Session 89: Inroads to Unreason: Negotiating the Eccentric and the Irrational in Edo Japan

Organizer: Puck Brecher, University of Southern California

Chair and Discussant: Peter Nosco, University of British Columbia

Keywords: Japanese history, Edo period, Japan, intellectual history, aesthetics, eccentrism.

Though touted as Japan’s ascendant age of rationalism, the Edo period actually witnessed a flourishing of unreason. In the 18th and 19th centuries especially, heterodox intellectual currents and nonconformist aesthetic practices synergized to yield generations of outlandish literati and scholars exploring a politics and aesthetics of unreason. Did unreason, the celebration of the unselfconscious and ahistorical self, emerge because of or in spite of the orthodoxy of Edo rationalism? This panel explores this question by examining individuals, usually signified with the terms kijin (eccentric) and kyôjin (mad person), who negotiated an influx of rational and empirical humanism by exhibiting an intuitive understanding of the value of unreason, whether manifested as political dissent or more private forms of self-expression.

Cheryl Crowley introduces issues of gender and eccentrism in her discussion of the female haikai poet Shiba Sonome (1664–1726). Jeffrey Newmark takes up the Wang Yangming ideologues Ôshio Heihachirô (1798–1837) and Ikuta Yorozu (1801–1837) as kyôjin who construct political resistance around an aesthetic of unreason. Puck Brecher highlights texts which challenge current historiography’s habit of explaining eccentrism (ki) and madness (kyô) as essentially Daoist and as hallmarks of modernization. Finally, Peipei Qiu returns to the aesthetic of kyô in three genres of Edo poetry, finding a variegated orthodoxy of unrestraint permeating poetic practice. Collectively these papers suggest that one cannot accept the orthodoxy of reason in early modern Japan without acknowledging the centrality of its opposite in the contexts of identity formation and self-expression.

Kijin, Haikai, and Sex: Bashô School Poet Shiba Sonome

Cheryl Crowley, Emory University

In the early modern period the term kijin (eccentric) was used to describe people who distinguished themselves by both their mastery of the arts as well as by their odd behavior. Not only were kijin allowed to act in ways that would normally be censured by more conventional society because of their perceived genius, but their very eccentricities identified them as especially worthy of admiration. The behaviors associated with kijin marked them as separate and independent from conventional social structures such as marriage and family, and in the early modern period the term kijin is applied almost exclusively to men.

However, some women also achieved renown as eccentric geniuses, one of whom was the haikai poet Shiba Sonome (1664–1726), a member of the Bashô school. Sonome’s Kiku no chiri (Dust of the Chrysanthemum) and Tsuru no tsue (Crane’s Walking Stick) are among the few haikai verse collections published by women in the early modern period. Sonome’s reputation came not only from the excellence of her verse, but also from her eccentric activities—activities like those of the kijin.

While her admirers praised her behavior as proof of her authentic understanding of haikai, their descriptions also include defensive attestations of her femininity, suggesting that the kijin lifestyle and femaleness were incompatible. This presentation examines Sonome’s verse and prose, as well as writings about Sonome by Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), Inazu Gikû (1663–1733) and Yamaguchi Sodô (1642–1716), to explore the gender implications of the kijin phenomenon.

Resistance for the Individual: Ôshio Heihachirô and Ikuta Yorozu’s 1837 Uprisings

Jeffrey Newmark, University of British Columbia

In 1837, Osaka magistrates paraded the head of a former samurai official along their streets. In a Kashiwazaki prison cell, another warrior’s widow laid between her asphyxiated children while choking in the blood of her severed tongue. These two macabre scenes represent the seeds of an individual-oriented aesthetic of resistance in late Tokugawa Japan.

The head of the Osaka samurai belonged to Ôshio Heihachirô (1798–1837), a warrior who had held such contempt for the Bakufu that in early 1837 he instigated an uprising that incinerated one-fifth of Osaka. Three months later, the dying woman’s husband, Ikuta Yorozu (1801–1837), led an attack against a guard post in Kashiwazaki. Eventually, both men committed suicide before their arrests.

Both came from contrasting ideologies. Whereas Ôshio was a Neo-Confucian, Ikuta was a pupil of Hirata Atsutane’s kokugaku school. If ideology played a crucial role in the uprisings, why did the riots mirror one another, and why were there discrepancies between the plans of attack and uprisings—actions from which both men thought they would later be deemed as kyôjin or madmen?

First, I will recount Ôshio and Ikuta’s lives. Next, I will address how Ôshio abandoned his academy, the Senshindô, and how Ikuta left his school of kokugaku, the Enjuku. I will then discuss the similarities in Ôshio’s and Ikuta’s texts, and compare the works with material from their ideological predecessors. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate that individual interest underlay the action of resistance, which would constitute an aesthetic adaptable to Bakumatsu Japan.

Celebrating the Unrestrained: Kyô in Edo Poetry

Peipei Qiu, Vassar College

The celebration of kyô (madness or eccentricity) is a prominent characteristic of Japanese poetry during the Edo period. It permeates the themes, diction, and persona of Bashô’s (1644–1694) haikai (comic linked verse), Nampo’s (1749–1823) kyôka (comic poem of 31 syllables), and Ryôkan’s (1758–1831) kanshi (poem in Chinese style), the representative poets of major genres popular at the time. The deliberate eccentricity, of these poets contributed directly to their lasting popularity, and kyô constituted an important part of their poetics.

Kyô became a notable aesthetic paradigm in Japanese literature since the medieval period, but the aesthetic of kyô has never been a monolithic concept. In fact, kyô in existing Japanese texts represented highly diverse authorial intentions and stances, including political resistance, religious nonconformity, aesthetic preference, social criticism, ethical concerns, and the construction of a literary identity. Through selected poems by Bashô, Nampo, and Ryôkan, this paper examines the different ways in which the major Edo poets re-present the aesthetic paradigm of kyô. While considering the different framework and significance of each poet’s unique eccentrism, it pays attention to a common interest shared by their kyô—the celebration of the unrestrained spirit—and analyzes the relationship between this shared authorial interest and the social/cultural climate.

Along the Wayside: The Confucian Legacy in Writings on Eccentrics in Edo and Meiji Japan

Puck Brecher, University of Southern California

The sociopolitical resistance implicit in the proliferation of kyôjin or kyôsha (madmen) and kijin (eccentrics) in the late Edo period, resistance against what so often is called Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, emanates in part from an unexpected source: the Confucian tradition itself. The Hôsa kyôsha-den (1779) is the first work to clearly articulate this classical Confucian perspective on eccentrics, and though it was never published during the Edo and Meiji eras it illuminates a new dimension in the construction of the eccentric identity during those periods.

Beginning with the Kinsei kijin-den (1790), it became standard practice among kijin-den writers to pay tribute to the Daoist roots of eccentrism as encapsulated in the aesthetic of ki. The discourse on kyô (the ambitious, hasty, wild, and mad) discussed by both classical Confucian and Neo-Confucian scholars in China, however, was also effectively utilized by biographers of kijin and kyôjin in Japan. The Kyôjin-dan (1902) and the Meiji kijin-den (1903), for example, are works which follow the Hôsa kyôsha-den in constructing eccentrism around kyô.

Recent historiography has generated the view that the abnormal and unreasonable take shape along the Wayside, along the margins of the Confucian Way. This misconception has posited Daoism as an oppositional alternative recovering as central (centric) that which Neo-Confucianism had rendered marginal (eccentric). Through an analysis of the above texts, this paper shows that eccentrism in modernizing Japan can be considered Daoist only through a dangerously narrow reading of Edo period orthodoxy and demonstrates that eccentrics self-identified through a variety of traditions, including classical Confucianism.