Paper short abstract:

Late Edo tales of vengeance were a prolific literary production born out of the Kansei Reform to disseminate neo-Confucian tenets supported by the Bakufu. These theories evolved over time, and so did the typical structure of tales of vengeance, under the pressure of the new paradigms.

Paper long abstract:

Published from the end of the eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth, the tales of vengeance, or katakiuchimono, were a prolific production whose intent was to disseminate among the readers the neo-Confucian orthodoxy supported by the military government in the immediate aftermath of the Kansei Reform (1787-93). Since the beginning of their publication, they presented a recurring structure and a list of dramatis personae, with specific functions, strongly influenced by the ideology. When time passed by, the intellectual paradigms at the foundation of the subgenre changed, thus affecting the entire production. Among these, the concept of natural order (shizen), quintessential to the entire Kansei Reform, gave way to the concept of invention (sakui). This, together with the new social and economic theories produced by Kaiho Seiryō (1755-1817) and by other thinkers, such as Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) and Satō Nobuhiro (1769-1850), just to mention a few, had a pivotal impact on tales of vengeance, leading to many transformations in the typical structure of the subgenre, in its functions, and in the number and typology of dramatis personae.

My paper aims to outline how this production evolved between Kansei and Man'en periods. It is based on a selection of seven tales of vengeance published from the immediate aftermath of the Kansei Reform to the sixth decade of the nineteenth century, and will follow a two-fold approach: on the one hand, morphology will be the core of my analysis; on the other, I will follow the evolution of late Edo history of ideas in order to show how a production that was always considered as a mere expression of the Confucian propaganda evolved through time, including different types of ideologies.

Paper short abstract:

Samurai painter Kōriki Tanenobu (1756-1831), as known as Enkō'an, produced nearly one hundred works about early modern Nagoya. This paper will examine his strategies for visualizing urban spaces and reporting on religious festivals, dance performances and other public spectacles.

Paper long abstract:

In a career spanning five decades, samurai painter Kōriki Tanenobu 高力種信 (1756-1831), commonly known by his handle Enkō’an 猿猴庵, produced nearly one hundred works about early modern Nagoya. A careful observer of religious festivals, dance performances and other public spectacles, Enkō’an was known to walk the castle town with his sketch books and brushes in hand, prepared to capture every fleeting detail and visualize it for prosperity. His illustrations typically oscillate between two modes—cartographic views of natural and urban landscapes from distant viewpoints, and closer, more intimate views that focus on scenes of people at prayer and play. In addition to the key role that Enkō’an’s works played in the visualization of Nagoya’s urban spaces, they were also important for how they circulated knowledge about events that were by their very nature intangible and ephemeral. Supplementing his own observations with painstaking research into historical, scriptural, and literary sources, Enkō’an produced work that was as remarkable for its scholastic rigor as it was for its arresting aesthetic effects.

This study examines several key issues in the production and reception of Enkō’an’s work, which, despite being in high demand among local readers, circulated almost exclusively through lending libraries in manuscript form. With due consideration of the tactics available to writers who worked in publicly circulated manuscripts, rather than printed books, we will examine three separate accounts of an exhibition of sacred relics held at Jinmokuji Temple in Bunka 2 (1805), demonstrating how genre conventions and distinctions between public and private manuscripts shaped his account from one work to the next.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on nineteenth-century scrapbooks’ materiality as a site that both represents an ephemeral record constituting textual heritage, and a material practice of documentation that allowed an heritagisation process of the ephemeral.

Paper long abstract:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the awareness of the fragile nature of paper as a material object ignited among intellectuals a rush to collect and preserve evidence of everyday urban life of Edo. This trend took the shape of different cultural practices that involved the ephemeral reality of the quotidian “as an object of historical inquiry” (Zwicker 2009). This trend witnessed the growth of the individual practice of collecting ephemera and broadsheets in scrapbooks (harikomichō) such as Shikitei Sanba Otoshibanashi chūkō raiyu. Scrapbooks constitute a real attempt to save from oblivion some of the more volatile products of Edo’s vibrant publishing market. They also represent a unique object fashioned from mass-produced material that mirrors the programmatic action of ‘heritagisation’ (Harrison 2013) executed by the collector.

Overlooked in Japanese scholarship because of their intrinsically popular nature and the problem of their materiality, this paper explores the world of nineteenth-century scrapbooks both as an ephemeral record constituting textual heritage, and the material practice of documentation as a heritagisation process of the ephemeral.

An analysis of the scrapbook Shinobigusa will be presented for the first time. Compiled by the historian Saitō Gesshin in 1843, it collects ephemera and various illustrated materials related to the urban life and customs of Edo from 1804.

The analysis of the compiler’s preface to his scrapbook will allow this paper to rethink the act of collecting as a process of heritagisation and better understand the nature of the “heritage discourse” on the everyday in nineteenth-century Japan. The analysis of Shinobigusa’s ephemera will also illuminate different methodologies for navigating these kaleidoscopic materials, as scrapbook materiality raises many questions about the accessibility of its contents. Scrapbooks challenge the theoretical division between intangible heritage and textual heritage as they are uniquely fashioned manuscripts that give access to a vast amount of ephemeral records of the intangible heritage of Early Modern period daily life.