Section 4, Visual and Performing Arts | Session 8B: Panel
Organizers: Cynthea Bogel and Melanie Trede
Panel
participants: Wakako Taneda, Melanie
Trede, Cynthea Bogel
Discussant: Bernhard
Scheid
In different periods of Japanese history there are varying degrees of distinction in the representation, conception, and worship of religious divinities or deified historical persons. Upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that there are no normative definitions through the ages of man and god, Shinto and Buddhist, image or icon. The borders we have created around belief systems, sites of worship, or modes of representation continue to shape our interpretations.
This panel acknowledges the influential role of academic and sectarian histories of images in religious or secular settings while probing that context to explore the validity of assumptions or accepted notions for Shinto and Buddhist representation. Ranging chronologically from early Heian shinzô (kami) or Buddhist images made to protect the nation; to medieval images of the historically fluid kami-prince, Shotoku Taishi; to early modern and modern representations of male and female Shinto divinities, the panel considers the fluid definitions and often borderless constructs that constitute icons and images of the divine. It will take up the specific ways in which images are fluid or recalcitrant in meaning, and may serve (or disrupt) Shinto, Buddhist, and secular functions in society. The panel will examine these images addressing issues such as politics, gender, history, historicism, myth and modernity. The borders that have been drawn between religious beliefs or modes of worship, between formats or styles of representation, across male and female gender, and between fact and myth may be shown to be so fluid that, indeed, there are no borders to cross but only to erase.
Wakako Taneda (Fuji Women's University, Japan)
I will examine the relationship between Kyoka and Edo as the Pre-Modern through focusing on two points. The first is the question of how performativity is linked to Kyoka's novels. Characters' emotions are displayed in their "Performative-Actions", and for this, Kyoka's novels are often called "theatrical". Kyoka's characters' words and gestures stand out on their own, and such actions even convert the novel's previous context. The characters' "Voices" and "Actions" are in synergy with their physical bodies. Some of the certain symbolic acts of Kyoka's characters are typical of the traditional "Kabuki". I will develop my analysis on Kyoka's novels by concentrating on the characters' "Performative-Act", with careful attention to the interplay between the text, the actual theater performances, and the response of the audiences of the era.
The second aspect of Kyoka's novels I would like to focus on is the "Ghost". 『注文帳』 (chumon-cho) uses the names of the Late-Edo actors, such as 三世澤村田之助 (sansei sawamura tanosuke). The narrators of this text are able to recall memories of the pre-Meiji Restoration Era by announcing such actors' names. In 『注文帳』 , お若 (owaka) is said to be "beautiful as the actor 田之助". By using the already deceased actor's image, the multiple images that the "Ghost" fundamentally own as its nature is recalled. This novel also shows traces of various citations from 講談 (kodan) and 南北 (nanboku)'s Noh scenario. How does Kyoka "trans-phase" and "de-construct" such texts by citing them in 『注文帳』? What kind of significance and contrivance do the "ghosts" that appear in Kyoka's novels have? These aspects will be developed in my analysis of Kyoka and his relation to the Edo/Pre-Modern.
Melanie Trede (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
In the wake of Eric Hobsbawm's influential "Invented Traditions" much has been written about the modern constructs of myths and legends to define nascent nation-states in the nineteenth century. Little has been done in the Japanese visual field, however, regarding gender in the revival of mythic-religious personas. This paper explores the multiple facets of two pre-historic women divinities in pre-modern Japan, contrasting this history with their reconceptualization during the nineteenth century. The sometimes blurry distinctions between Shintô and Buddhist deities, man and woman, sacred and secular can only be explored satisfactorily when looking at case studies of single divinities by crossing time-borders, ritual usages, and visual media.
Over the centuries, the sun-goddess Amaterasu and Empress Jingû experienced multiple adaptations and reinterpretations, cross-dressings or trans-genderings, all of which served political, religious, social and/or gendered needs. Both appear in the 8th century annals, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and each plays a vital role in Shintô and Buddhist veneration. In subsequent centuries, Amaterasu was worshiped largely as the male deities Tenshô daijin and Uhô dôji, and in her Buddhist manifestation as Dainichi nyorai. Jingû, on the other hand, came to exemplify an ambiguously gendered matrix, which was filled with motifs appropriate to serve political and legitimizing objectives. In pictorial narratives following the Mongol attacks on Japan of the late 14th century, she was celebrated contemporaneously as divine medium, pregnant empress, male warrior, and mother while iconic imagery focused on one or more aspects.
The Meiji government elevated Shintô to the status of national "religion", wherein Amaterasu was stripped of her Buddhist manifestations and reconfigured as a female Shintô deity, and direct ancestor of the Meiji emperor. While personifying a belligerent precedent for international Meiji politics, Jingû was visually promoted to a national guardian goddess, serving as both female deity and secular model woman.
Maeda Tamaki, Washington University, Seattle
One of the most frequent subject matters in Japanese painting, Kusunoki Masashige (1294-1336) symbolized the Confucian moral virtue of loyalty in the early modern and modern periods. This talk will investigate the development of the image of Masashige by painters like Kano Tan'yu, fukko yamatoe artists, Tomioka Tessai and Yokoyama Taikan. It will show that paintings of Masashige produced during the Edo period were precursor to history painting, which the government of modern Japan used to project an emperor-centered national history.