Ihara Saikaku's Regional Allegiances

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Shifting Perspectives on Media and Materials in Early Modern Japan

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JAPAN RESEARCH CENTRE SOAS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

International Symposium


Saturday 4 to Sunday 5 July 2015

Djam Lecture Theatre (DLT), SOAS, University of London

This two-day international symposium is the first of its kind in the UK to refocus on the varied sources for uncovering early modern Japan such as prints, books and ephemera. Bringing together perspectives from various fields of the human and social sciences, this symposium will provide an interdisciplinary space for discussing the role of sources as media and as research materials.

Although the period from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries is increasingly understood to interlink with the modern period in the field of cultural production, approaches to

researching this period continue to be largely limited by narrow disciplinary frameworks. Speakers from Japan, the US and Europe will consider how selected media produced discourse in early modern Japan and how the same media are currently categorised and archived as research

materials. The aim is to stimulate debate and to re-evaluate the position of the researcher in interpreting media and materials to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the cultural

production of early modern Japan.

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Organisers: Dr Doreen Mueller, Mr Radu Leca and SOAS Centres and Programmes Office

For further details about the symposium visit:

www.soas.ac.uk/jrc/events

Symposium supported by: SOAS Japan Research Centre, Japan Foundation, Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

www.soas.ac.uk/jrc/events


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Programme Saturday, 4 July 2015

9.00 – 9.30

Registration

9.30 – 10.00

Opening Remarks: Shane McCausland (SOAS, Department of the History of Art and Archaeology, SOAS School of Arts)

10.00 – 11.30

PANEL 1: Perspectives on Media: Text, Images and Discourse

近世日本における読書と国民意識 Reader Cultures and National Consciousness in Early Modern Japan Fuyuhiko Yokota (Kyoto University) Picture Books (Gōkan) and the discourse of the Grotesque in Early Modern Japan: the case of Santo Kyoden (1761-1816) Junko Yamana (Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University)

11.30 – 12.00

Discussion and Q&A Discussant: Rebekah Clements (Cambridge University)

12.00 – 13.00

Lunch Break

13.00 – 15.00

PANEL 2: Perspectives on Media: Place and Identities Cultural Geographies of Meisho-e: Representation of Land in the Late Edo Period Ewa Machotka (Leiden University) Ihara Saikaku’s Regional Allegiances Radu Leca (SOAS, University of London) The Mission to Visualise: Yokohama Photographs and Archiving Practices Morihiro Satow (Kyoto Seika University)

14.30 – 15.00

Discussion and Q&A Discussant: Alfred Haft (British Museum, SISJAC)

15.00 – 15.30

Coffee Break


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15.30 – 16.00

The Shuhanron Emaki (The Illustrated Scroll of the Sake and Rice Debate) from an Interdisciplinary Perspective: a Case Study Claire-Akiko Brisset (Université Paris Diderot)

16.00 – 17.00

Keynote Speech: Yutaka Yabuta (Kansai University) 交流する日本近世史ー美術と歴史・絵画と史料

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Early Modern Japan – History and Art History – Text and Image

17.00 – 17.30

Discussion and Q&A Discussant: Christine Guth (Royal College of Arts, V&A)

Sunday, 5 July 2015

10.00 – 11.30

PANEL 3: Framing Research: Taxonomies of Research Materials Fashion, Food, Finances, and Filial Piety: Kawase Yūzan and the Value of Free Print in the Late Edo Period Niels van Steenpaal (Kyoto University) Framing Documentary Representation: The Category of Kirokuga and the Practices of Recording Disaster in Nineteenth Century Japan Doreen Mueller (SOAS, University of London)

11.30 – 12.00

Discussion and Q&A Discussant: Patti Kameya (University of St. Thomas)

12.00 – 13.00

Lunch Break

13.00 – 14.30

PANEL 4: Framing Research: Sourcing Research Materials and Archives Uncovering the Lives of Early Modern Japanese Artists – The Case of Uncovering Early Modern Biographies through Extant Documents Hans Bjarne Thomsen (Zurich University) Archives and Sites of Knowledge Production for Early Modern Japan Maki Fukuoka (Leeds University)


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くずし字解読の意義：各分野の研究をクロスさせる

Reading Kuzushiji and Interdisciplinary Research Perspectives Kenichiro Aratake (Tohoku University)

14.30 – 15.00

Discussion and Q&A Discussant: Morihiro Satow (Kyoto Seika University)

15.00 – 15.30

Coffee Break

15.30 – 16.30

Keynote Speech: Peter Kornicki (Cambridge University) Taking Manuscript Cultures of Edo Period Japan Seriously – New Perspectives on Using Regional Archives and Materials in Japan

16.30 – 17.30

Roundtable Discussion


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Abstracts (in alphabetical order)

Kenichiro Aratake (Tohoku University)

“Reading Kuzushiji (Early Modern Manuscripts) and Interdisciplinary Research Perspectives” This presentation will discuss the opportunities and challenges of using regional archives in Japan as sources for the study of early modern Japan. It will also consider which research and teaching methods can be developed to make the lengthy process of acquiring manuscript reading skills more effective. The presentation will draw from the presenter’s experience in researching regional archives in Japan and in teaching early modern manuscript reading workshops in Japan, Europe, and the US. It will consider the perspectives of Japanese and international researchers and their positions towards these issues.

Hans Bjarne Thomsen (University of Zurich) “Lives of an Artist: Uncovering Early Modern Biographies through Extant Documents”

This talk will highlight the ways that various materials, including advertisements, novels, maps, woodblock prints, and diaries can be used to uncover lives of early modern artists. Using the case study of the woodblock print designer Utagawa Hiroshige, I will illustrate various details that can be gathered from a judicious use of early modern documents from a range of disciplines, and how the new perspectives can help to alter established thoughts within art history. Specifically I will demonstrate the process of selecting research materials in order to uncover the biography of artists. I hope to show how the researcher’s choice and interpretation of selected materials can affect the (re)construction of an artist’s life and their artistic production, and how a judicious use of primary sources/research materials can help challenge established master narratives of artist biographies and give new insights into the lives of artists. New insights gathered in this manner can contribute to a better understanding the artistic production of Hiroshige and other artists and will help us to better gauge the reception of their art by contemporary audiences. At the end of my talk, I will also discuss the range of materials that are available for researchers in Switzerland.

Maki Fukuoka (Leeds University) “Archives and Sites of Knowledge Production for Early Modern Japan”

This talk will be based on my experience of conducting primary research that culminated in the book, The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Stanford University Press, 2012). Revisiting the ways in which my archival research unfolded to unexpected and unforeseen directions and locations, both metaphorically and physically, this talk considers the rhizomatic movement of objects and thinking that was necessitated in the pursuit of historical activities and materials of the Shohyaku-sha, a group of doctors in Owari. I hope to demonstrate from this particular


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example, the ways in which disciplinary biases can be negotiated through materials themselves.

Radu Leca (SOAS, University of London) “Ihara Saikaku’s Regional Allegiances”

This paper discusses how the poet and novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) created an individual artistic persona in his semi-autobiographical work Saikaku nagori no tomo by fashioning himself as ‘the Western Crane’, an accessory of a tsukurimono (decorative ‘set-up’) of Mount Penglai, which will be identified as the castle of the daimyo of the Akashi Domain, Matsudaira Nobuyuki. This reveals intriguing connections between artistic persona, imaginary places and regional politics.

Ewa Machotka (Leiden University) “Cultural Geographies of Meisho-e: Representation of Land in the Late Edo Period’

This paper will explore visual representation as a means of transforming unidentified space into place and the role of text-image dynamics in these processes. The study will focus the concept of meisho-e or images of famous places, rooted in poetic expressions, which transform culturally anonymous space into a territory of meaning. It will analyze pictorializations of poems on Mu Tamagawa (Six Jewel Rivers) executed in diverse media including a handscroll by Sakai Ōho (1808-41), a folding screen painting by Katsuhsika Hokusai (1760-1849) and series of single-sheet prints by Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). It will explore cultural geographies born from the dynamic relationships of meisho-e with the realm of text and the realm of image. This paper will argue that meisho, imbued by societies with memories, histories, and symbolic significance, are fluid socio-cultural constructions, which play a vital role in the process of imagining of Japan. The investigation will contribute to a better comprehension of the notion of territorial belonging as one of the ways of individual and collective identification.

Doreen Mueller (SOAS, University of London) “What is a category for? Crossing Art History and Social History in Labelling Nineteenth Century Representations of Disaster as Documentary”

The concept of documentary is a practice and not a category – derived from media studies. The category of Kirokuga (documentary painting) and the pictorial documentation of disaster in late early modern Japan” This presentation will demonstrate the unsuitability of the art historical category of kirokuga for researching handscroll paintings depicting disaster in late early modern Japan (nineteenth century). These images functioned within a field of intersecting epistemological and aesthetic practices that cannot be fully captured by a single disciplinary category. Instead, the presentation will discuss these handscrolls as media that produced knowledge and perceptions about disaster in late early modern Japan.


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Morihiro Satow (Kyoto Seika University) “The Mission to Visualise: Yokohama Photographs and Archiving Practices” Travel photographs of the port city of Yokohama, so-called Yokohama Shashin, that were published in recent popular historical books are often cited as undoubted evidence of historical facts. This is partly because photography, or writing by light, has been considered as the indexical sign (Peircean concept), which fixes the trace of object with the aid of light. Thus, photography has been regarded as unmediated, transparent historical evidence. In this presentation, the discourse of “photographic truth” will be reconsidered by looking into how photographic media have been used as historical materials in different archiving practices. Yokohama photographic albums embodied compact archives through which the Euro-American bourgeoisie was able to visualise the landscape, history, and people of a foreign and "backward" Japan through the filters of the empirical sciences such as geography, ethnology and archaeology, and the aesthetic framework such as the picturesque. Eventually, the representations of Japan, as a foreign land, in Yokohama photographs functioned in a project of "the visualization of the world" with other emerging institutions of the contemporary visual culture, World Expositions and tourism

Niels van Steenpaal (Kyoto University) “Fashion, Food, Finances, and Filial Piety: Kawase Yūzan and the Value of Free Print in the Late Edo Period”

Despite the increasing popularity of studies of early modern Japanese print culture, the field has primarily restricted itself to examinations of the commercial print industry — a bias that has come at the price of ignoring a wide variety of free publications that, based on the frequency with which they appear in the archives, clearly played an important role in people’s lives. In order to consider the value of these free materials, both then and now, this paper will focus on the figure of Kawase Yūzan (1791-1857). Not long after he was installed as the head priest of the Suika Tenjin shrine in Kyoto, Yūzan founded a society called the Kōgakusho (Community for the Study of Filial Piety), from which he spent the following two decades publishing a variety of free books, booklets, and pamphlets that expounded on the relation between everyday life and filial piety. By examining the form, content, and distribution of this material, I aim to show how the parameter of “free” can enrich our understanding of early modern print culture.

Hiroyuki Suzuki (Tokyo Gakugei University) “A Pair of Camels of 1821: Image and Discourse in the Late Edo Period”

Focusing on a pair of camels arriving at Nagasaki in 1821 and parading all over Japan, this paper examines the interrelationship between visual images and discourse in the late Edo period. Purchased by an impresario, the pair of the strange animal was exhibited in a show performed in major cities and attracted a great number of people who visited the show. Broadsheets, woodblock prints, and paintings witnessed popularity of the animal. With the dissemination of its visual images, the pair of camels gained connotations that the spectacle of the animal show framed. Personalizing the animal, the connoted characters, however, had nothing to do with the biological nature of the animal. A typical example of this kind is found in a volume of gōkan, the illustrated popular novel, Wagō rakuda no


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sekai (The harmonious world of camel) (1825), in which the novelist Kōnantei Karatachi (?-?) fabricated a story of a married couple who learned from the animal a hint to lead a happy life. Contrasting to the popular images of the animal was the response of intellectuals such as the daimyo Matsura Seizan (1760-1841), known as the diarist of Kasshi yawa (The tales told at night [starting in the year] of kino-ene [the year 1821]). The essay in a diary format reveals transition of his understanding of the animal, which started with knowledge about camels originated in Chinese literature. But his knowledge was challenged and finally revised according to the reality of the animal bearing in the spectacle of the show. Even the literature produced by intellectuals like Matsura could not ignore the connotations that visual images of the animal produced. Similarly, depicting the animal in a realistic style and standing for the high-end of visual image, paintings such as those by Tani Bunchō (1763-1840) and Maruyama Ōshin (1790-1838) were not free from the discourse the animal show and the captions of various prints framed.

Junko Yamana (Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University, Tokyo) “Picture Books (Gōkan) and the discourse of the Grotesque in Early Modern Japan: the case of Santo Kyoden (1761-1816)”

This presentation will discuss how the popular author Santō Kyōden (1761-1816) shaped the genre of “Gōkan” picture books by balancing censorship demands with the production of his artistic style . The discussion will focus on the picture books Ehon Baika-Hyōretsu (1807, 梅花氷裂 Plum Blossom and Crackle Ice) and Sonarematsu Kinshi-no-Koshimino

(1810, 磯馴松金糸腰蓑 Leaning Pine and Golden Grass Skirt). Both books give a fascinating

insight into the textual and pictorial strategies Kyōden used to respond to Edo publishers' demands to diminish “Gōaku”– cruel and monstrous expressions (1807). Both books abound in monstrous goldfish motifs, but depict them in different ways. The former uses grotesque expressions in image and text. The text of the latter is a hodgepodge of selected plot lines and portraits of popular kabuki actors and flashy backgrounds borrowed from stage settings. The change evidently embodied Kyoden’s intention, after fines (1789 & 1790) and a 50-day writing ban (1791) imposed personally, to behave as a respectable writer and an upright citizen going with the public discourse in Edo. It might be argued that he changed in order to spearhead a redirection of the “Gōkan” genre in accordance with the authorities, also protecting himself as a writer in early 19th century.

Fuyuhiko Yokota (Kyoto University) “Reader Cultures and National Consciousness in Early Modern Japan”

Reader cultures flourished not only in the city but also in rural areas in early modern Japan. This presentation will discuss readers and reading culture through the lens of farming villages in the early eighteenth century. It will explore how illustrated encyclopaedias called reader manuals (setsuyōshū) gave expression to the idea of 'Japan' by shaping notions of region, historical time and space, law and culture. It will also investigate how the notion of 'Japan' was framed by the knowledge and ideas derived by readers from various sources.


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Speaker Biographies

(in alphabetical order)

Keynote Speakers

Peter Kornicki (Cambridge University) Yutaka Yabuta (Kansai University)

Presenters

Kenichiro Aratake (Tohoku University, Sendai) Maki Fukuoka (University of Leeds) Radu Leca (SOAS, University of London Ewa Machotka (Leiden University) Morihiro Satow (Kyoto Seika University) Niels van Steenpaal (Kyoto University) Hiroyuki Suzuki (Tokyo Gakugei University) Hans Bjarne Thomsen (University of Zurich) Junko Yamana (Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University, Tokyo) Fuyuhiko Yokota (Kyoto University)


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Keynote Speakers

Peter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies at Cambridge

University and Professorial Research Associate at the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on how ideas and literature circulated, how books were read and what factors determined their reception. He has published numerous catalogues of the large collection of early Japanese books at Cambridge University Library and of various other collections in Manchester, Lille and Moscow. His seminal work The book in Japan: a cultural history from the beginnings to the

nineteenth century has made a major contribution to the study of the history of the book in Japan. His current research interests focus on the adaptation of Chinese texts for Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean readers in the 17th-19th centuries. He is currently writing on the abandonment of movable-type printing in Japan, on Hayashi Razan's interest in translation and on a Japanese medical manual in the early 17th century. He has spent a total of six years in Japan, mostly in Kyoto. He was awarded the Japan Foundation Special Prize (with Hayashi Nozomu in 1992), elected a fellow of The British Academy (2002), elected a member of the Academia Europea (2012) and has been awarded the Yamagata Bantô prize (2013). In 2010 he became managing editor of the new journal East Asian Publishing and Society, which is now in its fifth year of publication.

Yutaka Yabuta is Emeritus Professor of Japanese History at Kansai

University, Osaka. He is also Director of Hyogo Prefectural History Museum in Himeji City, Japan. His research focuses on the social and regional history of early modern Japan. Under the leadership of the late Professor Oba Osamu, he researched Chinese ships that had drifted to Nagasaki and Chinese residences in Nagasaki in the early modern period. He has made major contributions to gender perspectives on the study of the history of women in Tokugawa, Japan. His English-language publications include Rediscovering women in Tokugawa Japan (2000) and “Nishitani Saku and Her Mother: Writing in the Lives of Edo Period

Women” in The Female as Subject: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan (2010). He has been a seminal force in the promotion of international exchange to advance the field of Japanese Studies and his monograph Nihon Kinseishi no Kanōsei (2005) explored the possibilities and directions of studying early modern Japan. He continues to be engaged in the educational and research activities of the Kansai University Institute for Cultural Interaction Studies (ICIS).


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Presenters (in alphabetical order)

Kenichiro Aratake is Associate Professor at the Center for Northeast Asian

Studies at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. He received his Ph.D from Kansai University in 2004. His recently published monograph Shinyō o meguru kinsei shakai: Osaka chiiki no nōson to toshi (Seibundo, 2015) explores the social and economic impact of the commercial circulation of night soil with a particular focus on interactions between urban and rural society in the region around Osaka. His research combines social and economic perspectives on urban history, the development of trade routes and market economies in late early

modern and modern Japan. Since 2013 he has given a range of international kuzushiji manuscript-reading workshops at Heidelberg University (2013), Berlin Free University (2015) and the University of Chicago (2014/15).

Claire-Akiko Brisset is Associate Professor of Japanese Cultural History at Paris Diderot

University, and a member of the Centre de Recherche sur les Civilisations de l’Asie Orientale (Paris). Her research focuses mainly on relationship between text and image, visual culture (from painting to cinema), as well as textual production in classical and medieval Japan. She is the author of À la croisée du texte et de l’image : paysages cryptiques et poèmes cachés (ashide) dans le Japon classique et médiéval (2009), as well as the co-editor of numerous books dealing with Japanese epic, visual and written culture. Recently she co-directed a long-lasting research program on a 17th manuscript kept in the National Library of France, the Shuhanron emaki (The Illustrated Scroll of the Sake and Rice Debate).

Maki Fukuoka is Lecturer at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the

University of Leeds. Her research focuses on visual culture of nineteenth and twentieth century Japan. Her work explores a history of seeing through textual and visual resources. Her publications include The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-century Japan (Stanford University Press, 2012), ‘Handle with Care: Shaping the Official Image of the Emperor in Early Meiji Japan,’ Ars Orientalis vol. 43 (December 2013), and ‘Selling Portrait Photographs: Early Photographic Business in Asakusa, Japan,’ History of Photography vol. 35, issue 4.

Radu Leca has completed a BA in Japanese Literature in Kanazawa

University before coming to SOAS for an MA and PhD in History of Art, the latter titled The Backward Glance: Concepts of 'Outside' and 'Other' in the Japanese Spatial Imaginary of the Seventeenth Century. Radu’s article on Brazilian Cannibals in 16th century Europe and 17th century Japan has recently been published in Comparative Critical Studies. Radu will soon commence a postdoctoral fellowship at the Sainsbury Institute for Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, where he will research a rich collection of premodern Japanese maps.


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Ewa Machotka is Lecturer in the Art and Visual Culture of Japan at Leiden University. She holds

a PhD in Japanese History of Art from Gakushūin University in Tokyo and she used to work as a museum curator in Kraków and Stockholm. She is interested in interdisciplinary approaches that intersect visual arts and social and intellectual history, focusing especially on the multifaceted relationships between text and image. Her research interests include early modern and modern Japan as well as the role of visuality in collective representation, gender and nationalism. Her current research projects pertain to socially engaged artistic practices and the relationships between visual representation of nature and environmental consciousness in contemporary Japan. In 2009 she published a monograph Hokusai`s Hyakunin Isshu: Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity (Peter Lang P.I.E.). Currently she is co-editing (with Katarzyna Cwiertka) Consuming Post-Bubble Japan: Commodity, Garbage, Art (Amsterdam University Press). She is also Convenor of the Visual Arts Section of The European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS).

Morihiro Satow holds a PhD in Art Theory from Doshisha University in

Kyoto and is Dean and Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the Faculty of Design at Kyoto Seika University. His research interests are topography and the landscape of modern Japan as well as popular and vernacular object-images. His book entitled Topography and Japanese Modernity: Edo Doroe, Yokohama Photography and Art Photography (Topogurafi no Nihon Kindai: Edo Doroe Yokohama Shashin Geijutsu Shashin) appeared in Japanese in 2011 at Tokyo’s Seikyusha.

Niels van Steenpaal studied and worked at Leiden University (M.A.),

Kyoto University (Ph.D), and The University of Tokyo (PD), and is currently Hakubi Assistant Professor of Japanese History at Kyoto University. He is a cultural and intellectual historian with a primary research interest in “moral culture”, a term that he uses to describe the pathways, processes and media through which morality and material culture mutually influence each other. He also works as an editor for two web-projects: Dissertation Reviews and The New Japanese-Dutch Dictionary Project. His recent publications include:

“’Hinoeuma engi’ kaidai, honkoku: kinsei ni okeru sein denpa no ichirei toshite,” Shomotsu, shuppan to shakai henyō (2013); “Kinsei chūki zaison ni okeru kōshi kenshō no shakaiteki kiban: yuisho to shite no kōshi,” Nihon kyōikushi kenkyū (2012).

Hiroyuki Suzuki is Professor of Japanese Art History at Tokyo Gakugei

University. Previously, he worked as a researcher at the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties following his M.A. graduation in Art History at Tokyo University. His research interests span the history of art


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institutions, nineteenth century exhibition strategies, as well as art historiography and theories. His latest publications are Meisho Fūzoku-zu (Paintings of Famous Places), Nihon no Bijutsu 491, 2007, and Kōkoka tachi no 19 seiki: Bakumatsu Meiji ni okeru mono no arukeorogii (19th-Century Antiquarians: The Archaeology of Object during Late Edo and Early Meiji Periods), 2003.

Hans B. Thomsen is Professor and Chair for East Asian Art History at the

University of Zurich. He holds a PhD in Japanese Art and Archaeology from Princeton University. His current book project is The Visual Salon: Itō Jakuchū and the Eighteenth-Century Culture of China in Kyoto, Japan. He is currently heading a research project surveying the Japanese Collections of a number of museums in Switzerland.

Fuyuhiko Yokota is Professor of Japanese History at Kyoto University. His

research explores the cultural and social history of early modern Japan with a focus on reader cultures in rural contexts. An important aspect of his research is the production of social status in early modern Japan. He uses a wide range of materials such as diaries, book inventories, readers’ notes and books of family precepts to uncover the social structure of reading publics and to explore how reader cultures transcended status boundaries between samurai and merchant. He has edited numerous seminal volumes on Japanese History.

His most recent monograph explores the cultural history of the book: Dokusho to Dokusha – Hon no Bunkashi (Heibonsha, 2015).