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Paper short abstract

This paper revisits the legend of Empress Jingū, showing how early modern publishers and entertainers reframed her narrative with new religious, imperial, and xenophobic elements in various woodblock print series, on-stage performances like kagura, and popular encyclopedias.

Paper long abstract

In numerous early modern materials, we find different modes of reimagining and popularizing Empress Jingū‘s conquest of the Korean Peninsula. By visually reinterpreting the past, these diverse works embedded imperial and religious symbolism into materials for everyday consumption, shaping how mythological and historical events were collectively recalled and interpreted. Empress Jingū is held to have conquered the Korean peninsula in the third century with divine aid while pregnant with the future Emperor Ōjin. While this legend first appeared in the eighth century chronicles, narratives of Empress Jingū proliferated following the Mongol Invasions of 1273 and 1281 and again during the Japanese invasions of the Korean peninsula in 1592 and 1598. While Jingū’s conquest was seen as a precedent for Japan’s success during these conflicts, the legend took on different meanings in a variety of media during the relatively peaceful Edo period.

This paper provides a preliminary examination of early modern publications and performances related to Empress Jingū. The empress appeared in a variety of woodblock print series, such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s One Hundred Heroes of High Renown (1843-1844) and Virtuous Women for the Eight Views (1842-1843), Utagawa Kunisada’s (1786-1865) Banners as Interior Decoration, and Utagawa Yoshitora’s A Mirror of Warriors (1859). The nature of the series and the descriptions of Jingū included therein display reinterpretations of her conquest journey, focusing on different story elements and attributes. Empress Jingū also appeared in kabuki prints featuring major actors as well as a number of kagura performed in Western Japan. Kagura pieces such as Jinrin and Sankan built on medieval reinterpretations of the Jingū legend to redefine the conquest as a defensive measure against Korean demons, projecting the increasing xenophobia of the early modern period back onto ancient times. Finally, the empress appeared in encyclopedic texts like the 1712 Wakan sansai zue, providing a selective interpretation of Jingū’s conquest and other historical events for a broad audience.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines sumo e-banzuke and publications such as the Tosei sumo Kongo-den as key media in early modern Japan’s information culture, showing how visual ranking shaped popular knowledge, memory, and imagination, fostering a shared culture and a unified sense of social and geographic order.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyzes e-banzuke (pictorial ranking sheets) as a central medium in the development of early modern Japanese print culture and practices of information organization. It argues that these prints played a formative role in the emergence of an early modern information culture by shaping how non-elite audiences perceived, remembered, and shared knowledge. Rather than merely reflecting existing bodies of information, e-banzuke functioned as mnemonic and imaginative tools that actively produced collective understanding and cultural integration.

The broadsides known as banzuke first appeared as playbills and announcement sheets in the late seventeenth century and quickly became integral to the urban entertainment economy. Throughout the eighteenth century, they underwent significant formal elaboration and functional expansion, gradually moving beyond simple performance records. In sumo wrestling, in particular, banzuke developed into a standardized documentary format for organizing tournament knowledge and were subsequently adapted for a wide range of classificatory and data-recording purposes. By around 1800, illustrated variants known as e-banzuke had become popular objects of mass consumption.

Focusing on e-banzuke from the first half of the nineteenth century and using the 1844 publication “The Biography of the Current Greats” (Tōsei sumō Kongō-den) by Tategawa Enba II as a case study, the paper demonstrates how visual systems of ranked representation shaped the cognitive habits of urban readers. By arranging wrestlers within fixed visual hierarchies that combined names, images, ranks, and symbolic markers of affiliation, e-banzuke transformed complex social and geographical information into legible, memorable arrays. These visual matrices encouraged repeated comparison, recollection, and evaluation, training audiences to think of knowledge as something that could be mapped, surveyed, and collectively possessed.

At the same time, e-banzuke fostered a shared cultural sphere by standardizing representations of prominence, reputation, and social position. Their visual conventions linked readers in Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto through shared symbols and interpretive practices, contributing to the emergence of a unified popular imagination in Edo-period Japan, in which the archipelago appeared as a coherent field of knowledge structured by visible hierarchies.

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Paper short abstract

Sangaku, votive tablets with mathematical problems, became popular during Japan's national seclusion; many problems were also reproduced in printed collections. The talk will discuss the dynamics caused by this twofold existence of sangaku problems within Edo Japan's mathematical community.

Paper long abstract

During the Edo period's national seclusion, Japan developed its own form of mathematics, retroactively dubbed wasan, complete with its bespoke social medium: sangaku, votive tablets featuring mathematical problems in word and image, dedicated in temples and shrines across the country. Today, over 900 sangaku are still recorded as extant; approximately 1500 problems from lost sangaku have been documented in manuscripts and printed books – the majority of which date back to the late 18th and early 19th century.

Sangaku were not the only ema recorded in scriptural sources. But whilst books like the Miyako ema kagami (1819) or the Itukushima ema kagami (1830) try to render the original object as accurately as possible, including the frame and a vernacular description, sangaku were rarely reproduced as complete objects. Rather, printed collections of select sangaku problems, most prominently Fujita Kagen's Shinpeki sanpō (1789) and Zoku shinpeki sanpō (1807), were used to propagate problems of interest beyond the local confines of the actual tablet. Whilst the original sangaku often boast artistic elements or colourful diagrams, the printed versions simply reproduce the geometric shapes that make up the problem in black and white, complete with the original problem statement in Kanbun. As that, select components of a sangaku could develop their own dynamic and reach far-flung mathematical communities, without their members ever having to set a foot in the actual place of dedication.

Proposed contribution will discuss the ramifications of this two-fold existence of sangaku as a medium of communication – and how the physical object's enhanced reach could promote response, emulation and reciprocation in the expert community.