1769). The authors argue that "bunraku theatre, despite its aspect as popular entertainment, was often a place for playwrights to manifest their political concerns" and a space of "reflection of the audience's expectations" (p. xvi). At first glance, this countercultural interpretation might seem to follow a well-trodden path in Tokugawa theater studies, recalling writings by Donald Shively that portrayed kabuki theater as a forum for popular resistance against censorship and governmental regulation.1 Analysis of this sort in previous English-language scholarship has tended to focus, however, on the dynamic within the administrative city of Edo as the center of political power and has never fully addressed bunraku, which saw its most dynamic developments four hundred kilometers west in Osaka. Despite drawing heavily on the world of the warriors and on contemporary political material, bunraku may have been shielded by sheer distance from the sort of scrutiny to which kabuki was subject. Odanaka and Iwai home in on this possibility and cultivate a focus on Osaka as a methodology, emphasizing the city's economic significance as an essential non-samurai center in the Tokugawa political body. The preface and introduction position "the rising economic power of the merchants" against the "sovereignty of the warriors" (p. xvi). Exploring the geographical division of Osaka into administrative spaces and areas of economic activity...

일본 문인화의 선구자 기온 난카이(祇園南海)의 시론 - 『시가쿠호겐(詩学逢原)』(1763)를 중심으로 -

This paper focuses on Confucian Nankai Gion (1676-1751), a Confucian scholar who is evaluated as a pioneer of Japanese literary painting, to note that his literary work began with the emphasis on literary works that appeared in the process of learning abroad. Specifically, through the analysis of Nankai's poetic book 『詩学逢原』 published in 1763, I would like to discuss that his poetic theory had a great influence on the background of the realization of the important element of literary painting. . In the early modern Japanese intellectual society in the early 18th century in which Nankai was active, it can be said that the core of intellectual activities of intellectuals was to thoroughly exclude the elements of worldlines that represent everyday things and secular things, and imitate torture and learn elegant. Throughout the entire 『詩学逢原』, the core of Nankai's poetry can be called ‘Shadow(影写)’ and ‘classical and colloquial(雅俗)’. ‘Shadow’ refers to the appearance of the original form by adding a thin piece of paper on top of a text or picture, and while appreciating the poem, it induces a three-dimensional sense of reality as if the image reflected by the poem unfolds before your eyes. Nankai emphasizes the distinction between poetic language(詩語) and common language(常語), and 斷章取義, which takes part of a poem and uses it for the realization of ‘Shadow’. On the other hand, he expresses that “poetry is a container that holds good spirits” and defines it as elegant that expresses one's feelings in relation to things, and elegant is a pursuit of strict and profoundness that is not easily used in everyday life. I saw the mood in plain language that was easy to understand. In order to realize this, he also emphasized the harmony of lightness, solicitation, greatness and smallness, gentleness, and strength in poetry. Nankai saw this as “the most important foundation of poetry,” but it is interesting to note that this poetic theory is applied as it is not only in poetry but also in the view of painting.

근세 일본 ‘문인’의 존재 양상과 문인 아집 ― 18세기 오사카 문인과 염담(恬淡) ―

근세 일본 ‘문인’의 존재 양상과 문인 아집 ― 18세기 오사카 문인과 염담(恬淡) ―

Imperial Loyalism and Political Fissures in Early Modern Japan

Scholars of early modern Japanese history have noted the imperial court's political insignificance and the lack of conflict most contemporaries supposedly saw between the emperor's institutionally supreme position and the fact that Japan's warlords had usurped power away from the emperor. This article draws on Korean visitors' observations of Japanese society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to challenge this view and reveal that the imperial court remained the only truly legitimate seat of power for many early modern Japanese elites, exposing the depths of fissures in the Japanese political order in ways most scholarship has overlooked.

Terms of Government: Early Modern Japanese Concepts of Rulership and Political Geography in Translation.

This article uses the relationship between the central Tokugawa government and its vassal domain of Satsuma as a window into changing notions of government and political geography in the context of early modern Japanese diplomacy. The article argues that a wide range of translation processes that occurred from around 1800-the coinage of new political terms in Japanese, cultural translation from Chinese Confucian classics, and the demands of Euro-American international law-both reflected changing circumstances of governance and foreign policy and contributed to a shift of the intellectual and institutional boundaries between the two.

A Comparative Historical Examination of Early Modern Japanese,Chinese,and Korean Acumoxa Medicine

A Comparative Historical Examination of Early Modern Japanese,Chinese,and Korean Acumoxa Medicine

Making and Using Scientific Instruments in Japan: How Scholars and Craftsmen Cooperated, 1781-1853.

This article examines five separate but interrelated cases concerning scientific instruments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan. Instruments like telescopes and clocks were not typically traded goods on the early modern Japanese market, but their use and production show us the inventive activities carried out in later Edo Japan. The first two cases highlight academic activities in Osaka, where scholars, in collaboration with craftsmen, made and used instruments in order to study Western natural sciences. Their activities were possible thanks to wealthy merchants, who promoted the active circulation of things and information. The three other cases are ingenious craftsmen who demonstrate the importance of their contact with academic intellectuals for making and elaborating optical and mechanical instruments. An analysis of their career paths reveals to what extent the goals and outcomes of their inventive activities were constrained and promoted by their social and occupational standing in the feudal society.

The Historically Changing Notion of (Female Bodily) Proportion and Its Relevance to Literature

Abstract Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909) was an early modern Japanese novelist, translator, and critic. He wrote what is now generally conceived of as the first Japanese ‘modern’ novel, Drifting Clouds (1887-89). He translated works by Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Garshin, Gorky, and others. He also published a number of critical essays, treatises on literary theory, political papers, and so forth. His early translation of Turgenev’s short stories: Aibiki (Rendevous, 1888) and Meguriai (Three Trysts, 1889) were extremely influential on the contemporary literati, who were amazed at the fresh, poetic prose used in stark contrast to the traditional Japanese fiction in the pre-Reformation period. These translations, seen in the light of the present-day readers, were unique in what we might term today ‘foreignizing translation’. Lawrence Venuti in Invisibility of the Translator argues that the ideal of (English) translation has been to conceal itself as a translation, i.e. to present itself as an original text (chap I and passim). In that sense, Futabatei’s translations, scandalously presenting itself as a translation, that is to say, as an alien text, is extremely ‘foreignizing’.

Adaptation as a Strategy for Participation: The Chikusai Storyworld in Early Modern Japanese Literature

-

Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan by Jakobina K. Arch

Reviewed by: Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan by Jakobina K. Arch Jonathan Stockdale (bio) Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan. By Jakobina K. Arch. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2019. xxii, 247 pages. $40.00. With Bringing Whales Ashore, Jakobina Arch almost singlehandedly places the emerging field regarding whales and whaling in Japanese history on solid ground. As the title hints, Arch is interested in exploring not just the detailed practice of early modern Japanese whaling, but also the myriad ways in which whales entered mainstream Tokugawa society and culture: as consumer products (primarily meat, oil, fertilizer, and pesticide), as "food for thought" (as in the fiction of Ihara Saikaku), and even as spiritual beings, speaking in dreams and in turn being memorialized in temples and graveyards. In the process, Arch also takes aim at historiographic issues within studies of the Tokugawa period, arguing powerfully for the importance of the oceanic environment for understanding a society too often characterized as "closed" to the sea or based overwhelmingly in agrarian rice production. More than an environmental and cultural history, however, Bringing Whales Ashore serves also as a work of environmental ethics, each chapter pausing amid Arch's detailed historical analysis to issue strongly worded rebukes of pro-whaling interests in contemporary Japan, who voice their legitimacy through claims to an "unbroken tradition" of Japanese whaling. Lucid, thoughtful, and thought provoking, Bringing Whales Ashore is a richly textured work that not only fills an important gap for scholars of Japanese history but also provides engaging material that should stimulate discussion—as well as debate—in the classroom. The first two chapters lay the foundation for the book regarding whales and whaling per se: chapter 1 reconstructs a natural history of the whales that once flourished in the waters around Japan, while chapter 2 explores the actual practice of coastal whaling that lasted from slightly before until slightly after the Tokugawa era. In chapter 1, Arch shows through Tokugawa-period illustrated manuscripts that a wide spectrum of whales was familiar to the Japanese, including toothed (sperm and beaked whales) as well as baleen varieties (primarily right, gray, and humpback, but also fin and sei whales), all of whom passed alongside Japan during their long-distance migrations, heading northward in the summer toward Arctic feeding grounds and southward in the winter to breed in warmer waters. (An inadvertent error on page 25 flips these seasons to read "summer breeding grounds" and "winter feeding grounds," but if one flips the two seasons within that sentence back again, the sentence is in agreement with the [End Page 174] detailed discussion in the rest of the chapter.) For early modern Japanese whalers, however—who launched their oar boats from the shore after sighting whales, and who processed their catch back on the shore—their targets were almost exclusively the shore-hugging baleen whales, and of those, the slowest moving, hence primarily right, gray, and humpback whales. Reconstructing historical whale populations is a much more difficult task, as Arch herself indicates: "historical whaling records are our best source for numbers and locations of whales before the twentieth century" (p. 23), but those records are not always extant and only show the number of whales taken, not the numbers actually present. As a result, Arch combines current whale population data with historical whaling records to yield a sense of the vast numbers of whales that would have been present in Japanese waters: if today only about 500 right whales exist in the entire North Pacific, but 30,000 right whales were taken by American whalers in the 1840s alone (p. 33), then the number of right and other whales that would have been visible in early modern Japan was surely considerable, and Arch is no doubt right to conclude that even on a purely environmental level, "whales were a powerful presence throughout early modern Japan" (p. 47). In chapter 2 Arch provides a nuanced analysis of the historical practice of Japanese coastal whaling. As she details, coastal whaling (as opposed to the opportunistic harvest of stranded whales) began in the 1570s with the advent of harpoon whaling from...