From: "Andrew Field" <adfield@BU.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2013 10:31 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: Early Modern Japan Network Panels at AAS
H-ASIA
Jan 2 2013
Early Modern Japan Network Panels at AAS
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From: Patrick R. Schwemmer <pschwemm@princeton.edu>
EMJNet at the AAS, San Diego
Once again EMJNet will present two scholarly panels at the AAS Annual
Meeting in San Diego in addition to sponsoring two more at the main AAS
meeting itself. We have a good bit to offer, but it is all bunched up on
Thursday and Friday, so plan to come early!
Overview
(PLEASE NOTE THESE TIMES AND THE LOCATION; NEITHER IS PUBLISHED IN THE AAS
ANNUAL MEETING PROGRAM:
Time: Thursday, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Place: Oxford Room
Panel I: The Gender of Early Modern Japanese Buddhism, 1640-1882
Panel II: Curating Gestures: Performance and Material Culture in
Early-Modern Japan
Abstracts
Panel I:
The Gender of Early Modern Japanese Buddhism, 1640-1882
If Buddhism in early modern Japan has proven a topic peripheral to most
scholars of Japanese religion and to scholars of Edo history alike, then
our understanding of gender within Edo Buddhism lags still further behind.
While scholarship has illuminated the roles of women in some Edo-era new
religious movements, for instance, gender as a problem within the
historical study of "establishment Buddhism" has so far attracted little
attention. This panel showcases the results of research that takes gender
seriously as a critical category for the study of early modern Buddhism.
Eschewing the all-too-common approach of "add women and stir," this panel
does not merely focus attention on nuns and other female practitioners.
Rather, it shows how broad thinking about gender helps to address existing
problems in Edo religious history. This panel illustrates how changing
notions of gender inflected the emergence of the status (mibun) system and
legal battles among Buddhist institutions. It shows how different gender
identities, both privileged and not, could be hindrances or conveyances in
the common Edo-era practice of religious travel. It reveals that
conspicuously gendered modes of expression formed part of an ongoing
historicist search for knowledge of past Buddhist practice as grounding for
the present. In this way, it demonstrates that gender is one key to
understanding the complex ritual, social, and ideological roles of Buddhism
in early modern Japan, and to understanding early modern Japan as a whole.
Nuns at the Intersection of Status and Gender: The Conflicts and
Compromises of Daihongan's Nuns in Early Modern Japan
Matt Mitchell, Duke University
Scholarship has demonstrated that status (mibun) was the central organizing
feature of early modern society in Japan. Despite the extensive examination
of various status groups over the past thirty years, work detailing women's
places within the status system has been sparse. This is particularly true
in the case of Buddhist nuns: Only a few articles examine nuns and status,
and they focus on the early seventeenth century. However, as Amy Stanley
points out in Selling Women, conceptions of women and their places in the
status system were in flux even through the late seventeenth century.
Because of this, early seventeenth-century nuns were able to act and
interact with monks and laypeople very differently from their later
successors. Therefore, in order to fully understand nuns' roles and places
in early modern Japan, we must first understand how concepts of gender and
their status as Buddhist clerics became solidified in the late seventeenth
century.
In this presentation, I use published and unpublished temple documents to
examine a series of lawsuits from the middle of the seventeenth to the
early eighteenth centuries. These cases, which determined the sectarian
identity and administrative shape of the popular pilgrimage temple Zenkōji
throughout the early modern period, were between its chief sub-temples: the
Daihongan convent (of the Pure Land school) and the Daikanjin monastery (of
the Tendai school). As I demonstrate, these conflicts and compromises also
fixed gender and status boundaries for Daihongan's nuns, circumscribing
their roles within the Zenkōji temple complex for the remainder of the Edo
period.
Bringing the Center to the Periphery: Buddhist Travel as the Extension of
Masculine Authority
Gina Cogan, Boston University
Scholars have long studied Edo era religious travel, but like any pilgrims,
they tend to follow only the well-traveled routes. Thus, lay pilgrims to
sacred sites like Ise, as well as low-ranking itinerant Buddhist preachers,
feature prominently in existing work. We know less about lecture tours by
eminent monks. This is a troubling omission, since the travel of clerics
like the Rinzai Zen reformer Hakuin (1686-1769) stands in sharp contrast to
trips by itinerant preachers. Unlike those peripatetic figures, Hakuin
spent years as the abbot of his home temple, Shōinji, setting out to preach
only after he turned sixty. Even then, he periodically returned home to
administer the temple and teach his disciples. This paper seeks to
understand Hakuin's travels in gendered terms. It argues that Hakuin's time
at Shōinji, a homosocial community and a site of ascetic meditative
practice, gave him the religious capital that served him as a "travel
pass." This enabled him to voyage through Japan with no loss of status, and
to avoid being grouped with the itinerant preachers, who were marked as
marginal. Roads are often associated with liminality, in the language of
Victor Turner, but here too Hakuin offers a striking exception. His time on
the road did not place him in a liminal state, but instead extended his
abbacy throughout Japan, affording him the opportunity to preach to his
traveling companions just as he did at his home temple. Status,
masculinity, and patronage all combined to make Hakuin one of the most
popular monks of his day.
The Nun Kōgetsu and the Gender of Buddhist Historicism in Late Edo Japan
Micah Auerback, University of Michigan
Although today overshadowed by the towering figure of her monastic master
Jiun Onkō (1718-1804), the late Edo-era intellectual and expert in monastic
discipline Kōgetsu Sōgi (1755-1833) also promoted a historicist vision of
Buddhism in her own right. While Jiun lived, Kōgetsu transcribed and edited
his teachings about the life of Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha. In 1830,
long after Jiun's death, she published her own original illustrated
literary biography of the Buddha, The Light of the Three Realms (Miyo no
hikari). Here Kōgetsu wrote in a classicizing and overtly "feminine" style.
She grounded her tale in the novel historicist scholarship pioneered by
Jiun. In doing so, she explicitly attempted to counter and "correct" the
vernacular variations of the Buddha's life story circulating in Japan in
her day. Republished in 1882 with the imprimatur of the early Meiji
Buddhist reformer Fukuda Gyōkai (1809-1888), The Light of the Three Realms
went on to assume a new role within the Meiji era effort to revive and
reform Buddhism. This presentation locates Kōgetsu's work in the context of
Edo-period historicism in its Buddhist guise. It considers how Kōgetsu's
position as a nun speaking to the commercial reading public influenced her
intellectual work. It further suggests the notably wide scope of Kōgetsu's
work, showing that it reached as far back in time as ancient India, and
suggesting that it speaks to the continuing preoccupation with the Buddha
today.
Respondent: Barbara Ambros, Religious Studies
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Panel II:
Curating Gestures: Performance and Material Culture in Early-Modern Japan.
The subjects and objects of performance studies and art history might seem
at first glance to be mutually exclusive, but this panel draws on the rich
early-modern archive to explore performances starring objects, objects
storing performances, and agents who signify in spaces between subject- and
object-hood. Screech deepens our understanding of Tokugawa diplomacy,
expanding in recent scholarship, by introducing an exchange of precious
objects, many still extant, between Hidetada and King James I of England.
Feltens, based on Ogata Kōrin's practice of painting on the spot before an
audience using new media like ceramic surfaces and a combinatory logic of
cultural cues from traditions like the noh theatre, argues for his
centrality to period ideas of time and signification. Kanemitsu follows
itinerant female bards as they change from the storytellers into the story
told, picking up clues to their social identity from the material culture
described in their ballads. Schwemmer introduces a previously-unknown
picture-scroll adaptation of a post-medieval ballad which exorcises the
violence of peacemaking, sublimating medieval warrior culture at the dawn
of the Edo order. How do we conceptualize political or other agency in a
performance studies that includes objects as actors? What does the
performativity of artistry, curatorship, and exchange, mean for art
history? We break new methodological ground with reference to bodies both
animate and inanimate.
Diplomacy and Performance in the Edo Period
Timon Screech, SOAS, University of London
This paper will look at the neglected subject of Edo-period diplomacy.
While academics no longer call sakoku the defining feature of the Tokugawa
state, studies of formal Tokugawa international intercourse have only just
begun to emerge, mostly for the Korean case. Issues of performance and
display at diplomatic encounters have barely been touched. I will take one
case study, and lead from that into a wider inspection of the issues. The
case study is the arrival of representatives of King James I in 1613. He
dispatched a letter to the 'emperor of Japan' in 1611, which was duly
delivered to Ieyasu, in retirement at Sunpu, two years later. Ieyasu was
also given a telescope, probably the first in Asia. The English then went
to Edo, where they exchanged gifts with Tokugawa Hidetada. Returning to
Sunpu, they received a shuinjō, then proceeded to Kyoto, where they were
given five gold screens, reciprocal presents from Ieyasu to the King. The
whole episode took about a month, but it has never been properly analysed.
There are scant records of the presents in Japan, but the fate of the
objects sent to London is clear, and some are extant. The wider issue takes
us from the performance to its representation. How were international acts
promoted in public? Paintings and prints of Korean retinues have been
studied, but what of the European case? I will conclude with assessment of
important surviving works.
Performance in the Work of Ogata Kōrin—Ceramics and Ink Paintings
Frank Feltens, Columbia University
This paper examines aspects of performance in Ogata Kōrin's
paintings—largely ignored yet crucial for understanding the oeuvre of this
important artist and the scene of art production in his time. Performance
is manifested in Kōrin's work in two ways: through so-called paintings on
the spot, artistic performances before an audience, and through aspects of
theatrical performance like noh which permeated the artist's aesthetic
consciousness. With examples of Kōrin's ink paintings and monochrome images
which he added to ceramics by his brother Kenzan, I will show that in situ
performances blurred the boundaries of artistic media and emphasized visual
experimentation over meaning and representation. Kōrin painted both ink
paintings and ceramic illustrations before audiences, making him the first
Japanese painter to use ceramic surfaces in precisely the same way as the
silk or paper ground of conventional paintings. These images in two vastly
different genres were produced in a minimum amount of time and emphatically
spotlighted individual virtuosity. Subsequently, in spite of their
reduction of form and content, the paintings immediately garnered a
long-lasting appreciation as collectible manifestations of a single
occasion, a never-reoccurring point in time. The Edo period demonstrated a
particular awareness of time which I believe constitutes a central aspect
of Kōrin's performed paintings. In light of this cultural context, I will
illustrate how Kōrin used performance as a social tool and as a means to
disseminate his skills as a painter, while demonstrating how performance
altered contemporaneous receptions of materials and artworks themselves.
In Search of Female Voices
Janice S. Kanemitsu, Cornell University
Described as the narrative origins of jōruri, the late sixteenth-century
tale of Lady Jōruri describes the romance between the daughter of a wealthy
lord and the teenage Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a fictionalized imagining of
the heroic warrior before the Genpei War. Although much light has been shed
on the identities and careers of jōruri reciters from the 1600s onward,
both by Tokugawa-period writers and modern scholars, we know little about
those who initially crafted, disseminated, and revised the tale of Lady
Joruri. And especially considering the amount of Japanese scholarship
focused on the Tokugawa-period puppet theater, the lack of research into
its "origins tale" seems curious. By tracing the flow of and ripples in the
transmission of this tale and its related narratives, including the
ballad-drama Eboshi-ori (The Hat Folder), as well as the description of
objects therein, I hope to trace the voices of female storytellers—both the
stationary entertainers at the rest stations along Eastern Sea Route and
the itinerant storytellers—and gauge a possible convergence in narrative
dissemination and detouring. In the process, I hope to clarify a number of
questions. How and when did the telling of this tale pass from female
entertainers to blind monks? Do the different versions of the tale allow a
profiling of the storytellers? What do the descriptions of objects within
the narrative(s) teach us about the possible producers, mediators, and
consumers of the tale? Could the character identified as the younger sister
of Kamata Masakiyo (former vassal of Yoshitsune's father, Yoshitomo), who
repeatedly appears in this series of related narratives, actually represent
a group of female storytellers?
The Princeton Sagamikawa Scrolls and the End(s) of the Ballad
Patrick Schwemmer, Princeton University
I have found a previously-unknown illuminated manuscript of the ballad
(mai/bukyoku) Sagamikawa in Princeton's Firestone Library. Sagamikawa, also
extant in a few early-seventeenth-century prints, is an exorcism of the
violence of peacemaking: the archetypal shogun Yoritomo is haunted at a
ribbon-cutting ceremony by a host of great souls whom his constructions
have displaced, but his preferment of a good vassal over a bad one assuages
their anger. Their ghostly laments read like a medley of classic
sixteenth-century ballads, and so Fujii Natsuko argues convincingly for
Sagamikawa's exclusion from the ballad canon. But why was such a
pseudo-ballad written? I argue that this post-ballad ballad represents a
hitherto-undiscussed stage in the well-known seventeenth-century evolution
of the genre from oral performance to reading material to narrative picture
scroll: the demand for ballad-like texts was sometimes met with texts that
had never been ballads. The Princeton exemplar, the only extant manuscript
or scroll of Sagamikawa and the only version with painted illustrations,
embodies the endpoint of this development. Its text shows scholasticizing
improvements like the addition of exact dates and more elegant diction, and
its paintings lavish gold leaf, azurite, and malachite on masterful
compositions in the Tosa style. Finally, its calligraphy is in the hand of
the Kyoto bookmaker Asakura Jūken (fl. c. 1660-1680<tel:1660-1680>), and so
I situate it within the seventeenth-century Kyoto renaissance described by
Pitelka et al: it protests the death of the old (dis)order while
simultaneously participating in the sublimation of medieval warrior culture
under the pax Tokugawa.
Respondent: Morgan Pitelka, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
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