2004.05

pmjs logs for May 2004. Total number of messages: 27

* kun vs. on (William Bodiford, Tom Dreitlein, Lewis Cook, Bob Leutner, Rokuo Tanaka, David Pollack)
* kun vs. on, and symposium reminder (Bernhard Scheid)
* Xuan-"The Grass of Forgetfulness"-"Wasuregusa" (Rokuo Tanaka)
* Any formal syntacticians out there? (Janick Wrona)
* Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas (Jonathan Dresner, Anthony Chambers, Lee Butler, Bob Leutner, Rose Bundy, Sarah Thal, Robert Borgen, Anthony Bryant, Mary Louise Nagata, Tom Conlan, Sybil Thornton)
* renga/renku translation to English (Dick Pettit, Cheryl Crowley, Rokuo Tanaka, David Cannell, Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen)
* Daruma Museum and Forum (Gabi Greve)
* Bulletin of Portuguese / Japanese Studies
* fans (Michelle Li)
* new members: Shayne Clarke, Dick Pettit, Catherine Roche, and Yoko Shibukawa.

Date: Sun, 02 May 2004 00:33:58 -0700
From: William Bodiford <bodif...@...a.edu>
Subject: Re: kun vs. on (WAS Jinno shotoki - thank you)

Dear List members:

***At 04/04/30, Lewis Cook wrote:
. . . . and hope this provokes continued discussion.

I also look forward to continued discussion. I might not post in response, though, as I am mostly off-line these days working on other matters. I do want to make one more comment, though.

The idea of manipulation here is no less than troubling than that of
"exploited" (if that means what I imagine, though I'd better wait to find
out). The presupposition seems to be that there is a usual sense of words
or passages from or against which manipulators (authors) deviate, and
indeed that there are specific techniques involved.

I do not understand what is so troubling here. It is a truism in religious hermeneutics, I think, that all reading (i.e., interpretations) of texts involves manipulation. There is an old saying in Biblical exegesis (which I do not have time to look up) that goes something like: "the literal murders the spirit." In other words, the goal of religious exegesis is to reveal the spiritual significance of words and sentences. This spiritual significance, almost by definition, deviates from the literal meaning of the text.

Chinese Buddhist developed various techniques (based on Sanskrit precedents) for manipulating the meaning of translated Buddhist scriptures. Many of these techniques are codified. Thus, for example (to use Japanese pronunciations), "kosho iron" highlights hidden differences between two statements that seem to be in agreement; "kokujitsu tsuron" forces two dissimilar statements into agreement; "kanri senhyo ron" affirms one part of a sentence while rejecting the overall context, and so forth. At least in the case of Chinese Buddhism we know about these techniques. We know their names and how they were used.

We lack similar information for Japan. Maede Eun discusses 3 techniques used in medieval Japan: "jikunshaku" = using strange kun translations to reinterpret kanji; "jizoshaku" = breaking kanji into their component parts and interpreting them figuratively (something that also is practiced in China); "tenshoshaku" = interpreting kanji as homophones (via either kun or on pronunciations) for other words. Kagamishima Genryu discusses many different techniques used by Dogen. For example, in Dogen's writings Chinese citations about future or potential are reinterpreted as present or actual; citations concerning temporally different items are reinterpreted as occurring simultaneously; citations making relative statements are reinterpreted as absolute statements; and Chinese metaphors or figurative citations are reinterpreted literally. The examples cited by Maeda and Kagamishima (and by other scholars), though, are based on a very small number of texts.

I wish to learn much more about premodern Japanese methods of interpreting Chinese texts. I read the comments of Andrew Goble, Thomas Howell, and Lewis Cook with interest. I hope other members of the list will share their knowledge as well.
________________________
William M. Bodiford (bodif...@...a.edu)
Phone: 310--206-8235; FAX 310--825-8808
Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures
290 Royce Hall; Box 951540
University of California (UCLA)
Los Angeles CA 90095--9515

Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 16:44:06 +0900

From: "tom dreitlein" <tdreitl...@...m.ocn.ne.jp>

Subject: Re: kun vs. on

A fair amount of information can be gleaned from setsuwa texts as to

how Chinese sources were read, by looking at how sentences and

vocabulary units were broken into pieces and rephrased when quoted in

non-kanbun environments. I read an interesting article on how the

Lotus Sutra was quoted in setsuwa and related texts, comparing examples

over time.

The author, Kobayashi Yoshinori, concludes that in moving from early

Heian up to the insei period <...>

I wonder if you have a reference handy for the article you mention? I'd like
to look into that.

Tom Dreitlein

Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 13:51:18 -0700

From: Thomas Howell <thowel...@...thlink.net>

Subject: Re: kun vs. on article

On 2004.5.2, at 12:44 AM, tom dreitlein wrote:

I wonder if you have a reference handy for the article you mention? I'd like

to look into that.

小林芳則、漢訳仏典の日本的受容；岩波講座－ー日本文学と仏教6、経典1994

(see similar article, 小林芳則、唐代説話の翻訳－－『金剛般若経集験記』の訓読について, in 日本の説話７、言葉と表現,11-74)

In case this Japanese doesnt come through, a transliteration:

Kobayashi Yoshinori, "Kanyaku butten no nihonteki juyou." In Iwanami kouza, Nihon bungaku to bukkyou 6, Kyouten(volume title) 1994

Another article which i haven't yet read,

Toudai setsuwa no honyaku, Kongou hannya kyou shuugenki no kundoku ni tsuite,

in Nihon no setsuwa 7, Kotoba to hyougen 1974 (Tokyo bijustsu shuppan)

I too would be interested in other references along these lines... Tom

Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 23:05:58 -0500

From: Bob Leutner <rleut...@...e.weeg.uiowa.edu>

Subject: Re: kun vs. on (WAS Jinno shotoki - thank you)

I don't think this is only a matter of religious hermeneutics. More largely

put, isn't the question of on vs. kun, and then "which kun?" really something

that slides over into the messy territory of translation? I am looking closely

at Bakin these days, and page after page encounter kanji strings with what look

for all the world like kun-yomi glosses but are really translations, either from

one kind or another of Chinese (echt Classical or vernacular--snippets of

Suikoden or other texts) or more problematically still, kanji strings that look

rather more like translations into Chinese of whatever Japanese words are

recorded in the "furigana."

Bob Leutner

Date: Mon, 3 May 2004 11:03:59 +0200

From: "Bernhard Scheid" <bernhard.sch...@...w.ac.at>

Subject: Re: kun vs. on, and symposium reminder

| ***At 04/04/30, Lewis Cook wrote:

| >. . . . and hope this provokes continued discussion.

I think the discussion has entered a state, which requires case studies

and in-depths analysis that not many colleagues are willing to develop

in the form of ephemeral e-mail comments. I would therefore like to take

this opportunity to remind you of our upcoming symposium on "The Culture

of Secrecy in Japanese Religion", from May 18-21 in Vienna, where we

will certainly address some of these problems as well.

For more information see:

http://www.oeaw.ac.at/ias/archiv/japan_symp04/program.htm

Best regards

Bernhard Scheid

Date: Mon, 03 May 2004 15:58:30 -1000 (HST)

From: Rokuo Tanaka <ro...@...aii.edu>

Subject: Re: kun vs. on

This may not be right source in question, but I am engrossed in turning

the pages of Kobayashi Yoshinori's _Zusetsu Nihon no Kanji_

(Tokyo:Taishukan, 1998, <www.taishukan.co.jp>) that covers the first

chapter: Introduction and dissemination of kanji to the final chapter: the

history of writing instruments. The fourth chapter deals with "kanbun

kundoku no ato wo tadoru: kunten no kufu to katakana no rekishi" (Tracing

the origin of kanbun kundoku: device of kunten and history of katakana).

The text is in a folio size, and Kobayashi provides photo plates in plenty

for comments as well as references for each chapter.

Rokuo Tanaka

Date: Wed, 5 May 2004 07:41:08 -0400

From: "Lewis Cook" <lc...@...thlink.net>

Subject: Re: kun vs. on (WAS Jinno shotoki - thank you)

William Bodiford recently wrote, in clarification:

I also look forward to continued discussion. I might not post in

response, though, as I am mostly off-line these days working on other

matters. I do want to make one more comment, though.

[in response to Lewis Cook, who had written:]

> The idea of manipulation here is no less than troubling than that of

>"exploited" (if that means what I imagine, though I'd better wait to find

>out). The presupposition seems to be that there is a usual sense of words

>or passages from or against which manipulators (authors) deviate, and

>indeed that there are specific techniques involved.

[returning to Bodiford:]

I do not understand what is so troubling here. It is a truism in

religious hermeneutics, I think, that all reading (i.e., interpretations)

of texts involves manipulation. There is an old saying in Biblical

exegesis (which I do not have time to look up) that goes something like:

"the literal murders the spirit." In other words, the goal of religious

exegesis is to reveal the spiritual significance of words and sentences.

This spiritual significance, almost by definition, deviates from the

literal meaning of the text.

The saying is a quotation from Paul in the New Testament:

"The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Corinthians, 3:6, thanks to google)

I don't think it would be fair to assert that this is proposed -- and my objection to 'manipulation' is not much more than this -- as a rationalization of deviance in interpretation of scripture. On the contrary, in the context, it seems clear that Paul is claiming that a true interpretation of the letter in question (in effect, the Old Testament) is _not_ a manipulation or deviation but a surpassing insight into the ultimate intentions of the authors (or Author). There is certainly something of a difference, however subtle.

I may be misreading (or overinterpreting), but what provoked my question was the suggestion, seemingly inevitable in the choice of the word "manipulation," that interpretations of scriptural or doctrinal texts which are not literal must entail a contrived deviation from a primitive and proper sense of which the re-interpreter was cognizant but wished to suppress or to overcome. I don't doubt that this kind of manipulation occurred frequently in the reinterpretation of translated Buddhist scriptures in Chinese and thence in Japanese. What I question is whether such re-interpretations were understood by the exegetes responsible to be manipulations rather than legitimate extrapolations of implicit allegorical meanings, for example. Forgive me if this sounds like hair-splitting, but I don't think it is a question to be glossed over.

Since you mention Biblical exegesis, take the familiar example of "The Song of Songs": to the uninitiated, this reads as a rather fleshly not to say erotic epithalamium, but it has for many centuries of course been interpreted as unadulterated allegory (of God's love of Israel, or of Christ's love of the church, depending on your tradition).

To call such an allegorical reading a manipulation would require the confident assumption that the exegetes involved knew perfectly well that the author(s) of the Song of Solomon had no such 'spiritual' or other intentions, and that the exegetes (re-interpreters) were just making this stuff up to explain away the inclusion of such a voluptuous poem among the Scriptures. Plausible as that assumption may seem to us modern pagans, I doubt if the translators of the King James version of the Bible, just for one example, would have allowed that they were 'manipulating' the text to arrive at their allegorical reading (clearly inscribed at the top of each page of the translation).

What I am suggesting, simply, is that -- for another example -- when medieval commentators on Isemonogatari performed the kinds of seemingly bizarre recombinant ("jizoshaku") interpretations of the graphemes "I-se" that they did (cf. some of the texts scrutinized in Susan Klein's seminal _Allegories of Desire_, which you mentioned earlier), however confidently we scholars or pagans dismiss these particular reinterpretations as manipulations (I am certainly ready to follow Prof. Klein in doing so, here), such instances do not give us a carte blanche to draw a universal equation between (a) the many kinds and degrees of medieval super-literal exegeses of scriptural text that yield such allegorical readings and (b) sheer, willful manipulation.

I am not merely trying to grind an axe. I take these to be real questions. Might it be, for Buddhists (and even for Buddhologists?), that the doctrine of 'upaya ,' qua universal solvent, could relieve a word or, more to the point, a concept such as 'manipulation' of any intentionalist burden, making it a neutral synonym for 'reinterpretation'? Much of the more extravagant (to pagan eyes) medieval commentary on Kokinshu, Isemonogatari, etc., would seem to depend, for its credibility, on such a premise. But how to tell?

Lewis Cook

Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 17:51:41 -0400

From: David Pollack <poll...@...l.rochester.edu>

Subject: Re: Edo kun vs. on

Thomas Howell wrote:

I recall reading a story by Ueda Akinari similar to this.My impression is that these Edo period texts have more a sense of self-conscious play and parody than one finds in the medieval. Exotic or obscure Chinese characters could be glossed with a simple furigana notation, such as "sakana." A rather fascinating device, as it left you reading "fish" in two wildly different ways. The substantial became evanescent, and vice versa.

The distinction between an author writing and a reader reading that story as we normally understand it gets blurred, since Akinari is reading a Chinese story, in that his reading takes the form of recopying or transcription. (The exotic Chinese characters came from a Chinese original story, or selections from several stories intermixed). Then the reader is, by choosing between main text and gloss, doing a kind of "writing" of a new story on top of Akinari's transcription. If this makes sense? A wonderful confusion of interpretations!

*************

Edo kanbun and the treatment of Chinese characters and texts and images in general during that period can best be considered as part of a continuum that included the sorts of problems and solutions encountered in earlier "serious" Buddhist texts. We don't even need to get into gesaku, though the disparity between the two languages and cultures, exacerbated by a relatively acute sense of temporal and spatial proximity, is obviously a major point of entry into geasku practice. As one obvious example, the eventual range of disparity between fo/butsu and hotoke, written with the same character, perhaps imparts a sense of the sorts of heuristic social practices required to define Japanese wine by Chinese bottles. The medieval Zen monk Gidou Shuushin once wrote of the transformation of the Chinese "Eight Views" of the Xiao and Xiang into their Japanese counterparts in Oumi in terms of honji-suijaku.

An example somewhat like that of Akinari's fish can be seen Bashou's allusion in "Nozarashi kikou" to an ancient Chinese plant:

"In the Long Month [i.e., the ninth lunar month], I returned to my family home. "The 'grass of forgetfulness'* had withered in the northern hall" [i.e., the poet's mother had died], and there no longer remained any trace of it. Everything had changed: my brother's hair had turned white, his brow wrinkled with age. 'Such is fate!' was all I could say. He opened a memorial pouch and said, 'Please pay your respects to this lock of our mother's white hair. Urashima may have had his treasure-box, but now your locks too have grown older.' For a time I wept."

te ni toraba kien Held in my hand it melts

namida zo atsuki -so hot! my tears-

aki no shimo this autumn frost.

[NKBZ 41: #86]

* 'The grass of forgetfulness' alludes to a poem in the Chinese Book of Odes (Shih ching #62, 'Po-hsi'):

Where can I find the grass of forgetfulness

To plant in the Northern Hall?

The antique Chinese character xuan, translated by Arthur Waley as "day-lily" [The Book of Songs (1962), p. 50], was glossed in China as "grass of forgetfulness" (wasuregusa), and a common Chinese variant form was also used in Japan to denote the Japanese plant - though whether the actual plant existed in Japan before the word in the canonical Chinese text created a cultural need for it is an interesting question (it occurs a few times in the Man'youshuu). Who knows what the "real" plant looked like, whether in ancient China or Edo Japan? The need for commentary suggest that even the Han dynasty Chinese didn't recognize it by its ancient name. Look up wasuregusa in botanical guides today and, sure enough, most books show the common old day-lily (yuri, hemerocallis), whose early-summer poetic associations according to the poetry handbooks would appear to have little to do with "autumn frost."

David Pollack

Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 16:14:48 -1000

From: Jonathan Dresner <dres...@...aii.edu>

Subject: Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas

This seems like a pretty basic kind of question for this list, I know, but I'm really, really torn on a couple of options for my Fall course, "Japan to 1600." I've usually taught "Japan to 1868" or some variation on that, but I finally got my department to allow me to break the sequence in three: to 1600, Tokugawa-Meiji, 20c-21c (I fell in love with this division at Berkeley, I admit). Now I have to come up with the books and syllabus for that first course, and I'm really struggling.

Usually I like to structure my courses with a textbook (which I disagree with routinely and publicly) some primary source readings (usually literary, particularly for this era), and then the students do outside projects which require them to do more scholarly reading (reviews of journal articles, lately). I've got a pretty good list of articles for students to read, present and review, but the books are driving me nutty.

Here's a few of the dilemmas:

Textbook: Hane v. Sansom? There's nothing that's up to date, that I'm aware of. Hane's "Premodern Japan" covers too much material and I never liked the writing. Sansom's first two volumes are perfect, chronologically, but it's a lot of reading and it's even more out of date than Hane.

Primary Readings: McCullough v. McCullough? I'm thinking about using either "Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology" supplemented with Seidensticker's abridged "Genji" or "Genji and Heike" supplemented with... well, I'm not sure what, though a Noh/Kyogen collection wouldn't be bad. Other good anthologies? I've used other sources before, like Murasaki's Diary and Yoshida Kenko's "Tsurezuregusa" and I've always wanted to assign Ury's "Tales of Times Now Past" but never quite had the nerve.

I'd like to assign a lot more, but my students really don't read quantity well. I'm planning to assign Berry's "Hideyoshi" for the conclusion of the course, and I'm toying with assigning Farris' "Population, Disease and Land" but I'm not sure that would work as well.

I'm entirely open to suggestions, syllabi, criticism....

Thanks,

Jonathan Dresner

Dept. of History

University of Hawai'i at Hilo

http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/~dresner

Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 22:53:05 -1000 (HST)

From: Rokuo Tanaka <ro...@...aii.edu>

Subject: Re: kun vs on in Edo literature

Kanji, upon importation from China, came into possession of a very limited

number of the ruling class and high raking priests only, then of

courtiers, aristocrats, and warriors, and further of the commoners as the

time went on. The diffusion of kanji among the commoners necessitated the

change of glosses (furigana) in both katakana and hiragana in a vernacular

style. The increased population of the literate stratum needed Japanese

language dictionaries. Thus, In Muromachi and Edo periods, the various

editions of dictionaries generally called "Setsuyoshu" were published

abundantly to meet the demand of the literati for writing and reading.

"Setsuyo" means, according to Kobayahsi Yoshinori, "shocchuu," or at any

time or always handy to look into the words, perhaps equivalent to

Iwanami's Kojien or Kokugo Jiten in our time.

In case of Bakin, he uses a feature of the Japanese writing system which

is characterized by parallel notation of Chinese characters and Japanese

glosses in syllabic scripts (furigana in katakana and hiragana), and takes

advantage of the help of then widely used encyclopedic dictionary

"Daikoeki Shinkaisei 'Dai Nippon Eitai Setsuyo Mujinzo' Shinso Ryoten."

This dictionary is considered to represent the orthographic standard of

the time of Bakin, Sanba, Ikku, and Akinari, et al., the popular writers

in the Edo period, and is, therefore, used as a window through which the

works of these writers can be read.

In this respect, a German scholar Guido Woldering in "Kummunikative und

expressive Graphie bei Takizawa Bakin (1767-1848" (Berlin, New York, Paris:

Peter Lang, 1998) analyzes Bakin's combination of kanji and furigana are

set relative to the standard of the Eitai Setsuyo, i.e. Bakin's seemingly

exceptional graphemic style is, indeed, normal over eighty percent of his

time.

Postulation that "the Edo period texts have more a sense of self-conscious

play and parody" is rather misleading.

Rokuo Tanaka

Date: Sun, 09 May 2004 23:48:20 -1000 (HST)

From: Rokuo Tanaka <ro...@...aii.edu>

Subject: Re: [pmjs] Xuan-"The Grass of Forgetfulness"-"Wasuregusa"

While I appreciate Arthur Waley's tremendous volumes of English

translations of Chinese and Japanese classical literature covering a wide

range of subjects, I feel not infrequently one or two words, phrases in

his translations to be bothersome and disagreeable. Being a non-native

speaker, I would not go as far as to say mistranslation nor inaccurate.

The "grass of forgetfulness" is a case in point. The word "forgetfulness"

is, according to the Webster's dictionary, the act or state of being

forgetful. To me it connotes carelessness, lazy, and the state of

pre-senile dementia (?!). The original Chinese word "xuan" or "xuan cao"

can be found in the kanji dictionary "Shuo wen Jie zi" (Setsumon

Kaiji), commonly called "Shuo wen" (Setsumon) edited by

the Late Han scholar Xu Shen (30?-124?) who defines xuan in another term

"wang you cao," "bo-yu-so" in Japanese. It means the grass that makes you

forget grief, sadness, melancholy, and care. Another encyclopedic dictionary

"Tai Ping Yu Lan" by Li Fang (925-996) cites four sources of xuan

including the last four lines from a poem no. 62 "Bo is Brave" in Guo feng

in the Mao Shi (Shi jing) as follows:

Where can I get a day-lily?

To plant behind the house?

All this longing for Bo

Can but bring me heart's pain

(The Book of Songs, tr. by Arthur Waley, Grove Press, 1996, p53)

"Behind the house" in the poem means "in the garden of the northern hall".

The northern hall, bei tang, or xuan tang (ken do), euphemizes the "residence

of a mother" for it being traditionally situated in the northern side of a

housing compound. The expression, then, turns to synonymize a "mother".

The legendary and superstitious custom in ancient China was that the mother

would plant xuan cao and pick its young leaves or flowers and eat them to

obtain the desired effect of forgetting sorrow, loneliness, and longing

after her husband who was deployed far away from home by the command of

the King as in the above poem.

The official name of xuan in Japan is "kan zo," "Yabu-kanzo," "No kanzo,

"Hime kanzo," or "Hama kanzo, and commonly called "wasuregusa." It is a

perennial plant that belongs to the family of Lily and grows wild. It is

not a fictitious plant. We can probably identify it, if pointed out in the

fields or mountains. Japanese version of the superstition attached to this

plant is slightly different from Chinese one: if you attach the wasuregusa

to you under-garment or wear it at the belt, all the troubles of heart-ache,

love-sickness, and loneliness would disappear and be forgotten.

Thus a poem by Otomo no Yakamoch in the Man'yoshu, Bk III No. 334

(NKBZ, 1971, p.233):

Wasuregusa On my sleeve I pin the day lily--

Waga himo ni tsuku "grass of forgetfulness"-

Kaguyama no so that somehow I may forget

Furinish sato wo my old village of Asuka

by Kaguyama. by Kagu Hill.

(tr. I. H. Levy. The Ten Thousand Leaves (Princeton UP, 1981, p185)

It seems that Levy follows suit to Waley's translation of the

wasuregusa.

Two love poems in the Kokin Waka Shu Bk XV, Love 5, Nos. 801 & 802 (NKBZ,

1971, p.307):

Minamoto no Muneyuki

Wasuregusa I wish

kare mo ya suruto frost would lie

Tsure mo naki Upon her heartless heart

Hito no kokoro ni That the wasure-gusa

Shimo wa okanamu. Might depart.

Priest Sosei

Wasuregusa I wondered then

Nanioka tane to What was the seed

Omoishi wa Of the wasure-gusa;

Tsurenaki hito no And now I see it is, indeed,

Kokoro nari keri. The heart, a heartless woman has.

(tr. T. Wakameda. Early Japanese Poets (UK: The Eastern Prs, 1922, P.181)

Kino Tsurayuki, Izumi Shikibu, and Fujiwara no Kinto composed a poem

with the topic of the wasuregusa.

Murasaki Shikibu uses this word wasuregusa in The Tale of Genji, Suma,

Yadorigi, and Ukifune Chapters. In the Suma, Murasaki misses Genji in Suma

keenly and ponders..."hitasura yo ni nakunarinamu ha iwamu kata nakute, yo

yo 'wasuregusa' mo oiyasuram..." (NKBZ v. 13, p.182). To which Royall

Tyler translates "If he really had no longer been among the living, that

would have been that, and she might have begun to 'forget', but..."

(Volume One, p. Suma 241) I will make no comment on this.

In the Nozarashi Kiko, Basho laments and mourns the death

(withered wasuregusa) of his mother (the northern hall). Although the

kigo (season word) for the wasuregusa is summer (Kaneko Tota. Gendai Haiku

Saijiki. Tokyo: Chikuma Shuhansha, 1998), the kigo in this case is

irrelevant to "Autumn frost" in Basho's haiku.

Lastly, One more haiku by Basho in the Edo Ja no Sushi (1679) that reads:

Wasuregusa It is the end of the Year,

Nameshi ni tsumamu Let's gather Wasuregusa

Toshi no kure For herbal cooked rice.

This haiku provokes us to think of the "Bo-nen-kai" to

forget our hustle-bustle days in the month of December.

Rokuo Tanaka

On Thu, 6 May 2004, David Pollack wrote:

An example somewhat like that of Akinari's fish can be seen Bashou's allusion in "Nozarashi kikou" to an ancient Chinese plant:

* 'The grass of forgetfulness' alludes to a poem in the Chinese Book of Odes (Shih ching #62,

'Po-hsi'):

Where can I find the grass of forgetfulness

To plant in the Northern Hall?

Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 12:02:36 +0000

From: Anthony Chambers <anthony.chamb...@....edu>

Subject: Re: [pmjs] Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas

Haruo Shirane's anthology of Japanese literature up to 1600 (Columbia

University Press) should be out before too long, but maybe not in time for the

fall semester.

Jonathan Dresner wrote:

This seems like a pretty basic kind of question for this list, I know, but

I'm really, really torn on a couple of options for my Fall course, "Japan

to 1600."

< ...>

Primary Readings: McCullough v. McCullough? I'm thinking about using either

"Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology" supplemented with Seidensticker's

abridged "Genji" or "Genji and Heike" supplemented with... well, I'm not

sure what, though a Noh/Kyogen collection wouldn't be bad. Other good

anthologies? I've used other sources before, like Murasaki's Diary and

Yoshida Kenko's "Tsurezuregusa" and I've always wanted to assign Ury's

"Tales of Times Now Past" but never quite had the nerve.

Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 20:32:31 -0600

From: Lee Butler <lee_but...@....edu>

Subject: Re: [pmjs] Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas

Instead of Hane or Sansom, I'd suggest that you use Souyri, The World Turned Upside Down. It doesn't cover the ancient period, but it covers a wide swath from late Heian until Nobunaga. And you'll find it interesting, instead of painful like Hane and Sansom. Among the monographs that I've used in the past with good success are Farris, Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures, Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane, and Collcut, Five Mountains (the second half).

Lee Butler

Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 22:28:08 -0500

From: Bob Leutner <rleut...@...e.weeg.uiowa.edu>

Subject: Re: Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas

Can someone post a TOC for the anthology? Or is it generally out there on the

web already, or on the Columbia site, and I have just been my usual sluggardly

self?

TIA,

Bob Leutner

Quoting Anthony Chambers <anthony.chamb...@....edu>:

Haruo Shirane's anthology of Japanese literature up to 1600 (Columbia

University Press) should be out before too long, but maybe not in time for

the fall semester.

Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 07:54:51 -0400

From: Rose Bundy <bu...@...o.edu>

Subject: Re: Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas

The Shirane EARLY MODERN (1600-1900) anthology is also available An extremely comprehensive collection. It's pricey, but my Tokugawa lit in trans. students point out that it would have been no more than the total amount for the 5 books I assigned. (Shirane's anthology has excerpts of some works that I wanted students to read the bulk of.

R. Bundy

Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 15:51:04 -0000

From: Sarah Thal <t...@...e.edu>

Subject: Re: Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas

I wholeheartedly agree with Lee. The Souyri is wonderful. While I haven't yet

assigned it, students have been fascinated by lectures I've given based on

material from the book.

Students also love Farris' Sacred Texts and Buried Treasures, especially the

way he demonstrates the relevance today of these debates about the past.

In addition, I would suggest Mary Elizabeth Berry's The Culture of Civil War

in Kyoto. While underclassmen especially need a bit of help pinpointing her

argument, all are intrigued by the part on tea. When combined with a

demonstration of the tea ceremony, for instance, her work prompts great

debate and discussion.

Students rave about Conrad Totman's History of Japan, especially the way it

makes them rethink connections between the use of resources and history. They

complain, however, that the organization makes basic chronology a bit

confusing. For your course, since the book extends all the way to today, it

is probably not a viable option. I felt bad enough assigning this text for a

course ending in 1800; for one ending in 1600, it's even less appropriate.

You might consider some excerpts, however.

Best of luck with the planning,

Sarah Thal

Department of History

Rice University

Houston, TX 77005-1892

Lee Butler <lee_but...@....edu> said:

Instead of Hane or Sansom, I'd suggest that you use Souyri, The World

Turned Upside Down. It doesn't cover the ancient period, but it covers

a wide swath from late Heian until Nobunaga.

Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 11:06:10 -0700

From: Robert Borgen <rbor...@...avis.edu>

Subject: Re: Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas

I was perversely pleased to see this question posted, as I had thought I might be the only person who teaches a Japanese history course that stops at 1600 and has discovered amazingly few books on the period suitable for use in the American undergraduate classroom. Since I must plead guilty to having assigned my own book, I was also pleased to see that someone else is also using it. Incidentally, I had heard that it had gone out of print, but apparently I was wrong. The University of Hawaii Press website shows it as available for $20.00, $5.00 less than the price shown on Amazon.com!

One book I have used is Hall's old "Government and Local Power," in its reasonably priced edition from Michigan's Center for Japanese Studies. Yes, it is out of date, but my undergraduates never notice. I continue to like the way Hall combines a case study of Bizen with an overview of Japanese history that runs only a little past the cutoff date for my course. Although the overview focuses almost exclusively on old-fashioned political and economic history, it more thoughtful than Hane and less dated than Sansom. I've tried the Grossberg's "Japan's Renaissance", reprinted by Cornell, which has the merit of brevity, much appreciated by my students. The next time I offer my course, I'm thinking of trying Adolphson's "The Gates of Power." It touches upon warfare, a subject that, alas, seems to fascinate many of my students--"The Last Samurai" and all that--and chapters have good introductions and conclusions that ought to help students keep track of things. Batten's "Ends of Japan" is thoughtful but not available in a paperback edition.

Proceeding to suggestions that may be more controversial, I avoid literary works in my early history course, although I do use them in my "all of Japanese history in 10 weeks" course. Whereas the latter is designed to attract a wide audience, the former is intended for students with a serious interest in either history or Japan. Such students should be discouraged from treating "Genji" and "The Pillow Book" as our best sources for understanding Heian history or "Heike" as all they need to know about warrior culture. I teach those works in my literature course, where I make a point of including Ury's "Tales of Times Now Past" precisely because it presents a less rarified, more cosmopolitan view of Heian culture.

To give my history students a first-hand look at early Japan, I have tried both David Lu's "Japan: A Documentary History" (vol. 1) and the new version of Columbia's "Sources," although I have reservations about both. The former is presented as a revised version of Lu's earlier document collection, published in 1974. Although I don't have a handy copy of that, the revisions appear to be modest. There is no bibliography, but a quick glance at the footnotes did not reveal anything published after 1970, and attentive readers will easily spot questionable interpretations. Lu, after all, is a modernist, and so I assume he put most of his energy into updating the second volume of his documentary history. Despite my reservations, I like Lu's inclusion of a wide variety of sources, ranging from poetry to law codes to religious treatises. Columbia's "Sources" is of higher quality, but it is narrower in its choice of documents. Although it does include, for example, excerpts from law codes not found in the first edition, its focus remains on intellectual history, with a lot of material on Buddhist thought. When I teach the course next time, I may give in and spend more time talking about Buddhism. Alternatively, since I'm not a Buddhologist, I may reluctantly give Lu another try.

I hope this query will attract more replies, since I too regularly struggle to find materials suitable for my undergraduates and would be very interested in learning from the experience of others.

Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 18:14:07 -0500

From: "Anthony J. Bryant" <ajbry...@...iana.edu>

Subject: Re: Premodern Japan Course Design Dilemmas

Here at IU, we used to use "Hired Swords," "Warlord, Artist, and Commoner," "Deus Destroyed," "Warrior Rule in Japan," and "Edo and Paris" when Prof. Elisonas was teaching the premod class. (Yes, all of them. It was more reading than most of the students seemed to want to do, but the books and their application really worked.) I don't know what is being used now that Prof. Keirstead is teaching the course.

Tony

Anthony J. Bryant

Website: http://www.sengokudaimyo.com

Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 22:56:02 -0500

From: Bob Leutner <rleut...@...e.weeg.uiowa.edu>

Subject: Re: kun vs on in Edo literature

I very much welcome Rokuo Tanaka's post. I am in the thick of translating

Yumiharizuki, but consider myself a novice in the realm of Bakin text

scholarship. The two things are, of course, not at odds--once you get to know

him, Bakin is a pretty easy read, which is itself an important point.

I have until now rather unthoughtfully marveled at the peculiarities of Bakin's

parallel glosses, attributing them on the fly variously to his show-off

tendencies, to his didactic impulses, even to a simple perverseness. It had not

occurred to me that he was actually writing in a local orthodox tradition well

supported by dictionaries/setsuyoshu--though it took anly a quick Google cruise to remind me of how rich the setsuyoshu realm is. That is actually a very

different take from what had been my lazy guess that Bakin's orthography is a

hodgepodge of pseudo-scholarship as authenticating device plus some variation on ideas of "gesaku."

Bob Leutner

Quoting Rokuo Tanaka <ro...@...aii.edu>: