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Poetry from the Edge: Rethinking Political Outsiders and Poetic Action in Japan
Organizer: Matthew Fraleigh, Brandeis University
Chair: Terry Kawashima, Wesleyan University
Discussant: Edwin A Cranston, Harvard University
Forlorn prisoners, fiery radicals, learned refugees: what unites this disparate collection is the status of political outsider, individuals who were captured, shunned, persecuted, or dispersed by political authorities. These figures were not reduced by difficult circumstances to silence or inactivity; rather, from them (or those in their immediate proximity) we have poetry at once mournful and brimming with vitality. This panel brings together three specialists of pre- and early-modern Japanese literature studying the plights and poetry of outsiders in various historical contexts. Fraleigh focuses on an enigmatic mid-nineteenth-century cohort of impassioned young samurai who composed kanshi to voice their pro-imperial, anti-bakufu sentiments. Despite their amateur status, these poets deftly mined the Chinese classics for allusions analogous to their own political sentiments: disaffection exacerbated by imprisonment and state persecution. Kawashima pursues the theme of captivity as manifested in Heike monogatari. Poetry related to prisoners of war, she discovers, is preoccupied with movement, whether curtailed or coerced—and may have assisted in ratifying the new spatial arrangement of government (a split between Heian and Kamakura) brought about by the Genpei Wars. Webb takes up seventh-century émigrés from the Korean peninsula, whose outsider status is two-fold: as foreign experts who made enormous contributions to the burgeoning Yamato government, and, in twentieth-century scholarship, as the neglected component of East Asian comparative research. In what way did calendrics specialists from Paekche affect Yamato poetic discourse about the seasons? How might attention to them overturn commonplaces about cultural “reception”? Edwin Cranston will act as discussant.
All shi wrote?: “Men of high purpose” and their Chinese poetry in late Edo Japan
Matthew Fraleigh, Brandeis University
The shishi, or “men of high purpose,” a group of mostly young samurai who banded together in the mid-nineteenth century behind various pro-imperial causes, also produced an extensive body of shi poetry. Whether they used Chinese poetry to vent their displeasure with the status quo or to stridently call for the overthrow of the shogunate, whether their poems attested to the purity of their own intentions or gave voice to ethnocentric or xenophobic ideas, the shishi shared a nationalistic identification with Japan, an intense concern for its fate and a stated willingness to become martyrs. Considering its requirement of familiarity with an extensive corpus of Chinese texts, poetic rules, and rhetorical techniques, not to mention its privileged status as an “insiders’” literature, the kanshi form may at first seem an unlikely choice for Japanese nationalists, who claimed to value direct action and unadorned expression, and who saw themselves principally as opponents of the establishment. This paper examines how Chinese poetry could become the dominant expressive form for the shishi of the bakumatsu period, one that forged bonds between various disenfranchised figures – often in times of greatest duress. After identifying some of the institutional, linguistic, and cultural factors that created a compositional context for Chinese poetry among the shishi, I examine works by Fujita Toko (1806-1855), Takasugi Shinsaku (1839-1867), Hashimoto Sanai (1834-1859) and others, looking at how the specific Chinese allusions and texts they chose could be re-worked, and how these in turn circulated as an intertextual currency among the shishi.
Poetry and Captivity in Heike monogatari
Terry Kawashima, Wesleyan University
Heike monogatari is most famous for its depictions of political dealings and military engagements surrounding the Genpei wars in the late twelfth century. Less attention has been paid to the analysis of poetry in the text, even though both waka and kanshi appear as direct invocations or allusions at crucial narrative moments. This paper focuses on how poetry functions within the particular trope of the traffic of war captives between the capital and Kamakura, the seat of the military government. These two centers of power exhibited their influence through various means, including the summoning of individuals from one place to another. Narratives of war-prisoners’ journeys build upon layers of earlier texts that refer to this itinerary, such as the azuma kudari and Kamakura-era travel literature; Heike reformulates these textual precedents to focus on the relationship between mobility, immobility, and power. The captive occupies a paradoxical positionality in which movement is both necessary and prohibited: he must travel when ordered to do so, but his freedom of movement is otherwise denied. This paper shows not only how poems composed by prisoners of war and those around them delineate the contours of the captive’s figure primarily with reference to the question of his movement, but also how that figure participates in establishing the legitimacy of the bifurcated system of rule through this very movement. Heike, whose many versions date from both during and after the era of the capital-Kamakura configuration, comments on the efficacy of this arrangement through the trope of the captive.
Superintendents of Time: Korean Émigrés and the Shape of Seasons in Man’yôshű
Jason P. Webb, University of Tokyo, (please select)
East Asian court poetry abounds with elegant controversies. One required poets to adjudicate between seasons: which is better, spring or autumn? Rarefied as this debate might seem, its implications are far-reaching: how did the seasons transform from being the awesome forces governing the agrarian cycle into manageable aesthetic objects? What role had calendar technology in codifying official poetic events, and, more broadly, in securing a royal monopoly on the measurement of time? This paper invokes seventh-century advances in calendrics visible in Yamato political institutions as a means to rethink the earliest surviving version of the spring/autumn contest in Japan—a chôka, composed in the 670’s by Princess Nukata, that ruled in favor of autumn (MYS #16). Because of a possibility that this composition breached protocol at a kanshi banquet, under the rubric of twentieth-century national literary studies it has accrued conspicuous symbolic value. Insular kokubungaku scholars have celebrated its elocution as a glorious moment of (female) nativist resistance towards rampant late-seventh-century court sinophilia, and hailed Nukata’s choice of season as seminal to a unique Japanese aesthetics. Broader-minded comparative scholars of East Asian literature have replied by introducing thematic and rhetorical correspondences between Nukata’s work and many plausible Six Dynasties’ precedents—texts that Nukata surely knew well. Neither of these approaches, I argue, is adequate. Scrutinizing calendrics enables us to place at the forefront the customary “intermediary” of East Asian reception studies, émigrés from the Korean peninsula, and in so doing articulate methodological alternatives to the fallacious Yamato-Han dialectic.