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Paper short abstract

This paper historicizes the epistemological evolution of kanshi (Literary Sinitic poetry) from the Edo to Meiji period and its broader intellectual historical background, shedding light on the interaction between Literary Sinitic context and the transformation of the Japanese language and writing.

Paper long abstract

This paper contributes to the flourishing academic attention on kanshi (Literary Sinitic poetry) by raising the following questions: When did “shi”, once the collective term for Sinitic poetry in general in Japan in contrast to the exclusive term ka or uta for traditional Japanese-language poetry, become the specific term “kanshi”? What did the surfacing and usage of the prefix “kan” (Sinitic) reveal about the epistemological transformation? How was this transformation related to other intellectual trends, its contemporary zeitgeist and the larger history of Japanese writing and language? With close reading, bibliographical and comparative research on intellectual discourses from the Edo to Meiji period, this paper investigates these questions through the lens of Literary Sinitic context (kanbunmyaku), focusing on texts such as The Music Bureau of Japan (Nihon gafu) by Rai San’yō, Anthology of New Style Poetry (Shintaishishō), and other writings by the compilers of ANSP on the reformation of the Japanese writing system, with the comparison to the contemporary Anthology of Sinitic Poetry of Japan (C. Dongying shixuan, J. Tōei shisen) compiled by the Late Qing scholar Yu Yue. Based on these resources, it can be concluded that ANSP played an integral part in the conceptual transformation of Sinitic poetry from shi to kanshi, and shi from exclusively Sinitic to an umbrella term including western and modern Japanese language poetry as well. While the contemporary Chinese intellectuals received and acknowledged kanshi from Japan, despite being written in the scripta franca, as nevertheless a body of writing that conducts on its own syntax and semantics, showing a two-way deviation within the Literary Sinitic context. Furthermore, the proposals in ANSP also spoke to the larger agenda of reforming the Japanese writing system and language in response to the modernization progress and the western influences. By examining such a transformation, this research frames the concept “kanshi” as not an everlasting theorem, but a Meiji response to the West as the Modern Other, a conscious intellectual move that innately bears a notion of repositioning and paradigm-shifting from Japanese-Sinitic (wakan) to Japanese-Sinitic-Western (wakanyō) as a result.