Organizer: Terry Kawashima, Harvard University
Chair: Margaret H. Childs, University of Michigan
Discussant: H. Richard Okada, Princeton University
Twelfth-century Japan is often described as a time of great political turbulence, filled with wars and repeated overthrowings of powerful figures. The players in these dramas who have received the most scholastic attention have been overwhelmingly male; warriors and aristocrats who struggled for control of the government.
This monolithic view of the twelfth century can be challenged through the examination of gender. Women, in fact, played crucial and complex roles in the determination of power relationships at the center of society. The three papers in this interdisciplinary panel address the issue of gender in relation to the questions of patronage and Buddhism from the perspectives of art history, religion, and literature. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan discusses the role of three imperial consorts and their avid involvement in the production of Buddhist art. Brian Ruppert examines the relationship between the religious powers of imperial women and their maintenance of Buddhist relics. Terry Kawashima focuses on the motivated sponsorship of "marginalized" women by a retired emperor.
The panel aims not only to establish the importance of women in reconsidering twelfth-century Japan, but also to problematize and add nuance to the question of gender itself. The papers attempt to treat gender not as an essential category, but as a constructed position which can be defined differently and strategically according to the interests of those seeking power.
Three Wives, Three Treasures: The Buddhist Cultural Productions of Three Heian
Empresses
Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University
From 1117 through 1156 three women dominated the court of Emperor Toba both politically and culturally. They were his consorts, but they were also his allies, strategists, and friends through the various factional disputes that strained the fabric of palace society. These women, Taikenmon'in, Bifukumon'in, and Kayanoin, competed over the status of their children, but in another way they were remarkably close. Each was avidly determined to sponsor as much Buddhist art and architecture as her individual coffers and personal circumstances would allow.
The result was the construction, with women as the primary patrons, of some ten major temples in and around the city of Kyoto, to which hundreds of scriptures and paintings, and thousands of sutra copies were donated at consecrations. The profound political, social, economic, and ideological implications of the fact that women, not men, were the primary patrons of Buddhist art for much of the twelfth century deserve our critical attention.
This paper first examines some of these implications in order to question a number of standard assumptions about women and Buddhist praxis in ancient Japan. Second, it delineates the extended role of women in the emergence of a distinctive Buddhist visual culture and ideology at the court of Toba and his heirs. Third, it considers visual representation in Buddhism as an area that, more radically than the textual realm and its predominantly masculine order, allows for a space of possibilities where the dialectical resistance of image to doctrine affords release from the iron house of gender.
Memorial Days and Family Treasures: Lineage and Gender in the Care and Veneration
of Relics (Shari)
Brian D. Ruppert, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
Buddhist clerics developed relic rites in early medieval Japan that were not only accessible to lay believers of both genders but were often patronized by female aristocrats. At the same time, this paper will show, by mid-twelfth century women of the imperial court played a pivotal role in the protection and worship of relics. Based on a study of representations of relics in court diaries and tale collections, it will be seen that women were heavily involved in both the care and the veneration of Buddha relics held by the imperial and Fujiwara houses. These lineages drew upon literary depictions of the special connection between women and the enriching powers of relics and jewels to establish traditions of female care and veneration of Buddha relics.
This paper will argue that the place of figures such as the retired empresses Bifukumon'in, Kokamoni'in, Hachijo-in, and Sen'yomon'in in the dynamics of these ritual activities suggests not only that they were mediators of religious power on behalf of their lineages, but that they also developed authority in the non-official realm of ritual practice. In doing so, they circumvented the dominant Buddhist discourse on relics, which described the male monarch as the proper patron of the Buddha's body, and monks his ritual charges. They appropriated both native traditions of female prominence in death ritual and images such as the "jewel woman" to produce a new arena for ritual authority-in the seeming service of a male ancestor that was both a Buddha and a family patriarch.
Manipulating the Margin: Goshirakawa and His Project of Song
Terry Kawashima, Harvard University
The retired emperor Goshirakawa (1127-1192) has been noted for his extensive involvement in politics and his patronage of literary circles during his lifetime, a turbulent era that spanned the Gempei wars. He is also well known for his fervor in pursuing the art of imayo (current-style song), which was practiced professionally by women entertainers who frequently engaged in prostitution. The culmination of his efforts is represented by the famous anthology of songs which he compiled, Rjojin Hisho; the work has been hailed in the past as a repository of the "popular voice" of the women entertainers whose songs portrayed everyday, lower-class phenomena.
However, a closer examination of Ryojin Hisho, particularly the last chapter in which Goshirakawa discusses his views on the imayo genre and the women who practice it, reveals the complexity of his stance vis-à-vis these women. In the space of one chapter, he elevates the women and their art in some places, but marginalizes them in others. This paper will show that these maneuverings were not simply accidental inconsistencies, but that the empowerment and marginalization of these women illustrate Goshirakawa's attempts to appropriate their art in order for him to achieve his religious and social goals. Ryojin Hisho, as well as the shifting position of these women as depicted in the work, therefore, are mediated and constructed products; the transparency of the "popular voice" thus must be questioned.