It’s possible that my favorite single panel at ASPAC this year was the first one I attended on Friday: three papers linking art and reality. In all three cases, it’s clear that an understanding of the reality behind the art creates a deeper understanding of social and cultural process. It’s easy to assume that literature and visual arts are clues to historical eras, but no evidence stands alone: putting the visual and textual evidence in the context of archaeological, ecological and other data is critical to making good use of it.

Ian Tullis’ paper described a kind of ecological niche approach to literary tropes: he was discussing the lesser cuckoo (hototogisu), a bird whose call is mostly associated with memory and summer in the fifth month. Tullis described the actual ecological niche of the cuckoo — whose habit of brood parasitism (placing its eggs in another bird’s nest; in Japan it’s usually the warbler [uguisu]) is the origin of the term “cuckold” — to explain the origins of its appearance in Japanese poetry. In contrast to the conventional image of Japanese, especially Japanese poets, as attentive to nature, Tullis pointed out that there was only one substantive reference in the Manyoshu to the cuckoo’s parasitic ways. The niche in which the cuckoo appears narrows over time, and this is true of almost all the birds, flowers and other phenomena of Japanese poetry: each term occupies narrower niches as the poetic tradition ossifies; still, the cuckoo’s association with memory meant that it was sometimes a positive and sometimes a negative association, more flexible than many other birds.¹

Joseph Sorensen, who delivered the second paper, had the dubious honor of taking my 20th century Japan class at UC Berkeley in 1993 and is now a premodern literary scholar.² His paper was on a fascinating literary dead-end: an attempt in 1295 by a group of Ise shrine priest-poets to produce a cycle of poetry identifying and celebrating new “famous places” [meisho] which could be added to the poetic landscape. As Sorensen pointed out, the idea of “new” famous places is an oxymoron, since meisho were, by definition, time-honored. But they tried, producing 160 poems on ten sites, including bridges, toll barriers, villages noted as travel stops — Sorensen noted the “incipient tourism” of the project, and that’s a theme that clearly has legs in Japanese literature — but the manuscript was never widely circulated and there’s no evidence that these shin meisho were ever used by other poets.

The last paper was Michelle Damian’s discussion of the boats in woodblock prints. She’s done some fascinating work combining archaeology on existing boats, anthropological investigations of traditional practice and, of course, the use of visual texts as historical sources. She discussed the difficulty of using art — which is often stylized and where artists sometimes emphasize things that highlight their skills — as a source, and some of the common errors and adjustments artists make. Often they’re accurate, and when they’re not it’s usually an artist-specific stylistic error. She’s found some fascinating details in the prints which reflect actual shipbuilding and use: my favorite is the use of retired boats for a pontoon bridge; perhaps the most intriguing is the lack of docks and piers in most pictures, especially at river crossings. The link above is to her project journal, which is as close as you can get to liveblogging a thesis project that I’ve seen, and has some great illustrations from her collection.

It was a great start to the conference.

1. “Ossifies” is my term, not Tullis’, and reflects my belief that the Japanese poetic tradition repeatedly squanders its successful creative developments by valorizing thick context over innovation.
2. He didn’t say that I’d driven him to premodern studies….

ASPAC was at Soka University of America this year. It’s in the hills above Laguna Beach, just down the road from Irvine, on the edge of a nature reserve. The campus is new — they opened in 2001 — and compact, with shiny new buildings and real ambition. Being a hilltop campus, there’s a lot of stairs; being in southern California, and near a nature preserve, there’s some lovely flora and fauna on campus, and I think I’ve solidified my reputation among my conference colleagues as “the camera guy.” Like so many American colleges, Soka U. has a religious foundation to its community and pedagogy, but is open to non-Soka Gakkai students and faculty¹ and has a secular, transformative mission.

Soka Gakkai tends to be something of a sideshow for Japan specialists — a Nichiren sect with a political wing, it’s the largest single religious institution in Japan but usually gets folded in with the rest of the Buddhist traditions; the political aspects of it get subsumed by the LDP’s continuing dominance — but it has a global reputation for peace, environmental and educational projects which goes well beyond their numbers. One of the papers I heard on Sunday was a discussion of the role of foreign language study in Soka Gakkai pedagogy.² Soka founder Makiguchi Tsunesaburo was an adherent of John Dewey’s liberal humanism and Immanuel Kant’s enlightenment philosophy before he became a Nichiren Buddhist, making it a thoroughly global new religion.³ The engraving on the left reads

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Foster Leaders of Culture in the Community
Foster Leaders of Humanism in Society
Foster Leaders of Pacifism in the World
Foster Leaders for the Creative Coexistence of Nature and Humanity

SOKA UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA
FOUNDER DAISAKU IKEDA

Not only is foreign language required at SUA, but a year of study overseas in a country that speaks the language. Since the student body is just over 400 at the moment, that’s got to make the campus seem even emptier,⁴ but it makes sense if you’re serious about training global citizens.

The public centerpiece of the conference is always the banquet, held in the appropriately grand Founders Hall. The featured speaker is almost always the AAS President, who makes the rounds of regional and specialist conferences. Robert Hefner presented some interesting material on religious growth and change in Southeast Asia, including the growth of Pentacostalism and, though he was running out of time, some about the rise of more political Islamic movements. There was a trio of cultural performances — Chinese music, modern Indian dance, and traditional Japanese dance — to cap off the evening. We also got some nice shamisen music — the medly which included the Star Wars theme caught some ears — to accompany our Friday night reception out at the Lotus ponds.

The private centerpiece of the conference is the board meeting, which was held on Friday night this year after the reception. My board colleagues saw fit to nominate me to another two-year term as secretary, putting my neurotic streak to good use, and that was ratified the next day.⁵ Though I’m no longer living in the ASPAC region, I do think it’s one of the nicest conferences there is: diverse, lively, nice folks, nice venues. I’ll keep coming: next year’s meeting will be at Portland State University.

Also, it’s one of the only conferences that takes place in the summer. Why aren’t there more? Is it protectiveness of our summertime? Is it the desire to get away mid-semester? I don’t get it: I hate losing class time to travel, and the paper writing mostly gets done in the summer anyway: the conference is a perfect venue to present a draft, get feedback, then go back and revise, submit.

Anyway, I’ve got a few panels and papers I want to talk about, and I’ll do that over the next few days. Most of the papers I want to comment on were about Japan, which is kind of unusual, actually. There were a couple of China papers, though, so check in over there sometime soon.

1. I can’t speak for the student body, but the Soka faculty who’ve dealt with the ASPAC board aren’t SG adherents
2. The paper was arguing that Soka theory leads to a more advanced and effective language teaching system, but most of it sounded an awful lot like the dialogues, N+1 and immersion methods I encountered in the ’80s. The Makiguchi stuff was fascinating, though.
3. No, I’m still not sure how you combine Kant, Dewey and Nichiren in a consistent theological fashion. The tensions between nationalism and internationalism, enlightenment ecumenicism and Lotus Sutra exclusivism, just to name a few, seem substantial. My personal experience with SG members in Japan suggests that it propogates as a sort of Prosperity Gospel, but that doesn’t actually simplify anything.
4. There were about a hundred people at the conference, plus a couple of dozen people participating in other unrelated groups, and there was clearly capacity for lots more.
5. mostly by the board, since hardly anyone else shows up to the general business meeting

I’m not sure when my family got this game, but I remember playing with it in the late 70s. Though Shogun is described as a “digital” game, there’s no electronics involved: magnets in the board turn the dial in each piece until a number shows in the window; that number is how far the piece can move next time. The pseudo-random element takes some of the strategy out of the game¹ and so it moves pretty quickly. Below you can see a rare early checkmate — most games involve a lot of piece exchanges before checkmate is on the table — that my 7 year-old managed to pull of in his third game. The numbers swinging around in the pieces is quite enchanting, especially for kids.

The game seems to have been invented by a Japanese, but I’m not sure it was ever marketed in Japan. Clavell’s Shogun came out a year or so before this game did, so it’s likely that the title would have been attached to anything with a hint of Japaneseness about it.

The association of ‘Japan’ with ‘digital’ is interesting; the use of ‘digital’ itself is an interesting cultural moment, the transition from ‘transistor’ to ‘digital.’ It’s got to be early in the analog v. digital wars, and the term is clearly being misused, as this is a patently analog game. Like “Shogun,” “digital” is a marketing device intended to invoke emotional responses rather than being descriptive.

1. especially if you play a cutthroat version which doesn’t allow players to test moves before making them

One of my students is doing a summer research project on the Japanese financial crisis of the 1990s and we just looked at Jon Woronoff’s book The Japanese Economic Crisis (1992) which was originally published as Japan, the Coming Economic Crisis (1979). Woronoff, who was at one point a correspondent for the journal “Asian Business” and still writes about East Asian economies, was apparently widely panned at the time for being a Japanophobe or maybe just a hater in general, but I was very struck by how many of the issues he raises–banking problems, too much reliance on exports and protectionism, widening social inequalities, insecurity for the elderly, the massive generation gap of the late 20th century, collapse of the company loyalty ethic–became widely acknowledged and commented-upon social and economic problems after the collapse of the bubble. Didn’t he turn out to be right about a lot of things? Has he gotten any credit? This is not my field. My understanding of postwar economic issues is thin (Is MITI a college at M.I.T?). But the many ways in which Japan’s response to its crisis of two decades ago resonate with both the global and Japanese situation today make this feel worth revisiting.

Am I the only person who had a bad reaction to the Tomb of legendary Japanese Queen Himiko found headlines I’ve been seeing?

The article says

Archaeologists had previously claimed that the tomb, built in the traditional keyhole-shape design, was built in the fourth century and therefore too modern for Queen Himiko.

But a team led by Professor Hideki Harunari has discovered new clay artefacts close to the site, which radiocarbon dating indicates were made between 240AD and 260AD. According to records from the Chinese court, with which the Yamatai kingdom had links, Queen Himiko died around 250 AD.

The evidence seems quite circumstantial to me, from the oddly specific radio-carbon dating to the fact that they haven’t studied the tomb itself, to the treatment of Himiko and Yamatai as unequivocally Nara-centered.

I was just commenting on Jonathan Jarrett’s article about rehdroxylation rate dating that it would be nice to have better dating technology, as a safeguard against wishful thinking and distortions of the archaeological record.