Organizer: Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Pomona College
Chair: Ronald P. Toby, University of Illinois, Champaign
Katherine Saltzman Li, University of California, Santa Barbara
In examining the history of the kabuki playwright (kyogen sakusha) as a function within the kabuki troupe, we witness the development from playwriting as an adjunct duty of actors to an elaborate hierarchical system of collaborative authorship. As playwrights were able not only to establish themselves as independent contributors within the theater, but to increase their stature and importance as well, the complicated hierarchical arrangement evolved to cover a wide variety of duties for which they came to be responsible. The growing importance of the position which top playwrights held in a troupe from the mid- to late eighteenth century-due to the increasing significance of plays in the kabuki theater and to interactions between the kabuki and literary worlds-has not often been reflected in descriptive studies of kabuki. When we find kabuki playwrights characterized as "stage magicians" or as "a sort of craftsman, rather like a property man or stagehand," a difficulty arises from the failure to make distinctions among various levels of playwrights and their respective duties.
In this paper, I will draw on treatises written by kabuki practitioners (playwrights and actors) from around the second half of the eighteenth century, the period in which the hierarchy of playwrights took on its characteristic shape. My focus will be to describe the hierarchy and explore some of the reasons both for the growing stature of playwrights from the later eighteenth century and for the poor view in which playwrights have often been held in kabuki scholarship. Comments about playwrights and their craft found in these treatises offer a rare view and invaluable base for a corrective to the depiction of playwrights in the kabuki theater as men who were little other than lackeys to the actors, a depiction that attributes to actors alone skill and artistic intent. The varied responsibilities of the men known as kyogen sakusha, some of which were quite menial, should not detract from the contributing value of the men at the top end of the hierarchy who were skilled at producing plays of great dramatic value and of great contributing value to the success of a troupe's efforts.
Barry D. Steben, University of Western Ontario
There are few words in the Japanese language as complex and as inseparable from the historical experience of the Japanese people as giri. The distinctive meanings the word acquired in Japan are rooted in the society, literature and thought of the Edo period, and particularly associated with samurai culture. The Kimon (Yamazaki Ansai) school was intensely concerned with adapting Confucian ethical norms to the realities of samurai society, endeavoring as much for the Japanization of Confucianism as for the Confucianization of Japan. But the realities of samurai society were also changing, as the impersonal legal authority of the bakufu asserted its supremacy over domainal loyalties and the samurai became accustomed to a bureaucratic life in the castle towns cut off from their traditional rural roots. Thus the process of the adaptation of Confucianism was intertwined with an effort to formulate new norms for samurai life that could draw upon the energies of traditional group morality while directing these energies toward the greater interests of peace and social order.
The word giri, combining the Mencian concepts of justice and righteousness (gi) with bushi concepts of loyalty and the Neo Confucian concept of the unchanging moral principles (ri) embodied in both the mind and socio political institutions, naturally became the focus of this pedagogical effort. Yet within the Kimon school, there arose an intense controversy over the true meaning of gi and ri and the nature of their relationship. This controversy centered on different conceptions of the relative weight of statutory law, customary law, group loyalty, intuition and emotion in defining what sort of action truly accorded with giri. While its constant point of reference was the decision making process of the ordinary samurai when confronted with the need to defend his honor, the endeavor to define giri could not avoid the macrocosmic question of the principles upon which the Tokugawa authority structure was based. By the same token, it also had to articulate a theory of the mind-the microcosm which cognized and enacted these principles of order. To assert the theoretical supremacy of the bakufu's authority over domainal loyalties, it was necessary to emphasize an autonomous center of moral decision making within the individual that was capable of recognizing and choosing the right independently of the forces of social or legal compulsion. The discovery and cultivation of this center was, of course, the perennial task of Neo Confucian character training.
Yet as soon as this position was articulated (by Sato Naokata) it came under attack by other members of the Kimon school on the grounds that it was too hard headed, cold and rational. Both Asami Keisai and Miyake Shosai insisted that, while giri did have to be understood intellectually, obeying giri had first and foremost to be motivated by spontaneous emotional impulses. They knew that most samurai could hardly be expected to feel emotionally committed to obeying bakufu laws, and that it was the loyalty and determination of the Ako ronin that really captured the samurai's conception of true giri in action. Yet in recognizing the moral validity of the ronin's illegal act, they also unwittingly established an association between rebellious, self sacrificing action and the conception of the autonomous moral self. Moreover, it was now philosophically conceivable that legal authority might act in ways diametrically opposed to what is right. Naokata's disciple Miwa Shissai, who converted to Yomeigaku in protest against Naokata's views, further developed and propagated the concept of the autonomous moral self that will balk at no sacrifice to enact the good in the world. A century later, idealist rebels such as Oshio Chusai and Yoshida Shoin completed the transformation of a concept of giri designed to sanctify the Tokugawa legal system into a concept of righteous action directed against the very locus of that legal authority. The present paper will examine the details of the competing conceptions of giri put forward by Naokata, Keisai, Shosai and Shissai in their efforts to translate Confucian norms into the language of daily life.
M. Pierce Griggs, University of Chicago
Social sciences have been generally assumed to have originated in Japan by way of early Meiji enlightenment thought. This assumption derives mainly from the example of the study of law. The study of law was boosted by European influences carried by the enlightenment thinkers Nishi Amane, Tsuda Mamichi and others. However, this study of law emerged independently of any conception of social scientific studies. The concept of a body of social sciences and its core tenet that scientific methods could have applications in all fields of learning was not accepted because of ideological impediments. These ideological impediments are explored in the writings of Nishi Amane. While law and politics as well as economics developed rapidly throughout the 1870's within courses of administrative training, two core fields of social science-psychology and sociology-were only recognized toward the end of the decade. Ideological impediments which prevented an understanding of the concept of society as well as of claims for the universality of scientific method, explain much of this gradual reception. Institutional impediments further contributed to gradual reception. Formidable barriers between branches of study, which stemmed both from contemporary understanding of science and from school reforms following the Meiji Ishin, inhibited the identification of particular methodologies and their exchange. Because of a combination of ideological and institutional impediments, social scientific studies were only accepted in Japan in the 1890's.
Steven T. Brown, University of Oregon
Ashikaga Yoshimitsu's fifteenth century institutionalization of shogunal patronage for Japan's most accomplished noh troupes was the first time a Japanese military ruler had ever officially sponsored noh drama. Yoshimitsu's sponsorship helped turn noh into an "aristocratic" art form, or at least an art form possessing "aristocratic" pretensions and "aristocratic" symbolic capital. In other words, during the fifteenth century, noh drama started to function for the first time as a mechanism for the acquisition, circulation, and display of cultural authority. Following Yoshimitsu's example, almost every subsequent ruler also extended such patronage to noh, thereby contributing to the eventual canonization and monumentalization of noh as Japan's "classical" form of drama par excellence.
One autocrat who stood out from the rest was Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), one of the three great unifiers of premodern Japan, whose patronage of noh drama during the Azuchi Momoyama period (1573-1604) included an unprecedented level of personal participation. Although members of the Japanese military elite had been studying noh recitation and dance since at least the middle of the fifteenth century, Hideyoshi was the first ruler of Japan ever to perform in a noh play as himself. Hideyoshi commissioned noh plays between the years of 1594 and 1598 in which he starred as himself, not merely in a cameo role but as a full blown "character." These so called "new noh plays" (shinsaku no no) were written to celebrate and memorialize Hideyoshi's power, family genealogy, and political, military, and artistic achievements. Hideyoshi, the ultimate political impresario, sought to turn himself into myth. By bringing the ruler literally onto the stage, the plays written for Hideyoshi not only raised self-aggrandizement to an art form but also transformed noh drama during the Momoyama era into an explicitly political spectacle, with special performances by Hideyoshi playing the role of himself in front of foreign diplomats, the imperial family, high ranking court aristocrats, and powerful war lords, whose very attendance served to legitimize such political myth making. Such self glorification is obviously political propaganda of the highest order, but what makes Hideyoshi's peculiar brand of ideological self staging so interesting is that in explicitly inventing himself on the noh stage and drawing attention to the fact that the hegemon is actually an actor, Hideyoshi's performances also disclose the very mechanisms of self fabrication and image making upon which they rely.
For the 1995 AAS Meeting in Washington, D.C., I propose to discuss Hideyoshi's self-invention in noh drama with its theatricalization of late sixteenth-century Japanese politics. How does Hideyoshi's explicit self-staging in noh expose similar techniques of performative self-invention in the everyday political and military arenas in which Hideyoshi performed the role of "ruler"? How and why does Hideyoshi's self staging take place at this particular juncture in history? What traces and linkages exist between Hideyoshi's self-staging in the dramatic theater of noh and his self-staging in the political theater of Japan more generally?
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