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Hi, I'm Robert Campbell and

I teach Japanese literature in the Department of Comparative Literature and

Cultures at the University of Tokyo.

I've prepared a series of lectures to share with you about

Japanese culture, literary and illustrative, from the 19th century.

The title of our lecture is Words Spun Out of Images, Visual and

Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan.

There are a lot of things that we have to clear before we move into

the lectures themselves, for example,

what does the 19th century mean in the context of Japanese culture?

The Tokugawa feudal system ended in 1868 during the so-called Meiji Restoration,

and the years after that we refer to the modern era.

Before that, we have a basically a feudal system, which is very,

very ranked socially and led by the samurai class.

And we call that the Tokugawa period, or

in English, the early modern period in Japan.

So the 19th century, which we're used to talking about in an English or

Western context, really refers to two very, very different systems,

periods, and ways of thinking about the culture and

the history of the Japanese people and the geography of the country itself.

So anyway, our talks, the lectures that you're going to be listening to and

participating over the next few days cover two very, very different periods in Japan.

But I want to use visual and literary culture,

the evidence of about a century of Japanese culture,

to demonstrate that even though the system, the ideology,

the political framework of the country, the nation, changed very,

very radically during this time, there are a lot of continuous, sort of underflows,

undercurrents, and aspects of Japanese culture which survived

the Meiji Restoration and actually supported the modernization of Japan

in East Asia and in the world from the 19th century into the 20th century.

I also want to take a look at what the difference between visual and

literary cultures are in the Japanese context in this period.

I've got a book in my hand here which was published in Kyoto in 1869.

I want to ask you, first of all, what do you think, what do you imagine,

how would you label the image that I'm just showing to you right now?

If you're familiar with Japanese, or Chinese, or Korean culture,

you may recognize that what's written here is written, they're words, in other words.

But on the other hand, you can see that it's not like printed words, the words

are each of them are written using ink and a brush and they look almost painterly.

In other words, we could appreciate or take a look at this as

a work of calligraphy, which might be a work of art in itself.

In fact, what I'm holding and showing you right now is the last

poem written by a Japanese political activist, a samurai,

whose name was Kusaka Genzui, who committed suicide in 1864 in Kyoto.

He was in the middle of a battle and losing obviously and

before being captured and perhaps tortured, and having to perhaps confess

all kinds of things about his comrades and so forth, he decided to commit suicide.

And this is his last poem before that.

As I said, it was published in 1869 right after the Meiji Restoration

as part of an anthology of the last writings of men and

women who fought to overturn the regime in the 1860s.

So one of the first things that we have to think about when we talk about visual

literary culture in Japan is

the difference between what a painting is or a visual representation is and

what's something that's written, the written word.

One thing that we're going to learn and experience, and I think perhaps sort of

understand more deeply through the lectures is the connection between

the written, so-called literary culture of Japan in the 19th century and

what we would call art history, the record of illustrated Japan in the same period.

My thesis, what I'm going to try to convey using a lot of evidence from this period

is that images and words depend upon each other.

They're sort of produced or spun out of each other in a very,

very sort of integrated, organic, sort of relationship in this period which is

different from Western culture at the same time and

also different from modern Japanese culture as well.

Let's take a look at what the modules actually are going to consist of.

First of all, I want to take a good look at how samurai represented themselves,

how they painted, drew, or wrote about each other, sometimes

actually on the illustrations that were produced of themselves in this period.

Self-portraits, portraits by other people, unlike in the West,

we'll find a lot of samurai portraits with words actually written onto them.

I want to take a look at and question the meaning of the association,

the integration between words and images.

The second module is going to concentrate on how women in the 19th century were

represented, how the formal qualities of representations,

portraits, idealized pictures of women but

also the actual conditions that some of these portraits or

images were made, who they were made for, how they were used.

The first viewers, what they had in mind while they were looking at them.

And of course,

the connections between these painted beauties and the literary word.

The third module is going to take us into the modern era.

From the late years of the Tokugawa regime into the new modern era and the Meiji.

One of the most important technological innovations,

something that really changes a lot of Japanese culture is the photograph.

Photography is introduced by European and

American photographers who come to the open ports — Yokohama, Kobe, Nagasaki — but

then almost immediately it's grafted into, taken on into Japanese culture itself.

Many Japanese young artists become photographers,

open up photographic studios, and of course besides landscape,

the most important and the most common way of taking a photograph is of one's face.

Unlike the same period in Europe or the United States,

Japanese early photographers, especially portrait photography,

was always very concerned with the word, how to couple or

dock the written word together with this new innovation, this very,

very realistic way of representing the human countenance.

Our fourth module is going to take a look at Japanese illustrated and

literary culture from a very global point of view,

the late 19th century when the pictorial postcard becomes very,

very popular for people who are taking world tours but also as souvenirs,

world exhibitions in the United States, France, all over the world.

Dozens and dozens, hundreds of postcards, pictorial postcards were produced

regarding almost any sort of event that occurred in the Western world and

these were introduced in the 1880s, 1890s, into Japan.

Technology developed, and by the first decade of the 20th century,

during, for example, the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese men and women,

really went crazy over pictorial postcards, and we see a lot of fascinating

collaborations between artists, photographers, and also literary figures

in creating original postcards but also in the way that they're used.

There are very individual characteristic ways of using postcards,

which we find in the late 19th and the early 20th century in Japan,

which will also give us a clue into how to approach and to think about,

set up a sort of historical paradigm for images spun unto words.

Anyway, let's start with the lecture, with Samurai Portraits.

1-1 Introduction

Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan

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