Kyoto Lectures
Boxes of Fleas and Butter
Collecting Insects in Colonial Taiwan
Kerstin Pannhorst
October 11th, 2018 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient
This talk will look into practices surrounding the collection and trade of insects in early twentieth-century Taiwan. It will explore the origins and entanglement of a mass-fabrication of research specimens, decorative art, and knowledge by focusing on two main actors, who both collected extensively but with different goals in mind. Hans Sauter, a German entomologist and collecting entrepreneur based in Taiwan, was interested in taxonomy and biogeography. He collaborated with the director of the German Entomological Museum towards what they called a “mass-fabrication of knowledge” about Taiwan’s insect world. Nawa Yasushi, a Japanese entomologist based in Gifu, founded his own insect research institute, which focused on applied entomology. In addition to research on insect pests and beneficial species, Nawa built an Entomological Factory, which mass-produced decorative objects such as paper lanterns or folding fans out of Taiwanese butteries. Together, their activities established an insect collecting economy in Colonial Taiwan. Fleas, beetles, or butterflies became resources that were accumulated, sold, traded, and turned into artifacts—into seemingly authentic representations of nature for museum collections or into aesthetic objects for the decorative arts.
Kerstin Pannhorst worked as a researcher in the humanities department of the Museum für aturkunde in Berlin and in the Neanderthal Museum near Düsseldorf, where she co-curated several exhibitions on cultural history. She is currently completing her PhD in history in Berlin, both at Humboldt niversity and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her research especially focuses on the intersections between natural history specimens, the arts, museum collecting, global trade and conomies of knowledge. She is co-editor of the book Wissensdinge. Geschichten aus dem aturkundemuseum (Nicolai Verlag, 2015), featuring essays on objects from the collections of Berlin’s Natural History Museum.
Kyoto Lectures
Heresy and Heresiology in Shingon Buddhism
Reading the Catalogues of “Perverse Texts”
Gaétan Rappo
September 14th, 2018 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient
In the medieval period a comprehensive discourse on “heresy” began to develop within Japanese Shingon Buddhist circles. This was mainly centered on the Tachikawa lineage (Tachikawa-ryu), a group known for its alleged dark rituals employing an explicit sexual imagery. Shingon monks did not only criticize such practices, but also created vast catalogues of writings considered heretical (jasho mokuroku).
Compiled in 1375, the oldest and most inuential of them—the Tachikawa shogyo mokuroku (Catalogue of Works Belonging to the Tachikawa Lineage)— lists the titles of more than 350 texts, but without much explanation as to their contents. Later works built on this catalogue’s ideas and rened them, and some even expanded the scope of such eorts. This talk will focus on one of these from around 1700, the Mosho jaho jagi-sho mokuroku (Catalogue of Texts Containing Perverse Doctrines and Rituals)—which also contains a broader reection on suspect or apocryphal works, and will present an analysis of this kind of sources to show how they give access to key concepts of the extremely shifting notion of “heresy,” and also apply a particular form of textual critique.
Gaétan Rappo is an associate professor at the Research Center for Cultural Heritage and Texts, Nagoya University. He has been conducting research on medieval Japanese religions, with a focus on Shingon Buddhism and Shinto. His book, Rhétoriques de l’hérésie dans le Japon médiéval (2017), analyses the life and work of the Shingon monk known as Monkan (1278-1357) confronting primary sources with posthumous depictions of this gure as a “heretic.” He has also edited medieval manuscripts, and published several articles on medieval Buddhist paintings as well as digital humanities applied to authorship attribution of Japanese religious texts.
Kyoto Lectures
Anomalies in Aesop
Extraneous Episodes in the Japanese Script Editions of Isopo monogatari
Lawrence E. Marceau
23 luglio 2018 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient
In 1593 the Jesuit Mission Press in Amakusa published the first translation of Aesop’s Fables in East Asia, Esopo no fabulas, in romanized orthography. A separate, but seemingly related, translation appeared in Japanese kanji and kana about two decades later. This translation went on to enjoy multiple reprintings and continued to be read over the next two centuries.
This lecture examines episodes in the fabricated “Life of Aesop” as well as several fables included in this text. When comparing the commercially published Japanese script text with the Romanized edition as well as with 16th-century European editions, we find that some stories have been transferred from the fables to the “Life of Aesop,” while other stories do not appear in any of the possible European source texts at all. One story, in fact, seems to have derived from a legend brought from the New World. This lecture attempts to recast the Fables from a new perspective, suggesting that the process of translation and adaptation into a Japanese idiom was far from simple.
Lawrence E. Marceau is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Auckland. He is currently serving as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. He is the author of several books and articles, including recently “Bunjin (Literati) and Early Yomihon” in Shirane, Suzuki, and Lurie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (2015), and “Woodblock Prints and the Culture of the Edo Period,” in Marceau, Norman, and de Pont, Fragile Beauty: Historic Japanese Graphic Art (2014).
Kyoto Lectures
Dead Goddesses and Living Narratives
Variant Accounts in Early Japanese Mythology
David Lurie
4 giugno 2018 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient
Most students of Japanese culture or comparative mythology are familiar with tales of the progenitor deities Izanagi and Izanami, or of Susano-o, rebellious scion of the next divine generation. But fewer people are aware that such myths exist in radically different versions with challenging contradictions. Through close readings of two key narratives—Izanami’s death and afterlife, and Susano-o’s murder of a cereal goddess—this lecture places the sources of ancient Japanese mythology in historical context and considers how we might make sense of their variant accounts.
David Lurie is Associate Professor of Japanese History and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His first book, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), received the Lionel Trilling Award in 2012. With Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, he was co-editor of the Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (2015), to which he contributed chapters on myths, histories, gazetteers, and early literature in general. He is currently preparing a scholarly monograph entitled The Emperor’s Dreams: Reading Japanese Mythology.
Kyoto Lectures
Christian Sorcerers Crucified
Reconsidering the Keihan Kirishitan lncident of 1827~29
Mark Teeuwen
May 29th, 2018 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient
In 1827, the Osaka eastern magistracy rolled up a network of what the investigators identified as a Christian conspiracy. Caught in the net were a small group of female healers and soothsayers who combined Inari practices with a Christian spell, and a few men who had heard lectures on Matteo Ricci’s works; all were connected to an already deceased mystery man called Mizuno Gunki. In the end, six suspects were crucified in Osaka, while 65 others received lesser sentences.
This talk will focus on two aspects of this case. First, the incident will be used as a lens to examine issues of gender. Three of the condemned were women, and three men; the differences between the ways they acted, how they were talked about, and how they were treated are striking. Secondly, the analysis will zoom in on the apparent confusion on the part of the authorities to understand what the “pernicious creed” banned by Ieyasu actually referred to, and how a “Christian” might be recognized. Was Christianity a dangerous threat, or merely an administrative nuisance? Was Christian sorcery real? How far did one have to go to ensure that the realm was safe from its presumed powers?
Mark Teeuwen is professor of Japanese studies at the University of Oslo, Norway. His publications include books and articles on the history of Shinto, shrines, and Japanese religious history more broadly. This talk is based on a joint project on the Keihan Kirishitan incident, with Miyazaki Fumiko and Kate Wildman Nakai. The members of the project sought out and transcribed extant manuscripts related to this case and translated the main sources into English, aiming to publish a complete transcription in Japanese and a monograph in English in the near future.
Kyoto Lectures
War without Blood?
The Literary Uses of Taboo Fluid in the Heike monogatari
Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger
April 17th, 2018 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient
The graphic representation of the bodily viscera of war—blood, guts, and severed heads—is something we intuitively associate with medieval war tales. Yet, though it is fairly violent, blood is curiously absent from the Heike monogatari, the war tale that charts the violent transition from the courtly world of Heian Japan to the “age of the warrior.” This presentation will consider the anomaly of a war tale without blood by showcasing its contemplative view of death and its taboo avoidance of bloody discharge from the wounded body. After considering this notable absence, the presentation will turn to hemic expressions unrelated to war used in the text, such as blood tears and blood ink, which are nevertheless given a taboo rendering. Situating the anomalous Heike monogatari within a larger cultural history of blood, this presentation broadly considers what blood signied before its bio-political transformation in the nineteenth century.
Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. During the 2017-2018 academic year, she is a Visiting Scholar at Waseda University on a Fulbright CORE Research Fellowship. Her previous research on medieval war tales was resented in a monograph Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Symbolism in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order (Brill, 2013). She is currently working on her second book The Law in Letters: The Legal Imagination of Medieval Japanese Literature and an article on Indo-Japanese literary crossings entitled “Reading the Ramayana in Japan.”
Kyoto Lectures
The Jesuits and Slavery in Early Modern Japan
The system of “permits”
Lucio de Sousa
March 14th, 2018
École française d'Extrême-Orient
Along with the ideals of Conversion and Salvation of the souls of newcomers, a strange and controversial covenant was established between the clerics and the associations of merchants of dierent nationalities headed by the Portuguese. This relationship was regarded as contentious at the time and remains controversial until the present day in what concerns the active conjunction between the Society of Jesus and slave trade. Along with silk trade, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean slaves were a key-product for the Portuguese in Japan. In the decades following the Portuguese settlement in Macau (ca. 1555-57), European and Asian merchants converged in this city, and through their overlapped networks slaves transited from there to various Asian, European, and American regions. A system of “permits” issued by members of the Society of Jesus in Japan and China made possible this trac, enabling and justifying the ow of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean slaves to cities such as Lisbon, Malacca, Goa, Manila, Acapulco, Mexico City, and Lima.
Lucio de Sousa is a specially appointed Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His primary eld of research is the slave trade and the Jewish diaspora in Asia in the Early Modern Period. A member of the Steering Committee of Global History Network and Chair of the Board of advisors of the project “Global Encounters between China and Europe: Trade Networks, Consumption and Cultural Exchanges in Macau and Marseille, 1680–1840” (GECEM), he was rewarded by the Macao Foundation, the Social Science in China Press and the Guangdong Social Sciences Association for his monograph The Early European Presence in China, Japan, The Philippines and Southeast Asia, (1555-1590) – The Life of Bartolomeu Landeiro (Macao Foundation, 2010). In 2017 he has published a book about the Japanese slaves in the Portuguese Empire (Daikokai jidai no nihonjin dorei, Chuo koron shinsha).
Kyoto Lectures
Japan of the World
Japan, Peace, and Internationalism in the wake of the First World War
Mahon Murphy
February 20th, 2018 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient
The role of the First World War in creating the conditions for Internationalism to ourish is the central paradox running through the period roughly corresponding to Japan’s Taisho Era. This talk will examine, through the lens of Japan, the transformation of attitudes towards war and peace during this period. The First World War resulted in a redistribution of power in the wake of imperial collapse, creating changes in the normative environment, and in the principles and ideas that underpinned international politics. Rather than merely a transformation as a result of shifts in material power, new behavioural norms also shaped the emerging international order. While not overlooking an emergent militarism, this talk will highlight Japan’s engagement with internationalism in the context of Japan’s rise as a Great Power. Crown Prince Hirohito’s visit to Europe, the Peace Exposition held in Ueno Park and Japan’s withdrawal from Shandong all pointed toward an ocial endorsement of peace and the new brand of liberal internationalism that shaped the immediate post-war order.
Mahon Murphy is presently a JSPS Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics, with a thesis on Britain’s takeover of Germany’s colonies during the First World War and the internment of Germans from these theatres. This thesis was awarded the Annual Thesis Prize of the German Historical Institute, London. He is currently working on Japanese attitudes towards internationalism and peace during the period 1914-1924. His rst book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) has just been published.
Kyoto Lectures
Tea Making and Drinking
Socio-Economic Perspectives on late 19th and early 20th-century Japan.
Robert Hellyer
January 24th, 2018 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient
Around the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan developed a tea export industry, shipping large volumes of green tea to the United States, then a predominately green-tea consuming nation. This presentation will use a socio-economic lens to outline the making of export tea, highlighting the perspectives of farmers, workers in refining factories, as well as the craftsmen who made the chests and the artists who created the labels adorning the tea packages shipped to the United States. It will also consider how the export trade influenced tea drinking practices in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, creating trends that continue to shape Japanese tea consumption today.
Robert Hellyer (Ph.D. Stanford), a historian of early modern and modern Japan, is associate professor at Wake Forest University since 2005. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he is a Visiting Research Scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. His previous research on Edo period foreign relations was presented in a monograph, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). He has also published on the socio-economic integration of the Pacific Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is now completing an international history of Japan’s export of green tea to the United States from circa 1850 to 1950.
Kyoto Lectures
Who Cooked for Consul-General Townsend Harris
Chinese and the Introduction of Western Cooking to Japan
Timothy Y. Tsu
24 novembre 2017 18:00
École française d'Extrême-Orient