This is a study of Japanese folding screens decorated with a variety of cartographic imagery of European origin. The central argument of this work is that Japanese cartographic namban screens made during the period considered in this dissertation can assist us to further understand the marked Christian eschatological character of the pictorial programmes decorating these screens, reflecting European contemporary hopes about the messianic coming of a universal Christian King, and about the Christian future of Japan at the onset of Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada's ban against Christianity (1614). By taking into account the use of folding screens as diplomatic gifts, this research seeks to argue that the hybridity of namban cartographic screens reveals as much about the expectation of Jesuit missionaries towards the evangelization of the Japanese archipelago as they did about how Japanese artists and observers understood European cartographic knowledge within a pre-existing local ritual use of maps and cartography. This dissertation is composed of four chapters. In chapter one I describe the material qualities of folding screens, the architectural environments in which they were displayed, and how the practice of donating folding screens as diplomatic gifts was eventually co-opted by the Jesuit missionaries operating in Japan. Chapter two is a discussion on the organization and the passage of the first Japanese diplomatic mission in Europe and the role that European cartography and geographical allegories played in this event. In chapter three I will examine the dissemination of Christian sacred images in Japan and the establishment of a Jesuit school to train Japanese artists in western-style painting. Chapter four unpacks the discussion developed in the preceding chapters and focuses on two specific pairs of namban cartographic screens - the Map of the World and Twenty-Eight Cities (today at the Imperial Household Agency in Tokyo) and the Battle of Lepanto and World Map (today at the Kosetsu Museum in Kobe) - for which I propose a new interpretation.

Despite the fact that hakko ichiu ideology was the key device deployed by fascists to mobilize the Japanese for total war, Japanese studies have not reexamined the meaning of wartime hakko ichiu ideology and its historical continuity during the postwar era.This study traces and analyzes the meaning and intent of wartime hakko ichiu ideology and how it has evolved in official events spanning nearly 60 years from the 1940 ceremony of the 2600th Anniversary of the Accession of Emperor Jinmu through Expo '70 and the 1998 Nagano Winter Games. The first part of the study analyzes how Meiji nationalists between 1868 to 1905 used a Western model of gender to create a maternal image of Amaterasu as the empress. This image became the primary Japanese icon of female gender. The second part of the study traces the development of hakko ichiu ideology in three official events over a half-century. By examining the representation of Nippon News No. 23, Part1, (the film version of the Opening Ceremony of the 2600th Anniversary of the Accession of Emperor Jinmu), I argue against the traditional meaning of hakko ichiu--as mere colonialism--and redefine its meaning in terms of dominance and unity. I also discuss the interrelationships among gender, national matsuri, and hakko ichiu ideology. Finally, I examine how, by deploying national matsuri in the opening ceremonies of official postwar events, neo-nationalists were able to revive hakko ichiu ideology and promote neo-emperor worship. In doing so, they used hakko ichiu ideology as an effective instrument to avoid the constraints of the Peace Constitution that grew out of the peace treaty ratified after the end of World War II.

This dissertation examines the life and monastic career of Shaku Sōen (1860-1919) in Japan, Sri Lanka, and the United States from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. It draws on a rich documentary record in Japanese, literary Chinese (kanbun), and English to analyze the social, doctrinal, and ritual life of the Rinzai Zen monastic community. It traces the survival and revival of Rinzai Zen to adapt to Japan’s nation and empire building through the Meiji period (1868-1912), and the negotiation with Zen’s pre-Meiji scriptures and practice and Western studies of Buddhism until the Taishō period (1912-1926). Previous studies tend to approach the modernization of Zen from a Westernization perspective or that of Japanese nationalism and colonial expansion. To bring the two perspectives in conversation with each other and add new insights, this study reconstructs Sōen’s life and career in association with his dharma lineage and three major Zen monasteries—Myōshinji, Engakuji, and Kenchōji—and their capillary network of branch temples throughout Japan. It also traces Sōen’s three-year study in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and his major international travels to Thailand (Siam), China, Korea, the United States, among other places, that shaped his conception of Zen in the modern world. It sheds new light on the process of preparation that he and his colleagues had made to participate in the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. This historical and transnational study of Sōen shows that he and his peers strove to modernize in the Western paradigm and identify Zen with nationalistic interests of the state, while preserving and reviving pre-Meiji scriptures and practices. They presented Zen from a Japanese cultural perspective and make Zen compatible with Japanese nationalism and militarism. Their collaboration with Ceylonese Theravādins and Westerners interested in Buddhism and Japanese culture encouraged the spread of Japanese Mahāyāna Buddhism to the West while supporting Zen revival in Japan. Sōen and his students including D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) introduced Zen teachings to the United States, setting the terms for Zen’s reception in the West through the twentieth century. It suggests that the modernization of Zen was not simply embracing the Western influences but was also a creative process for Zen monks to harness both the domestic and international resources to position themselves in the modern world.

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This thesis focuses on the modern Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) and his diverse range of graphic production, from illustrations in socialist newspapers and magazines with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women, referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" (Yumeji-shiki bijin) in newspaper illustrations, coterie magazines, postcards, frontispieces, posters, and advertisements. Such works circulated widely and within the context of a growing female readership and the emergence of a new media environment that transformed the print medium from its "floating world" profile of the previous century into a technically diverse medium of modern visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. Yumeji's graphic works participated in the generation of new kinds of modern identity. An extensive consideration of Yumeji's life and works reveals his role in the cultivation of a new demography of viewers and readers. / History of Art and Architecture

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The purpose of this thesis is to analyze various texts from Japanese literary history and extract the instances of trans-gender performances from those texts. I define “trans-gender” behaviors as actions that are culturally expected of the gender opposite that of the gender assigned to the performer at birth. In each text, I identify which character or characters perform actions that go against the expectations of the gender they were assigned at birth. I analyze how their performance is portrayed within the narrative, as well as how other characters in the narrative react to their performance. In this way, nuances are extracted that relate to the trope of gender play in these four historical eras. The literary representations of this trans-gender play respond to the needs and values systems of the time periods within which they exist. In the Heian period, this play is caused by external forces and ends due to sexual acts. In the Muromachi period, the character chooses to perform, but eventually revokes the world. By the Edo period, performance is more widely accepted and culturally ingrained because of the availability of spaces where trans-gender performance is allowed. The performers in Edo period literature usually perform in the context of receiving privileges or being allowed into gendered spaces. Finally, In the Meiji period, heteronormative gender roles are strictly enforced, and the literature reflects negative reactions to non-normative behavior. Trans-gender performers in the Meiji period are often punished in the narratives they inhabit.

The planned language Esperanto achieved popularity in early twentieth century Japan, inspiring a national movement which was the largest outside Europe. Esperanto was designed to facilitate greater international and inter-cultural communication and understanding; the history of the language in Japan reveals a rich tradition of internationalism in Japan, stretching from the beginnings of the movement, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war, through the end of the Pacific war, when, for a brief period, organised Esperanto in Japan ceased. Building upon existing studies of internationalism amongst elite opinion makers in Japan, this history of Esperanto reveals unexpected examples of internationalism amongst the broader Japanese public, a number of competing conceptions of the international world, and their realisation through a range of transnational activities. Esperanto was at once an intellectual phenomenon, and a language which could be put into immediate and concrete practice. The diversity of social groups and intellectual positions within the Japanese Esperanto community reveals internationalism and cosmopolitanism, not as well defined, static concepts, but as broad spaces in which different ideas of the world and the community of mankind could be debated. What linked the various different groups and individuals drawn into the Japanese Esperanto movement was a shared desire to make contact with, and help to reform, the world beyond Japan's borders, as well as a shared realisation of the vital role of language in making this contact possible. From radical socialists to conservative academics, and from Japanese diplomats at the League of Nations to members of rural communities in the deep north of Japan, although their politics often differed, Japanese Esperantists came together to participate in the re-imagining of the modern world; in doing so they became part of a transnational community, one which reveals insights into both modern Japanese history, and the nature of internationalism.

Children’s literature flourished in Edo-period Japan, as this dissertation shows through a survey of eighteenth-century woodblock-printed picturebooks for children that feature children in prominent roles. Addressing a persisting neglect of non-Western texts in the study of children’s literature and childhood per se, the dissertation challenges prevailing historical understandings of the origins of children’s literature and conceptions of childhood as a distinct phase of life. The explosive growth of print culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan not only raised expectations for adult literacy but also encouraged the spread of basic education for children and the publication of books for the young. The limited prior scholarship on Edo-period Japanese children’s books tends to dismiss them as a few isolated exceptions or as limited to moralistic primers and records of oral tradition. This dissertation reveals a long-lasting, influential, and varied body of children’s literature that combines didactic value with entertainment. Eighteenth-century picturebooks drew on literary and religious traditions as well as popular culture, while tailoring their messages to the interests and limitations of child readers. Organized in two parts, the dissertation includes two analytical chapters followed by five annotated translations of picturebooks (kōzeibyōshi and early kusazōshi). Among the illustrators that can be identified are ukiyoe artists like Torii Kiyomitsu (1735-1785). The first chapter analyzes the picturebook as a form of children’s literature that can be considered in terms analogous to those used of children’s literature in the West, and it provides evidence that these picturebooks were recognized by Japanese of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as uniquely suited to child readers. The second chapter addresses the ways in which woodblock-printed children’s literature was commercialized and canonized from the mid-eighteenth century through the latter years of the Edo period, and it shows that picturebooks became source material for new forms of children’s culture during that time. The translated picturebooks, from both the city of Edo and the Kamigata region, include a sample of eighteenth-century views of the child: developing fetus, energetic grandchild, talented student, unruly schoolboy, obedient helper at home, young bride-to-be, and deceased child under the care of the Bodhisattva Jizō. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

No description available.