Paper short abstract:

In my paper I shall discuss several of the women "collected" by Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the fifth Tokugawa Shogun Tsunayoshi's long-serving chief adjutant, with the aim of showing how the cultural capital they embodied was an essential aspect of their value to him.

Paper long abstract:

Some years ago, Anna Beerens argued that in premodern Japan we are most likely to find literate women "in the shadow of men." Numerous examples bear out this observation, from the literate women found in the shadow of the medieval courtier Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (1455-1537) to those who in one way or another served Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98).

The daimyo Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu (1658-1714), whose career was spent serving the fifth Tokugawa Shogun Tsunayoshi (1646-1709; r. 1680-1709), is famous for his collection and support of a number of Confucian scholars, the best known of whom are Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728), Hosoi Kōtaku (1658-1736), and Hattori Nankaku (1683-1759); Yoshiyasu also employed Kashiwagi Takemoto (style Soryō; d. 1716), who had been a disciple of Matsuo Bashō (1644-94). Less well known are the several extraordinarily literate women who served Yoshiyasu. Among them were two of his concubines: the first, Iizuka Somé (1667-1705), who left a number of religious writings, including her commentary on the collection of Zen koan Mumonkan (1228); and the second, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko (1679?-1724), author of the biographical memoir Matsukage nikki (In the Shelter of the Pine, ca. 1710-12). The sinologue Uchida Saki (style Tōsen; 1681-1720), whose collection of Chinese-style poetry was published in 1692, also served for a time in the Yanagisawa mansion.

Yoshiyasu obviously valued the cultural capital embodied by all of these women, since he encouraged their learning and showed them off on a variety of social occasions, from his annual full moon poetry party to formal visits by the shogun. A close look at the writing these women produced while serving Yoshiyasu reveals some of the ways he supported his women's literary and scholarly endeavours. Yoshiyasu's pursuit of Zen Buddhism is not unusual for a member of the Tokugawa warrior estate, but the reasons for his attraction to court culture in particular still require explanation; and in my paper I hope to be able to account for this interest.