- Convenor:
-
Daniel Schley
(Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Religion and Religious Thought
Short Abstract
The panel examines how individuals and communities in premodern Japan observed, interpreted, and responded to weather, and how these reactions were embedded in social, political, and religious contexts. It approaches weather as a historical category of experience and meaning with a focus on rituals.
Long Abstract
In premodern Japan, weather was a pervasive and socially consequential phenomenon, shaping agriculture, mobility, and religious practice. Heat, cold, rain, wind, and unusual weather phenomena were experienced sensorially and culturally, recorded in courtier diaries, historiographies, official documents or in literary texts. How people reacted to their weather conditions at different times and how weather influenced broader historical processes, has become a well-established field of research within historical climatology, particularly in studies linking societal change to environmental factors (Farris 2007, Totman 2014). By building upon these valuable insights, this panel focuses deliberately on weather rather than climate, emphasizing short-term, situational conditions as they were perceived, interpreted, and dealt with in Japanese society at different times and places.
The panel approaches weather as a historical category of experience, meaning, and social practice. It examines how individuals and communities observed, interpreted, and responded to weather, and how these responses were embedded in economic, social, political, and religious contexts. Weather often appeared as a sign of divine favour or disfavour, a political commentary, or a tangible risk factor, and it frequently structured communal or institutional reactions. These included mainly religious rituals, flood management and administrative measures, revealing both strategies of adaptation and the constraints imposed by environmental variability.
The individual papers explore extraordinary events such as prolonged rainfall, floods, or droughts as well as everyday weather phenomena. They apply weather as an analytically productive tool for investigating the time-specific perceptions, representations and adaptive strategies of and with nature and the interplay of natural and social processes, emphasizing dynamics that remain largely invisible in long-term climate reconstructions. Bringing together diverse case studies, textual genres, and social contexts, the contributions offer a nuanced understanding of premodern Japanese knowledge systems, routines, and expectations that shaped engagement with environmental uncertainty. By looking at political reactions, religious rituals and belief systems, literary expressions and emotional responses, they contribute to uncovering the complex interrelationships between nature and societal processes from different angles. In sum, they highlight that weather was not only a material necessity but also a culturally charged phenomenon, central to the organization of social, political, and religious life.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how eleventh-century Japanese court elites perceived and responded to extreme weather with rain as a case study. Using court diaries, especially Fujiwara no Yukinari’s Gonki, it analyses semantic representations, administrative measures and ritual reactions to droughts and floods
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the perception, interpretation, and practical engagement of the political elite in eleventh century Japan by looking at the impact of rain on the court nobility as well as on the living conditions in the broader city of Kyōto. In premodern Japan, rain was both an essential natural resource and a symbolically charged phenomenon, deeply embedded in religious and social life. Rice cultivation and other forms of agriculture made rainfall crucial for survival. Rain was often linked to the moral and spiritual order, with prolonged droughts or excessive precipitation interpreted as signs of divine favour or discontent, requiring corrective human action. The elite reacted to adverse weather conditions through administrative and ritual measures. They employed special officials for protecting the city from the nearby Kamo River. In case of serious devastation wreaked by floods and rainfall, the court provided aid to households. They also engaged religious specialists to respond with rituals, prayers and offerings (kiu祈雨, amagoi 雨乞い) to avert damage and to ensure agricultural prosperity.
A valuable source for investigating the representations and the influence of rain are courtier diaries written in Sinitic Japanese (kanbun nikki 漢文日記). Usually, an entry begins with a brief and often highly formalised account of the days’ specific weather conditions. Further ways of describing weather varies in each diary from simple expressions to very detailed depictions with the duration and quality of the weather. More detailed accounts can be expected in cases of unusual weather events, i.e., when there was too much or too little rain, causing problems for the court nobility.
In my presentation, I will analyse and contextualize the entries on rain in Fujiwara no Yukinari's 藤原行成 (972–1027) diary, Gonki 権記. I divide them into four thematically related areas: 1. General assessment of weather conditions, 2. Behaviour patterns of the court nobility, 3. Reactions in case of missing or excessive rain, and 4. Miscellaneous remarks related to rain. Using selected passages, I will present the routine procedures and exceptions in more detail.
Paper short abstract
Okayama domain suffered in the 1650s by extreme weather. Its Confucian daimyō Ikeda Mitsumasa understood the events as signs, that heaven disapproved of the way he ruled. I will argue that Mitsumasa’s ensuing reforms aimed to introduce Confucianism as guiding ideology in his domain.
Paper long abstract
Weather and natural processes influenced by it were decisive factors of historical causality in Confucian understanding. According to Confucian thinking, rule was legitimized by the mandate of heaven. Weather phenomena that influenced agricultural production, and thus the lives of the people, were seen as a way by which heaven commented on the quality of a sovereign’s rule.
Okayama domain was hit by droughts and floods in 1653 and 1654. Okayama’s daimyō Ikeda Mitsumasa (1609–1682), a student of Confucianism, interpreted these disasters as signs that heaven deemed his way of rule inadequate. Consequently, he introduced economic and religious reforms that profoundly affected the populace of his domain. Mitsumasa’s economic reforms improved the living conditions of Okayama’s peasants. His retainers, however, lost their economic independence due to these reforms. Among them discontent with his rule began to grow. When Mitsumasa attempted to substitute Buddhism by Confucianism and Shintō throughout his domain, he finally alienated his retainers as well as Okayama’s populace.
Mitsumasa’s economic and religious reforms are generally understood as two separate phenomena. I will argue that these reforms were merely different aspects of a process by which Mitsumasa attempted to establish Confucianism as guiding ideology in Okayama. His economic reforms were meant to improve agricultural production and living conditions of the populace following the disasters. Simultaneously, he began to introduce Confucian rites for his family, and, about a decade later, for the general populace. Mitsumasa’s reforms were rooted in his belief, that Okayama had been struck by disaster because, as ruler, he personally had not adhered to Confucianism in the correct way and had also neglected his duty to admonish his subjects to do so.
Thus seen, weather phenomena formed part of Mitsumasa’s Confucian worldview. They caused him to question his way of rule and to initiate a comprehensive reform process based on his Confucian notions.
Paper short abstract
The presentation examines how the medieval Tendai compendium Keiran shūyō shū explains rainʼs salvific meaning in linking life giving rain, dharma, wish granting jewel, Buddha relics, dragons, and rice as intertwined sources of material abundance and spiritual awakening.
Paper long abstract
As Brian D. Ruppert points out, the universal human concern with and dependence on rain has, in the case of Buddhism, created not only a rich metaphorical language but also an intricate ritual system centred on rainmaking. In my presentation, I want to take a closer look at how a fourteenth century Tendai compilation of “secret transmissions” (hiden 秘傳) and rituals, the Keiran shūyō shū 溪嵐拾葉集, explained the nature and origin of rain. Its passages underscore the profound soteriological significance attributed to rain in medieval Japanese thought at large and seem to suggest that the proximity between life-giving rain and the Buddhist teaching (dharma) was not merely conceived in terms of metaphor or analogy, but that they rather were functions of each other. Above all, they highlight the nexus between the “wish-granting jewel” (nyoiju 如意珠), relics, and rice. While the wish-granting jewel and the relics were essentially viewed as salvific entities which lead people to awakening through their effectiveness, they were simultaneously understood to be rain-producing. The wish-granting jewel, hidden in a dragon’s liver, was identified with the relics of the Buddha, which were entrusted to the dragon realm because they contain accumulated merits that nourish and lead beings toward liberation. Likewise, the dragons were imagined as ruling over the ocean and thus water and rain. The association of relics with rice further stemmed from translation processes in which the Sanskrit terms śarīra and śāli (the Sanskrit term for rice) became conflated, revealing an etymological and conceptual amalgamation through which material abundance and spiritual awakening are intertwined, casting agricultural fertility itself as a manifestation of salvific action.
Paper short abstract
Along with the question of how to graphically depict transparent elements, such as water, in the air, I will explore the motif of the rainmaking poetess Ono no Komachi. Her popularity demonstrates the enduring belief in rain magic in the comparatively „modern“ world of ukiyo-e artists.
Paper long abstract
In my talk, I will focus on the depiction of rain in ukiyo-e art from the late Edo period. These prints are fascinating, in part, because of their novel solutions to the question of how to graphically depict transparent elements, such as water, in the air. Ukiyo-e artists likely drew inspiration from weather illustrations in encyclopedias, which became popular in the seventeenth century. Along with such technical questions, I will discuss rainmaking and the motif of the rainmaking poetess Ono no Komachi (known as Amagoi Komachi). This motif combines several traditional ideas about poetry’s ability to influence the gods (or, in our conception, nature) into one figure. The Heian-period poetess was often compared to contemporary beauties in ironic mitate fashion. At the same time, the popularity of this motif may be explained by the magic abilities attributed to Komachi. Thus, my presentation will highlight the coexistence of modern, scientific, and realistic depictions of rain alongside traditional beliefs in the magic of rain rituals within the visual language of ukiyo-e artists.