Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine the poetic vocabulary and imagery Hayashi Gahō and his colleagues employed to imitate and glorify the Heian period in their kanshi composed in 1666, and attempt to explain how Edo-period antiquarianism developed in its early stages.

Paper long abstract:

The Edo period may be understood as a golden age of antiquarianism. Whether in Confucianism, medicine, or National Learning, a number of scholars sought to look beyond the biases of later generations to gain a more accurate view of antiquity. Emperors attempted to reenact ancient rituals and architecture, while literati became obsessed with ancient texts and objects. This paper will attempt to shed light on how this wave of interest in things of the past arose.

In 1666, Hayashi Gahō and fellow compilers of Honchō tsugan (A Comprehensive Mirror of Our Court), a bakufu-sponsored history of Japan, imitated a Heian-period court kanshi (classical Chinese poetry) gathering called "naien" (private banquet). The resulting 28 kanshi were supposedly first collected in a manuscript titled "Gi naien shikan" (A Volume of Classical Chinese Poems in Imitation of a Private Banquet). As Shūta Miyazaki has pointed out, these imitative poems reflected Gahō and his colleagues' adoration for the Heian period, which they saw as an unprecedented era of cultural sophistication and stable governance. Their poetic gathering can be considered as one early example of Edo-period antiquarianism.

This paper will examine the poetic vocabulary and imagery Gahō and his colleagues employed in their kanshi to glorify antiquity, i.e. the Heian period. Gahō's group used expressions and tropes found in the writings of the Heian-period nobility, as well as those commonly used by non-aristocratic poets of the Muromachi and early Edo periods. Their poems were thus in fact a mishmash of ancient and contemporary styles, since the kind of antiquarianism they practiced seemed to place an emphasis on melding together antiquity and the present, rather than excavating a "pure" form of antiquity. In turn, later generations of eighteenth-century scholars adopted a more draconian approach in their antiquarian projects, and rejected Heian-period kanshi, kanbun (classical Chinese prose), and Confucianism as lacking in rigor. Gahō and his contemporaries' pioneering antiquarianism may have served as both an inspiration and a negative example, driving the later generations to discover new, different ways of studying and perceiving antiquity.