CONTINUITY AND DISRUPTIONS IN MODERN ARTISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
Melissa Li, Columbia University
“'Momijigari' and Matsubame-mono: The Meiji Theatre Reform of Mokuami and Danjūrō IX"
Tracing the historical and social contexts in which the 1887 kabuki dance play “Momijigari" was created, this project engages with the origins and transformations of the kabuki subgenre matsubame-mono, and how this subgenre should be positioned among the vicissitudes of kabuki in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, throughout a tortuous process known as the “Theater Reform Movement.” In matsubame-mono, Meiji kabuki seems to have found an eclectic solution to the conflicting demands between the westernization-obsessed government and the traditionally-minded audiences. This paper demonstrates three defining characteristics of the Meiji matsubame-mono, in order to illuminate the social, cultural and political dynamics that underpinned the kabuki industry from Meiji onward. On the level of acting and staging practices, Meiji matsubame-mono was able to host both quintessential stylizations, musical accompaniment and theatrical tricks of the Edo kabuki, as well as tenets of Western theater such as “historical accuracy” and “psychological realism.” Second, the fact that matsubame-mono was adapted from the high-culture Noh theater and that Noh stories could be enacted by kabuki actors, speaks volumes about the rise of kabuki’s cultural status during Meiji. Third, most Meiji matsubame-mono plays revolved around nationalistic themes such as “oni-taiji” (鬼退治). I argue that, while maintaining long-standing practices of the grassroots theatre, Kawatake Mokuami and his all-star cast also discovered the literal definition of a national theater through adapting classical Noh narratives, thereby crystallizing the national consciousness in Meiji kabuki.
Kristin Schreiner, University of California, Los Angeles
"Base Town Literature: Racial and Sexual Tensions in the Aftermath of Japan's Defeat"
Japan’s surrender in 1945, marking the end of World War II, stands out as one of the most prominent moments of rupture in modern Japan. In its wake, Japan was stripped of its colonies, its military, and even its sovereignty as the nation was placed under occupation by the Allied forces. But did the war’s legacy come to a close when formal occupation ended in 1952? If not, how long did that aftermath last? Did it change in form as time passed? To explore these questions, I will examine two literary texts that delve into the aftermath of World War II: Hirabayashi Taiko’s “Hokkaidō Chitose no onna” (1952) and Murakami Ryū’s “Kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū” (1976). These two works, each set contemporaneously with their time of publication, were written over two decades apart—and these are particularly dramatic decades, as Japan moves from the immediacy of defeat and occupation to the height of the economic boom years. However, despite the gap between them, the two texts share a remarkable amount of common ground. Both texts are set in base towns, with the American military presence looming over their narratives. Both heavily feature sexual relations between their Japanese protagonists and the soldiers stationed at military bases within Japan, delving into the complex politics of pleasure and prostitution. And through their specific focus on relations with black servicemen, both create intensely racialized dynamics that highlight the tensions around these intimate relations. Though they are written and set decades apart, these two texts are clearly marked by many of the same tensions. Their similarities make it clear that the aftermath of World War II in Japan lingers long past the end of formal occupation and well into Japan’s economic recovery.
Shunichiro Oka, University of Tokyo
"Torn Between Internationalism and Japanese Tradition: Raising Consciousness of International Contemporaneity and Tōno Yoshiaki’s Struggle in Postwar Art Criticism"
A decade after World War II, art critics around the world paid attention to the relationship between the universality of modern art and the cultural specificity of nations/areas where the artwork was produced, with increasing opportunities for artworks to circulate internationally. During this time, art critics in Japan began discussing tradition as well in an effort to reconstruct the nation’s cultural identity, which the war had devastated. This paper examines the works of Tōno Yoshiaki, a prominent Japanese art critic in the postwar era, in the context of the discussion of tradition. Tōno viewed questions of tradition as pseudo-questions, as he believed that the concept concealed the questions that contemporary artists had to tackle. On the one hand, he denounced Japanese artists who made paintings of Japonesque subjects such as Mt. Fuji without critical reflection. According to him, by focusing on tradition, those artists turned their eyes away from the postwar reality. On the other hand, Tōno disapproved of foreign critics who only saw contemporary Japanese art through the lens of tradition. On the occasion of an exhibition of contemporary avant-garde Japanese art, Tōno criticized exhibition reviewers for seeing the works as mere imitations of an internationalized abstract style and praising Japanese craftsmanship as a sign of cultural legacy. For him, such perspectives did not encompass the questions born out of the postwar consciousness. This paper argues that Tōno soughtand engaged in a form of art criticism that considered both the postwar reality and the sense of international contemporaneity.
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NATIONAL LEGACIES AND PERIPHERAL NARRATIVES
Sophie Hasuo, University of Michigan
"Aftermaths of Internment: Legacies of Resistance Behind Barbed Wire"
The conscious erasure of Japanese American internment from national memory has continued to affect how Japanese American communities navigate understandings of belonging. Specifically, the replacement of accounts of organized resistance against camp authorities with narratives of Japanese American hyperpatriotism have led to reductive interpretations of the internment experience, aligning internees with an imagined model minority. This paper investigates the creation and maintenance of the model minority myth, in contrast with the Manzanar Relocation Center riot that marked the mobilization of Americans against unjust concentration camps. Given current tensions amidst heightened police brutality against Black Americans, compounded with minorities suffering at disproportionate rates from COVID-19, this project will contribute to discussions of race and solidarity, intersecting in the experience of internment. Informed by camp newspapers and texts by scholars including Lon Kurashige, Kandice Chuh, and Arthur Hansen, I will interrogate several interrelated questions: How did Japanese Americans protest racial, class, and gender hierarchies within the confines of the Manzanar internment camp? How does the model minority myth inhibit Japanese Americans today from asserting their social agency? How does consciously forgetting the organized resistance in internment camps inhibit the Asian American political imagination, and limit possibilities for solidarity with other oppressed groups? As national protests are driving many Americans to critically consider their role in dissolving various structures of oppression, the enduring legacies of activism in concentration camps help contextualize current violence against minorities and challenge the very idea of the ‘model minority.’
Adam Manfredi, Washington University, St. Louis
"1968 from 1987"
Across Japan in the late 1960s, students occupied hundreds of high schools and universities and images of hardhat-clad youths battling riot-geared police dominated the news. In the traditional narrative of the protests offered both in popular media and in academic publications, after the students won concessions from their schools’ administrations, they returned to class, graduated from their elite universities and eventually led the corporations that would ride the wave of the Japanese economic boom of the 70s and 80s. The judgment passed is that the violent protests were a short-lived fad among a small, disillusioned portion of an otherwise content and peaceful nation during the postwar Japanese economic miracle. This paper looks at Murakami Ryu’s roman à clef 69 published in 1987. Murakami Ryu was a high school student in the late 1960s, and like the protagonist of the novel, he barricaded the roof of his high school in imitation of the protests at the University of Tokyo. Looking back from the vantage of 1987 when Japan was at the height of its economic power, he presents the protests as at best frivolous and at worst a dangerous game. This investigation provides insight not only into the lived experience of the student protests, but also into how the protests were narrated in their aftermath. Furthermore, I situate the protests within the national narrative of the postwar Japanese economic miracle.
Chiara Pavone, University of California, Los Angeles
“On the Temporality of 'Looking On': Queer Futurities in post-3.11 literature”
Nine years from 2011, mentions of the Tōhoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster are increasingly dwindling in public discourse. This growing oblivion is partly owed to the prevalence of narratives emphasizing the success of local and national reconstruction (fukkō) initiatives from the damages inflicted by the catastrophe. Similarly to other popular and political projects centered on 'recovery', such accounts show complex temporal orientations: they attempt to recuperate a now inaccessible past, to consign it to the future. However, their twofold directionality is also inherently conservative, as through the insistent reproposition of nostalgic tropes – such as images of happy families – narratives of regeneration end up reproducing extant social and political dynamics.
In this paper, I will explore a selection of post-disaster literary materials that attempt to push against the teleological temporality of fukkō – and, consequently, against the reproductive futurism1 of its heteronormative imagery. My analysis will focus on characters from recent literary works – in particular Murata Sayaka's Konbini Ningen (2016) and Itoyama Akiko's Kyōshin Monita Sōmatō (2012) – who, excluded from the reproductive and restorative cycle of the mainstream political narrative, adopt an alternative, ethically self-sufficient stance towards futurity. This stance is embodied in the act of 'looking on' (both, reflexively, at oneself and in the direction of what is to come), an attitude comparable to “avuncular form[s] of stewardship”2 and that allows for the possibility to tend to a future outside of the prospect of familial reproduction.
1 Lee Edelman. No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press, 2004.
2 Sarah Ensor. "Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity." American Literature 84.2 (2012): 409.
---
LIBERATION AND PUNISHMENT IN BUDDHIST THEOLOGY
Kentaro Ide, Princeton University
"The Aftermath of The Extinction of The Dharma: Hōnen and Non-causal Theory of Liberation in Medieval Japan"
Major Buddhist thinkers in medieval Japan developed soteriology by invoking the eschatological discourse of the Final Dharma age, an era representing the last stage of Buddhism’s decline. Hōnen (1133-1212) was one of those pioneering thinkers who appealed to the eschatological discourse to envision liberation in the aftermath of the extinction of the Buddhist path. This paper will examine how Hōnen’s use of the eschatology allowed him to challenge the traditional concept of the karmic causality and present an alternative view of liberation in non-causal terms. In the traditional Buddhist worldview, liberation from samsaric rebirth, the goal of Buddhism, was often construed as a fruition of a causal process of effort culminating in the distant future. While this view remained predominant in medieval Japan, Honen claimed that, toward the end of the Buddhist path, the causal theory of liberation became antithetical to the Buddha’s vow to lead all beings to liberation, because human capacity can no longer endure such a long causal process. Hōnen’s appeal to the eschatology thus led him to conceptualize liberation not as the future goal but as a human condition already assured by the Buddha. Hōnen’s non-causal theory of liberation entailed an anachronistic view that liberation to come should have been already guaranteed in the past. In this paper, I will demonstrate that, in envisioning liberation in non-causal, anachronistic terms, Hōnen addressed a complexity of the possibility of universal liberation and the loss of the Buddhist path that religious subjectivity should embrace.
Pow A. Camacho-Lemus
"Beyond Divine Punishment: Theodicies of Post-Disaster Japan"
The religious responses to natural disasters predating the Great Northeast Japan earthquake (3/11) provide a lens into the conceptual atmosphere in which the religious language that persisted through this triple disaster continued to crystalize. Much of these responses took the form of theodicies to imbue meaning into the destruction in the aftermath of these disasters. An example of this is the appeal to tenbatsu 天罰, divine punishment, to explain a disaster as the product of the moral deficiency of those affected. This project surveys statements, mostly from the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, as a preliminary exploration into how disaster is divinely explained in Japanese post-disaster contexts. These statements uncover the greater political implications and the structural entanglements of those who resort to using them. Furthermore, sorting through the details of these different theodicies problematizes the idea that that divine punishment is a universal, and often karmic, theodicy. These examples elucidate more about how meaning is constructed, by whom, for what purposes and their direct effects, clarifying which theodicies create meaning for the benefit of those affected as opposed to theodicies that create meaning to maintain or weaponize existing power structures. The rich crafting of meaning between theodicies offers explanations that do not necessarily resort to punishment or to Buddhist-derived notions and yet the memory of tenbatsu 天罰 persists into present.
---
ART AND INTIMACY IN PREMODERN STATECRAFT
Dario Minguzzi, Sapienza University of Rome
"Poetizing Ministers: The Identity of the Sugawara House Through the Rise and Fall of Institutionalized Poetry Banquets in Early Heian Japan (ca 800-950)"
The claim by early Heian scholar and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) to fashion himselfas a “poetizing minister” (shishin) has been interpreted in continuity with the traditional narrative that sees Michizane as the quintessential Confucian scholar who aimed at using poetry as a tool for statecraft. In this paper, such claim is instead considered in relation to the institutionalization of sovereign-sponsored poetry banquets during the ninth century. Early Heian expansion of banquet culture is first analyzed as a cultural phenomenon whose institutionalization regulated the participation of graduates of the kidendō (the Way of Annals and Biographies) like Michizane to the poetic events held by the sovereign. Exploring Michizane’s personal anthology Kanke bunsō(Literary Drafts of the Sugawara House, 900) from this vantage point reveals that “poetic minister” is less a programmatic statement than a claim to the possession of a specific cultural capital that could fashion the socio-political identity of the Sugawara House as a consistent provider of poetry for the Imperial Household. The existence of a network connecting the Imperial Household and members of the Sugawara House during the early Heian period is then investigated through a number of sources. Conversely, the conspicuous absence of Sugawara poets in mid-and late Heian anthologies is put in correlation with the decline of sovereign-sponsored banquets and the appearance of new socio-political and cultural networks, a trend that testifies to the continuities and fractures generated within the Heian literary ecosystem by the rise and fall of institutionalized poetry banquets.
Deborah Price, University of California, Los Angeles
"Poetic Alliances: The Contexts and Spaces of Poetry Exchange in Kagerō nikki"
Kagerō nikki (The Kagerō Diary, 蜻蛉日記), a tenth century autobiography and poetry collection written by Michitsuna no Haha (Michitsuna’s Mother, 道綱母), records the events, emotions, and poems of a marriage to Fujiwara no Kaneie (藤原兼家), who served as regent (kanpaku, 関白) and chief advisor (dashōdaijin, 太政大臣) to the emperor from 978 to 989, that lasts about twenty years. Although the common impression of Kagerō is that its writer complains excessively about her husband, closer examination of the nuanced social structures that foreground the production of the text reveals a complex, literarily contingent dialectic between Michitsuna no Haha and Kaneie, who also serves as the patron of the autobiography/poetry collection. It becomes clear that Michitsuna no Haha, whose relatively weak social status places her in a position of utter dependence on Kaneie, seeks to display her affection for her husband and assert his protagonism, primarily through poetry exchanges, in order to secure her own and her son’s futures in the capital. In a waka exchange between Kaneie and the poetically talented Imperial Prince (Aki-akira Shinnō, 章明親王), Michitsuna no Haha inscribes poetry as a plastic, social space in which poets can negotiate their multifaceted relationships while simultaneously affirming her own social value within the socio-political system of Heian marriage.
Melissa Li, Columbia University
“'Momijigari' and Matsubame-mono: The Meiji Theatre Reform of Mokuami and Danjūrō IX"
Tracing the historical and social contexts in which the 1887 kabuki dance play “Momijigari" was created, this project engages with the origins and transformations of the kabuki subgenre matsubame-mono, and how this subgenre should be positioned among the vicissitudes of kabuki in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, throughout a tortuous process known as the “Theater Reform Movement.” In matsubame-mono, Meiji kabuki seems to have found an eclectic solution to the conflicting demands between the westernization-obsessed government and the traditionally-minded audiences. This paper demonstrates three defining characteristics of the Meiji matsubame-mono, in order to illuminate the social, cultural and political dynamics that underpinned the kabuki industry from Meiji onward. On the level of acting and staging practices, Meiji matsubame-mono was able to host both quintessential stylizations, musical accompaniment and theatrical tricks of the Edo kabuki, as well as tenets of Western theater such as “historical accuracy” and “psychological realism.” Second, the fact that matsubame-mono was adapted from the high-culture Noh theater and that Noh stories could be enacted by kabuki actors, speaks volumes about the rise of kabuki’s cultural status during Meiji. Third, most Meiji matsubame-mono plays revolved around nationalistic themes such as “oni-taiji” (鬼退治). I argue that, while maintaining long-standing practices of the grassroots theatre, Kawatake Mokuami and his all-star cast also discovered the literal definition of a national theater through adapting classical Noh narratives, thereby crystallizing the national consciousness in Meiji kabuki.
Kristin Schreiner, University of California, Los Angeles
"Base Town Literature: Racial and Sexual Tensions in the Aftermath of Japan's Defeat"
Japan’s surrender in 1945, marking the end of World War II, stands out as one of the most prominent moments of rupture in modern Japan. In its wake, Japan was stripped of its colonies, its military, and even its sovereignty as the nation was placed under occupation by the Allied forces. But did the war’s legacy come to a close when formal occupation ended in 1952? If not, how long did that aftermath last? Did it change in form as time passed? To explore these questions, I will examine two literary texts that delve into the aftermath of World War II: Hirabayashi Taiko’s “Hokkaidō Chitose no onna” (1952) and Murakami Ryū’s “Kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū” (1976). These two works, each set contemporaneously with their time of publication, were written over two decades apart—and these are particularly dramatic decades, as Japan moves from the immediacy of defeat and occupation to the height of the economic boom years. However, despite the gap between them, the two texts share a remarkable amount of common ground. Both texts are set in base towns, with the American military presence looming over their narratives. Both heavily feature sexual relations between their Japanese protagonists and the soldiers stationed at military bases within Japan, delving into the complex politics of pleasure and prostitution. And through their specific focus on relations with black servicemen, both create intensely racialized dynamics that highlight the tensions around these intimate relations. Though they are written and set decades apart, these two texts are clearly marked by many of the same tensions. Their similarities make it clear that the aftermath of World War II in Japan lingers long past the end of formal occupation and well into Japan’s economic recovery.
Shunichiro Oka, University of Tokyo
"Torn Between Internationalism and Japanese Tradition: Raising Consciousness of International Contemporaneity and Tōno Yoshiaki’s Struggle in Postwar Art Criticism"
A decade after World War II, art critics around the world paid attention to the relationship between the universality of modern art and the cultural specificity of nations/areas where the artwork was produced, with increasing opportunities for artworks to circulate internationally. During this time, art critics in Japan began discussing tradition as well in an effort to reconstruct the nation’s cultural identity, which the war had devastated. This paper examines the works of Tōno Yoshiaki, a prominent Japanese art critic in the postwar era, in the context of the discussion of tradition. Tōno viewed questions of tradition as pseudo-questions, as he believed that the concept concealed the questions that contemporary artists had to tackle. On the one hand, he denounced Japanese artists who made paintings of Japonesque subjects such as Mt. Fuji without critical reflection. According to him, by focusing on tradition, those artists turned their eyes away from the postwar reality. On the other hand, Tōno disapproved of foreign critics who only saw contemporary Japanese art through the lens of tradition. On the occasion of an exhibition of contemporary avant-garde Japanese art, Tōno criticized exhibition reviewers for seeing the works as mere imitations of an internationalized abstract style and praising Japanese craftsmanship as a sign of cultural legacy. For him, such perspectives did not encompass the questions born out of the postwar consciousness. This paper argues that Tōno soughtand engaged in a form of art criticism that considered both the postwar reality and the sense of international contemporaneity.
---
NATIONAL LEGACIES AND PERIPHERAL NARRATIVES
Sophie Hasuo, University of Michigan
"Aftermaths of Internment: Legacies of Resistance Behind Barbed Wire"
The conscious erasure of Japanese American internment from national memory has continued to affect how Japanese American communities navigate understandings of belonging. Specifically, the replacement of accounts of organized resistance against camp authorities with narratives of Japanese American hyperpatriotism have led to reductive interpretations of the internment experience, aligning internees with an imagined model minority. This paper investigates the creation and maintenance of the model minority myth, in contrast with the Manzanar Relocation Center riot that marked the mobilization of Americans against unjust concentration camps. Given current tensions amidst heightened police brutality against Black Americans, compounded with minorities suffering at disproportionate rates from COVID-19, this project will contribute to discussions of race and solidarity, intersecting in the experience of internment. Informed by camp newspapers and texts by scholars including Lon Kurashige, Kandice Chuh, and Arthur Hansen, I will interrogate several interrelated questions: How did Japanese Americans protest racial, class, and gender hierarchies within the confines of the Manzanar internment camp? How does the model minority myth inhibit Japanese Americans today from asserting their social agency? How does consciously forgetting the organized resistance in internment camps inhibit the Asian American political imagination, and limit possibilities for solidarity with other oppressed groups? As national protests are driving many Americans to critically consider their role in dissolving various structures of oppression, the enduring legacies of activism in concentration camps help contextualize current violence against minorities and challenge the very idea of the ‘model minority.’
Adam Manfredi, Washington University, St. Louis
"1968 from 1987"
Across Japan in the late 1960s, students occupied hundreds of high schools and universities and images of hardhat-clad youths battling riot-geared police dominated the news. In the traditional narrative of the protests offered both in popular media and in academic publications, after the students won concessions from their schools’ administrations, they returned to class, graduated from their elite universities and eventually led the corporations that would ride the wave of the Japanese economic boom of the 70s and 80s. The judgment passed is that the violent protests were a short-lived fad among a small, disillusioned portion of an otherwise content and peaceful nation during the postwar Japanese economic miracle. This paper looks at Murakami Ryu’s roman à clef 69 published in 1987. Murakami Ryu was a high school student in the late 1960s, and like the protagonist of the novel, he barricaded the roof of his high school in imitation of the protests at the University of Tokyo. Looking back from the vantage of 1987 when Japan was at the height of its economic power, he presents the protests as at best frivolous and at worst a dangerous game. This investigation provides insight not only into the lived experience of the student protests, but also into how the protests were narrated in their aftermath. Furthermore, I situate the protests within the national narrative of the postwar Japanese economic miracle.
Chiara Pavone, University of California, Los Angeles
“On the Temporality of 'Looking On': Queer Futurities in post-3.11 literature”
Nine years from 2011, mentions of the Tōhoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster are increasingly dwindling in public discourse. This growing oblivion is partly owed to the prevalence of narratives emphasizing the success of local and national reconstruction (fukkō) initiatives from the damages inflicted by the catastrophe. Similarly to other popular and political projects centered on 'recovery', such accounts show complex temporal orientations: they attempt to recuperate a now inaccessible past, to consign it to the future. However, their twofold directionality is also inherently conservative, as through the insistent reproposition of nostalgic tropes – such as images of happy families – narratives of regeneration end up reproducing extant social and political dynamics.
In this paper, I will explore a selection of post-disaster literary materials that attempt to push against the teleological temporality of fukkō – and, consequently, against the reproductive futurism1 of its heteronormative imagery. My analysis will focus on characters from recent literary works – in particular Murata Sayaka's Konbini Ningen (2016) and Itoyama Akiko's Kyōshin Monita Sōmatō (2012) – who, excluded from the reproductive and restorative cycle of the mainstream political narrative, adopt an alternative, ethically self-sufficient stance towards futurity. This stance is embodied in the act of 'looking on' (both, reflexively, at oneself and in the direction of what is to come), an attitude comparable to “avuncular form[s] of stewardship”2 and that allows for the possibility to tend to a future outside of the prospect of familial reproduction.
1 Lee Edelman. No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press, 2004.
2 Sarah Ensor. "Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity." American Literature 84.2 (2012): 409.
---
LIBERATION AND PUNISHMENT IN BUDDHIST THEOLOGY
Kentaro Ide, Princeton University
"The Aftermath of The Extinction of The Dharma: Hōnen and Non-causal Theory of Liberation in Medieval Japan"
Major Buddhist thinkers in medieval Japan developed soteriology by invoking the eschatological discourse of the Final Dharma age, an era representing the last stage of Buddhism’s decline. Hōnen (1133-1212) was one of those pioneering thinkers who appealed to the eschatological discourse to envision liberation in the aftermath of the extinction of the Buddhist path. This paper will examine how Hōnen’s use of the eschatology allowed him to challenge the traditional concept of the karmic causality and present an alternative view of liberation in non-causal terms. In the traditional Buddhist worldview, liberation from samsaric rebirth, the goal of Buddhism, was often construed as a fruition of a causal process of effort culminating in the distant future. While this view remained predominant in medieval Japan, Honen claimed that, toward the end of the Buddhist path, the causal theory of liberation became antithetical to the Buddha’s vow to lead all beings to liberation, because human capacity can no longer endure such a long causal process. Hōnen’s appeal to the eschatology thus led him to conceptualize liberation not as the future goal but as a human condition already assured by the Buddha. Hōnen’s non-causal theory of liberation entailed an anachronistic view that liberation to come should have been already guaranteed in the past. In this paper, I will demonstrate that, in envisioning liberation in non-causal, anachronistic terms, Hōnen addressed a complexity of the possibility of universal liberation and the loss of the Buddhist path that religious subjectivity should embrace.
Pow A. Camacho-Lemus
"Beyond Divine Punishment: Theodicies of Post-Disaster Japan"
The religious responses to natural disasters predating the Great Northeast Japan earthquake (3/11) provide a lens into the conceptual atmosphere in which the religious language that persisted through this triple disaster continued to crystalize. Much of these responses took the form of theodicies to imbue meaning into the destruction in the aftermath of these disasters. An example of this is the appeal to tenbatsu 天罰, divine punishment, to explain a disaster as the product of the moral deficiency of those affected. This project surveys statements, mostly from the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, as a preliminary exploration into how disaster is divinely explained in Japanese post-disaster contexts. These statements uncover the greater political implications and the structural entanglements of those who resort to using them. Furthermore, sorting through the details of these different theodicies problematizes the idea that that divine punishment is a universal, and often karmic, theodicy. These examples elucidate more about how meaning is constructed, by whom, for what purposes and their direct effects, clarifying which theodicies create meaning for the benefit of those affected as opposed to theodicies that create meaning to maintain or weaponize existing power structures. The rich crafting of meaning between theodicies offers explanations that do not necessarily resort to punishment or to Buddhist-derived notions and yet the memory of tenbatsu 天罰 persists into present.
---
ART AND INTIMACY IN PREMODERN STATECRAFT
Dario Minguzzi, Sapienza University of Rome
"Poetizing Ministers: The Identity of the Sugawara House Through the Rise and Fall of Institutionalized Poetry Banquets in Early Heian Japan (ca 800-950)"
The claim by early Heian scholar and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) to fashion himselfas a “poetizing minister” (shishin) has been interpreted in continuity with the traditional narrative that sees Michizane as the quintessential Confucian scholar who aimed at using poetry as a tool for statecraft. In this paper, such claim is instead considered in relation to the institutionalization of sovereign-sponsored poetry banquets during the ninth century. Early Heian expansion of banquet culture is first analyzed as a cultural phenomenon whose institutionalization regulated the participation of graduates of the kidendō (the Way of Annals and Biographies) like Michizane to the poetic events held by the sovereign. Exploring Michizane’s personal anthology Kanke bunsō(Literary Drafts of the Sugawara House, 900) from this vantage point reveals that “poetic minister” is less a programmatic statement than a claim to the possession of a specific cultural capital that could fashion the socio-political identity of the Sugawara House as a consistent provider of poetry for the Imperial Household. The existence of a network connecting the Imperial Household and members of the Sugawara House during the early Heian period is then investigated through a number of sources. Conversely, the conspicuous absence of Sugawara poets in mid-and late Heian anthologies is put in correlation with the decline of sovereign-sponsored banquets and the appearance of new socio-political and cultural networks, a trend that testifies to the continuities and fractures generated within the Heian literary ecosystem by the rise and fall of institutionalized poetry banquets.
Deborah Price, University of California, Los Angeles
"Poetic Alliances: The Contexts and Spaces of Poetry Exchange in Kagerō nikki"
Kagerō nikki (The Kagerō Diary, 蜻蛉日記), a tenth century autobiography and poetry collection written by Michitsuna no Haha (Michitsuna’s Mother, 道綱母), records the events, emotions, and poems of a marriage to Fujiwara no Kaneie (藤原兼家), who served as regent (kanpaku, 関白) and chief advisor (dashōdaijin, 太政大臣) to the emperor from 978 to 989, that lasts about twenty years. Although the common impression of Kagerō is that its writer complains excessively about her husband, closer examination of the nuanced social structures that foreground the production of the text reveals a complex, literarily contingent dialectic between Michitsuna no Haha and Kaneie, who also serves as the patron of the autobiography/poetry collection. It becomes clear that Michitsuna no Haha, whose relatively weak social status places her in a position of utter dependence on Kaneie, seeks to display her affection for her husband and assert his protagonism, primarily through poetry exchanges, in order to secure her own and her son’s futures in the capital. In a waka exchange between Kaneie and the poetically talented Imperial Prince (Aki-akira Shinnō, 章明親王), Michitsuna no Haha inscribes poetry as a plastic, social space in which poets can negotiate their multifaceted relationships while simultaneously affirming her own social value within the socio-political system of Heian marriage.