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.
