In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant.
Learners will walk away with a clear understanding of how society and the individual were conceived of and represented in early modern Japan. Unlike contemporary western art forms, which acknowledge their common debt as “sister arts” but remain divided by genre and discourse, Japanese visual and literary culture tended to combine, producing literary texts inspired by visual images, and visual images which would then be inscribed with poems and prose. Noticing and being able to interpret this indivisibility of visual/literary cultures is essential in understanding the social and psychological values embedded within the beauty of Japanese art.
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Samurai Portraits
One good way to gauge the distance between literary and visual culture in early modern Japan is to examine the ways in which painters and poets depicted their contemporaries. Portraits of samurai are especially rich in information about how men at the top of the social ladder wished to be “viewed” as physical entities, and how they expressed themselves as moral actors within society. In the first module, we will learn the basic formal aspects of samurai portraiture, and at the same time begin to interpret poems and prose inscribed onto the images themselves.
(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo (Current Affiliation) Director-General, National Institute of Japanese Literature
In this lesson I'd like to continue along our conversation about the art of resistance.
Samurai portraits through the 1850s and 1860s during
the decades, 18 years to
about 20 years of the troubles leading to the fall of the Tokugawa bakufu.
A lot of portraits were formed,
a lot of poetry and prose was also written about people and
about the intentions and the sort of political will of men,
sometimes women, who were active in trying to change the political landscape of Japan.
One important figure in this period, an educator,
scholar, activist himself, is named Yoshida Shōin.
Yoshida Shōin was a samurai,
a young samurai, from the Chōshū Domain,
which is in present day Yamaguchi prefecture at
the very western end of the Honshu island of Japan.
The Chōshū Domain was very
important in this period because they were extremely active and had a very,
very strong presence and force in pressuring the bakufu and then finally overturning
the bakufu and creating and completing the revolution which was the Meiji Restoration.
Yoshida Shōin was an educator.
He had formed his own small private academy near the castle where he lived,
and a lot of the young samurai from the Chōshū Domain attended his lessons.
He taught Confucian scholarship and history,
political geography and how to write in classical Chinese as well,
but at the same time he was also an advocate against the bakufu,
against the presence, the uncontrolled presence of foreign so-called invaders.
So he was one of the strongest ideological sort of forces in the western,
in the west of Japan in trying to beat back
or deny the position of the bakufu in the years leading up to the Restoration.
He was – Yoshida Shōin was arrested several times in his life,
once for trying to stow away an American ship to
leave Japan and to see what the broad world was like – he was stopped from
doing that – and another time – that was he was put under house arrest – and another time
was he was put in under house arrest back at home in Chōshū.
At the end of his life, in 1859,
the Edo bakufu decided that he was a dangerous figure,
couldn't be left to swim around and be active
and sort of inflame all of the youths around him,
and he was transported forcefully from his hometown in an old sort
of wooden and bamboo sort of palanquin or sort of basket all the way to Edo,
where he was imprisoned in the same prison that
Rai Mikisaburo was imprisoned in and which,
years before, Watanabe Kazan had faced interrogation.
Anyway, Yoshida Shōin gave a very,
very complete, perhaps overly detailed,
sort of confession of all of the things that he had hoped to accomplish,
and it was determined that he was a traitor in
a sense and he was executed at the age of 30 here at the prison in Edo in Kodenmacho.
What's fascinating and what I would like us to take a look at today
is what he did before he left in his hometown in Chōshū.
He was under house arrest there but he was able to visit with his students,
some of his relatives;
he has a young sister he was very close to,
her husband, and they went,
they came in and out of the prison.
And he was able to read as well and take simple notes in prison as well.
What he did in the days before being
transported to Edo was to have one of his students who was a very good painter,
a man named Matsuura Shōdō.
You see his name here on top of his portrait.
He decided to have Matsuura Shōdō,
a young disciple of his,
to draw a painting of himself,
a portrait, to leave behind.
At this point, he had a very strong notion that he was not
going to be able to return alive to Chōshū;
he was probably going to be executed.
And he in fact gave such a detailed confession,
it was almost sort of suicidal in a sense.
It's often said that he was a very,
very extreme and sort of pushed himself sort of into this situation.
But, anyway, before he left,
he made sure to leave a sort of memento mori,
a testimony in image,
to the young men around him who were very much engaged in protesting,
resisting against the bakufu.
The image that I've put up here is a detail of that portrait, one of the portraits.
In fact, we know that he had
at least eight copies of this portrait made by Matsuura Shōdō and
distributed to different students of his who he really trusted and really
hoped would would carry on the message and the movement after he was executed.
Let's take a look at what it looks in full.
Again, we see a portrait of a samurai with his sword at his side looking
out into the distance at a sort of 45 degree angle outside of the frame of the picture,
and above him, perhaps twice the size of his figure itself,
we see this body of text, of words.
This is all written, again, in classical Chinese.
And what's important and unique about this work is that Yoshida Shōin,
after having made copies of each of the portraits,
seven or eight – he may have actually made more of them,
we're not sure – but we know that there were seven or eight of them.
After having studiously created or recreated, reproduced his image,
he wrote prose sort of suited
to, or tailored to, each of the young men that he was going to leave his portrait to.
So, to one of them he would really encourage him to study more,
and on another disciple he would encourage him to just, you know,
leave his books and go out and be more active in the world,
in the movement against the bakufu and so forth.
He had different messages for different students.
And so we could see him leaving and leaving behind him a very,
very important, we might even say propaganda,
pieces of sort of visual and literary sort of propaganda
for his students and also for anyone else who might be around them.
We can imagine these are all hanging scrolls,
any of the 8 or 9 or 10 people
who had a copy of them would each have them in their houses.
And whenever people were invited,
they might ask people, invite people,
get together sort of caucus or discuss different sort of political problems,
they would display Yoshida Shōin's portrait and sort
of encourage themselves to actually sacrifice and to work harder,
to make the world a better place.
The sample that I'm showing you here of one of
the several portraits with writing
that Yoshida Shōin had produced and himself wrote before he was sent off to Edo.
This one right here that we have in front of us
was given to one of his youngest disciples,
and he writes about some things that he wanted,
a message that he wanted to get off to all of his students,
disciples who were left behind,
but then, in the end,
we'll see that he's tailored a section of it specifically to
the young man that he had this portrait delivered to.
Robert Campbell(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
