■ Source: “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar ,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49.2 (December 1989), 575–602.

Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China

Like the epic, like history, like the novel, the literature of travel has evolved through the centuries. Like them it has existed since the beginnings of oral and written literature. As with them some of its authors have been bad, others have delighted and informed their readers, and many, from the earliest times, have been popular, influential, even brilliant. As with other forms of literature its quantity and nature have varied because of political, religious, economic, and other social and human factors. And like them it includes countless subtypes that continually approach each other, separate, join, overlap, and consistently defy neat classification.1 Travel accounts form an immense literary genre of international propor- tions, hundreds, even thousands of years old. The global thirst for knowledge of how other peoples live has known no bounds since the reporting of travel tales first began. The reasons for this curiosity abound, from voyeurism to schol- arly interest to concerns for military planning. And, the growth of information about the inhabitants of every corner of the globe has in no way diminished contemporary man’s desire to learn more from places and peoples still little known on earth and elsewhere in the universe. Indeed, an entire sub-genre of science fiction, the imaginary voyage, aims at satisfying this curiosity in the realm of the fantastic.2 Japanese travel to China recommenced in 1862 following the lifting of the ban on travel by the Tokugawa bakufu, and travel accounts began to appear immediately. What were the origins of this literary form? There were the well- known diaries of eminent Buddhist monks who voyaged from Japan to China to study with masters in the Sui, T’ang, and Sung periods.3 In addition, the domestic travel diary constituted a well-recognized genre in Japan that dated

1 Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 38. 2 Philip Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study (New York: Press, 1941). 3 The best known example in the West is that of the monk Ennin (794–864). See Edwin O. Reischauer, trans., Ennin: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1955); and Edwin O. Reischauer, Ennin’s Travels in T’ang China (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1955).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004285309_034 Japanese Literary Travelers In Prewar China 519 back as far as the Heian period, such as the Tosa nikki (Tosa Diary) of 936.4 During the centuries of Tokugawa prohibition on overseas travel, the Japanese developed a widespread and rich domestic travel literature, dating from as early as 1655.5 Other genres of Chinese writings served as models for Japanese travelers, in particular the local (which clearly played a role in siring the guidebook as a genre).6 The other principal Chinese literary form, widely known in Japan and possibly significant in the formation of Japanese travel accounts of China, was that of the earlier fictional voyages: Hsi yu chi (Journey to the West) or T’ao-hua yüan chi (Peach Blossom Spring), for example.7 This last category is especially interesting because of the comparisons it allows us with the rise of European travel literature, as in the cases of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Thomas More’s Utopia, and most of Daniel Defoe’s work.

4 Partially translated by G.W. Sargent, in Anthology of Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Mid-Nineteenth Century, ed. Donald Keene (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1960), pp. 82–91. 5 Lawrence Bresler, “The Origins of Popular Travel and Travel Literature in Japan,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1975, Part I. 6 On non-administrative travel books of the Ming-Ch’ing period, see Timothy Brook, “Guides for Vexed Travelers—Route Books in the Ming and Ch’ing,” Ch’ing-shih wen-t’i 4:5 (1981):32–76. On differences between travel books and guide books, Paul Fussell has the fol- lowing to say: A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders, and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply. Travel books are a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker’s encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative—unlike that in a novel or romance—claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality. The speaker in a travel book exhibits himself as physically more free than the reader, and thus every such book . . . is an implicit celebration of freedom. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: , 1980), p. 203. This statement, mutatis mutandis, holds for the men and women travel writers in my study. 7 For many years T’ao-hua yüan chi was considered a utopian, imaginary piece, until Ch’en Yin-k’o 陳寅恪 demonstrated that, more likely than not, it was in fact an account of a trip to a community distinctive to the Six Dynasties period. See Ch’en Yin-k’o, “T’ao-hua yüan chi p’ang-cheng” 桃花源記旁証, Ch’ing-hua hsüeh-pao 11.1 (1936):79–88. This view has not gone uncriticized. Similarly, Percy Adams has shown how reliant Thomas More’s Utopia was on the then recent travel accounts of Amerigo Vespucci. Namely, many characteristics of his Utopia are exactly as Vespucci described the New World. The very fact that the latter’s name became forever attached to the New World is a reflection of the popularity of his accounts. See Adams, Travel Literature, pp. 41–42, 112–13; and Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).