Muromachi period

Estudio comparativo histórico-militar entre dos concepciones aparentemente lejanas, pero en el fondo coincidentes, de la caballería a ambos lados del mundo. Para ello, acotaremos el espacio temporal en el feudalismo: la Plena y Tardía Edad Media europea (siglos XI-XV), y la Era Feudal japonesa (Períodos Kamakura, Muromachi y Azuchi-Momoyama, siglos XII-XVI) atendiendo a los rasgos más característicos de la caballería en ambas culturas, así como a sus similitudes y diferencias. Y no sólo en el plano estrictamente militar, sino también en el socio-cultural, con especial atención a los valores caballerescos y al estatus aristocrático asociados al auge de los caballeros y los samuráis.

The Jesuits arrived in Japan in 1549 and until their expulsion they were very active, converting people to Christianity, building churches, schools, and hospitals. The Jesuits relied on the local lords’ financial support to build and often received Buddhist temples to be converted into churches. Based on a review of Jesuit letters, a brief analysis of Japanese Buddhist temple floor plan characteristics, a short review of Jesuit church architecture in general and in Japan I will illustrate how a Buddhist temple floor plan may have looked like when converted into a Jesuit church.

Enshrined at Daigoji 醍醐寺 temple—one of the most important centers of Shingon esoteric Buddhism—is the female tutelary deity Seiryō (or Seiryū) Gongen 清瀧権現. Medieval texts depict her as a draconic goddess, usually the third daughter of the dragon king Shakara (Sk. Sāgara) 娑伽羅龍王. Traditions say that she physically traveled to Japan with Kūkai 空海 (774-835), and that her cult became particularly prominent at Daigoji after the temple was established by the Shingon monk Shōbō 聖宝 (835-909).
From the eleventh century to the middle ages, Seiryō Gongen appeared mostly within the context of rainmaking rituals. Such practices at Daigoji eventually fell out of favor during the late Kamakura period, but her cult did not lose its popularity. In fact, her name is frequently referenced in one major Muromachi source for the history of the Shingon school, the diary of the Sanbōin 三宝院 monk Manzei 満済 (also Mansai, 1378-1435).  As the abbot of Daigoji, Manzei conducted various rituals at the Seiryō shrines of Daigoji temple, such as recitations of sūtras, offerings, doctrinal discussions (dangi 談義), and even included Nō performances. He also was a central figure at the court of the Ashikaga shoguns, especially Yoshimitsu 義満 (1358-1408), and he played a crucial role in supporting their regime (Mori 2004).
This article will analyze Manzei’s Seiryō’s rituals and and replace them in the historical context of this goddess’s cult. After a presentation of Manzei’s activities, a return to the origins of the Seiryō worship will show the cult’s stability and evolution during Japan’s less-understood late Middle Ages. I will show how Manzei’s rituals, although they followed traditional patterns, also consecrated a gradual shift in the goddess’s role inside the Daigoji temple. This analysis will then allow for a discussion of the category of guardian deities in premodern Japan, as well as shed new light on the cult’s developments during the Edo period and beyond.

The current study analyzes the documents of the Tannowa family, a warrior family which resided in Tannowa-no-shō, Izumi province, and seeks to undestand their path throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the pursuit of these goals, this study engages in a contextualist analysis of the primary sources, frequently bringing to the fore background matters that operated within the society, such as the model of familial organization and conveyance of property within the warrior families, the system of land administration, the political play between the Imperial Court and the bakufu, among other factors. As the study advances, we are confronted by the new realities of the fourteenth century, where the first bakufu is overthrown, the second one rises over its ashes, and a war of six decades proceeds, product of a schism within the imperial family. In such a background, autonomous warrior leaders (tōzama) seek to offer their services to those who can better reward them. Throughout this study, we see the Tannowa advancing through a series of steps, from their humble beginnings as mere officials under Tannowa-no-shō's proprietor to their ascension to  tōzama status in the fourteenth century, alternating between the Northern and Southern Court and consolidating a firm base of regional power in Izumi, ending the century as provincial magnates known as kokujin ryōshu. Their history also allows a rare glimpse of the warriors under the Southern Court and presents faded familial conflicts, possibly pertaining to a part of their history that the compilers wished to forget.

(Dissertation paper for the title of Bachelor of Arts in History)

When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. Accounting for this dramatic transformation, From White to Yellow is a pioneering study of the evolution of European interpretations of the Japanese and the emergence of discourses about race in early modern Europe. Transcending the conventional focus on Africans and Jews within the rise of modern racism, Rotem Kowner demonstrates that the invention of race did not emerge in a vacuum in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather was a direct product of earlier discourses of the "Other." This compelling study indicates that the racial discourse on the Japanese, alongside the Chinese, played a major role in the rise of the modern concept of race. While challenging Europe's self-possession and sense of centrality, the discourse delayed the eventual consolidation of a hierarchical worldview in which Europeans stood immutably at the apex. Drawing from a vast array of primary sources, From White to Yellow traces the racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.


ENDORSEMENTS
“This magisterial work by Rotem Kowner fills an important gap in contemporary scholarship about racial history and European perceptions of the Japanese during the age of maritime explorations, beginning with the voyages of Marco Polo. The author approaches a delicate and complex topic with a breadth of knowledge and erudition based on the careful analysis of primary documents from a wide variety of both printed and manuscript sources in numerous languages.”
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. Director of the Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco

“Rotem Kowner has written an extraordinary book which will be must-reading for anyone interested in Western perceptions of the Japanese from the beginning (Marco Polo’s account) to the 18th century, and to anyone interested in the history of the very concept of ‘race.’"
Gary Leupp, Department of History, Tufts University

“Erudite, comprehensive, and clearly-written, From White to Yellow offers the reader a panorama of the Euro-Japanese encounter in the pre-modern period that is unsurpassed in previous scholarship.”
Ronnie Hsia, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University


REVIEWS
“This is a path-breaking book, rich in insights and extraordinary well researched. ... This is a dense book, exhaustive in its treatment of European writings on Japan and duly aware of the need to keep in mind how Europeans wrote about Others. There are fascinating explorations of topics such as slavery, miscegenation, and George Psalmanazar, the self-styled Japanese. … [T]he text of this volume covers only slightly more than half of the pages and most of the rest is taken up by endnotes, many of them as long as a paragraph and some filling half a page, together with a huge bibliography covering works in twelve languages. Not only do the notes testify to the prodigious labor that has gone into this book, but they also show how meticulously Kowner has explored the ramifications and details of encounters between Europeans and the various Others they encountered. … This book is, though, unsurpassed in its careful examination of European writings on Japan, and the efficient index makes Kowner’s analyses and coverage of the literature easily accessible”
Peter Kornicki, Journal of World History 27 (2016): 347–350

“From White to Yellow is a big book in every way. The product of immense research, it is an exceptionally ambitious work that makes a string of innovative and far-reaching arguments. Even more strikingly, it is simply the first of a planned two-volume series that, once completed, will span over six hundred years of European interactions with Japan. ... The scale of the task and the depth of the research invite a comparison to Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, a groundbreaking series that can best be described as an almost supernatural feat of scholarship. … Overall the work is a significant achievement that should be read by anyone working in the field. It moves Japan from the margins to the very center of discussions over the development of early modern racial discourse, making a powerful case for the importance of the European encounter with Japan. Japan represented a problem for Europeans, and Kowner brilliantly dissects the varied ways in which they struggled to deal with it in the early modern period.”
Adam Clulow, Monumenta Nipponica 71 (2016): 140–143

“The book is a remarkable scholarly achievement and in some ways almost too detailed in its exposition. It throws valuable light on evolving European attitudes to race and to racial hierarchies and demonstrates how they were filtered through different social mechanisms – religion, trade, power – and how despite empirical evidence, few Europeans could actually ‘see’ racial differences in the case of the Japanese, even depicting their clothing in a quasi-European style in paintings and engravings. … Kowner’s book is the outcome of years of scholarly investigation in many languages including Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Latin, Spanish, German, English and yet others and is exhaustively documented with fully half of its almost 700 pages being devoted to sources, notes and bibliography. Its essential theme is the tracing of the transformation and images that slowly moved the Japanese from being seen as ‘white race’ to re-classification as a ‘yellow’ one, along it may be said with the Chinese and the Koreans, whose racial history in relation to the West is inevitably part of the larger story of the transformation of perceptions as they applied to East Asia as a whole, and the light that this sheds on the roots of racial and racialist thought in the West. ….”
John Clammer, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (2016): 1500–1502

“In this erudite, complex, and ambitious work, Rotem Kowner examines how Europeans came to see the Japanese nation as “yellow” and inferior, after initially perceiving them as “white” equals. ... Kowner’s work complicates the history of the construction and development of the idea of race by examining the European encounter with the Japanese, whom Europeans initially found different but not culturally or materially inferior  ... A short review cannot do justice to Kowner’s rich, multilayered work. The concluding chapter offers a prologue for the forthcoming second volume, which will examine how the Japanese were relegated to inferiority in the eighteenth century, and how a virulently racial discourse ensued.”
Robert Entenmann, Journal of Jesuit Studies (2016): 132–134.

"It is an unsurpassable analysis redolent of superb scholarship. In the end, Kowner makes a strong case that, from 1300 to 1735, Europeans slowly arrived at a system that enabled them to present a universal hierarchical taxonomy of humankind--based on rudimentary notions of race--with themselves at its apex. ... From White to Yellow does help us to understand ''the mechanisms that govern[ed] the rise and evolution of the concept of race in early modern times.'' In doing so, it richly expands our perspective on the origins of race and racism." Nam-lin Hur, University of Toronto Quarterly 85:3 (2016): 533-534.

“Kowner’s work is unique in that, unlike the majority of studies that focus on race in East Asia, it aims to elucidate the emergence of these distinctions at a much earlier point in Euro-Japanese relations—in fact, from their origin, if such can be found. … Focusing on the five centuries between Marco Polo’s first report of a mysterious island called Cipangu and Linnaeus’s categorization of the Japanese as a “yellow” race in 1735, Kowner builds a compelling argument that traces the development of racism from Europeans’ earliest imaginings of the Japanese people to the heart of Enlightenment thought. ... From Yellow to White is also notable for the breadth of its source materials, which, despite spanning several languages and centuries, are housed within a sound and well-organized theoretical framework; I can think of many other works that attempt to do the same but lack the clarity found here. The discussion of Japanese slavery, which tends to be a less-discussed topic in Japanese historiography, as well as of the cultural similarities between Japanese and their European observers, receive remarkably nuanced treatments as points of comparison between Japan and other countries within Europe’s purview. This work is therefore both timely and adds something new to the contemporary debate on the birth of race in Western thought.”
Christina Ghanbarpour, Itinerario 40 (2016): 318–320


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Figures xi
Note on Translations and Conventions xv
Acknowledgments xix
Preface xxiii
Introduction 3

PHASE ONE SPECULATION: Pre-Encounter Knowledge of the Japanese (1300-1543) 33
1 The Emergence of “Cipangu” and Its Precursory Ethnography 35
2 The “Cipanguese” at the Opening of the Age of Discovery 50

PHASE TWO OBSERVATION: A Burgeoning Discourse of Initial Encounters (1543-1640) 65
3 Initial Observations of the Japanese 67
4 The Japanese Position in Contemporary Hierarchies 101
5 Concrete Mirrors of a New Human Order 143
6 “Race” and Its Cognitive Limits during the Phase of Observation 181

PHASE THREE RECONSIDERATION: Antecedents of a Mature Discourse (1640-1735) 201
7 Dutch Reappraisal of the Japanese Body and Origins 209
8 Power, Status, and the Japanese Position in the Global Order 224
9 In Search of a New Taxonomy: Botany, Medicine, and the Japanese 251
10 “Race” and Its Perceptual Limits during the Phase of Reconsideration 283

Conclusion: The Discourse of Race in Early Modern Europe and the Japanese Case 309

Notes 345
Bibliography 511
Index 617

The Zen monk Sesshū Tōyō (1420 - ca. 1506) is among the most lauded painters in the history of Japanese art, a reputation in no small part due to his unique status as the first professional painter of the premodern period to travel to China and the only Japanese painter to study at the imperial painting academy. Despite his centrality to the tradition of Japanese art, Sesshū’s straddling of two worlds – that of Muromachi Japan (1338-1573) and Ming China (1368-1644) – has rendered elusive a clear understanding of the forces that shaped his artistic practice. Since the seventeenth century, Sesshū’s China trip has been the interpretive touchstone upon which commentators based their pronouncements on his life and art. Yet, the field of Sesshū scholarship had not sufficiently addressed why and how the experience of travel fundamentally changed both the manner of Sesshū’s painting and the conceptual foundations upon which his artistry was based. This dissertation argues that Sesshū’s experience in China transformed both his approach to painting and his understanding of what it meant to be a painter in medieval Japan. Through a series of painting case studies, I demonstrate that Sesshū returned to Japan with a new array of painting techniques and conceptual approaches to his craft that would define his legacy and have enduring ramifications for the future of Japanese painting.

This dissertation is divided into three parts titled The Journey, Spheres of Culture, and The China Legacy. In the single chapter of Part I (The Journey), I reconstruct the historical circumstances of Sesshū’s travel as a member of a Japanese tribute trade delegation bound for the Ming court. In the two chapters of Part II (Spheres of Culture), I address the socio-cultural and artistic environments of the two spheres – that of the literati and the court – in which Sesshū spent considerable amounts of time in China. In the two chapters of Part III (The China Legacy) I examine two painting projects that Sesshū undertook in the year 1486 to excavate the lasting implications of Sesshū’s travel experience in his late career. Ultimately, this study posits Sesshū as one lens through which to observe how conditions of mobility in the premodern world enabled cultural forms to circulate beyond boundaries of country and empire and thereby to assume new modes of expression and contexts of meaning.

The Fourteenth Century Japan was marked by intense political instability and a legitimacy crisis that lasted half a century, in which two centers of power declared themselves simultaneously as legitimate – the Ashikaga bakufu and the Southern Court in Yoshino. In this context, warlords changed sides in a long civil war according to what was most favorable to them. This article seeks to examine up to what point the topoi of samurai loyalty was historically existent. Furthermore, it tries to make a general summary regarding the circulating ideas concerning loyalty, especially in the gunkimonogatari and buke kakun, as well as to trace a parallel between those ideas and the historical reality of the Japanese Middle Ages.

Course abstract:

This course surveys the history of the East Asian civilizations from the medieval up to the premodern period (14th-17th century). It aims to offer an overview of the preindustrial East Asian countries or regions including Yuan and Ming China, Korean Koryǒ and Chosŏn, medieval Japan, the Ryu-kyu islands and Tsushima, and address their broader political dynamics, maritime trade networks and the exchange of knowledge and technology. In 5 thematic modules (13 lectures) it will introduce the region after the fall of the Mongol empire, the political and economic consequences of its downfall, and its dynamics. Moreover, it will introduce the maritime realm of the Ming period (1368-1644); Ming's naval policy and foreign trade with Chosŏn and Japan; maritime piracy; transfer of knowledge and technology; war conflicts and contacts with the Occident. The course is intended primarily for Erasmus students, but other students are welcome as well. It is designed as an introduction for undergraduate students in Asian studies majors or with no general specialization. Therefore, no prior training in East Asian languages is required. The classes will be taught in English. Maximum capacity of students for this course is 15. Course requirements and assessment criteria Participation in the class (max. 3 absences) and discussion on selected readings. Two articles will be assigned for each week. Assessment will be written essay (min 3-5p) and discussion about the essay.

Presented at the 2011 Asian Studies Conference--Japan.

Audiences have been fascinated by the warrior-monk Saitō Musashibō Benkei (retainer of Minamoto no Yoshitsune) for centuries. Depictions of Benkei appear in a wide range of premodern Japanese literary performance genres. A great deal of scholarship has already been done that examines Benkei featured in genres such as gunkimono (war tales), nō, and kabuki. Tales in these genres all seem to send the message that Benkei’s success as an “ideal warrior” relies on the balance he maintains between being a fierce warrior and cunning trickster.

This paper attempts to show how depictions of Benkei in Muromachi-era kōwakamai narratives emphasize the point that Benkei’s religious aspiration plays just as important a role in being an “ideal warrior” as his strength and wit. Three kōwakamai in particular (Shikoku-ochi, Togashi, and Oi-sagashi) display the significance that Benkei’s spiritual prowess has on his role as a formidable warrior. While the scenes in these three selections correspond to scenes featuring Benkei in other literary performance genres, these kōwakamai narratives truly assert the importance of the religious dimension of Benkei’s character and the central part that religion has in the formation of the “ideal warrior.”

Mediated by Gifts is a collection of essays by top scholars on gifts, giving and the social and political forces that shaped these practices in medieval and early modern Japan. The international assemblage of authors provides new insights into these deeply ingrained practices. The essays focus on topics such as shogunal visits to shrines and temples, exchanges between the imperial house and the shogun, a physician and his patients, the shogun, his vassals his and his ladies, the merchant class and the shogunal government, and between scholars and their cosmopolitan circle of contacts. This virtually unexplored view of Japanese history provides new tools to better elucidate both historical and modern Japan. Contributors are Lee Butler, Andrew Goble, Kaneko Hiraku, Laura Nenzi, Ozawa Emiko, Cecilia Segawa Siegle, and Margarita Winkel.

Sumiyoshi  mōde 住吉詣  (Pilgrimage  to  Sumiyoshi)  is  an  example  of  a  travel
diary from the early Muromachi Period that includes only fifteen waka poems
interwoven with descriptions of places visited by the second Ashikaga shogun,
Yoshiakira  足利義詮  (1330–1367,  r.  1358–1367).  According  to  the  title,  the
work  describes  a  journey  made  in  1364  to  the  Sumiyoshi  Shrine  located  in
Settsu  province  (now  in  the  Osaka  region).  The  itinerary  ran  along  the  most
famous  inland  waterway  of  medieval  Japan,  namely  Yodo  River,  which
connected the capital with Naniwa Bay (the eastern part of the Seto Inland Sea).
From  there,  making  frequent  stops  along  the  way  and  entering  Shitennōji
Temple, the travellers were able to easily reach the complex of the Sumiyoshi
Grand  Shrine.  The  reason  for  visiting  Sumiyoshi  was  the  shogun-pilgrim’s
desire to win a favour of the god who was “a great protector of those who are
deeply devoted to the Way of Poetry [uta no michi]”. Aspiring to be an excellent
poet the shogun wanted to bow before the deity, recite his vow in the hope that
he also will find success in “Way of the Myriad Islands [Shikishima no michi]”.

Many types of Japanese traditional performance genres are popular all over the world, for example, kabuki, nō, shamisen, and butō. These performing arts and many others are even more famous in their home country of Japan. However, there is one performing art that Japan has forgotten: kōwakamai 幸若舞. Kōwakamai was a popular performing art from the late Muromachi period until the beginning of the Edo period. At the beginning of the Edo period when live kōwakamai performances may have begun to fade away, it enjoyed a brief resurgence in written form, that is to say that the scripts used for the performances were written down and printed into book form and became ‘bestsellers.’ Today however hardly anyone in Japan even knows what kōwakamai is.
During this presentation, we will learn about what kōwakamai is; discuss its origins; compare and contrast it to a few other more well-known performance genres; talk about its rebirth in book form; and finally discuss its second rebirth as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property.
At the end of the presentation I will introduce Fushimi Tokiwa, a kōwakamai that I am currently translating and hoping to publish in the coming months.

The Kyōun-shū, collection of poems and stanzas of the monk Ikkyū Sōjun (1394-1481) differs from the numerous similar works produced during the middle age by others Rinzai Zen monks by the provocations and the very critical position against his religious community that can be found in it. The celebrity of Ikkyū, or more precisely of different images of him, has, for a long time, determined the way the quatrains were read. By questioning their meaning once put in the context of their production, this thesis proposes a presentation of the motivations and the issues of the thought of Ikkyū.
The xvth  century is a time of upheaval in the Japanese society, and consequently in the relations between the temples and the lay people. In the zen school history, when the Five Moutains system begins to decline, the Daitoku-ji temple experiences several crisis that undermine the specificity it priced itself. It is mainly against the evolutions of his school induced by this context that raise Ikkyū. He does it by adopting a special posture, claiming several forms of transgressions, at the first place the poetic composition. By doing so, he can, in the same time, have a polemical discourse and attack the monks he considers to be decadents, and not to have to leave a school he claims to be the only legitimate heir. His teaching, moreover, is founded on this attitude even in the very doctrinal points.