Paper short abstract:

The Man'yōshū was originally written entirely with Chinese characters, and the text can be understood as a hybrid of speech and picture. The talk examines the problems of kaki-kudashi, the rewriting of the original text into a composition written in hiragana phonograms and Chinese characters.

Paper long abstract:

The poem anthology Man'yōshū was originally written entirely with Chinese characters, but even at the beginning of the tenth century—and presumably before—the mixture of logograms and several types of phonograms was no more comprehensible than it had been in the original. For this reason, Murakami Tennō ordered a 'translation' into contemporary Japanese. The process of rewriting the original text by using hiragana phonograms, which is known as kaki-kudashi and is still ongoing, was also the beginning of poem interpretation and Man'yōshū philology. These developments were extremely crucial for Japanese cultural preservation because the anthology would not have survived without the readability of the text. Of course, there have been adverse effects, too, such as the equation of Man'yōshū poems with waka. However, it is significant that the poems are perceived as a part of the so-called phonographic dogma, i.e., reading the poems merely as a representation of speech.

The first part of the talk addresses notational iconicity, i.e., the pictorialization of writing or the hybrid of speech and picture. The aim is to reveal how meaning is lost in transliteration with hiragana phonograms (kaki-kudashi). This loss for the reading eye alone is problematic enough, but reading only the kaki-kudashi text and not taking the original text into account may also result in misunderstandings. I will explain these problems by a look at contemporary research and with some convincing examples from the anthology.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the poetic exchanges between Japanese literati and the envoys from the Korean kingdom of Balhae (698-926) in order to demonstrate the latter’s role as the driving force behind the reception of the collected works of the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi in Heian Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have long been puzzled as to why the collected works of the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi (772-846) achieved great popularity among the aristocratic elites of Heian Japan (794-1185), while the literary collections of other continental literati that are known to have reached Japan were largely disregarded. In this paper, I trace the origin of the Heian appreciation of Bai Juyi by placing his poetry in the context of the “Yuan-Bai style” that was disseminated across East Asia through the corpus of the poetic exchanges between Bai Juyi and his friend Yuan Zhen (779-831). In particular, I associate the popularity of this corpus among early Heian poets in ninth-century Japan with their poetic exchanges involving the envoys who were regularly dispatched by the Korean kingdom of Balhae (698-926). I argue, first, that this connection helps to reconstruct one aspect of the Sinitic literacy of the educated elites of Balhae, about which very little textual evidence has survived. Second, and more importantly, I make the case that these elites were the driving force behind the reception of specific continental texts, such as Bai’s collected works, in Heian Japan.

Paper short abstract:

I examine fifteen poems by Sugawara no Michizane and their place within his literary collection to investigate their use as documentary evidence for his governorship. My case study helps us think about text versus context and the possibilities and pitfalls of selective and comprehensive reading.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I examine fifteen poems by the early Heian scholar-statesman Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), with the twofold aim of questioning their value as evidence for his qualities as a provincial governor and interpreting these poems in light of the larger collection that preserves them, Michizane's own Kanke bunsō. These insights will serve as a point of departure to think about our practices of finding and selecting the texts we use to weave our narratives.

During the first two years of his stay in Sanuki, Michizane took up his brush to compose on the hardships faced by the poor and the elderly. Communis opinio holds that these poems betray a concern for a province and its people that is uncharacteristic for the governors of Michizane's day, and cites them as documentary evidence that he led an excellent administration based in Confucian principles of government. This narrative, however, fails to account for two crucial aspects of Michizane's poetry. On the one hand, other poems from the same period suggest concerns not easily reconciled with this more familiar narrative of Michizane as governor. On the other, the form in which we have these poems - both as individual pieces and as part of the collection as a whole - is of a much later date than Michizane's term as governor, for he compiled and presented his collection to Daigo tennō during his own most influential years at court. Nevertheless, few commentators (if any) question how Michizane's later personal political agenda may have influenced the contents of Kanke bunsō, if not within individual poems, then at least in the entire collection's presentation and arrangement, as well as possible omissions of poems now lost.

Such a contextually embedded reading of the poems reveals a much less straightforward persona of Michizane as governor. The clash between this persona and the familiar narrative shows how slower, contextualised close-reading remains a necessary safeguard to ground our practices of searching for evidence - a litmus test for the keywords we think with, digital and discursive.