"Onna daigaku": Character Building Calligraphy I

From Waseda's copy;
link is below

In the course of working on better understanding neo-Confucianism, I started thinking about Onna daigaku 女大学 (18th century), which borrows the name of the key neo-Confucian text I've been writing about here, Daxue. It's not a single text as much as a bit of shorthand to refer to a whole lineage of textbooks for women, the earliest of which is Onna daigaku takarabako 女大学宝箱 (Women's 'Great learning' jewel box), erroneously attributed to neo-Confucianist philosopher and educator Kaibara Ekken 貝原 益軒 (1630-1714).  Its content bears very little relationship to Daxue; its authors merely added the title to make the point that Onna daigaku should also be regarded as an essential basic textbook. Its intended audience was women, so there's none of the pithy, thought-provoking text of the real Daxue. Instead, it addresses specific behaviors expected from women -- how to get along in their own households and that of their husband.

The book I'm reading about it is called Onna daigaku shû (Onna daigaku anthology) 女大学集, by Ishikawa Matsutarô 石川松太郎 (Heibonsha, 1977). It covers textbooks for women starting in Hôei 7 (1711, Volume 5 of Ekken's "Girls' pedagogy," from 和俗童子訓 Precepts for Children in the Japanese Manner), with 8 more examples, the last of which is Fukuzawa Yukichi's Onna daigaku hyôron, (Critical Onna daigaku), 1899. It's got great annotations and commentary, and is illustrated with reproductions of woodblock editions of the texts it includes, so it's really useful. Right now I'm really interested in what it says about women's textbooks in the eighteenth century, so my notes here will summarize what it says about that. What caught my attention was the way that Onna daigaku demonstrates theories about relationship between moral education (or if you prefer, self-cultivation), calligraphy models, and visual imagery. Consciously setting to one side the deep unpalatability of the message about women always obeying men, I want to think more deeply about the issue of specialized textbooks for women and wonder what's here.

(Click "Read more" for the rest of this post.)

If you're curious about the content, a partial translation is available online, and you can read the whole thing as a book.

• Excerpts from Onna daigaku (PDF, hosted by Columbia University)
• The book is called Women and Wisdom of Japan. A number of versions are kicking around on the internet. A reprint is also available as Onna Daigaku: A Treasure Box of Women's Learning from Nezu Press, 2010.
• Also, there are some amazing digitized editions available through Japanese libraries. Try this one, at Tokyo Gakugei Repository; or this one, at Waseda.

Ishikawa's commentary describes several phases in textbooks for women. Education in the early modern period for men and women was different, as there were different expectations for the roles men and women would play in the ie (household). In describing the differences, the implication is that in the 17th century most of the education was taking place in elite families, and as social organization was based in the ie, it focused on preparing people to take their respective roles. The ie included long-dead ancestors as well as newborn grandchildren. Boys were taught scholarship, martial arts, and how to maintain the continuity of the ie in which they would spend their lives. As girls would eventually leave their natal ie and join somebody else's, they also had to learn how to get along with their husband's family as well as how to raise children and perform household tasks. The requirements for being a cultivated woman was essentially possession of these four qualities: 1) wifely virtue 婦徳, 2) wifely speech 婦言, 3) wifely appearance 婦容, 4) wifely skills 婦巧. Educational materials tended to convey their message in two different ways: abstract admonition about morals was one, and illustrative stories about exemplars was the other.

The first appearance of textbooks aimed particularly at girls corresponded with a few developments -- a peaceful state, improved printing technology, and the importation of books from China. These included Chinese texts for educating girls; thus, some of the earliest Edo-period girls' textbooks were basically annotated Chinese texts. Ishikawa mentions Kumabara Banzan's Precepts for Women 女訓 (1691). Another group of texts consisted of annotations of the imported Women's Four Books 女四書 (1656), including Women's Classic of Filial Piety 女孝経, Admonitions for Women　女誡, Women's Analects　女論語, and Precepts for the Interior 内訓. Also in 1656, Kitamura Kigin published a version of (the Chinese) Biographies of Exemplary Women called Biographies of Exemplary Women in the Japanese Syllabary 仮名列女伝. This was followed by Kurozawa Hirotada's 黒沢弘忠 Japanese Biographies of Exemplary Women 本朝列女伝(1663) and Asai Ryoi's 浅井了井 Japanese Mirror for Women 本朝女鏡 (1661).

Things developed further in the eighteenth century, as access to education and books began to extend to commoners, and correspondingly there was more demand for texts that would teach women basic literacy, letter writing skills, and proper behavior. An early best seller at this stage was based on the Muromachi-era classic Imagawa Admonitions 今川状 (by Imagawa Nakaaki); it was called Onna Imagawa 女今川 and followed a similar format of bullet-point style instructions about what not to do. In addition to its content, it was important as a model for handwriting practice.

A digital version of a copy at Waseda is here.

Other kinds of textbooks followed on from late Heian/early Kamakura boy's textbooks like Teachings on Words of Truth 実語教 and Teachings for Children 童子教: Women's Admonitions Illustrated Women's Teachings on Words of Truth 女誡絵入女実語教 and Women's Admonitions Illustrated Women's Teachings for Children 女誡絵入女童子教.

A digital version of the former at Tokyo Gakugei Repository is here.  A digital version of an edition of the latter that is not illustrated, but written in exquisite calligraphy, is here.

The content emphasized developing wisdom and good moral character, as they were supposed to collect the essential teachings of the Four Books. They were also used as models for handwriting. In addition to these, there were lots of other women's textbooks published during this period, all of which combined examples of good writing with instruction in the virtues and skills required of women in maintaining the continuity of their households.

Wow! This has gotten more detailed than I'd anticipated! Ok, I'll publish this in two parts. The rest will follow before too long.

Peter Kornicki's Bibliography of Japanese History

Professor Kornicki teaches at the University of Cambridge.

The bibliography was originally compiled in 1996 and has been revised since then. It covers Japanese history up to the Meiji period, and is searchable.

The link is here:
http://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/jbib/

Development of Japanese Studies Outside Japan

The Pre-Modern Japanese Studies listserv has an interesting thread developing, inspired by celebrations of the Queen's Jubilee in the UK. Here are some highlights.

1) Ross Bender:

I just finished reading Orienting Arthur Waley: Japonism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English by John Walter de Gruchy (Hawaii, 2003) which is chock full of fascinating insights about the origin of premodern Japanese studies.

One of my favorite factoids is that when the SOAS was founded in 1917 in London, there were seven students in the Japanese program in the first year, "rising to an average of twenty-seven a year over the next five years." After the termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1921, the average number dropped to a mere eleven students between 1923 and 1941, and only two students actually took degrees in the period between the wars. According to de Gruchy, quoting Earl Miner, it was not until Donald Keene that the academic field of Japanese literature was actually created as an academic discipline.

Bike Ride Across Georgia 2012

This weekend I start an epic adventure, the 33rd annual Bike Ride Across Georgia. I -- and about 1,200 other people -- will travel about 350 miles (560 km) during the course of a week. I've never done anything like this before, so I'm pretty intimidated; on the other hand, I'm looking forward to what I hope will be a beautiful ride. We average about 55 miles a day, eat cafeteria-style from a mobile catering service, shower in a truck, and sleep en-masse in school gymnasiums. I'm also bringing plenty of reading to catch up on; however, considering how totally unathletic I am, maybe I should just be content to live through it.

Route map, BRAG 2012; click to embiggen

David Slater on Volunteering in Tôhoku

The Asia-Pacific recently published a short article by David Slater of Sophia University on volunteer opportunities to help survivors of the 3.11 disaster in Tôhoku.

Volunteering in Tôhoku 東北で奉仕活動をするには

If you're planning a visit to Japan soon, here's a way to do something to help people who need it.

Asian Heritage at Dekalb County Public Library I

May is Asian-Pacific Heritage Month in the US. The US government site announcing it has a lot of great materials. Their page on education (link follows) includes a link to a nice page on teaching haiku in English:

Asian-Pacific Heritage Month for Teachers
Can You Haiku?

On Saturday I went to the Decatur branch of Dekalb Public Library to to a reading of folktales from East Asia. It was a lot of fun and I hope to do something similar again. The event was sponsored by Laura Hauser of Literacy Services. Here's the program. The call numbers are specific to the Dekalb Public Library Catalogue. Complete bibliographic information is available through the catalogue.

(Event program and finding list below the cut.)

Kentucky Foreign Language Conference

This past weekend Yumiko Nishi and I went to present our paper on the fourth-year Japanese class at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, held at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I'd been to Kentucky before, once for the Southeast Council Association for Asian Studies conference when it was held in Louisville, and once for the fabulous Bluegrass in the Park/Pickin' & Pedalin' Bicycle Tour in Henderson, but I'd never been to Lexington. Lexington is really beautiful and the surrounding area is fabulously green and peaceful-looking. I had a very nice time.

The conference itself was in its 65th year. The majority of the presentations were related to European Languages, but there were a sizable number of papers related to East Asia also, thanks to the work of Doug Slaymaker and Masamichi (Marro) Inoue (info here).

The paper Dr. Nishi and I gave was "Teaching The Japanese Environment: 3.11 and After." It was great to work with her in writing it, because I got a lot of insight into all the planning that went into the class. I also got to hear about the amazing projects the students worked on -- 10-page papers in Japanese on some very difficult and challenging topics. All in all, Dr. Nishi's work sounded very impressive.

All the papers I heard were very interesting. I particularly want to follow up on the work of Dr. Inoue (who talked about his work on campus policing at UK and how it suggested directions for future research on Japan), Jianjun He of Western Kentucky University (who talked about literary trope of the "immortal" -- 神 or 仙 -- in Wei-Jin and Tang era Chinese poetry) and Matthew Wells of UK, who works on Taoism.

I was also fortunate to have a chance to briefly chat with Sharalyn Orbaugh of the University of British Columbia. Dr. Orbaugh's talk was "Japanese Pop Culture Tackles the Big Questions: Gender, Race and Posthumanity in Anime."