Organizer and Chair: Lawrence E. Marceau, University of Delaware
Discussant: Kate Wildman Nakai, Sophia University
Notions of "China" appear in disparate forms in early modern (Edo/Tokugawa period) Japan. As a result of a great influx of both material and intellectual culture from the Asian mainland, not only did views of China drawn from perceived "classical" traditions shift, but explanations of Japanese cultural identity also changed radically.
This panel explores the selective and often idiosyncratic nature of the manner in which "China" flourished in early modern Japan. We combine the efforts of art historians and literature specialists, all sharing interest in Asian continental relationships with the early modern Japanese. We take up such subjects as the implications associated with ceramic motifs, the discovery of vernacular languages, reinterpretations of the value of literary expression, and the subversiveness of sencha as a tea alternative.
Continuing lines of inquiry explored in work by Ronald Toby, David Pollack, Marius Jansen, and others, we proceed to examine issues heretofore given little notice, yet still central to our understanding of Japanese identity at this time. For example, sencha tea practices exist in an environment rich in both theoretical and practical texts, while motifs found on ceramic pieces also appear in book illustrations. Conversely, contact with vernacular Chinese texts triggers a reexamination of the Japanese language, while a new reading of a Chinese canonical work opens the door to a promotion of the value of human emotionality. This panel ultimately aims to explore new ways to determine the nature of attitudes held by the Japanese themselves during this rich and complex period.
Bringing Out the Good 'China': Imported Chinese Porcelains and their Japanese
Counterparts
Nicole Rousmaniere, University of East Anglia
A strong underlying theme in early seventeenth-century Japanese art is the employment of Chinese imagery and symbolism. When we examine these images and symbols, we find that they reveal not just a transference from China, but a Japanese reconstruction of a perceived Chinese aesthetic. Chinese-style imagery appears on all artistic media from the period, from painted screens and architecture to textiles and ceramics. In this paper, I will mainly address motifs executed on early Japanese porcelains and compare them with motifs found on the Chinese porcelains that contemporary Japanese imported into the country. The data for this comparison comes almost exclusively from recent archaeological investigations.
When Japanese porcelains started to be produced for domestic consumption, large quantities of Chinese porcelains were still being imported into Japan through Nagasaki. When we examine original Chinese porcelain motifs, both made for the Chinese domestic market, and those tailored for the Japanese market, and conjoin them with Japanese 'Chinese-style' counterparts, we discover that the differences reveal a conscious aesthetic transformation. It is in this transformation of style and this reinvention of a new visual vocabulary employed on Japanese porcelain that we can better understand early Edo (Ken'ei) period designs.
'Plain Words': Studying Vernacular Chinese at Ogyû Sorai's Ken'en Academy
Emanuel Pastreich, Harvard University
This paper addresses the following crucial development in late-17th century Japanese thought. Disappointed by Confucian scholars' inability to read such important texts as Chinese legal codes, which employed vocabulary outside the classical canon, Ogyû Sorai began to train a generation of intellectuals in colloquial Chinese. This act triggered nothing less than a revolution in the Japanese understanding of Chinese language and culture. In addition, this exposure to a colloquial foreign language inspired revisions of the meaning of "classical" and "vernacular" in the Japanese context as well.
The Sorai school's curriculum in vernacular Chinese thus yielded a more sophisticated notion of language. Vernacular expressions heretofore ignored in Japanese now became subject to serious analysis. Furthermore, scholars no longer approached the Chinese or Japanese classics as entities unrelated to present-day concerns. The language of the Man'yôshû, for example, was now understood to be cast in its own vernacular. It seemed refined or distant, not due to inherent qualities, but because of historical processes of linguistic change. For the new generation of Japanese intellectuals, analogies between the classics and contemporary culture brought the language of the ancients to life. Sorai advocated, for example, translating the Analects into the modern idiom.
Sorai's historicism and grounding in practical linguistic study thus paved the way for a new and in many ways more accurate view of China in its historical and cultural diversity. After Sorai and his linguistic insights, the Japanese could never turn back to an acritical reading of the Sung Confucian commentaries.
Ninjô and the Affective Value of Literature at Itô Jinsai's Kogidô Academy
Lawrence E. Marceau, University of Delaware
In Japan's early modern period, scholars set out to identify coherent rationales for the world in which they found themselves. Their writings cover a broad range of social and personal issues. Since virtually all these writers grounded their positions in Confucian, Buddhist, or syncretic systems, their writings tend to dismiss the literary arts as an unacceptable field of pursuit.
In contrast to these positions, Itô Jinsai and his Kogidô academy affirmed literature, in both its production and its appreciation. Jinsai grounded this perspective on literary expression in his interpretation of human nature as arising from jin (Ch. jen, "benevolence"). As such, he included literature among a range of activities that fostered jin. For Jinsai, his son Tôgai, and their disciples, literature was a direct expression of ninjô (Ch. jen'ch'ing, "human emotions").
In this presentation, I examine an important Kogidô work, Essentials for Reading the Shih ching (Doku Shi yôryô, c. 1736), by Itô Tôgai. While ostensibly discussing a canonical Chinese Confucian text, Tôgai develops a new approach to reading based on his father's innovative arguments. Tôgai's aim goes beyond issues of the Chinese classics to a more general critique of the nature of reading, writing, and appreciating literary works. In so doing, Tôgai promotes an organic and contextual hermeneutic that rejects the dominant didactic, metaphysical approach to interpretation and commentary long taken as given in both China and Japan. The ramifications of this new approach reverberated throughout the rest of the early modern period.
Searching for the Spirit of the Sages: Baisaô and Sencha in Japan
Patricia J. Graham, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the University of Kansas
Baisaô Kô Yûgai (1675-1763) was a great popularizer of Chinese literati culture in the early modern period. We credit Baisaô, kanshi poet and calligrapher, with founding the practice of sencha (steeped tea). An Öbaku Zen monk also influenced by Confucian kogaku teachings, Baisaô idolized Chinese sages whose fondness for tea had stemmed from their belief in its ability to facilitate spiritual enlightenment. Baisaô propagated this philosophy while selling sencha on the streets of Kyôto, and his followers subsequently embraced sencha as preferable to the often rigid chanoyu etiquette.
By the mid-nineteenth century, this new China-oriented sencha practice came to eclipse established chanoyu in popularity. The numerous texts from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries extolling the benefits of sencha chart its growth and development. They also identify the existence of a broader aesthetic, based on perceived notions of Chinese literati taste. Sencha theorists and practitioners include eminent scholars, physicians, merchants, writers, and painters, active in all of Japan's urban centers.
In this presentation I explore the phenomenon of sencha in early modern Japan, especially with reference to Baisaô's pioneering activities. We shall view sencha from the perspective of a broad and deep-seated interest in Chinese literati culture, first by Japanese intellectuals, but later by the general public. Finally, I demonstrate how early modern participation in sencha gatherings and the collection of sencha paraphernalia indicate a sharing of values in defiance of social boundaries, and reflect profound changes that occurred within early modern Japanese society.