There's an interesting sequel to the production and

reception of Watanabe Kazan's portrait of Satō Issai at the age of 50.

Watanabe Kazan, as we'll see later on in our lectures,

died at an early age in 1841.

And right after that, Satō Issai, or

just at that same time, Satō Issai became 70 and 71.

The age of 70 is a an important sort of milestone in Japan,

your birthday is often very celebrated on that year, sort of specially.

I believe if Watanabe Kazan had been living,

he probably would have painted another portrait of him.

But what we see is that a disciple of Watanabe Kazan,

one of his most important, talented painter disciples,

a man named Tsubaki Chinzan painted a portrait of

Sato Issai at the age of 71, a year after Kazan passes away.

This tells us that probably first of all that Sato Issai, who sat once again for

a very again realistic portrait 20 years after the first one,

must have really liked the first one to begin with.

He must have really sort of felt what he wrote about on

top of Kazan's paintings, agreed with it.

Recognized himself in the image and then was willing to,

20 years later, in almost the same pose, sit for

another portrait of himself, again at the age of 70 or 71.

An interesting aspect, another aspect of this is this portrait,

when we take a look at the whole object,

we can see once again that at the top of the painting there are a lots of sort

of kanji, Chinese characters, written, and if we look at that close up,

we can see that it's exactly the same piece of prose

that Satō Issai contributed to his own portrait 20 years earlier.

Except at the end, I'll just point it out here with my fingers,

it says here a man at the age of 71.

And again, his name, and he attests to the fact that

he's actually written, composed this in his own hand.

So we have Satō Issai at the age of 50, writing this really heartfelt

sort of appraisal, appreciation, piece of criticism about his own portrait.

And then 20 years later, he re-inscribes it onto a portrait

of him which shows obviously sort of the changes that the years have

sort of cast upon his figure and so forth.

We have both of these portraits with Satō's autographical

sort of prose survive and you can compare them.

But you can also use them to show the power of

Watanabe Kazan's original portrait, the realism, the verisimilitude,

and the reaction in words that Satō Issai sort of contributed to it and

basically collaborated to make it one work of art.

Anyway, that's sort of a a sequel to the portrait that we saw in the last lesson.

In this lesson, I want to move on a little bit to literary or intellectual figures

and to take a look at what basically in the 19th century, earlier in the 19th century,

before the troubles leading up to the Meiji Restoration, Japanese intellectuals

had to say about writing realistically or representing things as they are,

as opposed to something that's perhaps very,

very formalistic or classical, very, very rhetorical.

There's a lot of argument going on in the early 19th century

about how the world should be, or could be, presented.

And a lot of people of the samurai class, but of other classes as well,

talk about, discuss, communicate with each other about the very, very sort of basic

issue of what it means to actually describe the world around oneself and

the importance, or the lack of importance, of verisimilitude.

Hirose Tansō is a merchant-class intellectual active in the 19th century.

He lived his whole life on the southwestern island of Kyushu, where he

started in his 20s a private academy for

students from all over Japan to come live at

his academy and study there for 1, 2, up to 6 or 7 years, and

to study Confucianism, especially, or not just Confucianism but Chinese,

East Asian sort of culture or civilization in a very, very broad sense.

Hirose Tansō is considered one of the most important early modern educators.

He presaged or he sort of gave us a sort of template for

modern education before the Meiji Restoration late in the Edo period.

He introduced the principle of academic competition to Japanese schools.

At the time, if you had samurai- and farmer- and

merchant-class students in the same level, in the same class,

the samurai would all sit in the front and they would be treated differently, and

they would be perhaps promoted to a different grade, just because of

the fact that they were samurai or they're within a samurai class,

there are people who are more noble and less noble because of their families.

Hirose Tansō, at his private academy in Kyushu, again to the south of here,

insisted that all of his students work hard and he gave regular

examinations to determine whether the students could move on to the next level.

He was very, very concerned with merit and academic competition, which sort of,

as I said, foreshadows the modern educational system here in Japan.

What he also did, he spent a lot of time with his students teaching them to write

literary Chinese, either prose or

poetry in order to express their feelings, to relieve themselves,

their tensions and stresses and so forth, to create a sort of free space,

allowing students then to study political economy or history or

other more social studies, sort of more areas that

might relate with actual governance or sort of help the communities,

each of which the students would return to and spend their lives working with.

Anyway, he was a very important literary figure in this period as well and

wrote a lot about their theories of poetry and prose as well.

One of his essays, which we call the Tansō's Essays on Poetry, is fascinating

because he goes on it at length about how important it is to be immediate and

to be very, very sort of manifest and concrete in what you write about.

And it gives us a sort of window on what young men and women in this period

were thinking about when they thought about expressing themselves,

especially representing the world or themselves in word.

Let's read an excerpt from his essay.

"People nowadays love writing up the smallest, most vulgar details,

thinking these are what 'real' is all about.

What I take to be 'real' though is something else: the actual situations and

real emotions of people narrated with no ornament.

Young writers today will sketch out the hazards of infirmity and old age,

or concentrate on representing mountain landscapes

even while they toil daily as public officials."

He's making a criticism here of contemporary poets and writers.

A lot of people he says are basically hypocritical.

They write about things that they don't know from their own experience.

They consider something real, I almost want to say realistic here,

writing realistically is being detailed, very, very extremely sort of detailed,

filling in all of the shadows, all of the spaces,

regardless of whether they've actually experienced what they're writing about,

and he says, he argues, that that's the wrong way to approach writing.

He goes on, "What results is something they have neither seen with their own eyes nor

felt within their hearts:

nothing more than rote imitation of words by the ancients.

In such cases, even if they've represented a scene precisely as if one had seen it,

the effect is no different from an actor dressed up in costumes.

How can you say this is what's 'real'?"

Again, like Satō Issai, Hirose Tansō is very,

very concerned, consumed, we might say, about what can be considered real,

what's the divide between something that feels and

can be recognized or approached as real and something not.

This is a very important distinction to him, to all of the men and

women who were writing or illustrating in this period.

1-5 Representation of Reality in Literatures I

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

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