Cultural History of Late Tokugawa Japan

thank you for joining us today and please join me in welcoming Professor Maxi good afternoon this is a much larger lecture hall than I'm used to occupying at ammer College where our average class size rages between 15 and 20 so um might take some getting used to here um it's a great honor and pleasure to be here at the MFA I never dreamed that would be giving a lecture at the Boston MFA I am not an art historian um and so I'm going to be using a great deal of images but I beg your kind of patience with me because I will be using these images to tell a story and tell a kind of historical story but I will not be capable of answering questions about genre technique materials and so on which are of course extremely interesting and important when we uh work with visual uh material so I beg you to kind of suspend that set of questions and maybe think about other kind of more historical questions what I hope to do today is to lay out in Broad brush Strokes emphasis on Broad um the context for the impressive print culture that we find in the first half of the 19th century in Japan and if you've seen the hookai exhibit already I think you know what I'm talking about it's Vivid it's varied it's extremely uh prolific um and in doing so I want to kind of combine a political story with a cultural story to kind of try to put hookai at the Terminus of a long kind of history that stretches approximately two and a half centuries and so to get us started I thought we would look at this detail from a painting it's not a woodblock print um by kutska shuno who was active in the latter half of the 18th century he is known as an ukio artist did woodblock prints as well but what we have here is a vignette a scene a seasonal scene of what is most likely a well-to-do merchant household we see the women and children of the house airing the books in the spring to make sure the worms don't eat them many uh early modern Texs in Japan are indeed worm eaten which can make uh historians weep when a crucial passage is no longer legible um and I think we can say a good number of things from this image quite apart from the very interesting composition and the technique that went into it but simply we see books were relatively abundant books were available and they were economical by late 18th century Japan and coming into the 19th century Japan and literacy was widespread enough that women could read at least women of a certain strata and above could read and that literacy was widespread enough that we see publishing as a commercial Enterprise and so the fact that they're engrossed in what they're reading suggests it was rather entertaining perhaps even rbbl in some ex um instances and so there's this question of where this came from where this literacy came from and where does it fit into the story of Tokugawa Japan so my object today is essentially I'm combining three separate lectures I usually given a course into one um might be tall order to pull off but to connect the iCal story um the kind of political economic and social infrastructure that allowed this print culture to arise and in doing so to answer a fairly large Riddle That confronts us when we look at Japan in the first half of the 19th century and the riddle is something along these lines the basic organization and structure of the Tokugawa polity was premised on discrimination segregation differentiation by region by status by occupation it was a society that in many ways would have mitigated against any sense of unity any sense of national identification and yet we see by the 1850s signs of what some historians call proton nationalism that there is a growing sense of cultural cohesion in the face of all of these structures of segregation and differentiation how did that come about that's the riddle and I think if we kind of follow the story here from a political origin into the burgeoning um explosion of urban commoner culture in Edo in the latter half of the tokuga period we'll get a better sense of where hokai fits into this larger story okay so with that let me kind of launch into the first third of it here if I can get this clicker to work no here we go um going back one great peace under Heaven this was the kind of key legitimizing phrase that the Tokugawa shunet used to justify its rule the basic bald fact that it had brought peace after a century of endemic Warfare they celebrated this they embraced this and easa the first Shogun was deified as the literally deified as the founder of this great peace under heaven so we see passages like this all the struggle and pain Lord yasu endured was to bring peace to all Japan therefore it is worthy of Celebration that bows and arrows are kept in bags swords in wooden cases that the shogun's men keep their armor in merchant storehouses means that Japan is now enjoying unprecedented peace the ultimate wish of toou this is the term for the Dei es has been realized you should not be sorrowful that swords and Bows rocked in Pawn houses thus the eth shun yoshimune answered one of his retainers whom he overheard deploring the fact that sedai were pawning their armor the Hundred Years 100 years or so into the tokuga era many like yoshima himself celebrated the fact that the shunet had ushered in this great peace under heaven and in truth the political order derived much of its legitimacy from the absence of warfare following a century of endemic Warfare from 16003 to 1867 the Japanese archipelago enjoyed one of the longest periods of uninterrupted peace in the world according to the sociologist Reinhardt Bend's calculation During the tokuga period France was at War for 115 years Britain was at War for 125 years Spain 160 Austria 130 Prussia 97 and Russia 147 this was a great piece under Heaven it's noteworthy that a poity that was organized as a permanent Garrison managed by a warrior estate putatively ever ready to go to war managed to produce such stability this is remarkable to understand the culture and the vibrant print culture that emerges from Japan we need to First understand where this stability came from and how it was designed what did it produce how did Tokugawa es and his descendants organized the archipelago into such a stable order in the past it was very common for historians especially Western historians to talk about Japan prior to 1867 as stagnant that this very stability and peace meant nothing happened um clearly this is not true you can just look at hookai prints and art and see Dynamic things happened the great peace under Heaven did not create stagnation it facilitated the basis for a remarkable remarkably Innovative and Urbane culture that was obsessed with new fashions and Commercial Innovations so this is kind of where we're going to start from we what did it look like politically what was the political map that yasu and his successors produced if we were to look at the archipelago as it was divided into the 68 provinces of the old Imperial State this is what it would look like these provinces though contined to be used in reference to General local in Japan were no longer the administrative organization of the archipelago by the time eosu took the title of Shogun in 1603 in fact I'm I'm going to show you a colorcoded map of the administrative or political boundaries of tokuga Japan next it's going to be chaotic the archipelago was divided into roughly 260 autonomous daal domains it was carved up into large in small units this was the political landscape of the Island until 1867 okay this was a carefully organized system however as chaotic as it looked Tokugawa asasa traded the concession of Dao autonomy within their own own domains with the demand for their absolute falty to the Shogun and so he moved them around he put the largest least trustworthy damel here colorcoded in Greens and blues to the periphery and he put the smaller most trustworthy dial coated in the warmer colors of orange red and pink around the core regions of the imperial capital the commercial city of Osaka and of course the shunet seat in Edo it was a very carefully arranged geopolitical order that allowed the Dao to remain Lords of their thiefs and yet subservient to the Shogun okay this is the Baku Han system the Baku for the shogun's government the Han for the daal's domains it was seemingly chaotic but surprisingly stable it was a system of counterbalances ESU was the largest the tokuga family was the largest landowner the largest Dao of them all and if you combined collateral houses and loyal Dao he had a preponderance of wealth and power to keep the other Dao in check however it doesn't really point to integration this is a this is a political order of Divergence different countries within one archipelago it is not one of Union to kind of complement this system this geopolitical Arrangement there was also a formalized status system in Tokugawa Japan this was an attempt to apply a neoc Confucian vision of social order to a diverse population to organize them according to occupation with the vision that as long as everybody fulfilled their duties and obligations of their status and only that the realm would remain in peace and in order and in ideal form it divided the population into roughly four groups the Warriors The Peasants The Artisans and the merchants and it was ideally hierarchical in this way the Warriors come first because they're willing to provide for peace and Justice at the the cost of their lives there is nothing more precious than being willing to spill your blood for the purpose of a greater good therefore they rule the peasants technically come second because they produce what everybody must have food no food no life then The Artisans they may produce frivolous things but they also produce things with their labor the merchants come last because they produce nothing they profit off the productive labor of others there is an implicit vision of Commerce and Merchants as parasites to this order now this was the ideal order it was never in reality quite this tidy and if I can give a little bit of Statistics here there were many other status distinctions and the principal distinction that really mattered was simply that between Samurai and commoners and these are the kind of sens of status of two domains from the middle of the 19th century to give you some sense of the ratio of the status groups the sum of I at most made up 8 to 9% of the total population they were a distinct minority the commoners made up up to 80% of the population and the rest was divided between clerics aristocracy the Imperial Court outcasts and other groups now what kind of society did this create it again created a society based on segregation and differentiation John Whitney Hall calls Tokugawa Society a container society as long as you knew which status container you fell in you knew what you had to do and who you were obliged to answer to but there were many many containers and so this is a society divided into multiple containers there was no legal category above a status group to unify everybody as Japanese there is no concept of citizenship there is no passport if somebody asks you who you were you would answer what your status was status was not cast however you were not determined your cast your status wasn't determined by Blood it was the occupation that you that you fulfilled so you could be born into a commoner household but if you married into a suedi house you would become suedi or if you were Simply Hired into a suedi household you could become samai now the whole order though was premised upon maintaining these containers so there were a lot of laws sumary laws in particular where you could live what you could wear what you could eat and so on was strictly restricted based on status okay so kimono for example wealthy merchants were not allowed to wear ostentatious embroidered kimono on the outside and if you ever get a chance to see examples of textiles and fashion from this period what you'll often see is incredibly lavish Linings of kimono because there they could spend the money there they could but status was supposed to restrain your Avenues of expression what you wore what you did what you consumed was supposed to reflect your status so for samai it was a very serious issue to keep up appearances you were obligated depending on the size of your fief and your income to have a certain number of retainers to travel with a certain Entre etc etc again this is a society that emphasizes difference and stability based on maintaining those differences it's hard to really see where we get cultural convergence from this system creating the the stable pieace however had unintended consequences and this is where the story gets interesting one unintended consequence was the rapid urbanization of the archipelago through the 7 Century into the 18th century every Dao was allowed to keep one Castle which meant almost all of the 260 domains had a castle town where the Dao lived and had his administrative headquarters all of the samai were required to move into these towns they did not live in the land and then you would have had a common or strata in every Castle Town servicing these samai and moreover these Castle towns and here's a kind of distribution of some of them and most of Japan's modern cities have Origins as Castle towns okay this is a lot of them will still have remnants if not entirely intact castles left over but these Castle towns then become connected to each other and how does that happen by the 1630s um this formalized system of alternate attendance is imposed upon the Dao it's a very ornate system um it's very smart um and it had tremendous unintended consequences on the culture and life on the Japanese archipelago every Dao was required to maintain a residence in Edo in fact most of them had two or three compounds in edel that was staffed by their retainers and their wives and their children were required to re reside permanently in Edo the Dao himself alternated one year one year between living in Edo and in his provincial domain he had to then travel between Edo and his castle town and he had to travel with a retinue pegged to the size of his domain so some of these retinues could reach up to 2300 retainers in one group traveling hundreds of miles across the archipelago this was an incredibly ingenious system by which the Tokugawa Shogun could hold hold the Dao's wives and heirs hostage but it was also a system by which they could impoverish the Dao by some estimates the total cost of maintaining compounds in edel and in his home Province and traveling in between would consume up to 2third of a Dial's income no chance for war if this is what you were spending your money on and that money went to good purposes it went to facilitate an incredibly sophisticated at and well-maintained network of Highways two of wh which are particularly famous the nakasendo and the too the tokaido highway linked Edo to the old imperial capital of Kyoto and along the way stations developed stations where a Dio's retinue could rest where they could hire new laborers and pack animals and so on and between Edo and Kyoto there were 53 stations and they become famous they become the topic of woodblock print series hosig 53 Stations of the Eastern Sea Highway for example and this print already gives us a hint of one of the unintended consequences of the alternate attendance system which to reemphasize is really geared primarily at just controlling the Dao but it facilitates movement it facilitates travel and it facilitates the movement not just of people and goods but of prints print culture so we come come back to this there was as a result of this great piece a significant peace dividend to Japan during the first half of the tokuga period we see a very steady increase in the population from roughly 12 to 13 million in the late 1500s to approximately 26 million um in the middle of the 18th century and then as you see it plateaus and the same thing happens with arable land Patty acreage which increases dramatically through the middle of the 18 century and then it plateaus they run out of land productivity continues to increase but the point here is by the end of the first century around the time yoshimune was telling his retainers it's okay if you're pawning your armor there was a great amount of affluence that had been generated as a result of the peace where did that affluence go what did it do well a great amount of that affluence traveled to Edo the seat of the shogun's house Edo was a interesting City it was created artificially it started off as a sleepy fishing Village when Esa simply chose it as his headquarters and built it up over the next 40 years it was built for the shogun's Garrison it was a garrison city and yet it goes on to become the largest city in the premodern world with an inhabitants of about 1 million by the end of the 17th century it's spatial Arrangement its spatial geography reflects the principles and the aims of the Tokugawa po okay what we see is a kind of concentric model this is the kind of multiple layers of Moes this is modern-day train lines in Tokyo if you were to ever visit but at the center is the Shogun seat and then it goes kind of in a spiral and at the close closest end of the Spiral are the most trusted di The Trusted retainers and then it moves out to Tokugawa retainers and then on the Outer Circle you have the less trustworthy Dao so the spatial Arrangement is again reflects the larger segregated geopolitical arrangement of the archipelago and the point I want to really emphasize here is where do the towns people go they don't really fit into much of this space the commoners are really entirely ancillary to the purpose of Edo they're just brought there to service the majority Samurai um and so the yamanote the Western kind of Highlands of the city are given over to Samurai Estates and it's the the shachi the downtown literally on the lower ends of the town along the sumida river where the commoners are crowded in and so there is a kind of spatial segregation that's built in here that separates the suai from the commoners hookai is a commoner right where is hookai going to emerge from this segregated space how does that work okay and one way we can see this is a distribution of surface area so the warrior districts from 1644 into 1865 they dominate the surface area of the city the commoners begin to expand somewhat but it never they never really overtake the fact that Edo was a suiz city when the shogunate is collapsing and they allow all the dial to go home they don't have to do alternate attendance anymore the city collapses and there is a tense period of 5 to S years after 1865 where it's not obvious that to Edo is going to survive as a city so dependent was it on the samurai it was as I mentioned a terribly large city 1 million people um and the wealth that congregated there had unintended consequences for the first half of the tokuga period the cultural products that were most prized in this city were things called Karim mono things that had come down from the old imperial capital of Kyoto textiles Ceramics tea implements and so on these old aristocratic culture things were prized because this is what the samai did this is what they did to emphasize their cultural capital amongst each other they watched no theater and so on so to this day the Japanese expression for things that are worthless is Kar which means something that doesn't come down right it didn't come from the capital therefore it's worthless okay this is not a space in which culture commoner culture has much audience this changes finally by the end of the 1600s when all that wealth has congregated into this city but before that I want to walk through some very Vivid images of the idealized space of Edo at its height and these are the Ed zuu which depict the city during the third shun yamit Reigns that's considered kind of the golden age and it's two sets a left and a right set of six panel screens and the left set kind of depict Edo to the north and Northeast a lot of hunting scenes and so on and we have Kani and uo so on but it's the right set that I'm particularly interested in the right six screens give us the castle in the center and then a large portion of the South and Southwest part of the city the castle was enormous I'm trying to find my proper quotes here the tenu the central keep was 58.4 M tall from the base of the stone wall to the ridge capping tiles the outer moat the circumference of the outer moat of the Edo Castle reached 15.7 kilomet it was an enormous edifice and a monument to the Tokugawa Shogun and you see the artists making very deliberate choices here to emphasize what this city was about we see retainers doing Marshal trainings retainers welcoming an imperial Envoy to the Shogun because of course the emperor comes to him not the other way around we see kind of the the Gilded Eaves of the administrative buildings inside the castle it is a fortress it is a palace it is an administrative headquarters we see diamel attending making their kind of trip from their Estates into the castle to see the Shogun and they include a scene of an embassy from the Korean Court celebrating the installation of a new Shogun again foreign powers pay homage to the Shogun it is about showing off the power and the centrality of the Samurai based political order here and as we move down in the scene we get to the daal Estates and these fantastically ornate gates with lacquered pillars and gilded uh lattice work and so on they were called hiim meaning you could live a day sitting in front of it and looking at all the day details these Gates were used for one purpose and one purpose only or when the Shogun visits you even the dial did not pass under these okay so you can kind of get some sense of the lavishness and the focus on this but as the scene moves down we get to Nashi Japan Bridge the central Terminus of the tokaido highway where the alternate attendance uh Revenue retinues would come in and we begin to see a different kind of City we begin to see commoners Commerce and here the artist is clearly trying to emphasize the wealth look at all the lumber look at all the rice we have population growth this is a wealthy City and it's supposed to reflect back onto the glory of the Shogun and in many ways it does but we also begin to see this is a space where the status groups mingle the commercial space is a place that in some sense threatens the Tidy differenti of status and occupation Commerce is the place where the idealized Tokugawa order begins to feel threatened undermined it is this Urban space that then spawns and attracts the wealth that will then fuel a new kind of cultural production that we're going to call toning culture urbaner culture this really kind of comes into its own During the genu period um the very end of the 17th century early 18th century cultural historians were often used to Shand gendu culture to talk about this many of the kind of cultural practices and products that we associate with kuga Japan come into their own at this point Kabuki theater haiku poetry bulu Puppet Theater the pleasure quarters the ukio woodblock prints these things all in some sense have their initial kind of flowering during the Genoa period perod what kind of culture was this and how does this then fit into the larger story we're trying to follow here of how do we get to hokai and how do we get to a cultural awareness of Japan as a unit in the face of a polity that's organized around segregation and differentiation I use the example of Kabuki and the pleasure quarters today Kabuki had a long history prior to the gendu period it started off as a fairly UNC form of female dance review type theater in on the Riverbanks in around kto it was often a Prelude to prostitution the authorities frowned upon this it then became young man Kabuki which is also a Prelude to prostitution they didn't like this either so they forbade young men from doing Kabuki and then it became its mature form Yaro Kabuki which is adult male Kabuki in which all the roles male and female were played by men and this was all an attempt by the authorities to keep it on the up and up virtuous but it was always something risque about Kabuki um this is an early kind of Kabuki review from the 17th century in kto by the time we get to the gendu period it has blossomed into an incredibly prominent attraction in the city of Tokyo Edo sorry um so this is the Theater District in edel um the theaters themselves were very ornate the stages were very sophisticated yet had rotating stages trap doors and so on and going to Kabuki was a tremendous investment of time and money you would rent a box Caterers would deliver boxed meals you would drink and you would watch a series of Kabuki plays over the course of a day the Kabuki actors El became the celebrities of the day so it's no surprise that when you walk through hookai exhibition here many of the ukio prince he he wrote he drew were of Kabuki actors male and female uh Specialists so if you were a uh actor who specialized in playing female roles that's all you played and you became famous as an unata and there was always again a whiff of Scandal about this the sensors shut down Kabuki theaters many times they did not like the clientele they did not like the content of the plays it was in some sense constantly undermining what the Tokugawa authorities thought the proper order of things should be rivaling the popul of Kabuki were the pleasure quarters there were always been pleasure quarters and in the eyes of the Tokugawa authorities these were unnecessary evil especially in a castle town like edel where the majority of the population weread and so initially these kind of pleasure quarters that involved different establishments um cortison houses meeting houses tea houses gesha houses and so on it was located originally within the boundary of edel proper this is the Moto Yoshi after the Great Fire of 1647 in which the main keep of the castle burnt down it was never rebuilt they move Yoshi outside of the city and they put it up the up the Sida River and they create the new Yoshi this was a moted community there was one way in and one way out this is a way of controlling the traffic but also to be very blunt a way of controlling the women um and so as I lay out the pleasure quarters I want to underscore that as idealized as it was then there is always an undercurrent of tragedy to it and the Tokugawa kind of artists the novelists and so on who WR wrote of the floating world of the Yoshi were often very sensitive to this undercurrent of tragedy in Yoshi nonetheless this is where we get the idea of ukio ukio originally meant in the medieval context a kind of Buddhist lament about a transient ephemeral world of suffering and so the Chinese character they used to represent ukio meant lament in the Tokugawa period as Edo becomes the of a vibrant Urban commoner culture and we have the pleasure quarters emerging they start using a different character for it a floating World which still retains that sense of ephemerality but it's also a place where you get to escape a suspends the constraints of polite Society it's a place to escape to and Little Wonder then that artistic representation very quickly latches on to the pleasure quarters um here from the late 17th century it's one of the earlier generation of uh multicolored woodblock print artists but what you see here is not a todry brothel right it's not explicitly or even primarily about the skin trade it is a place of elegant Amusement a place of elegant tastes where you would sit in a room with elegant calligraphy elegant music elegant verse elegant dance it's a place where you could feel feel whatever your birth if you had the money and the tastes you could feel you were part of aristocratic culture long last lost this was the floating world and you could access it with money and the commoners who had acquired wealth flocked to it they loved the floating world and so I want to emphasize its function as a place of Elegance but as a place that suspended the constraints of the proper order if you were a Samurai and you went to the pleasure quarters you had to check your sword at the door the markers of status were suspended within the floating world of the yoshiwara right many Samurai who did go they had to cover their faces they had to go Incognito because it was frowned upon to go to the pleasure districts Suzuki harunobu is again considered probably the early Master of the ukoha print and the cortis themselves become stars of their own right they become kind of rival to Kabuki actors as very famous individuals they are women of accomplishment okay and just to kind of clarify a basic question that many of you may have at this point the GHA is the musician the gesha is the performer g means art you are a person trained in a particular art the gesha is not the corisan she is not for sale it is the corisan who is for sale and like many things in this world of cultural production they loved ranks they like to create rankings and so the cortis are of course ranked at the very top you had the tou or the oang and then it goes all the way down to the Hashi right the terminology changes from time and place but the premise that when you enter the world of the floating world when you enter the pleasure quarters you're also entering a world of connoisseurship in which ranking matters right so here we have kind of Revel makers from a festival passing through the Central Avenue of the Yosh they're looking in on the cortis and we know that this is an oong the highest ranked corisan we know this from her hair we know this from the number of um ornaments in her hair and we also see her kind of colleague here she's writing a letter she's corresponding with her clients maybe even with a lover she was literate and she probably knew how to write in a very elegant script so to become a top ranked cortisen was to be a woman of considerable accomplishment okay right this it wasn't just a beauty contest it was also a contest of what you could do and so when a customer came to the pleasure District came to yoshiwara and was able to procure the attentions the service of a top ranked cortisen she would travel from her keeping house to a tea house where she would meet her client for a liaison and it would be she would prominade like this through the Central Avenue of the pleasure quarters it was ostentatious right it's very showy but it's also again emphasizing the point that this is a realm of sship so the the categories that emerge in the floating world of Kabuki and the pleasure quarters as iy and right you wanted to be iy you wanted to be a iy means you were fashionable you were up todate you wore your hair in a raish way you wore a really Dandy kimono a new print you wore your Obie just so and so on and you knew the what was what and to be a mean meant to be a connoisseur you had mastered the pleasure districts and in order to win the attentions of atisan you had to be a no matter how wealthy worth you if you were not a she would not meet you here is a customer nervously nervously waiting to be introduced to a cortisen in the pleasure District he is sitting below she is going to sit in the kamisa she is going to sit above him she has more cultural capital than him this is not simply about a skin trade this is something entirely different and here we have an amusing scene from a book in which a Unfaithful customer is being punished he is being crossdressed and being emasculated by the oan right here right she is how dare you go to her when I'm your cortisen okay these places then these commoner kind of floating world places were designated auo or bad places they were technically censored they were tolerated to a point but they were bad places what made them so bad why were they bad they were clearly attractive but they were bad they were bad because they threatened the political order they threatened segregation they threatened the hierarchy by which the elite Tokugawa Samurai tastes were better than the connoisseurship of the pleasure quarters they were threatening and yet they remained extremely alluring for that reason I want to give an example of a very famous Kabuki play called SKU and this is a kind of artist drawing um of the very famous scene in which our our protagonist soku dances in from the hanamichi the flower path leading to the main stage and this is a kind of replica of the scene at the Edo Tokyo Museum in Tokyo and you'll get some sense of how Kabuki theater Taps into the pleasure quarters and the bad places in the ukoh here it concerns three primary protagonists we have aaki and oang a cortis a top ranking cortisen she is in love with SKU who frequents the pleasure quarters they are lovers but she must still take customers and she is unhappy because they can't be together every night and one of her customers is this unsavory wealthy elderly Samurai um who named U who comes in and Slanders soku and she must bite her tongue and not fight back because he is a customer she receives a letter from sku's mother who is a Samurai and says You must throw my son out because he is supposed to be avenging his father's Honor by seeking out the man who killed him and yet he's spending every day in the pleasure quarters but she can't bear to cast him away well it turns out that the man who killed his father is EKU and SKU has to try to provoke him to draw his sword because the sword is what will prove that he is his father's killer and the play therefore revolves around honor Duty sentiment and love these tensions right and the crowds love this much of the literature and theater of this period of the commoners r revolves around the tension between gidy and ninjo giddy is the duty the social obligation which you must fulfill your obligation to your parents your father's business the honor of a sumedi household but ninjo is what you feel in your heart and this is the kind of principal value system that the commoners explored and enjoyed in the ukio not exactly what the Tokugawa State wants to celebrate and in fact one way in which we see the subversive nature of this is the popularity of Love suicides love suicides occurred and every time they happen the playwrights were quick to write theatrical versions of it so this is one of the most famous ones love suicides in amijima where it's an upright Merchant son and a corisan and their starcross love and the only way that they can satisfy both their Giddy and their ninjja is to die together and they do and it's a real te jerker and it's sold like pancakes one of the questions that I ask my students we read one of these plays and I say why is this a bestseller what's fun about this right but there's something cathartic apparently for the commoners to really celebrate this so what we see then here is to kind of wrap up the second third of the of the talk is this commoner culture that blossoms in the second half of the tokuga period seems at odds with in intention with official culture how does this then relate to a growing sense of cultural Unity so this the answer lies in print culture generally how are the kind of cultural ideals of urban commoners diffused what is the technology by which this happens and how might this allow us to understand why someone like hookai when he arrives in the latter half of the 19th century is able to tap into and facilitate a kind of what we might call a growing National vernacular a visual vernacular a literary vernacular movable type had been introduced to Japan but they very quickly abandoned this um in favor of wood carving um and wood kind of woodcarved printing um I'm trying to get to my place in my notes here um was very very efficient um with the book with one print they could make around 300 copies um they could then make another 500 copies off of it before having to recut the the wood wood blocks and so they were able to really begin to produce fairly large quantities of printed material by the latter half of the 17th century and the growing literacy of the archipelago clearly helped things hard literacy numbers are hard to come by in part because we have to deal with different kinds of literacy there is a literacy that allowed you to read classical Chinese and then there is a literacy that allowed you to read the kind of phonetic script and so there were different levels of literacy and if you add it all together we're talking maybe upwards of 40% of the population had some level of literacy by the early 19th century this is a fairly large uh audience and it was not restricted to the sumedi remember if it summed are no more than 10% that's the majority of the reading public are not suide they are commoners there are wealthy landowning peasants in the countryside who are literate their children are literate you have Urban commoners and Merchants who are literate and they're very interested in these books to give you some sense of the scale of these things um a new and reprinted titles in Tokyo I'm I'm sorry Edo by the early uh 19th century the total number of titles in print reached between 100,000 and 200,000 volumes okay that's a significant amount of textual material in circulation um book sellers expanded in 1814 there were 183 book sellers in kto and 17 rental libraries in Edo in 1808 there were 656 rental libraries so you didn't even have to buy the books you could pay a guy these guys walk the streets with a backpack of books and they pedal this print culture okay copyrights were established and so on so here we see a kind of early um block color at work to give you some sense of the basic technology here um one of the kind of Heroes of the print culture is a guy by the name of tayak who opens a Bookshop initially right outside the gates of yoshiwara he moves into Edo um and he serves as a kind of producer of text right it's these book sellers that commission the woodblocks they commission the woodblock artists like utamaro like hiros and so on and he puts out a lot of these kind of best-selling woodblock prints that disseminate widely during this period but there is this question of what's being print and here I'm kind of borrowing a great deal from uh Mary Elizabeth Barry from UC Berkeley who has a fantastic book called Japan in print and she's very interested in this question of what do we see in these books and what might what story might these books tell us so a lot of it was useful information okay this is a a page from a book in a military Mir mirror of the great forest from the early 18th century and what it is is a reference guide for all the Dao houses so if you are a wealthy Village headman in one of those station towns along the tokaido highway you needed this right because the dial retinue are going to come up and down your Highway and what this tells you is here's the the genealogy of the Dio and notice that the women don't get names right the girls are not named they we find out who they marry right but they don't get named so you have the genealogy so you know who the current head the current Lord is and here is his title his set of titles and this tells you the size of his domain these are the family crests and this is the most important piece of information these are the um jushi these are the cereem Al spearheads that will be at the Vanguard of the dial retinue so if you see the Vanguard and you look those up you know who's coming and you can prepare the proper reception befitting the status of that Diel it was to borrow again Mary Beth uh Berry's it was an Information Society people were extremely interested in consuming printed information so this is a surprisingly kind of modern and mundane kind of text from Edo it's a list of urban professionals doctors right you need a pediatrician these are the pediatricians you need a surgeon these are the surgeons okay print presses would print this stuff they would buy it right now one of the kind of more popular kind of compendia of information that emerges um in this print culture is the idea of a mesel a famous place mhel literally means a named place a place with a name that everybody knows and this is very much a function of the unended consequences of the alternate attendance system the tokido highways right commoners began to travel for business and then for pleasure so here we have an opening scene from The M right a tour guide to the famous places of the capital and by Capital they mean Kyoto the old imperial capital and so here what we have is a retired Merchant right an elderly man travel in at leisure to see the SES right and he has his little attendant boy to carry the luggage for them and he has stopped somebody clearly a local and he's asking directions from his guide book right so this guide book is promising you hit the road we'll tell you everything you need to know well what is it that you need to know so this is another one uh called K Shang excellent views of kto and what it tells you is the stories the history behind the famous shrine and temples of the old aristocratic Capital right so here if any of you have gone or will be going um there's ginkakuji um sorry G Kakui is right there the silver Pavilion so all you need to know about the history of this part of kto is listed here what I want to kind of point out is here at this stage famous places the places you want to see are aristocratic right they belong to a past that commoners don't really participate in don't really belong in this begins to change the idea of Mel um expands and print culture latches onto it in a very dramatic way so for example the lowly 53 stations along the tokaido highway itself become meal another way it becomes common is that there is an explosion of pilgrimage to e during the early modern period here's e right and commoners even fairly poor commoners would join these pools neighborhood pools called the iso where everybody would pay into it and then at the end of the year they would pull lots and maybe two out of the group would win and they would be able to go on pilgrimage on behalf of everybody and in 1830 they figure as many as two million made the pilgrimage to e right that's they they figure that over over the course of the tokuga period a fifth of the population when to EA and so this is a scene from a comedic travel Narrative of these country bumpkins going down the tokido highway to is right so slowly the commoners begin to kind of repaint and rearrange what the famous places are so then they produce an edel Mel edel becomes a place to visit and what are the famous places of edel well it's nibash which is at the center of the commercial District what else is the m right the fish market right n Shinjuku a station town right this is I mean where the Metropolitan uh City Hall is in in Tokyo today um and I don't think I I I'm missing a slide here where even the Yoshi is a mes and the kabaki theaters are a meso what has happened the commoner culture has now becoming famous noteworthy shared so that when we get to the 19th century then hirosh perhaps kind of celebrated as the last of the great ukio artists makes a hundred views of edel a series of just amazingly Technical and innovated woodblock Prints but they're all organized around this idea of a famous place and Landscape begins to kind of join um actors cortis as a kind of dominant motif of woodlock prints and here we begin to see how this vernacular this visual vernacular that's facilitated by print culture creates a common Geographic referent for a broad literate public and they're able to begin to imagine themselves as sharing a landscape sharing a society that this kind of in some sense in undermining the status order imposed by the Tokugawa regime facilitates the birth of what Mary Elizabeth Barry calls proton nationalism and these are very stunning stunning prints so niom Bashi of course fits into it but the composition I mean it's very Innovative um one of the things that frustrates me more than anything else if you read a travel guide or watch a documentary to Japan you will get this fasile and hack NE statement that the old and new are tension in Japan the old and new are always in tension they're always that way there's nothing traditional about this art form he is doing something incredibly Innovative here incredibly new but he's drawing on an old reference everybody knows what nihombashi is and what niom Bashi should look like and here he's creating a novel composition a new way to look at it a new way to think about but it's still Nashi everybody knows where Nashi is and these are again they're not Elite sites these are commoner sites these are place of the ukio they're just gorgeous and so usually when we see these in exhibits and catalogs we really see they're beautiful but we often don't see is that long history of the Tokugawa period in which this was initially subversive this was marginal this was commoner and but by the end of the 19th century on the other side of the restoration it becomes celebrated as the cultural heritage of the nation right and we get to see the way print culture kind of facilitated this shared imagination and I want to tack on a kind of final unit to these images here and talk a little bit about where what other information is coming in and being disseminated in this print culture I didn't I wasn't able to bring in some slides but if you look at a lot of the runs of ukoha prints from the latter half of the tokoa period especially from the 1840s onwards you'll see a lot of Uka prints that have scientific instruments in them um uh sorry magnifying glasses telescopes microscopes and so on and so we get we see hints of another stream of information coming into Japan and some of these prints and I'm just going to kind of skip ahead very quickly this is one of my favorites and here we see hosig has already latched onto Western perspective where did that come from how did he access that well he's accessing it in part through through Dutch learning one of the other cliches that we'll see is Japan during the tokuga period was closed off to the outside world it was never closed off it was tightly regulated so a Dutch ship arrived in the port of Nagasaki once a year and every time that ship came in the captain of the ship was required to sit and write out an extensive report of what had happened outside in that year and the shog it had an small army of Japanese Dutch translators they would translate this letter into Japanese and it would be sent to edok they knew about Napoleon they knew about the steam engine they knew about all this stuff and so they allowed a certain amount of technical information to come in and be translated and this became a kind of body of thought called laku which comes from the Japanese frame for Holland oranda and gaku is for learning and perhaps the greatest triumphs of this learning school of learning was overseen by sigita uh gaku who was again a product of this last period of Tokugawa Japan he was a scholar of Dutch could read Dutch and speak Dutch and he laid hands on an anatomy text and he was surprised at how intricate and detailed this Anatomy text was and he received special permission to have an executed prisoner dissected now he couldn't do it it was defiling so they had to have an A an outcast do it but they watched and as they did it he's looking at the book and he's like it's accurate so he and a group of men sit down and they spend I believe it's six years translating this right from Dutch into Japanese and then they publish it as the kai Shino which is based on this Dutch transl of uh another European text and it's the same print culture that allows it and to really give you some sense of the enormity of this task they had to invent the vast majority of the medical terms how do you translate nerve when there's no word for it in Japanese they invent it it's called shink which means Pathways of the Gods which is still the term used in Japanese medicine to this day much of the medical terminology used comes from this translation attempt in it is diffused it's published in woodblock form they rip off the etchings um you know not no C copyright here and so this kind of scientific knowledge is also traveling around during the time that hookai and others are producing their stunning stunning images and of course one way the The Great Wave is great because as the exhibit explains Prussian Blue has been introduced right there's already an an influx an accommodation and appropriation of technology and awareness and so even their kind of geographic imagination improves in 1809 the Shogun it sends Ino tataka around the country he walks on foot and he surveys the shoreline using triangulation and he produces this map which is the most accurate map that Japan has had of itself in its history and even by it's not GPS quality but it's surprisingly accurate right and it's not just that they have a fairly accurate view of themselves they also have a very accurate view of the world they were not naive and the print culture that allowed hookai to trade his amazing artistic expertise and sell a great number of prints was also the print culture that facilitated the circulation of images like this so it should be little surprised then that when Commodore Perry arrived in 1853 in many ways they saw him coming and it's shouldn't be surprising that it was the print culture and the woodblock artists who were the first to capture and disseminate images of Perry images of the Black Ships so if you get a chance I hope you will visit the visualizing cultures website the link is on the back of the handout that John Da has set up at MIT there they have entire units of the kind of Visual History of commodore Perry's arrival in Japan the visual history of Japanese woodblock artists capturing the exoticism of Yokohama as a treaty Point report so this habit of combining a sense of who we are as Japanese with a sense of the world right came out of the print culture and I think gives us some idea of how the unintended consequences of the great peace under Heaven is really were the greatest consequences so thank you for your [Applause] attention so we have time for a few questions uh there is a microphone on either side please raise your hand and we will bring the mic to you first of all I would have learned a lot more if I'd known a lot more when I came to the lecture I came practically blank slate and that's a tough audience three questions come to mind sure one is uh as I've learned they weren't so closed as I thought they were closed but they weren't engaging in international trade apparently and I wonder where did they get raw materials that they needed in that case that's the first first question second question was the fall of the Shogun pretty directly related to the visit of the black sheep black ships and thirdly can you give any indication any comparison any combination of comparisons about American Social and sexual life that helps me understand the cortison Okay so the first question um well they didn't import any raw materials and in fact there's a there's a growing body of historical scholarship that really likes to celebrate the recycling culture of tokuga Japan so when the fire swept through you have people you'll see prints where they're picking up the nails from the fire so they were they worked with the scarcity and the official ideology is we don't need anything because again Commerce it's not about growth right it's about stasis stability so they weren't really interested in trade in fact it was a very hard sell Commodore Perry wins the right to relieve American ships and whaling ships but he doesn't win the right to trade because they insist we don't need trade we don't want trade was very similar to the kind of Chinese attitude initially um the second question yes and no um Commodore Perry does in in instigate a series of political events that does lead to the fall of the Shogun however the basic Dynamics that undermined the superiority of the Shogun Vis other powerful dial preceded it so there is a kind of quite in contrast to the kind of visual opulence of hookai the economic story of the last 50 years in the 19th century is pretty Grim on on in Japan and that's kind of a much more important and Salient uh conversation point to explain why the Shogun it falls um parallels the cortis um I believe the closest is is not not uh the parallel is not to be found in the US but in France so my colleague Tim Von compol who teaches literature and film he co-teaches a course on the Japanese pleas pleasure quarters with the Parisian demim right the cortisen culture you know that is often then shows up in French painting seems to have something of a resonance um but I'm not really capable of saying more more than that thank you thank you thanks is this ready to go yes um so since clear Japan has changed so much since this time what would you say remains today that you know is still part of their culture is it the cast system of occupations I don't want to lead you in that direction but what what retains today it is a radically different Society so one of the things that's very interesting is if you watch costume dramas in Japan that are set in this period many of them will play down the cast the status system because contemporary one of the first things they do when they modernize is we have to become all Japanese and so they under they deconstruct status distinctions and create a sense of nationhood and so that is an unbridgeable divide and so it's in some sense whatever cultural continuities there are the social context of their production and consumption are irrevocably different so I think that's that's the starting point um but nonetheless the kind of the technique the Arts that went into producing these things continue um I don't have the number at the top of my head but I believe Japan leads the world and the number of family-owned businesses that last six Generations or more right um there's there's actually international organization that registers these businesses and so Craftsmen right textiles Ceramics these things the the technology of these things continue but the discursive context has changed right now they're treated as traditional arts and they're preserved they're not the domain of fashion anymore right it's not about newness it's not about Innovation it's about preservation so I think it's in some sense when I tell my students is when we look back in the in from an ammer classroom to edel it's as foreign to us as it is to a resident of Tokyo today that's that is my my view question uh did uh Japanese Scholars travel abroad pardon me did Japanese Scholars travel abroad at all um so they were not allowed to travel during this period right they're not allowed to travel and one of the stories then of the very late Tokugawa period is the number of informed and conserved intellectuals who do travel abroad and in some cases some leading Dao smuggled their own retainers abroad to study abroad in London in the 1860s and they become the leaders of the new state right so travel abroad becomes very very important but for the vast majority of the tokuga period it is not allowed on so if you leave you can't come back in if you come back in you will have your head lopped off but they read in Translation so they could read a great deal of European texts in Chinese translation that would be brought in by the Dutch or Chinese Traders so the information was flowing yes were there any Rel religious uh changes that accompanied the political developments you speak of thank you um were there religious trans Transformations so that's part of the story I left out because it fits the larger picture that I'm sketching at the Inception of the tokuga period they had just violently exterminated Christianity tens of thousands are slaughtered and every resident of the archipelago is required to register at a Buddhist temple as a parishioner it's called the temple registry system so when you're born when you marry when you move when you die a priest has to register and that's how they control the population you're not allowed to convert so it freezes in place the kind of sectarian landscape so that's the picture of stasis nonetheless there are a lot of popular Cults that pop up oh that Shrine you know cures infertility and it will become wildly popular and thousands will flock to it and then the authorities will say oh it's gotten too rockus and they'll start um uh Distributing kind of rumors that it's all fake and then it'll die down and so this kind of they call them hayami popularity Gods these came and went so there is a certain dynamism to the religious life but the sectarian landscape and its formal qualities remains tightly tightly regulated throughout the tokuga period yes um is there any sense uh of see a positive image of the other classes the non aristocratic classes in Tokugawa Japan in other words the sense of something like peasant virtues um Merchant virtues um The Peasant virtues are a little more straightforward they do celebrate the good peasant right the idea of a good rice producing hardworking peasant who doesn't spend money and time on frivolous things like Rel religious rituals and urban pastimes that is celebrated right you know increased productivity we like that um Merchant virtue it's a little bit more complicated it's not as though the merchant classes are completely denigrated they're vital to the whole system working and they do become wealthier and we wealthier and therefore more powerful um so there's a there's a a great book called visions of virtue which talks about this Academy that was established in Osaka by merchants and they have Scholars there and they produce writing and there they articulate a very co coherent and proud vision of how economic rationality is contributes to Great peace under heaven and so there are these moments in Pockets where the virtue of economic rationality is celebrated um and so there is actually some room for scholly debate at just how low was the kind of commercial classes viewed by the elites um because all the Dao had Merchants that did their business for them right and in many cases um if a Dao was particularly heavily in debt to a merchant he would say I give you the right to a surname and two swords so you could become an honorary Samurai um but uh David how who will be coming in a couple weeks he does this Great gives a great story about baby don't let your son grow up to be a Samurai um where he has Merchant households the father writes these moral to their children whatever you do never become a su it will ruin you um so there's a space in which these questions were actually actively debated now yes thank you um do the people living today have any consciousness of their family's Heritage are the politicians in the diet today from the Samurai class or are they from The Artisan class if they trace back thank you I mean yes I think there is you know because of the the kind of religious life of the typical Japanese family revolves around ancestral rights so that there is a very strong relationship and kind of identification with their ancestors and I think contemporary sociologists would say that's beginning to thin a little bit but you have a few very prominent public individuals who have kind of blue blood lineages so there was a prime minister in the 19 early 1990s um Mr hosokawa who was the the descendant of a prominent Dao family right um and you'll have people in kind of you know upper levels of corporate boardrooms and so on who can trace their family lines back to aristocratic lineages and so on but for the vast majority of the population their ancestors are commoners and so um I I don't have the kind of Smoking Gun on this but I've been given to understand that a lot of these families chose surnames after the ma Restoration in 1867 um and therefore the kind of two most common surnames in Japan are Tanaka and Suzuki and Tanaka means in the middle of the field right so you get some sense of the reson but a lot of them also invented lineages as well but the invention of but the invention of lineage I'm quickly to add has a long and venerable history going back several Millennia in Japan um so it's not a modern phenomena people fake lineages all the time um so it's it's an interesting combination of they're very I think conscious of it and they're very conscious of tradition so this might goes back to the earlier earlier question where culture and tradition are very very meaningful in Japan it means a great deal they really do care for it um but it's still hard to avoid the fact that it is still something profoundly different today than it once was but I think that's the same just about anywhere so I'm not sure you know I'm I'm very hesitant to talk about past and present in Japan in terms that make it seem unique in that way I don't think it's Unique interesting but not unique um a lot of here yes um some Japanese environmentalists look back on Edo as his period of self-sufficiency and a sustainable culture and I'm curious about the plateau that one sees in your population statistics yes on the slide that you showed and wonder how they maintained a stable population once they reach that plateau and rice growing in population infanticide yeah so you there's a there's a very rich textual uh record of the Samurai the elite classes railing against this railing against infanticides this great evil whereas historians looking back say it's this spread of economic rationality to the producing classes especially the peasants and so they're doing family planning and so they're thinning and so on so that's it's somewhat contentious and so one way it's contentious is some say well this suggests that they achieve a higher standard of living when in fact no they were really miserable and so the the accurate picture seems to be depending on who you were where you were regionally in Japan life got a little easier in the second half of the to perod versus it got harder um but the the the there's a strong kind of belief that infanticide played a very important role in limiting uh population growth um just a little dark but um is there nonetheless I was wondering what was the source of the shogun's wealth um you said that two-thirds of it was consumed in traveling around and maintaining a household so I'm going to try to give a a short answer to this um in theory every Dao that Shogun Holdings included was measured in units of rice called koku and so that the majority of their income individual diales and the Shogun household as well came in the form of rice from Fields right there's other taxation in kind but it's mostly rice one of the reasons why the samai estate as a whole grows uh poorer over time is inflation so the Dao has to he collects his rice his tax in rice but he has to pay in cash it's a cash economy so he has to convert the rice into cash so there's a very sophisticated Commodities Market that emerges and the relative value of rice to the cost of living continues to decrease over the two and a half centuries but the standard of opulence that a suodai has to maintain never changes so that by the first half of the 19th century the vast majority of the Dao are in debt and the way they try to deal with this is they cut back on the salaries they give to their retainers who are then in debt and so one of the jokes was half of the Samurai walking the streets of Edo wore not swords but takit which means a bamboo sword because they pawned the sword but they had to keep wearing them right they but they because they have to keep up appearances and so what they would also do is if you had to have three retainers go with you to see the Shogun right you would hire commoners for the day and they would put on the group and they would go to Castle and David how calls this status transvestism right it's a fantastic fantastic phrase because as long as you wore the right thing that's all that mattered it didn't matter it wasn't cast right nobody would judge you by appearance or anything like that so it was rice income and it paid less and less and less so there's there's more to it but that's the basic the basic picture thank you thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 51,343

Keywords: Japan, japanese art, history, tokugawa, art, art history, lecture, course, wodblock prints

Id: E5KMdvS9l64

Length: 78min 27sec (4707 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2016