Paper short abstract:

Fuzoku uta were regional songs that represented the power of the sovereign and central court through their performance as offerings to the emperor upon his/er enthronement. This paper explores instances of dialect variation as symbolically potent features of language in these songs.

Paper long abstract:

Fuzoku uta "folk/regional songs," were songs performed on the occasion of the emperor's accession, the Daijōsai. In this context, the songs featured prominently as "offerings" for the emperor as part of the court's solemn accession rites. In the oldest form of the ritual, songs were chosen by divination to represent the eastern (yuki) and western (suki) regions peripheral to the court. Fuzoku uta fulfilled a critical symbolic and religious role in the context of the Daijō rites, representing the extent of the sovereign's domain, and, for the people in those provinces, it solidified their relationship to the emperor and central court as an act of filiality and allegiance. Although geography was at the center of symbolic potency of regional songs, a concept reinforced by the notion of kuni-tama "land-soul" operative in court ritual, by the mid-Heian period fuzoku composition was outsourced to court literatus. Little is known about fuzoku uta before the Heian period. However, a number of eleventh and twelfth-century manuscripts preserve the songs as they were likely performed from the tenth-century. These texts have been the subject of research on the development of waka and the history of ritual song, but little attention has been paid to the lyrics themselves.

This paper will focus on the language of fuzoku uta, highlighting numerous instances of linguistic variation usually identified as accent (namari) or dialect (hōgen). In contrast to scholars' tendency to bypass these elements of the text, this paper considers, "Is there a connection between dialect variation in fuzoku uta and its position as regional songs within the Daijōsai?" Further, if we imagine that these variants were intended elements of the text, what are the implications of dialect variation in fuzoku? In answer to these questions, I propose that the fuzoku uta featured dialect variation to invoke a sense of verisimilitude, in keeping with their ostensive provenance as regional songs. Furthermore, that this was a form of literary dialect used to imbue the text with authenticity and ritual potency.

Paper short abstract:

Early medieval poet-scholars started to textualize parts of their waka knowledge as a result of their urge to stabilize their own line of knowledge transmission as the most legitimate one. Therefore, they produced commentaries (karon) and circulated them as advertisements of their poetic expertise.

Paper long abstract:

Transmission of poetic knowledge in Japan has been examined mainly as the realm of the "written." However, the study of early medieval (late 12th-early 13th century) poetic commentaries (karon) reveals traces of oral teachings. Even though, as pointed out by Brian Steininger, the realm of court ritual in mid-Heian (10th century) was not primarily text-based, we observe a shift in the format of teachings about waka (court poetry) from oral transmissions (kuden) to what I call "the rise of karon." This increased production of poetry criticism in the early medieval period is related to the professionalization and politicization of poetic practice, a phenomenon observed by Robert Huey. I address why and by whom some of the oral teachings about waka were recorded in writing.

By mid-Heian period, general knowledge about ancient poetry was already fragmentary; the ur-texts of some poetic collections were lost, including Man'yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, 759-785), the first extant Japanese poetic collection; those collections survived in the form of multiple manuscripts, containing numerous textual variants. Early medieval poet-scholars, like Rokujō Kiyosuke (1104-1177), Kenshō (ca. 1130-1210) and Fujiwara Shunzei (1114-1204), attempted to recreate parts of the lost poetic discourse and speculated on various textual and historical issues. In their activity as literary critics, we sense an urge to stabilize their own line of knowledge transmission as the most legitimate one. They produced poetic commentaries, in which they revealed those parts of oral transmissions that had never before been recorded in writing and circulated those newly compiled texts as advertisements of their expertise about waka.

As argued by Richard Okada, the written cannot exist without the oral; and while the written is more permanent, it is the oral that authorizes the written. Thus, the activity of writing about poetry presented an opportunity to establish oneself as the center of literary production and thus leader of the poetic world. The poets recognized the level of power that comes with the possession of a manuscript; by textualizing their knowledge and transforming orality into textuality, they were claiming and legitimizing their own lines of knowledge transmission.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how Japanese poetry, waka, was defined by medieval Japanese poets and intellectuals. I will argue that Japanese poetry was not conceptualized in the same terms that Chinese poetry was. Instead, Japanese poetry was conceived as the presence of a voice, rather than of writing.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will investigate how Japanese poetry, waka, was defined in poetry treatises written by medieval Japanese poets and intellectuals. My main argument is that in medieval Japan (12th-15th c.) Japanese poetry was not conceptualized in the same terms that Chinese poetry was (that is, it was not simply thought of as the Japanese-language version of the same kind of "poetry" that existed in Chinese). Instead, Japanese poetry was conceived as the presence of a voice, rather than of writing.

I will introduce three examples that would demonstrate how medieval Japanese poetry privileged the phonetic element of poetry. The first example is the argument put forward by medieval poets and intellectuals such as the author of Notes on Three Streams (Sanryû-shô, 1286), who described Japanese poetry as a "softened poetry" (yawarage-uta), that Japanese poetry could deliver the Buddha's voice to readers in a more direct and approachable way than Chinese poetry did. I will then describe how some medieval poets and monks such as Jien (1155-1225) and Ryôyo Shôgei (1341-1420) developed a particular Waka-Dharani theory, which claimed that a person could attain a Buddha's voice by composing Japanese poetry, because Japanese and Sanskrit shared the same pronunciations and vocabulary. Lastly, I will show how medieval poets such as Fujiwara Toshinari (1114-1204) focused on the phonetic component of Japanese poetry by describing it as a genre of folk songs.

Through a discussion of these examples, I will highlight how medieval Japanese poetics developed a metaphysics of presence in which writing comes after voice. That argument enabled medieval poets and intellectuals to draw a narrative of the history of Japanese poetry that did not need to mention the influence of Chinese poetry or Chinese writing. Previous studies on medieval Japanese poetry and poetics have mainly focused on the specific details of the relationships between different authors, or the various influences of Buddhism or Shintoism over particular poems and poetry treatises. Instead of zeroing in on granular questions such as those, this paper will try to provide a holistic and critical understanding of the overall characteristics of medieval Japanese poetics.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will argue that the "direct expression of feelings" in seijutsu shincho poems of Man'yōshū means heightened coherence. These poems represent the beginnings of written poetry as opposed to oral tradition; within the corpus of waka they belong on the "prosy" end of the spectrum.

Paper long abstract:

Kibutsu chinshi (mono ni yosete omohi wo noburu; poems that relate feelings relying on things) and seijutsu shincho (tada ni omohi wo noburu; poems that directly relate feelings) are two categories of poems in Volumes 11 and 12 of Man'yōshū, usually seen as complementary. Itō Haku argues that the two terms were coined by Hitomaro; I maintain that regardless of their origin these categories are an important early attempt at a literary taxonomy, prefiguring later karon developments. The variety of "things" in kibutsu chinshi make them immediately attractive to the scholars of literature, while there is nothing obvious about seijutsu shincho. Kōnosu Hayao even argues that seijutsu shincho are a category subsidiary to kibutsu chinshi. Some scholars, however, have made fascinating observations that touch both upon the possible place of seijutsu shincho in the history of waka and their more formal characteristics. Even though both categories contain only tanka verses, Mori Asao, for instance, notes that seijutsu shincho appear "prosy" rather than poetic. Some scholars have pointed out that these poems might represent certain transitions: on the spectrum from chanting and singing to writing and reading (Mori Asao, Ōura Seiji); from the oral, folk tradition to the literary, aristocratic tradition (Mori Atsushi). Thinking about the evolution of waka diachronically is thus intertwined with literary-theoretical questions of defining such binaries as poetry and prose.

Building upon these and other approaches, I will try to answer the question: what does it mean for a speaker of a seijutsu shincho poem to express feelings "directly"? I argue that the main feature of these poems is a heightened level of coherence. The feeling is expressed through explaining the circumstances and the motivations, as well as through revealing cultural biases and constructs. The main operation of these poems is that of sense-making: the speakers arrive at some coherent narrative of what is going on. Having developed a working definition of the category, I will turn my attention to the poems themselves: through a series of close readings I will attempt to showcase why these poems merit further study.