Triangle Center for Japanese Studies

Please check out the website of the Triangle Center for Japanese Studies, which I am working on with colleagues from Duke and NCSU. It includes announcements of events at the three universities in the area, as well as news about faculty and the TCJS itself.

New digs

I’m writing from my new home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

JLSC Research Group Strikes Again: Berkeley, 2010

The elaborately named “Japan’s Long Sixteenth Century Research Group” held its third symposium in February of this year, graciously hosted at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, UC Berkeley. This gathering, “Lost Strands of Japan’s Long Sixteenth Century” (great title, David S!) focused on aspects of the long sixteenth century that have been overlooked in historiography and popular representations of the period, which tend to focus on themes such as the medieval/early modern split, unification, and heroic figures like Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The event brought together historians of Japan who gave papers and also included commentary from Professor Beth Berry and Professor Greg Levine among other local faculty.

My talk was entitled “Absent Actors: Falconry in and out of the Long Sixteenth Century”:

Sixteenth-century warlords such as Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) and his peers were active practitioners of falconry (takagari) according to the documentary record. These men gave and received falcons as part of the gift exchanges that cemented military alliances and created networks of potential cooperation. They also invited vassals and allies to accompany them on trips into the countryside to engage in this uniquely rough and rural form of warrior civility. Falcons—captured, raised, and trained in harsh and distant locales such as Korea and Ezo as well as in numerous provinces across Japan—were rare luxuries comparable in their social and cultural power to Chinese ceramics or heirloom swords. Unlike those durable pieces of material culture, however, falcons had limited life spans.

This paper explores the practice of falconry in the long sixteenth century with particular focus on Tokugawa Ieyasu and his peers. Elite warrior falconry emerged out of imperial patronage of takagari and faded into Tokugawa dominance of land and the right to hunt. As such it is key to mapping the long sixteenth century as a period in which warriors continued to appropriate courtly culture while also embracing material and textual forms of Chinese institutional authority. This paper concludes by arguing that the disappearance of falcons from the material legacies of powerful warriors like Ieyasu effected a contiguous effacement of this key warrior practice from later historiography. It may be that the absence of falcons from our narratives of the sixteenth century contributes to the privileging of unification and the obsession with the establishment of new, early modern institutions.

I will draw upon sources such as Ieyasu’s letters (collected in the seven total volumes of Tokugawa Ieyasu monjo no kenkyû), chronicles such as Sumpuki, and the posthumous record of Ieyasu’s probate, Sumpu owakemono odôgu chô. I will also consider the few material remnants of Ieyasu’s obsession with falconry, such as leather cords and paintings.

Stanford Material Culture Workshop

Professor Paula Findlen of the History Department at Stanford University organized a wonderful gathering January 29-30, entitled the “Early Modern Things Workshop.” The schedule included historians of science, scholars of Renaissance mercantilism and design, art historians and museum curators who work on everything from furniture to fashion, and many historians who have come over time to work with material culture (finally a growing trend?). I was struck by the openness of the historians of Europe and America to the notion that Asia was centrally involved in the production and flow of early modern material culture. I wonder if the tireless efforts of Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and others have finally produced a shift in the awareness and consciousness of those operating at the center of the historical enterprise in the U.S.?

My paper was:
The Shogun and His Things: Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) and the Agency of Objects

ABSTRACT:
Tokugawa Ieyasu is best known as the founder of the military government that ruled Japan from 1603-1868. Less recognized is his role as a collector, whose acquisitions were divided upon his death, distributed among his descendants, and carefully preserved in family storehouses as well as temples and shrines that honored his apotheosis. I am currently finishing up a biography of Ieyasu, in which I examine his relationships with objects of material culture—swords, ceramics, paintings, books, and even falcons—in an attempt to foreground the social and cultural practices which enabled his career. I argue that these inanimate, material “actors” shaped his horizon of choices and contingencies. The book also tracks the diachronic history of Ieyasu’s collection and makes the case that the Shogun’s things have shaped the hagiography and historiography of not just Ieyasu but all of early modern Japan.

Fowler Tea Events, 2009

2009 Public Lecture Series – Steeped in History: The Art of Tea

Asia Institute Public Lecture Series in conjunction with UCLA Fowler exhibition, “Steeped in History”

Steeped in History: The Art of Tea

Exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum, August 16-November 29, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009

Curator Lecture: Steeped in History: The Art of Tea

Beatrice Hohenegger, exhibition curator and author of “Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West”
Saturday, September 12, 2009
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM

From Elephants to Tea: The Nilgiris under Colonial Rule

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, UCLA Professor of History
Thursday, September 24, 2009
7:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Tea and Chinese Cultural Aesthetics

Pei-kai Cheng, Chinese Civilisation Centre, City University of Hong Kong
Saturday, October 24, 2009
3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

The Buddhist Arts of Tea in Medieval China

James A. Benn presents the 22nd Annual Sammy Yukuan Lee Lecture on Chinese Archaeology and Art
Saturday, November 07, 2009
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Tea of the Samurai in Times of War and Peace

Morgan Pitelka, Occidental College
Sunday, November 22, 2009
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

K-12 Teacher Training Workshop: Food for Thought

An ARTalk Multi-Part Teachers Workshop at the Fowler Museum
Saturday, October 03, 2009
12:00 PM – 4:00 PM

For more information please call (310) 825-4572.

Sincerely,

The UCLA Asia Institute Staff
asia@international.ucla.edu
www.interntional.ucla.edu/asia

Changes to the site

I recently moved this blog from Bluehost.com to WordPress.com. In the previous iteration, I was responsible for updating the blogging software quite regularly, and lots of maintenance was required. Now those changes occur automatically. WordPress only does blogging, whereas Bluehost is a fully configurable web hosting service, with marketplace and email options that I didn’t need. Anyway, I unfortunately have also given up on the “Displaying Japan” blog and the “Ravi and Luca Files” blog, both of which were just too much trouble to maintain. I will probably continue to tweak the design of this site, and some of the old posts need to be reformatted to remove incorrectly coded quotation marks, but overall the transition was very smooth.

Essay in Impressions 30

I have an essay in the recently published issue of Impressions. This special issue came out of a Festschrift conference held in honor of Henry D. Smith II.
The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America
Number 30 (2009)

PICTURES AND THINGS: BRIDGING VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN JAPAN
Essays in honor of Henry DeWitt Smith II

The Early Modern Warrior Experience

An essay that I originally wrote for an anthology (that was not meant to be, alas) has now appeared, in a completely new version, in the new issue of the wonderful online journal Early Modern Japan. It provides a general introduction, probably best for undergraduates, to the history of daily life of the samurai during the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868). It also introduces three wonderful essays on warrior food, shopping, and travel:

The Early Modern Warrior: Three Explorations of Samurai Life
Pitelka, Morgan pp. 33-42
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (977.23 kB)

Banquets Against Boredom: Towards Understanding (Samurai) Cuisine in Early Modern Japan
Rath, Eric C. pp. 43-55
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (537.34 kB)

Samurai and the World of Goods: the Diaries of the Toyama Family of Hachinohe
Vaporis, Constantine N. pp. 56-67
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (476.05 kB)

Encountering the World: Kawai Tsugunosuke’s 1859 Journey to Yokohama and Nagasaki
Nenzi, Laura pp. 68-83
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (631.69 kB)

I began this project when I was doing the early research for my current research into the life and career of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. I was surprised to discover that the scholarship on warriors seemed to focus mostly on institutions and war, rather than issues such as social networks, cultural practices, class, gender, and daily life. That scholarship is invaluable, but I feel that we need to build on it by shifting our focus away from questions of periodization and political power.

Review of What’s the Use of Art? in Japan Times

Thanks to Donald Richie for reviewing What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context in The Japan Times on February 24, 2008.

Acquiring and Possessing Korean Things: Material Culture and National Identity in Japan

I’m giving a public talk at UCLA’s Center for Korean Studies (243 Royce Hall) on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, which will consider how the survival of old things (especially objects from the 16th century) informs modern national identity in Japan. In particular, I’ll examine the genealogy of “acquiring and possessing Korean things” as an elite cultural practice in late medieval and early modern Japan. Buddhist monks, merchant tea practitioners, and feudal lords actively sought ceramics and other forms of material culture from Korea, and cherished and labeled these pieces as products of Korai (Koryo). I will survey some of these objects, and then theorize the legacy of their existence in Japan.

Examination of Korean art in Japanese collections has tended to focus on style and aesthetics with little attention to the biographies or socio-political influence of such objects. Perhaps we assume that in the relationaship between art and society, pictures and things are mere contrivances or tools. However, some anthropoligists have challenged us to revise this view, arguing that artistic products have a non-linguistic agency through which they influence people. How, we need to ask, do material things shape (literally and figuratively) the world we live in? What role have old things played in the making (and unmaking) of modern identity in Northeast Asia?