DOCSLIB.ORG

Dejima As an Imaginary Homeland

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Dejima As an Imaginary Homeland Kobe University Repository : Kernel Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland : The Imag(i)nation of Gaijin in David タイトル Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet(想像の祖国として Title の出島 : デイヴィッド・ミッチェル『ヤコブ・デズートの千の秋』に おけるガイジン／外人の（イマジ）ネーション) 著者 Wang, Ching-Chih Author(s) 掲載誌・巻号・ページ 海港都市研究,8:41-59 Citation 刊行日 2013-03 Issue date 資源タイプ Departmental Bulletin Paper / 紀要論文 Resource Type 版区分 publisher Resource Version 権利 Rights DOI JaLCDOI 10.24546/81004813 URL http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/handle_kernel/81004813 PDF issue: 2021-10-04 41 Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland The Imag(i)nation of Gaijin in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Ching-Chih WANG The portraits of strangers have been widely and strategically re-examined by scholars of contemporary British fictions who focus on the anxieties of alienation that the outsiders would encounter in the era of uncertainty. By suggesting David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) as a text that deals with imaginations of the uncertain, I argue that the images and imaginations of gaijin (the alien) described by Mitchell in his creation of the Dutch colonizers of Dejima, a protruding and secluded artificial island offshore the Nagasaki harbor,1 are reflections of his writing as a gaijin in Japan. They also lay bare the outsiders’ ignoration of the strangeness implied in their construction of the imaginary homeland. Alienated as a gaijin on Dejima, Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch officer working for the Dutch East Indies Company (De Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the VOC), perceives the world not through his eyes but through his imaginations. It first appears that he enters into a bewilderment of cultural dislocation and miscommunication. Such mis-conceptualization and alienation, however, unbolt the padlock of the uncommunicative and paradoxically resolve the mysteries of his-story (his story and history) as a gaijin on an isolated island designed to keep the Westerners at bay. How can the outcast Dutch colonizer imagine the alien nation, Dejima, as his homeland, and eventually redeem his sense of alienation? In addition to the analysis of gaijin’s image and his imagined nation, the “imag(i)nation” I coin in this paper, I would also explore the influence of the Dutch Learning on the secluded Japan during the turn of the eighteenth century. Exercised in the name of the shougun ( 将軍 ), Japan locks herself up and the Dutch study becomes the only means she learns about the world. How can the foreign Rangaku ( 蘭学 , the Dutch Learning) assist the midwife, Orito, to transform from “the disfigured damsel, spurned by her own race” (Mitchell, TAJZ 62) to a bridge that brings the pre-modern Japan “from ignoration, . to knowledge”? (Mitchell, TAJZ 1 Dejima was constructed in the shape of a fan because, as legend had it, when the shogun was asked to decide its formation, he had “snapped open his fan with a turn of his wrist” (Goodman 19). The name Dejima means “Fore Island,” which aptly describes its position before the town of Nagasaki. 42 海港都市研究 69, emphasis original)?2 Why is her projecting Dejima as an imaginary homeland apposite to her “goal in life” (Mitchell, TAJZ 69)? Other than the stranger’s imaginary homeland, the differentiated colonial control executed on Dejima will also be tackled in the examination of gaijin’s failure to understand the reality. Distinct from the other imperialists who are usually soldiers or missionaries when participating in colonial expansions, the Dutch colonizers in Japan are traders, scholars, or physicians. To what extent do they make a contrast to those who claim unauthorized sovereignty over the colony? How do the Dutch colonizers devise policies to control over the so-called uncivilized people? In like manner, the Japanese middlemen described in the novel do not directly engage in colonial exploitations, but they cunningly choose to keep their heads down when facing the huge profits the Dutch colonizers bring along through usurpations of their colonies. Another go-between character in Mitchell’s Dejima story is the Dutch language translator, Sôzaemon Ogawa. Why is Dejima a place where his imagination of the gaijin becomes substantialized? In what sense does his study of the Dutch provide great “solace”? (Mitchell, TAJZ 86) How does Rangaku assist in unlocking the chained society? From which aspect can David Mitchell’s intervention in and invention of history configurate a paradigm for the study of contemporary British fictions ? Writing as a gaijin David Mitchell was once an alien sojourned in Hiroshima in his mid twenties, but his early life in the town of Malvern in Worcestershire, England, would never have anything to do with alienation because it was “white, straight, and middle-class,” as he told Adam Begley in 2012 (Begley). After exposing himself in a foreign land for nine years, Mitchell published his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999). It was highly praised by its fabrication of an “intricately assembled Fabergé egg,” where “a daisy chain of characters” wander through every time zone to go across “the gamut of individual experience” (Mendelsohn). This ambitious and weighty debut book won him the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature by a British or Commonwealth author thirty-five or younger. He was also short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for his second novel, Number9Dream (2001), and his third, Cloud Atlas (2004). In 2003, Granta acclaimed him one of the best young 2 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet will hereafter be abbreviated as TAJZ when referred in parentheses. Dejima as an Imaginary Homeland 43 British novelists, while Time magazine, following the publication of his fourth novel, Black Swan Green (2006), honored him as the only literary novelist in their 2007 list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. Unlike the British Asian author Kazuo Ishiguro, who writes novels to “recreate” a Japan that can “put together” all his memories of Japan before they fade away (Ishiguro and Oe 110), David Mitchell commits to writing stories about Japan to tackle the sense of alienation he experienced in Japan. In an author essay he writes for the publisher, Random House, Mitchell reveals such anxiety and says: “In Japan, I am . an alien amongst natives” because Japan is a “classic club society” in which he has to “kiss [his] sense of social belonging goodbye” (“Japan and My Writing”). Different from the “Mission” countries that define “foreignness” by behavior, the “Club” countries define foreignness by one’s “lineage or passport.” It makes no significant difference for “what you do, how well you learn the language, . you are foreign and always will be.” On the contrary, in Mission countries, as a foreigner acts “like a native, and as far as other natives are concerned,” he eventually has “as much right to be there as [the natives] do” (“Japan and My Writing”). It is this lack of belonging that urges him to start his writing career: I lack a sense of citizenship in the real world, and in some ways, commitment to it. To compensate, I stake out a life in the country called writing. I don’t mean the publishing world: I mean a mental state . , where characters and plots in the head achieve the solidity of people and lives outside the head. Of course, other writers not living in Japan, and many non-writers, not to mention psychotics, do the same. But for me, my ability to compound inner-skull reality is a direct result of my life away from where I “belong.” To date, many of my characters show the same trait. (“Japan and My Writing”) Writing not only grants him compensation for sense of alienation, it also awards him with “fulfillment.” As he tells Sam Bradford, What will always be true is that you write because it’s fulfilling, and right now part of the fulfillment is the multiplicity of voices. The buzz and satisfaction of expressing something, not only hopefully reasonably well, but in one character’s voice reasonably well. That’s very very fulfilling. (Bradford) 44 海港都市研究 For the gaijin writer David Mitchell, his intention to create “plurality of lenses” for “a necessary forcing of the limits of the imagination” (Finbow) cannot be understood if he puts himself and his works outside the context of Japan because Japan is a “built-up” place bombarded with signs and codes that are “largely” strange to him (Mitchell, “Japan and My Writing”). He would “understand less” if he tries to understand more. It is for such perplexity Mitchell thinks that for “foreigners, the casing of the human condition sometimes turns transparent, like a see-through Swatch” (“Japan and My Writing”). The transparent cover of a Swatch seemingly displays every part of the watch, but for the uninitiated strangers, the casing of the transparent watch illuminates nothing but their ignoration of how the machine proceeds to function in reality. To put Mitchell’s words succinctly, a “see-through Swatch” covers a stranger’s inability to understand; it also uncovers the foreignness implied in his imagination of the real world. David Mitchell in several occasions has mentioned about how Japanese arts have influenced his writing strategies. His conceptualization of “less is more,” for example, is developed by the allusive Haiku, while the ending of Ghostwritten is “influenced directly by the ending of Mishima’s problematic masterpiece, The Sea of Fertility (“Japan and My Writing”). Likewise, Haruki Murakami’s novels fascinate him, especially The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, because they show him “how literature can marry popular culture to cook up humour and metaphor” while indicating tactics for a stranger to manage sense of alienation as he is “overly impressionable” to the world around him (Mitchell, “Japan and My Writing”).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Redalyc.Nagasaki. an European Artistic City in Early Modern Japan
    Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies ISSN: 0874-8438 [email protected] Universidade Nova de Lisboa Portugal Curvelo, Alexandra Nagasaki. An European artistic city in early modern Japan Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies, núm. 2, june, 2001, pp. 23 - 35 Universidade Nova de Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=36100202 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative BPJS, 2001, 2, 23 - 35 NAGASAKI An European artistic city in early modern Japan Alexandra Curvelo Portuguese Institute for Conservation and Restoration In 1569 Gaspar Vilela was invited by one of Ômura Sumitada’s Christian vassals to visit him in a fishing village located on the coast of Hizen. After converting the lord’s retainers and burning the Buddhist temple, Vilela built a Christian church under the invocation of “Todos os Santos” (All Saints). This temple was erected near Bernardo Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage’s residence, whose castle was set upon a promontory on the foot of which laid Nagasaki (literal translation of “long cape”)1. If by this time the Great Ship from Macao was frequenting the nearby harbours of Shiki and Fukuda, it seems plausible that since the late 1560’s Nagasaki was already thought as a commercial centre by the Portuguese due to local political instability. Nagasaki’s foundation dates from 1571, the exact year in which the Great Ship under the Captain-Major Tristão Vaz da Veiga sailed there for the first time.
    [Show full text]
  • Asian Studies Programs in Canada
    Asian Studies Programs in Canada University Undergraduate Language Inter- Special Graduate Admission requirements Language requirement Website Requirement disciplinary Programs Programs (for admission) Simon Fraser -Asia-Canada -Yes-6 credits Yes (major in Yes-China No N/A N/A www.sfu.ca/ University Minor Program -No other field) Field School -Certificate in Chinese Studies University of BA Asian studies Yes-6 intro credit hours, 6 Yes Yes + Japan, No N/A N/A www.umanitoba.ca/ Manitoba credit hours India and 200 level or above Hong Kong exchanges University of No Depends on program Grad Program- Study abroad Yes-Collaborative Masters Admission to “home graduate unit’ N/A www.utoronto.ca/ Toronto Yes opportunities program in South Asian for Collaborative Masters in Asia Studies, thesis stream -Anthropology MA and PhD in East Asian -English Studies -Geography MA and PhD in History with -Religion focus in India, China or Japan -Social Work MA and PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations BA in relevant field with good academic standing and appropriate language training if required University of -BA Asian Area Asian Area studies require Yes Study Abroad Yes-for MA and PhD, see MA:-BA in relevant discipline MA:- 3-4 years previous www.asia.ubc.ca/ British Studies 12 credits of lang. opportunities specific departments -reading competence in 2nd Asian coursework (good reading Columbia -BA Chinese instruction, others require at in Asia (Interdisciplinary) language comprehension) -BA Japanese least 18 credits at the 300 MAs and PhDs are thesis- PhD:-MA in Asian Studies or related -BA Korean level and 6 at the 400 level based field PhD:-good command of Asian -BA South Asian language Languages (Minor only) University of -BA Chinese 30-48 credit units at upper N/A Study Abroad MA in Chinese literature BA with a B average in last two Each MA degree requires 4 http://gradfile.fgsro.u Alberta -BA Japanese year level with 6 units in lit.
    [Show full text]
  • Japanese Economic Growth During the Edo Period*
    Japanese Economic Growth during the Edo Period* Toshiaki TAMAKI Abstract During the Edo period, Japanese production of silver declined drastically. Japan could not export silver in order to import cotton, sugar, raw silk and tea from China. Japan was forced to carry out import-substitution. Because Japan adopted seclusion policy and did not produce big ships, it used small ships for coastal trade, which contributed to the growth of national economy. Japanese economic growth during the Edo period was indeed Smithian, but it formed the base of economic development in Meiji period. Key words: Kaimin, maritime, silver economic growth, Sakoku 1.Introduction Owing to the strong influence of Marxism, and Japan’s defeat in World War II, Japanese historians dismissed the Edo period (1603–1867) as a stagnating period. Japan, during this period, was regarded as a country that lagged behind Europe because of its underdeveloped social and economic systems. It had been closed to the outside world for over two hundred years, as a result of its Sakoku (seclusion) policy, and could not, therefore, progress as rapidly as Europe and the United States. This image of Japan during the Edo period began to change in the 1980s, and this period is now viewed as an age of economic growth, even if Japan’s growth rates were not as rapid as those of Europe. Economic growth during the Edo period is now even considered to be the foundation for the economic growth that occurred after the Meiji period. In this paper, I will develop three arguments that demonstrate the veracity of the above viewpoint.
    [Show full text]
  • Aoki Konyō (1698-1769) and the Beginnings of Rangaku
    Aoki Eony5(1698-1769) and the Beginnings of Rangaku Patricia Sippel* Introdnction Studies of Japanese interaction with the West from the mid-19th century have emphasized the importance of preceding contacts through Westerners resi dent in Japan. Such contacts arose as early as the 16th century, when Portugal dominated a period of vigorous European missionary and trading activity and, though severely restricted less than a century later, they continued throughout the Edo period, through the Dutch trading factory in Nagasaki. During these years a key intermediary role was played by the official interpreters, whose oral and, in some cases, written language ability gave them direct access to the re presentatives of Western civilization. Even more significant, however, were the efforts of another group, the Edo-based Rangakusha [scholars who study the Dutch learning], who emerged towards the end of the 18th century. Though in most cases their oral ability in Dutch was insufficient to permit direct conver sation with the foreigners, they attempted to investigate the outside world by a study of Dutch-language books. Regular contacts between Dutch and Japanese in Edo date from the first part of the 17th century. In 1609, the Bakufu granted permission to the Dutch factory director to pay a visit of greeting to the shogun, and from 1733 this practice was introduced as an annual obligation.^ The system which developed over the succeeding decades was that the director, his scribe and surgeon, two Japanese interpreters, together with other Japanese officials and attendants, would set out from Nagasaki early in the new year on the five or six week trip to Edo.
    [Show full text]
  • Chaotic Narrative Dillon 1.Pdf (372.1Kb)
    Full metadata for this item is available in Research@StAndrews:FullText at: http://research- repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ ‘Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten’ Sarah Dillon Date of deposit 7/11/12 Version This is an author post peer review but pre-copy edited version of this work. Access rights © This item is protected by original copyright. This work is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To see the final definitive version of this paper please visit the publisher’s website. Citation for Dillon, Sarah, ‘Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, published Causality, Time and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s version Ghostwritten’, Critique 52:2 (2011), 135-62. Link to 10.1080/00111610903380170 published version 1 Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten ‘simplicity is not the hallmark of the fundamental’ (Prigogine and Stengers 1985: 216) It is impossible to read or write about David Mitchell’s first novel Ghostwritten (1999) without remarking upon, and attempting to understand, its structure. Ghostwritten consists of nine interconnected short stories, each narrated by a different character and set in a different geographical location, with an epilogue which returns the reader to the pre-story of the opening. In an interview with Catherine McWeeney, Mitchell explains that, The first three stories started life as unrelated short stories that I wrote on location. Then when I realized there was narrative potential waiting to be tapped by linking the stories, it made sense to keep the locations on the move. The far-flung locations test-drive this interconnected novel about interconnection more strenuously.
    [Show full text]
  • HIRATA KOKUGAKU and the TSUGARU DISCIPLES by Gideon
    SPIRITS AND IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NORTHEASTERN JAPAN: HIRATA KOKUGAKU AND THE TSUGARU DISCIPLES by Gideon Fujiwara A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Asian Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2013 © Gideon Fujiwara, 2013 ABSTRACT While previous research on kokugaku , or nativism, has explained how intellectuals imagined the singular community of Japan, this study sheds light on how posthumous disciples of Hirata Atsutane based in Tsugaru juxtaposed two “countries”—their native Tsugaru and Imperial Japan—as they transitioned from early modern to modern society in the nineteenth century. This new perspective recognizes the multiplicity of community in “Japan,” which encompasses the domain, multiple levels of statehood, and “nation,” as uncovered in recent scholarship. My analysis accentuates the shared concerns of Atsutane and the Tsugaru nativists toward spirits and the spiritual realm, ethnographic studies of commoners, identification with the north, and religious thought and worship. I chronicle the formation of this scholarly community through their correspondence with the head academy in Edo (later Tokyo), and identify their autonomous character. Hirao Rosen conducted ethnography of Tsugaru and the “world” through visiting the northern island of Ezo in 1855, and observing Americans, Europeans, and Qing Chinese stationed there. I show how Rosen engaged in self-orientation and utilized Hirata nativist theory to locate Tsugaru within the spiritual landscape of Imperial Japan. Through poetry and prose, leader Tsuruya Ariyo identified Mount Iwaki as a sacred pillar of Tsugaru, and insisted one could experience “enjoyment” from this life and beyond death in the realm of spirits.
    [Show full text]
  • Early Modern Japan
    December 1995 Early Modern Japan KarenWigen) Duke University The aims of this paperare threefold: (I) to considerwhat Westernhistorians mean when they speakof Early Modern Japan,(2) to proposethat we reconceivethis period from the perspectiveof world networks history, and (3) to lay out someof the advantagesI believe this offers for thinking aboutSengoku and Tokugawasociety. The idea that Japan had an early modern period is gradually becoming common in every sector of our field, from institutional to intellectual history. Yet what that means has rarely been discussed until now, even in the minimal sense of determining its temporal boundaries: I want to thank David Howell and James Ketelaar for raising the issue in this forum, prompting what I hope will become an ongoing conversation about our periodization practices. To my knowledge, the sole attempt in English to trace the intellectual genealogy of this concept is John Hall's introduction to the fourth volume of the Cambridge History of Japan-a volume that he chose to title Early Modern Japan. Hall dates this expression to the 1960s, when "the main concern of Western scholars of the Edo period was directed toward explaining Japan's rapid modernization." Its ascendancy was heralded by the 1968 publication of Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan, which Hall co-edited with Marius Jansen. "By declaring that the Tokugawa period should be called Japan's 'early modern' age," he reflects, "this volume challenged the common practice of assuming that Japan during the Edo period was still fundamentally feudal.") Although Hall sees the modernization paradigm as having been superseded in later decades, he nonetheless reads the continuing popularity of the early modern designation as a sign that most Western historians today see the Edo era as "more modern than feudal.',4 This notion is reiterated in even more pointed terms by Wakita Osamu in the same volume.
    [Show full text]
  • The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention
    humanities Article Seeing What’s Right in Front of Us: The Bone Clocks, Climate Change, and Human Attention Elizabeth Callaway Environmental Humanities Program, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA; [email protected] Received: 1 November 2017; Accepted: 18 January 2018; Published: 26 January 2018 Abstract: The scales on which climate change acts make it notoriously difficult to represent in artistic and cultural works. By modeling the encounter with climate as one characterized by distraction, David Mitchell’s novel The Bone Clocks proposes that the difficulty in portraying climate change arises not from displaced effects and protracted timescales but a failure of attention. The book both describes and enacts the way more traditionally dramatic stories distract from climate connections right in front of our eyes, revealing, in the end, that the real story was climate all along. Keywords: climate change; clifi; digital humanities; literature and the environment Climate change is notoriously difficult to render in artistic and literary works. In the environmental humanities, there is an entire critical conversation around how and whether climate change can be represented in current cultural forms. The challenges often enumerated include the large time scales on which climate operates (Nixon 2011, p. 3), the displacement of climate effects (p. 2) literary plausibility of including extreme events in fiction (Ghosh 2016, p. 9), and the abstract nature of both the concept of climate (Taylor 2013, p. 1) and the idea of collective human action on the planetary scale (Chakrabarty 2009, p. 214). In this article, I argue that David Mitchell’s novel The Bone Clocks proposes a different primary difficulty in representing climate change.
    [Show full text]
  • A Short History of the British Factory House in Lisbon1
    A Short History of the British Factory House in Lisbon1 Reprinted from the 10th Annual Report of the British Historical Association - 1946 Kindly transcribed from the original Report by the Society’s Librarian, Dani Monteiro, maintaining the original grammar of the article. By Sir Godfrey Fisher, K. C. M. G It is a curious and regrettable fact that so little information is available about those trading communities, or factories, which developed independently of control or assistance from their home country and yet played such an important part not only in our commercial expansion but in our naval predominance at the time when the distant Mediterranean suddenly became the great strategic battle-ground - the “Keyboard of Europe”. Thanks to the ability and industry of Mr. A. R. Walford we now have a picture of the great British Factory at the vital port of Lisbon during the latter part of its history.2 Of the earlier part, which is “shrouded in obscurity” I would venture to place on record a few details which have attracted my attention while trying to find out something about the history of our early consuls who were originally chosen, if not actually appointed, by them to be their official spokesmen and chief executives. An interesting but perhaps characteristic feature of these establishments, or associations, for that is probably a more accurate description, is that they were not legal entities at all and their correct official designation seems to have been the “Consul and the Merchants” or the “Consul and the Factors”. The consul himself on the other hand had an unquestionable legal status, decided more than once in the Spanish courts in very early times, and was established by, or under authority from, royal patents.
    [Show full text]
  • Glories of the Japanese Music Heritage ANCIENT SOUNDSCAPES REBORN Japanese Sacred Gagaku Court Music and Secular Art Music
    The Institute for Japanese Cultural Heritage Initiatives (Formerly the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies) and the Columbia Music Performance Program Present Our 8th Season Concert To Celebrate the Institute’s th 45 Anniversary Glories of the Japanese Music Heritage ANCIENT SOUNDSCAPES REBORN Japanese Sacred Gagaku Court Music and Secular Art Music Featuring renowned Japanese Gagaku musicians and New York-based Hōgaku artists With the Columbia Gagaku and Hōgaku Instrumental Ensembles of New York Friday, March 8, 2013 at 8 PM Miller Theatre, Columbia University (116th Street & Broadway) Join us tomorrow, too, at The New York Summit The Future of the Japanese Music Heritage Strategies for Nurturing Japanese Instrumental Genres in the 21st-Century Scandanavia House 58 Park Avenue (between 37th and 38th Streets) Doors open 10am Summit 10:30am-5:30pm Register at http://www.medievaljapanesestudies.org Hear panels of professional instrumentalists and composers discuss the challenges they face in the world of Japanese instrumental music in the current century. Keep up to date on plans to establish the first ever Tokyo Academy of Japanese Instrumental Music. Add your voice to support the bilingual global marketing of Japanese CD and DVD music masterpieces now available only to the Japanese market. Look inside the 19th-century cultural conflicts stirred by Westernization when Japanese instruments were banned from the schools in favor of the piano and violin. 3 The Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies takes on a new name: THE INSTITUTE FOR JAPANESE CULTURAL HERITAGE INITIATIVES The year 2013 marks the 45th year of the Institute’s founding in 1968. We mark it with a time-honored East Asian practice— ―a rectification of names.‖ The word ―medieval‖ served the Institute well during its first decades, when the most pressing research needs were in the most neglected of Japanese historical eras and disciplines— early 14th- to late 16th-century literary and cultural history, labeled ―medieval‖ by Japanese scholars.
    [Show full text]
  • Talking Book Topics September-October 2019
    Talking Book Topics September–October 2019 Volume 85, Number 5 Need help? Your local cooperating library is always the place to start. For general information and to order books, call 1-888-NLS-READ (1-888-657-7323) to be connected to your local cooperating library. To find your library, visit www.loc.gov/nls and select “Find Your Library.” To change your Talking Book Topics subscription, contact your local cooperating library. Get books fast from BARD Most books and magazines listed in Talking Book Topics are available to eligible readers for download on the NLS Braille and Audio Reading Download (BARD) site. To use BARD, contact your local cooperating library or visit nlsbard.loc.gov for more information. The free BARD Mobile app is available from the App Store, Google Play, and Amazon’s Appstore. About Talking Book Topics Talking Book Topics, published in audio, large print, and online, is distributed free to people unable to read regular print and is available in an abridged form in braille. Talking Book Topics lists titles recently added to the NLS collection. The entire collection, with hundreds of thousands of titles, is available at www.loc.gov/nls. Select “Catalog Search” to view the collection. Talking Book Topics is also online at www.loc.gov/nls/tbt and in downloadable audio files from BARD. Overseas Service American citizens living abroad may enroll and request delivery to foreign addresses by contacting the NLS Overseas Librarian by phone at (202) 707-9261 or by email at [email protected]. Page 1 of 84 Music scores and instructional materials NLS music patrons can receive braille and large-print music scores and instructional recordings through the NLS Music Section.
    [Show full text]
  • The Making of Modern Japan
    The Making of Modern Japan The MAKING of MODERN JAPAN Marius B. Jansen the belknap press of harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Third printing, 2002 First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2002 Book design by Marianne Perlak Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jansen, Marius B. The making of modern Japan / Marius B. Jansen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-674-00334-9 (cloth) isbn 0-674-00991-6 (pbk.) 1. Japan—History—Tokugawa period, 1600–1868. 2. Japan—History—Meiji period, 1868– I. Title. ds871.j35 2000 952′.025—dc21 00-041352 CONTENTS Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii Note on Names and Romanization xviii 1. SEKIGAHARA 1 1. The Sengoku Background 2 2. The New Sengoku Daimyo 8 3. The Unifiers: Oda Nobunaga 11 4. Toyotomi Hideyoshi 17 5. Azuchi-Momoyama Culture 24 6. The Spoils of Sekigahara: Tokugawa Ieyasu 29 2. THE TOKUGAWA STATE 32 1. Taking Control 33 2. Ranking the Daimyo 37 3. The Structure of the Tokugawa Bakufu 43 4. The Domains (han) 49 5. Center and Periphery: Bakufu-Han Relations 54 6. The Tokugawa “State” 60 3. FOREIGN RELATIONS 63 1. The Setting 64 2. Relations with Korea 68 3. The Countries of the West 72 4. To the Seclusion Decrees 75 5. The Dutch at Nagasaki 80 6. Relations with China 85 7. The Question of the “Closed Country” 91 vi Contents 4. STATUS GROUPS 96 1. The Imperial Court 97 2.
    [Show full text]