Organizer and Chair: Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Pomona College
Basho's Haikai and Lin Xiyi's Explanation of the Zhuangzi
Peipei Qiu, Vassar College
The influence of the Zhuangzi on Basho (1644-1694) and the seventeenth century Japanese comic linked verse haikai has been a prominent phenomenon that draws wide scholarly attention. Because previous studies on this subject have concentrated on textual comparison and philosophical issues, the literary significance of the phenomenon remains obscure. This study argues that rather than philosophical values, Basho and his fellow poets sought poetic inspiration in the Taoist classic. Furthermore, their reading of the Zhuangzi as a source of poetry owed much to Lin Xiyi's Explanation of the Zhuangzi, the text proven to be used by the haikai poets in Edo Japan.
A scholar and official in Song China, Lin Xiyi (Jinshi, 1234-37) in his annotations frequently refer to Chinese poetry to enunciate Zhuangzi's words. He ascribed the achievements of the great Chinese poets to the reading of the Zhuangzi, and asserted that the Zhuangzi is the most important work for literati and poets. Lin's integration of Taoist philosophy and the Chinese poetic tradition cast a revealing light on the poetic possibilities the haikai poets sought. It was through the increasing awareness of the correspondences between the fundamentals of Taoist philosophy and the principles of Chinese poetry that Basho grasped the quintessential elements of Chinese poetry-elements that can be characteristically described in the terms found in the Zhuangzi, "free and easy wandering" and the "naturalness." This study gives a synchronic analysis of the Chinese critical tradition embodied in Lin Xiyi's explanation of the Zhuangzi and examines how this tradition affected Basho's haikai creation.
Andô Shôeki (1703-1762): Shizen and its Ideological Appropriations
Jacques Joly, Eichi University, Amagasaki, Japan
Ando Shoeki (1703-1762) is a Confucean master who, since he was "'rediscovered" in 1899 by Kano Kokichi, underwent an ideological appropriation by socialist, Marxist and ecologist thinkers in Japan. We can even say that the history of the studies on Andô Shôeki coincides almost totally with the history of the take-over process of his ideas. After having retraced such a process in its broad lines, I would like to show that it has been triggered off by the definitions he gives and the use he makes of the word shizen -ziran, a word nowadays translated as "nature" but which referred to the spontaneous way the Tao acts, the ultimate notion serving to put a closure to every discourse and which can justify anything by its own authority. Shôeki understood that relying on shizen enabled him to be automatically right and avoided the risk of having to argue. For the discourse he utters, an outdated one by the Sorai's school standards, a forerunning one by the nativist standards, at any rate, a very conservative one indeed, proclaims a vitalism he considers as the Chinese way of thinking in its most pristine form, and in which shizen refers to the fact that the way of truly being is to be a totality or an autarkical closed world, totality of the cosmos at the image of which are the rigid totalities of the village, of the lineage, of the man. A worldview which is not so different as the one his Maoist appropriators were propounding.
Religious Folk Art as an Indicator of Nationalistic-Imperialistic Aspirations
Among Local Elites: Jingu Kogo Ema in Southwestern Japan
Richard W. Anderson, Willamette University
Preliminary investigation suggests that ema (votive paintings) featuring a third century legendary empress (Jingu Kogo) of Japan as their subject were used by peasants and local elites alike in southwestern Japan in the nineteenth century to justify the need for overseas expansion-in particular the need for an invasion of Korea. Jingu Kogo ema exhibit two basic motifs, both of which allude to her alleged invasion of Korea: the first pictures a pine arching over Jingu Kogo and her advisor Takenouchi, who kneels, holding her infant son Ojin, while the other shows Jingu Kogo sitting on a ship surrounded by samurai fully armed for battle approaching Korea where fully armed Korean warriors await. The first scene depicts a calm, diplomatic stance toward Korea, whereas the second suggests an aggressive, bellicose position.
From ema surveys in Yamaguchi-ken and in a rural area of Fukuoka-ken I have discovered that a geographical and temporal correlation emerges from the distribution of these ema: in Fukuoka-ken the bellicose motif was the most common, and most of the ema were donated before 1870, while in Yamaguchi-ken the calm peaceful motif was most common, and the majority of ema was donated after 1870. In this paper I contend that the prevalence of different motifs in these areas, and the dating suggest that peasants and local elites were using Jingu Kogo ema as an iconographic "text" to discuss and comment on the seikanron (invade Korea) debate of 1873. This spillover of political themes into religious artifacts is an interesting and potentially very fruitful area of study that has received inadequate attention.
Fragmentation, Will to Power, and the Overcoming of Modernity: Watsuji Tetsurô's
A Study of Nietzsche (1913) and its Place in the Development of his Thought
David B. Gordon, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Seminal Japanese thinker Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960) published his first book at the age of twenty-four on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. This work has been both praised by subsequent scholars as an acute analysis of Nietzsche's thought and, frequently, neglected as the product of a Western-individualistic phase reputedly outgrown by the mature Watsuji. I wish to confirm the praise and allay the neglect by contending that the concerns of the work were: (1) long-standing for the early Watsuji; (2) maintained in altered form after Watsuji shifted his attention to Japan; and (3) indeed shared with Nietzsche.
Foremost among these concerns, I hold, was Watsuji's desire to find dynamic unity and purpose immanent within reality. His pre-Study writings show him to have been both agitated by the cacophony and atomistic egoism of late Meiji urban Japan and opposed to authoritarian attempts to impose unity from outside. In treating will to power as the central moment in Nietzsche's thought, Study comprises an early, quasi-mystical solution to this problematic: it asserts that the cosmos as will to power is flow-simultaneously multiple and unitary-and prescribes that readers live as this flow.
Watsuji's continued attraction to an open-ended, internally complex, and "truly concrete" unity later led him to attribute jûsôsei (multi-layeredness) to Japan. By this time, he had replaced paradox with interrelation and grounded unity in particularism. As he did so, however, he preserved his early intent to reject fragmentation and its sometime corollary, the imposed substitution of part for whole, in favor of essentially non-destructive development.
Kobayashi Hideo and the Configuration of an "Anti-Modern" Critical
Genre
James Dorsey, University of Washington
Faith in the universal validity of scientific objectivity was one aspect of Western modernity enthusiastically embraced by post-Meiji Restoration (1868) Japanese intellectuals. Literary criticism was no exception: broad, inclusive analyses of life, and literature's place in it, gave way to a dispassionate observation and critique of the minutiae of literature, an approach which could maintain the pretense of some modern scientific method.
The Marxist criticism of the 1920s further inscribed this aspect of modernity on criticism. The Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900-1945) is representative of this trend in his insistence on hihyô no kagaku-sei ("the scientific nature of criticism") and his demand for a thoroughgoing kyakkan-sei ("objectivity"). This paper will address the reactionary backlash to this as spearheaded in the early 1930s by the literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902-1983).
Disenchanted with the tedium that modern "objectivity" had brought to literary criticism, Kobayashi resurrected and reconfigured the traditional Japanese genre known as the zuihitsu ("discursive essay"). This genre, in Kobayashi's hands, was to be diametrically opposed to that developed on the premises of modernity: first, as opposed to the Marxist aspiration to an objective methodology, Kobayashi's modus operandi is gloriously subjective; his is a criticism which does not so much admit its bias as revel in it. Criticism, to Kobayashi, was the "borrowing of an object in order to narrate the self." As for the goal of literary criticism, Kobayashi replaces the pursuit of some extra-literary critical "truth" with an exercise in rhetorical finesse and stylistic elegance.
This paper will explore how Kobayashi, through debate with Tosaka Jun and other Marxist critics, came to this vision of a new genre of literary criticism. In this formulation of his perspective is to be found not only the root of Kobayashi's long and successful career as a critic but also that dimension of his work which has so strongly influenced the critics which were to follow in his footsteps.