Organizer: Ethan Segal, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Hitomi Tonomura, University of Michigan
For many years, modern scholarship taught that women lost rights over the course of Japan’s pre-modern history. The Heian period was held up as a time of female literacy and empowerment, known for authors including Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon. In contrast, the subsequent medieval period saw the gradual loss of women’s rights ranging from inheritance to divorce and accompanied by the silencing of women’s voices. Recently, scholars have begun to question this declension narrative, and the papers in this panel build upon such efforts through re-examination of four pre-modern Japanese women and the ways that they have been remembered. Laffin opens with Nun Abutsu and considers her poetic and scholarly activities in the context of patronage for Kamakura court women. Segal turns to Hojo Masako, powerful wife of the first shogun, and explores contrasting images of a woman both reviled and valorized. Gerhart focuses on Hino Shigeko, examining the rituals and artifacts associated with her funeral while re-thinking the status of women in the fifteenth-century Muromachi bakufu. Ryu concludes with Ono no Komachi, investigating why this legendary Heian poet is transformed in Taisho literary works into a promiscuous character for ridicule. Together, the four papers show that Heian women were not always remembered as positively, or medieval women as negatively, as the standard accounts might lead us to believe. Equally important, the panel employs a variety of disciplines – art history, history, and literary studies – to reveal how perceptions of these women were constructed to reflect the contemporary attitudes of (usually male) writers.
Within literary history, women’s writings of the Kamakura period are usually situated along a trajectory of decline. Opportunities for patronage decreased, and court appointments became more competitive, making for fewer female-authored literary works. Despite this, extant works show that some women found means of supporting their literary activities. The case of Nun Abutsu (1222-1283), while perhaps exceptional, reveals how some court women were able to find patrons and means of marketing their cultural knowledge to new audiences. As wife to one of the era’s most influential poets, Fujiwara no Tameie (1198-1275), Abutsu was in a unique position to access literary resources and transmit poetic teachings to her descendents and clients outside the Mikohidari lineage. This presentation will take up Abutsu in her capacity as a waka poet and Genji scholar, focusing on how she was educated, what enabled her to participate in poetry contests and scholarly debate, and how she capitalized on her skills to position herself as a mentor both in the capital and Kamakura. The client networks created by Abutsu were eventually passed on to her children and expanded by them, contributing to her veneration as “godmother” of the Reizei line. In closing, I will consider how other literary works, such as Towazugatari (ca. 1310), show the development of client-patron relations in Kamakura and how this can be related to the socio-economic status of court women in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
As wife of the first shogun and mother of the next two, Hojo Masako (1157-1225) stands out as an influential figure in the creation of Japan’s first warrior government, the Kamakura bakufu. She is also one of the few medieval women mentioned by name in modern textbooks. But careful examination of modern writings on Masako reveals the need to reconsider her life and the ways she has been remembered. What did she accomplish, and why did no other women follow in her footsteps? Some sources suggest that she was greatly respected by her contemporaries and list her as having been a shogun herself, whereas other, later materials condemn her for promoting her natal family’s interests and possibly being complicity in the murder of her husband and sons. How have portrayals of Masako come to differ so greatly over time? This paper addresses such questions with two goals in mind. First, it examines Masako’s life, calling renewed attention to her prominence in the bakufu and exploring how Masako was able to succeed as a woman when seemingly no other women achieved positions of power. Second, it turns a critical eye to the sources in order to determine how portrayals of Masako have evolved and what biases may or may not have influenced later writers. The paper’s findings suggest that Masako was much more successful – and far less disloyal – than many modern accounts would have us believe.
Hino Shigeko (1411-1463) is one of only a handful of women from the medieval period to merit scholarly attention, albeit attention garnered primarily through her personal relationship to men in positions of political power. Shigeko was one of many secondary wives or concubines of the sixth Ashikaga Shogun Yoshinori. The position of primary wife was held first by her older sister Muneko, and later by another concubine, Ogimachi Sanjo Tadako. Shigeko, however, produced two sons who became shogun: Yoshikatsu, the seventh Ashikaga shogun, and his successor, Yoshimasa, who became the eighth shogun at age fourteen. Thus, it was Shigeko’s success as a mother that launched her into a position of some prestige within the Ashikaga household. In particular, she is said to have wielded significant political power over Yoshimasa because he had inherited the title of shogun at such a young age. Shigeko’s funeral service was held on 8.11 of Kanshô 4 (1463) and is described in Inryôken nichiroku. It was, in many respects, very similar to the funerals held for the Ashikaga shoguns; it was even held at Tôjiin, the Ashikaga family mortuary temple (bodaiji). This paper will investigate the rituals, ritual paraphernalia, and participants in Shigeko’s funeral as a means to more fully understand how the Ashikaga chose to present and preserve her public image. It argues that the treatment accorded Shigeko suggests a higher status than we might otherwise expect and suggests interesting questions about her role as consort and mother.
This paper investigates the cultural currency of the legendary Heian poet and femme fatale Ono no Komachi through two Taisho authors’ literary productions. In 1923, a year before Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Chijinnoai created a literary scandal due to its rendition of the sexually exuberant and self-centered heroine Naomi, Kikuchi Kan and Akutagawa Ryunosuke respectively published Ono no Komachi and Futari Komachi. In these works, Komachi is transformed into the butt of a joke centering on her female gender, sexuality, and agency. Some might see these Komachi writings as merely the modern authors’ imaginative reworking of the canonical Komachi narratives, including The Hundred-Nights Tale (ca. 11th c.) and Tamatsukuri Komachishi Sosuisho (mid-to-the late Heian). But I argue that the symbolic signification of the male authors’ excessive misogynistic treatment of Komachi can be better explained through its link to the tension surrounding the emergence of the new Japanese woman in the Taisho era, when the traditional notion of Woman became unhinged as evidenced by the “moga (modern girl)” phenomenon, the impact of which on the Taisho cultural consciousness was palpably demonstrated through the so-called “Naomi-ism.” By highlighting the conceptual intersection between the image of Komachi and that of the moga, this paper reveals the degree to which the name “Ono no Komachi” functions as an empty signifier to be filled by the gender ideology of any given time.
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