Bikes Empower (and Warm) Protesters in Wall Street

Here's a link to the NYT article "With Generators Gone, Wall Street Protesters Try Bicycle Power"

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/with-generators-gone-wall-street-protesters-try-bicycle-power/

Conference: Pirates, Merchants, and Cool Maps

This weekend I went to a conference at Emory called Sea Rovers, Silk, and Samurai: Maritime China in Global History. It was organized by Tonio Andrade of the History department. It was really fabulous, and brought together leading scholars on East Asian and European history (particularly of the 17th century) in various disciplines, such as military history, cartography, trade relations, and law. There were some very formidable elder celebrities such as John Wills (emeritus professor from USC) and Leonard Blusse (Leiden), but also many younger and extremely impressive scholars from all over the world as well. It was wonderful to have such a great event right here, and I was sorry I could only hear a few of the papers.

One of the things I liked about the conference was that it helped me think about Japan in the 17th century in a way I haven't before. I usually think of travel in terms of barrier stations (sekisho 関所) and highways (kaidô 街道 ); i.e., places you walk to. I don't think much about the sea. The sea seems formless and (obviously) fluid; except for harbors and beaches, it can't be named or celebrated in poetry in the same way that territory (=terra) is. And yet its significance is enormous. I can't believe I've never noticed it much, but I haven't.

From H-Japan: Fukushima Women Activists

This post comes from the listserv H-Japan (contact info after the jump) and is by David Slater of Sophia University.

A while ago I pointed out that women, and in particular, mothers, have been
quite active in radiation measurement, calls for contaminated dirt removal
and efforts to secure safe food. They have thus also been effective as
anti-nuke spokespersons. Of course, there is nothing new in women being at
the front of social shifts, as seen in work as diverse as Shell
Garon's *Molding Japanese Minds* and Robin LeBlanc's *Bicycle Citizens*
demonstrate. They are continuing on with a sit in front of METI from Oct.
29th.

Here is a link to their protest notice--you still have time to make it to
Tokyo for the start:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/onna_suwarikomi/20111020/1319087481

And here is a Ustream of a pre-demo meeting with Fukushima Women against
Nukes.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18140229#utm_campaign=synclickback&source=http://blog.livedoor.jp/amenohimoharenohimo/archives/65772087.html&medium=18140229
Notice in the immediate ritual of the event, that women are not limited
here to speaking as mothers (if that is a limitation), they are not
hesitant to engage emotionally, and the staffing and seating arrangements
makes gendered confront almost inevitable.

Conference: MARAAS at Princeton

The conference for the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Association for Asian Studies went very well. The site was Princeton, so the facilities were very fancy indeed. The organizers did a terrific job, the food was great; it was nice to stay at the nearby hotel (the Nassau Inn) and take the train in from NYC. And the library there was so wonderful. It's the first time I've been to Princeton, and while there were annoying aspects (I frown on cyclists who ride on the sidewalk when there was no reason not to be on the road) there was a lot that was nice about it also. I hope I have another chance to visit when I can spend more time in the library, at least.

Youth Activism in Japan: Repost from H-Japan

By David Slater

Today, youth in Japan are more active than they have been in many years (and as we have pointed out before, there have not been more demonstrations since the 1960's and 70's). The recessionary image of politically disaffected and economically alienated--the "lazy freeter" image--- has to be reevaluated. In fact, it is in the context of a political system that seems to show little concern for the situation of this generation of young people (and now, not so young) and a labor market that still does not provide meaningful work, job security or a living wage to many, lots of young people are recently quite engaged. Let me note two different and seemingly distant, but I think potentially complementary forms of youth engagement.

Travel and the Bashô Style

Here are two key phrases from Bashô-related texts on the subject of travel and haikai. In both cases, fûga is basically synonymous with haikai.

1. 東海道の一筋しらぬ人、風雅におぼつかなし。
People who know nothing of the Tôkaidô have no understanding of fûga (poetic elegance).

-- Bashô. Cited in Sanzôshi 三冊紙 (Three notebooks).



2. 旅は風雅の花、風雅は過客の魂。
Travel is the flower of fûga; fûga is the spirit of the traveler.

-- (Bashô disciple) Kyoriku. From Infutaki 韻塞.

These phrases are discussed in a nice little book, Kazumi Yamashita's Bashô hyaku meigen 芭蕉百名言 (One hundred famous Bashô phrases), Kadokawa gakugei shuppan, 1996, 2010.

Modern Haiga - Angie Werren

Here's the verse; go to the site to see the image:

today slips
into the room     hungry
on tiny paws

From Tinywords: http://tinywords.com/2011/10/19/7678/

Bibliography for this paper

A partial list of sources consulted. Not all were actually useful in this instance, but nice to know about.

Inagaki Shisei. Nihon no kaidô handobukku. Sanseidô, 1993.
Isobe, Masaru. Edo haiga kikō: Buson no hanami, Issa no shōgatsu. Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 2008.
Kira Sueo. Bashō, Buson, Issa no sekai  kinsei haikai, haiga no bi: karā-ban. Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2007.
Miki, Takeshi; Miki, Yasuko. Nozarashi kikô: Eiyaku to sono kenkyû. Kyôiku shuppan sentaa, 1996.
Miki, Yasuko. Nozarashi kikô kochû shûsei. Kenkyû Sôsho, 2006.
Ogata, Tsutomu, Nozarashi kikô hyôshaku. Kadokawa sôsho 1998.
Ogata Tsutomu, Sasaki Jōhei, Okada Akiko. Buson zenshû, Vol. 6: Kaiga, iboku. Kōdansha, 1992-2001.
Okada, Rihei. Buson to haiga. Yagi Shoten, 1997.
Uwagawa, Shôsuke. Nozarashi kikô no kaishaku to hyôron. Ôfûsha, 1968.
Yayoshi, Kan'ichi. Bashô Nozarashi kikô no kenkyû,  Ôfûsha 1987.
Yayoshi, Kan'ichi, "Buson jihitsu Nozarashi kikô emaki no kôsatsu -- sono honbun keitô joretsu o chûshin ni," Kinsei bungei kô, No 2 1965 pp., 1-12.
Yoshizawa, Chû. Yosa Buson. Nihon bijutsu kaiga zenshû 19.  Shûeisha, 1980.

Genocide in the Americas = Little Ice Age in Europe

This is very disturbing. (Repost from PhysOrg.com.)
 ...................

Research team suggests European Little Ice Age came about due to reforestation in New World
(PhysOrg.com) -- A team comprised of geological and environmental science researchers from Stanford University has been studying the impact that early European exploration had on the New World and have found evidence that they say suggests the European cold period from 1500 to 1750, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, was due to the rapid decline in native human populations shortly after early explorers arrived.
 ...................
While the content is horrifying, the emphasis in the title is troubling also.  Its focus on climate change seems out of proportion with the tragedy of the genocide. Of course, the Little Ice Age brought about its own share of death and disaster.


Very, very grim findings indeed.

Volunteering in Miyagi (in Japanese)

From John Morris of Miyagi Gakuin Women's University

The 宮城資料ネット is soliciting volunteers to help restore historical
records rescued from tsunami affected areas. The content of the work is
described in detail below. Futhermore, accommodation is available at the
Joudo Shinshuu Honganji facitilies given at the bottom of the list.

John Morris


各位

宮城資料ネット事務局佐藤大介です。東日本大震災にかかる被災歴史資料レス
キューでは、多くの方々のご協力を賜り、改めて御礼申し上げます。

事務局（仙台市）でのボランティアにつきまして、11月の募集を行います。ご協
力いただける方は、下記の要項をお読みいただき、末尾のテンプレートに必要事
項をもれなくご記入いただいた上で、事務局宛ご返信ください。また周りにご関
心のある方がいらっしゃいましたら、ご案内いただければ幸いです。引き続きご
協力のほど、どうぞよろしくお願い申し上げます。

Haiku, travel, poetic elegance (風雅)

Looking now at the rather free-form Bashô to Buson no sekai.* The first chapter/section is about the expression "sleeping on a journey" (tabine たびね, which can also be written 旅寝 or 旅寐). The beginning of the chapter cites these two verses. I'm quoting them here in part because they're interesting, and in part because it's a windy autumn day in the ATL now.

しにもせぬ旅寝の果よ秋の暮

I didn't die
at the end of sleeping on my journey --
autumn twilight

たびねして我が句をしれや秋の風

sleeping on a journey
know my verses!
autumn wind

The first verse is included in the main text of Nozarashi kikô, when Bashô arrives at Ôgaki. The second one is only in the preface to the Nakagawa Jokushi 中川濁子 illustrated version. There's a handwritten comment by Bashô in the Sodô preface:

Nozarashi kikô in Buson's handwriting

I'm working on Buson jihitsu Nozarashi kikô emaki no kôsatsu - Sono honbun keitô joretsu o chûshin ni (Nozarashi kikô in Buson's handwriting - Centering on the compilation history of the main text) by Yayoshi Ken'ichi, in Kinsei bungei kô, No. 2, pp. 1-12, 1960.

It's very similar to what's in his book, but I just wanted to mention it because I love the article for being handwritten. I've posted an excerpt, left. How amazing, though. Considering these days typing on a keyboard itself seems a chore. I love the person's handwriting -- it's gorgeous. (Could it be done by Yayoshi himself? I only got a copy of the article itself by interlibrary loan. The next time I have a chance to go to Harvard-Yenching I'll check it out.)

He talks about the difficulty of identifying the owner of the piece, how he tried to track it down in the Itsuo Bijutsukan collection, where Sanseidô's Bashô kôza article by Professor Sugiura had claimed it was, and even asked Okada Rihei himself about it, but it turned out that this information was wrong. He also found another reference for it that was wrong, this time in a volume on Buson published by Heibonsha. So he ended up working from a reproduction published by Tôkyô Bijutsu sha. (A quick glance at recent photographs of the piece in books simply say it's owned by a "private collection." Mysterious!)

Haiku on Wall Street

This is from American poet Sharon Rousseau:

...................

As morning rain falls / protesters march toward Wall Street / tweeting photographs.

..................

American haiku is usually quite different from the kind I work on, but I found this one gave me something to think about today.

First Lines of Nozarashi kikô

From this, you can see why scholars call this opening section "sad." I think I have to take it a bit farther to see the "poetic madness" aspect.

千里に旅立て、路粮を包まず「三更月下無何に入」
と云けむ昔の人の杖にすがりて、
貞亨甲子秋八月、江上の破屋を出づる程、
風の声そぞろ寒気也。

野ざらしを心に風のしむ身かな　

秋十年却て江戸を指故郷

Without packing provisions for my thousand-league journey, I drew support from the words of the ancient sage who said, "Beneath the light of the moon at midnight, entering into a condition of neither having nor lacking anything..." and in the Eighth Month, in the autumn of the first year of the Jôkyô period, when I left my riverside home, the sound of the restless wind had a chilly feeling.

bleached bones in a field
and the piercing wind
in my heart

already I have passed
ten autumns in Edo
it's become my hometown

The first line alludes to a passage in Zhuangzi which notes that travelers can only start their packing three months in advance. The "ancient sage" is a Chinese Zen cleric called Yanxi Guangwen 偃溪廣聞 (1189～1263).

Ogata's Bashô Handbook and Barnhill's Version

1. I'm looking at a useful book I got on my most recent trip to Japan, Ogata's Bashô Handbook 芭蕉ハンドブック (Sanseidô, 2002, 2008). Here's its list of Bashô's journals, travel and otherwise:

Nozarashi kikô 野ざらし紀行 Bleached bones in a field travel journal
Kashima no ki かしまの記 Kashima record
Oi no kobumi　笈の小文 Rucksack journal
Sarashina nikki　更級日記 Sarashina journal
Oku no hosomichi　奥の細道 Narrow road to the interior
Saga nikki 嵯峨日記 Saga journal

There are also 6 other haibun 俳文 (haikai prose works), including Genjû-an no ki 幻住庵の記 (Record of the "Unreal Dwelling" Studio).

........................................................

2. The travel journals are all translated in a recent book by David Landis Barnhill, Bashô's Journey (SUNY Press, 2005). This is an excellent collection and the translations are of very high quality. It's directed more at people who are coming at the topic as "haiku," and Barnhill includes an introduction that situates the travel journals in the context that would be familiar to readers of American poetry. So it doesn't address a lot of the issues that a Japanese classical literature geek finds interesting.

But that's okay. Maybe I'll "write what I want to read" myself, as Alice Walker attributes to Toni Morrison.

Textual Variants of "Nozarashi kikô"

All of this Nozarashi kikô writing is related to the paper I'm working on for the upcoming Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. The paper is about Buson's version of the text, and in order to understand what Buson does with it I first have to have a good sense of what it is. One of the things that comes up when thinking about Buson's version is the variant of Nozarashi kikô that he uses, so let's think about the history of the text's compilation and publication.

Buson's version is based on a particular textual variant that is called 初懐紙本, hatsukaishibon, perhaps? or 初懐本, shokaihon? This looks like a version that emerged later in the chain of versions, and seems to be rather unlike the others in many important respects, such as where it ends and the sequence of some of the episodes.

Here is a list of the different versions. Scholars arrived at this typology by detailed analysis of tiny differences in the grammar and content. (Japanese literature scholars are masters at this kind of painstaking, precise work.) The typology below comes from Yayoshi Ken'ichi 弥吉菅一, Bashô Nozarashi kikô no kenkyû 芭蕉『野ざらし紀行』の研究 (1986).

Type 1. 菊本本 [天理本] (Jôkyô 2, 1685?)
Type 2. 泊船本 (Genroku 11, 1698)
Type 3. 孤屋本 (Jôkyô 3, 1686)
Type 4. 三康本 (Jôkyô 3-4, 1686-7)
Type 5. 初懐本 (Hôreki 11, 1761)

Buson's version is related to Type 5. It was copied by hand. Interestingly, a lot of these were actually woodblock printed.

(Chômu's version, which I hope to discuss in a later post, is related to the Hakusen ms., Type 2. It dates from An'ei 5, 1776))

Anyway, I'm making myself crazy with all of this, and I am going to stop trying to figure it out. The chart on page 512 on Yayoshi's book lists over 30 distinct versions of Nozarashi kikô published or compiled between 1685 and 1863, which is pretty amazing. (Some of these are conjectural, based on analysis of existing versions.) Of course the actual text is pretty short, and in most cases it was included as part of collections of Bashô's works.

However, I notice a couple of points:

• there's a slightly perceptible concentration of publication/compilation dates between 1761 - 1780 (7) which makes sense, considering these were the years of the Bashô Revival and
• between 1802 and 1853, there were 5 new versions; 4 were printed and 1 was hand-copied.
• some either are or seem to be reprints of earlier copies.

Nozarashi kikô map

If you click on the image, it will get a bit bigger. But don't bother -- it's not very pretty. If I have time and the inclination I'll redo it, but for now, it's just something to help me understand the geography better.

I tried to work out for myself the route that Bashô took by making a map. Now, I'm not the world's greatest cartographer, so this is primitive. However, it was very useful to try to map the route because it was easy to see how 1) Nozarashi kikô is fictionalized, because the sequence of places doesn't make sense as a single round-trip journey and 2) some versions of the text list the places in a slightly different order. I'm not even sure if the routes reflect actual roads in all cases. Books that include maps (like the one on which this is based, Uwagawa Shôsuke's Nozarashi kiko no kaishaku to hyôron) give the routes of the actual journeys Bashô took which became the basis for the text, from what I can see.

So, is it safe to conclude that Nozarashi kikô is not really the record of a journey, but more like a collection of verses and prose contexts related to them, put together because the places were nearby each other? That in addition to collating a thank-you volume for the benefit of his patrons, Bashô found the "travel journal" format useful for creating a collection of verses that reflected his experiments with fûga (poetic elegance)?

So much has been written about Bashô and I've read so little of it. Nozarashi kikô gets considerably less attention than Oku no hosomichi (Narrow road to the interior), so perhaps it's a good place to start.

Bashô's "Nozarashi kikô" route

This is a list of the main sites Bashô lists as having visited on the Bleached bones in a field journey. This reflects sections in annotated editions of the text more that anything strictly linked to a date or a verse; remember that the text itself is fictionalized so it's not possible to really be precise as one might with an actual itinerary.

Section (Japanese)	Section (English)
旅立ち	Departure, Edo
箱根	Hakone
富士川	Fujigawa River
大井川	Ôigawa River
小夜の中山	Sayo-no-nakayama
伊勢神宮	Ise Jingû
西行谷	Saigyô Valley
上野	Ueno (9th month)
竹内	Take-no-uchi
二上山 (当麻寺）	Futagami Taima Temple
吉野山	Yoshino
不破の関	Fuwa-no-seki
大垣	Ôgaki
桑名	Kuwana
熱田	Atsuta
名古屋	Nagoya
熱田	Atsuta (after returning from Nagoya)
伊賀上野	Ueno (returned home for the New Year
奈良	Nara
京都 （鳴滝、伏見）	Kyôto (Narutaki, Fushimi)
大津	Ôtsu
辛崎	Karasaki
水口	Minakuchi
熱田	Atsuta (3rd-4th month)
甲斐	Kai