Producing, or reading, any work of history or ethnography is fundamentally a series of translation acts—across time and space, across language and culture. Both authors and readers must constantly remind themselves that language is constantly changing. To paraphrase the medieval poet, critic, and priest Kamo no Chōmei (1153?–1216), the flow of language is ceaseless, and yet the words are never the same:1 Writing about peoples or cultures of one time and place, for an anticipated audience of another, writing in one language of lives or practices lived in another, inescapably entails choices of language and representation that are, each of them, multiple acts of translation.
Some would argue as well that writing from the subject position of an American academic about aspects of a Japanese past entails still further translations, and I would be the last to dispute that; still, I would argue that no-one writing today about the distant past can claim to be writing as anything but an outsider. The past is, decidedly, “another country,” all of whose inhabitants are gone; only their words, acts, and artifacts remain. It is the historian’s craft to fashion meaning from those leavings, and this is above all an exercise in translation. An extended inquiry into the practice of history as a series of translation acts will have to await another opportunity, but some acknowledgement of the process is essential if we are to maintain some self-awareness of our own agency in the work.
The texts, artifacts, and practices examined in these essays were mediated, in the main, by the symbolic field of early modern Japan, both linguistic and non-linguistic, a field in which multiple, shifting registers of discourse necessarily cohabited, but the modes of cohabitation shifted over time. The explosive expansion of literacy beyond the religious and ruling elite, the emergence of a vast and highly ramified and specialized publishing industry, and the growth of reading not only as a consumer practice—the consumption of books as cultural commodities producing new forms of cultural capital—were both products of and precursors to a proliferation of linguistic registers. Texts were produced in “Japanese,” of course, but even that seemingly simple label belies the varieties of language it entailed; it is no accident that language itself became an arena of ideological and political contestation.
But more importantly, for our purposes, even texts that were “Japanese” might simultaneously be “in Chinese.” Writing, of course, first appeared in the Japanese archipelago in the form of written Chinese—legal, religious, diplomatic, administrative, and literary; to be a “literate Japanese” at the highest level, even in the early modern era, meant the ability to produce and consume texts, not only in any register of written Japanese, but in Chinese, as well. At the same time, as David Lurie, Emanuel Pastreich, and others have shown, the production or reading by Japanese of what appears on the surface to be a Chinese text—no matter how seemingly fluent—is inevitably a form of “Japanese language.” And even among those who “knew” Chinese, knowledge was invariably limited to the literary language or, from the late seventeenth century, the written vernacular of popular Chinese fiction; almost no-one learned to speak Chinese.2
From earliest times, Japanese readers and writers developed what one might call “translation machines,” or at least, a “mechanics of translation,” to turn a grammatically, syntactically, and graphically Chinese text into Japanese. The nexus of practices through which this was accomplished are known collectively as Kanbun, a term which seems simply to mean, “Chinese text,” but refers to this translation system. My late mentor Herschel Webb distinguished Kanbun from “Chinese,” by suggesting—perhaps a bit too broadly—that whenever the seemingly Chinese text was operated upon by a Japanese actor, either as writer or reader, the product was Kanbun.
Early modern Japanese writers and readers took full advantage of Kanbun, often without consciousness of the linguistic boundary transgressions inherent in the practice. Indeed, both the official language of legal texts, and the informal language in daily use had long since incorporated Kanbun locutions, phrases taken wholesale from Chinese but assigned domesticated significations, and purely Japanese locutions that came to be written in faux Chinese grammar and syntax. By the seventeenth century if not earlier, Japanese were producing entire texts in faux Chinese—not texts that tried but failed to be “proper” Chinese, but texts that consciously exploited the grammar and syntax of Chinese, and the translation practices of Kanbun, to create texts that looked Chinese, but were intended to be read as Japanese, and to exploit the Otherness of Chinese for comic purposes.
I dwell on this faux Chinese because it became a favored medium for messages about the Other: Prose and poetry about the Other, in what might be mistaken for the language of the Other, to be read as comic prose or verse in Japanese. Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823), for example, a minor bakufu official but a major wit and prolific writer, was a master of comic expression in faux Chinese, both prose and poetry, and often chose that medium as the langue for his scathing commentary on Japan’s Others. Much of what Nanpo wrote in this vein—or any vein, for that matter—we would find outrageously discriminatory or “racist” (if “race” were a meaningful notion in eighteenth-century Japan), but Nanpo’s wit was “no respecter of persons,” and happily roasted all sacred cows to a crisp.
This brings me to the most delicate of linguistic matters. My own linguistic range is relatively limited—the brand of American English on which I was raised, nearly fifty years’ more-or-less daily use of Japanese, an atrophying knowledge of Korean, a reading knowledge of literary Chinese, and the smatterings of Latin, French and a few other languages imperfectly acquired in youth, and mostly forgotten, that remain with me today. In none of these languages can I think of a term for outsiders—foreigners, outcasts, minorities—that is not, at least potentially, freighted with deprecation. Even a seemingly simple and straightforward word like “foreigner,” with an appropriately sneering inflection, quickly becomes a pejorative. Even a term for the Other that seems to be chosen as neutral or respectful seem invariably to morph quite quickly into a term of opprobrium or disrespect, so long as the underlying disrespect and discrimination persist.
The historical engagement of Japan with its Others inevitably brings with it the baggage of pejorative vocabulary in which the Other was spoken in popular discourse. Chapter 6, “The Birth of the Hairy Barbarian,” explicitly engages one of the best known of these pejoratives, but other unhappy terms for Other bob through the texts examined here like flotsam on a stormy sea. Most problematic is the Japanese term Tōjin (Ch., Tangren), the most common term for Chinese in particular and for foreigners in general in the broad parlance of the early modern age. At its most benign and “literal,”3 in Japanese discourse Tōjin meant a “Chinese person,” and more narrowly, a person from Tang dynasty China (618–907). In the maritime world of early modern China, overseas Fujian merchants identified themselves as Tangren, but it is unlikely that Japanese in early modern times referred to Chinese and other foreigners as Tōjin simply because that is what Fujianese called themselves.
But Tōjin had an independent life as a Japanese term. It appears in late eleventh century texts, for example, over a century and a half after the fall of the Tang dynasty in China, and a century after the establishment of the Song.4 A witty mid-sixteenth century Japanese dictionary notes that, “Even when the Tōjin blows his nose, he does it in rhyme”;5 a few years later, a more sober-minded Buddhist prelate records an exchange of gifts with some Tōjin;6 while an early seventeenth century wit’s list of “high things” (takaki mono) included “Mt. Sumeru [the Buddhist axis mundi], kingship, the Heavenly Realm of Non-cognition, the pagoda at Tōji, [and] the Tōjin’s nose.”7 The attribution of a tall (i.e., “big”) nose to Tōjin suggests that by the turn of the seventeenth century, Tōjin had already enlarged its capacity to envelop all “foreigners,” for it was the recently-encountered Europeans (Nanban; “southern barbarians”) who were usually seen—and represented—as having large noses.
In common parlance, then, Tōjin was both a specific name for “Chinese,” and an omnium gatherum for the generic Other. In most contexts, though, as a term for people from Ming and Qing China, from Korea, the Ryukyus, or Southeast Asia, it was unquestionably pejorative, much as “Chinaman” is in English. I have wrestled with the question of translation, and have chosen to offer this brief explanation of Tōjin, rather than to render it into an English equivalent. To translate it as “Chinese” or “foreigner” is to be both too “literal” and too narrow, on the one hand, and over-determined on the other, for any single translation effaces the penumbra of other significations. And to translate it as “Chinaman,” it seems to me, is not only needlessly offensive to our ears; at the same time it merely emphasizes the pejorative, while eliding the more-or-less neutral valences of the term.
I have therefore chosen to carry Tōjin across (trans-latus) the linguistic divide; its very strangeness to our ear emphasizes that it signifies Otherness, and recalls the multivocal valences of strangeness that it signified to Japanese as they wrote or spoke, read or heard, painted or viewed, images of the Other. It was precisely in dialogic engagement with Tōjin, writ large, that Japanese constructed and confirmed identity: Just as there is an almost limitless inventory of deprecatory visions of the Tōjin in all registers of Japanese discourse, from comic routines (rakugo) to scholarly debate, there were also many who spoke with either admiration or detachment of foreign—especially Chinese, but Korean as well—ideas, institutions, and cultural models. While the word Tōjin was rarely the term of choice for those who held up Chinese ideas and institutions as ideals, it seems best to let context determine content; otherwise, we would need a half-dozen translations for it.
1 Some Practical Matters
At the practical level, I use the standard Romanization systems, Modified Hepburn (Japanese), McCune-Reischauer (Korean), and Pinyin (Chinese) throughout, except when quoting a western-language text that employs its own transcription, e.g. European writers like Engelbert Kaempfer or Rutherford Alcock who predate the invention of standard transcription schemes. I omit macrons for terms that have entered the English dictionary, such as “shogun,” and common toponyms like “Osaka” and “Tokyo.” All Japanese, Chinese, and Korean names in the text, notes, and references appear in standard order, i.e., family name preceding given name; an exception is made for names of modern authors writing in English and signing themselves in Western name-order. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.
Kamo (1956), Hōjōki, opens with a sentence known to every Japanese schoolchild: Kawa no nagare wa taezu shite, shikamo moto no mizu ni arazu (In Donald Keene’s [1955, 197] rendering, “The flow of the river is ceaseless and [yet] its water is never the same.” Kamo, born into a prominent line of Shinto priests, took the tonsure as a Buddhist priest at age fifty.
Best known of these is the Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), though it is not certain how well he had mastered spoken Chinese. Less well-known, but surely more fluent, was Amenomori Hōshū (1668–1755), a Confucian scholar employed by the daimyo of Tsushima, who studied spoken Chinese in Nagasaki, and Korean in Pusan.
To assert a “literal” meaning is to suggest that there is a precise one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified; only one “correct” translation for each word. (The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed. [2000], defines “literal” as, “Being in accordance with, conforming to, or upholding the exact or primary meaning of a word or words.”).
The Mother of Jōjin, Jōjin Ajari Haha no shū (1073), quoted in NKD (2: 982).
Gyokujinshō (1536), quoted in ibid.
Shōnyo (1966–1968, 1: 545), entries of Tenbun 16/8/13; 16/6/20 (1547/9/26; 1546/10/3).
Uzumasa Munemura, Inu makura (1606), quoted in NKD (2000–2002).