W. G. Aston, Japanese Studies, and the Heike Monogatari
M.G.Watson
Scholar of Japanese literature, student of Shinto and pioneer of Japanese
linguistics, William George Aston (1841-1911) is one of the towering figures
of early Japanology in the West. His publications, like those of Sir Ernest
Satow and Basil Hall Chamberlain, introduced the country and its civilization
to the English-speaking world at the time. While some of his scholarly work
has inevitably dated and has no more than historical interest today, much
has proved of lasting value.
This paper was stimulated by reading the annotations Aston wrote in the
margin of his copy of Heike monogatari •½‰Æ•¨Œê, The Tale of the
Heike. The seventeenth-century edition is now in Cambridge University
Library which houses more than nine thousand volumes once owned by Aston.
Many show signs of his use, for in the last twenty years of his life they
were the working library of a scholar with access to almost no other Japanese
resources.
Aston's jottings are not perhaps of great importance in themselves, but
they do give a fascinating insight into the working methods of a early student
of Japanese literature. They illustrate the problems involved in reading
an early text in a faulty and unannotated edition, without the reference
books and commentaries available to the modern scholar. Comparison of Aston's
annotations with the original text and modern commentaries have revealed
surprisingly few real mistakes, but there are many points of interest in
terms of emphasis and interpretation. [...]
International and Regional Studies 10, Meiji Gakuin Review 509
(February 1993): 25-43. For an offprint of this article please contact:
Michael Watson, Faculty of International Studies, Meiji Gakuin University,1518
Kamikurata-cho, Totsuka-ku, Yokohama 244, Japan