pmjs logs for July - September 2006. Total number of messages: 91
This is an open version of the log. Email addesses have been hidden.
For recent discussions of this list, see the new PMJS
listserve.
* Call for Papers: conference at National University of
Singapore (Lim Beng Choo)
* Maeda Toshiie's Kokuso yuigon (Anthony Bryant)
* North American Kanbun Studies? (Anthony Bryant, Michael Pye, Lawrence
Marceau, Aldo Tollini, Tim Kern, David Pollack, Ivo Smits, Aileen
Gatten, David Lurie, Frederic J. Kotas, David Eason, Thomas Howell)
--> continued below.
* query regarding online library searching (Lawrence Marceau, Richard
L. Wilson, Tim Kern, Lewis Cook)
* kirin qilin (Glynne Walley)
* --> Kanbun ( (David Eason, Richard Bowring, Nobumi Iyanaga,
Judith Froelich, Thomas Howell, Kristina Troost, Michael Pye, Robert
Borgen, David Eason, David Pollack)
* Search in Japanese Theater at Yale (Edward Kamens)
* Relationship of kanbun (text) and Japanese (language)
(James Unger)
* bibliography of
pre-modern Genji commentary (Lewis Cook, Anthony
Chambers, Patrick Caddeau)
* liver revisited --> wound medicine (Charles
De Wolf, Andrew Goble)
* UBC Waka Workshop Oct. 6 & 7 (Christina Lafin)
* Announcement of an international symposium at Aoyama Gakuin
University (Yasuhiko Ogawa)
* new Japanese literature in translation series (Gustav Heldt)
* Nichibunken JAPAN REVIEW database (James C. Baxter)
* BDK Canada Graduate Scholarship (Shayne Clark)
* Change of address (Monika Dix)
* new members, new profiles (Michael Watson)
* Kyoto Lectures: Iyanaga on sexual heresies 9/13 at 6pm (Roberta
Strippoli)
* Fujiwara no Tadazane (Michael Watson [for Hans Morten Sundnes],
Lawrence Marceau)
* available position at the Australian National University (Peter
Hendricks)
* position opening at International Christian University (Richard
Wilson)
* Theatre Nohgaku Pine Barrens tour (Richard Emmert)
* CSJR workshop 'The Power of Ritual' (Lucia Dolce)
* 2006-07 North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library
Resources (NCC) Multi-Volume Sets Grant Application Guidelines (1)
* UBC Waka Workshop Update (Oct. 6-7) (Stefania Burk)
* new book on secrecy in Japanese Religion (Bernhard Scheid, Lewis Cook)
* Herman Ooms talk at USC (Elizabeth Leicester)
* Jingu Kogo (Royall Tyler, Richard Bowring)
From: "Lim Beng Choo" <___@nus.edu.sg>
Date: July 5, 2006 12:57:21 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Call for Papers: conference at National
University of Singapore
Dear friends and colleagues,
The Department of Japanese Studies of the National University of
Singapore is hosting the inaugural conference of Japanese Studies
Association in Southeast Asia from 12 to 14 October 2006. The
conference will be held as part of the events to celebrate the 25th
Anniversary of the Department of Japanese Studies, as well as to mark
the 40th Anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Japan and
Singapore.
The Japanese Studies Association in Southeast Asia (JSA-ASEAN) is an
academic association of scholars and researchers set up in 2005 to
serve as a catalyst in promoting Japanese studies in the region. One of
the objectives of the association is to organize a biennial conference
in the region as the major platform for a trans-disciplinary
international exchange and networking among scholars in Southeast Asia,
as well as other parts of the world.
The association conference will enable scholars from the region to come
together regularly, present their research and explore the many
opportunities for collaborative research that exist. For the inaugural
conference the Department has also invited renowned scholars
outside Southeast Asia to make presentations and
interact with participants.
The conference organizers especially encourage younger scholars to
participate and will provide financial support on a competitive basis
to help facilitate their participation.
Call for Panels and Papers
We invite individual paper and group panel proposals to be presented in
the concurrent sessions of the inaugural conference of JSA-ASEAN.
Papers/panels are welcome in the following streams:
1. Politics and
International Relations
2. Sociology,
Anthropology and History
3. Business,
Economics and Law
4. Literature and
Linguistics
Proposal of Panels
The deadline for proposals of panels is 31 July 2006.
All panel proposals must include the following:
* Name
* Position
*
Affiliation
* Title of
panel
* Brief
description of panel
* Proposed
presenters, their details and paper abstracts (see submission of
abstracts and individual papers below)
* Preferred
stream
*
Audio-visual requirements (if any)
* Contact
details (mailing address, tel., fax and e-mail address)
Please submit all proposals of panels to ___@nus.edu.sg.
Notification of acceptance of panels: 20 August 2006
Submission of Abstracts and Individual Papers
The deadline for submission of paper abstracts is 31 July 2006.
All submissions must include the following:
* Name
* Position
*
Affiliation
* Title of
paper
* Abstract
– either in Japanese (not more than 200 characters) or English (not
more than 250 words)
* Preferred
stream
*
Audio-visual requirements (if any)
* Contact
details (mailing address, tel., fax and e-mail address)
Notification of acceptance of papers: 20 August 2006.
Please submit your proposals and paper abstracts on-line through the
following website (available from 12 July):
http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/jps/jsa2006
For enquiries, please contact the conference secretariat at
___@nus.edu.sg.
----------------------------------------------------
From: Elizabeth Leicester <___@earthlink.net>
Date: July 6, 2006 5:54:17 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Ishigami Eiichi talk at USC
The USC Project for Premodern Japan Studies, in conjunction with the
2006 Heian Kambun Workshop, presents a talk by:
Prof. Ishigami Eiici, University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute
"The Shosoin and its Documents in the Eighth Century"
Friday, July 21, 2006 at 2:30 pm
in the Stoops East Asia Library on the University of Southern
California campus
Parking for the Stoops East Asia Library (EDL on the USC map) is
available for $7 in Lot B. Enter at Gate 4 from Jefferson Blvd. at
Royal St.
For further information, contact Prof. Joan Piggott at 213-821-5872
----------------------------------------------------
From: Robert Borgen <___@ucdavis.edu>
Date: July 10, 2006 0:28:28 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] North American Kanbun Studies?
As some of you may know, Nisho Gakusha University has gotten a COE
grant for "Establishment of World Organization for Kanbun
Studies." You can learn about it on their website
(http://www.nishogakusha-coe.net/). As part of the project,
in September, they will be holding an conference in Hangzhou and have
asked me to report on any developments in North America during the past
year relating to kanbun studies. I can think of two summer
language programs, those at Columbia and University of Southern
California, and two books, Dance of the Butterflies, by Judith
Rabinovitch and Timothy Bradstock (although it may be a bit more than a
year old) and Haruo Shirane's new anthology of early Japanese
literature (although it may not yet be out by the time of the
conference). I assume I've missed things, such as recent
dissertations and articles published in books or journals that escaped
my my attention. If you know of anything I've overlooked or
have a project you'd like mentioned, please let me know.
Robert Borgen
----------------------------------------------------
From: Anthony Bryant <___@cox.net>
Date: July 10, 2006 2:32:49 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
This reminds me of something I keep wanting to ask here.
Has anyone used Komai & Rohlich's "An Introduction to Japanese
Kanbun"? I've been wanting to use it as a sort of "teach yourself
kanbun" text, but the book suffers from the lack of a key to the
exercises in it. I'm hoping that someone out there might have put one
together.
Tony
--
Anthony J. Bryant
Website: http://www.sengokudaimyo.com
All sorts of cool things Japanese and SCA:
http://www.cafepress.com/sengokudaimyo
----------------------------------------------------
From: Barbara Nostrand <___@acm.org>
Date: July 10, 2006 3:05:25 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Still looking for published emaki
Hi.
This time I am looking for a copy of Nezumizôshi鼠草紙 Has anyone
published a complete version of this work?
Thank you very much.
Barbara Nostrand
----------------------------------------------------
From: Sharon Domier <___@library.umass.edu>
Date: July 12, 2006 7:56:25 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Still looking for published emaki
This begs the question: which version, which language?
There is an English translation published in Monumenta Nipponica, that
cites three different versions.
The Tale of the Mouse. Nezumi no Soshi
D. E. Mills
Monumenta Nipponica > Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 1979), pp. 155-168
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?etc
Did you already look at the KoNara ehonshu. Tenri: Tenri Daigaku
Shuppanbu, 1972-1975. 2 vols.
But there is also an online version in Japanese that you can access
through the Nara Ehon Project at Keio.
http://dbs.humi.keio.ac.jp/naraehon/ehon/index2-e.asp?ID=KL027&FRAME=False
This is pretty amazing. And it cites a similar text published in
Muromachi jidai monogatari taisei' (Collection of tales from the
Muromachi Period), vol. 5.
Sharon Domier
UMass Amherst
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Watson <___@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp>
Date: July 12, 2006 11:04:16 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Still looking for published emaki
Actually it turns out that there are actually two quite separate
stories known as "Nezumi no soshi."
(1) Nezumi no soushi, also known as "Nezumi no gon no kami" (written
with itaiji for nezumi)
Three variant lines, with manuscripts in the Tenri library (two
fragments, one late Muromachi, one early Edo), Tokyo Hakubutsukan,
Suntory Collection, Spencer Collection. The Suntory version is edited
in the NKBZ 36 (Otogizoshishu)--with translation. Reproductions of the
Spencer Collection version can be found in _Zaigai Naraehon_.
(2) Nezumi no soushi (beppon)
Cambridge University Library (Aston collection). Edited in Kokubungaku
kenkyushiryokan kiyo 5 (March 1979). This is the version
translated by D.E.Mills.
See Kanda Tatsumi and Nishizawa Masashi, _Chuusei ouchou monogatari
Otogi zoushi jiten_ (Benseishuppan 2002), p. 862-63 (entry for story 1
only, with plot summary and analysis), and p. 964 (information about
manuscripts and editions of 1 and 2).
A bibliography of Otogizoshi translations prepared by Roberta Strippoli
can be found on the PMJS site. I have just updated the information
about Nezumi no soshi, including kanji, and some more information from
Kanda and Nishizawa about other editions of the variants.
http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~pmjs/biblio/otogi.html#nezumi
Michael Watson
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Watson <___@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp>
Date: July 12, 2006 11:56:22 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Still looking for published emaki
P.S.
The Keio manuscript that Sharon Domier mentions involves a battle of
mice, and is a variant of yet a third story. The title on the box is
"Nezumi no soshi" but the text itself has the title "Kakurezato (The
Hidden Village), by which it is more commonly known.
Corrections and additions to the otogizoshi bibliography page are very
welcome. There are still some JSTOR links to add, and no doubt other
more substative things too.
Michael Watson
----------------------------------------------------
From: "M.Joly Jacques" <jacques.___@free.fr>
Date: July 13, 2006 8:13:43 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
One complementary note :
for French reading people, the best introduction to Kanbun may
be Jean-Noel Robert's Lectures Elémentaires en style
sino-japonais, Université Paris 7 , 1986. It is not a really published
work so you must ask the Dept of LCAO in the University itself if they
ahve some remaining copies.
Jacques JOly
--
ATTENTION !! MAIL ADDRESS HAS CHANGED !
NEW ADDRESS :
jacques.___@free.fr
Jacques JOLY
Takano Kamitakeyacho 10-4
Sakyo-ku KYOTO 606-8105 Japon
T/F 00 81 75 791 4351
----------------------------------------------------
From: Sachie Noguchi <___@columbia.edu>
Date: July 12, 2006 22:45:50 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Still looking for published emaki
Thank you, Watson-sensei for maintaining valuable lists.
When I read the initial posting, I had the same question as Sharon
stated, which version (including Soshi itself, or research on the
Soshi), which language.
Meanwhile I found the title in the following (sorry, macrons are all
omitted in Romanization):
Shinshu Nihon emakimono zenshu; Bekkan 2. Zaigai hen.
Tenjin engi emaki, Hachiman engi,
Amawakahiko-zoshi, Nezumi no soshi, Bakemono-zosho, Utatane-zoshi /
Shimada Shujiro henshu tanto.
Tokyo : Kadokawa Shoten, 1981.
Unfortunately, Columbia does hold this volume and could not confirm
which version of the title is included.
Sachie Noguchi
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sachie Noguchi, Ph.D.
Japanese Studies Librarian
C.V. Starr East Asian Library
Columbia University
308M Kent Hall, Mail Code 3901
1140 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027
E-mail: ___@columbia.edu
Tel: 212-854-1506
Fax: 212-662-6286
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
----------------------------------------------------
From: Anthony Bryant <___@cox.net>
Date: July 13, 2006 1:52:07 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Maeda Toshiie's Kokuso yuigon
I'm in a bit of a bind. Since there've been a few threads
here on finding texts, I thought I'd throw one out.
I'm trying to get my hands on a copy of Kokuso yuigon (国祖
遺言) by Maeda Toshiie. I know there's (an original?) copy
at Kyoto University, but I'm hoping someone knows of a
published edition, or perhaps seen it mentioned as one of
the inclusions in one of those huge multi-volume compendia
of Japanese historical thought...
I'd appreciate any information that may be available. In the
meantime, I'm still looking.
Tony
--
Anthony J. Bryant
Website: http://www.sengokudaimyo.com
All sorts of cool things Japanese and SCA:
http://www.cafepress.com/sengokudaimyo
----------------------------------------------------
From: Anthony Bryant <___@cox.net>
Date: July 13, 2006 4:03:26 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
M.Joly Jacques wrote:
One complementary note :
for French reading people, the best introduction to Kanbun may
be Jean-Noel Robert's Lectures Elémentaires en style
sino-japonais, Université Paris 7 , 1986. It is not a really published
work so you must ask the Dept of LCAO in the University itself if they
have some remaining copies.
Thank you. I'll get in touch with them.
(Am I the only one who's used Japanese high school textbooks to get up
to speed with bungo and kanbun?)
Tony
--
Anthony J. Bryant
Website: http://www.sengokudaimyo.com
All sorts of cool things Japanese and SCA:
http://www.cafepress.com/sengokudaimyo
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Pye <___@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 13, 2006 6:44:34 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
Anthony Bryant wrote:
(Am I the only one who's used Japanese high school textbooks to get
up to speed with bungo and kanbun?)
Well anyway, not quite. When teaching in a high school in the early
sixties I
went along to the kanbun class and found it quite useful. It was
interesting
not only (a) to learn the Chinese itself (in a certain way...) but also
(b) to
puzzle out what Japanese teachers and pupils were doing with it. Iused
the
textbooks a bit by myself, but it was more interesting to go to the
class and
see fifty sixteen year olds wrestling with it.
Since that time I have often dreamed of a kakikudashi system for
putting Latin
into a kind of basic English grammar. This would make Latin texts
available to
readers of English, making the sometimes apparently tortuous grammar
transparent, while keeping the basic vocabulary. This idea never found
any
takers (yet) but at least it's a way of explaining what "kanbun" is
insofar as
it isn't just quite the same as "Chinese prose" any more.
I have some questions.
1) Am I correct in thinking that (in Japan) the only Chinese texts read
in the
Chinese order of the characters are the Buddhist sutras in so far as
recited?
This has always been my simple assumption, but am I missing some
interesting
corner here?
2) Was this (if true) always the case? I have long been tortured with
worry
about how eighteenth century writers of kanbun actually thought of what
they
were writing, in their heads. If there was a time when literati thought
(sometimes) in the Chinese order, when did it start and stop?
3) Can it be that there is some truth in the adage ascribed to the Sage:
"The true Gentleman trains his hand with the characters determined by
Above, but
does not actually pronounce them." ?
Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto, Japan
----------------------------------------------------
From: Lawrence Marceau <l.___@auckland.ac.nz>
Date: July 13, 2006 10:15:46 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
At the EMJNet meeting in conjunction with AAS in San Francisco this
past April, one of the panels dealt with Kanshibun. Hopefully
one or more of these presentations is going to be expanded and
submitted to a journal in the near future, if not already.
**************************************
Panel 2: Writing Japan, China, and the World: Kanshi Poets in the
Nineteenth Century
Organizer: Paul Rouzer, University of Minnesota
Discussant: Ivo Smits, Leiden University
This panel centers on Japanese poetry in literary Chinese (usually
termed kanshi) during the 19th century, to demonstrate its vitality as
well as cultural and social relevance. Kanshi underwent a tremendous
revival during this time, as several generations of samurai authors,
combining a sophisticated education in both the Chinese and Japanese
classics with an expanding curiosity about the world, brought literary
Chinese composition to a new level of native expression. For them, the
use of literary Chinese was not merely a schoolbook exercise. Rather,
they used the language to voice their own distinctive needs: for
personal self-expression and for political engagement with the turbulent
period that saw the decline of the bakufu, the discovery of the Western
world, and the changes of the Meiji era. A full understanding of 19th
century kanshi requires a reading that straddles disciplines and borders
one that is sensitive to both Chinese and Japanese literary conventions,
and one that can locate poetic composition within the nexus of social
and political change without reducing it to an epiphenomenon of those
changes.
Panelists see continuities over a period of volatile discontinuity, as
poets confront the challenge of articulating new subject matter within
the restrictions of Chinese form, from Rai San’yo’s (1781-1832)
exploration of the Dutch presence at Nagasaki, to Ryuhoku’s (1837-1884)
attempts to articulate political courses of action, to Mori Ogai’s
(1862-1922) personal mediation of a Chinese heritage.
1. Rai San’yo’s Nagasaki Poems: Domesticating (Sinicizing) the West
Paul Rouzer, University of Minnesota
During 1818 and 1819, Rai San’yo’s (1781-1832), the most prominent
kanshibun author of his generation, took a tour of western Honshu and
Kyushu, where he wrote over 270 poems. One of the most striking aspects
of this trip involves the verses he wrote in Nagasaki, where he made
contact with local intellectuals, visited members of the Chinese
merchant community, and described the Dutch legation. These works bring
up one of the most interesting issues surrounding modern kanshi
composition: how does one employ the conventions and imagery of
traditional Chinese poetry to speak about the alien and the modern?
This paper discusses two approaches San’yo took in writing about the
West. First, by relying on the Chinese convention of capturing scene
through the humor and irony implicit in the quatrain form, San’yo
created a series of aesthetic vignettes (not unlike similar poems he
wrote on paintings, for example) that distances the author from the
effects of the alien; framing allows for the incorporation of the
picturesque and the exotic. Second, San’yo expanded his vision through
the use of narrative /gafu/ (C: /yuefu/), in this case, through a long
ballad on the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. San’yo had already become
famous for his /gafu/ ballads on the Genpei and Taiheiki conflicts,
where he used Chinese rhetoric, with conventions rooted in Confucian
historical judgment, to create a detailed historiography. Here, he plays
out his narrative of Napoleon against the classic Sino-Japanese
narrative of imperial hubris: the rise and fall of the first Qin
emperor.
2. Stones from other hills: a Japanese Confucian encounters the West
Matthew Fraleigh, Harvard University
The arrival of Western warships at Japan’s shores in the mid-nineteenth
century brought not only a diplomatic crisis for the Tokugawa shogunate,
but also presented popular new topoi for Japanese kanshi poets. In the
proliferation of /kanshi/ written in response to the incursion, authors
drew on classical Chinese precedents and the domestic kanshi tradition
both to depict the unfamiliar and also to articulate a variety of
possible courses of action. Because these poets attended gatherings
where they shared their works, received feedback on them, and composed
works collaboratively, such poems in classical Chinese served as an
important medium for the exchange of ideas.
This paper focuses on the dramatic shifts in representations of the West
evident in the poems of Narushima Ryuhoku (1837-1884), a Confucian
scholar in the employ of the Tokugawa shogunate. Whereas Ryuhoku’s
earliest poetic journals contain several works that feature fantastic
scenes of cataclysmic rebuff, his later works evince an eclectic
curiosity about the West. An examination of Ryuhoku’s extant poetic
manuscripts offers the chance to see how Ryuhoku’s poetic seniors
commented upon his poems, what standards were used to select poems for
later anthologies, and how Ryuhoku himself revised his earlier poems to
reflect his evolving views. I also look at the works of other prominent
Edo poets with whom Ryuhoku was associating, such as Onuma Chinzan and
Otsuki Bankei, in order to illustrate the diversity of responses to
Perry’s arrival and to suggest the importance of kanshi as a mode of
literary exchange.
3. Mori Ogai (1862-1922) and kanshi: mediating traditions
John Timothy Wixted
Mori Ogai’s mediation between Japan and the prime cultural legacy of
China (its writing system, in this case in the form of Sino-Japanese
kanshi poetry) was to be paralleled by his mediation between Germany and
Japan (through translation activity, the writing of his most famous
short stories, and other cultural undertakings prompted by the West).
Mediation, in Ogai’s case, is both more personal and more general than
might at first appear, referring to apprenticeship, the acquisition of
skills, personal display (in particular evidence in his kanshi),
maturation, and the forging of an identity both personal and national.
Best,
Lawrence Marceau
---------------------------------------------------
From: Lawrence Marceau <l.___@auckland.ac.nz>
Date: July 13, 2006 10:24:51 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] query regarding online library searching
To PMJS:
I'm looking for online resources that
would help me find out whether a
certain book, originally published in 1396 in China, might survive in a
Japanese collection. I've tried the Shido bunko at Keio, the
Kano bunko
at Tohoku-dai, and the Kyodai Jinbunken, but to no avail.
(I'm planning
on checking Tenri next...)
If someone has information or links to
such databases of Chinese books
(Kanseki), I would appreciate knowing about it. Please
forgive, if you
already have such a link on your own website...
Best,
Lawrence
(By the way, the book is 『草書韻会』, by the Jin (金) Dynasty author,
張 天錫. It's the 1396 明・洪武29年 edition I'm looking for.)
----------------------------------------------------
From: "Richard L. Wilson" <___@icu.ac.jp>
Date: July 13, 2006 11:06:05 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: query regarding online library searching
Dear Larry,
I was trolling though the Kyodai Jinbun Kanseki DB when your query came
though, have you seen:
草書韻會五卷 金 張天錫 輯 慶元中覆朝鮮明洪武刊本 和刻本書畫集成第二輯 神戸市立中央
If this 洪武刊 is the one you are looking for, it is also available in the
commercially printed Wakokubon soga shusei.
Yours,
Richard
----------------------------------------------------
From: Tim Kern <___@nichibun.ac.jp>
Date: July 13, 2006 12:50:13 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] FW: query regarding online library searching
My colleague Liu Jianhui made a search and thinks the book you are
looking
for might be in Univ. Kagawa try the URL below. hope it helps.
<http://www.lib.kagawa-u.ac.jp/www1/kanbara/kanbara.html>
From: Liu Jianhui <___@nichibun.ac.jp>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 13:02:09 -0700
To: Tim Kern <___@nichibun.ac.jp>
Subject: Re: [pmjs] query regarding online library searching
翻刻版と思いますが、香川大学の神原文庫に三種類入っているみたいです。
http://www.lib.kagawa-u.ac.jp/www1/kanbara/kanbara.html
--------------------------------------------------
From: Lawrence Marceau <l.___@auckland.ac.nz>
Date: July 13, 2006 13:49:36 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: FW: query regarding online library
searching
Many thanks to both Tim Kern and Richard
Wilson for their help. I
noticed the Kanbara Bunko as a possibility in the online Kokusho
soumokuroku.
For reference, the Zenkoku Kanseki Deetabeesu (at the Kyodai Jinbunken)
link is as follows:
http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/kanseki
This link provides 28 examples, mainly
of the facsimile edition the
Richard mentions.
Best wishes,
Lawrence
--------------------------------------------------
From: "tollini" <___@unive.it>
Date: July 13, 2006 15:41:37 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
A short notation to Michael Pye's "dream" for kakikudashi system for
Latin.
It wouldn't be strange at all!
In the late Edo period and in the early Meiji period there were
attempts to put the Dutch and later the English language in kakikudashi
in order to study those languages. In other words, there was the idea
that just like Chinese, the general method for studying foreign
languages was by means of kanbun kundoku.
For example this is the case with Dutch in Rangaku kei [蘭学逕]
by Fujibayashi Fuzan 藤林普山 of 1810.
Aldo Tollini
Venice
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Pye" <___@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Since that time I have often dreamed of a kakikudashi system for putting
Latin into a kind of basic English grammar. This would make Latin texts
available to readers of English, making the sometimes apparently
tortuous grammar
transparent, while keeping the basic vocabulary. This idea never found
any
takers (yet) but at least it's a way of explaining what "kanbun" is
insofar as it isn't just quite the same as "Chinese prose" any more.
--------------------------------------------------
> As the original kanji did not survive transmission, Webcat was
used to find the correct characters. The full title of "Rangaku kei" is
given as 譯鍵 附蘭学逕. /ed
From: Tim Kern <___@nichibun.ac.jp>
Date: July 13, 2006 17:18:34 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
Sorry for this end of the day (for me) comment to Aldo Tollini's point.
the
Japanese still do this when they read English. I don't know but maybe
Italian or any other language too. especially those who had formal
kanbun
kyoiku. You can often see or feel it when you read a Japanese
translation of
an English text, especially before it gets polished up. (We are probably
doing something similar when we read Japanese as well). I particularly
find
it among Japanese academics (with a strong classical training) who
write a
paper or even when they try to present something in English. I used to
wonder why there were repeated patterns of, what to a native speaker
were
strange (not necessarily wrong), wording. One time in a graduate
seminar I
realized my sempai were using kakikudashi to read an English
translation of
an Edo text (I think it was Sorai), they would go back to the original
and
wonder why the English translation didn't necessarily follow the
standard
kanbun reading. It was hard to convince them that it was not "good"
English,
because the counter to me was that it was not "acurate." These
discussions
lasted late into the second sessions at the izakaya.
tim kern
Kyoto
--------------------------------------------------
From: "pollack" <___@mail.rochester.edu>
Date: July 13, 2006 19:45:48 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
Isn't this pretty much what all those generations of suffering 19th
century
English schoolboys did when they were made to "construe" Latin? I
gather from
novels that this particular variety of hell was carried out in a quite
rigidly
formulaic manner. Aside from the relative few in those days who might
have had
reason actually to communicate in Latin, most likely within the Church,
I
suspect that even something as familiar as the Latin mass would have
sounded to
the majority of the population much like the Japanese bouyomi reading of
Buddhist sutras to most Japanese, a vaguely comforting and traditional
drone
whose actual meaning could safely be left to the anointed. I further
suspect
that sutra-reading as performed in Chinese temples might well have had
the same
effect on Chinese ears.
David Pollack
University of Rochester
----------------------------------------------------
From: Glynne Walley <___@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: July 13, 2006 23:12:26 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: kirin qilin
Dear list,
Michael Pye wrote:
[...] perhaps somebody can enlighten me on a possible connection
between ryume
and kirin. Perhaps there is none.
I'm no expert on kirin and ryume, but just the other day I was
translating a
passage from Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin's Nansou Satomi hakkenden in
which he
mentions them in a discussion of dragons. He writes:
"The dragon by nature is yin, and there is nothing with which it will
not
mingle. If it consorts with an ox it will bear a qilin
; cross it with a
pig and it will bear an oliphant [i.e., an elephant, but he uses the
archaic
term kisa, as well as the more familiar zou]; cross it with a horse and
it
will bear a dragon-steed [ryume]."
Of course this is fiction, and I haven't yet looked into Bakin's
sources.
But at least there's one connection.
Glynne Walley
PhD candidate
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University
---------------------------------------------------
From: Ivo Smits <i.b.___@let.leidenuniv.nl>
Date: July 13, 2006 23:31:26 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
Dear all
Completely off track, but this reminds me of an academic myth here in
Leiden, where until at least the middle of the nineteenth century
classes were taught in Latin.
One day during lecture a student came in late for class and forgot to
close the door behind him. The professor said, in Latin, "close the
door". No one reacted; all students simply went on taking notes. What
this (apocryphal?) story was supposed to illustrate is that no one in
the class room had any idea of what was being said, but wrote down,
verbatim, whatever they heard the professor say, and only later would
translate their notes into something intelligible.
I suppose what the story taught is that academic education was (still
is, sometimes?) mostly a ritual, not a meaningful exchange of knowledge
and insights.
Ivo Smits
---------------------------------------------------
From: Aileen Gatten <___@umich.edu>
Date: July 13, 2006 23:58:57 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
Here's another instance of "kakikudashi"
for Latin. Some years ago when I was doing some research in
the manuscript room of the Vatican Library, a Latin professor also
working there told me about a strange manuscript he was
reading. It was a medieval copy of poetry by Prudentius, and
it had little marks by the words. No one knew what the marks
signified, but the "teisetsu" had been that they were musical notations.
This professor instead suspected that
the purpose of the marks was to rearrange the Latin into something that
could be read more easily by a northern European, perhaps a speaker of
German or Anglo-Saxon. To judge from the reaction of other
classicists who heard about this manuscript, marking a classical text
in this way was unusual in medieval Europe. The
professor was very interested to learn that the Japanese had a
well-established system for reading Chinese in an approximation of
Japanese syntax.
Aileen Gatten
---------------------------------------------------
From: Lewis Cook <___@earthlink.net>
Date: July 14, 2006 1:20:12 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: query regarding online library searching
On Jul 12, 2006, at 9:24 PM, Lawrence Marceau wrote:
To PMJS:
I'm looking for online resources that
would help me find out whether a
certain book, originally published in 1396 in China, might survive in a
Japanese collection. I've tried the Shido bunko at Keio, the
Kano bunko
at Tohoku-dai, and the Kyodai Jinbunken, but to no avail.
(I'm planning
on checking Tenri next...)
...
(By the way, the book is 『草書韻会』, by the Jin (金) Dynasty author,
張 天錫. It's the 1396 明・洪武29年edition I'm looking for.)
Lawrence,
Forgive me for what is likely an irrelevant suggestion, but have you
checked the bibliography published in Showa 8 by 神田喜一郎 and 長沢規矩也 under
the title『佚存書目』If not, it might help though I'd be surprised if it were
online. Assuming that exemplars of the Ch'ien Lung edition exist in
China, the Ming edition of your book may not be considered an
"issonsho" proper, though I gather from the entry in Morohashi that the
latter was quite different from both the original and the Ch'ien Lung
edition.
FWIW,
Lewis
---------------------------------------------------
From: David Pollack <___@mail.rochester.edu>
Date: July 14, 2006 3:01:59 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
English-language kanbun textbooks have always seemed an odd waste of
time to me since there are so many available in Japanese, but then I
imagine that's how the entire subject has always looked to Chinese
readers.
Besides the apparently now-standard _Introduction to Japanese Kanbun_
by Akira Komai and Thomas Rohlich (1988), I don't know if
anyone has mentioned the earlier succinct Introduction to Kambun by
Sydney Crawcour (1965). This work is no doubt long out of print, but as
I recall it was well done, and according to FirstSearch it's still in
61 libraries worldwide.
Funny readings of Chinese texts aside, can someone recommend a manual
on the awful genre of kana-majiri kanbun of the sort written by
Japanese through the Edo period? It seems nearly everything important
ever written in classical Chinese can be found in Kanbun Taikei
<http://kanbun.info> and other collections in its three
states of genbun, kundoku and gendaiyaku, but all those letters between
Sengoku daimyo or chajin? Fugedaboudit.
David Pollack
University of Rochester
---------------------------------------------------
From: David Lurie <___@columbia.edu>
Date: July 14, 2006 4:27:44 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
As a weekly digest recipient, I hesitate to make what may be a belated
or superfluous post, but I am currently completing a manuscript that
addresses the phenomenon of _kanbun kundoku_ in detail, and can't help
chiming in with a few scattered, hasty remarks about the recent
discussion of this topic.
I've run across repeated references to notations in Latin texts (in
Anglo-Saxon/English contexts) that sound very similar to kunten
markings, although I have not yet been able to track down an actual
example (if anyone knows of one I'd be most grateful to hear about
it). The interesting question about such markings is whether
they were used to prepare a more-or-less independent translation (a
variety of formats are imaginable), or 'on the fly' to make a reading
in English of the Latin text, which would be remarkably close to
kundoku. There are other non-East Asian instances of
kundoku-like practices in the world history of writing: Akkadian uses
of Sumerian graphs have long been talked about in this connection, and
I've recently seen some very interesting discussions of connections
between Arabic and other languages in the context of Koranic
studies--(tantalizingly mentioned in Michael Cook's _The Koran: A Very
Short Introduction_). And, as Prof. Tollini notes, in the
19th century the techniques were used by Japanese students reading
alphabetic texts in European languages; these fascinating practices are
discussed in Morioka Kenji's [森岡健二] _Obun kundoku no kenkyu_ (Meiji
shoin, 1999); Prof. Morioka recently published a nice summary of his
research as "Obun kundoku shoshi" (_Yuriika_ no. 35, April 2003).
The question of what Edo period (or earlier, for that matter) writers
of kanbun "actually thought of what they were writing, in their heads"
is a complex one, but a simple answer would be that for the most part,
assuming they thought about it at all, they were writing Japanese; it
might be more accurate to say that in general what they were writing
did not have a stark linguistic distinction from texts written in kana
or mixed kana and kanji. It is true, however, that from the
late Muromachi period this gradually became controversial in certain
elite circles. With increasing exposure to contemporary
Chinese commentaries and other forms of scholarship, and eventually to
vernacular Chinese publications (something that Emanuel Pastreich has
written about extensively), proponents for the linguistic Chinese-ness
of the kanbun medium emerged--Ogyu Sorai being the most famous of
them. But this was one side of a debate that continued into
the Meiji period, with people like Hio Keizan [日尾荊山] on the other side,
arguing for the priority of traditional kundoku practices in accordance
with Japanese grammar.
I am convinced that from the mid-7th century on (essentially, from the
beginning of widespread written communication in the Japanese
archipelago), kundoku was the default method of reading (incidentally,
it is increasingly clear that it developed first in the Korean states,
perhaps as early as the 6th century). As was mentioned in
this thread, one prominent exception is the practice of 'bo-yomi' in
Buddhist contexts, but students in the most elite curricula of the Nara
university were required to learn current Chinese pronunciations for
formal bo-yomi style readings of the non-Buddhist classics they
studied--though even there it looks like kundoku served as an adjunct
for those who were puzzling over what the texts 'meant.' The
other great exception is with kanshi poetry, where ondoku was
extensively used (albeit also usually accompanied by kundoku) by
reader/writers concerned about rhyme and tone (I believe Ivo Smits
discusses this in the long two-part piece on the _Wakan roeishu_ that
appeared in Monumenta Nipponica several years back).
With apologies for an abrupt and probably belated post after a long
silence---
David Lurie
===========================
David B. Lurie
Assistant Professor of Japanese History and Literature
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Columbia University
www.columbia.edu/~dbl11
---------------------------------------------------
From: "Frederic J. Kotas" <___@cornell.edu>
Date: July 14, 2006 6:28:34 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
On the contrary, David, your comments are very interesting, and as you
know, I am in general agreement with much that you write. I
have gone so far as to say that at many (most?) times in Japan's
history, kanbun was simply another method of expressing the Japanese
language, the writer thinking in Japanese and anticipating that his
reader would read the text as Japanese.
Cornell recently hosted a young Korean scholar who worked with Prof.
John Whitman, and who recently contributed to a book on Korean
kundoku (韓國 角筆 符號 口訣 資料 와 日本 訓點 資料 연구 : 華嚴經 資料 를 중심
으로). He was also quite familiar with the work on kakuhitsu
markings (角筆) by Kobayashi Yoshinori (no, not the ｇōmanizumu fellow),
who, I am told, devised a machine to make them more readily
detectable.. Prof. Whitman has been studying the Shosoin
texts with kokunten that have made available with the publication--in
color--of the Shōgozō kyōkan (聖語蔵経巻) .
Last year at a book dealers' flea market I discovered an early Meiji
English language textbook.. In addition to providing
"approximate" pronunciation with the use of kana, the author also
provided kunten with the English text--for example, the kaeriten
between verb and direct object!
Prof. Whitman and I are quite interested in the possibility of someday
holding a different sort of "kanbun workshop," one devoted to kunten
and kundokugo. Any other interested parties?
Frederic Kotas
Japanese Bibliographer
Cornell University
---------------------------------------------------
> The hangul in the title of the book on Korean kundoku did not
come through, for me at least, but here is the Webcat reference, with
names of authors, etc.
http://webcat.nii.ac.jp/cgi-bin/shsproc?id=BA67677807
and while I am abou it, here is a book on kakuhitsu by Kobayashi
Yoshinori 小林芳規:
http://webcat.nii.ac.jp/cgi-bin/shsproc?id=BN01255410
-- ed
---------------------------------------------------
From: David Eason <___@ucla.edu>
Date: July 14, 2006 10:13:06 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: North American Kanbun Studies?
On 2006/07/13, at 12:27 David Lurie wrote:
proponents for the linguistic Chinese-ness of the kanbun medium
emerged--Ogyu Sorai being the most famous of them. But this
was one side of a debate that continued into the Meiji period, with
people like Hio Keizan [日尾荊山] on the other side, arguing for the
priority of traditional kundoku practices in accordance with Japanese
grammar.
Concerning the two contrasting positions represented by Ogyu
Sorai and Hio Keizan, as well as many of those in between, there is a
recent article by Aihara Kousaku entitled "Joji to kobunjigaku: Ogyuu
Sorai seijiron josetsu" and published in _Toukyou toritsu
daigaku hougakkai zasshi_ in early 2004 that deals with this and other
related issues. For those interested, the full citation in
Japanese is -
相原耕作 「助字と古文辞学：荻生徂徠政治論序説」『東京都立大学法学会雑誌』第四十四巻 第二号（二〇〇四年一月）
As the title suggests, the article focuses on how scholars -
particularly Sorai, and to a lesser extent, Dazai Shundai - argued over
how to understand the sentence final characters in Chinese texts such
as 哉 and 焉, as well as what to do with them when reading these texts in
kakikudashi order. But even more interestingly, the
article explores many scholars divided positions on the proper
way of appropriating Chinese texts through either onyomi or
kunyomi readings and the ongoing issue of how best to come to an
understanding of certain grammatical points in Chinese that could not
be easily addressed through translation.
In truth, however, I am not the one who should be providing
a summary for this or any related research. My own research
focuses on Sorai's military thought rather than his writings about
specific reading practices. Still, as I was given a
copy of the above article by the author a few years back while I was
living in Tokyo and able to regularly show up to meetings of the
monthly Ogyu Sorai kenkyuukai, I would recommend that those with an
interest in this issue might wish to take a look at this particular
article as an informative addition to this ongoing discussion.
Best,
David
-----------------
David A. Eason
PhD Candidate, Early Modern Japan
Department of History, UCLA
___@ucla.edu
---------------------------------------------------
From: Thomas Howell <___@earthlink.net>
Date: July 14, 2006 10:19:23 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Kanbun
Michael Pye wrote:
2) Was this (if true) always the case? I have long been tortured with
worry
about how eighteenth century writers of kanbun actually thought of what
they
were writing, in their heads. If there was a time when literati thought
(sometimes) in the Chinese order, when did it start and stop?
Another way to approach this question, and borrowing from Ivo Smit's
anecdote, is this: Did it bother a writer of kanbun that he couldn't
express "Close the door" in kanbun, in the way he might say
it? Did the distance between the forms and words used in writing, and
vernacular speech, bother him or her?
Suppose this writer thought: if I go a day's journey in any direction,
and say to someone," Close the door," in my vernacular, there's a good
chance they won't understand me. What is stable and universal is not
the vernacular, or a form of writing that tries to imitate the
vernacular, but my own kanbun. When I think of everyday things, these
may come out in speech, but if I want to make an argument on deep and
profound matters, naturally that comes out in kanbun.
In other words, they wouldn't necessarily have to be used to a type of
thinking closest to speech (or Japanese word order), as being more
natural than the thinking formed by writing-- in the style of writing
they were used to write in.
Tom Howell
From: David Eason <___@ucla.edu>
Date: July 15, 2006 11:26:42 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun
While I fear that my previous posting about Ogyu Sorai and
kanbun may have resulted in a substantial decrease in interest towards
this ongoing thread, I still cannot resist posing a few more questions
and comments in response to Tom Howell's most recent post.
I have to admit that I do not quite understand the
seemingly clear distinction that is being proposed between the act of
saying "Close the door" in the vernacular versus writing it
down in kanbun. My inability to grasp this point stems from a
basic doubt. Namely, do we know how "Close the
door" or any other number of utterances might sound when spoken as
compared to how they would have been expressed in writing? Or
to rework and expand the question - during various historical
periods, how do we know that many of the elements within the system of
written kanbun were not also a part of a larger oral culture and vice
versa?
Certainly in terms of grammar and syntax there are
and were many differences between kanbun and the spoken language, and I
am not suggesting that individuals spoke in some sort of unadulterated
kanbun as they went about their daily lives. However, on the
other hand, I am also not comfortable with the suggestion that one can
posit a clear and unproblematic break between these two forms of
communication, assuming that kanbun was somehow less capable of
conveying everyday actions and ideas. For, on the
contrary, at least in those texts I have come across during my research
into 16th and 17th century conflict the issues addressed by those
writing in kanbun would seem to be very much a part of the everyday.
This ability to express everyday actions and ideas seems to
have been facilitated, at least in part, by the incorporation of quite
a bit that was not strictly "Chinese" into the written medium of
kanbun. For unlike the example sentences provided throughout
the Rolich textbook that was mentioned in a previous post, very few
actual texts from the sixteenth century were written exclusively in
Chinese characters. Rather, as a quick glance over Oda
Nobunaga's letters or any volume of collected sources such as the
_Sengoku ibun_ will quickly demonstrate, most 16th century kanbun
correspondence also employs a liberal amount of kana interspersed
throughout. And while can hardly seem anything
other than "atarimae" when repeated to an email list full of experts,
this obvious point also leads to another, perhaps less frequently
mentioned issue . Namely, that together with the use of kana,
many sixteenth-century texts also include words and phrases that are,
in fact, drawn from specific regional dialects. To take but
one example, recent research has shown that during the middle and late
sixteenth century the Mouri family often employed specific words found
only in their local Chuugoku regional dialect within compositions
written in otherwise unremarkable kanbun.
For this reason I am highly skeptical that the act
of writing in kanbun, at least in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, represents an engagement with language either
completely removed from or in strict opposition to the
vernacular. At the very least, the above example of
the Mouri family demonstrates that when writing in kanbun one did not
automatically exchange one's particular, local dialect for a completely
separate and universally accessible alternative mode of communication.
This leads me to wonder then how one might begin to conceptualize the
complex relationship between written and oral language in the sixteenth
century, as well as during earlier and later times.
Historians of medieval Europe have increasingly taken up such issues as
part of a larger exploration into daily practices, discussing the way
in which oral culture shapes, as well as is shaped by, interaction with
the written word. Is there similar work
written by historians of "medieval" Japan? I have a few books
recently published by Japanese scholars that address some of these
issues, but the literature on this topic still seems to be quite
sparse. Any suggested readings?
David
-----------------
David A. Eason
PhD Candidate, Early Modern Japan
Department of History, UCLA
___@ucla.edu
----------------------------------------------------
From: Richard Bowring <___@cam.ac.uk>
Date: July 16, 2006 18:33:41 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Kanbun again
On the matter of Latin texts, which both Gatten and Lurie brought up, a
friend working in Romance languages tells me that if you are interested
you should investigate writings by Professor Roger Wright of Liverpool
University, who has been working on the break up of Latin into the
vernaculars. There are texts with diacritics etc that would look like
Latin to us but if we heard the stuff read out in the Middle Ages (pre
9th/10thc.) we may well have heard something that we would clearly
classify as a Romance language, not Latin. This is, of course a
controversial topic. Note that although it might well involve
transposition of elements it involves Romance languages, not Germanic,
and so charts a process of change rather than translation per se. I
suspect that this is rather different from kanbun kundoku, which
involves two utterly different languages and only really works as a
method of translation because of the nature of the Chinese script and
the special relationship between Japanese and Chinese. I could imagine
a kundoku method for construing Latin that marked it with numbers for
word order or did what linguists do now and interpolate signs like
"obj, sub, vb, part[icle]" when quoting uncommon languages, but in the
end it is surely easier just to learn Latin grammar, particularly if
you have to compose in Latin as well, which is what I had to do in
England aged 12 in the late 1950s.
What a pity the Koreans, who undoubtedly invented the system, were so
careless as to lose it!
Richard Bowring
----------------------------------------------------
From: Nobumi Iyanaga <n-___@nifty.com
Date: July 17, 2006 11:13:23 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Kanbun
Hello,
On Jul 13, 2006, at 11:58 PM, Aileen Gatten wrote:
Here's
another instance of "kakikudashi" for Latin. Some years
ago when I was doing some research in the manuscript room of
the
Vatican Library, a Latin professor also working there told me
about
a strange manuscript he was reading. It was a
medieval copy of
poetry by Prudentius, and it had little marks by the
words. No one
knew what the marks signified, but the "teisetsu" had been
that
they were musical notations.
This
professor instead suspected that the purpose of the marks was
to rearrange the Latin into something that could be read more
easily by a northern European, perhaps a speaker of German or
Anglo-
Saxon. To judge from the reaction of other
classicists who heard
about this manuscript, marking a classical text in this way
was
unusual in medieval Europe. The professor
was very interested to
learn that the Japanese had a well-established system for
reading
Chinese in an approximation of Japanese syntax.
This reminds me an interesting story about professor Etienne Lamotte
(or, perhaps, it was about prof. Louis de La Vallee Poussin?
I don't
remember very well), the well known Belgian scholar of Buddhist
studies. Anyway, the professor was so versed in Sanskrit that
he was
reading Chinese Buddhist texts translating them into Sanskrit (then,
translating from Sanskrit to French); he didn't know at all what mean
the kunten marks in Chinese texts (edited in Japan). Someone
asked
to him what mean these marks, and he replied: They are no important
for meaning; they should be marks for chanting the suutras in Japan...
Best regards,
Nobumi Iyanaga
Tokyo,
Japan
-----------------------------------------------------
From: ___@swissonline.ch
Date: July 18, 2006 16:21:30 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] kanbun
David Eason wrote:
This leads me to wonder then how one might begin to conceptualize the
complex relationship between written and oral language in the sixteenth
century, as well as during earlier and later times. Historians of
medieval Europe have increasingly taken up such issues as part of a
larger exploration into daily practices, discussing the way in which
oral culture shapes, as well as is shaped by, interaction with the
written word. Is there similar work written by historians of
"medieval" Japan? I have a few books recently published by Japanese
scholars that address some of these issues, but the literature on this
topic still seems to be quite sparse. Any suggested readings?
I did not plan to make advertisement for my own book. But this seems an
opportunity.
"Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan:
Ategawa no sho, 1004-1304." Bern/New York: Peter Lang (in print)
The central argument of my book is that in Japanese medieval society
with a limited literacy the dissemination and reception of texts took
place primarily through speaking and hearing. At least professional
scribes did not have any difficulties to convert oral statements into
kanbun and vice-versa to vocalise kanbun texts.
Some of my referees and anonymous readers found the idea of the
importance of orality and "vocality" in medieval Japan nonsense. But
even if one shares their opinion, my book contains a bibliography of
Western and Japanese works on the topic of orality and literacy with
reference to medieval Europe and Japan up to around 2004.
Judith Froehlich
-----------------------------------------------------
From: Thomas Howell <___@earthlink.net
Date: July 19, 2006 2:36:48 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: kanbun
On Jul 18, 2006, at 12:21 AM, ___@swissonline.ch wrote:
"Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan:
Ategawa no sho, 1004-1304." Bern/New York: Peter Lang (in print)
This looks very interesting. Thank you!
Also:
Yamada Shunji, Moji bunka to shite no ondoku to mokudoku
(221-43), in Onsei to Kaku koto, Vol 8 of the series, Souzou suru Heian
bungaku.
Although the starting point here is the Genji, and there is nothing
about the Edo period, in the later sections of this essay
Yamada summarizes the state of the field on silent versus oral reading
in Japanese scholarship. including the Amino essay I mentioned, Maeda
Ai, etc.
Tom Howell
-----------------------------------------------------
From: "Kristina Troost" <___@acpub.duke.edu
Date: July 19, 2006 5:14:28 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: kanbun
Dear Judith,
I have been unable to find any reference to your book in the US
bibliographic databases (Worldcat and RLG) and could not find it on the
Peter Lang site either. Since most of the books on the Peter
Lang site are published in German, I wonder if the title below is a
translation from the German, or if it was written in
English. I tried both author and title searches,
but mostly author. If it was published in German, that would
explain why libraries in the US don't hold it. I also found
no holding libraries in Japan, though NDL is presently down.
It sounds very interesting; could you provide a more complete citation?
Thank you,
Kristina Troost
-----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Pye <___@staff.uni-marburg.de
Date: July 19, 2006 16:44:20 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Kanbun again
Dear Colleagues,
I have been fascinated by the different ways in which this complex of
problems
has been aired. I have learned a great deal. Thank you.
My first, and most serious question was whether there was ever a time
when
Japanese literati really read and wrote kanbun texts as Chinese, i.e.
(leaving
aside variations in the pronunciation) in the straight order of the
Chinese
characters, following the Chinese grammar and that alone. Taking all the
learned contributions into account, I am coming to the conclusion that
there is just no evidence that this was ever so. Indeed, the literati
probably
never even aspired to it. Perhaps some "kogakusha" did, but by then it
was too
late, since they were inevitably influenced by the other modality and
thus the
attempt could amount to little more than pretentiousness (as criticised
by
Tominaga Nakamoto in Okina no Fumi). Would anybody care to dispute this
(and
I"m very willing to be instructed) or is this the conclusion I should
draw?
It has even been suggested (Tom Howell) that dialectic variations the
orality of
Japanese are a more interesting subject anyway, which somehow
reinforces my
suspicion.
A second comment:
Tom Howell wrote:
"Suppose this writer thought: if I go a day's journey in any direction,
and say to someone," Close the door," in my vernacular,
there's a good chance they won't understand me. What is stable
and universal is not the vernacular, or a form of writing
that tries to imitate the vernacular, but my own kanbun. When
I think of everyday things, these may come out in speech, but if I want
to make an argument on deep and profound matters, naturally that comes
out in kanbun!
I was very impressed by the last sentence which Tom Howell puts into the
mouth of an imaginary writer, and since then I have been trying to make
this attitude my own (!!!), so far without success alas, no doubt due
to the insufficient profundity of my thoughts. It would be nice to
think of something so deep and profound that it "naturally" came out in
kanbun!!! (smiles).
They couldn't/wouldn't think "please close the door" in kanbun in
pre-modern
Japan, because they didn't have doors. But other simple actions or
commands
could theoretically be expressed in kanbun, I think. At the same time, I
suppose the kanbun used to express the more profound thoughts would be
(was)
comparable in quality to the English which just naturally comes out of
the
mouths of people all over the world today when "they want to be
understood" at
conferences etc., i.e. rather varied...
Third, the Latin parallel.
I'm fascinated by the details provided about the annotation of Latin in
Europe,
which has to be a significant parallel, if partly for contrastive
purposes. The
examples show that people have felt a need for aids since mediaeval
days and
thus that the idea of a kakikudashi system is not entirely new. New for
the
European tradition would be to learn things from the very effective
Japanese
system, and start again.
The first phrase in my very first Latin book was "Discipuli picturam
spectate", - a late pedagogical formulation by a non-Roman. From this
simple
sentence we learn that pupils are not necessarily disciples and that
word-order
in English and Latin is not the same. This was back in the early
fifties,
mentioned by Richard Bowring (and indeed I too, in the language stream,
composed prose and verse in Latin as a duty, and somehow a pleasure when
compared with the rougher sports which were obligatory). However the
great
majority of modern people in the European cultural tradition have never
learned
to write in Latin (and of course like most of the few who still do/did,
I have
forgotten it myself). What I do remember, however, is that the prose of
Tacitus, for example, is notably more complex than that of "easy"
authors
such as Livy or Cicero, so that his history sparkled more, while the
poets and
playwrights have their own vagaries. For these reasons I'm not quite
convinced
that just learning Latin grammar, and then reading, as Richard Bowring
suggests, is quite so satisfactory an answer as it may seem in brief.
What
about all the other aids to the elucidation of texts in foreign
languages? why
not just learn the languages and forget the aids? Of course many people
nowadays jump this stage for Latin anyway and take comfort in the
excellent
kokuyaku which all those Classicists have gone to the trouble of making
for us,
knowing that so few will take the originals with them to the beach. But
a
kakikudashi system would leave people nearer to the original
vocabulary, while
being assisted with the syntax. That's the main point. By the way, I
haven't
thought out just what it might look like (before anybody asks) as I'm
too busy
with other uncompleted tasks. Maybe if I ever make it to a beach, which
seems
more and more unlikely...
Lastly, parallels with modernity: The point about the interpretative
function of
reading aids (noted especially for the Buddhist context) is well taken,
and as
everybody knows, furigana are used to this day not only to indicate
pronuncation but in some cases to add something a little bit different
to the
original. So there's nothing new/old in that. It's simply yet another
indication, especially when katakana are provided for English words,
that
nobody really cares about the original words very much, only about the
meaning
- or a new meaning.
Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto, Japan
----------------------------------------------------
From: Robert Borgen <___@ucdavis.edu>
Date: July 20, 2006 5:18:40 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun again
Dear Colleagues,
I've been reading everyone's comments with great interest, even though
only a few (some sent to me directly) have called my attention to North
American activities that I can report at my upcoming
conference. Although I felt I ought to ought contribute to
the ongoing discussion, I didn't have much to say until I read Michael
Pye's comments, which offered a convenient review of some key
points. His first point was to propose that Japanese never
really read and wrote kanbun texts as Chinese and asked if anyone was
willing to dispute this. I am, albeit with many of the
qualifying words that composition teachers, at least here in America,
tell us to avoid.
If you read the sections of the Yoro codes prescribing the pedagogical
procedures for the court university, you will learn that Japanese
students began their studies under a "Professor of Phonetics" (or maybe
"Chinese Pronunciation" would be the more accurate translation of
"on-hakase" or, tellingly, "koe no hakase). At least in the
Nara period, these professors appear to have been all
Chinese. After students had learned to "read" a text, they
attended lectures on its meaning. Ryou no Shuuge provides a
series of comments on what "read" meant (p. 449 of the Kokushi Taikei
edition). The first tells us it means "hakudoku"
("white-reading"), which I would have guessed means to read a text out
in the straight in the Chinese word word. I was surprised to
discover, however, that the term appears in Morohashi only as a modern
Chinese word meaning something like "read to no avail" ("munashiku
yomu"). My old Kokugo Daijiten says it means to read without
paying attention to meaning and then cites the same passage I just
cited myself. Given the context, I still think it probably
means something like "make an attempt at reading--probably aloud--a
text using something resembling Chinese pronunciation--and probably
memorizing it, since on their examinations students were to be shown a
copy of the text and asked to provide a few characters that have been
omitted." Other commentaries, however, say that "read" means,
well, "read-read" for want of a better translation of "dokukun" (i.e.
the familiar "kundoku" with the characters reversed). That
word does not appear in the dictionaries I have at hand and so I have
no idea whether or not it refers to what today we call "kundoku," but I
suspect not. According my Kokugo Daijiten, the earliest
example of "kundoku" in its now familiar meaning apparently dates from
the Bunmei era (1469-87). In other words, we should not jump
to the conclusion that in the ninth century (or perhaps even earlier
since I do not know the date of the commentary cited in Ryou no Shuuge)
"dokukun" meant the same thing as the modern "kundoku." In
the mid-ninth century, Sugawara no Michizane had a teacher who appears
to have been Chinese, suggesting that the rules prescribed in the codes
may have been still followed at that time and he may have been taught
to read out and memorize Chinese texts in something resembling Chinese
pronunciation (further details appear in my book). Such
evidence is more suggestive than conclusive, but at least it leaves
room to question the conclusion that Japanese never read kanbun texts
as Chinese.
This leads me to a related issue. I suspect my hosts a
Nishogakusha University would be surprised at the direction taken by
this discussion, which has focused largely on the issues internal to
Japan and the problem of how the Japanese conceived and read kanbun,
leading to Michael Pye's proposed conclusion. The assumption
of most postings seems to be that "kanbun" refers to things that the
Japanese wrote using only Chinese characters (but probably construed as
Japanese). At least among American scholars, the term does
appear to have taken on that meaning, but not in Japan. If
one were to follow David Pollack's suggestion and get a Japanese
introduction to kanbun, one would discover that most of the examples
are taken from standard Chinese works--the Confucian classics, Tang
poetry, and the like. A few years ago, I had a chance to
observe a high school "kokugo" class in Nobeoka, Kyushu, not a great
cosmopolitan center. The teacher happened to be doing kanbun
that day. I no longer recall what Chinese text she was
teaching, but, in addition to giving the usual yomikudashi, she also
did her best to read it out in modern Chinese pronunciation.
In other words, kanbun is broader, more cosmopolitan, than the
discussion thus far might suggest. Whereas Thomas Howell's
comments point to the role of kanbun as a sort of domestic lingua
franca for high-level written work, kanbun was also also used for
international diplomatic and scholarly exchange. Wang
Zhenping's new book Ambassadors from the Island of the Immortals (UH
Press) has some very interesting material on this topic. Once
I met a native Chinese scholar who, to my surprise, had read
Michizane's kanshi. He reported that most of it read quite
nicely as Chinese and was good, although not great, poetry.
Nishogakusha's COE project focuses on Japan's own kanbun, it also has
groups treating cultural exchanges between Japan and Korea, and between
Japan and China. It has hosted a symposium on the Analects of
Confucius, a lecture on Six Dynasties Literature, and so
forth. In other words, I think we must resist the temptation
to treat Japanese kanbun as simply strange way of writing the Japanese
language. At least for some Japanese, it was (and remains) a
means of communication with the rest of East Asia.
Robert Borgen
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Pye <___@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 20, 2006 9:44:49 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Kanbun again
Dear Colleagues,
Very grateful to Robert Borgen for the fascinating additional
information. She
she (or sha sha!).
As I'm not a specialist in early Japanese culture I wasn't really
trying to
propose a thesis, rather just asking whether it would be correct to
draw a
particular conclusion from the contributions of those with greater
knowledge. I
learn that this conclusion should definitely be modified, but, -
perhaps not
very much! Robert Borgen's qualifying words are noted, but perhaps
there should
be more of them. The expressions "hakudoku" and "munashiku yomu" really
say it
all. Naturally in those early situations where there was a Chinese
teacher (of
pronunciation), the students would be following him (probably not her!)
in
reading through the text in an approximation to Chinese pronunciation
(as used
by the instructor: all those consonantal endings to syllables which
lead to the
-ku and -tsu endings in ondoku!) How else could all the vocabulary have
been
introduced into Japanese? But then came the next step. What did a given
text
"mean" if not "read vainly"? To know this, the text was not exactly
"translated", it seems, but turned around so that it made sense in a
head used
to different grammatical patterns. So far, so good?
In RB's account we have references to things which are centuries apart.
I speculate that once the second step had become common, and all the
key texts
were provided with the right markings, the teachers learning from each
other,
and so forth, the first step was no longer necessary. In the Edo
Period, the
widely used Daigaku, for example, could be taught by means of the
second step
only (without Chinese teachers and without first reading it in the
direct order
of the kanji in some imitated but long since unrecognisable Chinese
pronunciation). This new way of reading was a skill in itself which
could only
be taught by Japanese to Japanese. Chinese persons would find it
incomprehensible and shake their heads in disbelief; like Sinologists
wandering
around in contemporary Japan with "kanji-shock"! Similarly, Japanese
students
today are baffled if you mention Da Hsue (?) or Sanjiaolun or
Miaofalienhuajing.
I am speculating that the Japanese way of reading, and now I mean
thought order
as well as pronunciation, itself eventually became the basis, for
Japanese
writers, for composing texts using Chinese characters. (I'm talking
about
prose, not kanshi.) The question is, accepting Robert Borgen's
instructive
points about the earlier history, from when had this shift irreversibly
taken
place? (Or is anybody still saying that it never did?)
I realise that the in-between history is complicated by the fact that
Buddhist
monks went to China for considerable periods and learned Chinese all
over again
from their teachers, and also because written texts were used for
diplomacy and
trade and may have been read aloud now and then in mixed international
company
(but hardly on a daily basis, since they were on paper anyway and
that's what
counted). (Then there were Hideyoshi's soldiers who must have
communicated with
Koreans in kanbun before cutting off their ears as mementos (????).
One of the long-term results of this process is that Chinese texts
which have not been prepared for Japanese readers by specialists can
nowadays
only be accessed with difficulty and hence get ignored (like German
texts in
some North American libraries (smiles?)). In other words, there is a
canon (or
canons) of texts which have been learned and elucidated, and a whole
lot more
texts out there which nobody can make head or tail of, or only with
great
difficulty. And certainly nobody would dream of trying to read them
with the
help of modern putonghua.
This brings me to the concept of kanbun and kanbun textbooks. Robert
Borgen's
point about the contents of kanbun textbooks is absolutely right and
important,
if I may say so. In fact "kanbun" as a high-school subject is used as an
introduction to classical Chinese language and culture. It is striking
that, as
far as I can remember (my books being elsewhere), Japanese kanbun texts
are only
marginally included in the textbook extracts (maybe some kanshi). This
might
seem odd, depending on viewpoint, in that so much writing important for
Japanese history was itself written in kanbun. The Japanese term kanbun
has to
refer to both elements.
The balance tipping to Chinese texts in the kanbun school textbooks is
like the
balance in teaching Latin in Europe. That was always based entirely on
classical Latin. Theological Latin, Ecclesiastical Latin, Mediaeval
Latin in
general, Legal Latin, Medical Latin, Botanical Latin: all of this never
got a
look in while I did it at school (over seven years). It was as if it
all never
existed. At the same time the reasons for learning the "dead" language
(with no
attempt to pronounce it like Romans did) were always that it was the
basis of
European culture and that it made the learning of "other" languages
easier
(which always had to be postponed because we were so busy learning
Latin, of
course worthwhile in itself).
Back to kanbun in Japanese schools. It's very nice to hear that a
teacher made a
point of reading out a kanbun text using modern Chinese pronunciation.
However,
unless things have changed out of all recognition since I attended
kanbun
classes in the high school I mentioned before, this will have been an
individual, and unusual educational initiative. In the sixties there was
practically no knowledge of spoken Chinese in Japan. The first NHK
programmes
came in round about then and were quite good (not like the clown-about
programmes they have nowadays), but hadn't had time to take effect. In
the
meantime some people have taken it up, and can of course travel in
China. So
it's very good and progressive that the teacher referred to by RB made
the
point in school. However I would be surprised if it's on the curriculum
or
mentioned in the guidelines for teachers. Moreover it was a kokugo
class (says
RB) rather than a kanbun class. Kokugo and kanbun courses are very
independent
of each other.
Robert Borgen writes:
" In other words, I think we must resist the temptation to treat
Japanese kanbun
as simply strange way of writing the Japanese language. At least for
some
Japanese, it was (and remains) a means of communication with the rest
of East
Asia."
I agree that we shouldn't regard the character of Japanese kanbun as
"simply a
strange way to write the Japanese language". (I don't think anybody has
really
quite been suggesting that.) However it does still seem that there came
a point
when those who read and wrote kanbun for themselves no longer did it
with the
straight kanji for kanji order in their heads. Or if so, it was only a
part of
what was in their heads. The language of Japanese kanbun was a literary
language which was neither normal "Japanese", nor Chinese in the sense
that its
Japanese writers had "normal" Chinese in their heads. Did it not come
to be so?
And if it came to be so, would this not have come about, without people
really
noticing it much, sometime between the Heian Period and the Edo Period?
The ones who tried to turn the clock back were the kogakusha, who
realised that
there is more to kanbun than its mere intellectual contents (smiles)...
I will
conclude with a an ironic quotation from Tominaga Nakamoto (1717-1746),
which I
think (though it only touches on pronunciation and not
grammar) shows what a
long distance had been travelled:
"....Since meat is an important food in China the Confucianists should
raise
cattle and sheep for their consumption. Moreover the menu should be
composed
with reference to the chapter on 'Inner Rules' in the Book of Rites. At
weddings...and at funerals... Similarly for clothes: they should wear
Chinese
costume and a Confucian hat on their heads... Confucianists should read
Chinese
characters in their Chinese pronunciation. Since there are various
kinds of
Chinese pronunciation they should copy the pronunciation of the state
of Lu in
the Chou period. Since there are many styles of Chinese characters,
they should
write with one of the most ancient styles." (Okina no Fumi 3)
As colleagues may well know, Tominaga was thrown out of school,
probably for
saying disrespectful things like this, but he went on to write his own
kanbun
which contrasts quite starkly with the quotations from Chinese Buddhist
scriptures embedded in his work.
I see I am tending to propound a view now. But really, I'm just trying
to
imagine the mental processes involved, the character of which does seem
to have
shifted over a lengthy period.
Would welcome any further instruction, but will try not to bore the
list.
best wishes,
Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto
----------------------------------------------------
From: David Eason <___@ucla.edu>
Date: July 20, 2006 10:51:19 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Varieties of Kanbun?
Dear All,
This ongoing thread concerning kanbun has been
extremely informative and I have learned quite a lot from all of the
information and opinions provided by other posters. I also
wanted to thank both both Tom Howell for his reference to the Amino
article as well as Judith Froehlich for mentioning her upcoming
book. This larger question of orality, though not
the topic of the initial thread, is also an issue that I look forward
to learning more about in the future.
At present, however, I would like to tack on a brief
addendum/clarification to my message from last week, particularly in
light of Robert Borgen's most recent comments. The teaching
and recitation of kanbun texts through the medium of Chinese is
certainly a point that should not be overlooked. As the
kanshi written by Sugawara no Michizane or even that written by a much
later figure such as Arai Hakuseki reminds us, at least among the
highly educated, kanbun allowed one to communication with an audience
that extended beyond the boundaries of Japan. I
certainly did not wish to deny this important aspect of
kanbun. Rather, in my previous message I merely
wished call into question the notion that written kanbun and a spoken,
vernacular language were separate entities by default and relegated to
separate existences with little or no bearing on one another.
Then again, perhaps no one was suggesting such a clearly demarcated
binary in the first place...
In any case, I should have taken more care to
clarify terms when attempting to discuss potential points of overlap
between formal writing and regional vernaculars. For, in all
honesty, after reading Professor Borgen's most recent post I am not
certain if either he or the Nishogakusha's CEO project would even
consider sixteenth-century texts which combine kanji and kana as
qualifying as kanbun. For although I have heard and
seen this mixed style of writing referred to as a form of "hentai
kanbun," turning to any number of dictionaries for a definition only
complicates the issue further. For example, the definition
provided for "kanbun" in the _Koujien_ clearly includes such mixed kana
and kanji compositions while in the _Nihon kokugo daijiten_ neither the
entries for "kanbun" or "hentai kanbun" specifically mention this mixed
style. At any rate, it goes without saying that my
previous post about words from regional dialects finding their way into
kanbun only makes sense if one considers mixed kana and kanji texts a
form of kanbun in the first place.
And if I might continue with this point a bit further, there
is another example concerning regional variations and vernacular
language that may be of interest to those still following this
thread. There is some evidence that, at least during the late
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were ever so slightly
different ways of reading certain parts of "kanbun" texts depending on
the region in which one lived. Now, it is unclear whether
this reflects differences in dialect, differences in writing styles, or
simply that all these individuals had a bad kanbun instructor :-), but
there are enough surviving texts which include kana among the records
of families such as the Go-Hojo to at least suggest that these
deviations from "standard kanbun" were consistent rather than simply
the result of occasional grammar mistakes. As Yamada Kuniaki
has pointed out, in the surviving records of the Hojo family as well as
other warriors located in the Kanto region one finds patterns like -
「可申付候」and 「可被申候」
which one would expect to be read in yomikudashi as "moushitsukeru beku
sourou" and "mousaru beku sourou" respectively, but which
instead appear consistently in kana as "moushitsuke beku sourou" and
"mousare beku sourou" where the "ru" before "beku" is always
dropped. Apparently Hojo Soun and his successors
would have failed high school kanbun...
Best,
David
-----------------
David A. Eason
PhD Candidate, Early Modern Japan
Department of History, UCLA
___@ucla.edu
----------------------------------------------------
From: David Eason <___@ucla.edu>
Date: July 20, 2006 11:18:17 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Varieties of Kanbun? - Correction
As Yamada Kuniaki has pointed out, in the surviving records of the Hojo
family as well as other warriors located in the Kanto region one finds
patterns like -
「可申付候」and 「可被申候」
which one would expect to be read in yomikudashi as "moushitsukeru beku
sourou" and "mousaru beku sourou" respectively, but which
instead appear consistently in kana as "moushitsuke beku sourou" and
"mousare beku sourou" where the "ru" before "beku" is always
dropped. Apparently Hojo Soun and his successors
would have failed high school kanbun...
Actually, it's not a question of "ru" being dropped as I had
mistakenly wrote at the end of my last message. Rather, as
Yamada himself explains, it appears rather that, for whatever reason,
instead of conjugating shimo ni-dan verbs in the "u-dan" (saru, tsuku,
etc.) before "beshi" the Go-Hojo regularly used the "e-dan"
(sare, tsuke) instead.
Incidentally, the Mori family, despite
incorporating words from their regional dialect into their
letters, consistently used the "u-dan" before
"beshi." Clearly they would have done much better in high
school kanbun than there contemporaries in the east. :-)
Best,
David
-----------------
David A. Eason
PhD Candidate, Early Modern Japan
Department of History, UCLA
___@ucla.edu
----------------------------------------------------
From: Robert Borgen <___@ucdavis.edu>
Date: July 20, 2006 16:53:43 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Varieties of Kanbun?
David Eason is quite right: my definition of both "kanbun"
and "hentai kanbun" would be those found in Kokugo Daijiten and I'm
startled to see that indeed Koujien's definition of "hentai kanbun"
does include souroubun, which I had always thought was a variety of
Japanese, perhaps because the only souroubun I've ever read is that
appearing in noh plays, which seems very Japanese. So, I
checked Minegishi Akira's book, Hentai Kanbun, in which he states
something like "In terms of its script, hentai kanbun can called
writing that uses kanji exclusively," i.e. the definition I would have
shared with Kokugo Daijiten. However, he then goes on to
write, "But this is only the general rule and sometimes various types
of kana are also used," (again freely translated; see p.
109). Defining our terms here is clearly a big
problem. I may prefer the narrower definitions, but I do not
assume this prejudice is shared by the scholars at Nishogakusha.
To change the subject slightly, as I recall Roy Andrew Miller's book,
The Japanese Language, states that Chinese was spoken in the Nara
capital, but he doesn't give a citation for that claim. If my
recollection and Miller's book are both correct, they would support the
view I presented earlier that in ancient Japan kanbun was more
distinctly Chinese--and even oral--than it would later become.
And to change the subject yet again, Michael Pye commented that kanbun
is not taught as part of high school kokugo classes. I must
confess I had thought the class I observed was a kokugo class, but I
can't be sure and certainly am not up on guidelines teachers must
follow in such classes. I had assumed that the teacher was
imitating the practice of NHK's early morning kanshi program (5:00 AM
on the educational channel, last time I checked), which explicates a
classical Chinese poem in Japanese and does have it read in authentic
Mandarin, apparently by a native speaker of the language.
And finally, about ten years ago, I picked up a book "Shinpen Jouyou
Kokugo Benran," which was apparently intended as supplementary reading
for high school students. I got it for its lovely color
pictures of such things as flowers mentioned in Kokinshuu.
After its chapters on modern literature (pp. 178-309), it has a brief
section on major foreign writers, arranged by country:
England, France, Germany, Russia, America and finally China (pp.
310-12). Whereas England and America each get 4 writers (the
selection would surprise my colleagues in our English Department), only
Lu Xun made the grade among modern Chinese writers. But
wait! There's more! The book concludes with a
section on kanbun, complete with more lovely pictures and a few sample
passages, all from the Chinese classics (pp. 314-376). In
other words, the books author's seem to think of modern Chinese
literature as "foreign," but not classical Chinese literature, which
gets a long section all to itself. Japanese writing in kanbun
rates passing mention in the chronological survey of Japanese
literature (pp. 1-176). Although I didn't count words,
Japanese kanbun seems to get only slightly more attention than Lu
Xun. Rai San'you, for example, appears only in the nenpyou,
which has an entry, "1836: Nihon Gaishi (Rai San'you)," to quote it in
its entirety. As I said, my impression would be that for most
Japanese, "kanbun" is classical Chinese writing by classical Chinese
authors.
Robert Borgen
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Pye <___@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 20, 2006 20:05:15 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Varieties of Kanbun?
Dear Colleagues,
Robert Borgen writes (in a kind of conclusion to his latest extremely
valuable
mail):
"As I said, my impression would be that for most Japanese, "kanbun" is
classical Chinese writing by classical Chinese authors."
However, if you will excuse me saying so, I think is a little
one-sided. Kojien is quite clear. There is (a) and there is (b). The
first is classical Chinese prose by Chinese authors. The second is
writing composed only in kanji, in "wagakuni", as opposed to kanamajiri.
The fact that today's kanbun textbooks for schools concentrate mainly
on the
first is neither here nor there. (Of course it's an interesting matter
in
itself, as already discussed). However the other stuff is still lying
about in
libraries and bookshops (I nearly said "exists", but didn't want to get
metaphysicians at my throat.) And there's a lot of it. To mention
Tominaga
Nakamoto again (excuse my limited information base), Okina no Fumi is
written
in kanamajiri (as in the title) and Shutsujokogo is written in the
kanbun of
wagakuni. No Japanese person could refer to it as anything other than
kanbun.
The same distinction can be made for much earlier writings like those of
Buddhist leaders such as Shinran Shonin.
I still believe that there came a time when the Japanese syntax in the
head came to dominate the kanji by kanji texts written in wagakuni,
while the
kanbun form was retained (especially for profound thoughts!). But the
question I can still only answer very vaguely is when this shift
occurred. Perhaps it just can't be
answered very well at all.
As the Sage said, any time remaining (after administration) should be
spent in
study, and I know I have a lot to do.
Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto, Japan
----------------------------------------------------
From: "pollack" <___@mail.rochester.edu>
Date: July 21, 2006 11:51:59 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun again and again and....
Re: the contemporary Japanese use of "kanbun" to communicate with other
Asians,
I venture (habakarinagara) to mention the example in chapter 11 of my
book
Reading Against Culture (Cornell UP, 1992) entitled "The Escape from
Culture:
Takeshi Kaiko's Into a Black Sun." The narrator, a Japanese journalist
in
Vietnam in the 1970s (who happens to be Kaiko), finds himself able to
communicate in some depth with Vietnamese Buddhist monks simply by
resorting to
the kanbun he learned in high-school, and earns the trust of another
Vietnamese
by his ability to come up with the second couplet of a famous Tang
Chinese
quatrain after he is given the first. Because of this shared
background, Kaiko
finds himself able to see dimensions of Vietnamese lives that will
always be
tragically invisible to his Western colleagues. It makes one wonder
what might
remain today of this common Asian cultural fund -- it seems more likely
they
might get along by referring to anime.
Kyoushuku,
David Pollack
From: ___@aol.com
Date: July 22, 2006 3:09:41 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: kanbun discussion
As an outsider in this learned group I normally stay pretty quiet,
though I follow the discussions faithfully. My interest in the subject
is historical and cultural since I write about the 11th and 12th
centuries.
I found the detailed discussion of the use of Chinese in ancient Japan
fascinating and hope that my understanding of the subject is fairly
accurate. It seemed to me that Chinese (whether it was the written form
or also the spoken version) was reserved to upper class males, usually
university-educated and government-service-bound. Exceptions, no doubt,
existed (Lady Murasaki seems to have had a smattering of Chinese and
hidden the fact for fear of censure) and one would assume that a very
large number of people in the lower ranks of the government (scribes,
clerks, etc) would have been able to decypher documents that applied to
their jobs. Perhaps the latter needed to know only the Japanese
equivalent of the Chinese original. Presumably that is then how kanbun
entered into the written language and how perhaps certain class
distinctions might have been attached to differing levels of knowledge
of Chinese.
Perfectly spoken Chinese was most likely a rarity during the late Heian
period and may have become even rarer later on. Professor Borgen's
posts remind me that Sugawara Michizane was a fine poet of Chinese
poetry. My English translations suggest that it resembles
original Chinese poetry in format and subject matter rather than
Japanese poetry. Would one find such expertise in later centuries?
Please make allowances for my possibly foolish assumptions.
I.J.Parker
----------------------------------------------------
From: James McMullen
<james.___@oriental-institute.oxford.ac.uk>
Date: July 22, 2006 0:22:37 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Kanbun
The recent PMJS exchanges of opinion on the status of ‘Chinese’ or
kanbun written by Japanese raise serious questions about how the
extensive corpus of material written in that medium should be
approached. Should it be regarded as essentially a special highly
Sinicized variety of Japanese,as Japanese, or as Chinese,
albeit presumably sometimes Japanicized, Chinese? This is not
a new debate, but the question has not least a practical aspect, at
least for translators. In the lastest PMJS, Michael Pye writes as
follows:
“My first, and most serious question was whether there was ever a time
when Japanese literati really read and wrote kanbun texts as Chinese,
i.e. (leaving aside variations in the pronunciation) in the straight
order of the
Chinese characters, following the Chinese grammar and that alone.
Taking all the learned contributions into account, I am coming to the
conclusion that there is just no evidence that this was ever so.
Indeed, the literati
probably never even aspired to it. Perhaps some "kogakusha" did, but by
then it was too late, since they were inevitably influenced
by the other modality and thus the attempt could amount to
little more than pretentiousness (as criticised by Tominaga
Nakamoto in Okina no Fumi).”
My own view is that each scholar writing in the medium of
kanbun should be evaluated separately. I also think that the
intention of the author, insofar as it is accessible or can be
inferred, should be considered. In the end, rigidly to apply the
categories of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Sinico-Japanese’ or ‘Japanese’ may be
unproductive or futile. There must be a continuum here; some variables,
such as linguistic skill and authorial intention may help plot the
position in any one case. Some scholars , especially those who edited
their own texts with diacritics, wrote a form of
what I think G.B. Sansom called ‘Sinico-Japanese’, rather
than Chinese; their texts are basically intended as Japanese,
simply cosmetically rearranged on the page to look Chinese and to evoke
the cultural authority of that language. But other scholars, perhaps a
minority, surely did write in what they thought of as
Chinese, rather than any form of Japanese. Pace Michael Pye in the
above quotation, contemporary sensitivity to Chinese and
Korean comments on Japanese writing in Chinese, together with
the alacrity with which praise from that quarter was recorded, surely
attest to the conscious will to write acceptable Chinese.
An instructive case in point must be Itoo Jinsai. Jinsai habitually
left his texts as hakubun [in the sense of kanbun
without diacritics] and is said rarely to have added
diacritics to his own writings. The linguistic status of Jinsai’s
kanbun recently erupted into a minor controversy in connection with
Jinsai’s Go-Mou jigi , translated into English by
John Allen Tucker [Leiden: Brill, 1998]. This is a useful, fluent and
readable version. But Tucker based his translation on the assumption
that this was a Japanese text, even referring to the ‘original text in
Japanese’. In my review of Tucker’s translation [MN54, no. 4;
winter, 1999], I took him to task. There was a serious question about
the authority of the diacritics on the published versions of
Go-Mou jigi used in the translation; they cannot safely be attributed
to Jinsai himself. The main reason, however, was that I could
not, and still cannot, get my mind round the fact that Jinsai
incontrovertibly presented his text formally as Chinese, rather than
any form of Japanese.
In his riposte [MN vol. 55 , no. 2, pp. 331-33], John Allen Tucker
robustly reasserted the radical “Japanese”
position. “My response is, first, that there is no “Chinese”
version of [Go-Mou jigi]. Jinsai wrote in kanbun, for a Japanese
audience. Whether punctuated or not, kanbun is meant to be read as
Japanese.” [p. 331]. Especially in the light of the ambiguity
of the term kanbun, I confess to finding this claim still
puzzling. But behind Tucker’s assertion, no doubt, is the
view of the Jinsai textual scholar Miyake Masahiko, who wrote
in his study of Jinsai’s method of construing his own texts into
Japanese: “So long as Jinsai conceived [his thought] in Japanese and
expressed it in kanbun, it is necessary, especially with [Jinsai’s]
various drafts, to take not just the kanbun text
but also Japanese kundoku forms as basic [to
interpretation].’ This assertion, however, also
seems problematic; it in turn begs the question of how it is
possible categorically to recover Jinsai’s thought processes.
As a life-long reader of Chinese texts and a brillant linguist, why
should he not have thought in Chinese?
If the intentional argument is to be applied to Jinsai, the evidence of
the MS page itself surely suggests strongly that he intended
Chinese. It is surely natural to read it and to translate on
that basis. To read a text that survives in autograph form in
hakubun versions only as ‘Japanese’ and on the basis of
diacritics from another hand only circumstantially associated with
Jinsai himself, seems perverse and risky. The act of applying
diacritics interposes another translation.
Moreover, it invites potential misreading. Indeed, my review
pointed to a small number of such misreadings in Tuckers own
version.
It is certainly true that some Jinsai texts were edited and diacritics
supplied, most often by other hands. But this was surely for the
benefit of his students. Whatever concessions Jinsai allowed
for them, however, he himself strove, in the opinion of Sinologists,
with outstanding success, to write accurate, idiomatic,
rhythmic and stylish Chinese. The quality of the Chinese text
evidently supports this. Please see the encomium of Yoshikawa Koojiroo
on Jinsai’s achievement in this field in Jinsai, Sorai, Norinaga
{Tokyo: The Toohoo gakkai, 1983; also NST, vol. 33]. The fact that
Jinsai almost certainly didn’t speak Chinese does not seem
relevant.
But above all, to read Jinsai’s hakubun text as
Japanese seems to defy common sense. A European contemporary such as
Hobbes couldcommunicate his thought in either Latin or English. Maybe
he formulated his ideas in English in his own mind first, though he may
easily have thought in Latin. As with Jinsai and Chinese, this cannot
be recovered. But Hobbes communicated his ideas on occasion
in Latin, on occasion in English. Even if he put his own Latin into
English, how are we possibly to say that his original Latin
versions are really English?
As for Jinsai’s motives, Michael Pye may be somewhat harsh is
impugning kogakusha with ‘pretensiousness’. Probably, like
Sorai, Jinsai believed that to understand the Chinese sources of the
Way authoritatively, one must master the language; and mastery included
the capacity to reproduce it oneself. Chinese carried high
prestige; it was the language of moral authority. Jinsai had to
demonstrate, maybe not least to himself, his mastery of it.
James McMullen
Oxford
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Pye <___@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 22, 2006 16:15:33 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun
Dear Colleagues,
I am most impressed by the plausibility of James MacMullen's assessment
of Ito
Jinsai's extremely high ability and familiarity with "Chinese". And of
course
the "intentionality" is important. What were writers themselves trying
to do? I quite agree (as a learner). But also, what were they able to
do? Seeing
it as a continuum and allowing for some writers being closer than
others to having
"Chinese" in their heads (phonetically and in terms of word order), is
no doubt the most perceptive approach. But how close were they, and
others, to such a
state?
Your caveats, James (and by the way, hello! ..after a long time!) are
also quite significant, are they not?
My own question was/is not so much whether the result of compositional
efforts
is better or less good, or seemed fine to other users of Chinese at the
time,
but whether the mental processes really took place in the Chinese word
order.
This may well be assumed by Chinese persons and by such foreign readers
who
have themselves systematically studied classical Chinese and who just
look at
the results of the authors' distinguished efforts as Chinese. But it
may be
less obvious to others. Perhaps Ito Jinsai achieved thinking in terms of
Chinese word order, and represents one end of a wide spectrum.
By the way, I myself have never referred to anything written in kanbun
as
"Japanese", - that's not my point (or my question), touching on your
critique
of other authors. But the fact that this is disputed shows how
difficult it is
to know what was going on. Hence I noted your caveats.
For one, I read:
It is certainly true that some Jinsai texts were edited and
diacritics supplied, most often by other hands. But this was surely
for the benefit of his students.
Exactly. But why did they need it? It's because no ordinary Japanese
student
could conceivably sit down and just read a kanbun text in the Chinese
order,
then any more than now. Moreover, correct me if I am wrong, by the Edo
Period
they weren't being taught even to try.
Further: "The fact that Jinsai almost certainly didn’t speak
Chinese does not
seem relevant."
Well. It seems very relevant to me. It means that his profound thoughts
didn't
just come out in kanbun by themselves, but that he constructed his
prose. Of
course he will have had regular turns of phrase etc. which he didn't
need to
think about, but for the rest, there will have been a more explicit
thought
process. What does "he didn't speak Chinese" mean? Was it simply that
he had
different, no longer quite "Chinese" pronuncations in his head for the
kanji?
Or did it mean that he couldn't meaningfully "say" sentences in
kan(bun) in the
order of the kanji?
But I do understand the result that
If the intentional argument is to be applied to Jinsai, the evidence
of the MS page itself surely suggests strongly that he intended
Chinese. It is surely natural to read it and to translate on
that
basis.
Indeed. Anything else can only be an aid, which may be amazingly
useful, but
sometimes misleading.
Finally:
As for Jinsai’s motives, Michael Pye may be somewhat harsh in
impugning kogakusha with ‘pretensiousness’.
Yes, but it's not so much what I personally impugne as how the approach
of the
kogakusha came over to others in the period. (By the way, I originally
wrote
"pretentiousness" - your typing slip (in quotation marks) had me a bit
worried!) Perhaps pretentious isn't the right judgement for us to make
(it was
Tominaga Nakamoto's view). But, as you also suggested, they were trying
to use
Chinese at least partly in order to impress, and not only because all
the
discussions about statecraft and morals etc. were couched in it. Their
sheer
devotion both to learning and to its contemporary applications is indeed
admirable.
People who take things really seriously may often seem to be
pretentious to
others. For example, I have a personal campaign (completely
ineffectual) to
teach British and Japanese people to say Beijing (rather than something
like
Beizhing as in the BBC and Pekin (!) like Japanese news readers).
Probably
people think this is just a bore, and quite "pretentious". But on the
other
hand, given this borrowed, neo-colonial approach to pronouncing the
name of the
capital of China, it's not surprising that contemporary Japanese
foreign policy
is such a disaster...
best wishes,
Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto, Japan
----------------------------------------------------
From: "Rein Raud" <rein.___@helsinki.fi>
Date: July 22, 2006 19:08:48 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun
This is a very interesting thread indeed. But so far most of the
discussion has focussed on texts written by Japanese authors. Could
anybody point out any difference of reception between these kanbun
texts and texts that had been imported from China and "domesticated"
for Japanese use with diacritics, such as sutras, goroku etc? Whatever
happened during the reading act, I'd still hesitate in seeing this
domestication as a translation of a kind - rather, it would be
comparable to adding vocalisation marks to Arab texts for the benefit
of those non-Arab muslims who needed to read the Qur'an aloud. And it
is also difficult to think that the Japanese authors' kanbun texts and
originally Chinese texts would somehow seem to the same Japanese
audience to be written in a different linguistic medium, if there is no
evidence to the contrary.
With greetings,
Rein Raud
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Pye <___@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 22, 2006 20:11:04 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun (Buddhist)
Dear Colleagues,
About Buddhist texts, which I wanted to mention for a long time:
Zitat von Rein Raud <rein.___@helsinki.fi>:
Whatever happened during the reading
act, I'd still hesitate in seeing this domestication as a translation
of a
kind - rather, it would be comparable to adding vocalisation marks to
Arab
texts for the benefit of those non-Arab muslims who needed to read the
Qur'an aloud.
The purpose is comparable, but the linguistic process is different. The
difference is simple but considerable: the word-order is changed. I
would be
surprised if this happens with the Qur'an, where it is above all a
matter of
getting the pronunciation right.
Further:
And it is also difficult to think that the Japanese authors'
kanbun texts and originally Chinese texts would somehow seem to the same
Japanese audience to be written in a different linguistic medium, if
there
is no evidence to the contrary.
Agreed. Their intention was to write them in the same medium. The
results seemed
to them to be in the same medium: kanbun. The question is,
given the
prevalence
of the reading methodology, what was the writing methodology?
I am very interested in the relevance of this problem to Buddhist texts
because,
to give an example relevant to some current work on pilgrimage, people
recite
the Heart Sutra in the kanbun form, but they attend to its meaning in
explained
forms. So the question in this case is, not so much how do they write
such texts (because they are a given) but how do they understand them
when they
are recited in straight kanji order? That is, I'm interested in the
intentionality of
religious acts in this case. People do come to understand these texts,
partly
with the help of the explanations (and kokuyaku). But as far as the
basic
kanbun form is concerned, the constant, ritualised repetition is
necessary for
the meaning to be internalised, such that brief bits like shikizokuzeku
gradually become meaningful whereas at an earlier stage of learning and
Buddhist practice they were not. In other words the great majority of
people in Japan do not understand the Heart Sutra (or any other)
because they have prior
knowledge of Chinese. Of course they don't have such knowledge. This
will have
been true in pre-modern Japan as well as now.
(The parallels with the use of English today are many and varied, but
that's not pre-modern.)
best wishes,
Michael Pye
(Marburg/Kyoto)
----------------------------------------------------
From: Paul Rouzer <___@umn.edu>
Date: Jul 23, 2006 12:26 AM
Subject: [pmjs] Kanbun and Chinese poetry
I felt that so much had been said on this posting that my own
contributions, such as they might be, would be unhelpful or extraneous.
But I thought I might stir the pot one more time by bringing up Chinese
poetry's place in this debate.
Most Japanese poets writing kanshi tended to write risshi, or so-called
"regulated verse." As I'm sure most of you know, there is a strong
tendency to make many of the couplets in risshi "syntactically parallel"
-- i.e., to place the same parts of speech in the same positions within
a couplet (along the lines of "flock of birds fly over the mountain;
herd of horses rush over the plain" and so forth). Kanshi poets are
quite capable of writing parallel couplets -- sometimes of breath-taking
beauty and sophistication, and grammatically far more complicated than
my trite example above.
What I find interesting is that kanbun rewritings of such couplets often
distort or violate the parallelism, even sometimes reinterpreting
individual words as different parts of speech than they would have been
if read as "pure Chinese". It may just be an issue of how one constructs
the kanbun syntax -- perhaps modern annotators are not paying attention
sufficiently to the parallelism to find a rendering that does justice to
it. But I think it quite likely that Japanese kanbun poets are, on some
level, "writing" and "reading" the poem as Chinese.
Of course, this then brings up even further complications. What does it
mean to "read" a Chinese poem? Is it possible to construct one almost
like a puzzle, conceiving of it as some device that conveys meaning, but
not necessarily a form of meaning analogous to that found in a poem in
Japanese (or even to that found in a passage of kanbun prose)? And
perhaps it should be remembered that even late imperial Chinese poets
wrote poetry based on tonal and rhyme categories that were already
obsolete in their contemporary speech -- so that Chinese poetry was in
China to a certain extent increasingly "artificial" from the 11th
century on.
I can't answer these questions -- though I am convinced that poets like
Rai Sanyou, who were well-read in contemporary Chinese poetry from the
continent, probably conceived of their poems in Chinese word order. I've
also found it interesting to note that Sanyou's poetry collection, as
published in his complete works in the 1930s, does not contain any
diacritics whatsoever.
Paul Rouzer
University of Minnesota
----------------------------------------------------
From: "pollack" <___@mail.rochester.edu>
Date: July 23, 2006 10:11:56 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun and Chinese poetry
My scattered experience of the history of the Japanese reading and
writing of
kanshi, both by Chinese and by Japanese themselves, would seem to
confirm the
oft-repeated observation that the syntactical parallelism of
lushi/risshi
(sorry, I can't find diacritics on this borrowed pc) was, predictably,
something
profoundly alien to Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, a matter I
touched on in
"The Fracture of Meaning" (1986). I've always thought that educated
Japanese
would have been perfectly capable of rendering Chinese parallel
constructions
faithfully into Japanese if doing so hadn't made them sick to their
stomachs.
Chinese requirements of end-rhyme and the use of flat/oblique tones,
etc. were
of course never in question.
But I've also thought that Japanese learned in Chinese poetry would
likely have
been familiar with the long Chinese practice of using parallelism
(along with
the other inescapable and to the Japanese equally unappealing
requirement of
lexical variety -- seen most clearly in fu or "rhymeprose," but when a
word/character is repeated in lushi and jueju/zekku it clearly signals
a very
significant choice) as a heuristic device. That is, a lushi or pailu
couplet may
often appear on the surface to follow the strict rules of syntactical
parallelism (this of course doesn't apply to the non-couplet jueju
form, which
in effect uses only the first line of each couplet of a quatrain,
whence its
name of "cut-off lines") even as it in fact has a subtly or very
different
meaning, and in the best case of all the meaning is entirely ambiguous.
Since
the Tang dynasty this practice was the very soul of poetic exchanges in
competitions and games among friends and sometimes among enemies (my
1976
dissertation dealt with this subject in the context of Chinese
"linked-verse"
poetry, a subject suggested by the Japanese practice that may have been
influenced by it -- alas, I never followed up on this).
I now somewhat belatedly suspect that it was not the profound alienness
to
contemporary Japanese life of classical Chinese verse alone that led Edo
Japanese to the practice of parodic kyoushi or "wild verse,"
as I had once
proposed in an old article, but may to the contrary have been the
result of
their familiarity with the well-established Chinese practice of writing
verse
that appeared to mean one thing on the surface and another or even
opposite
thing at the same time. Some of this depended in Chinese on the lexical
variety
I mentioned, since so many characters have multiple meanings in
Chinese, often
depending on their context, their syntactical position, or the tone or
reading
assigned to them. I would imagine that men of the learning of Rai
San'you or
Itou Jinsai knew both how to produce a perfectly and blandly acceptable
verse
when required by convention (those well-know handbooks like Santaishi),
and how
to parody convention -- shall we be provocative and call it mitate? --
when the
circumstances were more unbuttoned.
I'm afraid I haven't thought about this issue for a long time and could
be wrong
as rain about it. Since I'm currently in the middle of moving house,
and have
other projects to deal with, I'm too busy (and I admit too lazy) to
back these
proposals up with examples, which I promise to do in another
incarnation.
With apologies,
David Pollack
----------------------------------------------------
From: Sean Somers <___@yahoo.ie>
Date: Jul 23, 2006 6:15 AM
Subject: [pmjs] Kanbun (and everything after)
Dear List,
Of course, like many reading this latest series of
developments on the issue of kanbun, I have read
eagerly, but I have also avoided contributing directly
because of the issue at hand. In short, I'm now
applying the customary caveat before I let loose my
typing fingers.
Prof Pye's comments have always caught my attention
and have sent me to the library on more than one
occasion, but I'd like to speak up on the possible
hazards of cultural comparison. Earlier, kanbun had
been compared to Latin marginalia, with limited
success, IMO. It was established, quite succinctly,
that kanbun is a unique product of the
inter-relationship of Chinese and Japanese, both
culturally and linguistically.
Now kanbun is being compared to classical Arabic.
Zitat von Rein Raud writes, via Prof Pye's message:
----
. . .during the reading act, I'd still hesitate in
seeing this domestication as a translation of a kind
- rather, it would be comparable to adding
vocalisation marks to Arab texts for the benefit of
those non-Arab muslims who needed to read the Qur'an
aloud.
----
I don't quite follow this, and I'm not sure how useful
these inter-cultural allusions are for our
understanding of kanbun. The Qur'an is *always*
vocalised, whether it's for a native Arab speaker in
Yemen or a mosque in Hawai'i. The classical Arabic
language transcends, as it were, dialect. Indeed,
like the aforementioned journalist in Vietnam, a form
of 'literary' Arabic allows educated members of
different regions to communicate with one another.
However, Vocalisation is a necessary feature of the
Qur'an itself: it is never optional. The
presentation of the scriptures requires the vowel
markings, either as an independent text, or as cited
in a tafsir (commentary). To not have these markings
would to have something that is not the Qur'an. I
don't believe that I am overstating this here.
Kanbun markings, however, and their purpose in syntax
or perhaps even pronunciation, is – as discussed – a
much more debatable matter.
And lest I seem like I am spliiting hairs -- really, I
am just a silly bystander who would like to
participate briefly in this exchange -- I'd like to
emphasise the point that the flexible conventions of
the genre seems to be the curious issue here in terms
of kanbun composition. As the detailed messages have
indicated, the conventionality is further complicated
by the independent motivations of particular authors.
My wife studied kanbun as part of her high school
curriculum in Oita. With few exceptions, her lessons
were almost entirely kanshi, Confucius, and the
classes seemed to be more of an introduction to
Chinese Classics. Some emphasis was placed on
Yamanoueno Okura. I'm interested in, also, that Koamai
and Rohlich's textbook emphatically seperates their
definition of 'Japanese kanbun' as "the written
representation of the Japanese language in kundoku
style, not classical Chinese" (xiii). In North
American, at least, many graduate seminars in kanbun
tend to make the same distinction. That's not to say
this is somehow a standard to be universally followed,
but it does say something about contemporary pedagogy
of the issue. (And this, to me, is an interesting
sub-discussion which can be traced back to this
thread's origins: what selections are best for
teaching and introducing kanbun to graduate students?)
Out of curiosity, I re-read Soseki's 'Botchan', where
the officious teacher of Chinese Classics is
fleetingly referenced as an instructor of kanbun, as
well as Chinese literary classics.
The Qur'an must be presented in a certain way,
according to theological law . . . vocalisation is
required, but the actual recitation of the text has a
fair degree of adaptability (warsh style, etc); but it
seems to me that kanbun is entirely more flexible, in
terms of how the text is annotated, or how the genre
is emulated.
I thank you for your indulgence.
-Sean Somers
University of British Columbia
----------------------------------------------------
From: "Rein Raud" <rein.___@helsinki.fi>
Date: July 23, 2006 13:57:08 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun (and everything after)
My purpose in comparing kanbun to vocalisation marks of Semitic
alphabets was not to compare the cultural practices with their
institutional background and its implications for the status of the
texts, but the mechanic of the reading act. The Qur'an has to be read
the same way at all times because of the status of the text, which most
kanbun texts do not have. (There are many other vocalized texts beside
the Qur'an in Semitic cultures, for which the rules are not so strict.)
However, in both Semitic and kanbun cases we are dealing with a "core"
text that is ambiguous (and, in the Chinese case, often initially meant
to be so), and a "surface" text that can only be read in one "correct"
way. For instance, the Wang Bi and the Wang Anshi readings of Daodejing
chapter I would have resulted in different kanbun diacritics. (It would
be interesting to know if there actually were differently domesticated
versions of the same Chinese text in circulation at any time in Japan.)
Anyway, if such variants existed, I'd still prefer to say we are
dealing with variants of the same text regardless of how the diacritics
have been applied (and the way to read the text aloud selected). But I
concede that it is possible to argue that the read-aloud form of the
text is primary, and texts without diacritics would be "homographs" of
the multitude of readings, which can only be rendered adequately with
the diacritics in place. As it seems, in the former case the text can
be said to be in Chinese, in the latter, in Japanese.
Greetings,
Rein Raud
----------------------------------------------------
From: Thomas Howell <___@earthlink.net>
Date: July 23, 2006 23:35:54 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Kanbun
On Jul 22, 2006, at 12:15 AM, Michael Pye wrote:
It's because no ordinary Japanese student
could conceivably sit down and just read a kanbun text in the Chinese
order,
then any more than now. Moreover, correct me if I am wrong, by the Edo
Period
they weren't being taught even to try.
I looked again at Maeda Ai's essay, Kindai dokusha no seiritsu, which
has been translated by James Fujii as "From Communal Performance to
Silent Reading: The Rise of the Modern Japanese Reader." In part 2 he
describes how "children of former samurai and wealthy and powerful
families" in early Meiji were trained to read Chinese classics,
beginning at the age of 5. He calls this (or Fujii translates it as )
"performative recitation" (roushou). This training began at home and
was afterwards pursued in juku schools. Maeda Ai does not describe how
the Chinese text was read, but I assume it was in Chinese word order
without any voiced kunten. This was "sodoku," reciting and repeating
the sounds to memorize the passage, without yet understanding the
meaning. The reciting was done very loudly, Ai cites a newspaper
article which complains of the noise students made at night doing this
"reading."
Ai (I'm copying Fujii here) concludes: " The sound-reading of the
Chinese classics -- wherein the repetition of the rhythms and the
vibrations of the voiced words creates a kind of 'spiritual language'
[seishin no kotoba] that is radically different from everyday Japanese
--represents a form of instruction that imprints the very form of the
Chinese language [kango no keishiki] on the souls of these youth. Even
if comprehension of meaning appears beyond reach, the material
qualities of the words, their resonance and rhythm, are fully mastered,
and the understanding that is attained through reading, explication,
and reading groups [rindoku] when the students have matured adequately
supplements their grasp of these texts."
He goes on to say this reading, with its commutarian ethos,
since it was often done in a group, fostered a "community of
intellectual elites" that cut across other social boundaries.
Now, whether this means anyone thought in Chinese word order after this
training, or freely and spontaneously wrote their kanbun without using
kunten as a mental aid, is obviously too big an assumption to make. But
at least one can surmise those who underwent this training did not
think of untranslated Chinese prose as "unnatural," and a select few,
based on their early training, might indeed have read and written
kanbun, or Chinese texts, with the "resonances and rhythm" they learned
as children.
Incidentally, Ai gives Tayama Katai's memoir, My thirty years in Tokyo
(Tokyo no sanjuunen) as an example. Tayama, in a chapter entitled
Dokusho no koe, recalls as a boy walking on the road by the juku
school, Houkou gijuku, which his older brother attended, and hearing
the sound of the voices spilling out of the upper floor windows,
wishing he could join them.
Tayama concludes: "As for the Chinese studies juku school (kangaku no
juku) my older brother went to, there were a number of such schools,
including the Doujinsha of Nakamura Kei'u, and the Nishou (2 pines)
gakusha of Mishima Chuushuu. Of the students of that period, there were
any number who made their sword handles rattle, and argued over the
affairs of the world. They made a point of going about in ragged
clothes and with dishevelled hair, and they particularly despised
anyone with a slight touch of the feminine -- shifun(=cosmetics) no ki
ni chikazuku mono wo iyashinda. The Houkou gijuku was famous for
teaching the Eight houses literature in sodoku, and the
instructor...had once been an assistant lecturer at Shouheikou
(Confucian academy founded 1690)."
(Eight Houses referring to a grouping together. first in a
Ming compilation, of Han yu and Liu zongyuan of the Tang, Ou yangxiu.
Wang anshi, Zeng gong, Su xun, Su shi, Su zhe of the Song).
Tom Howell
----------------------------------------------------
From: Christina Laffin <___@interchange.ubc.ca>
Date: July 24, 2006 15:36:24 GMT+09:00
Subject: UBC travel workshop and digitized collection announcements
(1)
The Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia
will host a workshop August 4 and 5 entitled "Tokugawa Society and
Travel Culture, as Seen in Maps, Illustrations (ezu), and
Travelogues." Day One will feature an exhibition of the
Early-Modern Beans Map Collection and Day two will offer a full day of
panel presentations on the culture of travel in early-modern
Japan. The workshop complements the Early-Modern Komonjo and
Kuzushiji Workshop taking place at UBC July 16 to August 12, which is
also utilizing the Beans Collection. For further information,
please contact Nam-Lin Hur at ___@interchange.ubc.ca.
> Workshop Session 1: New Approaches to Maps,
Illustrations, and Diaries
> Session 2: Religious Sites and Geographic Imagination
> Session 3: Famous Places and Travel Guides
> Session 4: Travel Diaries, City Maps, and Literary
Works
> For the full program of the workshop, please see:
> http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~pmjs/announce/2006_ubc.html
http://www.asia.ubc.ca/index.php?id=8228
(2)
Rare Books and Special Collections, and University Archives, at UBC
Library are pleased to announce the launch of a newly digitized
collection: "Japanese Maps of the Tokugawa Era," at
http://angel.library.ubc.ca/tokugawa/.
UBC Library's Rare Books and Special Collections holds one of the
world's largest collections of maps and guidebooks of the Japanese Edo
period, also called the Tokugawa period, 1603-1867. The core of the
collection was formed after World War II by George H. Beans. Over 300
maps from the collection have been digitized and are searchable and
viewable online. The digitization process allows the user to see a
whole map as well as offering detailed views of larger or smaller
portions of the maps.
The focus of the Beans collection is on privately published and
travel-related maps and guides published in Japan. There is world
coverage, although the majority of maps are of the whole or parts of
Japan. A number of prominent Japanese woodblock artists are represented
in the collection.
The digitization of the Japanese Map Collection is a collaborative
project between the UBC Library's Rare Books and Special Collections
and the University Archives. In the first phase of the project all the
single-sheet maps have been digitized. A second phase will digitize the
maps in atlases. Bronwen Sprout, Digital Initiatives Librarian at the
University Archives, and Katherine Kalsbeek, Reference and Maps
Librarian at Rare Books and Special Collections guided the first phase
of the project to completion. Special thanks to Leslie Field, Archives
Assistant, who provided expert assistance and guidance with the
digitizing work.
The project is funded by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and has
also received support from the Department of Asian Studies. The Beans
Collection is presently being studied by participants of the month-long
Early-Modern Komonjo and Kuzushiji Workshop hosted by the Department
Asian Studies.
The collection is located at: http://angel.library.ubc.ca/tokugawa/
(click on the "detailed image" link in each record to zoom in on the
images). Please send comments or suggestions to: Bronwen Sprout
___@interchange.ubc.ca or Katherine Kalsbeek
Katherine.___@ubc.ca.
For further information contact Ralph Stanton, Rare Books and Special
Collections Librarian at ralph.___@ubc.ca.
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Watson <___@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp>
Date: July 27, 2006 17:13:29 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] update
I have returned (temporarily) from my mountain retreat to the world of
broadband and was able to check various things.
First, there is now an online link for the UBC conference on "Tokugawa
Society and Travel Culture":
http://www.asia.ubc.ca/index.php?id=8228
I'm not trying to have the last word on "kanbun" but I have now finally
been able to locate an online copy of Sydney
Crawcour's Introduction to Kambun (1965), mentioned by David
Pollack and still very much in use, it seems--included, for example,
David Lurie's syllabus for his autumn course at Columbia on kanbun!
For those of you without a copy in a local research library,
the whole text can be read online or downloaded as a PDF file (7 mb),
thanks to the Center for Japanese Publications, University of Michigan:
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/b/bib/bibperm?q1=akz7043.0001.001
http://www.hti.umich.edu/c/cjs/images/akz7043.0001.001.pdf
The online text is searchable, except for the handwritten kanbun
examples which are rendered graphically. The PDF version consists
entirely of images, it seems.
I have archived the whole "kanbun" thread at:
http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~pmjs/archive/2006/kanbun.html
The archive is public, not requiring a user name and password like the
quarterly "logs" of all pmjs messages, so that you can pass on the url
to anyone who might be interested. I have made a few corrections of
typos and changes in formatting. Please contact me off-list
(___@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp) if you notice anything substantial that needs
correcting.
I'd also like to call the attention of participants to email addresses.
Rather than eliminate them entirely (and lose the sometimes helpful
information about affiliations) I used a wild-card technique to
substitute "------" for the user name to the left of the @ sign. I hope
this is acceptable to everyone.
In the early years of pmjs, I regularly made public archives of
interesting threads. I'd like to revive the tradition--with your
permission--whenever I find time to create an archive.
Having mentioned the logs, let me also remind you how they work. Rather
than monthly logs, they are now quarterly (three months on a single
page), but I've striven to update them several times a month, usually
after sending out a "weekly digest."
To access the logs, please use the following:
user name: pmjs
password: logs99
(Hint: the list began in 1999.)
The main purpose of the password protection is of course to protect
addresses from being "harvested" for spamming.
Index to the logs (public page):
http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~pmjs/logs.html
The most recent log:
http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~pmjs/logs/2006/2006.03q.html
Michael Watson
----------------------------------------------------
From: Edward Kamens <edward.___@yale.edu>
Date: July 28, 2006 4:59:41 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Search in Japanese Theater at Yale
Dear Colleagues, I would be very grateful if you would bring this
announcement to the attention of qualified applicants.
Thank you.--Edward Kamens, Chair of Japan Theater Search Committee
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF
TRADITIONAL JAPANESE THEATER AND PERFORMANCE
YALE UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES AND PROGRAM IN
THEATER STUDIES
The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and
the Program in Theater Studies announce a search to fill a
joint appointment as assistant professor in the field of traditional
Japanese theater and performance. The appointee will teach
undergraduate and graduate courses on the Japanese dramatic tradition
(such as Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki) and courses in the Theater Studies
program. Candidates should have completed a Ph.D. by the time
of appointment. This is a regular ladder appointment,
effective July 1, 2007, for an initial four-year term, renewable upon
review.
Send letter of application, curriculum vitae, a sample chapter or
scholarly paper (30 pp. maximum), and three letters of recommendation
to Japanese Theater Search, Theater Studies, Yale University, Box
208296, New Haven CT 06520-8296, fax (203) 432-1308. Deadline
for applications: October 13, 2006.
Yale University is an affirmative action/equal opportunity
employer. Yale values diversity among its students, staff,
and faculty and strongly encourages applications from women and
underrepresented minorities.
----------------------------------------------------
From: "James M. Unger" <unger.___@osu.edu>
Date: July 29, 2006 7:29:16 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Relationship of kanbun (text) and Japanese
(language)
My guess is that most people who used kanbun in the Edo period did so
in a way cognitively similar to the way many educated Europeans of the
18th and 19th centuries used Latin. Few but schoolboys
uttered more than phrases in it aloud. If they did, their
pronunciation typically mirrored theur L1 pronunciation of loanwords
from Latin. Hardly anyone conversed in it, as they often did
in French, German, or some other L2.
Think of Gauss. He probably did not approach the task of
writing his papers in Latin as translation from German, but rather like
setting down music: just come up with the prescribed
combination of symbols and Latin sentences needed to get the ideas down
on paper. Eventually, he switched to German in his
publications. Whether he did so because he felt writing in
Latin was a waste of time, because he felt the number of Latin readers
was declining, or because his editor told him to switch, I don't know,
but unless you believe he started back-translating from Latin to German
he obviously was not dependent on "thinking in Latin" to do his work!
My larger point is that if someone wants to challenge a conjecture like
this, they need to supply comparative historical evidence showing how,
say, the way Ito Jinsai learned or used kanbun was different from the
way Gauss learned or used Latin. Autograph manuscripts
without yomikudashi marks don't prove much unless one can show that
almost all other contemporary kanbun writers seldom if ever omitted
them.
Jim Unger
Ohio State
P.S. I would be skeptical of any theory of kanbun that
assumes kanbun texts instantiate meanings independently of their being
read in some language or other. Also, "knowing L2" is more
than a binary feature or even a continuous one-dimensional
variable. There are obviously many differences, cognitive and
practical, between Conrad's English and Gauss's Latin. We
ought to look at many perspicuous examples of "high culture" L2 usage
from around the world before zeroing in on kanbun.
----------------------------------------------------
From: Lewis Cook <___@earthlink.net>
Date: July 30, 2006 19:29:21 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] bibliography of pre-modern Genji commentary
I am writing a terse account of pre-Edo traditions of commentary on
Genjimonogatari and will append to this a bibliography of recent
scholarship on the subject. I can't think of anything in languages
other than Japanese that might belong there, but I'd appreciate
suggestions to the contrary.
Lewis Cook
----------------------------------------------------
From: anthony.___@asu.edu
Date: July 30, 2006 22:45:26 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: bibliography of pre-modern Genji
commentary
How about T. J. Harper's "Genji Gossip," in New Leaves:
Studies and
Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Edward Seidensticker?
Tony Chambers
----------------------------------------------------
From: Lewis Cook <___@earthlink.net>
Date: Jul 31, 2006 9:32 AM
Subject: [pmjs] Re: bibliography of pre-modern Genji
commentary
On Jul 30, 2006, at 9:45 AM, anthony.___@asu.edu wrote:
How about T. J. Harper's "Genji Gossip," in New Leaves:
Studies and
Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Edward Seidensticker?
Tony Chambers
Thank you, Tony, for this suggestion. My vague recollection from a
tachiyomi is that "Genji Gossip" is a translation of a version of
"Ise Genji onna-awase". Please correct me if that is mistaken. What I
had in mind was studies of more or less hardcore exegetical lit. I'll
assume for now that the bibliography can be confined to items in
Japanese.
Lewis Cook
----------------------------------------------------
From: Charles DeWolf <___@yahoo.com>
Date: July 31, 2006 15:56:53 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] liver revisited
With apologies for going back to (and lingering on) an
old thread, I should like to reply to Andrew Edmund
Goble (AEG)'s statement (6/26): "The Konjaku extract
[KJM 29:25] translated by De Wolf is noted in my
Autumn 2005 Monumenta Nipponica article, 'War and
Injury: The Emergence of Wound Medicine in Medieval
Japan' (see note 127 and text), in the section on
Dried Infant (which De Wolf and others incorrectly
render as Infant Liver)."
I have more than a translator's interest in the issue,
as in my brief comments I suggest that there is
cross-cultural/mythic symbolism in the notion of the
liver as a source of strength. On the other hand, I am
quite open to the possibility of having been
"incorrect," though I must say I winced at the thought
that, out of context, "De Wolf and others" might be
assumed to have been *carelessly* so.
I find AEG's article most interesting, however
sobering its subject, but on this point I am still not
convinced. Please consider the following. My purpose
is not to score points but rather to seek
clarification.
1. Following all commentators, I assume that what is
written 'child-dry' is intended to be 'infant liver',
the second character being an abbreviation. (KJM is
replete with such, along with outright goji -
incorrect characters.) What is the reasoning behind
the hypothesis and why is it so uniform? Even the
Nihon Kokugo Daijin entry for jikan ('child dry')
points an arrow to "chigo no kimo" 'child liver'. AEG
says that "the sensibilities of recent commentators
have prevailed over evidence," (p. 323) but I fail to
see what those "sensibilities" might be.
2. While fully admitting that in translating the tale
I willingly played follow-the-leader, I must say that
I too found the interpretation more plausible simply
*in terms of the story itself*. And we must not forget
that this *is*, after all, a story - and in all
probability a made-up story, intended to paint a
maximally sinister picture of the warrior chieftain
Taira no Sadamori. In reading Shakespeare's Macbeth, I
assume that "witches' mummy" means "mummified material
in the possession of witches" - not "mummified witch"
But such hardly has much bearing on medieval medicine
- to say nothing of the existence of witches.
3. Pace AEG's brief summary of the tale, the physician
who advises Sadamori does *not* tell him that his
canker (kasa) "is much the same as a wound." He would
be foolish to let on that he knows more than is good
for him; in fact, Sadamori's fear that the physician
has guessed the truth leads him to attempt his murder.
Sadamori wants to keep secret the fact that he has
allowed himself to be injured in battle (probably by
an arrow), for such would damage his reputation in the
eyes of both the Court and the barbarians he will soon
have to suppress. The physician *does* tell him that
he needs immediate treatment and that the nature of
the medicine he wishes to prescribe calls for great
discretion.
3. I admit that it would be quite a coincidence if a
kanji compound intended to signify 'infant liver' but
appearing with an abbreviated character that would
suggest 'dried infant' just happened to correspond
precisely to the name, written as such, of a highly
reputed medicine. But then there is the matter of
chronology. After all, by AEG's own admission, the
earliest reference is the Konjaku story. The Kinsou
hiden, jou, he tells us, dates from the fifteenth
century. Especially given the highly arbitrary and
superstitious nature of medieval medical lore, how do
we know that we are not dealing with an
extraordinarily garbled chicken-and-egg problem?
(Again, just asking...)
4. Another awkward detail in the story for AEG's
hypothesis is the next-to-the-last sentence in KJM
29.25: "Sadamori no ason, yome no kwainin-sitaru hara
wo hirakite, jikan wo toranto omohikeru koso asamasiku
hadi-naki kokoro nare." ('Lord Sadamori, simply for
having considered opening the womb of his pregnant
daughter-in-law to extract a/the jikan, was truly a
dreadful man, devoid of a moral conscience.') Even if
"dried infant" is the intended meaning, this strikes
me as akin to calling a pig a sausage. The "liver
interpretation" again strikes me as more plausible.
5. KJM is, I repeat, a collection of folktales. We
must remember that though Taira no Sadamori was an
historical personage, he lived in the mid-10th
century, i.e. at least a 150 years before the (likely)
compilation of KJM. The dates of his birth and death
are unknown, and, as with other KJM tales, the story
contains details of dubious historical accuracy.
Still, we have reason to believe that he was every bit
as ruthless as he is there depicted, though it is also
clear that the compiler(s) had, as it were, an axe to
grind in regard to warriors in general. In denouncing
Sadamori as hadi-naki, the narrator writes muzan,
though with the characters reversed. The Buddhist term
suggests a man violating the moral law without
compunction. Like Shakespeare's Richard III, he is a
politically correct villain. The ultimate purpose,
however, is to tell a good yarn, the more gruesome the
better.
It's all in the frisson: if one wants to make a
monster out of Sadamori, I would submit, extracted
foetal liver works better than dried infant. After
all, horror stories depend on what we do *not* take
for granted. Does Hollywood produce scary movies about
rich people buying foetal material to prolong their
lives? No. Are there famous Japanese films about
mabiki (pre-modern infanticide)? Not that I know of.
That's because both are too close to what we moderns
actually *do* - and don't wish to be reminded of.
oyasute (parent-abandonment), on the other hand, which
may never have been an actual "custom" anywhere in
Japan, is the stuff of legend. Again, that's because
in most countries, even today, killing old people is
generally considered bad form. The Konjaku story, I
would argue, likewise reflects a moral outlook that
cuts at least some slack for daughters-in-laws.
It has been said that, even up until the end of the
Edo Period, Japanese children were at risk of
abduction and murder as a source of dried organ
medicine (jikan). Is this true? If so, how do we know?
There are stories today of Afghani children being
kidnapped for their kidneys. Given the horrors of
which we read daily, such might seem all too
believable, but how much of it is a modern urban
recycling of timeless pre-modern legends?
6. Finally, many or most KJM tales have an element of
the magical or supernatural about them. KJM 29:25 is,
again, for the most part a horror story, though it
should be noted that it takes the efficacy of the
"medicine" (whatever it is) for granted. The modern
reader may resort to willing suspension of disbelief,
having swallowed so much else already in order to
follow along. But for the more literal-minded student
of history, exuberant testimony to the efficacy of
Dried Infant (or Infant Hand) in the treatment of war
wounds should surely arouse suspicion. What is meant
by oni no ko, cited by AEG from Kinsou Ryoujishou?
(BTW, shouldn't this be onigo?) Here too we are in the
twilight zone between the fantastic and the
superstitious...One meaning of onigo suggests newborns
whose appearance alarmed their parents and were
therefore sometimes murdered. Is that what the writer
has in mind? Or does he literally mean 'demon
children'? How seriously are we to take any of this?
Ch. De Wolf
----------------------------------------------------
From: "Patrick W. Caddeau" <___@Princeton.EDU>
Date: August 1, 2006 0:01:44 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] bibliography of pre-modern Genji commentary
The appendices to _Appraising Genji_(2006:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0791466736/) include an annotated
translation of the list of Genji commentaries Hagiwara Hiromichi relied
upon in compiling his _Genji monogatari hyoushaku_ (1854-61).
This list
includes most major Genji commentaries from Genji okuiri (ca. 1227) to
Genchuu yoteki (1818). The focus of the book is on Genji
commentary
from late Edo on, but numerous references are made to earlier
developments and issues in Genji commentary that I hope would be of
interest to the users of such a bibliography.
-Patrick Caddeau
---
From: Lewis Cook <___@earthlink.net>
I am writing a terse account of pre-Edo traditions of commentary on
Genjimonogatari and will append to this a bibliography of recent
scholarship on the subject. I can't think of anything in languages other
than Japanese that might belong there, but I'd appreciate suggestions to
the contrary.
----------------------------------------------------
From: "andrew edmund goble" <___@uoregon.edu>
Date: August 2, 2006 5:22:48 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] wound medicine
Dear All,
1. Perhaps I should clarify that I assume that Mr. deWolf followed
annotations and edited texts provided by Japanese commentators, and did
not provide those annotations and was not involved in the editing
himself. I noted his piece since he has published on a topic that was
relevant to the issue I was addressing.
2. I should also state that I disagree very strongly with Mr. deWolf's
definitive characterizations about the nature of medieval medicine. I
am inclined to believe that his comments reflect a rhetorical posture
rather than any knowledge of the field.
3. The material upon which I based my study is available. I would hope
that Mr. deWolf, or anyone else, would at least have the courtesy to
examine the sources before making claims about my methodology or
motivations, or even about the content of the sources themselves.
4. As to liver being a source of strength - my article also notes
instances which allude to liver being consumed; but these are not ones
noted in the medical texts that I have brought to our attention. Am I
to understand that Mr. deWolf has failed to note them when reading my
article? or, that he has not read my article?
5. I would be delighted if Mr. deWolf - indeed more people in general -
might take up issues of medicine by way of research and publication.
Andrew Goble
----------------------------------------------------
From: Charles DeWolf <___@yahoo.com>
Date: August 2, 2006 14:28:59 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: wound medicine
My purposes in responding to Mr. Goble's message of
June 26 were (1) to rectify his (I am sure
unintentionally) misleading statement regarding my
translation of Konjaku Monogatari 29:25 and (2) to ask
for clarification concerning his various claims and
lines of argumentation. I am pleased to see that the
first issue, however personal and petty on my part,
has now been settled. As for the second issue, I would
like to hear more - simply (I hope) out of
intellectual curiosity. As I tried to make clear in my
last message, I was and am not trying to "score
points" - which would obviously be unwise, as I am
merely an old linguist, not a young warrior in the
field of Japanese cultural history.
I intended neither to offer any "definitive
characterizations" of medieval Japanese medicine nor
to assume any "rhetorical posture"; I readily admit
that before I read Mr. Goble's article, my exposure to
pre-modern remedies was confined to scenes of a
samurai doctor blowing sake on slash victims and of
odd old herbalists saving villagers in Mito Komon. I
further confess that I remain quite ignorant of the
medicinal properties of "dried infant" as a remedy for
battle wounds and that, reactionary cultural
inclinations to the contrary, I may easily have fallen
back on modern prejudices and then leaped to
conclusions. But then I tried to frame my comments as
questions, not claims.
Mr. Goble states: "The material upon which I based my
study is available. I would hope that Mr. deWolf, or
anyone else, would at least have the courtesy to
examine the sources before making claims about my
methodology or motivations, or even about the content
of the sources themselves."
I have read this several times and again looked at my
post of 8/30 but still fail to understand the basis of
Mr. Goble's complaint. How have I made any "claims
regarding...methodology or motivations"? At the risk
of revealing embarrassing ignorance, I was simply
posing the sort of naive question that might occur to
students when faced with an intimidatingly exotic
subject. How do we know, for example, which medical
substances, described and recommended, were "real" -
i.e. actually put to use - especially if, for whatever
reason, they were said to be carefully guarded
secrets? As a non-historian, I sought (and seek) to be
enlightened. Alas, Mr. Goble has not responded to any
of my questions. I am flattered that he seems to think
me capable of delving into the sources myself, but,
like many students today, I am rather lazy or at least
preoccupied and would prefer to have it all explained
to me.
What I said about liver consumption referred
exclusively to the notes accompanying my translation
of ten years ago. I did not even intend to discuss the
truth or relevance of those comments; I was simply
stating for the sake of clarification (confession?)
that I had not only translated jikan as "infant liver"
but also attempted to put it in a possible (!)
cross-cultural framework. Frankly, having other fish
to fry, I don't care terribly much whether I was right
or wrong about that, and (again) I was certainly not
in attack mode when I responded to Mr. Goble's
message.
Not having at hand the winter 2005 Monumenta
Nipponica, I went to the Keio University library in
Mita to copy Mr. Goble's contribution. I then read and
reread it, perhaps a bit compulsively. I'll happily
plead guilty to denseness and even precocious
senility, but I somewhat resent the suggestion that I
may have lied about having read the article. (Why
would anyone be so foolhardy?) In fact, I was
sincerely trying to understand it and the cultural
history behind it.
"Motivations"? I must say that find this bizarre. Is
this meant to suggest that I have questioned Mr.
Goble's personal or scholarly integrity? If so, how
absurd! Perhaps it is Mr. Goble who should be reading
more carefully. He clearly misread details of the
Konjaku story, whatever their importance, and it now
seems he has misread both the content and the intent
of my response to his initial message. I also note
that he appears to have difficulty with such trivial
matters as orthography and punctuation, including the
spelling of my name.
I am only a dabbler in the world of pre-modern Japan
and, as for medicine, feel fortunate when I can
remember to follow the directions on a prescribed
bottle of (presumably) post-medieval elixir. Yet as I
tried to say before, I am more than happy to be
enlightened by those willing and able to delve into
matters quite beyond my ken.
Pax
Ch. De Wolf
----------------------------------------------------
From: Christina Lafin <___@interchange.ubc.ca>
Date: August 11, 2006 0:58:05 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] UBC Waka Workshop Oct. 6 & 7
New Perspectives on Waka Culture:
Women, Patronage, and Genre in Medieval Japan
The Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia
is pleased to announce a two-day workshop, "New Perspectives on Waka
Culture: Women, Patronage, and Genre in Medieval Japan," on October 6
and 7, 2006.
The workshop follows the successful gathering held at UBC last March
("Constructing Style and Poetic Affiliation via Anthologization: The
Mikohidari House in the ShokuShuuishuu, 1278"). During the
October workshop we will turn our attention to two more late-Kamakura
works that allow us to consider waka culture from new
perspectives. Last March we focused on the male-dominated
world of imperial anthologies and the influence of lineage.
This October we will look at texts that, while produced in the same
milieu, invite us to address how female patrons and authors came to
participate in waka culture by drawing from prose traditions
(monogatari and karon).
On Saturday, October 7, we will follow a seminar-style format and
consider short selections from two works. First,
Fuyouwakashuu (1271), an anthology commissioned by Go-Saga’s consort
Omiya-in and compiled by Fujiwara Tameie. It resembles a
chokusenshuu (standard organization, 20 books, etc.) but contains only
poems from monogatari. Second, Yoru no tsuru (ca. 1280) a
short karon written by the Nun Abutsu (1222-1283) for a high-ranking
female patron. These two works come from the same period as
ShokuShuuishuu and touch on topics discussed in March, such as
anthologization, Mikohidari poetics/authority, dai, etc. In
addition, new topics and issues are brought to the table, such as
gender and patronage, genre and prestige (e.g., the situating of
monogatari poetry, karon by women, etc.), authorship (a love poem by
Kashiwagi?), dai and its relationship to situation/context/occasion,
etc. Selections from the two texts will be limited and made
available in advance to all attendees. Saturday will not
involve any formal presentations. Since October is a busy
time of year, the format will be an informal roundtable discussion in
which all participants are encouraged to share their expertise and
interests.
For Friday, October 6, we invite those interested to present
papers. In keeping with the tone of Saturday’s discussion, we
encourage works-in-progress and presentations of new
research. Papers need not be limited to Kamakura
poetics. We seek presentations that touch on issues of gender
and patronage, generic interstices (karon, monogatari, shuu), the
intersection of context and text (dai, headnotes, utaawase, etc.), and
other topics that might complement Saturday’s readings.
This workshop is made possible by a generous private donation and
support from the Department of Asian Studies. Although funds
are limited, we hope to cover the costs of accommodations and meals for
participants. We are happy to send formal letters of
invitation to assist attendees in securing other funding.
If you are interested in participating in the workshop, as an attendee
or presenter, please contact us by MONDAY, AUGUST 28. This
will allow us to secure accommodations. Further information
will be posted online at http://www.asia.ubc.ca/index.php?id=8380.
We look forward to seeing you in Vancouver.
Stefania and Christina
Stefania Burk
Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature
Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
stefania.___@ubc.ca
Christina Laffin
Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature
Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
christina.___@ubc.ca
----------------------------------------------------
From: "Yasuhiko Ogawa" <___@topaz.dti.ne.jp>
Date: August 12, 2006 20:32:57 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Announcement of an international symposium at
Aoyama Gakuin University
Dear PMJS members,
We are pleased to announce an international symposium at Aoyama Gakuin
University on the cultural interaction between Japan and China in the
medieval period.
Detailed information follows.
We welcome everyone.
Yasuhiko Ogawa
Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
********
JAPANESE AND CHINESE LITERATURE CROSSING THE SEA: TALES, POEMS,
PICTURES, AND PERFORMING ARTS IN JAPAN AND EAST ASIA
Date: 2 September 2006
Time: 1:30-5:30pm
Place: Lecture Room 1173, in Building no. 11
Aoyama Gakuin
University
4-4-25 Shibuya,
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 153-8366
Tel +81 (0)3 3409
7901 (Department of Japanese Literature and Language)
Language: Japanese
Fee: Free
OPENING ADDRESS
Motoaki Muto (President of Aoyama Gakuin University)
LECTURES
1) Shinichi Saeki (Aoyama Gakuin University)
"The Inside and the Outside of Medieval Japanese Literary Studies"
2) Yang Xiao Jie (The University of Calgary)
"The Tale of the Poem, the Tale of the Picture: The Picture Scroll
_Koka Juhappaku Zu_"
3) Bian En Tian (Doshisha University)
"'Shiho-shiki' (The Four Directions and the Four Seasons) and Japanese
Literature: _Shunko Den_ and _Kingo Shinwa_"
4) Shosuke Murai (The University of Tokyo)
"The Interaction of Zen between Japan and China from the Viewpoint of
Portraits and their Inscriptions"
SYMPOSIUM
Discussants: Masami Ogami (Aoyama Gakuin University), Yoshiaki Fujiwara
(Aoyama Gakuin University)
Coordinator: Kazuhito Hiroki (Aoyama Gakuin University)
http://www.cl.aoyama.ac.jp/japanese/info/index.html
（日本語版）
青山学院大学日本文学科・国際シンポジウム（2006年度）
海を渡る文学−日本と東アジアの物語・詩・絵画・芸能−
期日：2006年9月2日（土）
時間：13:30〜17:30
会場：青山学院大学青山キャンパス11号館、1173教室
開会挨拶 武藤元昭（青山学院大学学長）
佐伯真一（青山学院大学）「日本中世文学研究の内外」
楊暁捷（カルガリー大学）「詩の物語・絵の物語−絵巻「胡笳十八拍図」にみる中国と日本−」
邊恩田（同志社大学）「「四方四季」と日本文学−『春香伝』と『金鰲新話』から考える−」
村井章介（東京大学）「肖像画・賛からみた禅の日中交流」
コメンテーター 大上正美（青山学院大学）
コメンテーター 藤原良章（青山学院大学）
司会 廣木一人（青山学院大学）
----------------------------------------------------
From: Gustav Christopher Heldt <___@virginia.edu>
Date: August 23, 2006 6:22:36 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] new Japanese literature in translation series
EastBridge is pleased to announce a new literature-in-translation
series, JAPANESE HORIZONS. Our aim is to expand current knowledge of
Japan’s rich literary tradition in the English-speaking world by giving
visibility to a wide range of historical experience and forms of
expression. With this goal in mind, the series seeks to provide quality
translations of literary works that are both of interest to a general
audience and informative in an academic context.
Forthcoming titles include:
White Man/Yellow Man by Shusaku Endo. Translated by
Teruyo Shimizu.
Tarnished Words: The Poetry of Ôba Minako. Translated by
Janice Brown.
Birds Crying by Minako Ôba. Translated by Michiko N. Wilson
and Michael K. Wilson.
We solicit translations of Japanese literature from earliest
times to the present in areas such as drama, essays, fiction, literary
criticism, memoirs, and poetry. Submissions should include 1)
a proposal with a brief plot/content summary and a description of the
translation’s contribution to the existing body of work available in
English 2) a sample translation of one chapter and 3) the translator’s
C.V. Please send these materials in hard copy, along with a
disk or email attachment including the same information, to Professor
Michiko N. Wilson, Department of Asian & Middle Eastern
Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia, P. O. Box 400781,
Charlottesville, VA 22904. Email: ___@virginia.edu.
Japanese Horizons
Michiko N. Wilson, University of Virginia, Editor
Gustav Heldt, University of Virginia, Associate Editor
From: "James C. Baxter" <___@nichibun.ac.jp>
Date: August 31, 2006 18:17:09 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Nichibunken JAPAN REVIEW database
At the International Research Center for Japanese Studies
(Nichibunken), we recently uploaded full-text pdf files of the contents
of the 2006 issue (Number 18) of our refereed Western-language journal
JAPAN REVIEW into our online database. All articles, research notes,
and other items that we have published since our first issue in 1990
can be retrieved and downloaded from this database. The index and
search features are available in both Japanese and English (please see
http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/graphicversion/dbase/review.html or
http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/graphicversion/dbase/review_e.html). No
registration is necessary to use this database.
PMJS list members might be interested in one or more of the following
essays in JAPAN REVIEW, Number 18 (2006):
Original Articles
Royall Tyler, "'Sagoromo' and 'Hamamatsu' on 'Genji': Eleventh-Century
Tales as Commentary on 'Genji monogatari'"
Noel John Pinnington, "Models of the Way in the Theory of Noh"
Markus Ruettermann, "'So That We Can Study Letter-Writing': The Concept
of Epistolary Etiquette in Premodern Japan"
Louis Cullen, "Tokugawa Population: The Archival Issues"
Research Note
Sergey Lapteff, "Relationships between Jomon Culture and the Cultures
of the Yangtze, South China, and Continental Southeast Asian Areas"
* * * * *
For your reference, and to provide a sense of the scope of this journal
to readers who are not familiar with it, let me mention also several
original articles with a premodern focus that appeared in our previous
two issues.
In JAPAN REVIEW, Number 17 (2005):
Constantine N. Vaporis, "Lordly Pageantry: The Daimyo Procession and
Political Authority"
Frederik Cryns, "Translation of Western Embryological Thought in the
Edo Period: Tsuboi Shindo and Malpighi's Observations of Fertilized
Eggs"
In JAPAN REVIEW, Number 16 (2004):
Henry D. Smith II, "The Trouble with Terasaka: The Forty-Seventh Ronin
and the Chushingura Imagination"
David E. Riggs, "The Life of Menzan Zuiho, Founder of Dogen Zen"
* * * * *
Macrons have been omitted in this announcement, and titles have been
put inside single quotation marks instead of in italics.
JAPAN REVIEW welcomes submissions of manuscripts in all areas of
research on Japan. For the journal masthead and information on
refereeing, format of manuscripts, submission of manuscripts, editorial
decisions, and the like, please see
http://www.nichibun.ac.jp/lib/pub_2_e.html.
JAPAN REVIEW is published once a year and distributed in hard copy to
approximately 1000 institutions in more than forty countries.
Additional copies are available for sale at a price of 2500 yen per
copy; for ordering information, please contact ___@nichibun.ac.jp.
An expanded version of this announcement (covering modern as well as
premodern topics) will soon be posted on H-Japan. Apologies in advance
for duplication, but I feel fairly confident in guessing that the lists
of recipients of pmjs and H-Japan do not overlap completely.
Jim Baxter
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
James C. Baxter
Editor-in-Chief, JAPAN REVIEW
International Research Center for Japanese Studies
3-2 Oeyama-cho, Goryo, Nishikyo-ku, Kyoto 610-1192, Japan
Tel. (+81)-75-335-2264
Fax. (+81)-75-335-2043
E-mail: ___@nichibun.ac.jp
----------------------------------------------------
From: "Dix Monika" <___@hotmail.com>
Date: September 1, 2006 1:22:32 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Change of address
Dear Members,
Please note the following change of address and affiliation. With best
wishes,
Monika Dix, Ph.D. Robert & Lisa Sainsbury Fellow Sainsbury
Institute SOAS, Russell Square London WC1H 0XG United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (020) 7898-4465 Fax: +44 (020) 7898-4499 Email:
m.___@sainsbury-institute.org
----------------------------------------------------
From: Shayne Clarke <___@mcmaster.ca>
Date: August 31, 2006 6:51:53 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] BDK Canada Graduate Scholarship
Dear Colleagues,
Please pass on the announcement of this important scholarship to
anyone you know who might be interested and/or eligible.
BDK Canada Graduate Scholarship for a year of Buddhist Studies at a
Japanese University. This scholarship will enable advanced graduate
students
in Buddhist Studies who are Canadian Citizens or studying in a Canadian
University
to spend one year in a Japanese University, studying and/or carrying
out doctoral
research.
Value: $40,000 (Canadian)
Eligibility and Terms
The applicant must be a registered full-time graduate student in a
Canadian university or a Canadian citizen studying as a full-time
graduate
student in a university outside of Canada. Visa students in
degree programmes in
Canadian universities may apply.
Preference will be given to advanced graduate students preparing to
carry out doctoral dissertation research, but others at an early stage
in
their study will also be considered.
Some familiarity with Japanese language is expected but fluency is not
required. The results of the award will be announced by January 15,
2007.
The term of the successful candidate's stay in Japan will be one year,
which
may begin at any time between April l, 2007 and March 2008.
The award will be paid in two installments. This amount
should cover
one round trip ticket to Japan and a large part of the expenses directly
related to study in Japan.
1. A completed application form and three
letters of reference are
to be submitted to
Dean of Graduate Studies
School of Graduate Studies
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4K1
2. Transcripts from all university level
courses are to be sent
directly to the School of Graduate Studies, McMaster University
3. Three letters of reference.
These confidential letters must
accompany the application in separate sealed signed envelopes.
i) One letter must be from the
applicant92s supervisor.
ii) Another letter must be from a
Japanese scholar based at the
Japanese
institution where the applicant proposes to study.
iii) Applicants from the University of
British Columbia, University
of Calgary, McMaster University, University of Toronto and McGill
University must have a letter from the member of the Selection
Committee representing his or her institution.**
Applications may be obtained from
The Department of Religious Studies
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1
or from the website http://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/relstud/
**Names of the members of the current Selection Committee may be
obtained from the Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University.
Applicants requiring assistance in contacting scholars at Japanese
institutions may
write to a member of the Selection Committee for advice.
Application Deadline: November 1, 2006
-------------------
Shayne Clarke
Department of Religious Studies
McMaster University
University Hall, Room 104
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario
L8S 4K1
CANADA
Phone: 905 525 9140, ext. 23389
Fax: 905 525 8161
clarsha[at]mcmaster.ca
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Watson <___@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp>
Date: September 2, 2006 0:20:11 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] new members, new profiles
Dear All,
I had a guilty feeling that I had not updated the members' database for
months, but hadn't realized quite how long it was--since February. Many
apologies to all new members, whose profiles are listed below and also
online at
http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~pmjs/members/db.html
When signing up to pmjs, members have the option of asking for their
mail addresses to be kept private, or including only in the "new
members' message," or included also in the online database. I hope I
have followed your preferences. You will note that [at] appears for the
@ mark online. This apparently affords some protection against spam
robots.
New members: Mikael Bauer, Clemente Beghi, Ross Bender, Erin
Brightwell, Heidi Buck-Albulet, Shayne Clarke, Ive Aaslid Covaci, John
Creamer, Philip Flavin, Joshua Fogel, Amaury A. Garcia, Patricia
Graham, Gerald Groemer, Cornelius J. Kiley, Lisa Kuly, Bryan Lowe,
Christopher M. Mayo, Helen E. Moss, Takashi Nishiyama, Jesse Palmer,
Michael Pye, Andreas Marcel Riechert, Satoko Shimazaki, Akira Shimizu,
Sook Young Wang, Elizabeth Tinsley, Kumiko
Tsuchida, Alicia Volk, Alexander Vovin, Judy Wakabayashi
Changes of affiliation/email, changes to profile: Stefania Burk,
Patrick Caddeau, Charlotte Eubanks, Gus Heldt, Patti Kameya, Stephen D.
Miller, Yasuhiko Ogawa, Jeremy Robinson
If I have missed you, please write to me
<___@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp> off list. I promise I won't
keep you waiting another six months!
Two technical notes. I have used circumflexes rather than macrons for
the latest entries online. I suspect that circumflexes display better
for most of you. The same is also true of the translation database, now
renamed "premodern Japanese texts and translations" and a single large
(rather than frames):
http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~pmjs/trans/index.html
Like everything I do, it is "work in progress" but I have found the odd
moment over the summer to add new entries.
Best of the new term/new academic year to all of you. --- Michael Watson
Mikael Bauer <___@fas.harvard.edu>
affiliation = EALC, Harvard University
Research interests: premodern Japanese Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism and
Sanskrit Studies;
Main interest: synthesis between esoteric and exoteric Buddhism in
Heian Japan.
Clemente Beghi <beghi.___@gmail.com>
affiliation = Cambridge University
I am a PhD student doing research on Japanese Buddhist Art History
(especially that belonging to esoteric schools) and its relationship
with society. I am now focusing on the Myoo and their rites.
Ross Bender <___@rossbender.org>
affiliation = University of Pennsylvania
I give occasional lectures on Shinto in Cameron Hurst's Pre-Modern
Japanese History course at Penn. Currently I am working on a study of
imperial pronouncements (senmyou, choku, shou) during the reign of
Koken/Shotoku Tenno (749-769) and on a translation of the Senmyou with
Peter Nosco.
Publications:
1978 "Metamorphosis of a Deity: The Image of Hachiman in 'Yumi
Yawata' ". MN 33(2)
1979 "The Hachiman Cult and the Dokyo Incident". MN 34(2)
1980 "The Political Meaning of the Hachiman Cult in Ancient and Early
Medieval Japan". unpublished diss, Columbia University
(http://rossbender.org/dissertation.html)
1983 "Correspondence (with A.N. Meshcheryakov)".MN 38(1)
1989 "Hojo River". unpublished translation of the Noh play Hojogawa.
(http://rossbender.org/HOJOTEXT1.html)
1989 "Jesus". Pinchpenny Press. translation of "Iesu" by Yorifumi
Yaguchi. (http://rossbender.org/jesus1.html)
Erin Brightwell <___@u.washington.edu>
I am an MA student in Chinese at the University of
Washington. My research interests include literature on the
supernatural written in kanbun.
Heidi Buck-Albulet <___@japanologie.uni-tuebingen.de>
affiliation = University of Tuebingen
Selected publications:
1) Emotion und Aesthetik. Das Ashiwake obune - eine Waka-Poetik des
jungen Motoori Norinaga im Kontext dichtungstheoretischer Diskurse des
fruehneuzeitlichen Japan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005. (Dissertation,
Tuebingen 2002.)
2) "Rhetorik, aussereuropaeische; B. IV. Japan.". In: Rhetorik.
Begriff-Geschichte-Internationalitaet. Hrsg. v. Gert Ueding. Tuebingen:
Niemeyer, 2005. S. 278-283.
See also:
http://homepages.uni-tuebingen.de/japanologie/heidi.buck-albulet/
Shayne Clarke <shayne.___@yahoo.ca>
Department of Religious Studies
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Ive Aaslid Covaci <ive.___@yale.edu>
I am a PhD candidate in Japanese Art History at Yale University,
currently writing my dissertation on the Ishiyamadera engi and the
representation of dreams and visions in premodern Japanese art.
John Creamer <___@gmail.com>
PhD candidate at Yale University. My dissertation examines scribal
culture, scribal patronage and textual commerce as it is described in
Prince Sadafusa's "Kanmon nikki". I'm interested in textual commerce in
Medieval Japan, copying and calligraphic hands, calligraphic lineages,
and the place of imperial houses such as Fushimi no miya in the
capital's scribal network. Other interests include the participation of
performers such as biwa hoshi and sarugaku troupes in the network. My
focus throughout graduate school has been premodern Japanese theater,
particularly Noh. I wrote a MA thesis at the University of Hawaii on
Komparu Zenchiku's use of Genji yoriai, their connection to Teika's
"Okuiri" and Genji hikiuta, and the possible transmission of Teika's
"Shui guso" to Zenchiku through Shotetsu.
Philip Flavin <___@berkeley.edu>
Ph.D., Music, University of California at Berkeley, 2002.
My primary interest is in Edo period music, particularly sokyoku-jiuta.
After finishing my undergraduate education, I attended the Seiha
Ongakuin in Tokyo to pursue my interest in koto and shamisen. After
completing my studies at the conservatory, I remained in Japan studying
and performing koto and shamisen. After returning to the States in
1990, I entered the U.C. Berkeley Music Department's graduate program
in 1992. My research thus far has focused on a specific genre within
sokyoku-jiuta known as sakumono - a specifically humorous genre. Other
interests include the history of the Todoza and the position of the
blind musicians in Edo period society, humor studies in Japan, and the
print culture of the Chinese literati and the guqin. From 2003 to 2005,
I was a visiting researcher at the Kyoto University of Fine Arts.
During this time, I also began to explore Noh (utai and shimai) and
Chikuzen biwa.
Joshua Fogel <___@yorku.ca>
affiliation = York University
all aspects of Sino-Japanese cultural interactions, modern Chinese and
Japanese history, historiography.
_Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naitou Konan (1866-1934)_ (Harvard,
1984)
_Ai Ssu-ch'i's Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism_
(Harvard, 1987)
_Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit_ (Harvard, 1989)
_The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China,
1962-1945_ (Stanford, 1996)
lots of translations and edited volumes
Amaury A. Garcia <___@colmex.mx>
affiliation = Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico
I am a PhD Candidate from El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City.
My main interests are Edo period visual culture, mainly chonin
culture's image production. Also, the various relationships between
images and power structures, image control and censorship. I've been
working with ukiyo-e prints and Edo period society, and currently I am
finishing a research about the discourses and control on makura-e
prints.
Publications: "Cultura popular y grabado en Japon" (Popular culture and
the prints in Japan). El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico, 2005.
"Desentrando lo pornografico: las estampas makura-e" (Unscrambling the
pornographic: the makura-e), in Anales. No. 79. Instituto de
Investigaciones Esteticas, Mexico, 2001. etc.
Patricia Graham <___@ku.edu>
affiliation = University of Kansas
My research interests are mainly in Japanese art of the Early Modern
period and later, especially literati and Maruyama-Shijo schools of
painting, arts for the sencha tea ceremony, and Buddhist arts and sites
of worship.
Selected Publications:
Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600-2005. Forthcoming
(2007), University of Hawaii Press.
Tea of the Sages: the Art of Sencha (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i
Press, 1998), 259pp.
"Kenkyu shiryo: Kano Eino hitsu 'Higashiyama ki" (Research materials:
Kano Eino's Painting of 'A record of Higashiyama'). Kokka 1327 (May
2006).
"Naritasan Shinshoji and Commoner Patronage During the Edo Period,"
Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Fall-Winter
2004:11-25.
"Shingon in Japanese Visual Culture, 17th to 20th Century," Bulletin of
the Research Institute of Esoteric Buddhist Culture (Mount Koya,
Japan), October 2003: 119-138.
"Karamono for Sencha, Transformations in the Taste for Chinese Art" in
Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice, edited by Morgan
Pitelka (London: Routledge-Curzon Press, 2003), 110-136.
"Early Modern Japanese Art History: An Overview of the State of the
Field," Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10/2 (Fall
2002): 2-21. Available online: https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/583
"The Later Flourishing of Literati Painting in Edo-period Japan," in:
Kobayashi Tadashi et al. An Enduring Vision: Paintings from the
Manyo'an Collection from the 17th to the 20th Century. New Orleans: New
Orleans Museum of Art, 2002, 69-87.
"Kinsei Nihon no Bukkyo bijutsu ni okeru Chugoku no eikyo" (Chinese
Influences on Professional Buddhist Painting of Early Modern Japan),
in: Uji: Manpukuji, obaku Bunka Kenkyujo, obaku Bunka (obaku culture)
114 (March 1994): 42-45.
"Edo jidai ni okeru sencha bijutsu to Chugoku bunjin kyomi" (Arts for
Senchado and Chinese Literati Taste in Edo period Japan), in: Nihon
bijutsushi no sumiyaku (Currents in Japanese Art History, festschrift
for Professor Tsuji Nobuo of Tokyo University), Tokyo: Pelican, 1993,
860-880.
"A Heterodox Painting of Shussan Shaka in Late Tokugawa Japan," Artibus
Asiae, Part I, vol. 51 no. 3/4 (1991): 275-292 and Part II, vol. 52 no.
1/2 (1992): 131-145.
"Yamamoto Baiitsu no Chugokuga kenkyu" (Yamamoto Baiitsu's Study of
Chinese Painting), Kobijutsu 80 (Fall 1986): 62-75 (article translated
into Japanese).
Gerald Groemer <___@yamanashi.ac.jp>
I am professor of Japanese Music History and Ethnomusicology at
University of Yamanashi. Currently my research focuses on
blind female musicians (goze), street performers of Edo, and
small-scale kabuki theater in Edo.
Cornelius J. Kiley <___@comcast.net>
affiliation = Villanova University, retired
born 10/24/29
PhD Harvard University 70
contributor, v. 2, Cambridge History of Japan
author of several monographs on ancient and medieval Japan
Lisa Kuly <___@cornell.edu>
I am a PhD candidate at Cornell University. My research focuses on
rituals of childbirth in Japan. From June 2006 to June 2007 I am a
visiting researcher at Bukkyo University, Kyoto.
Bryan Lowe <___@princeton.edu>
I am a PhD student in the department of Religion at Princeton
University. I am interested in interactions between Buddhism
and indigenous beliefs in the Nara and Heian periods particularly as
seen as an exchange between the capital and the provinces.
Christopher M. Mayo <___@christophermayo.com>
MA student in Japanese language and literature, Department of East
Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Kansas.
My interests include:
*the development of writing in early Japan
*the history of Japanese law, particularly the penal codes
Helen E. Moss <helen.___@gmail.com>
affiliation = IchiFuji-kai Dance Association, Ltd.
With IchiFuji-kai, I'm a performer and licensed teacher of Japanese
classical dance in the Souke Fujima tradition, and also lecture at
workshops and performances. As an independent scholar, I'm
interested in history, Kabuki theatre, costumes and costuming, makeup,
kimono dressing and sewing, fans and props, textile design and
production, etc.
Takashi Nishiyama <___@mit.edu>
Currently I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Dibner Institute
for the History of Science and Technology, MIT (completed Ph. D from
the Ohio State Univ). My research area is the history of modern Japan,
with an emphasis on the social history of technology during the 20th
century. I am interested in how the rise/demise of the imperial empire
influenced technology transfer in Japan before, during, and after World
War II. As a case study, I look at how and why the Japanese engineering
community responsible for wartime kamikaze aircraft (such as the Zero
fighter) was reborn as the creators of the Bullet Train.
Jesse Palmer <___@hotmail.com>
affiliation = University of California at Irvine
I am in my third year in UC Irvine's Department of East Asian Languages
and Literatures, East Asian Critical Studies emphasis, working on
transnational Buddhist communities in East Asia. My research
focuses on the interaction between Japanese and Chinese Buddhism and
the deployment of the signifier of Chinese-ness in Japan from
Nara-Heian period through the Kamakura. Within this
framework, I am particularly interested in the travel narratives of the
Japanese monks and the way these were utilized in Japan, the material
culture and the exchange of goods that accompanied the various
diplomatic and religious missions from Japan to China, as well as
issues of orthography, particulary the kanbun/kana dichotomy.
Michael Pye <pye[at]staff.uni-marburg.de>
Professor of the Study of Religions at Marburg University, Germany,
until retirement in 2004. Guest Professor at Otani University, Kyoto
(2005-2008). Sometime President of the International Association for
the History of Religions (IAHR, 1995-2000). BA/MA Cambridge Univ.,
England, PhD Leeds Univ., England, Dr Theol h.c. Univ. of Helsinki,
Finland. Main fields of interest: Buddhist studies, history of Japanese
religions, contemporary Japanese religions, comparative study of
religions. Not an expert in pmjs, but a learner. Books very broadly
relevant to the list: Skilful Means, A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism
(2nd ed. Routledge 2004), translations from Tominaga Nakamoto (1715-46)
in: Emerging from Meditation (Duckworth and Univ. of Hawaii Press 1990).
Working within the discipline of the "Study of Religions", my special
field of interest is Japanese religions with an emphasis on
modern aspects. Pre-modern, but also in a sense pre-Japanese, was my
work on "Skilful Means. A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism" (1978, 2nd
edition 2003). I have also been fascinated by the critical views of
Tominaga Nakamoto (1715-46), and attempted translations of his works in
"Emerging from Meditation" (1990). Having recently retired from the
University of Marburg in Germany, I am currently teaching in the
graduate school of Otani University in Kyoto (2005-8) and writing on
contemporary Japanese religion/s.
Andreas Marcel Riechert <___@pobox.com>
PhD candidate, Tuebingen University, Germany.
Research interests: Edo period historical linguistics, confucianism (
esp. Kaibara Ekken); knowledge modelling, description logic;
cognitive science, semantics; natural language engineering (esp,
classical Japanese).
Satoko Shimazaki <___@columbia.edu>
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and
Cultures at Columbia University. I am currently at the Waseda Theater
Museum working on my dissertation, which will deal with representations
of female ghosts in Bunka-Bunsei period Kabuki and literature.
Akira Shimizu <___@uiuc.edu>
I am a graduate student in history at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. My current research is focused on issues on
meat-eating practice during the Tokugawa period and relations between
food and identities.
Sook Young Wang <___@inha.ac.kr> 王淑英
Professor of Japanese Literature, Department of Japanese Studies, Inha
University, Inchon, Korea.
My research is on medieval Japanese literature: waka and renga. I have
had several books published in Japan and Korea, for example:
Inventing the Classics: National Identity, Gender and Japanese
Literature [translation of title], Seoul: Somyeong Press 2002, Jisanka
Kochu Soran [A Comprehensive Survey of Classical Commentaries on
Jisanka Poetry] Tokyo:Tokai University Press 1995.
Elizabeth Tinsley <___@hotmail.com>
I am an MA student at Otani studying Buddhist Culture. I completed an
MA at SOAS in Japanese studies and studied art history for a year in
Tokyo. I am now researching the female deity Niutsuhime.
Kumiko Tsuchida 土田久美子 <___@hotmail.com>
am a post-graduate student in the department of international
communications at Aoyama Gakuin University. I am interested in the
problems of translation of Japanese classical literature into foreign
languages, especially into Russian. I am now analyzing the Russian
translation of The Tale of Genji for my Ph. D. dissertation.
Alicia Volk <alicia.___@aya.yale.edu>
Post-doctoral Fellow, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese
Arts and Cultures and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London
Although my primary area of research is Japanese modern art, I have
tended to focus on topics that have strong links to the earlier arts of
Japan, especially painting and prints. My dissertation on the
Taisho-period oil painter Yorozu Tetsugoro, for example, examines the
revival of nanga and the "return to the East" movement in modern art,
and I am presently writing a text on 20th century byobu in relation to
traditional models as well as to contemporary art practices. From
summer 2006 I will be a Getty Fellow, and then move to Washington, DC
to take up a position as Assistant Professor of Japanese Art History at
the Univeristy of Maryland, College Park.
Recent publications include: Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print
Movement (University of Washington, 2005); Japan and Paris:
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the Modern Era (co-authored with
Christine Guth and Yamanashi Emiko, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2004);
"Yorozu Tetsugoro and Taisho-period Creative Prints: When the Japanese
Print Became Avant-garde" (Impressions no. 26, 2004); and "Katsura Yuki
and the Japanese Avant-garde" (Woman’s Art Journal 24, no. 2, 2003).
http://www.sainsbury-institute.org/newfellows.html
Alexander Vovin <___@gmail.com>
affiliation = University of Hawaii at Manoa
profile = http://www.hawaii.edu/eall/ppl/indiv/Jap/VovinAlexander.htm
Judy Wakabayashi <___@kent.edu>
Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies, Kent State
University, Ohio.
Research interests: Japanese-English translation, history of Japanese
translation, translation theory and pedagogy.
** Changes of affiliation/email, changes to profile**
Stefania Burk <stefania.___@ubc.ca>
Assistant Professor of Japanese, University of British Columbia
Interests include medieval waka and anthologization, women's
poetry/autobiography, and modern canonization of premodern texts and
traditions.
Current projects involve the late Kamakura imperial anthologies and a
book-length study of Eifukumon-in.
Patrick Caddeau <___@princeton.edu>
Director of Studies, Forbes College, Princeton University.
URL: www.princeton.edu/~caddeau
Appraising Genji: Literary Criticism and Cultural Anxiety in the Age of
the Last Samurai
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0791466736](2006)
Areas of interest and research include: Genji commentary, criticism,
and reception; early modern literature and interpretation from yomihon
to shousetsu; the role of cinema, performance, and technology in the
formation of cultural identity.
[First chapter can be read on following link. (ed):
http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61232]
Charlotte Eubanks <___@psu.edu>
Charlotte Eubanks is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature
and Japanese at The Pennsylvania State University where she teaches
courses in world literature, Japanese language and literature, Buddhist
writings, and literary theory. Her research interests include Buddhist
sermon-related writings, premodern Japanese literature, contemporary
women's fiction, folklore, performance studies, and theories of
orality. She is currently working on a book length study of
setsuwa.
Gus Heldt <___@virginia.edu>
University of Virginia
Areas of interest include early and medieval Japanese literature,
cultural history, and gender studies.
Patti Kameya <___@kent.edu>
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Kent State University. My
dissertation focused on the intersection between ideas of virtue and
eccentricity as portrayed in Kinsei kijinden (Eccentrics of our times,
1790) by Ban Kokei. Additional and tangential interests
include Okinawa, gender, early modern cultural exchange, and folklore
studies.
Stephen D. Miller <___@asianlan.umass.edu>
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Editor and one of the translators of Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of
Japanese Gay Literatur e (Gay Sunshine Press, 1996). My interests
revolve around a number of things: literature and Buddhism, classical
poetry, the imperial poetry anthologies, expressions of gay male
sentiments in Japanese culture (lit, film, TV), the thorny problem of
translation (how to do it and doing it), and the teaching of bungo at
the university level. I am (still) working on a manuscript on the
relationship between Buddhism and the sub-genre of waka known as
shakkyoka. Right now my focus is on the "Aisho" book of the
Shuishu. Most recently I've worked on some collaborative
translations of a Noh play (Shunzei Tadanori) and 7 shakkyoka with the
poet Patrick Donnelly.
Yasuhiko Ogawa <___@topaz.dti.ne.jp>
Professor, Faculty of Letters, Aoyama Gakuin University
Jeremy Robinson <___@wlu.edu>
Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature at Washington & Lee
University. My primary area of specialization is premodern
Japanese poetry, particularly that of the Man'yoshu, but my research
interests are broad, including the role of humor in Japanese
literature, the relationship between literary and performance genres,
and works which combine text and image.
From: Roberta Strippoli <___@stanford.edu>
Date: September 4, 2006 2:23:49 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Kyoto Lectures: Iyanaga on sexual heresies
9/13 at 6pm
Dear friends and colleagues,
On behalf of ISEAS and EFEO I am very happy to announce that Iyanaga
Nobumi will deliver a fascinating lecture in Kyoto on September
13. Please refer to the addresses and phone numbers below if
you need more information.
Cheers,
Roberta
PS: I am also happy to announce that I recently completed my PhD at
Stanford and moved to Bates College (Maine) to take up a Visiting
Assistant Professor position. (I hope those who don't know me
will forgive the personal note.)
============================
Scuola Italiana di Studi sull'Asia Orientale ISEAS
École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient EFEO
KYOTO LECTURES 2006
Wednesday September 13th 18:00h
Nobumi Iyanaga will speak on:
“Sexual Heresies” in Medieval Japan:
With Special Focus on the So-called Tachikawa-ryû
The name of Tachikawa-ryû 立川流 is famous for its ‘infamous’ sexual
doctrine and practices, but its reality is very little known and often
misunderstood. Analysis of one of the most influential “heresiological”
works of the Middle Ages, the Hôkyôshô 宝鏡鈔 by Yûkai 宥快 (1375),
reveals that the Tachikawa-ryû was the victim of a false and (probably)
deliberate incrimination. This does not mean, however, that there were
no
sexual doctrines and practices in the Middle Ages. On the contrary,
different
trends existed, and not only within the Shingon school. One trend,
criticized
in the Juhô yôjin shû 受法用心集 by Shinjô 心定 (1268), apparently held a
very peculiar teaching, in a sense very close to some of the extreme
forms
of yoginī-tantra. Inquiry into the kind of groups that transmitted such
teachings makes it possible to offer a new vision of different religious
movements in the Middle Ages.
Nobumi Iyanaga 彌永信美 is an independent researcher specializing in the
study of
Buddhist mythology, with a special interest in the religious culture of
medieval Japan. He has
also studied the history of Western images of the Orient (particularly
from the Middle Ages
until the Renaissance) in Gensô no Tôyô 幻想の東洋 (“Imaginary Orient,”
Tokyo, 1987, and
repr. 2005). His studies on Buddhist mythology were published in 2002
in two volumes:
Daikokuten hensô 大黒天変相 (“Variations on the Theme of Mahākāla”) and
Kannon
hen'yôtan 観音変容譚 (“Metamorphosis of Avalokiteśvara”). Nobumi Iyanaga also
contributed two articles to the Hôbôgirin, the French encyclopedia of
Buddhism, on
Meheśvara and Mahākāla respectively.
Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS)
École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)
4, Yoshida Ushinomiya-cho, Sakyo-ku Kyoto
606-8302 JAPAN
ISEAS
Phone: 075-751-8132
Fax: 075-751-8221
e-mail: ___@iseas-kyoto.org
EFEO
Phone: 075-761-3946
e-mail: ___@mbox.kyoto-inet.or.jp
----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Watson <___@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp>
Date: September 5, 2006 0:29:08 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Fujiwara no Tadazane
Dear All,
The following question from a Norwegian writer is not something that I
could begin to answer myself, but I am sure that someone on the list
could point him in the right direction. Can anyone help?
Michael Watson
From: "Hans Morten Sundnes" <hans.morten.___@tussa.com>
Date: September 4, 2006 19:02:10 GMT+09:00
To: <___@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp>
Subject: Fujiwara no Tadazane, question from Norwegian writer
Dear Michael Watson, I'm not sure if I even should try to disturb you
with this. But I'm working on a book about kamaboko/surimi/crabsticks -
the origin, the development and the globalisation. In such a project
you would always have a dream about tracing the first kamaboko meal.
That is probably not possible, but some years ago a kamaboko/surimi
scholar at a University in Kyoto found a description of a meal in the
Heian period in Edo Shogunate archives (Ruijuzooyooshoo in 1672). The
documents describes a meal/banquet in 1115. And the occasion shall have
been that Fujiwara no Tadazane moved to a new estate in Kyoto (Higashi
to Sanjo) Chikuwa-kamaboko was served at the third table, but that's
all I know. Even though the sources are a bit thin, I could like to
describe this meal for my readers. But I find it hard to find out
anything about the occasion, about the bulding, about the relation
between the Fujiwara regent and the emperor at the time.(probably not
good) Is there anything to tell about this? ( I have also heard that
Fujiwara bulit a villa, Fukedono, north of Byodo-in in Uji in 1114, but
those sources are less reliable. I know that he settled back in Uji not
many years after.
I see that this is not exactly this period, and maybe it's not easy to
answer this at all, but thank you anyway.
Your sincerely
Hans Morten Sundnes
6120 Folkestad
Norway
+ 47 70 05 20 32
----------------------------------------------------
From: Lawrence Marceau <l.___@auckland.ac.nz>
Date: September 5, 2006 6:03:23 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Fujiwara no Tadazane
There is a reproduction of Tadazane's banquet in the 類聚雑要抄 (Ruiju
zouyou shou, 1672), Kyoto University Library collection. A
link to the image mentioning "kamaboko" at the 3rd "table"(course? 台三進)
is found here:
http://ddb.libnet.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit/h694/image/01/h694s0005.html
The entire banquet is described, so
someone with the time and interest should be able to translate it.
Lawrence Marceau
From: Peter Hendriks <peter.___@anu.edu.au>
Date: September 8, 2006 14:12:22 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] available position at the Australian National
University
Dear Colleagues,
The Australian National University has just announced an opening for a
lecturer in Japanese Studies. See below and also
http://info.anu.edu.au/hr/Jobs/Academic_Positions/_FAS3624.asp for more
details. The closing date is 6 October 2006.
Regards,
Peter Hendriks
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Lecturer In Japanese Studies
Fixed Term – 3 years
Academic Level B
Salary Package: $62,985 - $74,313 pa plus 17% super
Reference No.: FAS3624
The Faculty of Asian Studies seeks to appoint a Lecturer in Japanese
studies. The position is in the Faculty’s Japan Centre delivering one
of the largest and most distinguished Japanese programs in Australia.
The applicant will possess native or near-native speaker fluency in the
Japanese language and English; a PhD relevant to our teaching and
research missions; a promising research and publications record in
Japanese studies, and a commitment to publications and success in
competitive research grant schemes. The applicant will also be
experienced in and committed to the supervision of students at Honours,
Postgraduate and Research degree levels.
Responsibilities will include teaching the Japanese language and some
teaching in the candidate’s specialist field. You will be expected to
supervise sessional staff (eg tutors) in group teaching courses.
Applicants with a professional focus in the humanities and social
sciences, and those with interests in Japanese visual and popular
culture are particularly welcome to apply.
Commencement is negotiable but preferably the successful applicant will
take up duties in February 2007. This is a three-year fixed period of
employment, with the possibility of conversion thereafter to standard
on-going employment.
======================================
Peter Hendriks
Sub-dean
Faculty of Asian Studies
College of Asia and the Pacific
Baldessin Precinct Building
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
t: +61 2 6125 3206
f: +61 2 6125 3144
e:
peter.___@anu.edu.au
日本語でどうぞ
CRICOS #00120
======================================
From: "Richard L. Wilson" <___@icu.ac.jp>
Date: September 8, 2006 17:24:37 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: position opening at International
Christian University
Dear Colleagues,
International Christian University in Mitaka, Tokyo has a full-time
position opening in Philosophy/Ethics (and/or Religion) with a Japan
specialization. See the details below or
<http://subsite.icu.ac.jp/gjg/1h/phil0607e.html>
Thank you for your consideration,
Richard L. Wilson
Japanese Religion in Tokyo
The Division of Humanities at International Christian University,
announces a tenure track opening at the assistant, associate or full
professor level in the field of Philosophy/Ethics (Religion).
The starting date: September 1, 2007.
Primary responsibilities for this position will be teaching general
education and undergraduate courses, as well as supervising senior
theses. Graduate level teaching is also a possibility. The
candidate must be committed to research in the field of Japanese
Ethics/Religion
Requirements: Doctorate in hand in the field of
Philosophy/Ethics(Religion), publications and evidence of scholarly
potential and ability to teach Japanese religion as well as
“Introduction to Christianity” in English. The candidate should be
committed to teaching, research and university service.
Japanese/English bilingual competence and international experience
desirable, but not required
Please send c.v. and the summary of research achievements as well as
research planning in the future, and the name and address of three
references to :
Professor Naoki Onishi, Chair, Division of Humanities,
International Christian University,
10-2, Osawa 3-chome, Mitaka-shi, Tokyo 181-8585, Japan.
The deadline of submission is November 30th, 2006
These documents sent by email will be accepted.
International Christian University (ICU) is an elite, private,
coeducational, bilingual liberal arts university based upon Christian
principles, founded in 1949 by Christians in Japan and North
America. The campus is located on 156 acres in the western
suburbs of Tokyo.
For further information, please contact Professor Naoki Onishi,
Phone: +81 422 33 3217,
Fax: +81 422 34 6983,
e-mail: kobo-___@icu.ac.jp
From: Richard Emmert <___@gol.com>
Date: September 10, 2006 1:06:54 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Theatre Nohgaku Pine Barrens tour
Dear List members,
For members in the North Carolina and Virginia area of the United
States, Theatre Nohgaku wishes to announce a short performance tour of
a new noh play in English entitled Pine Barrens, a demon play about the
Jersey devil which by legend resides in the pine barrens of New Jersey.
Performances will be at the North Carolina School of the Arts in
Winston-Salem on September 15 and 16, Duke University on September 19
and Hampden-Sydney College on September 21. Detailed information from a
short blurb follows. Also see Theatre Nohgaku’s website:
www.theatrenohgaku.org.
Thanks,
Rick Emmert
======================================
Announcing Theatre Nohgaku’s World Premiere tour of Pine
Barrens, a Noh play in English. Written by Greg Giovanni. Music and
direction by Richard Emmert. With special guest hayashi musicians from
Japan, and also featuring Theatre of Yugen in The Melon Thief, a Kyogen
comedy directed by Yuriko Doi.
Once in the desolate Pine Barrens when the impoverished Mrs.
Leeds was in labor with her thirteenth child, she cried out, “Let the
devil take this child!” Thus began the legend of the Jersey Devil...
NORTH CAROLINA SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, WINSTON-SALEM, NC
OUTDOOR TORCHLIGHT PERFORMANCE
FILMMAKING SCHOOL REFLECTING POOL
Friday, September 15 @ 7:00 pm
Saturday, September 16 @ 7:00 pm
ALTERNATE RAIN DATE AND LOCATION:
Sunday, September 17 @ 2:00 PM
Performance Place, NCSA
Tickets: $15 general; $12 students/seniors
Tickets may be purchased by phone, fax, online, mail or in person.
Phone: 336-721-1945
Fax: 336-631-1212
Online:
www.ncarts.edu/performances
Box Office: Stevens Center,
405 W. Fourth Street,
9 AM-5 PM Mon.-Fri.
******
DUKE UNIVERSITY, DURHAM, NC
REYNOLDS THEATER
Tuesday, September 19 @ 8:00 pm
Tickets: $18 general; $5 Duke students
Tickets may be purchased by phone or online.
Phone: 919-684-4444
Online: www.tickets.duke.edu
Presented by Duke Performances. Made possible in part with
support from the Duke University Office of the Provost, the Vice
Provost for International Affairs, and Presenting Partner Thomas S.
Kenan, III.
******
HAMPDEN-SYDNEY COLLEGE, HAMPDEN-SYDNEY, VA
JOHNS AUDITORIUM
Thursday, September 21 @ 8:00 pm
Free Performance
Sponsored by the Lectures and Programs Committee and the Department of
Fine Arts.
******
Pine Barrens is a presentation of the Thomas S. Kenan
Institute for the Arts and Theatre Nohgaku. For more information call
the Kenan Institute at 336-722-0030 or visit www.kenanarts.org. The
Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts is a privately funded program of
the North Carolina School of the Arts
For more information on Theatre Nohgaku see:
www.theatrenohgaku.org.
Supported in part by the Piedmont Japanese Business
Association, the Triangle Japanese Business Association, and All Nippon
Airways (ANA)
Endorsed and promoted by the Consulate General of Japan, Atlanta.
----------------------------------------------------
From: "Lucia Dolce" <___@soas.ac.uk>
Date: September 11, 2006 21:34:57 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] CSJR workshop 'The Power of Ritual'
Dear pmjs−members
(apologies for cross-posting)
The following annoucement may be of interest to some of you who are in
Japan.
Regards,
lucia dolce
The forthcoming workshop of the SOAS Centre for the Study of Japanese
Religions will take place in Kyoto on 14-15 September 2006,
co-organized with the Art Research Centre of Ritusmeikan University.
The workshop is open to the public. For further information please see
the attached programme and the
URL: http://www.arc.ritsumei.ac.jp/events/060914/index.html
We look forward to see you in September.
THE POWER OF RITUAL
Interdisciplinary perspectives on medieval religious practices
14-15 September 2006
Venue: Art Research Centre, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.
[14 September]
13:00-13:25 Welcome and Introductions ごあいさつ
Kawashima Masao 川嶋將生, COE Project Director
Lucia Dolce, CSJR Chair
Matsumoto Ikuyo 松本郁代, Symposium co-organizer
1. Religion as Performance 儀礼としての宗教
Chair: Hongô Masatsugu 本郷真紹（立命館大学）
Discussant: Abe Yasurô 阿部泰郎（名古屋大学）
13:30-14:00 Petitions and Rites for the Gods of Curse
呪詛神の祭文と儀礼
Saitô Hideki 斎藤英喜 （佛教大学）
14:05-14:35 Aesthetic Performance and Empowerment: The Nature of
Medieval Shômyô
中世声明の美的表現力と権力
Fumi Ouchi 大内典 （SOAS/ 宮城学院女子大学）
14:40-15:10 Why Ritual Matters: Religious Performance and Social Life
at Medieval Hokkeji
なぜ儀礼が重要かー中世における法華寺の儀式と社会
Lori Meeks (University of Southern California)
15:10-15:40 Response and Discussion 質疑応答
15:40-16:00 Tea Break 休憩
2. The Liturgical Body 儀礼的身体
Chair: Michael Jamentz（立命館大学）
Discussant: Kadoya Atsushi 門屋温（早稲田大学）
16:10-16:40 Esoteric Rituals and the Power of Wishing: The Skull
Liturgy of the Jûhô-yôjin-shû
密教儀礼と「念ずる力」－『受法用心集』の「髑髏本尊儀礼」を中心にして
Iyanaga Nobumi 彌永信美 （仏教学研究家）
16:45-17:15 Ritualizing Duality: Fudô, Aizen and the Secret Iconography
of Empowerment
二元性の儀礼ー不動･愛染 と秘力の図像化
Lucia Dolce (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London)
17:20-17:50 Response and Discussion 質疑応答
18:30 Reception 懇親会
[15 September]
3. Socio-cultural Practices 社会･文化的実践
Chair: Ikemi Chôryû 池見澄隆 （佛教大学）
Discussant: Francois Lachaud (Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient)
9:35-10:05 The Twofold Body of the Elephant-god: Narratives and Rituals
for Shôten
聖天の縁起とその儀礼ー双身歓喜天を中心に
Tanaka Takako 田中貴子 （甲南大学）
10:10-10:40 Daigoji, Esoteric Rainmaking Rituals and the Dragon Lady
Seiryô Gongen
醍醐寺、祈雨修法と清滝権現をめぐって
Steven Trenson （京都大学/ Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes）
10:45-11:15 The Power of Sacred Vehicles: Carrying Portable Shrines and
Sacred Trees into the Capital
入洛する神輿・神木の「神威」
Matsumoto Ikuyo 松本郁代 （日本学術振興会特別研究員）
11:15-11:45 Tea Break 休憩
11:45-12:15 Response and Discussion 質疑応答
12:30-14:00 Lunch 昼食
14:00-16:00 Round Table Discussion 全体討論
Organized by
主催
・COE Program Kyoto Art Entertainment Innovation Research,
Art Research Centre, Ritsumeikan University
立命館大学21 世紀COE プログラム「京都アートエンタテインメント創成研究」
・Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
ロンドン大学SOAS 日本宗教センター
Organizers: Lucia Dolce, Matsumoto Ikuyo
For further information and registration please e-mail:
arc-jimu.@arc.ritsumei.ac.jp
URL: http://www.arc.ritsumei.ac.jp/events/060914/index.html
日本中世という時代は、多くの宗教儀礼が新たに創出され、改変された時代であった。現在、儀礼研究は民俗学や歴史学をはじめ文学、美術史など、様々な分
野で行われているが、各分野における儀礼研究は、儀礼を宗教としての要素より、一つの資料や型として捉え、各文脈の中で分析されているのが現状である。儀
礼における「宗教」とは、儀礼行為とそれを意味付ける思想とが一体になっているものとして考えることができる。そして、この儀礼と思想が、外部世界と相互
関係を持ち、様々な反応を起こすことによって、新たな儀礼や思想が生み出され、或いは、改変されていった。この問題は、儀礼が発する力学的問題であり、こ
れを儀礼のEmpowerment（権能）として捉えることができる。
儀礼における権能は、様々なレベルでの意味が存在する。その一つが、儀礼の実修や上演による宗教としての機能である。この他に、儀礼を修す実修者やその
演者にも権能が存在する。すなわち、儀礼によって新たな肉体を得ることができる、身体的な意味での権能である。また、このような権能を包有した儀礼が、社
会的・世俗的なネットワークと連続することによって、儀礼は正統性や社会や世俗に適応した権能を帯びていくことになる。
本シンポジウムでは、中世に作り出された儀礼行為やその思想を、従来的な枠にとらわれることなく、中世の力学的問題として捉え直し、儀礼の
Empowerment（権能）の実相を解くことを目的とする。
From: Philip Brown <brown.___@osu.edu>
Date: September 14, 2006 1:56:52 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] 2006-07 North American Coordinating Council
on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) Multi-Volume Sets Grant Application
Guidelines
The North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources
(NCC) Multi-Volume Sets Project Committee is pleased to announce the
guidelines for 2006-07 MVS Project grant application and invites you to
submit titles for pre-screening.
Please note two important provisions for 2006-07 MVS grant.
1. ILL: the requirement has been changed from ILL "free of charge" to
"freely circulating." MVS permits the charging of ILL fees in accordance
with the loan policies of individual holding institutions.
2. Second-hand titles may now be proposed for MVS funding. Applicants
must provide a written statement from the vendor assuring that those
titles will be held until the MVS Committee makes grant award decisions,
and that the condition of the proposed volumes is at a level that will
permit the materials to freely circulate through ILL.
The 2006-07 MVS guidelines are available on the MVS homepage at:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ncc/mvs.html.
Please remember that important dates for the 2006-07 MVS grant
applications are:
Prescreening Deadline: Novembe 6, 2006
(via e-mail to: ___@stanford.edu)
MVS Application Deadline: January 12, 2007 (parcel shipping deadline)
Please see check details of application procedures on the NCC Website.
For any questions about MVS prescreening or application procedures,
please contact MVS Librarian Co-Chair Naomi Kotake at ___@stanford.edu.
From: stefania.___@ubc.ca
Date: May 9, 2006 0:28:14 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] UBC Waka Workshop Update (Oct. 6-7)
New Perspectives on Waka Culture: Women, Patronage, and Genre in
Medieval
Japan
The Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia
will
be hosting a two-day workshop, "New Perspectives on Waka Culture: Women,
Patronage, and Genre in Medieval Japan," on October 6 and 7,
2006. The
program, paper abstracts, and other information have now been posted at
http://www.asia.ubc.ca/index.php?id=8380.
This workshop is made possible by a generous private donation and
support
from the University of British Columbia Department of Asian Studies and
the
Faculty of Arts.
If you are interested in attending or would like further information,
please
contact us.
Stefania and Christina
Stefania Burk
Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature
Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
stefania.___@ubc.ca
Christina Laffin
Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature
Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
christina.___@ubc.ca
From: Bernhard Scheid <bernhard.___@oeaw.ac.at>
Date: September 18, 2006 20:56:59 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] new book on secrecy in Japanese Religion
Dear list members,
today I received information that the book _The Culture of Secrecy in
Japanese Religion_ is finally out on the market. The book, published by
Routledge, is a collection of essays by international experts of
Japanese and Asian Religious Studies including quite a few members of
this mailing list, and has been edited by Mark Teeuwen and myself.
Table of Contents
Preface (B. Scheid)
1. Introduction: Japan's medieval culture of secrecy from a comparative
perspective (M. Teeuwen)
Part 1: Prologue
2. Secrets and secrecy in the study of religion: Comparative views on
secrecy from the Ancient World (A. DeJong)
3. The problem of secrecy in Indian Tantric Buddhism (R. Davidson)
4. Myth and secrecy in Tang-period Tantric Buddhism (M. Lehnert)
Part 2: Japan’s Medieval Culture of Secrecy
5. Secrecy in Japanese esoteric Buddhism (F. Rambelli)
6. Reconsidering the taxonomy of the esoteric: Hermeneutical and ritual
practices of the Lotus sutra (L. Dolce)
7. Knowing vs. owning a secret: Secrecy in medieval Japan, as seen
through the sokui kanjo enthronement unction (M. Teeuwen)
8. Secrecy, sex and apocrypha: Remarks on some paradoxical phenomena (N.
Iyanaga)
9. Esotericism in Noh commentaries and plays: Konparu Zenchiku's
Meishukushu and Kakitsubata (S. Klein)
10. The elephant in the room: The cult of secrecy in Japanese Tantrism
(B. Faure)
11. Myths, rites, and icons: Three views of a secret (A. Kadoya)
12. Two modes of secrecy in the Nihon shoki transmission (B.
Scheid)
Part 3: The Demise of Secrecy
13. When secrecy ends: The Tokugawa reformation of Tendai Buddhism and
its implication (W. Bodiford)
14. Hiding the shoguns: Secrecy and the nature of political authority in
Tokugawa Japan (A. Walthall)
15. "Esoteric" and "public" in late Mito thought (K. Nakai)
The only drawback of this edition is the price: 85 pound = 126 EURO =
159 USD = 18.853 JPY. It seems, however, that Amazon offers the book for
only 65 pound resp. 125 USD. Perhaps they will adjust their prices, so
if you want to buy it, better buy it quickly..
Best regards
Bernhard Scheid
PS: Our blurb reads:
The Japanese Middle Ages were a period when secrecy dominated many forms
of religious practice. This fascinating collection traces the secret
characteristics and practices in Japanese religion, while analyzing the
rise and decline of religious esotericism in Japan.
Esoteric Buddhism developed in almost all Buddhist countries of Asia,
but it was of particular importance in Japan where its impact went far
beyond the borders of Buddhism, also affecting Shinto as well as
non-religious forms of discourse. During the Middle Ages, secret
initiations became a favoured medium for the transmission of knowledge
among Buddhist monks, Shinto priests, scholars, actors and artisans
alike.
The Culture of Secrecy in Japanese Religion looks at the impact of
esoteric Buddhism on Japanese culture, and includes comparative chapters
on India and China. Whilst concentrating on the Japanese medieval
period, this book will give readers familiar with present day Japan many
explanations for the still visible remnants of Japan's medieval culture
of secrecy. This compelling look at a largely undiscovered field of
research successfully demystifies the study of esotericism and Tantrism,
and will be essential reading for scholars of East Asian Buddhism,
Japanese religion and religious history.
PPS: Sorry for cross-postings.
to order through Amazon.com (.co.uk, co.jp, etc.) see this
link / pmjs ed.
From: Elizabeth Leicester <___@earthlink.net>
Date: September 19, 2006 1:41:00 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Herman Ooms talk at USC
The Project for Premodern Japan Studies at the University of Southern
California announces
A lecture by Prof. Herman Ooms, Dept. of History, UC Los Angeles
"Daoism in Ancient Japan: Still-born or Aborted?"
Thursday, October 5, 2006, 7:00-9:00 pm in the Stoops East Asia Library
Seminar Room on the campus of the University of Southern California
In the historical record for pre-Temmu times, compiled in the
early eighth century, one can find a number of disparate Daoist
elements. During Temmu's rule, however, and that of Jito, his wife and
successor (672-702), these elements are articulated into structural
moments to give rulership a Daoist cachet. Subsequently, however,
Daoism became associated with subversive activities.
Parking for the Stoops East Asia Library (EDL on the USC map) is
available for $7.00 in Lot B. Enter at Gate 4 from Jefferson Blvd. at
Royal St.
For further information, please contact Prof. Joan Piggott at
___@usc.edu
From: Royall Tyler <___@alpaca-s.com>
Date: September 22, 2006 8:58:53 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Jingu Kogo
I have a question about the position and significance of Jingu Kogo and
her son Ojin in the line of Japanese sovereigns. I don't know how or
where to pursue it on my own. All hints will be much appreciated.
The official chronology has Chuai (Jingu's husband) reigning 192-200
and Ojin reigning 270-310. Jingu Kogo herself effectively reigned
between them, but apparently she was never emperor de jure; hence the
seventy-year official gap between Chuai and Ojin. Nonetheless Nihon
shoki, for example, sometimes refers to her as though she really had
been emperor; and apparently her authority did indeed command that kind
of treatment.
Chuai died after being cursed by the triple sea deity (Sumiyoshi)
speaking through his wife, who then set off to conquer Korea. Jingu
Kogo completely overshadowed her husband. Similarly, Ojin occupies a
particularly prominent position in the line of emperors, one quite
unlike his father's.
Has anyone ever suggested that Chuai's death and Jingu Kogo's
long-wielded power broke the line of imperial succession, and that Ojin
actually founded, or at least restored (中興), the existing line? Or, to
put the question more broadly, has anyone ever suggested that the Jingu
Kogo interlude affected the imperial succession and that Ojin's
accession therefore has a special significance?
Royall Tyler
From: Royall Tyler <___@alpaca-s.com>
Date: September 22, 2006 12:03:36 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Jingu Kogo
Begging everyone's pardon: Kojiki, not Nihon shoki, is the source of
the account of Chuai's death to which I alluded in my last message. The
Nihon shoki account is different.
Royall Tyler
From: Richard Bowring <___@cam.ac.uk>
Date: September 22, 2006 16:42:34 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: Jingu Kogo
I was under the impression that the usual interpretation of Jingu, the
attack on Korea and the delayed birth was precisely to see it as a
metaphor for hiding what was in fact a complete break in the succession.
Richard Bowring
From: Lewis Cook <___@earthlink.net>
Date: September 26, 2006 3:09:44 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs] Re: new book on secrecy in Japanese Religion
On Sep 18, 2006, at 7:56 AM, Bernhard Scheid wrote:
Dear list members,
today I received information that the book _The Culture of Secrecy in
Japanese Religion_ is finally out on the market. The book, published by
Routledge, is a collection of essays by international experts of
Japanese and Asian Religious Studies including quite a few members of
this mailing list, and has been edited by Mark Teeuwen and myself.
<...>
The only drawback of this edition is the price: 85 pound = 126 EURO =
159 USD = 18.853 JPY. It seems, however, that Amazon offers the book for
only 65 pound resp. 125 USD. Perhaps they will adjust their prices, so
if you want to buy it, better buy it quickly..
Forgive me for complaining, but "out on the market" is a rather ironic
choice of words. The price-tag on a book like this - not that it is
unusual for British and European academic publishers - is a good enough
assurance that it will remain unobtainable and thus unread by those
indigent scholars to whom it is presumably addressed, and somewhat
beyond the budget of their libraries, in many cases. Routledge might as
well seal it in a tomb for all the circulation the book is likely to
receive, and perhaps this would be the most appropriate way of
disposing of a collection of studies on esoterica?
LCook