著者

MEADE Ruselle

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.34, pp.113-137, 2019-12

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Juveniles were the foremost target of attempts to transform the Japanese people into imperial subjects during the late nineteenth century, with prominent intellectuals marshalling the influence of mass media in support of this goal. This essay examines the case of Shōnen’en (1888–1895), Japan’s first major juvenile magazine, exploring its use of science in shaping the identity of the modern imperial subject. With the turn to morals-driven education in the mid-Meiji period, the government sidelined science instruction in schools, considering it a Western import detrimental to developing loyalty to the emperor. However, at this time, Shōnen’en’s editor placed great emphasis on science, believing it to be not only compatible with, but also an important means of nurturing juvenile subjecthood. Drawing on an image of science that had taken shape during the eighteenth century, when scientific discovery came to be seen as an endeavor requiring both intellectual and physical prowess, Shōnen’en (Youth’s garden) offered Japanese adolescents an imaginary landscape in which they could envisage themselves as heroic and truth-seeking imperial officers. This examination of a magazine published before Japan’s modern international wars broadens our understanding of the role of science in mid-Meiji Japan by demonstrating how an influential publication used science to shape the identity of the modern imperial subject, and shows that these efforts predated the establishment of Japan’s formal empire.

著者

CARTER Caleb

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.151-176, 2022-12

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The Shugen Ichijitsu Reisō Shintō mikki is an origin account for a religious lineage constructed at Mount Togakushi (present-day Nagano Prefecture) in the early eighteenth century. In addition to providing a fascinating glimpse into thought, practice, and politics at this site at the time, the account offers a lucid example of four contingent features of religious culture in early modern Japan. The first, and well-known among scholars, is the hybrid nature of religious life before the Meiji era, evident in the text's indulgent synthesis of Shinto, Shugendō, and Buddhism. At a time when nativist (kokugaku) doctrines were on the rise, this work reveals that combinatory discourse remained alive and well. Second is the rapid growth of Shinto and Shugendō into new regions during the Edo period—a geographical development that belies modern, nation-centered assumptions about either. Third, this spread was enabled through site-based narratives that wove imported trends into local histories, thereby legitimizing their presence at these new places. Finally, such narratives reflect a growing appetite among the lay public to visit and mingle with the intoxicating mix of gods, mythological imprints, and legendary figures reported in them.

著者

SCREECH Timon

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.36, pp.5-32, 2022-02

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Hokusai's print known as the Great Wave, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji, is among the most recognized works of art worldwide. Prior scholarship has addressed its production, circulation, and extensive afterlife. This paper, by contrast, enquires into what the subject actually means. Why did Hokusai make a representation of vessels in heavy seas, with a sacred mountain behind them? I question what Hokusai might have wanted to impart, and where his visual conceptualization could have come from. In this iconographic investigation, the argument will be made for the Great Wave being best understood in terms of Dutch maritime disaster painting. Such works were theological, offering the terror of death averted by some external divine intervention. Several examples were brought to Japan during the Edo period. It would not have seemed odd to Japanese viewers that ships were capable of supporting symbolic meanings. At the same time, there is no previous example of an independent Japanese depiction of ships in distress. Furthermore, Mt. Fuji offered precisely the promise of safety, its name punning on "no death."

著者

TOMASI Massimiliano

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.36, pp.111-138, 2022-02

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Dazai Osamu's literature is replete with Biblical references and Christian motifs. The Anglophone scholarly community has, however, traditionally dismissed the importance of Christianity in his work, calling it "disconcerting," "confused," and "obvious." This study is concerned with how Dazai interfaced with the Christian religion and whether it is true that—to put it in one scholar's words—that interface "failed to give his works the additional depth he sought." The purpose of the study is twofold: 1) to address the current paucity of scholarship on this topic among researchers overseas and provide a long-overdue analysis of Dazai's interaction with Christianity, and 2) to offer evidence that the modalities of that interaction were deeply rooted in the Meiji Christian experience and as such a development consistent with the outcomes of that legacy. The significant similarities between Dazai and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke in terms of their fictional representation of fate and the Christian God, and an early infatuation with Uchimura Kanzō's works, demonstrate Dazai's own exposure to those ideas, reaffirming the need to reinterpret his religious discourse vis-à-vis earlier developments.

著者

NEARY Ian

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.206-208, 2022-12

著者

WALLACE Corey

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.226-228, 2022-12

著者

DAHL Shayne A. P.

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.36, pp.167-169, 2022-02

著者

GERHART Karen M.

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.31, pp.3-24, 2017

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Uesugi Kiyoko (1270–1342) was the mother of the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate, Takauji (1305–1358), and his brother and chief administrator, Tadayoshi (1306–1352). Although Kiyoko lived within the vortex of a new political order that was being formed by her politically important sons in the early decades of the fourteenth century, little is known about her. Hers is a story not easily told: because information about her is so fragmentary, no monograph or even a single article in English or Japanese has been published about her life. In this essay, I seek to reconstruct the life of Uesugi Kiyoko through an examination of written records by contemporary diarists, personal letters, and poetry written by Kiyoko herself, and a number of physical sites relating to her life. The result is a nuanced picture of an educated woman who wrote letters and poetry, wielded significant land stipends in her own interests, and helped her two sons work together for political gain.

著者

SATHER Jeremy A.

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.29, pp.39-68, 2017-03-17

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This translation and analysis of Imagawa Ryōshun’s Nan Taiheiki examines the events that led him to write the work, namely his dismissal from the office of Kyūshū tandai and his subsequent participation in the Ōei Disturbance. After the rebellion ended in failure, he spent the rest of his life writing and critiquing literature. Nan Taiheiki, written around 1402, was a product of this period and of his rancor toward the Ashikaga chieftain Yoshimitsu. While the original Nan Taiheiki has no chapters or section headings, a close examination reveals three fundamental concerns. First, a focus on the Ashikaga’s status as a collateral family of the Minamoto, which gave them a near divine right to lordship. In order to protect his family from “becoming lowly people without name or rank,” Ryōshun asserts his family’s loyalty to the Ashikaga, in the process laying the groundwork for his criticism of Yoshimitsu later in the work. Second, a repudiation of Taiheiki, not for its overall storyline, but for its omission of the deeds of families that had participated in the Ashikaga’s rise to power, most notably his own. And last, a criticism of Yoshimitsu, whose maladministration led to Ryōshun’s dismissal from the office of tandai. Importantly, his criticism is of Yoshimitsu the individual, not of the Ashikaga family; a large part of Nan Taiheiki is meant to demonstrate Yoshimitsu’s unworthiness as a ruler and to cast Ryōshun’s participation in the Ōei Disturbance as the act of a loyal follower of the Ashikaga. Accordingly, I show that Nan Taiheiki, which Ryōshun did not even title, has been misinterpreted: its criticism of Taiheiki is but one of several aspects of the text, all of which are tied together by Ryōshun’s need to protect his family’s legacy and criticize Yoshimitsu, who he considered the architect of his downfall.

著者

HENDRY Joy

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.32, pp.208-210, 2019

著者

ROTS Aike P.

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.30, pp.179-205, 2017-07-24

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This article analyzes contemporary Shinto ideology in the light of recent theories on the formation of the category “secular” and on secularization. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s discussion of the original meaning of the categories “religious” and “secular,” as well as the work of Kuroda Toshio and others, it suggests that premodern shrine worship may have been perceived as the “immanent,” “this-worldly” counterpart of a more transcendentally oriented monastic Buddhism. In the Meiji period, Shinto developed into a modern Japanese “immanent frame” (or “Shinto secular,” as Josephson has called it)—a public, collective, non-optional frame of reference— while Buddhism, Christianity, and “new religions” were configured as “religious,” that is, private and optional. Contemporary Shinto leaders such as Tanaka Tsunekiyo and Sonoda Minoru draw upon such Meiji-period understandings of Shinto as the immanent, foundational framework by which Japanese culture and society are shaped and conditioned. According to them, Shinto should not be subject to the same legal restrictions as other religions, as it is an essentially public tradition uniting communities (kyōdōtai) around their shared sacred center, the shrine grove (chinju no mori). As this article demonstrates, these authors actively contribute to Shinto’s discursive secularization: they seek to dissociate Shinto from “religion,” instead framing it as Japan’s underlying “traditional culture” (dentō bunka). Rather than challenging the postwar legal state apparatus and separation of religion and state, therefore, they seek to renegotiate Shinto’s position within this apparatus, asserting its role as a “secular” worship tradition concerned with the common good of the nation as a whole.

著者

PUGLIESE Giulio

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.32, pp.228-229, 2019

著者

GARCIA RODRIGUEZ Amaury A.

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies / SPECIAL ISSUE : Shunga: Sex and Humor in Japanese Art and Literature (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.26, pp.137-149, 2013-01-01

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In 1911 the journals and fierce enemy of censorship, Miyatake Gaikotsu 宮武外骨 (1867-1955), rescued some old references about the publication ban, in 1723, of a purportedly erotic sequel to the book Hyakunin joro shina sadame, by the famous Kyoto artist Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1750). Those references apparently turn this book into one of the first and rare examples of direct Edo period prohibition of sexually explicit material. Miyatake explores some other important cases in his Hikka shi 筆禍史. Yet, despite the many years that have passed since 1911, until now thisparticular episode has been dismissed, probably because of issues with credibility regarding Miyatake himself and the uncertainties about the existence of copies of the erotic book in question.

著者

IVINGS Steven

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.187-189, 2022-12

著者

PAN Mengfei

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.123-150, 2022-12

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This article examines a case of community mapping in the late Meiji period to illustrate how a cartographic work represented a symbolic community centered around the neighborhood of Negishi in Tokyo. It focuses on the Tōkyō Shitaya Negishi oyobi kinbō-zu, a map compiled by the Negishi Club in 1900, and investigates the symbolic community surrounding it. The Negishi Club was a group of local residents established by the lexicographer and linguist Ōtsuki Fumihiko in 1899. Previous studies of historical cartography have paid attention to how maps served political authorities or helped forge the nation. This case is useful in illuminating the dynamic production of place at another scale, that of the community itself. The article argues that the mapping conducted by these mapmakers-cum-residents not only reflected their interest in local history, but also their cognitive and sentimental images of the Negishi community and alternative social values. During the course of their community mapping, a symbolic community took form, and a local place became the symbolic referent. It thus shows how the symbolism of community mapping contributed to the reinvention of the local place and the identity of its members. The article adds to our understanding of the production of place in Japan in the late Meiji period. More broadly, it refines the concept of community mapping by elucidating the symbolic aspects of community and its historical validity.

著者

SAKURAI Ryōta

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.101-122, 2022-12

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The tension between remembering and narrating war memories has been a significant theme in the discussion of postwar Japanese literature because it is closely tied to the broader issue of historical consciousness (rekishi ninshiki mondai) in postwar Japan. This article focuses on the postwar fiction of Shimao Toshio (1917-1986), whose work was shaped by his tokkōtai (special attack force) experience in the Asia-Pacific War. The article argues that the memory of imperial Japan forms an overarching thematic thread in Shimao's postwar fiction. The author engaged with this theme by employing Christian motifs in his work. While his early fiction tends to mask the memory of imperial Japan's violence, his later novels, culminating with his best-known fictional work, Shi no toge (The Sting of Death, 1977), uses such imagery to deal with the traumatic past, exploring the possibility of a restorative approach in dealing with past failures and their consequences. In this way, Shimao goes beyond the dynamics of victim-victimizer, providing a key illustration of the ways in which the traumatic memory of modern Japan can be transformed into a resource for the regeneration of society.

著者

LECA Radu

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.77-100, 2022-12

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This article investigates the characteristics of scribal culture in early modern Japan and its relationship to print culture. I focus on the intersections between the activity of Ihara Saikaku and the representative scribal format of the handscroll. In his artistic production, Saikaku engaged with all aspects of handscrolls: their materiality, production, use, and social significance. I analyze Saikaku's works from two complementary perspectives that structure this study: as meta-textual and visual references to the uses and meanings of scribal formats, and as artifacts with distinct material profiles. The article shows that the meaning and use of early modern texts were intertwined with the materiality, affordance, and social context of text-bearing artifacts. This was a dynamic and palimpsestic process: scribal formats preserved echoes of authority and cultural capital while accommodating contemporary usage. While making full use of the material connotations and established uses of the format, Saikaku negotiated and innovated its meanings. Saikaku can thus be reassessed as an astute practitioner of a range of scribal practices and a versatile producer of scribal artifacts who developed a side practice of commercial publishing. Saikaku's aesthetic identity emerged from within the scribal culture and aesthetic networks of his time. For a better understanding of the dynamics of this process, the history of early modern literature needs to be recentered on the relationship between various media.

著者

KAMEYAMA Mitsuhiro

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.51-75, 2022-12

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In this article, I will examine the engagement of two precept-upholding monks, Shaku Unshō and his disciple, Tanaka Seijun, with the notion of "Korean Buddhism." Disaffected by the decadence surrounding Japanese Buddhism, in 1906 Unshō and Seijun traveled to Korea, seeking an ideal Buddhism in what became Japan's new protectorate after the Russo-Japanese War. Existing scholarship on Japanese Buddhism has emphasized its disregard for the precepts. Meanwhile, post-World War II Korean Buddhists sought to reform Korean Buddhism by associating it with priests who observed monastic precepts. Japanese Buddhism and Korean Buddhism were therefore associated with breaking and adhering to the precepts, respectively, and the boundaries between them were discursively produced during Japan's colonization of Korea. The article both details the origins and complicates the simple contrast which is often drawn between these two Buddhisms. I argue that Unshō and Seijun used the idea of Buddhism's supposed degeneracy in Korea to redirect the criticism of their contemporaries in Japan. By the time of the Russo-Japanese War, the precept-oriented vision associated with Unshō, in particular, had made these priests object of deep skepticism in Japan, but Korea provided a new stage for the realization of their ideal Buddhism. Unshō and Seijun's deployment of narratives regarding reformation and regeneration around Buddhism demonstrates how modern religious dynamics in East Asia revolved around these precepts.

著者

SWIFT Philip

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.29-49, 2022-12

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The Japanese new religion, Mahikari, is known primarily for its practical technique of manual purification, okiyome. However, this article instead focuses on the program of practices that is regarded as being equally important in terms of its purificatory and salvific effects: that of engaging with revelatory teachings, a form of engagement that is often articulated in terms of the expression "sticking the teachings to the body" (oshie o mi ni tsukeru). I consider this particular idiom of attachment and the ways in which it is actualized in devotional practices, and I contend that this notion of somatic yet spiritual "sticking" acts as a conceptual corrective to overly internalizing models of religiosity. In conclusion, I suggest that while Helen Hardacre once proposed that "cosmology" was analytically restricting, and argued instead in favor of "worldview," the issue with regards to the role of embodied practice in Mahikari calls for a reconsideration of these analytical terms. Accordingly, the article ends by suggesting a turn away from "worldview," back towards the category of the cosmological.

著者

INAGA Shigemi

出版者

International Research Center for Japanese Studies

雑誌

Japan Review : Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (ISSN:09150986)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.37, pp.7-28, 2022-12

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This article engages with the notion of an aesthetic "chiasma" developed by the Japanese philosopher Imamichi Tomonobu in the 1960s. According to Imamichi, the nineteenth century saw an inversion of basic ideas associated with the artistic traditions of East and West. While in the East, the earlier dominance of expression was replaced by an emphasis on the importance of representation, for the West, the idea of mimesis-representation was superseded by a focus on expression. Imamichi's argument remain influential. Drawing on a series of philologically relevant reflections by several generations of scholars and artists, from Watanabe Kazan to Hashimoto Kansetsu, and situating them in relation to their Western and Chinese counterparts, this article clarifies the developments which occurred and the conflicts which emerged over the course of this interaction. In doing so, it demonstrates that Imamichi's notion of chiasma remains too restricted to capture the degree of exchange between the Eastern and Western aesthetic ideals taking place in modern Japan. The article concludes that Imamichi's chiasma was made possible by the awkward mapping of a pair of fundamental dualities associated with Eastern and Western thought onto one another, in a manner which reveals more about the geopolitical imperatives of the 1960s than the process of intellectual exchange itself.