Paper short abstract

In describing his journey through northern Japan, Bashō manipulates the temporal conventions in Japanese poetics. His geographically and socially liminal wanderings also upset temporal sequence, allowing him to set forth a contemplative perspective on the conditioned nature of our existence.

Paper long abstract

Bashō's Oku no hosomichi is renowned for its virtuoso display of Japanese poetic conventions, the product not only of his professional knowledge but also of his drive to manipulate those conventions in order to convey a powerful message about what it means to be human in a conditioned world whose true nature is cognized only when we free ourselves from the fetters of worldly habit.

I will focus on temporality and the poetic techniques that Bashō uses to discombobulate our habituated sense of time and sequence. Yet time is inextricably interwoven with space. The central activity of this work - moving through a liminal world that is set against mundane society - is the perfect vehicle for the poet to explore the Buddhist-inspired ideas and practices that lie at the core of Bashō's vision. He explores temporal liminality to complement the more obvious geographic, social and political liminality.

As the poet and his companion move away from their everyday world into the disruptive space of the Oku, temporal sequence also becomes upset. The progress of the seasons shifts in accordance with the travellers' movement along the highways and by-ways. This is accomplished not only by the more obvious devices of anticipation, such as donning the white unohana at the gateway to Oku (looking backwards to the ancients, forwards to winter, old age, and the full awakening that comes only on death). There are also indications that the poet's inner life oscillates between different temporal scales: the cicada's blind and frantic life, the ancient mosses and timeless absorbency of Ryūshakuji's crags, all encompassed by the implicit human incarnation that alone offers the liberating perspective.

Direct indications of Bashō's indebtedness to Buddhist doctrine and practice are not to be found in his work, certainly none of a confessional or apologetic nature. But the temporal shifts that help to inform the Oku no hosomichi, are an integral part of a very Buddhist meditation. The collapsing of conventional temporality indicates the poet's inner time, which breaks through habituation and provides a key to the lightness that sees this life as an awakened life.

Paper short abstract

<b></b>This paper will introduce and interrogate Ogyū Sorai's Treatise on Music Tones (Gakuritsukō 楽律考) showing why music had become a pressing issue for the leaders and intellectuals of the period and analyzing the rhetorical appeals and ideological presuppositions of Sorai's response.

Paper long abstract

In the 1720s, Ogyū Sorai was tasked by Yoshimune to collate and critique the shogunal collection of music-related works. Central to the results of this enterprise - and, indeed, to a little-known "musical turn" in the intellectual trajectory of one of early modern Japan's most influential thinkers - was Sorai's musical treatise Gakuritsukō 楽律考.

Music mattered to Sorai and Yoshimune for two reasons. First, ritual music had a direct impact on the diplomatic status of the Tokugawa relative to other status figures inside and outside of Japan. This was exemplified by the Korean embassies, whose musicians claimed to be performing the music of the sages. Japan's best response came from gagaku court musicians. Both claims to musical orthodoxy - the Korean and the Japanese - were, however,　disadvantageous to the Tokugawa vis-à-vis both their continental counterparts and the imperial court in Kyoto.

Second, music summarized in a visceral way the issue of a changing popular culture. The principle examples here are the love-suicide dramas and their real life imitators - phenomena that symbolised the nefarious influence of "vulgar" music and led directly to government intervention in musical practice.

In Gakuritsukō, Sorai calculated the "correct" mathematical measurement of the tones, stating that, although these had been lost in China, they were preserved in ancient texts and instruments in Japan - and that specialist philological and organological analysis could unlock their secrets. There was, therefore, an opportunity for the shogunate to establish its own legitimacy over and above that of its peers if it were to use these tones to "restore" a properly Confucian ritual programme of musical performance.

Time is central to Sorai's musico-philosophical project in that music (*the* temporal art) is, according to Confucian orthodoxy, the most profound expression of societal harmony - or, as with love-suicides, a troubling symptom of degeneracy and disharmony. For the Sorai of the musical treatise, music was a temporalization, an actualisation, of otherwise shadowy fundamental beliefs. But it was not simply a one-way reflection: it was also an avenue through which a re-making of society could be attempted, via the correct regulation of musical tones.

Paper short abstract

The Sakuteiki is often referred to as the gardening bible of Japan. However, the treatise from the mid-11th century only rose to prominence in the 20th century. Japanese garden experts used it as a tool against Western orientalism. To achieve this, they had to ignore its mystic qualities.

Paper long abstract

Today, the Sakuteiki is widely acknowledged as the fundamental classic text on Japanese gardens and their design. Especially recommendations and rules on setting stones from this treatise of the mid-11th century are cited widely as proof that Japanese garden design is rooted firmly in national history and has not changed very much over the last thousand years.

However, the Sakuteiki actually only rose to its prominence since around 1900. Ozawa Keijirō (1842-1932), a teacher at the Tōkyō Metropolitan School of Horticulture, was one of the first to rediscover the Sakuteiki in the Meiji period. But it was only in the 1920s and 30s that Japanese garden experts became more interested in the Sakuteiki. They used the old treatise as one important argument to repudiate Western interpretations of the Japanese garden and to establish zōengaku (horticultural science). Eventually Yamada Yoshio, a linguist, published a new interpretation of the Sakuteiki in 1940 which became canonical in the following decades. Given the ultranationalist undertone of Yamada's interpretation and the fact that he had been a member of the committee responsible for the infamous Kokutai no hongi, it is quite surprising that his interpretation remained so influential.

This presentation will discuss the rise in popularity of the Sakuteiki within the context of redefining the Japanese garden since 1868. Gardens in Japan were turned into a national symbol through presentations at world's fairs and an ongoing process of cultural translation between East and West. The Sakuteiki acted as one tool for Japanese experts to break the Orientalist hegemony of Western experts. However, this strategic move lead to a naive essentialist interpretation of Japanese garden history. The mystic character of the Sakuteiki had to be downplayed in order to turn it into the modern and national gardening bible of Japan.