Acknowledgements
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We historians inevitably pass many days and months in silent conversation with “souls of poets dead and gone,” figures of the near or distant past about whom we write, time alone with their diaries, letters, and random jottings; with their paintings, prints, maps, and artifacts. We often imagine ourselves as solitary searchers in the archives, and to an extent, of course, we are. Yet our work is also highly social, a tapestry woven of relationships, not only by our engagement with both our subjects and our audience, but even moreso by engagement with family, friends, colleagues, students, and the larger world in which we live and work. They sustain and enrich our work with their interest, encouragement, and criticism, often without fully realizing how critical their contributions are.
All scholarship therefore rests on a foundation of countless moral and intellectual debts, great and small, and my own is no exception in this regard. In researching and writing his book, which has matured over the course of many years’ inquiry, I have been exceptionally fortunate to benefit from wisdom generously offered by friends and colleagues, whose patience, insight, and criticism have helped me beyond measure.
A chance suggestion in 1985 from Michael Cooper, then editor of Monumenta Nipponica, that I take a look at some “newly discovered” Edo-era paintings of Koreans that had recently been covered in the Japanese press, began me on the winding path that led eventually to the writing of this book. I had, of course, been aware for many years of early modern Japanese paintings, prints, and book illustrations depicting Korean, Ryukyuan, and other foreign sojourners in Japan, but had seen them primarily as exceptionally interesting and vivid illustrations—examples that could tell me and my readers, e.g., “this is what a Korean embassy parade looked like.” Michael’s suggestion, which bore fruit in an article for Monumenta the following year, opened my eyes to these works of art as a discursive medium which, with appropriate theoretical and methodological rigor, one might interrogate to learn what it meant—in Japanese eyes—to be something other than Japanese.
The late Sin Kisu, the independent scholar, zainichi activist, and art collector who had found the paintings that Michael Cooper set me to investigating, was ever-generous with ideas, insights—and sake—granting access to his collection, introducing me to other collectors, and to people all around Japan who have preserved or revived festival performances rooted in Edo-period variations on the theme of “Koreans embassies visiting Japan.”2 Mr. Sin was instrumental in organizing the first exhibit of art and artifacts related to those embassies, at the Tokyo National Museum (1985) and Korean National Museum (1986), which heightened Japanese and Korean awareness, and catalyzed the discovery of many more textual, visual and folkloric resources that have energized my own research as well as that of many others.
I had not anticipated, however, all the tricky reefs, shoals, and undercurrents that were hidden beneath the surface of this inquiry. The reaction of a Korean-American undergraduate attending an early presentation of this work at Cornell in 1986 brought some of the dangers home to me. It should not surprise anyone that early modern Japanese ideas about Korea and Koreans were neither unambiguously positive, nor congruent with Koreans’ self-image, and in my talk I had tried to explain how some of those views—early modern Japanese seeing Korea as a vanquished tributary state, for example—had come into being, and how they affected Japanese attitudes and actions toward Korea. The student’s comment made it clear that she had understood me as advocating—rather than analyzing—what were often deprecatory attitudes toward Korea, which was, if anything, the very antithesis of what I had hoped to do. To that student, and interlocutors like her in other forums, who have questioned and challenged me both to better understanding and to clearer exposition, I am forever grateful.
1 Signs/Meanings
Appointment to a Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois enabled me to spend the 1987–1988 academic year across the Quad, in the Department of Anthropology, reading cultural anthropology, and auditing seminars with Edward Bruner, Alma Gottlieb, and Ann Anagnost. The pathways revealed in those seminars, and in conversations with Ed, Alma and Ann, and the larger community of anthropologists, especially David W. Plath, have led me to the essential, critical avenues along which I have pursued the sometimes elusive meanings Japanese invested in the system of signs they developed for representing non-Japanese, and generating the shifting boundaries of identity.
Nancy Abelmann, Aoyagi Masanori, Asano Shūgō, E. Taylor Atkins, Misha Auslin, Jim Barrett, Mary Elizabeth Berry, James Boon, Kai-wing Chow, Martin Collcutt, Laurel Cornell, Kevin Doak, Paul Droubie, Byron Earhart, Joshua Fogel, Poshek Fu, Fujii Jōji, the late David Goodman, Alma Gottlieb, the late JaHyun Kim Haboush, Jeffrey E. Hanes, Hashimoto Hiroyuki, Tom Havens, Mette Hjort, David Howell, Rania Huntington, the late Marius B. Jansen, Kanda Yutsuki, Janet D. Keller, Cornelius J. Kiley, Kinoshita Nagahiro, Kinoshita Naoyuki, Kurushima Hiroshi, Harry Liebersohn, Paisley Livingston, Joshua Mostow, Murai Shōsuke, Kate Nakai, Nakao Hiroshi, Oka Eri, Ōkubo Jun’ichi, David W. Plath, Brian Platt, David Prochaska, Jacob Raz, Kenneth Robinson, Sata Yoshihiko, Satō Masayuki, the late Shin Kisu, Henry D. Smith II, Sugimoto Fumiko, Bob Tierney, Royall Tyler, Constantine Vaporis, Kären Wigen, Rod Wilson, Yamaji Hidetoshi, Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Yoshida Mitsuo and Yoshida Nobuyuki have offered advice, read and commented on all or part of the manuscript at critical junctures along the way; their generosity of spirit and acuity of insight have helped me to refine arguments, to focus ideas, and to improve my prose.
In the critical final stages of preparing the manuscript to send if off to Brill, Kate Babbitt, historian, documentarist, and editor extraordinaire, went through the entire draft with what I can only call dispassionate commitment. Kate rendered out excess, leaving a leaner text, with subtler textures and flavors than my efforts alone might have served up.
Curators at museums, archives, and private collections in Japan, Korea, the U. K., and the United States, who have opened their collections to me deserve special mention, for without their remarkably generous willingness to grant access to the treasures they contain, little of this work would have been possible. I am especially grateful to Norma and Howard Lee; the late Mary Griggs Burke and her curators, Stephanie Wada and Sandy Williams; Money Hickman and Ann Morse (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); Yamamoto Yūko (Nagoya City Museum); Tanaka Atsuko (Kawagoe Museum); the late Sin Kisu; Miyoshi Tadayoshi and Oka Yasumasa (Kobe Museum); Takafuji Harutoshi (Nikkō Tōshōgū); Barbara Brennan Ford (Metropolitan Museum of Art); Margaret Glover (New York Public Library); James Ulak (Freer Gallery). Janice Katz (Art Institute of Chicago) invited me to curate a small exhibition at the Institute in 2007, “Alien Images: Foreigners in Japanese Prints, 17th–19th Century,” which stimulated further articulation of my ideas about the perception and representation of non-Japanese in Japanese discourse. Roger Keyes introduced me to a key work of Suzuki Harunobu (Fig. 7.14) that catalyzed profound changes in the way Chapter 7 has evolved.
In Japan, I have been uncommonly fortunate in the hospitality afforded me over many years by the Historiographical Institute (Shiryō Hensanjo) at University of Tokyo, both during several extended periods of formal affiliation as a Visiting Scholar, in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, as a frequent short-term visitor during brief trips to Japan over the years, and during my tenure as a professor in the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology. The faculty of the Historiographical Institute—more than fifty immensely erudite and talented historians of premodern Japan—were always welcoming, and the unfettered access to their remarkable library. It is surely the most comprehensive collection of both manuscript and printed original source materials and historical journals and monographs, and a resource I have learned to rely on more than any other. Gonoi Takashi, who had the dubious pleasure of sharing his office with an ever-changing parade of visiting overseas scholars at the Institute, graciously guided me to important Jesuit correspondence I would not likely have found otherwise; I am ever grateful for his quiet erudition and unfailing good cheer, as I am to his assistant, Ōhashi Akiko. Over the years, Hotate Michihisa, Ishigami Eiichi, Katō Tomoyasu, Komiya Kiyora, Kurushima Noriko, Miyachi Masato, Miyazaki Katsumi, Sata Yoshihiko, the late Takagi Shōsaku, the late Tanaka Takeo, Tsuruta Kei, Yamamoto Hirofumi, and Yokoyama Yoshinori have been uncommonly generous with their expertise and advice.
It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge my profound intellectual and personal debt to Kuroda Hideo, who has been generous beyond measure with ideas, sources, and criticism. I was particularly fortunate to encounter Kuroda, who has been a pioneer in the reading of visual materials as historical texts—what he terms kaiga shiryō—in the early stages of my project. Kuroda shares not only an interest in the visual as historical, but in the construction and representation of boundaries—difference—in Japanese history. In Medieval of the Boundary; Medieval of the Symbol,3 Kuroda had begun to “deconstruct the map” well before J. B. Harley’s exhortation.4 Whenever I was in Tokyo, daily conversations in our favorite Mermaid Tavern—the “Mrs. Moa” coffee shop, itself now dead and gone, opposite Tokyo University’s Akamon (“Red Gate”)—gave me the benefit of his immense interdisciplinary erudition, seemingly limitless familiarity with both written and visual texts, piercing Socratic interrogation, and insatiable appetite for knowledge and understanding. His methodological and interpretive rigor, his intellectual passion, relentlessly probing questions, and his introductions to entirely new sorts of materials, have immeasurably enriched this work.
If, as Tip O’Neill observed, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” the same is true of scholarship. Without the generosity of the University of Illinois and a number of foundations, this project would never have come to fruition. I began the project while on a Fulbright Fellowship-Hays Faculty Research Fellowship at Keio University in 1984–85. Much of the research was done during several extended research visits to the Historiographical Institute at Tokyo University, and a year as Visiting Professor at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at Kyoto University. I am grateful to both institutes for providing a stimulating, intellectually rewarding environment in which to work. Research for this paper has been supported by a travel grant from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, a William & Flora Hewlett Summer Research Grant from the Office of International Programs and Studies, University of Illinois; a Japan Foundation Professional Fellowship, a Senior Research Fellowship and a Summer Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship; the Institute for Research in the Humanities of Kyoto University; grants from the Toyota Foundation, the University of Illinois Research Board, the Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies of the University of Illinois, and the Cultural Affairs Agency, Japan, provided funding for research assistants, travel, and photography, and other research needs. I am deeply grateful to these organizations for their generosity.
Earlier versions or sections of several chapters in this volume have appeared previously in either English or Japanese, but have been substantially revised and expanded here. An earlier version of Chapter 2, “The Ragged Edges of State and Nation,” was published as “Kyōkai ryōiki no kinsei-teki ninshiki: Nihon-zu o chūshin ni,” in Chizu to ezu no seiji bunkashi (Kuroda Hideo et al., ed. 2001), Chapter 3, “Imaging and Imagining Anthropos,” is a revised and expanded version of an article that appeared in The Visual Anthropology Review (Toby 1998a); parts of Chapter 4 appeared as “The Indianness of Iberia and Changing Japanese Iconographies of Other,” in Implicit Understandings (Toby 1994b). Chapter 5, “Parades of Other, Reaffirmations of Self,” has been substantially revised from “Gaikō no gyōretsu/gyōretsu” (Toby 1994a); Chapter 6, “The Birth of the Hairy Barbarian,” has been revised from “‘Ketōjin’ no tōjō o megutte” (Toby 1997); and parts of Chapter 7, “The Mountain That Needs No Interpreter,” appeared in much shorter form as “Kan-Nihonkai no Fugaku enbō” in a volume I co-edited with Aoyagi Masanori, Kanryū suru bunka to bi (Toby 2002), further revised as Chapter 6 in “Sakoku” to iu gaikō (Toby 2008).
In the end, of course, even the best efforts of friends and colleagues can help an author only so far in improving the work and steering clear of error, interpretive or empirical. As I have watched my own understanding of both—of seemingly minor empirical details, and broad interpretive frameworks—form and re-form over the years, I have become even more intensely conscious of the fragile nature of the interpretive enterprise. Interpretation is, after all, an inevitably inexact and provisional endeavor. For whatever errors may remain, whether matters of fact or of interpretation, I alone am responsible.
Finally, to my wife Yuko, whose wit, warmth, and love have sustained me throughout the many years this book has gestated, evolved, and—yes—occasionally seemed to stall in its tracks, I owe far more than a few dedicatory words can possibly measure.
2 Some Practical Matters
At the practical level, I use the standard Romanization systems, Modified Hepburn for Japanese and Ryukyuan, McCune-Reischauer for Korean, and Pinyin for Chinese, throughout, except when quoting a western-language text that employs its own transcription, e.g., contemporary European writers like Engelbert Kaempfer or Rutherford Alcock who, in any case, predate the invention of standard, systematic transcription schemes. All Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Ryukyuan names in the text, notes, and references appear in standard order, i.e., with the family name preceding the given name; an exception is made for names of modern authors writing in English and signing themselves in Western name-order. I omit macrons for terms that have entered the English dictionary, such as “shogun” and “daimyo,” and common toponyms like “Osaka” and “Tokyo.” All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.
Words in Chinese orthography can be pronounced as “Chinese,” “Korean,” or “Japanese” words, and transliterated as such. Even in “Chinese,” the Pinyin system transcribes only the pronunciation of standard modern Chinese (“Mandarin”), which is but one of many regional dialects. A Japanese word like Tōjin, for example, would be read Tangren in modern Mandarin, but T’angin in modern Korean, though seventeenth or eighteenth century pronunciation was surely different in each of these languages, as well as from region to region within each. Moreover, the Chinese who came to Japan were for the most part from Fujian, where a distinct dialect was spoken that was (and is) quite different from the Beijing standard. Representing the parlance of early modern maritime China in modern Mandarin is no more than a convention and convenience, but it will have to do.
Keats, “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” at www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44476.
The term zainichi (“in Japan”), short for zainichi Chōsenjin or Zainichi Kankokujin, generally refers to ethnic Koreans who are long-term residents in Japan.
Kuroda (1986).
Harley (1989).