Japonica Humboldtiana 21 (2019) (original) (raw)

The Bronze Age of Japanese Poetry: The Surge of Modern Verse in The Meiji—Taisho—Early Showa Period.

The Bronze Age of Japanese Poetry: The Surge of Modern Verse in The Meiji—Taisho—Early Showa Period., 2015

The book, being the second part of the fundamental History of New Japanese Poetry, examines the developments in the realm of kindaishi and gendaishi verse of the Meiji – Taisho– early Showa period. The names of the great bards like Takamura Kotaro and Hagiwara Sakutaro, Nakano Shigeharu and Oguma Hideo, Murano Shiro and Nishiwaki Junzaburo , Miyoshi Tatsuji and Kaneko Mitsuharu are introduced along with the names of minor Japanese classics of the time. The concepts of the leading kindaishi and gendaishi schools analyzed in the monograph show the closest interaction of the Japanese authors with their counterparts in the West, which has resulted in the creative fusion of the indigenous and borrowed poetic traditions.The book is richly illustrated with portraits of the poets and lithographs by early modern artists.

How to Establish a Poetic School in Early Medieval Japan: Fujiwara no Shunzei's Man'yōshū Jidaikō

Monumenta Nipponica 74/2 , 2019

Fujiwara no Shunzei introduced his poetic school, the Mikohidari, to the waka world with the composition of his rst poetic commentary, Man’yōshū jidaikō. Shunzei intended the text to demonstrate his expertise on Man’yōshū, the earliest extant collection of Japanese poetry, which had started to attract greater attention in early medieval Japan. The text t into Shunzei’s larger agenda of taking over power in the poetic world from the Man’yōshū specialists of the Rokujō school, with which he had already been in open con ict. It helped him to promote his new school, which would later become the driving force behind waka development.

Popular music before the Meiji period

The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music, 2008

Hayaru, so the dictionary tells us, means to be popular, fashionable, in vogue. Often written with the ideographs 'to flow' and 'to go', this verb, properly conjugated and coupled to the noun uta (song), results in the expression hayari-uta: songs that 'go with the flow', in short, 'popular song'. 1 From around the seventeenth century, when the term came into common parlance, most Japanese differentiated hayari-uta from songs that seemed more resistant to change. Traditional, anonymously composed songs from the hinterland, today known as min'yi5 (folk song), represented one sort of permanence; aristocratic genres, especially those based on ancient, seemingly eternal Indian or Chinese tradition exemplified another. Between the peasant's timeless ditty and the courtier's time-honoured• chant lay hayari-uta: ephemeral strains and verses often identified with professions or sectors of society that the country bumpkin could not and the samurai would not fully know. No matter how one chooses to define such song, the emergence and growth of Japanese 'popular' culture has always been linked to transformations in the composition of the 'populace', especially to changes resulting from the growth and development of major cities. Gradual urbanization in many parts of the land can already be detected in an early age, but from the Edo (Tokugawa) period (1600-1868) the centralization of culture proceeded at breakneck speed. When the military government, the Tokugawa shogunate, decreed in the early seventeenth century that each province was to maintain only one castle, both warriors and commoners tended to move to the site of this fortress, which usually became the political and cultural hub of the area. The policy of' alternate attendance' (sankin ki5tai), requiring warrior lords and much of their administrative apparatus to spend every other year in the city of Edo (pre-modern Tokyo), meant both that much of the culture 1 The (undated) gloss hayaru of the ideographs 'to flow' and 'to go' appears already in a lyric of the twelfth-century popular song collection Ryojin hisho (see below; song no. 369 in Usuda and Shinma 1985), where it refers to Kyoto fashions.

Edo in the Manga World: Appare Jipangu! and Early Modern Japanese Literature

2019

of lower classes becoming official daimyô concubines. Although elevated by marriage, these woman were still beneath the daimyô and subject to their rules, reinforcing their lower status. Edo literature brought attention to the status of its characters, and the interactions of the characters mirrored the bakufu's intentions of the Edo hierarchy. These interactions were prominent in Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693). 43 In his work, Life of a Sensuous Man (Kôshoku Ichidai Otoko), written in 1682, a silver miner named Yumesuke and several of his friends form a relationship with Kazuraki, Kaoru, and Sanseki, three courtesans of the pleasure quarters, and one bears a son named Yonosuke. 44 When Yonosuke turns thirty-five, he falls in love with a courtesan named Yoshino and plans to marry her, but their "relationship greatly displeased Yonosuke's relatives." 45 Because she is a courtesan, Yonosuke's relatives "refused to meet him or recognize her as being in any way related to them." 46 Yonosuke and Yoshino's relationship, given their different classes, reflects the ideologies of the bakufu. As the son of a miner, Yonosuke would be either farmer or merchant class, and Yoshino is lower than him. Yoshino's occupation also added stigma to her personhood, and she is perceived as a lesser being by Yonosuke's relatives as a result. The lower one is in the hierarchy, the less human one is. Saikaku also wrote about how the samurai interacted with lower classes. In his book Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku Ôkagami) written in 1687, a samurai's son, Nagasaka Korin, becomes a servant to the samurai envoy Horikoshi Sakon, and the daimyô that Sakon serves under becomes increasingly infatuated with him. 47 Korin, however, does not reciprocate his master's feelings, as he loves "a man named Sôhachirô," and the two ultimately "pledged