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Paper short abstract

Tsuboi Yoshichika, a self-made authority on court manners in mid-Edo-period Kyoto, pursued critical and empirical investigation of court customs. His research extended to textual criticism of Heian kana literature and his use of literary texts as informational sources prefigured antiquarian inquiry.

Paper long abstract

This presentation traces the life and work of Tsuboi Yoshichika (or Yoshitomo, 1657-1735), a self-made authority on court manners (yūsoku), whose investigations led him to produce his own commentaries on Heian kana literature.

Tsuboi was born a farmer’s son in Kawachi. In 1685, after unsuccessful attempts to serve daimyo, he became a courtier’s retainer in Kyoto, where he undertook the study of court manners. Court customs had fallen into obscurity in the medieval chaos and efforts at restoration were still tentative; the daijōsai was not restored following a suspension of over two centuries until shortly after Tsuboi’s arrival in Kyoto. In this environment, Tsuboi rejected the exclusivist, hereditary approach of court scholars and pursued a rigorous method grounded in textual criticism and empirical examination of sources. By his mid-thirties, he was recognized as an authority on court customs and began producing texts, particularly on the court rank-office system and court attire. His expertise led to an invitation in 1725 from the shogunal government under Tokugawa Yoshimune to advise on court customs and lend rare books from his personal library.

The study of court customs developed conjointly with the study of Heian kana literature, making Tsuboi’s engagement with literary annotation a natural extension of his research. In 1696, he published an enlarged version of Genji nannyo shōzokushō, adding his own notes to a compilation of medieval commentaries on court attire in The Tale of Genji. Several topical commentaries on Genji followed, and in 1729, he published the first-ever annotated edition of Murasaki shikibu nikki, in which he corrected the received text through textual criticism and provided sparse but solid notes. The same year, Makura no sōshi shōzokushō, his commentary on a score of phrases from The Pillow Book, was published as an appendix to a reprint of Kitamura Kigin’s (1624–1705) Shunshoshō. This short volume exemplified Tsuboi’s interest in using classical texts as sources of information about Heian court practices.

Tsuboi thus laid the foundation of yūsoku studies as a critical antiquarian investigation. Although primarily text-based, his method shaped later scholarship and contributed to the eventual material restoration of court customs.