Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan 0674425227, 9780674425224

Citation preview

Plucking Chrysanthemums

Harvard East Asian Monographs 390

“Portrait of the venerable Narushima Ryūhoku,” from the prefatory material to RI, vol. 1.

Plucking Chrysanthemums Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan

Matthew Fraleigh

❋

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2016

© 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Printed in the United States of America The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the Fairbank ­Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, ­Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fraleigh, Matthew, 1973– Plucking chrysanthemums : Narushima Ryūhoku and sinitic literary traditions in modern Japan / Matthew Fraleigh.    pages cm. — (Harvard East Asian monographs ; 390) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-42522-4 (hardcover : acid-free paper)  1.  Narushima, Ryūhoku, 1837–1884.  2.  Authors, ­Japanese—Biography.  3.  Kanbungaku (Japanese literature)—History and criticism.  I.  Title. PL812.A75Z63 2016 895.63'42—dc23 2014048398 Index by Susan Stone

  Printed on acid-free paper Last figure below indicates year of this printing 20 19 18 17 16

Con ten ts

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments Note to the Reader Introduction

vii ix xi 1

1 Book and Sword: A Young Poet Comes of Age

37

2 Book and Zither: The Private Realm

77

3 Discovering New Worlds

121

4 Withdrawal and Resurgence

169

5 Wandering

217

6 Ryūhoku the Journalist

265

7 After the Wake

312

Conclusion

353

Notes Bibliography Index

369 437 463

Figu r e s a n d Ta bl e s

Figures Frontispiece: “Portrait of the venerable Narushima Ryūhoku,” from the prefatory material to RI, vol. 1. 0.1 Liang Kai, Dongli gaoshi tu (Scholar of the eastern fence)

14

0.2 Seki Tokudō, Eiri Eigaku mōgyū (1871)

25

0.3 Map of the Sumida River and environs

29

0.4 Poems exchanged between Narushima Kinemaro and Shinmi Bōzan

32

1.1 An octave composed by Ryūhoku on New Year’s Day, from Kankei shōkō, Kaei 7 (1854)

45

1.2 First page of Ryūhoku’s diary, Kenhoku nichiroku, vol. 1, Kaei 7 (1854)

49

1.3 Map of the Ueno, Shitaya, and Outer Kanda area, Kaei 3 (1850)

54

1.4 Slip of paper from Seki Sekkō’s scrapbook, Kaei 7 (1854)

60

1.5 Slips of paper with poetry topics, surely for Ryūhoku’s gatherings, Kaei 7 (1854)

60

2.1 Map of Shitaya literati (ca. 1855–59)

79

2.2 Ryūhoku’s poem calendar (shireki) for Ansei 2 (1855)

96

3.1 Utagawa Kuniteru, illustration of Yanagibashi and environs

122

3.2 Section from Ryūhoku’s Kankei shōkō poetry manuscript showing revisions 126 3.3 Map of the Shitaya area, Bunkyū 2 (1862)

160

3.4 Narushima Ryūhoku and Yanagawa Shunsan, “Evaluation of the Twenty-Four Flowers of Yanagibashi,” Bunkyū 2 (1862)

162

4.1 Ryūhoku’s Ballad of the Two Soga, calligraphy scroll

171

4.2 Detail of fig. 4.1 showing the first graphs of Ryūhoku’s postscript

174

viii

Figu r es a n d Ta bles

4.3 Ryūhoku, poem from Kankei shōkō showing revisions

184

4.4 Pages from Ryūhoku’s Kaigai kahei shōfu 187 4.5 Futakida Nozomu, Kihei renpei no gazu (Image of cavalry training, 1868)

201

4.6 Letter from Narushima Ryūhoku to Charles Chanoine

207

5.1 Record of summons to serve in the Chamber of the Left (1871)

247

5.2 Shipping report in the Japan Weekly Mail (1872)

254

5.3 Société d’ethnographie membership roster (1873)

261

6.1 Book of Rites (Li ji), chapter 40, “Pitchpot”

306

6.2 Tōkei shinshi poem, “Shinbun segaki” (1875)

310

7.1 Utagawa Hiroshige III, The Chōya Newspaper Company Building on the Ginza (1880)

316

Tables 0.1 Successive heads of the Narushima family

31

1.1 Poem topics assigned at Ryūhoku’s poetry gathering in Kaei 7/Ansei 1 (1854)

61

6.1 Features associated with two different categories of newspaper in Meiji Japan

272

Ack now l edgm en ts

M

y interest in Ryūhoku and modern kanshibun first took shape many years ago when I was a graduate student at Harvard. In the space of a few weeks, readings from several quite disparate classes happened to mention Ryūhoku in passing, and the fortuitous overlap left me fascinated with a figure previously unknown to me. Hal Bolitho and Atsuko Sakaki were particularly encouraging to me in these early stages. Without the foundations in classical Japanese and Chinese that I received through many classes with Ed Cranston and Paul Rouzer, I would never have embarked on this project. Just as I was preparing to leave for Japan to carry out my dissertation research, Jay Rubin invited me to contribute an essay on Ryūhoku to Modern Japanese Writers; it was a great opportunity to get my preliminary thoughts together, and I am grateful for his continued advice and support. I still remember my delight on receiving an e-mail from Hino Tatsuo accepting my request to study under him at Kyoto University from 2000. Near the end of my two-year stay, Hino-sensei generously commented on and encouraged me to publish my early findings. I also learned a great deal from Fukui Tatsuhiko during my time at Kyoto University and from Ju Chiou-er at National Taiwan University. In 2009–10, thanks to the support of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, I was lucky to spend a stimulating year at the University of Tokyo, where I benefited from conversations with Robert Campbell. Kawai Kōzō and Ōtani Masao have been encouraging in many ways over the years, especially during the time I spent at Kyoto University in the spring of 2012. Will Hammell and Bob Graham were both extremely helpful in shepherding the completed manuscript through the acquisitions process at Harvard later that year. On New Year’s Day of 2014, just as I was wrapping up the changes I wanted to make before I submitted the completed revision later that year, I unexpectedly received an e-mail greeting from Inui Teruo, whose work on Ryūhoku I had long followed. I have enjoyed the chance to discuss Ryūhoku with him on several occasions since then and appreciate the generous and collaborative spirit with which he has shared handouts from presentations of his research that I could not attend. I am also grateful to him for introducing me to Okiyama Sadako, Ryūhoku’s great-great-granddaughter. The Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature at Brandeis University has been my academic home since 2006. I am deeply appreciative of the cama-

x A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

raderie of my colleagues Robin Feuer Miller, Steve Dowden, David Powelstock, Harleen Singh, Hiroko Sekino, Sabine von Mering, Aida Wong, and Yu Feng. Jim Mandrell and Sue Lanser have always been willing to offer advice on any number of matters. Since joining the Brandeis faculty, I have had the opportunity to present my work on Ryūhoku and modern kanshibun at various other institutions, and I would like to thank in particular Jon Abel, Chia-ning Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Kōno Kimiko, Will Fleming, Seiji Lippit, Gōyama Rintarō, and Chris Nugent for these invitations. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, where I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in 2005–6. Access to the resources of Harvard-Yenching Library has been invaluable to my research, and I am particularly grateful to Kuniko McVey. Friends Vernica Downey, Emi Shimokawa, Paul Warham, Chen Zhengheng, Seth Jacobowitz, and Satō Shinji have kindly provided access to various library materials that were important to completing this project. Christian Polak and Timon Screech graciously allowed me to use images in their possession; Josh Fogel, Gujima Misako, and Tim Wixted thoughtfully provided copies of their recent work on topics of interest to me and relevance to this book. I am indebted to the two anonymous readers for Harvard University Asia Center, who read the manuscript very carefully and offered several valuable suggestions. I have benefited also from the comments and critiques of Micah Auerback, Glynne Walley, and Steve Hanna, all of whom read portions of the manuscript. Thanks are also due to Susan Stone for her vigilant copyediting; to Suzanne Harris, who collaborated to solve some of the book’s typographical challenges; and to my editor, Deborah Del Gais. I treasure my friendship with Mark Quigley, Jason Webb, and Alexander Akin, who have always been willing to listen and have seen me through some difficult moments over the years. Not long after beginning my research on Ryūhoku in Kyoto, I was fortunate to meet Yanagimoto Katsumi, who has been a wonderful companion in the years since. Finally, I am grateful to my family for their support and constant encouragement.

Note to t h e R e a der

T

he revised Hepburn system is used for romanizing Japanese terms and pinyin for romanizing Chinese terms; when otherwise unclear from context, the respective language for those terms is indicated by the abbreviations J. and Ch. Throughout this book, dates are given according to the calendar that was in effect in Japan at the time in question. Japan officially used the lunar calendar through the second day of the twelfth month of Meiji 5 (December 31, 1872), after which it adopted the Gregorian (Western) calendar. For dates before this change, rough equivalents to the relevant Gregorian calendar year are provided to facilitate reference. To take the final day of the lunar calendar’s official use in Japan as an example, this day would be indicated as 12.02 (1872) and the following day as January 1, 1873. Intercalary months are indicated by the prefix “i.” In keeping with the practice of most of the cited sources, ages are given in kazoedoshi, the traditional reckoning according to which an infant was one at birth and turned two on the following New Year’s Day. I use square brackets to indicate my own additions to and clarifications of quoted sources; when parentheses appear in quotations, they indicate parenthetical material that appears in the quoted source. Abbreviations are used in this book to refer to several frequently cited sources. A complete list of those sources, with full bibliographic references, appears in the first section of the bibliography.

Introduction

I

n 1883, thirty years after Matthew Perry’s arrival signaled the start of a new era in Japan’s relations with the outside world, the journalist and Washington-based consular official Charles Lanman compiled a volume titled Leading Men of Japan. Interest in Japan was significant among American readers at the time, and Lanman’s book provided them with a basic outline of the country’s history along with biographies of several dozen men who had shaped its emergence as a modern nation. Starting with the emperor who had come to power in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Lanman profiled many of the era’s most distinguished statesmen, including four of the emissaries who had toured the United States in the early 1870s, Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83), Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), and Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), as well as diplomats who had been posted to the United States in the early Meiji period (1868–1912), such as Mori Arinori (1847– 89); politicians who guided Japan’s development, such as Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840–1900); and military officials such as Enomoto Takeaki (1836–1908). Lanman’s list contained many eminent men from the private sector as well: successful entrepreneurs such as Shi­ busawa Eiichi (1840–1931), leading educators and intellectuals such as Niijima Jō (1843–90) and Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), and pioneering journalists such as Fukuchi Gen’ichirō (1841–1906). If asked to identify Japan’s “leading men” of the mid-nineteenth century, most present-day historians of Japan and members of the Japanese general public alike would name several of these men as well as others on Lanman’s list. Yet at least one of Lanman’s choices might strike both groups as curious, for he extensively treats the career and accomplishments of the writer who is at the center of this book: Narushima Ryūhoku 成島柳北 (1837–84).1 In fact, only two of the more than fifty individuals Lanman chose have lengthier profiles. The choice would not have surprised anyone in 1883, however, for at the time Lanman published Leading Men of Japan, Narushima Ryūhoku was one of the most prominent figures in Japan’s literary world. The successor to a scholarly family that had served as historians and tutors to the Tokugawa shogunate for generations, Ryūhoku attained

2 i n t r o d u c t i o n

early distinction for his erudition and his skill as a poet. Apart from his official service, he was also an enthusiastic chronicler of contemporary society, turning his discerning eye toward realms of everyday urban life that scholars in his esteemed position typically deemed beneath their notice. Ryūhoku recorded his observations with ironic wit and stylistic flair, inspired by the works of his predecessors, while also experimenting with new forms. After losing his post with the demise of the shogunate, he traveled extensively both domestically and abroad. During these six years, he wrote several poetry-filled travel diaries about his experiences and eventually found an opportunity to transform his longstanding journalistic interests into an avocation. In 1874, Ryūhoku was invited to take charge of a daily newspaper that he quickly transformed into the most influential and successful intellectual paper of the period: one that his contemporaries and later historians alike consistently describe as setting the highest standards for literary quality in the early Meiji press. Ryūhoku was often a spirited critic of the Meiji government; his books were banned repeatedly, and he was even imprisoned for several months when an essay that he and another journalist had written was found to violate the government’s stringent press restrictions. Yet, until his untimely death in 1884 at the age of forty-eight, Ryū­hoku remained an outspoken advocate for various reforms and an engaged commentator on Japanese society. Following his detailed and largely accurate account of Ryūhoku’s early career, L ­ anman records the formal emergence of the writer as a newspaperman: He was next called, after the Restoration, to an honorable position connected with the Senate, but declined the office; not long afterwards he became the editor of the Chōya Shimbun (Daily News) in Yedo, which acquired an extensive circulation; he also published a number of valuable books, and did much to promote the cause of literature. . . . Among his countrymen he is reputed to be a very eloquent writer, a man of uncommon sense and sagacity, a true patriot, and an able poet. As to his newspaper, it is to Japan what the London Times is to England—an institution of superior power.2

Lanman was perceptive in highlighting Ryūhoku’s efforts “to promote the cause of literature,” for that was certainly a major focus of Ryūhoku’s attention. In 1873, just one year before he launched the Chōya shinbun, for example, Ryūhoku addressed the status of the literary arts in a preface he contributed to Tōkyō shashinkyō (Photographs of Tokyo), a new collection of verse that sought to document the whirlwind of changes in material culture, customs, and attitudes that had taken place in the first years of Meiji: Poetry may be dismissed as nothing more than a minor art, and yet, among all the nations arrayed around the globe, there has never been one that lacks poetry. The nations of Europe and America that are said to be civilized . . . are all accustomed to respecting poetry. . . . Recently, various gentlemen from our country have devoted themselves to mastering Western studies; they have conducted research in the natural sciences, and they have scrutinized Western laws. They have overlooked no domain of study, except for one: poetry, which nine out of ten of them reject as something useless. I find this quite puzzling, for the poetry of our country is quite like the poetry of the West—even though we use different letters.3

i n t r o d u c t i o n 3

What is particularly noteworthy about this preface is the way in which Ryūhoku frames literature as a discipline unjustly neglected in Japan’s rush to modernize. When Photographs of Tokyo was published in the early 1870s, the fledgling Meiji government (led by several of those Lanman featured in his Leading Men of Japan) was busily sending hundreds of students and officials abroad to investigate Western industrial, educational, legal, and social institutions. On the basis of the detailed reports these visitors compiled, the Meiji state earnestly set about the business of consolidating central power, singlemindedly striving to catch up with the West and thereby allow Japan to take its place as a modern nation. When the author of Photographs of Tokyo, Kikuchi Sankei (1819–91), asked his friend Ryūhoku to compose a preface for it, the latter had just returned from his own world tour, and he pointedly situated the new poetry collection in this context, portraying it as an essential, complementary component of Japan’s nation-building enter­ prise. In this new era of international intercourse, Ryūhoku envisioned Japanese poets “standing alongside the poetic masters of the West,” and to that end he proposed translating the work “so that the poets of Europe and America would know that our country also has talented poets.” Yet, in spite of the ringing endorsements of Ryūhoku and other prominent literary men, Kikuchi Sankei’s timely collection of poems on early Meiji Tokyo is virtually unknown today.4 The reason the work has faded from Japanese memory is not, however, difficult to discover, for it is composed in Literary Sinitic: the classical written language that developed in ancient China and subsequently spread throughout the Sinosphere.5 From our vantage point today, it might seem strange that this work billed by Ryūhoku as proof that “our nation of Japan” has high-caliber poets should be composed in anything but Japanese, yet such doubts would not have even occurred to him or to other literary figures of the time, when Sinitic poetic composition by Japanese individuals enjoyed unprecedented popularity. Residents of the Japanese archipelago had been composing poetry in Literary Sinitic for well over a millennium, but a tremendous expansion of the practice had taken place around the turn of the nineteenth century. This flowering of Sinitic literary production in Japan came about as the result of several factors. First, newly introduced poetic theories promoted the naturalization of Sinitic verse forms, turning Japanese poets’ attention to their local environment and encouraging individual expressiveness to a degree not seen before. At the same time, the Kansei Reforms of the 1790s put a new emphasis on the mastery of a standardized canon of Literary Sinitic texts. As educational opportunities expanded and as printed reference materials were more widely disseminated, acquisition of literacy and compositional proficiency in Literary Sinitic was brought within the reach of a broader population.6 These trends continued into Meiji, when poetic societies devoted to Sinitic verse sprung up in both rural and urban areas, the social backgrounds of Japanese poets working in Sinitic forms further diversified, a broader range of female poets came to participate, and new venues were established to showcase poetic production.7 The first decades of the Meiji period were in fact the historical zenith of Sinitic literary production in Japan: its final spectacular flourish before its even more precipitous decline.8 The new Meiji media landscape was crucial in enabling this explosion, for it stimulated aspiring poets by providing them ready access to models they could emulate while also fostering novel forms of poetic expression and interaction.

4 i n t r o d u c t i o n

Ryūhoku was absolutely central to these developments. In addition to composing and publishing his own poetry, his newspaper provided the Meiji reading public with its first regular forum for Sinitic verse composition, instruction, and exchange. He would also go on to found one of Japan’s first literary journals, Kagetsu shinshi (New journal of blossoms and the moon), which devoted substantial attention to Sinitic prose and poetry, and was one of the favorite magazines read by literary figures of the next generation.

The Invention of Kanshibun and National Literature Although Lanman notes that Ryūhoku was a “master of the Chinese and Japanese languages and history” in his biography, it is significant that in his account of Ryūhoku’s contributions to “the cause of literature,” with its references to his ability as a poet and the reputation he enjoys “among his countrymen” as an “eloquent writer,” Lanman does not mention that Ryūhoku established his reputation as a poet working in Sinitic verse forms, that the “valuable books” he published were also written principally in Literary Sinitic, and that Ryūhoku’s efforts on literature’s behalf were mainly undertaken through literature either in Literary Sinitic or in highly Sinified forms of Japanese. Though this omission may simply reflect ignorance on Lanman’s part, it also suggests that it had not occurred to the contemporary Japanese individuals who presumably served as his informants to highlight the linguistic form of Ryūhoku’s writings. Indeed, Ryūhoku wrote before the creation of the very idea of a “national literature” in Japan. This is evident even in the specific term that he uses to discuss “poetry” in the above preface to Sankei’s Photographs of Tokyo: shifu 詩賦 (shi and fu), which refers to two genres of Sinitic poetry as a collective term for Sinitic poetry in general. In presentday Japanese usage, Literary Sinitic poems are called kanshi (lit., “poems of Han”), Literary Sinitic prose is called kanbun (lit., “prose of Han”), and both are referred to collectively as kanshibun. Whereas the Sinitic modes of Japanese literary expression that terms such as kanshibun designate are nearly as old as writing itself in Japan, the terms themselves are of recent vintage and would have been unfamiliar, perhaps even distasteful, to Ryūhoku and his contemporaries.9 In contrast to kanshi, the term shifu from the above passage includes no marker of foreignness; there is no sign that the poems constituting the category of shifu belong to any particular nation-state. Whereas the Japanese term shi now refers to poetry in general, during most of Japanese literary history, shi specifically designated Sinitic poetry (whether composed by Japanese, Chinese, or other individuals), and the word was long used in contrast to ka (or uta) 歌, the term for Japanese-language poetry.10 Rarely is it the case that changes in nomenclature are merely superficial phenomena, for they often signal transformations of the ways in which even a stable referent is conceptualized. As Karatani Kōjin and others have pointed out, the prefix kan (Sinitic) can perhaps best be understood as the lingering trace of an epistemological shift in the third decade of the Meiji period through which Sinitic literature came to be reconceived in opposition to other “national literatures”: both those of the West and Japan’s own.11

i n t r o d u c t i o n 5

At this time, a decade or two after Ryūhoku wrote his preface for Sankei’s volume, new narratives of Japanese “national literary history” began to be constructed, and these systematically excluded kanshibun from the category of “national literature.” In the year 1890, something of a watershed in the production of the national literary canon, the first comprehensive histories of Japanese literature were published, and the Nihon bungaku zensho, a twenty-four-volume series of modern printed editions of classical primary texts, was launched. Though the standards by which works were selected for inclusion in these histories and anthologies varied slightly, one factor was consistent; as Michael Brownstein observes, “the primary criterion for imaginative literature was style, that is, the use of wabun 和文 or ‘pure’ Japanese as opposed to kanbun 漢文 (writing in Chinese) or the hybrids that emerged after the Heian period.”12 In the same year that the first volumes of Nihon bungaku zensho began to appear, Ochiai Naobumi (1861–1903), one of its three editors and a founding scholar of the emerging domain of “national literary studies,” published an essay heralding the present triumph of Japanese-language poetic forms over Sinitic and explaining it as the inevitable outcome of Japan’s rising sense of national identity: “Kanbun and kanshi have declined and kokubun and kokushi [prose and poetry in the national language] have greatly flourished. . . . Why have they gained such sway in this manner all at once? It is precisely because each and every member of the populace has felt their necessity. It is because they realize that ultimately kanshi and kanbun are incapable of expressing the thoughts of the nation’s people. The populace has realized the necessity of kokubun and kokushi.”13 This essay by Ochiai is but a single instance among many similar statements by pioneering kokubungaku scholars of the period, for whom this kind of “linguistic nationalism” constituted the new discipline’s ideological pillar.14 The idea that the kanshi and kanbun were incompatible with “the thoughts of the nation’s people” retroactively cast the long tradition of kanshibun by Japanese authors in a suspect light, tainting it as somehow inauthentic. Haruo Shirane explains the eventual outcome of this idea that the national language was the embodiment of the “national essence” (kokutai): “This notion of a national language, which was strengthened by the importation of Western phonocentric notions and the genbun-itchi (union of spoken and written languages) movement, was contrasted with kanbun, a written language associated with China, a country that was in decline and that would succumb to Japan in the Sino-­ Japanese War. The result was a dramatic pedagogical shift away from the Confucian classics and the devaluation of Japanese writing in kanbun, which had been the language of religion, government, and scholarship.”15 While Japanese public schools continued to teach basic passive literacy in Literary Sinitic as a required subject, educational reformers in the mid-1890s began to argue against requiring students to attain competence in the composition of original kanshi and kanbun works.16 In the first years of the twentieth century, the Japanese Ministry of Education precipitated a lively debate when it considered eliminating kanbun instruction from Japanese middle schools altogether or incorporating it in attenuated form as part of the kokugo curriculum. Although public outcry prevented the more radical proposals from being implemented, the number of hours of instruction in kanbun was nevertheless reduced dramatically.17 Such shifts in the curriculum of the new national school system as well as institutional realignments in higher education steadily eroded the place of

6 i n t r o d u c t i o n

kanshibun, producing new generations of readers that came to regard what had always been an integral component of Japanese literary activity as something antiquated, affected, and abstruse. The kanshi columns that had been so common in Meiji news­ papers began to disappear by the Taishō era (1912–26), though a few magazines continued to feature kanshi regularly through the 1940s. At the same time, the technical training necessary to compose kanshi increasingly became something acquired only through an individual’s independent initiative. By the mid-twentieth century, kanshibun was unambiguously a part of the past but less and less a part of the Japanese past; according to one survey, whereas 41.1 percent of the selections in secondary school kanbun textbooks were by Japanese authors before World War II, compositions by Japanese authors declined to just 4.3 percent of the textbook passages in the postwar period.18 Although Lanman had selected Ryūhoku as a “leading man” of Meiji Japan in 1883, these subsequent transformations meant that it was a distinction he subsequently lost. Ryūhoku remained immensely popular among those who came of age in the late nineteenth century; Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), for example, recalled about Ryūhoku’s bestknown work, “There probably wasn’t a student around in the Meiji period who was unfamiliar with Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles of Yanagibashi.”19 Yet a deemphasis on ­kanbun instruction made Ryūhoku’s Sinitic text increasingly inaccessible to later generations. In 1940, Odagiri Hideo observed that Ryūhoku and his New Chronicles “had already begun to be forgotten owing to their forbidding kanbun” style.20 The editions of the text that have appeared since the Meiji period reflect the escalating levels of editorial intervention necessary to render the text available to contemporary readers.21 Outside Japan as well, Ryūhoku has been largely overlooked. Through the end of the twentieth century, one of the very few Western scholars of Japanese literature to devote any attention to him was Donald Keene, whose Dawn to the West briefly introduces his career in the context of a chapter on “writing in Chinese of the Meiji era.”22 The extent to which Keene’s scholarship in this domain of modern Japanese literature was pioneering is evident from William Sibley’s review of the work, which lauds Keene’s efforts to engage with “various forms of writing which, from the point of view of the ‘mainstream’ as charted by standard Japanese surveys, would be considered marginal, abortive, or terminal.” Sibley made a point of praising in particular Keene’s attention to “the wonderfully strange Meiji boomlet in ‘popular’ writings in Chinese” as well as to “epicurean hacks like Narushima Ryūhoku” who “were destined to become footnotes in standard surveys.”23 As the introduction of neologisms like kanshi and kanbun in the 1890s shows, the status of Sinitic writings by Japanese authors was radically reevaluated under the influence of a “national literature” paradigm. Although obscurity ultimately awaited Ryūhoku and other Japanese of early Meiji who composed in such forms, they would not necessarily have predicted this fate, for the Sinitic expression to which they devoted themselves had long enjoyed an esteemed place at the very center of scholarly endeavor in Japan. The exclusion of kanshibun from the canons of national literary study, however, left its position decidedly ambiguous. Some of the scholars who had been part of the effort to establish the domain of classical literature later regretted this development. Haga Yaichi (1867–1927), for example, gave a series of lectures in the early twentieth century on “The

i n t r o d u c t i o n 7

History of Japanese Kanbungaku,” arguing for a reaffirmation of its historical importance as part of Japan’s literary tradition: The history of Japanese kanbungaku is the history of Chinese literature (Shina bungaku) written by Japanese. I would like to consider this as part of Japan’s literary history. Recently research into national literary history and Chinese literary history has been active, but I have not seen much investigation into the Chinese literature written by Japanese people. So I decided to give lectures on the history of this Chinese literature by Japanese writers. But first things first: should this body of kanshi and kanbun be viewed as Chinese literature? Or should it be viewed as Japan’s literature? . . . Nowadays, when one says “national literature,” it is held to mean exclusively works written in the national language. Of course, I am not saying that such a perception is mistaken, but when we conduct research into Japan’s literature in a broad sense, we must also examine kanshibun. After all, there is no one who includes these works of kanshibun within the category of Chinese literature. And that means that, in the end, these works of literature have no place to go. If we exclude them from the category of Japan’s literature, it will mean that research on the nation of Japan is incomplete.24

As the matter-of-fact declaration that opens this quotation indicates, Haga’s subsequent statement that “no one” includes kanshibun within the bounds of Chinese literature does not mean that he disqualified it on linguistic or technical grounds from membership in the category. In fact, around the turn of the century, many of the commentators who inveighed most vehemently against Japanese kanshibun did so precisely because they had no doubts whatsoever that it was part of Chinese literature. In the course of their survey of the 1897 literary scene, for example, the editors of Teikoku bungaku wrote: “Inasmuch as kanshi and kanbun alike are the literature of a foreign country (gaikoku bungaku), how can [Japanese authors’] imitation and cobbling together produce enduring masterpieces?”25 Rather than arguing that kanshibun somehow fell short as literature in Chinese, Haga sought to draw attention here to how the boundaries dictated by the concept of “national literature” essentially ensured its exclusion from scholarly consideration altogether. Although he was careful to reserve the term kokubungaku, or “national literature,” for works written in the Japanese language, Haga’s effort to include Japan’s kanshibun as part of Nihon bungaku, or “Japan’s literature,” marked an important intervention; still, the concern he expresses here that the tremendous body of Sinitic works by Japanese authors might slip through disciplinary cracks in the academy was prescient. Haga’s anxiety that the “place” of these literary works was unfixed also describes the situation outside of Japan, where the scholarly community’s collective understanding of kanshibun has undergone several shifts. Perhaps the clearest way to appreciate this evolution is to consider the literal place that Japanese kanshibun occupies within the academy: the location of kanshibun works on its library shelves. Early on in its history of acquiring and cataloging Asian materials, the United States Library of Congress, which created and maintains the cataloging system used by almost all academic libraries in North America, treated Literary Sinitic works written by Japanese authors, published in Japan, and read mainly by a Japanese readership in the same way that it treated Literary Sinitic works by Chinese authors, or in Haga’s terms, as part of “Chinese literature.” And so, if one browsed the shelf space assigned to Qing dynasty (1644–1911) literary figures whose romanized

8 i n t r o d u c t i o n

family names begin with “K,” for example, one would also come across interfiled works by and about Japanese authors who wrote in Literary Sinitic during that time period. Under this rubric, a book concerning the early modern Japanese kanshi poet Kan Chazan (1748–1827) might be found alongside books about Qing scholar and statesman Kang You­ wei (1858–1927) and late Chosŏn period Korean calligrapher and statesman Kang Se-hwang (1713–91), for all three composed Sinitic works during China’s Qing dynasty. Under this framework, the region in which the authors lived, the particular cultural milieu in which they produced and circulated their works, is irrelevant. What matters instead is the language in which they wrote. Clearly a certain degree of Sinocentrism underlies this schema, since Korean and Japanese authors were arranged not on the basis of the periodization of their own countries’ literary histories, but by the succession of Chinese dynasties. Yet this approach also has a certain undeniable logic to it. Many Japanese kanshi poets aspired to write Sinitic verse that was not linguistically or stylistically marked as the product of a Japanese hand. There are important exceptions, but, for most poets active from the Edo period into Meiji, the term washū 和習 (meaning something like “in the Japanese custom”) was the worst criticism to receive, for it meant that choices in diction or syntax betrayed the poet’s Japanese origins and training.26 Borrowing a term from contemporary cultural studies, one might say that these poets aspired to write “culturally odorless” poetry. In his work on the present-day globalization of Japanese consumer products and the marketing of television programs, manga, and anime in Asia, Koichi Iwabuchi has used the suggestive term “culturally odorless” to describe how Japanese marketers sometimes attempt to rid the nation’s exports of attributes that might overtly identify them as Japanese.27 Composers of Sinitic poetry in Japan in fact hit on the same olfactory metaphor a few centuries earlier, for those kanshi poets who were preoccupied with avoiding the stigma of washū often wrote the pejorative term with a phonetically identical, yet distinctly more pungent set of characters: 和臭, or “Japanese odor.” This integrationist approach to conceptualizing kanshibun was in tension with an additional organizational framework also employed at the Library of Congress. Under this second cataloging rubric, the library gave works composed in Literary Sinitic by non-Chinese authors their own separate category—albeit one at the very end of Chinese geographic space. This marginalizing model recognized the distinctiveness of the discursive sites in which Japanese kanshibun authors operated. Yet the frame was still Sinocentric in that the new peripheral category of Chinese literature from Japan was tacked on, along with categories for Chinese literature from Korea, Vietnam, and other peripheral points, as the outermost locus after Chinese literature collections specific to various domestic localities. In the summer of 2000, however, the Library of Congress adopted a third paradigm, introducing new subject headings that explicitly incorporated kanbungaku and kanshi into the province of Japanese literature. The same changes were simultaneously applied to the Sinitic poetry and prose of Korean authors. Significantly, the library decided to write the subject headings in the vernacular terms used in the respective languages: kanbungaku and kanshi in Japan’s case, hanmunhak and hansi in Korea’s. Though deriving from the same Sinitic compounds (hanwenxue and hanshi), the use of the domesticated terms reinforces the idea that these Sinitic forms are an organic and inseparable

i n t r o d u c t i o n 9

part of each country’s literary tradition. Now works by contemporaneous Japanese poets appear together regardless of whether the predominant language of their poetry is Japanese or Literary Sinitic. Returning to the example of Kan Chazan, books concerning this Edo period Sinologue that the library has acquired and cataloged since its 2000 decision are now arrayed among the works by and about his Japanese literary contemporaries such as Kamo no Suetaka (1754–1841), a Japanese-language nativist poet and scholar, and Kashiwagi Jotei (1763–1819), a leading Sinitic poet.28 These shifts in the library’s conceptualization of Literary Sinitic texts composed by non-Chinese show how vexed the category of kanshibun has been, but they also attest to a revolution in thinking that has been going on outside of the library’s stacks. The 2000 shift in cataloging procedures at the Library of Congress reflects the fact that in recent years the very definition of Japanese literature has expanded to include kanshibun. Whereas terms such as kanbun and kanshi had once been used to jettison Sinitic texts from the category of “national literature,” they are now being employed to reclaim the texts as an essential part of Japanese literary history. This reassignment of kanshibun to the field of Japanese literature is the counterpart of ongoing efforts in academic circles to think beyond the conventional boundaries of “national literature”: a framework that is often founded on presumptions of monolingualism and an assumed correspondence between literary practice and a putatively transhistoric ethnic identity. Such a commitment to resist the projection of the modern nation-state of Japan back in time is shared by many working in the fields of literature and history today.29 Closely intertwined with this attempt to rescue literature from the nation has been a recent critical interest in the process of canon formation in Japan. Considering canon production diachronically provides another indication of a tectonic shift in thinking about the place of kanshibun in Japanese letters. In the field of classical literature, the Nihon koten bungaku taikei, a one-hundred-volume set of annotated primary texts published in the 1950s and 1960s by the prestigious Iwanami Shoten, went a long way toward defining the canon for a generation of postwar scholars. Yet, as the work of Tomi Suzuki, Haruo Shirane, Tomiko Yoda, and others has made unquestionably clear, it would be naïve to assume that the Japanese classical literary canon is pre-ordained: timeless in its stability and inevitable in its contents.30 By tracing in detail the process of canonization from the Meiji period onward, their work has historicized certain assumptions about what constitutes literature, showing how various contemporary ideas, often conceived through comparison with European literary traditions, have informed the criteria employed in selecting or eliminating works from the Japanese canon. Not surprisingly, reconsideration of the canon has been an active focus of Japan-based academics as well.31 Beginning in the late 1980s, Japan’s preeminent literary scholars were recruited by Iwanami to produce a new version of the classical canon. Although there is some overlap, the contents of the new Taikei differ strikingly from the version published a generation earlier. When the one hundredth and final volume at last appeared in 2005, one of the new series’ principal editors, Nakano Mitsutoshi, reflected on the project’s significance. Nakano described the old Taikei as “the classics as viewed from a modern perspective” and characterized the new Taikei, by contrast, as “the classics as viewed from the critique of modernity.” Offering a specific example, Nakano noted that, whereas “Edo

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literature” once called to mind popular writers such as Saikaku, Chikamatsu, and Bakin, “ideas have changed, and people now think that Edo studies should be pursued on the basis of Edo’s own standards.” As a result of this change, the number of works in kanshibun included in the new Iwanami Taikei has increased dramatically.32 A similar effort has begun to reshape versions of the modern canon as well. Several volumes of the new series Iwanami launched in 2001, a Meiji counterpart to the classical Taikei, feature generously annotated editions of works by modern Japanese authors who worked in Sinitic forms. The traditional neglect of Japanese kanshibun has, until very recently, characterized Western studies of Japanese literature as well, as Sibley’s review of Keene’s Dawn to the West suggests. In an important article from 1998, Timothy Wixted issued a clear call for greater academic attention to this body of literature: “In terms of its size, often its quality, and certainly its importance both at the time it was written and cumulatively in the cultural tradition, kanbun is arguably the biggest and most important area of Japanese literary study that has been ignored in recent times, and the one least properly represented as part of the canon.”33 In addition to Wixted’s articles on Mori Ōgai, recent years have seen the emergence of new work in English on modern kanshibun.34 The first book-length study was published in 2000, when Stephen Addiss and Jonathan Chaves coauthored an engaging and informative monograph called Old Taoist, focused on the life and works of Fukuda Kodōjin (1865–1944). Born in the last years of the Edo period, Kodōjin was a gifted painter who was also accomplished in both haiku and kanshi. The first extensive treatment of a modern kanshi practitioner, Old Taoist is without question a groundbreaking work. In spite of its excellence, however, the absence of much work on other individuals may leave readers with a somewhat skewed view of kanshi poets in the Meiji period. Kodōjin’s self-styled literary name means “man of the old Way,” and, if one takes him to be representative, then it might seem that kanshi poets are best understood as quaint antiquarians, willfully out of step with the world in their devotion to the practice and perfection of an anachronistic lost art.35 Yet it is important to bear in mind that there were also many kanshi poets active in Meiji who saw themselves as being on the very cutting edge of contemporary culture and literary expression. As Iritani Sensuke has pointed out, “at least until 1887, kanshi seemed like the type of poetry that would be most flexible in responding to the new age,” a status he attributes to its much wider variety of forms and its larger vocabulary in comparison to other types.36 Even in 1896, the young critic and poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) straightforwardly observed: “Comparing the development of waka, haiku, and kanshi in the literary world today, kanshi are most advanced, haiku second, and waka third.”37 In his study of Edo and Meiji kanshi, Sugishita Motoaki has also emphasized the adaptability of kanshi to engagement with new sociocultural phenomena, specifically dialogue with Western literature and material culture; he argues that it was in nineteenth-century Japanese kanshi that the sensibility constituting the dividing line between the classical and modern worlds made its first appearance in Japanese literature.38 To view kanshibun as antiquated or “obsolete” in Meiji is thus to retrospectively read the practice through foreknowledge of its eventual decline. Donald Keene’s acute observations on Meiji kanshibun are an important reminder of just how commonplace composition in Literary Sinitic was in Japan during the final quarter of the nineteenth century:

introduction 11

For men of this time, “serious literature” meant neither fiction nor poetry in Japanese, but the composition of poetry and prose in classical Chinese. Intellectuals who had received the traditional samurai’s education in the Chinese classics not only esteemed the Confucian modes of thought and expression but looked down on any form of writing in Japanese as being unworthy of a gentleman’s consideration. Such men, even those who by temperament seemed least likely to be moved to compose poetry, felt obliged to display their mastery of Chinese metrics and allusions. Statesmen and generals took pride on being able to compose grammatically accurate and nobly allusive kanshi, as poetry in Chinese was called. No sense of foreignness was felt when writing classical Chinese. In the minds of the educated class of the time, it was no more associated with China than, say, Latin was associated with Italy by the Englishmen who composed Latin verses in the nineteenth century.39

Keene’s comments share Nakano Mitsutoshi’s concern to discover and be sensitive to the literary standards and expectations of the contemporary context. His comparison of Japanese kanshibun to Latin composition in Victorian England is also instructive, but it is an analogy that must be drawn carefully.40 Perhaps the most important difference between Latin and Literary Sinitic is that the latter is fundamentally a written language; as Victor Mair observes, “Latin was both sayable and writable” in medieval Europe, a sharp contrast to Literary Sinitic, which served as a means for the educated to write but not for them to speak.41 While Literary Sinitic functioned as an essentially written form of discourse even within the Chinese context, this inherent feature was if anything more pronounced beyond China’s borders; only a tiny handful of the Japanese individuals in the Edo and Meiji period who devoted themselves to composing poetry in Literary Sinitic had any comprehension of spoken Chinese. As Shirane’s above-cited comments confirm, the move away from the written language of kanbun was a move toward phonocentrism. But there are, to be sure, significant similarities. Mirroring the prevalence of Sinitic composition as a component of instruction in many private and public educational institutions in nineteenth-century Japan, classical verse composition was a fixture of instruction in many English public schools of the same period: contests were held, anthologies were compiled and circulated, and classical texts were often cited in a variety of public settings. As for what to make of this proliferation of classical versification, one historian has memorably suggested that “this great nineteenth-century English tradition . . . is ‘what people did before the crossword puzzle was invented.’ ”42 And here too the case of kanshi is not without a parallel, for poems composed under a variety of truly elaborate and arbitrary constraints were popular. Drawing on Bourdieu, Christopher Stray has pointed out how proficiency in Greek and Latin composition also conferred distinction upon English aristocrats, providing them with a resource to assert their own status and deny such privilege to others. Likewise, kanshibun composition was largely, though by no means exclusively, a male enterprise, and the training in the Chinese classics necessary to write it was, at least until the early nineteenth century, in many ways the preserve of a rarified socioeconomic stratum. It is thus possible to regard Sinitic poems composed by Japanese men as fulfilling a similar social role. One of the aims of this book, however, is to show that kanshibun composition was far more than mere patrician pedantry. For Ryūhoku and many others of his time, composing Sinitic poetry was a vital means of self-expression. Beyond simple lexical diversion

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or intellectual challenge, it provided them with opportunities for literary artistry, intensive self-scrutiny, rich forms of social interaction, engagement in political critiques to which other poetic forms were unsuited, and a host of other purposes. Although the composition of Sinitic verse was part of traditional education for men of Ryūhoku’s generation, many of them did not compose simply out of scholarly obligation. Rather, they pursued it with sincere zeal in part because the act of writing Sinitic poetry enabled them to articulate themselves in reference to the shared cultural heritage that was the foundation of their education. Exchanging Sinitic poems with their peers offered opportunities for dialogue, but even in their own compositions they took part in multifarious forms of interaction with figures from the literary past (and present). The act of writing Sinitic poetry was a means by which they could insinuate themselves into a common textual tradition: a tradition that in many ways structured their worlds.

Plucking Chrysanthemums In the passage quoted above, Keene calls attention to the use of allusion in Sinitic poems composed by Japanese of the time. Allusion was indeed one important feature of classical verse composition, and the technique’s centrality in part explains the decline of compositional practice when the content of education no longer focused on the mastery of the Literary Sinitic canon.43 Yet it is important to note that the deployment of such references was not unidimensional, but offered instead opportunities for complex forms of engagement. Consider the following poem that Ryūhoku composed in 1871, a few years after having lost his position in the shogunate: 秋懷十首録六 [2]

Autumn feelings; ten poems, six recorded [2]



北窓高枕誦陶詩

5

大馬長槍彼一時 病客身邊秋到早 醒人宅裏月來遲 少年感慨老應悔



浮世交情窮始知



忘却從前榮辱事 琴書消日不圍棋

By the north window I prop my pillow and chant Tao’s poems; My great steed and long spear part of times now past. To the sick man’s body, autumn comes quickly; In the sober man’s house, the moon approaches slowly. The sentiments of a young man turn to regret when he gets old; True feelings in this floating world are first known in times of crisis. I forget the triumphs and humiliations of the past; Spending my days with zither and books, waging no battles of go.



In the first couplet, Ryūhoku refers by name to Tao Yuanming (365–427), one of his favorite Chinese poets and a figure to whom he turned repeatedly over the course of his career. By composing this poem, Ryūhoku was joining a rich East Asian tradition in which literary figures through the centuries have declared an affinity with some aspect of the Six Dynasties (220–589) poet, who is without question the best-known Chinese

introduction 13

literary figure of the pre-Tang period. Today Tao Yuanming is thought of primarily as a poet of reclusion, as one who transcended worldly concerns, eschewing public service in the pursuit of an untrammeled life. This was a status he had already attained in the early sixth century, when Zhong Rong wrote in his Shipin (Poetry gradings) that Tao Yuanming was “the lineage-founder of all the eremitic poets from antiquity to the present.”44 At the same time, he is also remembered as a man who was fond of drink, as a celebrant of simple agrarian pleasures, and as a founding figure of the genre of pastoral poetry. Several of these associations are brought together in visual representations of Tao Yuanming such as the one in figure 0.1, from the thirteenth century. In depicting the poet grasping a chrysanthemum and gazing off into the distance, the painting references perhaps the best-known poem in Tao’s series “Twenty Poems on Drinking Wine”: 5

結廬在人境 而無車馬喧 問君何能爾 心遠地自偏 采菊東籬下 悠然見南山 山氣日夕佳 飛鳥相與還 此中有真意 欲辨已忘言

I built my hut beside a traveled road Yet hear no noise of passing carts and horses You would like to know how it is done? With the mind detached, one’s place becomes remote. Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge I catch sight of the distant south hills: The mountain air is lovely as the sun sets And flocks of flying birds return together. In these things is a fundamental truth I would like to tell, but lack the words.45

The chrysanthemum that Tao Yuanming picked from his eastern fence became one of the iconic references both to his person and to his mode of being. In articles tracing the depiction of Tao Yuanming in Chinese art over the centuries, Susan Nelson notes how later painters employed the chrysanthemum as a prop to suggest “Tao-like qualities in a patron or sitter,” an indexical usage she demonstrates with a portrait of the Qing literatus Yuan Mei (1716–98) clutching the flower.46 If visual artists plucked the chrysanthemum from Tao Yuanming’s poem to indicate their subjects’ affinity with the poet, it was also common for literary figures to engage in a more lexical form of plucking: endowing the spaces they occupied with such Tao-like qualities by naming them with words appropriated from his poems. The Qing poet and statesman Huang Zunxian (1848–1905), for example, named the study that he built in 1874 Renjinglu 人境廬 (Hut in the Human Realm), taking three characters from the above poem’s first line. But such borrowing was not a practice confined to China. Tokugawa period painter Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800) took the first two characters of the poem’s fourth line when he named his residence in Kyoto the Shin’enkan 心遠館 (Hall of the Detached Mind). Around the time he wrote the above poem, Ryūhoku had established a new residence for himself and seized the opportunity to name it the Shōkikusō 松菊莊, or “Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage.” As a prose account Ryūhoku wrote at the time explicitly noted, he took the name from a Tao Yuanming text and implicitly drew a connection between his own circumstances and those of Tao Yuanming: a “vassal of a deposed regime.”47 Just as Ryūhoku lost his post in the collapse of the Tokugawa and refused to serve the Meiji government that had toppled it, so too did Tao Yuanming enter reclusion

Fig. 0.1 Liang Kai 梁楷 (act. early 13th c.), Dongli gaoshi tu 東籬高士圖 (Scholar of the eastern fence). Courtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taipei.

introduction 15

not long before the collapse of the Jin dynasty (265–420), a decision that has sometimes been attributed to his sense of loyalty to it and his refusal to serve its successors. Over the course of his life, Ryūhoku would allude to Tao Yuanming in many other ways, but this particular figuration of Tao is the one that dominates the poem quoted above. The references to “crisis” in line 6 and to “triumphs and humiliations” in line 7 imply such a reading, but the martial equipage that the poet consigns to the past in line 3 as well as the battles of go that he no longer wages in line 8 strongly suggest the sort of military conflict that would give rise to dynastic change. In addition to the reference to reading Tao’s poems in line 1, the identification between Ryūhoku and Tao is further evident in the second line’s “northern window,” which alludes to a Tao Yuanming couplet from his time in reclusion: 新葵鬱北牖 嘉穟養南疇

The new hibiscus blooms by the north window Excellent grain grows in the southern field.48

The speaker of Ryūhoku’s poem thus constructs himself as reading Tao’s poems while at the same time embodying Tao’s position in retirement. In the word “autumn” from the third line of Ryūhoku’s poem lies an implication that the autumn of the poet’s life has arrived, but it also matches the season of the same Tao poem, which contains a line noting that “already autumn has come.”49 Likewise, the “zither and books” in Ryūhoku’s eighth line are two iconic items associated with reclusion and with Tao Yuanming specifically, as I discuss in chapter 2. Ryūhoku’s engagement with Tao in this poem is a form of self-fashioning. That he and others, both Japanese and Chinese, would name their residences with allusions to Tao Yuanming demonstrates the latter’s looming presence in East Asian letters and shows also just how widespread the notion was that an appreciation of Tao Yuanming’s poetry says something about a person’s character. Take, for example, the late-eighteenth-century Seiki yohitsu (Superfluous jottings at the Hall of Tranquil Lodging), a treatise on composing Sinitic poetry by the Japanese Neo-Confucian scholar Bitō Jishū (1745–1813). After noting Zhu Xi’s fondness for Tao Yuanming, Jishū declares in blunt terms: “Anyone who does not love Jingjie’s [i.e., Tao Yuanming’s] poetry is invariably a person of vulgar taste.”50 Though innumerable Chinese and Japanese poets have sought to affiliate themselves in one way or another with the figure of Tao Yuanming, the question of what each individual reader saw in his poetry is a different matter. Several recent works by scholars of Chinese literature have approached this issue from a variety of distinct yet complementary perspectives. In her 2005 study of his writings, Xiaofei Tian has illuminated the process by which a certain image of Tao Yuanming came to be constructed. By focusing on manuscript culture and the wide array of textual variants that it produced, Tian shows how these alternative readings, when taken seriously, might conjure entirely different visions of this canonical cultural figure.51 Her careful deconstruction of the subtle feedback loops inherent in the collating and editing process not only recovers possibilities lurking beneath the printed text, but also allows us to see the process by which certain variants are selected or neglected in accord with readerly assumptions and dispositions. Just a few years after Tian’s book, Wendy Swartz produced a detailed study of the reception of Tao Yuanming

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over the broad span of Chinese literary history. Sharing Tian’s aim of unpacking the construction of the poet’s image, Swartz observes that Tao Yuanming’s “ ‘personality’ embodied different virtues and ideals in different periods,” and she argues that Tao Yuanming was a “precious mirror reflecting those who read him and about him.”52 Most recently, Robert Ashmore looks at the question of Tao Yuanming’s reclusion in the context of the philosophical assumptions of the early medieval period. Devoting particularly close attention to scenes of reading in Tao Yuanming’s own poems, Ashmore’s work shows how these moments mirrored later readers’ engagements with Tao Yuanming’s writings, shedding new light on the question of the special kinship subsequent readers have felt for him.53 One point on which all three of these books concur is their recognition of something protean in the figure of Tao Yuanming: a quality that has enabled readers over the centuries to engage with his poetry in strikingly diverse ways. Nineteenth-century Japanese readers such as Ryūhoku approached Tao’s poetry not only at a temporal but also at a cultural and geographical remove, yet they engaged with it in a similarly robust and enthusiastic manner. The collections of Japanese poets from the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods reveal numerous works explicitly framed as inspired by specific Tao Yuanming poems. They emphasize various aspects of his persona, such as his fondness for drink, the pleasure he took in the comforts of his zither, the loyalty he is said to have shown toward the dynasty he served, or the transcendence of the political that he showed in his decision to withdraw from public office. Kondō Tokuzan (1766–1846), a Japanese kanshi poet from Iyo (in Shikoku), engaged with Tao Yuanming to such an extent that the authors of a recent book introducing Tokuzan’s poetry position him as nothing less than “the Tao Yuanming of Iyo.” Yet what they mean by doing so is that Tokuzan found contentment in the pastoral scenery of his rural Shikoku life.54 That Tao Yuanming remained a vital touchstone even for literary figures of later generations is evident in the many poems, both Sinitic and Japanese, that Masaoka Shiki wrote alluding explicitly to Tao Yuanming, such as the following tanka: Enmei no Now finished reading the poems shi o yomi yamite of Tao Yuanming, kiku no ne ni Upon the chrysanthemum root hitori tsuchikau that I have planted alone, hi wa yūbe nari is the evening sun.55

Shiki’s poem enacts one reader’s literal transplantation of Tao’s chrysanthemum from the textual world of the latter’s poetry into both his own lived environment and his own poetic realm. Or consider the use to which Shiki’s close friend Natsume Sōseki (1867– 1916) puts Tao Yuanming’s chrysanthemum in the 1906 novel Kusamakura (The ThreeCornered World): Happily, oriental poets have on occasion gained sufficient insight to enable them to enter the realm of pure poetry. Beneath the Eastern hedge I choose a chrysanthemum, And my gaze wanders slowly to the Southern hills.

introduction 17

Only two lines, but reading them, one is sharply aware of how completely the poet has succeeded in breaking free from this stifling world. There is no girl next door peeping over the fence; nor is there a dear friend living far away across the hills. He is above such things. Having allowed all consideration of advantage and disadvantage, profit and loss to drain from him, he has attained a pure state of mind.56

The early twentieth-century writer and artist who is the narrator of Sōseki’s novel sees in Tao’s couplet about “picking a chrysanthemum” an embodiment of his own spiritual ideal of worldly transcendence. Yet his explanation of the couplet shows that he envisions a pointedly solitary variety of such transcendence: one that echoes Shiki’s usage but departs from the sociability depicted in Tao’s other reclusive poems and even from the implications of this poem’s first line, which locates Tao’s hut in a peopled setting. All of these East Asian literary figures engaged with Tao Yuanming, each of them “plucking a chrysanthemum” to declare some sort of affinity or bond with the Six Dynasties poet. Yet their allusions were anything but univocal; far from a simple oneto-one correspondence, the particular associations that these individuals implied by their gestures varied. Moreover, even in the case of a single poet, the invocations made of Tao Yuanming were diverse. As will become clear in the course of this book, by emphasizing discrete aspects of the Tao Yuanming tradition on different occasions, Ryūhoku could make the recluse poet’s persona function by turns as the epitome of indifference to public affairs or as an emblem for intensely felt political loyalty, as a symbol of resigned retirement but also as an exponent of aggressive intervention. Although Ryūhoku’s invocations of Tao Yuanming were especially multifarious, he found such possibilities in other literary figures from the Literary Sinitic tradition as well, drawing in various ways on Xie An, Du Mu, Du Fu, Li Bo, Bo Juyi, and many more. The striking transformations in Ryūhoku’s use of Tao Yuanming and these other figures over time demonstrate how the Sinitic literary tradition constituted a referential repository to be shaped, shifted, and variously spun to meet the poet’s emerging circumstances and expressive aims.

Formal Features of Kanshi Taking part in this shared tradition through the composition of Sinitic poetry required not only the ability to make use of such allusions, but also to compose texts that conformed to rules of Chinese grammar and prosody. Sometimes kanshi are casually described as “poems written only in Chinese characters,” and, although this description is not exactly inaccurate, it is also profoundly insufficient.57 The exclusive employment of Chinese script cannot be the only criterion to use in identifying kanshi, for poems meeting this definition would include all of the Japanese-language works contained in the Man’yōshū, a collection that was compiled before the advent of kana. Such a scriptbased formulation is distorted and misleading because it overlooks the principal characteristics of kanshi: that they are composed in the written language of Literary Sinitic, that

18 i n t r o d u c t i o n

they observe the formal features of classical Chinese poetry, and that they have an extremely high degree of regional intelligibility. There has been much innovative scholarship in recent years that has attempted to problematize the so-called wakan binary, showing the ways in which the boundaries between Japanese wa and Chinese kan are more permeable than has previously been supposed. Attention to the interpenetration of wa and kan in the content and themes of Japanese literary works is essential and productive, but our understanding will be severely compromised if, in our zeal to deconstruct the wakan dyad, we underestimate or trivialize Japanese kanshi poets’ efforts to write in recognizably Sinitic forms.58 In other words, we must not lose sight of the indisputable fact that a defining principle of kanshi production in Japan (and elsewhere in the Sinosphere) was adherence to the conventions of Sinitic poetry, which can be classified by several formal criteria. One basic distinction is between the often shorter “poems in the modern form,” or jintishi 近體詩 (J. kintaishi), that obey certain rules of rhyme and tonal prosody crystallized early in the Tang dynasty (618–907) and the usually longer “old poems,” or gushi 古詩 (J. koshi).59 The former category is further divided into three main types based on the number of lines: quatrains known as “broken verse,” or jueju 絶句 (J. zekku); “regulated verse” octaves, or lüshi 律詩 (J. risshi); and variants of the latter type with ten lines or more, called pailü 排律 (J. hairitsu).60 Each of these types is in turn subdivided based on the number of graphs in each line. Like his contemporaries, Ryūhoku mainly wrote penta­syllabic and heptasyllabic poems, but composed a few hexasyllabic works too. Ryūhoku’s poem on reading Tao Yuanming in autumn is a heptasyllabic octave (a poem of eight seven-graph lines, each of which usually has a slight semantic break between its fourth and fifth graphs), and the rules of this form require that the poet observe syntactic parallelism in the middle two couplets. To take the first of these as an example, the structure of the sequence of seven graphs in both line 3 and line 4 can be analyzed as follows: adjective, noun (referring to a person), noun (referring to a place), locative, noun (relating to the natural world and the passage of time), verb (of motion), adjective (referring to speed). 3

病 客 身 邊 秋 到 早 Sick man body side/area autumn arrive soon 4 醒 人 宅 裏 月 來 遲 Sober person house inside moon come late

The rules of regulated verse also require that the poet rhyme the poem’s even lines as well as its first line. In Ryūhoku’s poem, the rhyming characters are thus the terminal graphs of these five lines, 詩 (Ch. shi; J. shi), 時 (shi; ji), 遲 (chi; chi), 知 (zhi; chi), and 棋 (qi; ki), all of which are part of the rhyme group 韻目 (Ch. yunmu; J. inmoku) known as 支 (zhi; shi). These rhyme groups were codified on the basis of their pronunciation in Middle Chinese, and the rhyme categories devised in the Tang (somewhat simplified in the Song) became the basis of composition throughout the Sinosphere. Linguistic change over the centuries means that the rhyme may be difficult to discern when the poem is read out in modern Mandarin, but often the rhyme survives in the Sinoxenic pronunciations of the

introduction 19

graphs that are used in present-day Japan. Rhyme is a feature that is fundamental to the composition of Sinitic poetry, and this most basic feature of Chinese prosody is observed by essentially all composers of kanshi. In addition to end-rhyme, another important consideration in the composition of Sinitic verse forms relates to the patterned distribution of level and oblique tones 平仄 (Ch. pingze; J. hyōsoku) within each line and also between adjacent lines in a poem. The guidelines that shape this tonal aspect of jintishi were likewise established during the Tang era, and they ensured that a poem, when recited aloud, has euphonic variation in pitch. Whereas end-rhyme is readily apparent even to a casual observer familiar with modern Japanese who simply considers the Sinoxenic pronunciations (on’yomi) of the terminal graphs, there is little that marks the distinction between level and oblique tones in modern Japanese linguistic experience.61 However, Japanese composers of Sinitic poems nevertheless tended to observe these rules when writing jintishi, recalling the tonal and rhyme categories they had memorized at early stages of their training or relying on rhyme manuals and other reference materials. Such guides were readily available from commercial publishers from the early modern period onward. The degree to which the various rules of level and oblique tone distribution were obeyed varied considerably over time and between individual poets, but the most fundamental principles were widely upheld. To take the above poem as an example, the two cardinal rules of tonal distribution in heptasyllabic regulated verse dictate that the second and fourth characters of any line must be of a different tone and that the second and sixth characters of any line must be of the same tone. A further rule holds that the two lines of a couplet have opposite tones in these second, fourth, and sixth positions. Moreover, between two couplets, the second line of the first couplet and the first line of the second couplet should have opposite tonal values in the second, fourth, and sixth positions. In the case of an octave, an additional rule holds that, between the fourth and fifth lines, the same tonal values should be used in these positions. There are also prosodic faults to be avoided, such as ending any line with three graphs of the same tone or having an isolated level tone (a level tone in between two oblique tones) at the fourth position in any line. These core rules are sufficient to determine the basic tonal structure of a poem. For example, if the second character of the first line is to be level, then the tones of about two-thirds of the other characters in the poem are determined as indicated in the following diagram, where  represents a level tone,  represents an oblique tone, ◎ represents a rhyming character, and ◇ represents a position in which either a level or an oblique tone is permitted: 5

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ◇  ◎ ◇    ◇  ◇  ◎ ◇  ◇  ◇     ◇  ◇    ◎ ◇  ◇    ◇  ◇  ◇  ◎ ◇   ◇   ◇  ◇   ◎

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

◎       ◎              ◎          ◎                  ◎  

20 i n t r o d u c t i o n

The left side of the diagram indicates the general tonal pattern required for heptasyllabic octaves in which the second character of the first line is a level tone; the right side shows the tones of the characters appearing in Ryūhoku’s poem quoted above. As can be seen by comparing the tonal markers, Ryūhoku’s poem accords with all of the requirements outlined above.

Kanshibun: What to Call It? The last decade has seen a great expansion of scholarly interest in this domain of Japanese literary expression. Inasmuch as such Sinitic forms have been solidly reincorporated into the boundaries of Japanese literature, perhaps the day is not far off when terms such as zekku and risshi will be as familiar to students of Japanese literature as words such as tanka, chōka, haiku, and senryū are. Yet, although there is broad commitment among a diverse range of Anglophone scholars to the notion that kanshibun merits serious academic attention, there is still a lack of consensus about one fundamental question: what is kanshibun and what should we call it? Various proposals have been made.62 Many of the earliest scholars to discuss and translate kanshibun in English, such as Burton Watson, Donald Keene, Judith Rabinovitch, and Timothy Bradstock, refer to kanshi as “Chinese poetry.”63 Another prominent scholar of kanshibun, Timothy Wixted, has argued for using the term “Sino-Japanese” to refer to kanshibun by Japanese and for reserving the term “Chinese” to refer to Sinitic works by Chinese individuals.64 Still other scholars have used the term “Chinese-style poetry” for kanshi by Japanese authors while retaining “Chinese poetry” for works by Chinese. In this book, I use “Sinitic poetry” to translate the word kanshi because I believe it provides us with the clearest understanding of what kanshi most fundamentally are and also comes closest to reflecting how the overwhelming majority of Japanese who composed such poems through the centuries understood the enterprise: namely, as a shared practice among the educated throughout the Sinosphere.65 The Japanese term kanshi has never referred to the works of a particular nationality or ethnicity, but has always indicated verses of a particular linguistic form regardless of who composed them. This simple fact is no inconsequential triviality. As noted above, the term kanshi first became widespread in the late nineteenth century, but the term used before it, shi, also made no distinction between Sinitic verses composed by Japanese and those composed by Chinese. We should also bear in mind that the way the terms kanshi and shi are used contrastively today by some Anglophone scholars to distinguish Japanese compositions (kanshi) from Chinese compositions (shi) in fact departs from the way that these terms have been and continue to be used in Japanese, where both terms denote poetic compositions in Literary Sinitic irrespective of the poet’s nationality.66 In other words, whether they are called kanshi or shi, Japanese poetic compositions in Literary Sinitic have always been (and are still today) unmistakably identified by Japanese poets and scholars alike as occupying the same category as other works composed in this written language, whether they are produced by Chinese, Koreans, or others.67 By the same token, when Chinese began to

introduction 21

read, anthologize, and comment on Japanese Sinitic verse in the early Meiji period, they universally referred to the works as shi, without seeing any need at all to invent a separate term and thereby distinguish the Japanese works from shi composed by Chinese. Rather than manufacture a distinction in English where none exists in either Japanese or Chinese, I have elected to follow the longstanding practice by which Japanese and Chinese authors and scholars of what I term Sinitic poetry have used the same term to refer to both poetic works by Japanese and those by Chinese authors. Yet it is worth considering why some researchers have proposed alternative translations of the term. There are at least three reasons that can be given in support of Wixted’s recommendation to use “Sino-Japanese” for compositions by Japanese and to reserve “Chinese” for compositions by ethnic Chinese. First, to call kanshi “Chinese poetry” may risk placing it outside the bounds of Japanese literature, and it may also impute a certain experiential foreignness to the act of composition that a great many Japanese practitioners clearly did not feel. By using the adjective “Sino-Japanese” for works by Japanese poets rather than “Chinese,” the argument goes, the integral place of kanshi in the discipline of Japanese literary study can be affirmed. Wixted’s pioneering work has directed our attention to the tremendous yet often overlooked significance of kanshibun in Japanese literary history. Yet I would contend that we can fully embrace his crucial larger point that kanshibun is an inseparable part of Japanese literature without needing to claim that kanshibun by Japanese individuals is written in something other than Literary Sinitic. A second reason advanced by some supporters of the term “Sino-Japanese” is that it recognizes the distinctive ways in which Sinitic literature took shape in Japanese literary history. Calling for scholars to acknowledge “the independence of Japanese kanshibun from Chinese literature,” Wiebke Denecke has presented an eloquent argument against what she sees as a scholarly tendency to read Japanese kanshibun solely in light of Chinese standards or to measure its progress merely by its degree of conformity to analogous Chinese literary developments. When such “evolutionist paradigms of literary history” are employed, Denecke warns, “Chinese-language literature in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan is seen as eclectic and ‘imitative’ ”: she seeks to counter this view by emphasizing the active role that Japanese poets played in negotiating with and appropriating from Chi­ nese canonical texts.68 As other scholars have pointed out, the types of poetry that became widespread occasionally varied between Japan and China, and the particular poets that proved influential were sometimes different as well. When applied to a particular time period, Denecke’s recommendation to take into account the specific circumstances under which Sinitic poetry grew in Japan is thus eminently sensible. Yet, when we look at the full span of kanshibun in Japan, it is undeniable that Japanese poets were perpetually stimulated by the influx of new styles of poetry and new theories of literature imported from the continent—a factor Ivo Smits adduces as a major reason for the discontinuous history of Japanese kanshibun and the absence of a “consciously indigenous tradition.”69 Denecke’s declaration of independence separating Japanese kanshibun from Chinese literary history can certainly help to shed important light on synchronic discontinuities between Japanese and Chinese kanshibun, yet denying the role that Chinese literature played (in Smits’s phrase) as “a continuous frame of reference” for Japanese poets risks obscuring the diachronic discontinuities that exist within Japanese kanshibun. Moreover,

22 i n t r o d u c t i o n

as her detailed elucidation of the ways in which Nara and Heian period poets used “passages from Chinese classics as libretti to choreograph court spectacles through their kanshi poetry” or how they “were creative in appropriating Chinese culture performatively by reenacting significant gestures in particular from Chinese classical texts, and representing this reenactment in their compositions” shows, Denecke would surely agree that Chinese literature functioned as the dominant frame of reference for these Japanese poets, even though their “reenactments” may have deviated in their particularities from Chinese practice or precedent.70 If the Japanese poets in question had, as Denecke argues, made a point of eliding Japanese references and achieving “the complete naturalization of Chinese temporal narratives,” then this seems to me all the more reason to use the term “Sinitic,” not “Sino-Japanese,” to refer to the poetry they wrote in Literary Sinitic. As Denecke and others have convincingly argued, it is essential to examine the local con­text in which Sinitic poetry took shape in Japan and to consider the specific ways in which it developed, but I think we can do that best by seeing Japanese Sinitic poetry as one case among several in the Sinosphere, rather than by positing “Sino-Japanese” as an altogether separate category of literary expression. If Japanese composers of Sinitic verse truly saw themselves as engaging in some sort of “independent” enterprise, one would expect that at least some of them would instruct their aspiring disciples to devote themselves above all to studying the exemplary works of this supposedly separate domestic tradition. Yet, although the particular models held in highest regard by theorists and commentators of different eras varied widely, the Sinitic verses of Japanese poets never formed more than a supplement to the Chinese canon, which remained unquestionably central in all recommended curricula. A third motivation for using the term “Sino-Japanese” relates to the perceived quality of kanshibun composed by Japanese authors. Wixted draws a parallel with the high level of Latin proficiency among the classically educated Westerners of earlier times and observes, “Of course, the Sino-Japanese written by Japanese, like the Latin written by late-medieval, Renaissance, and even later practitioners, often shows the influence of the writer’s vernacular: hence, the insistence on its being called Sino-Japanese.” As Peter Kornicki has pointed out, however, Wixted is inconsistent in insisting on “Sino-Japanese,” on the one hand, while, on the other, using simply “Latin” rather than “Franco-Latin” or “Anglo-Latin” or “Czech-Latin.”71 Although there is no question that Wixted is right when he identifies occasional elements in Japanese kanshi expression that are unusual or ungrammatical, I think these variations are best understood as occasional departures from dominant norms, whether unconscious or conscious, rather than as a feature that defines the practice of Sinitic versification by Japanese individuals. In a more recent article, Wixted reiterates his call for the term “Sino-Japanese,” citing the specific example of a Mori Ōgai poem with several nonstandard usages that leads him to conclude, “This underscores the argument that Sino-Japanese (i.e., kanshi and kanbun written by Japanese) is another kind of Japanese, an alternative modality of expression, in the language broadly defined.”72 Wixted is absolutely correct in pointing out the “linguistic play” of Ōgai writing 浦山敷, which is nonsense in Literary Sinitic but can be read urayamashiku in Japanese. Yet it is also imperative to note that such consciously comic usages are anything but representative of Ōgai’s own work, let alone Japanese kanshi in general. The

introduction 23

source text from which Wixted cites this Ōgai poem clearly identifies it as a kyōshi, or “crazy poem,” rather than an orthodox kanshi.73 The poem’s manifest outrageousness even prompted Iritani Sensuke to take it up in a brief chapter on Ōgai’s poetry, writing: “As is obvious from a cursory read of this poem, it is in the form of a kyōshi” and thus distinct from “the majority of Ōgai’s poems,” which were “composed in seriousness.”74 The humor that Ōgai intended in fact requires readers to remain cognizant of such distinctions between proper usage and deliberate deviations from it. The willful absurdity ubiquitous in kyōshi should not be confused with inadvertent infelicities occasionally found in proper kanshi.75 For the latter case, it is important to recognize the wisdom of Wixted’s general observation that traces of Japanese diction and syntax can sometimes be glimpsed in Japanese kanshi. Although Japanese kanshi poets have shown a range of responses to such grammatical, tonal, and thematic departures from Chinese norms, most have sought to write in basic conformity with what they understood these norms to be.76 Ogyū Sorai’s fulminations against washū are well known, but even his rival Arai Hakuseki, who dismissed Sorai’s interest in learning spoken Chinese as a misguided affectation, agreed with him that Japanese Sinitic poets should strive for regional intelligibility. As Hakuseki wrote in a letter, “One should seek to write in such a way as to be readily comprehensible to Chi­ nese [J. Tōjin],” noting that, since “poetry and prose are not in their essence something of this country, it is only possible to write them by studying [works written by Chinese].”77 Whatever differences Japanese kanshi poets showed in terms of how problematic they regarded deviations from Sinitic norms, the underlying sense that Japanese Sinitic poets were taking part in a broader regional practice was foundational. In addition to “Sino-Japanese poems,” another English term for kanshi has been proposed by Christopher Seeley in A History of Writing in Japan: “Chinese style poems.”78 Seeley adopts an “agnostic” approach, observing that “it is not always possible to be certain” which language, Chinese or Japanese, the writer intended to represent. Yet, in his review of the book, Roy Miller took Seeley to task for using this term to describe the poems gathered in the oldest Japanese kanshi collection, the mid-eighth-century Kaifūsō. Observing that European and American universities sometimes feature ceremonial addresses in Latin or Greek, Miller argues: “They may have been in bad Latin or good Latin, bad Greek or good Greek. But they were in those LANGUAGES; and a language is not a ‘style.’ ”79 Miller’s objection is logical, but it is also true that his comparison to Latin oratory overlooks the fact that Literary Sinitic was fundamentally a written language. The ways in which it was vocalized varied greatly. In the Japanese case, a Literary Sinitic text could be read aloud in an approximation of Chinese pronunciation, or, in those comparatively rare cases when the Japanese reciter had proficiency in spoken Chinese, the text could be read in Chinese pronunciation. But more commonly it would be vocalized using the kundoku reading method, by which a Literary Sinitic text is construed through Japanese syntax and grammar.80 The prevalence of kundoku in Japanese oral recitation of Sinitic verse is another factor that some raise in discussing the appropriate English equivalent for the term kanshi.81 The practice thus deserves our attention. Early on in their encounters with Chinese texts, those on the peripheries of Chinese civilization developed a host of technologies for making a given Literary Sinitic text intelligible in the local languages; though sometimes

24 i n t r o d u c t i o n

assumed to be a unique Japanese approach to reading Literary Sinitic texts, recent research has shown that a variety of strategies similar to kundoku can be found in several other linguistic communities within the Sinosphere.82 The kundoku process produces forms of highly Sinified Japanese, a kind of translationese that is distinct from mainstream Japanese and that may well not be readily intelligible to a listener who does not have access to the written text. In this book, I use the term “Sino-Japanese” for the Sinified Japanese renditions that kundoku produces and not, as Wixted has proposed, for kanbun texts by Japanese authors that retain their intelligibility as literary Sinitic to individuals who know no Japanese.83 One useful way to think about the kundoku reading method is to look at an application of the methodology to reading English. In 1871, Seki Tokudō, an associate of Ryūhoku’s and the younger brother of one of his close friends and literary collaborators, Seki Sekkō 關雪江 (1827–77), produced a work titled Eiri Eigaku mōgyū (Illustrated primer of English study), a translation of an English reader (fig. 0.2). Seki’s textbook reproduces sentences from the English reader with three levels of glossing. Above each English word, he provides an approximation of the English pronunciation using kata­ kana. In the first example, “It is my cat” is rendered Itto isu muai katto: Itto isu muai katto It is my cat sore wa aru ware no nekode 4 2 3 1 muai katto on e matto My cat on a mat. ware no neko ue no shikimono no 4 2 1 3 isu jie katto Is the cat aru ka neko wa 3 1

fatto fat? koete

2

Beneath each English word, he gives a Japanese semantic gloss for the word, ignoring both definite and indefinite articles. Like Literary Sinitic, English syntax is subject-verbobject and thus requires syntactic rearrangement to conform to Japanese syntax; Seki thus provides circled numerals to indicate the sequence by which the one-to-one Japanese equivalents can be rendered into an intelligible Japanese sentence, such as “Sore wa ware no neko de aru.” Likewise, “My cat on a mat” can be rearranged to “Shikimono no ue no ware no neko” and “Is the cat fat?” to “Neko wa koete aru ka.” This approach to learning English grew out of the efforts of Japanese scholars in the Edo period to apply the kanbun kundoku reading practice to the study of European languages including Latin, Portuguese, and Dutch. When English language study became widespread in the early Meiji period, word-for-word kundoku-inspired direct translation methods as in Seki’s text proliferated, showing the dominance of the kundoku approach in reading and translating foreign languages.84

introduction 25

Fig. 0.2 Seki Tokudō, Eiri Eigaku mōgyū, 1871. Courtesy of the National Diet Library, Tokyo.

In his recent study of Japanese writing, David Lurie situates logography as the central mode of Japanese inscriptive practice, seeing kundoku as a method for both reading and writing logographic texts. Lurie consistently uses the term “Chinese-style” rather than “Chinese” in reference to kanshibun works. In contrast to Wixted’s, Lurie’s focus is not on the degree to which Sinitic inscriptions by Japanese individuals do or do not deviate from orthodox standards of Literary Sinitic writing. Instead, he observes that, “regardless of how thoroughly a text might conform to literary Chinese style and usage, it could potentially be read in Japanese (or Korean) rather than Chinese.”85 One of Lurie’s goals is to overturn what he calls the “bilingual fallacy,” and he argues strongly against the notion that kanbun or kanshi texts are written “in Chinese.” If our focus is on reading practices and performance traditions, it only makes sense to conclude that these texts are not exclusively “in [literary] Chinese,” for Lurie’s observation that any Literary Sinitic text could be approached through the kundoku methodology is indisputable. Yet, if in rejecting the notion that kanshi and kanbun are written “in [literary] Chinese,” he is instead arguing that they should be understood as having been composed in some form of Japanese that is then perfunctorily rearranged so as to conform graphically to regional

26 i n t r o d u c t i o n

standards, then I have questions about the utility of such a framework for understanding the composition of kanshibun texts, especially poetic texts. At one point, Lurie compares kanshibun composition to spelling in European languages: “Just as writers of English or French endure long years of training, and continually consult reference works (or computer programs) to maintain elaborate spelling distinctions that are inaudible when texts are vocalized, Japanese authors writing ‘in Japanese’ were—at least in principle—capable of creating logographic writings elaborately arranged in accord with literary Chinese ordering and usage.”86 There is an assumption here that the Japanese author of a kanshibun text is starting from Japanese and then mechanically rearranging it into Literary Sinitic. As I discussed above with regard to Ryūhoku’s octave on reading Tao Yuanming, the Japanese composer of kanshi attended to a variety of features apparent only in the text as a Chinese text. Consideration of the poem’s meter, rhyme, and tonal features were clearly intimately involved at every stage of its composition, influencing its very content. It is virtually inconceivable that Ryūhoku’s poem was conceived solely as Japanese and was then simply rearranged to accord with Chinese graphic standards in the manner of running spell-check. Lurie makes a crucial observation about kundoku when he notes that it is interlingual and that the same text could be read in two languages.87 As is clear from the fact that he does not discuss a single Sinitic verse in his study, Lurie’s focus is not on kanshi, yet in one of the text’s few passing references to Sinitic poetry composed by Japanese poets, he notes: “Vocal rendition was one of the principal means of appreciating Chinesestyle poetry (probably in ondoku to preserve the rhymes and syllable counts of the Chinese literary forms, but very likely accompanied by kundoku at times).”88 Although kundoku was one means of reciting Chinese poems, as Lurie recognizes here, the only way to appreciate the rhythmic, tonal, and metrical features of Sinitic verse, which were so obviously important to Japanese poets when they composed their works, is through reference to the Sinitic text as a Sinitic text. Though “My cat on a mat. Is the cat fat?” may not seem a rewarding target of literary analysis, it is fair to say that two obvious features of it as English are its rhyme and its rhythm. Even one not fluent in spoken English who recites this text in the manner of Japanese ondoku as “Muai katto on e matto. Isu jie katto fatto” can perceive these features. To insist, however, on viewing the script merely as an elaborate means to deliver a Japanese meaning—“Shikimono no ue no ware no neko. Neko wa koete aru ka”—renders invisible features of the text that obviously guided its composition and offers little insight in return. If “cat” and “mat” are conceived of as just packages for the Japanese words neko and shikimono no, what principle accounts for the Japanese word that follows them as a sentence terminus being “koete” (i.e., “fat”)? It required a substantial amount of effort on the part of the kanshi poet to ensure that a verse matched the rules of rhyme and tonal distribution. Both composers and readers of Japanese kanshi in the nineteenth century were aware of these rules and sensitive to them; they formed part of the rubric through which the poems were composed and read. Yet Literary Sinitic is fundamentally a written language, one that esteems concision and tends toward abbreviated or compressed forms of expression. In approaching these texts, we must resist the phonocentric assumption that orality is always primary and that some specific bit of speech lurks behind each and every tersely written Literary

introduction 27

Sinitic phrase as its primary cause.89 When such written texts are vocalized, the manner of articulation varies widely. Consider Ryūhoku’s octave: 北窓高枕誦陶詩 Hokusō ni makura o takaku shite Tōshi o shōsu Hokusō ni makura o takaku shite Tōshi o shōsu Hokusō makura o takau shite Tōshi o shōsu 大馬長槍彼一時 Taiba chōsō kare mo ittoki Taiba chōsō kare mo ittoki nari Taiba chōsō kare ittoki 病客身邊秋到早 Byōkaku no shinpen aki no itaru koto hayaku Byōkaku shinpen aki itaru koto hayaku Byōkaku shinpen aki itaru hayaku 醒人宅裏月來遲 Seijin takuri tsuki no kitaru koto ososhi Seijin takuri tsuki kitaru koto ososhi Seijin takuri tsuki kitaru ososhi 少年感慨老應悔 5 Shōnen no kangai oite masa ni kuyuru narubeshi Shōnen no kangai wa oite masa ni kuyu beshi Shōnen no kangai oite masa ni kuyu beshi 浮世交情窮始知 Fusei no kōjō kyūshite hajimete shiru Fusei no kōjō wa kiwamarite hajimete shiru Fusei no kōjō kyūshite hajimete shiru 忘却從前榮辱事 Bōkyaku su jūzen eijoku no koto Jūzen eijoku no koto o bōkyaku shi Bōkyaku su jūzen eijoku no koto 琴書消日不圍棋 Kinsho ni hi o keshite ki o kakomazu Kinsho ni hi o keshi ki o kakomazu. Kinsho hi o keshite ki o kakomazu.90

I have given here three readings of each line from three modern editions. As can easily be seen, there is not a single line in the poem for which all three scholars agree on the reading; there are only three lines in the poem on which any two of them agree. Consider the first two readings for each line. These readings were produced by two eminent scholars (Hino Tatsuo and Ōtani Masao), both of whom were educated at and went on to teach at the same university (Kyoto University) and both of whom were engaged by the same publisher (Iwanami Shoten), to produce kundoku readings of this poem for annotated editions that appeared less than fifteen years apart (in 1990 and 2004). Nevertheless, there are differences in their renderings. Whereas Ōtani adds a copular nari formation to line 2, he takes a similar structure away from line 5; Ōtani prefers the absence of genitive no markers in lines 3 and 4 but adds a topic marker wa to lines 5 and 6. Ōtani also chooses to read a character with its Japanese as opposed to Sinitic reading in line 6. The greatest variation is in the reading of line 6, which differs on whether the verb “forget” is allowed to remain at the beginning (which produces, from the Japanese perspective at least, the effect of anastrophe) or is instead relocated to the end of the sentence (which is more in accord with Japanese syntax). These differences are minor to be sure, but it is also worth remembering that, of the eight lines of the poem, only one has been given an identical reading by these two scholars. There is occasionally an assumption that kundoku is a

28 i n t r o d u c t i o n

mechanical process, but styles of reading have evolved significantly over time.91 Fundamentally, kundoku is a form of translation, and over the centuries Sinological scholars in Japan have advocated a full range of approaches, from the highly target-oriented (which privilege the intelligibility of the resulting kundokubun reading as Japanese) to the highly source-oriented (which sacrifice naturalness as Japanese in order to preserve features of the original Literary Sinitic text). Even though largely standardized in Japan’s modern educational curriculum, a substantial degree of stylistic variation persists not only in the readings of particular structures, but in broader terms concerning whether Sinitic or Japanese readings are prioritized, the extent to which supplementary Japanese particles are introduced, and other factors. Moreover, the essentially interpretive nature of the act of reading through the kundoku approach should not be forgotten. Rather than posit any of these Japanese kundoku renditions as the underlying “original text,” it seems reasonable to take as our primary object of analysis the one text that is constant and actually written by the poet rather than performed or conjectured by later readers: the Chinese graphs that comprise the Literary Sinitic poem.

A Family of Scholars Ryūhoku was born in Edo on the sixteenth day of the second month of Tenpō 8, or March 22, 1837, by the Western calendar. The day of his birth corresponded to the first of sixty days in the repeating sexagenary cycle, an auspicious position that was recognized in two of the names by which he was known as an infant and later as a young man: Kinemaro 甲子麻呂 and Kinetarō 甲子太郎.92 Like many men of the time, Ryūhoku adopted a variety of different names in the course of his life, but, in the interest of simplicity, I use the sobriquet “Ryūhoku” throughout this book, even in reference to Narushima as a young man, when strictly speaking “Ryūhoku” is anachronistic.93 The Narushima family records list Ryūhoku as the third son of Narushima Yoshimatsu (Kadō, 1802–53), but it seems that he was in fact adopted. It was only as an adult that Ryūhoku learned the circumstances of his birth: that his biological father was a shogunal retainer named Matsu­ moto Jiemon and that he had been adopted while still a baby. Narushima Kadō’s two biological sons had died in infancy, leaving the Narushima family in need of a male heir to carry on the household and eventually succeed to the hereditary position of oku­ jusha, or “interior Confucian scholar,” the duties of which included tutoring the Tokugawa shoguns in the Chinese classics. At the time, familiarity with the Chinese canon not only was identified with literacy itself, but was furthermore regarded as forming the core of essential knowledge for men of the samurai class. Inasmuch as the Confucian tradition supplied the vocabulary and principles used to justify the social structure and the Toku­ gawa’s stewardship of the state, the office of okujusha was a prestigious one. Shortly after his birth, Ryūhoku was brought to the Narushima’s official residence along the banks of the Sumida River in Asakusa, where he was adopted into the household (fig. 0.3).94 From his infancy, he was brought up to think of himself as Kadō’s biological son and eventual successor to this family tradition.95

Fig. 0.3 Map of the Sumida River and environs: 1. Eitai (Eternal) Bridge; 2. Edo Castle; 3. Nihon (Japan) Bridge; 4. Shin’ō (New Great) Bridge; 5. Ryōgoku (Two States) Bridge; 6. Yanagi (Willow) Bridge; 7. Yanagiwara; 8. Shōheizaka Gakumonjo; 9. Shitaya district near Izumibashi-dōri; 10. Asakusa Onmaya-gashi; 11. Shinobazu Pond; 12. Azuma (Eastern) Bridge; 13. Kan’eiji Temple; 14. Sensōji Temple; 15. Suzaku-mura (and Mimeguri); 16. Mount Matsuchi; 17. Chōmeiji (and Mokuboji); 18. Yoshiwara. Modified from a map provided by Timon Screech.

30 i n t r o d u c t i o n

As the family’s eighth patriarch, Ryūhoku inherited a tradition of scholarship and official service that spanned the entire Tokugawa period. The family traced its origins to Narushima village in the province of Kai (modern Yamanashi), the natal village of their ancestor Nobusato, a warrior who had served the powerful sixteenth-century daimyo Takeda Shingen. It was Nobusato’s son, Nobutsugu (1591–1660), however, whom Naru­ shima family records designate the house’s founding patriarch, for it was he who had ventured to Edo to serve the newly established Tokugawa shogunate as a low-ranking castle official, or omote-bōzu.96 Service to the Tokugawa was integral to the family’s sense of identity, but the nature of this service changed dramatically with the third Narushima patriarch, Nobuyuki (1689–1760). Born in the northeast province of Mutsu, Nobuyuki came to Edo as a young man and was adopted into the Narushima family, whose headship he assumed in 1705.97 Nobuyuki served initially as an omote-bōzu like his adoptive father, but his expertise in both Japanese and Chinese learning quickly caught the attention of the eighth shogun, Yoshimune (1684–1751), who occasionally engaged him to lecture on texts, to take part in exchanges of Sinitic poetry with emissaries from the Kingdom of the Ryukyus, and to interpret documents. With Yoshimune, the shogunate came to focus its attention on civil administration rather than military readiness, and his reign was characterized by renewed support for scholarly endeavors. One of the reforms Yoshimune introduced was the formalization of the position of okujusha, a role that Nobuyuki would assume.98 Among the rewards that the shogun bestowed upon Nobuyuki for his efforts were editions of the core of the Chinese canon: the thirteen classics of Confucian learning and the twenty-one dynastic histories.99 Moreover, in recognition of Nobuyuki’s deep erudition in Japanese subjects and skill at Japanese poetic composition, he was also called on to compile treatises about the history of certain Japanese court practices and to host members of the Reizei house on their visit to Edo in 1740.100 From Nobuyuki’s time onward, the subsequent generations of Narushima would all serve the shogun in a scholarly capacity: overseeing official libraries and acting as instructors, chroniclers, and advisors to the shogun. In 1745, Nobuyuki was ordered to serve as tutor to the son of the ninth shogun, Ieshige (1712–61); similarly, Nobuyuki’s son, Kazusada, and his grandson, Katsuo, both served as councilors to the tenth shogun, Ieharu (1737–86), and likewise both provided instruction in reading to the eleventh shogun, Ienari (1773–1841). These various roles were continued by the subsequent heads of the Narushima family down to Ryūhoku’s generation, each of whom was in turn appointed okujusha (see table 0.1). In addition to their instructional service, the Narushima family also played an important role in the compilation of official historical records. Whereas earlier generations had been rewarded monetarily or with exquisitely wrought gifts for preparing chronicles of shogunal pilgrimages and other specific events, during Motonao’s time, the historiographical role of the Narushima family became even more pronounced. In 1809, Motonao was ordered to oversee the editing of the Tokugawa jikki, a massive annalistic chronicle of the regime from its founding onward. This endeavor to compile a history spanning more than two centuries would occupy Motonao for the next several decades, and, from the project’s inception, the Narushima family’s official residence in Asakusa was designated as the site where the work of editing was to take place.101 In 1837, Motonao’s

introduction 31

Table 0.1 Successive heads of the Narushima family Common name

Name

Dates

Style

1

Dōsetsu 道雪

Nobutsugu 信次

b. 1591 d. 09.1660

2

Dōsetsu II 二代道雪

Nobuyoshi 信好

b.1658 d. 09.10.1715

3

Dōchiku 道筑

Nobuyuki 信遍 Hōkei 鳳卿

b. 01.15.1689 d. 09.19.1760

Kinkō 錦江

4

Tadahachirō 忠八郎

Kazusada 和鼎

b. 1720 d. 05.05.1808

Ryōshū 龍洲

5

Senzō 仙蔵

Katsuo 勝雄 (Mineo 峰雄)

b. 1748 d. 07.19.1815

Kōzan 衡山

6

Kuninosuke 邦之助 Kuninojō 邦之丞

Motonao 司直

b. 02.15.1778 d. i08.02.1862

Tōgaku 東岳

7

Kannosuke 桓之助

Yoshimatsu 良譲

b. 1802 d. 11.11.1853

Kadō 稼堂 Chikuzan 筑山

8

Kinetarō 甲子太郎

Korehiro 惟弘 (Hiro 弘)

b. 02.16.1837 d. 11.30.1884

Kakudō 確堂 Ryūhoku 柳北

Source:  Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 3–24. Some of the information presented here differs slightly from Ōshima’s, reflecting corrections identified by Inui 2003 and Kubota 2000. Sixth patriarch Motonao died during the intercalary month, but his death would be commemorated on 08.13 in subsequent years, reflecting the annual eleven-day discrepancy between the solar and lunar calendars. The inscriptions on the Narushima family graves in Zōshigaya give death dates differing by a few days for Kazusada and Katsuo; see Isogaya 1935, 8:1275–83; and Isogaya 1943:39–40. Ryūhoku’s name 弘 may also be pronounced Hiroshi or Hiromu.

adopted son Kadō was charged with the editing of a separate chronicle, the Nochikagami, a similarly ambitious history of the Ashikaga shogunate. Even after the initial submission of the completed text in 1843, many years of work finalizing and supplementing it remained: tasks that would engage Motonao, Kadō, and Ryūhoku alike. Ryūhoku’s earliest childhood memories are of a home where the editing of these official shogunal chronicles was taking place. In accordance with the traditional prestige of Chinese learning in Tokugawa Japan, Ryūhoku’s father and grandfather oversaw his training in the Chinese classics and his studies of Sinitic poetry. A preface Ryūhoku wrote much later in life for the posthumously published manuscript of Shinmi Masamichi (1791–1848) offers a glimpse of Ryūhoku’s childhood and the context in which he acquired his competence in Literary Sinitic. After explaining that Masamichi, who used the literary style Bōzan, was a shogunal vassal, Ryūhoku writes: As a young man, Mr. Bōzan studied under the guidance of my grandfather. My father was also honored to make Mr. Bōzan’s acquaintance. The two of them were constantly working together to refine and polish their skills in writing. When I was a child, I would occasionally overhear my grandfather ask my father, “I wonder if Shinmi isn’t the one these days who is most distinguished in both erudition and virtue.” At the time, I still lacked discernment, but

32 i n t r o d u c t i o n

Fig. 0.4 Poems exchanged between Narushima Kinemaro and Shinmi Bōzan. Ryūhoku’s poem, at left (one character lower), is presented as an appendix to Bōzan’s response, at right. Shinmi Masamichi, Bōzan isō. Courtesy of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley.

I do remember hearing this. When I turned nine years old, I went to meet Mr. Bōzan at Kayama. On New Year’s Day of the following year, I composed my first Sinitic poem. Mr. Bōzan praised it enthusiastically and honored me by presenting me with a composition that matched its rhymes.102

Ryūhoku’s original poem and Bōzan’s response are both contained in the latter’s posthumous collection of verse (fig. 0.4). Scholars have typically identified another poem that Ryūhoku wrote, supposedly at the age of sixteen, as his earliest extant Sinitic poem. As I discuss in chapter 4, the dating of this latter poem is off by two decades, but the poem he sent to Bōzan at the age of nine, previously unknown to scholars, is his earliest extant work:

丙午元旦

雙親膝下拜春光 隨例屠蘇先捧觴 堪愛小園風雪裏 穉梅已放一枝香

New Year’s Day in the forty-third year of the cycle [1846] At my parents’ side, I welcome spring’s dawn; Following custom, we first offer cups of spiced wine. How lovely in the little garden, amid wind and snow, A tender plum in bloom, the whole branch fragrant.

introduction 33

Narushima Kinemaro, ten years old, composed his very first poem to commemorate the beginning of the New Year. Having been shown it, I composed this following his rhymes. 成島甲子麻呂十歳初賦元旦試毫詩見眎因次其韻 萬戸春回對旭光 一番梅影促吟觴 郵筒遙寄試毫賦 驚看神童風藻香

Spring returns to the myriad houses, as we face the dawn; The first plum urges us to drink and compose poems. From far away comes a first-of-year composition by post; With a start I observe the fragrant words of this prodigy!103

The practice to which Bōzan refers here, ciyun (J. jiin), involves reproducing the rhyme characters of another’s poem; here, Bōzan matches the graphs ending lines 1, 2, and 4. A longstanding practice throughout the Sinosphere, rhyme matching was one of the many ways in which producers of Sinitic poetry engaged each other socially.104 In diplomatic con­texts, such as when Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) exchanged matched-rhyme poems with visitors from Parhae in the mid-ninth century, the act might affirm a spirit of goodwill or a sense of cultural camaraderie; in the banquets held by early Heian emperors, vassals might express their fidelity to the sovereign by composing poems duplicating the rhyme graphs in one of his compositions. In less official settings, the act of matching another’s rhymes generally served to express feelings of kinship or affinity with an individual or a text, but here we see how it functions almost as a rite of initiation for the nine-year-old Ryūhoku into a world of interaction mediated by Sinitic poetry. From the intimate sentiments expressed in Ryūhoku’s recollection thirty-four years later, one might assume that he had given the poem to Bōzan in person. Yet the reference in Bōzan’s poem to the arrival of Ryūhoku’s poem by post serves as a reminder that Literary Sinitic is fundamentally a written language and confirms that the textually mediated nature of interaction in it by no means compromised its expressive and affective potential.105 Aside from the poem quoted above and a few examples of childhood waka compositions, Ryūhoku’s earliest extant writings are from Kaei 7 (1854), a pivotal year in his life. His father Kadō had died the previous year, leaving the eighteen-year-old Ryūhoku to assume headship of the Narushima family and also to commence his apprenticeship as a sho­ gunal tutor. Chapter 1, “Book and Sword,” focuses on this year in which Ryūhoku came of age as a poet and entered the shogun’s service. Using the diary and poetry journals that he began to keep at the time, I show how Ryūhoku wrestled with the tensions between two forms of service to the shogunate: the scholarly service that it was his family’s place to provide as historians and tutors, on the one hand, and the military valor that Ryūhoku yearned for, on the other. The issue of Japan’s fate in the face of a foreign threat was an important focus of Ryūhoku’s attention in this year when Matthew Perry made his second visit to Japan, forcing the shogunate to enter into negotiations for a commercial treaty with the United States. Ryūhoku’s poems demonstrate his intense interest in the crisis and also show his spirited rejection of Perry and the civilization he represented. Yet, they also reveal the doubts Ryūhoku was beginning to have about his own place in the shogun’s administration. In addition to his tutorial apprenticeship, Ryūhoku had

34 i n t r o d u c t i o n

taken over responsibility for a poetry gathering that met monthly at his residence. Using his own poetry manuscripts and those of his literary partners that are preserved in the archives of Japan’s National Diet Library, I reconstruct their exchanges and consider what revisions to the manuscripts can tell us about the aesthetic aims and evaluative criteria of Sinitic poetry composition in Japan at the time. While primarily defining himself as a shijin 士人, or scholar-official, like many of his contemporaries, Ryūhoku also used his poetry to explore the realm of the bunjin, 文人, or literatus. Chapter 2, “Book and Zither,” examines these complementary worlds and how Ryūhoku found his footing between them in the mid-1850s. Whereas the former category emphasized the scholar-official as civil servant and master of the Confucian canon, the latter category emphasized his skill in poetic and prose composition and encouraged the pursuit of literary expression for its own sake. The chapter compares two poetry composition circles in which Ryūhoku took part. The first was convened by the Hayashi family of Confucian scholars and oriented toward the shijin realm. The second was presided over by Ryūhoku himself, attended by his neighbors in the Shitaya district of Edo, and oriented toward the bunjin realm. I discuss the different sorts of poetic topics explored in each, focusing in particular on Ryūhoku’s interest in the theme of reclusion, especially in connection with Tao Yuanming, and his efforts to seek out new domains of Sinitic poetic expression in his immediate environment and inspired by Japanese literature and history. In chapter 3, “Discovering New Worlds,” I consider two developments that took place in the late 1850s and early 1860s: Ryūhoku’s introduction to the pleasure quarters of Yanagibashi and the friendship that he developed with Japanese scholars of Western learning. In part through the influence of his in-laws and relatives, Ryūhoku began to make frequent leisure excursions to the Yanagibashi district in 1857. He became intimate with several geisha there, one of whom he eventually married. Yanagibashi would also form the subject of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, a text Ryūhoku wrote in Literary Sinitic to describe the quarter’s denizens and its unique customs while at the same time soberly and satirically revealing its underside. Inspired by both Chinese and Japanese Sinitic texts, Ryūhoku created an amusing disconnect between form and content, willfully misappropriating phrases from the canonical texts it was his duty to teach. In con­ trast to the orthodox composition that was the mainstream of his literary practice, he introduced various elements of stylistic hybridity and linguistic juxtaposition into this text. Just as he was completing it, Ryūhoku became friendly with a new circle of individuals: scholars of Western subjects, many of whom he met in the course of his leisure trips to Yanagibashi. Whereas Ryūhoku’s earlier rejection of Western learning had been adamant, he experienced a transformation in the early 1860s and now sought to pursue Western study himself. During this time, Ryūhoku was becoming increasingly prominent in Edo’s literary circles and also as a “court poet” for the Tokugawa shogunate. Yet his frustrations with his official position festered, and, in 1863, something happened that caused him to be dismissed from his post and ordered confined to his home. Ryūhoku was evasive about what had prompted his punishment, but among the reasons he suggested as the cause were two that were connected to these newly discovered worlds: his dalliances in Yanagibashi and his advocacy of Western study.

introduction 35

In chapter 4, “Withdrawal and Resurgence,” I address the years that Ryūhoku spent confined to his home, beginning with a consideration of what may have led to his dismissal. During his time in confinement, Ryūhoku spent a great deal of time with Western scholars including Katsuragawa Hoshū, Yanagawa Shunsan, and others. I present a rereading of evidence concerning Ryūhoku’s interaction with these figures and argue that the time Ryūhoku spent with them should not be seen simply as a period of total disengagement. In 1865, Ryūhoku was offered a position as part of the shogunate’s new military training program in Yokohama, giving him an opportunity to draw on the knowledge of the Western world and the proficiency in English that he had acquired during his period of confinement. The military post gave Ryūhoku the chance to fulfill his earlier fantasies, but the shogunate’s days were numbered. In the chaotic final months before the Tokugawa shogunate collapsed, Ryūhoku ascended to the heights of its central administration, but he eventually retired, renounced his samurai status, and went to live in reclusion, styling himself temporarily as a “vassal of a deposed regime” in the manner of Tao Yuanming. In chapter 5, “Wandering,” I address Ryūhoku’s activities in the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, focusing in particular on how he came to terms with his status as a former shogunal vassal in the world of the new regime. During these several years, Ryūhoku traveled extensively, both in Japan and abroad. I examine the travelogues he wrote about these experiences as well as the second volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, arguing that in different ways the writing of these texts laid the groundwork for his emergence as a journalist and critical commentator. Previous scholarship on Ryūhoku’s overseas journey of 1872–73, which he undertook as the treasurer and translator for four priests from the Higashi Honganji temple, has tended to understand it as a leisure trip without any particular purpose. Many scholars have proposed to make sense of Ryūhoku’s journey in terms of its contrast to the serious mission of the Iwakura Mission that toured the world at the same time. Yet I show that the Higashi Honganji priests made their journey with the extensive encouragement and support of the Meiji government and that Ryūhoku’s experience on the journey can best be seen as preparation in the short term for his directorship of the temple’s Translation Office and in the long term for his eventual emergence as a newspaper journalist. Chapter 6, “Ryūhoku the Journalist,” focuses on Ryūhoku’s complete transformation of the struggling Kōbun tsūshi newspaper into the thriving Chōya shinbun in 1874. The Chōya’s success has been attributed by many scholars to the stylistic appeal of Ryūhoku’s zatsuroku: “miscellaneous essays” that he wrote principally in Sino-Japanese. I analyze how Ryūhoku used these columns to articulate a position for himself as a “newspaperman,” a new identity that he fashioned in dialogue with Literary Sinitic texts. One concern Ryūhoku repeatedly emphasized in his columns was the importance of traditional culture and literature in a time when more obviously practical pursuits carried the day. To that end, the Chōya shinbun regularly published kanshi in its literary section, the first to be established by a Japanese daily. By creating this new forum, Ryūhoku pioneered the forms of interaction that would characterize the kanshibun magazines that quickly sprang up in following years. I devote particular attention to how Ryūhoku dealt with the harsh restrictions on the press that the Meiji government imposed in 1875. I discuss

36 i n t r o d u c t i o n

the variety of literary techniques he deployed to fight these restrictions, many of which marshaled canonical Chinese texts in innovative ways. In 1876, Ryūhoku was imprisoned for violating these laws, but I show how the newspaper’s readers wrote kanshibun to rally in support behind him and other embattled journalists. The seventh and final chapter, “After the Wake,” concerns the last several years of Ryūhoku’s career as a journalist. It was once a widely held view that Ryūhoku withdrew from the public sphere after his release from prison, yet this chapter shows that Ryūhoku remained an engaged participant in public discourse right to the end of his life. Another assessment of Ryūhoku’s position in early Meiji situates him as the antithesis of the Meiji government’s state building, but, by introducing a variety of essays that he wrote toward the end of his career, I show that Ryūhoku was in fact deeply interested in these issues. In these essays, Ryūhoku outlined an eclectic approach to modernization, and he sought out additional opportunities to make his opinions known to a wider population when he started writing for the Yomiuri shinbun as well. Far from disengaging from public life, Ryūhoku remained committed, and, as I discuss in the book’s conclusion, he developed new readings of Tao Yuanming to mark his involvement.

Ch a p t er On e

Book and Sword A Young Poet Comes of Age

N

arushima Ryūhoku wrote kanshi, or Sinitic poetry, throughout his life, for publication, for poetry gatherings, and for his personal journals. Though he is best known today for his work in predominantly prose-based genres such as the essay, the urban chronicle, and the travelogue, kanshi play more than a minor role in many of these texts, including his two most celebrated: New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West. It is no exaggeration to say that Sinitic poetry composition was central to his literary enterprise. In “Biography of the Sumida Recluse,” the autobiographical essay he wrote in the wake of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Ryūhoku emphasized this special importance that kanshi held for him, noting his acquisition of Sinitic poetic competence as the consummate event of his childhood and early adolescence: “The Recluse [i.e., Ryūhoku] is the grandson of Tōgaku and the son of Kadō. From an early age, he read books and composed waka [Japanese poetry]. He was fondest of shifu [Sinitic poetry]. In the winter of his seventeenth year, he lost his father. In the spring of his eighteenth, he became a tutorin-training to the shogun Iesada and also oversaw the editing of shogunal histories.”1 As this passage implies and as Ryūhoku made explicit elsewhere, it was from his grandfather and father, eminent Confucian scholars who preceded him as the sixth and seventh in a line of hereditary tutors to the Tokugawa shoguns, that he acquired his abilities as a reader and producer of Sinitic poetry and prose.2 Yet, in an important sense, Ryūhoku was himself the product of this education focused on the Chinese classics: the literary tradition embodied by the “books” (J. sho) with which he spent his youth. Ryūhoku’s practice of kanshi composition and the textual world in which it situated him shaped him in no small way as an individual. His kanshi provide us with the best insight into his inner life, charting his shifting modes of thought and revealing to us the rhetoric and the paradigms through which he defined himself and made sense of the world. They offer

38

Chapter One

eloquent testimony about his feelings and reactions to contemporary events, for to Ryūhoku and many of his Japanese contemporaries the form was a vital expressive medium. This chapter examines how Ryūhoku used Sinitic poetry to wrestle with the challenges and dilemmas that faced him in the pivotal eighteenth year of his life. This period following the death of his father was a mournful but also exciting time for the young Ryūhoku, as he assumed the headship of his family, made his debut on the Edo literary scene, and commenced his official service to the shogunate. The Sinitic poems he composed during these tumultuous months show him adapting to these new roles, but they also record his internal struggles over the meaning of his scholarly service to the shogunate: a question that had taken on particular importance in 1854, when Japan’s military government was beset by unprecedented threats to its very existence. Images of “swords” and other martial equipage appear frequently in Ryūhoku’s poetry from the period. Often counterposed to “books,” they serve as emblems of an imagined path of service he would figuratively discard in succeeding to his father’s position.

Ryūhoku’s Early Poetry Manuscripts: Kankei shōkō The main published collection of Ryūhoku’s kanshi, a posthumous anthology titled Ryūhoku shishō, contains some 377 poems, but this is but a small fraction of the total that survive elsewhere. Since Ryūhoku’s kanshi include published and nonpublished works, individual compositions as well as those integrated into larger pieces, it is difficult to give a precise number, but there are easily well over one thousand extant poems.3 Yet even this seemingly large number surely represents only a portion of Ryūhoku’s total poetic oeuvre. Four volumes of Ryūhoku’s early poetic manuscripts are extant, and, if these yearly journals are any indication, he composed roughly one hundred Sinitic verses annually that he deemed worth saving. Titled Kankei shōkō (Little manuscript composed by cold lamplight), these four poetry journals now held by Japan’s National Diet Library are the focus of this and the following chapter. A somewhat unusual term, the kankei (Ch. hanqing) of the title means “cold lantern stand” or simply “cold lamplight,” and probably suggests diligent, if lonely, lucubration.4 For this young man who had been brought up in a distinguished house of scholars and was now about to succeed to its headship, the image and its association with nights spent reading and writing was a fitting choice. Each of the four volumes represents Ryūhoku’s poetic production over the course of a single year from Kaei 7 to Ansei 4 (roughly 1854 to 1857). Within each volume, the poems are for the most part arranged in the order in which they were composed, at least so far as can be deduced from datable clues in their headings and seasonal references.5 The four volumes do not seem to have been transcribed by the same person: three different styles of brushwork can be seen, and, of the four volumes, only the second is in Ryūhoku’s distinctive hand. The three volumes not in Ryūhoku’s hand are presumably fair copies that he engaged a scribe to produce from source texts no longer extant. Although these three volumes are not authorial holographs, it seems that Ryūhoku did



A Young Poet Comes of Age

39

proofread and directly correct transcriptional errors in these manuscripts.6 Throughout, there are also some revisions of graphs, deletions, and other notations written into the body of the text, but these amendments are not dated.7 In addition to such marks of authorial editing, the first volume contains handwritten comments in the pages’ upper margins by two senior members of the late Edo literary establishment.8 The Kankei shōkō manuscript is a precious document not only for the light it sheds on the youthful Ryūhoku’s emergence as a poet, but for the detailed behind-the-scenes insights it provides into the nature of kanshi practice in mid-nineteenth-century Japan. It preserves traces of the creative process and the compositional context that gave rise to the poems it contains while also providing clues to the poems’ early reception and subsequent evolution. The text can help us to discover the criteria by which the poems were evaluated at the time, how commentators advised and encouraged a poet, and how the poet himself might revisit and recast his work in later years. Moreover, unlike edited col­ lections with restrictive selection criteria, these volumes provide in their relative comprehensiveness a rich source for appreciating the wide range of themes Japanese poets addressed in their kanshi, the circumstances under which poems were written, and the formal varieties that were common. When Ryūhoku shishō was published in 1894, the anthology’s editors chose just 51 of the 442 poems contained in Kankei shōkō to represent these four years. As Sugishita Motoaki observed in the 1999 article that first introduced Kankei shōkō to the Japanese research community, the poems that are contained in these manuscript volumes but not included in the posthumous poetic anthology are in many cases all the more interesting to us today.9 Precisely because they in some way departed from the aesthetic standards of the time, he argues, they may reveal the emergence of new sensibilities to which the kanshi establishment had not fully accommodated itself.

New Poems for the New Year Ryūhoku’s earliest extant poetic journals, the four volumes of Kankei shōkō, begin in Kaei 7 (1854), the eighteenth year of his life. Ryūhoku must have composed quite extensively before this time, but any poems he wrote before this year are absent from all collections of his work. Aside from the youthful New Year quatrain that I discussed in the introduction, the only poems that survive from Ryūhoku’s childhood are a few waka that his grandson quoted in a biography before the volumes themselves were destroyed.10 Perhaps Ryūhoku discarded previous works as embarrassing juvenilia, though that seems unlikely given that he preserved even these earliest waka volumes. In any case, Kankei shōkō is the major departure point of Ryūhoku’s poetry, for nothing earlier is included in either the handwritten collection Ryūhoku prepared himself in 1870, Shunseirō shishō, or the numerous collections produced in later years by other compilers. In creating this new volume of poetry to coincide with the New Year and in explicitly assigning it the volume number one, Ryūhoku declared his poetic coming of age. It is easy to imagine why the start of this year would have seemed an appropriate time for Ryūhoku to put away childish things. Above all, it was a point of momentous

40

Chapter One

transition in the young man’s life, for he had lost his father Kadō just over one month earlier and would soon not only take over the headship of the Narushima household, but also assume many of Kadō’s official duties. But beyond this host of changes in Ryūhoku’s personal world, it was also a time of uncertainty and confusion for the shogunate and for Japan as a whole. The naval mission of Commodore Matthew Perry had reached Japan in the sixth month of the previous year to deliver a letter from American President Millard Fillmore demanding that Japan open its ports to trade. Now, half a year later, it was only a matter of time until Perry returned to receive the Tokugawa government’s response to his ultimatum. In what was a custom he observed throughout his life, Ryūhoku composed several poems to commemorate the New Year, and it is with a set of four such poems that the first volume of Kankei shōkō opens. The poems, two quatrains and two octaves, reveal the complicated mixture of feelings Ryūhoku was experiencing at the time, ranging from a deep sense of personal loss to a broader concern for the fate of Japan in the face of foreign incursion. Strong undercurrents of alienation and self-doubt coexist with statements of militant identification with the shogunal government. One of the two quatrains reads: 元旦賦二絶二律

New Year’s Day. I compose two quatrains and two octaves.

山頽梁壞一身單

The mountain destroyed, the beam collapsed, and I left alone; Flowers and willows fill the city, but I cannot bear to look at them. Fortunately I have my mother, still in good health, In the northern quarters, I serve her the pepper tray as usual.11

花柳滿城難忍看 幸有阿孃尚無恙 北堂依舊捧椒盤

The figures of physical devastation that occur in the poem’s first line refer to the death of Kadō and the impact of the loss on Ryūhoku. The ostensibly transparent metaphors are heightened, however, by the additional layer of meaning in these words, which Confucius is said to have spoken just seven days before he died.12 To compare the death of his father to the death of Confucius and, moreover, to do so with phrasing drawn from one of the classic texts he had mastered under his father’s tutelage was no empty formula. Rather, the heightened language suggests just how traumatic the experience was for Ryūhoku. Over the course of the first hundred days of mourning, Ryūhoku’s diary shows him diligently performing funerary rites for his father and making several visits to his grave.13 Throughout his life, Ryūhoku wrote several poems in honor of his father, occasioned not only by the predictable yearly arrival of the anniversary of his death, but by the memories awakened on subsequent visits to places they had once traveled to together or triggered at the sight of objects associated with him.14 The remainder of this quatrain tempers to some degree the sense of disorder and solitude laid bare in its first half. The “pepper tray” mentioned in the fourth line presumably refers to the tradition of consuming toso (Ch. tusu), a sweet wine steeped in Sichuan pepper and other spices, on New Year’s Day. Drinking this and other flavored medicinal wines to ward off malign forces and ensure health in the coming year was a Han dynasty



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ritual transmitted to Japan in the Heian period (794–1185). It was customary for the youngest family members to serve the eldest, a practice that seems to be reflected in the last line of Ryūhoku’s poem.15 Phrasing in the poem using such terms as “still” and “as usual” frames the maintenance of this traditional rite as restoring a measure of continuity to the household in the wake of Kadō’s death. Nevertheless, the poem’s overall lugubrious tone would have been an inauspicious way to begin the new collection, and thus the most celebratory in this sequence of four New Year poems is placed at its head: 風吹瑞靄滿城扉 梅荅柳芽春又歸 去歳聖恩饒萬邸 新彫金甲映暾暉

The wind blows a marvelous mist that fills the city’s doors; Plum blossoms and willow buds—spring has come again. Last year, the sagely munificence enriched the myriad houses, And now newly forged armor shines in the morning sun.

Appended to the poem is an interlinear note in which the poet explains the last couplet: “In the last month of last year, a shogunal edict provided funding to the various vassals to make repairs to their [military] equipment.” Military reforms, especially attempts to strengthen coastal defenses, had been a topic of sporadic concern within the government and among intellectuals for the past few decades, as European and American vessels appeared with increasing frequency off Japanese shores. Ryūhoku would have been exposed to this elevated sense of Japan’s military vulnerability early in life, for his father had addressed the emergent threat in an 1850 treatise titled Kaikeiroku (Coastal defense records). The preface to Kadō’s work begins by sketching a scene of impending catastrophe, a crisis in which Japan is dangerously ignorant about and unprepared to contend with a technologically advanced and implacable foe: Misty seas spread out endlessly, surrounding the four corners of our land. Yet voracious sea creatures are working their jaws; starved crocodiles are sharpening their fangs. How can we lie propped up on our pillows snoring contentedly? This is why coastal defense is an urgent matter. Ever since the advent of military government, a prohibition on ocean travel has grown increasingly strict. People of our land have thus become unenlightened about the advantages of boats and paddles.16 Day by day, conditions in the various barbarian lands of the West advance, their craft and cunning growing steadily. They race across the stormy depths as though sliding over a rush mat. They practice gunnery as though they are handling objects of everyday use. With each day, they advance toward ingenuity while we become more ignorant. We attempt to rely upon our ever more ignorant populace to counter these ever more ingenious scoundrels. This is the reason that the matter of defense is hard to implement.17

Perry’s arrival three years after Kadō compiled Kaikeiroku gave the issue of coastal defense a new and irrevocable urgency. In accordance with the auspicious tone of the New Year, however, Ryūhoku’s focus in the quatrain quoted above is not on the ominous threat that Perry embodied but on the majesty of shogunal dispensations and the security they seem to insure—like the fresh spring foliage, the new armor shines with promise in the vernal sunlight.

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The invocation of martial imagery in Ryūhoku’s quatrain is characteristic of many early poems in Kankei shōkō. Ryūhoku wrote this New Year’s sequence just as a patriotic spirit of “concern for the fate of the land” (J. yūkoku) was becoming widespread especially among young samurai, a class of men who were at least nominally charged with the task of protecting the realm by military force. For samurai of the time, dual mastery of the military and literary arts (J. bunbu ryōdō) was an ideal; consider the closing line of the following quatrain, which Ryūhoku presented to a friend named Takeuchi who was likely a former student of Kadō: 再逢竹内生 一別三年萬縷情 相逢先把巨盃傾 休嘲吾膽依然大 左劍右書尋舊盟

Meeting Takeuchi again Three years since our parting: a complex web of feelings; Reunited now, we first down giant cups of wine. Don’t laugh: my spirit is as ardent as ever; With a sword in the left hand, a book in the right, let us rekindle old ties.18

Late Tokugawa anxieties about Japan’s international situation resulted in the greater prevalence of such martial imagery in the Sinitic poetry of contemporary samurai and also gave it a new degree of immediacy. In contrast to medieval times, the peaceful centuries of the Tokugawa era had given the samurai little opportunity to serve in actual conflict. Especially in the early nineteenth century, scholarly aptitude increasingly became a factor shaping their course of advancement, making their actual position as civil bureaucrats more analogous to that of Chinese scholar-officials (shidafu). As Saitō Mareshi notes, however, the continued valorization of martial virtue was a lingering point of contrast between the samurai and the shidafu.19 Moreover, whereas in the Chinese ideal of statesmanship highly placed scholarofficials might be called on to offer counsel to the sovereign and thereby potentially shape policy, in the Japanese context, even high-status okujusha like the Narushima were confined to a role behind the scenes: their principal duties restricted to the early education of the shogun and to the editing of historical documents. The oku of okujusha in fact makes this circumscription explicit, for it refers to the “interior” or private space of the shogun within Edo Castle, in contradistinction to the public space where state business was transacted and various officials went about their work.20 Ryūhoku’s grandfather and father alike struggled against the limitations imposed on okujusha, suffering censure, dismissal, and even temporary domiciliary confinement when they voiced controversial opinions on current political matters.21 Yet their conviction that a scholar-official was duty-bound to contribute to government deliberation remained unshaken. In the remainder of his preface to Kaikeiroku, Kadō lists several incidents of foreign threat that Japan had successfully weathered before going on to argue that consideration of such historical experience could prove a useful source of insight into the present crisis: One with discernment is able to use the past to illuminate the present, to take from one and apply it to the other. Although there may be differences between what was suitable in past and present; although these barbarians may be of a distinctive type, nevertheless such



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precedents may be of use in providing a means to repel them. For this reason, I have broadly surveyed instances concerning foreign brigands in our national histories, and I have also referred to the various books of China and Korea; I have gathered together the episodes into three volumes to facilitate consultation. I have also appended to each volume my own unpolished opinions. To discuss current events with recourse to the events of the past can indeed be called an idle activity that does not serve practical concerns, but it is nevertheless also a manifestation of my enduring intent to benefit the nation.

In a career that saw him alternately fêted and fettered not only by the Tokugawa, but also by the Meiji regime, that included life both in and out of government service, Ryūhoku never fully abandoned this fundamental conviction, expressed at the close of Kadō’s preface, that a man of learning ought to marshal his talents to contribute to debate about the pressing events of the day. Though the American incursion had brought the threat of actual military conflict into the realm of possibility, in preparing to eventually assume his father’s position as an okujusha, Ryūhoku also knew it was his fate to serve the state not as a soldier, but as a scholar. The tension between these two roles and the turmoil Ryūhoku experienced even after resigning himself to follow in his father’s footsteps emerge clearly in the New Year’s sequence and would prove to be recurring themes in many of the poems he wrote as a young man. Ryūhoku’s poems incorporating martial themes range in tone from a laudatory encomium such as the above quatrain on the shining armor to some that verge on belligerence. As we shall see, Ryūhoku occasionally used lengthy Sinitic verse forms to imagine mounting a violent response to the foreign threat. But tempering any bravado was his constant awareness of the gap between such fantasies and reality. The remaining poems in this New Year's sequence in fact reveal the poet’s sense of his own ineluctable distance from military affairs. The following is one of the sequence’s two octaves:

一夢醒來十八年 此身孑孑有誰憐 鷄晨衣上猶苴杖



人世牀頭幾寳船

5

梅墅曉風梅綻雪



柳塘春水柳生烟



嗟吾初志渾灰燼 閑卻腰間鐵馬鞭

Roused from my dream, already eighteen years; I find myself all alone, and who will take pity? A cock crows dawn, but still I bear the mourning staff atop my robes; Out in the world of men, several treasure ships lie beside people’s beds. Dawn winds come to Plumhouse, where plums blossom in the snow; Spring waters flow at Willowbank, where willows bud into mist. But alas how my first aspirations have all turned to ash; The iron horse-whip at my waist just lies unused.

As the first and last couplets in particular show, Ryūhoku used this poem to give voice to a profound sense of disaffection, but it is worth examining the stylistic criteria and technical considerations that structured the manner in which he sought to convey this conflicted state of mind in Sinitic verse. To begin with, the manuscript Kankei shōkō shows that Ryūhoku initially used a different term for the mourning garments that

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appear in the third line: 衰絰 (Ch. cuidie; J. saitetsu), meaning loose sackcloth worn over the chest and with a band around the waist. Though the Confucian classic the Book of Rites identifies the wearing of this item as an important element in mourning the death of one’s parents, Ryūhoku later replaced the term with 苴杖 (Ch. juzhang; J. shojō), meaning a kind of dark bamboo staff also used in ancient mourning rituals also described in the Book of Rites (fig. 1.1).22 No explanation of the reason for the change is given in the manuscript, but it is safe to surmise that the substitution was based on the meanings and associations of these two terms rather than on prosodic grounds, for the tones of these graphs are identical, and their rhythmic features would have been irrelevant given their place in the poem.23 One possible rationale for the substitution is that, in contrast to the sackcloth, which is worn by the bereaved child to mourn the death of either parent, the reference to a wooden staff makes it possible to convey the particularity of Ryūhoku’s loss; according to the Book of Rites, the black bamboo staff mentioned in the poem is reserved for mourning one’s father, whereas a paulownia staff is used for mourning one’s mother.24 Whatever the reasons for the change may have been, the simple fact that such deliberation between these two equally erudite possibilities took place demonstrates the sort of sophisticated engagement with Chinese textual precedent shared by many Japanese composers of kanshi during Ryūhoku’s time. One of the broad trends in late Edo period kanshi circles was the domestication of Sinitic verse; kanshi composition itself was becoming increasingly popular, but poets were at the same time turning more and more to local subjects, and the kanshi they composed became increasingly self-referential. At the same time, however, the comments, suggestions, and revisions in poetry collections such as Kankei shōkō show that nuanced understanding and use of Chinese texts, especially the canonical Confucian classics, remained a fundamental evaluative criterion for kanshi even at the end of the Edo period. Rather than dismissing such attention to the subtleties of precedent usage as mere imitation or showy pedantry, we can see it instead as revealing Ryūhoku’s sensitivity to the classic texts in which the terms originated and his concern to evoke the particular circumstances in which he found himself most effectively. Since Ryūhoku was presumably neither wearing sackcloth nor carrying a dark bamboo staff, however, there is a sense in which his use of either one of these terms that refer to idealized mourning practices in Zhou era China to describe his own situation in nineteenth-century Japan may seem strained or perhaps even affected.25 Yet the privileging of literality or rigorous realism was not necessarily an aspiration of the Japanese author of kanshibun. On the contrary, rhetorical resonance with earlier Sinitic texts was often more important to the poet than mimetic effects. Moreover, part of the challenge of writing kanshi and one of the pleasures of reading them lay in the tension that occasionally developed between the elements of classical Chinese material culture denoted in a poem’s language and the corresponding elements of contemporary Japanese material culture that they were being called on to represent. When such discrepancies arose, the Japanese reader could enjoy a sense of doubled vision, appreciating how the textually familiar classical Chinese places and forms were being superimposed on experientially

Fig. 1.1 An octave composed by Ryūhoku on New Year’s Day, from Kankei shōkō, Kaei 7 (1854). The comments in the upper margin read: “Chō [i.e., Funabashi Seitan] says: the term ‘world of men’ 人世 is unsuitable. I am certain that there is a better word, but I cannot think of it. The penultimate couplet is wellwrought. Very moving indeed!” The change of 衰絰 to 苴杖 is evident near the top of the second column from the right. See KS, 1:1b. Courtesy of the National Diet Library, Tokyo.

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familiar Japanese locales and practices. In this way, the occasional use of such “Literary Sinitic embellishment” did not foreclose the depiction of particular domestic scenes and customs, but might instead permit a new way of seeing them.26 As the very next line shows, however, kanshi poets sometimes chose to depict uniquely Japanese practices without recourse to such imaginative substitutions or allusive metaphors. Ryūhoku refers in this line to the treasure ship that in Japanese mythology bears the traditional seven gods of good fortune: an assemblage of Hindu, Daoist, Buddhist, and indigenous deities that have enjoyed propitiation in Japan from antiquity to the present. It was customary in early modern Japan to place an image of this treasure ship beside one’s pillow on New Year’s Eve as an augur of pleasant dreams and good fortune in the coming year. Ryūhoku needed no special lexical apparatus to launch this “treasure ship” in his poem, for the term he uses (Ch. baochuan; J. hōsen) was already well established in kanbun; it appears in Buddhist texts and other Chinese sources with the basic meaning of “a ship laden with treasure.” Only in Japanese kanbun does it have the additional local association with the Seven Gods of Fortune and the festivities surrounding the New Year. In addition to the juxtaposition with the mourning garments, the treasure ship functions in Ryūhoku’s poem to highlight poignantly the contrast between the blithely festive mood outside and the poet’s own inner turmoil. Continuing this cognitive gesture toward the world beyond his household in the following couplet, Ryūhoku describes the emergence of spring verdure around the city. As a rule, regulated verse octaves require parallelism in their second and third couplets: a feature that is especially pronounced in the complete grammatical and semantic correspondence of the words composing lines 5 and 6. As he had done in one of the quatrains from this New Year’s sequence, Ryūhoku uses plum and willow as symbols of renewal and rebirth, depicting the blooming of these harbingers of spring at two local sites particularly associated with the trees. Of particular interest here is Ryūhoku’s incorporation of Japa­ nese toponyms into the poem. The binomes at the head of lines 5 and 6, 梅墅 (Ch. meishu; J. baisho; lit., “plum residence”) and 柳塘 (Ch. liutang; J. ryūtō; lit., “willow bank”), refer to two celebrated scenic sites in eastern Edo: Umeyashiki in Kameido and Yanagiwara.27 So well known are these sites, in fact, that, just a few years after Ryūhoku wrote these poems, ukiyoe artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) would depict them in his series of prints One Hundred Famous Scenes in Edo.28 It is noteworthy, however, that the graphs Ryūhoku uses in the poem to refer to these local sites are not those most frequently used to identify them in the written Japanese of the time: in everyday discourse, Ryūhoku’s contemporaries would have written the toponym Umeyashiki, for example, as 梅屋敷 or 梅屋舗, and not 梅墅. Though it may seem a minor point, this subtle change shows how, in writing about a domestic site in Literary Sinitic, especially in poetry, a Japanese writer was often presented with both a linguistic obstacle and an expressive opportunity. The Chinese graphs typically used to write the place’s name in everyday Japanese discourse might be verbose or unwieldy, their pronunciation in Sino-Japanese might produce distract­ing associations, or they might simply appear nonsensical or unrefined as a Literary Sinitic compound. From the classical period onward, it had thus been common for Japanese kanshi poets to use Sinified versions of Japanese toponyms. They might style



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the capital of Kyoto as “Luoyang” 洛陽 (J. Rakuyō), for example, metaphorically linking a Japanese site with an analogous site on the continent, or more commonly they might select (or fashion) a plausible Sinified place-name that was also somehow connected to the typical Japanese orthography. It was presumably the shared initial graph that led to the Japanese province of Musashi 武蔵 being styled Buryō 武陵 (after the Chinese toponym Wuling) in Japanese kanshi or Musashi’s capital Edo becoming Buto 武都 (Ch. Wudu; lit., “capital of Wu”) or Bukō 武江 (Ch. Wujiang). The practice had become so entrenched within Japanese kanshi circles by the Edo period that mid-eighteenth-century dictionaries such as Tōsō kaii and other reference works were compiled to record the various Sinified styles for Japanese toponyms that well-known poets were commonly using in their kanshi.29 Following this dual image of spring’s reemergence in the outer world, the final couplet of Ryūhoku’s poem continues the counterpoint by returning to the poet’s personal circumstances. Probing the tension between restoration and devastation, the poem discovers an additional reason for the poet’s distress, one that lies beyond the loss of Kadō. As the last couplet suggests, at the beginning of his eighteenth year, Ryūhoku was struggling to come to terms with his future role as an okujusha. Though what precisely he cherished as his “first aspiration” is left unstated, the suggestion is clear enough, given the manner in which it is opposed to the iron horse whip that dangles limply at his side. Ryūhoku was not convinced, it seems, that his ambitions could be fulfilled by succeeding to his father’s position as a scholar and historian. Even if we choose not to read the whip as an expression of the poet’s inability to fulfill a literal desire to serve the state militarily, we can perhaps see it as a metaphoric expression of his awareness that, like his father, he might well be frustrated in attempting to play a more active role in state affairs.

A New Diary: Kenhoku nichiroku As these opening poems suggest, Kaei 7 (1854) marked in many ways a turning point in Ryūhoku’s life. In the eighth month of the previous year, Ryūhoku had begun to record the events of his daily life in a kanbun diary: a custom that he would maintain throughout his life.30 But indicative perhaps of the axial nature of this moment is the fact that, with the beginning of his eighteenth year, Ryūhoku not only began recording his poetry in Kankei shōkō, but also gave a new name to his diary: Kenhoku nichiroku, a title he wrote on the journal’s outer cover along with an inscription reading, “I took up my brush on the first day of the first month of spring.” Ryūhoku’s sense of embarking on something new is evident in his creation of the title and in his explicit designation that the Kaei 7 diary was to be its “first volume.” The diary he had started midway through the previous year, by contrast, appears to have been untitled.31 I have come across no consideration in Japanese scholarship of the significance of the new title, Kenhoku nichiroku, but I believe that the naming is intimately connected to the young man’s self-definition in the wake of his father’s death. The term kenhoku 硯北 (Ch. yanbei) literally means “north of the

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inkstone” and refers to reading, writing, and other forms of textual work undertaken at a desk. The expression derives from the fact that desks were commonly placed in studies so that they faced south to allow for optimal lighting; the person seated at the study’s desk would consequently be positioned “north of the inkstone.” The title of Ryūhoku’s new diary might therefore be translated “The daily record of a study-dweller,” or “The daily record of a desk-worker.” The sense that Ryūhoku had in mind is perhaps suggested by the way in which poet Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) chose the term as the name for his residence. According to “An account of the ‘North of the Inkstone’ Hall,” an essay by Hongdao’s younger brother Zhongdao (1570–1624), Hongdao had chosen to give his dwelling this name because “there is nothing more leisurely and comfortable in human life than being [in a position that places one] north of the inkstone, able to commune with books from time to time.”32 Just as the new title Ryūhoku chose for his poetry manuscripts, Kankei shōkō, showed his emerging sense of himself as a scholar and writer, so too does the title Ryūhoku selected for his new diary seem to indicate his acceptance of the new roles of editor of official histories and Confucian tutor-in-training that he was about to embark on.33 Yet both titles are inherently ambiguous, for they could also be seen as dismissively diminishing such bookish pursuits in the face of more active or heroic forms of service. The ambivalence expressed in the poems he composed during the remaining months of the year suggests that Ryūhoku himself may have oscillated between these two readings.34 The basic linguistic form Ryūhoku chose for his diary is Literary Sinitic, and it is, for the most part, a terse factual record. With rare exception, he made an entry for each day, and these entries conform to a virtually invariant pattern: he records the date accord­ ing to the lunar calendar, notes the sexagenary stem-and-branch combination for that date, gives a brief comment on the weather, and then provides an abbreviated outline of his activities at work or his participation in various study and poetry sessions. The first journal begins (fig. 1.2): A journal of the fifty-first year in the cycle. I, On, am in my eighteenth year. The first month; a “small” month [i.e., of twenty-nine days]. The first day of the month. The thirty-eighth day in the cycle. Cloudy and warm. I am still under mourning restrictions. Our entire house is not carrying out celebrations. However, we did open the gate and put up pine and bamboo decorations as usual. It is because our mourning has not been made public. Today, I had a slight cold. The old blind masseur came to administer the acupuncture needles. As night fell, it rained, and there was a light snow.

Employing a contrast like that in the New Year poems between celebrations of Tokugawa martial splendor and laments of personal tragedy, this diary entry shows Ryūhoku drawing a clear distinction between the internal nature of the family’s loss and the outward display of festivity.35 Ryūhoku’s prose diary sometimes includes personal expressions such as this one, but in general it lacks the kind of elaborate exploration of personal feeling that can be found in the poems of Kankei shōkō. In addition to short comments about his official duties, Ryūhoku made notations in his diary about people who came to visit him or places he went, more often than not given in codes or abbreviations. There are



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Fig. 1.2 First page of Ryūhoku’s diary, Kenhoku nichiroku, vol. 1, Kaei 7 (1854). Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Ithaca. Also included in KN, 9.

occasionally more elaborate narratives of events or excursions, but, intriguing as these are, they seldom extend beyond a few lines. Having studied the Chinese classics under his father’s and grandfather’s guidance since earliest childhood, Ryūhoku was ready to begin his official apprenticeship to be an okujusha in the first month of Kaei 7 (1854), only a few months after the death of his father. On learning that the day had come when he would assume the post of trainee, Ryūhoku wrote in his diary about how his heart “danced like a sparrow” in anticipation of the honor. The entry for 01.12 details the ceremony, in which Ryūhoku was ordered by the shogun’s “senior councilor,” rōjū Abe Masahiro (1819–57), to “fulfill your father’s duties.”36 He was given new status, access to areas of Edo Castle formerly off limits to him, and a stipend of three hundred koku. After taking a “blood oath,” Ryūhoku was escorted on a tour of various offices to extend his greetings to future colleagues. It was a momentous day for the young Ryūhoku but also one that brought a sense of foreboding. Not only was he uncertain about his readiness to assume his father’s many responsibilities, but he had also begun to cherish doubts about the relevance of his family’s profession given the predicament that was increasingly impossible for Japan to ignore. The final seven characters of the entry for this date tersely note: “I hear barbarian ships are anchored off of Izu.”

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Encountering Perry’s Black Ships Commodore Matthew Perry had first come to Japan in the summer of 1853, at a time when the shogunate’s general policy permitting only very limited formal engagement with the outside world had been in place for two centuries.37 Needless to say, Japan was not completely isolated during this time, for the shogunate allowed Dutch merchants to reside on Dejima, an island in the Nagasaki harbor, where they ran a factory and engaged in trade. The Dutch also made annual visits to the shogunate in Edo, where they answered questions and reported on world affairs. Ambassadorial delegations from the Korean Peninsula likewise visited Japan periodically during the Edo period, their visits scheduled to commemorate the ascendance of successive shoguns. Furthermore, although Japan did not have formal state-level relations with the Qing court, Chinese merchants engaged in a robust trade operation with Japan based in Nagasaki. In addition to these various ties the shogunate maintained with the Dutch, Koreans, and Chinese, Japan’s peripheries were also zones of interaction with other groups not fully part of the Toku­ gawa polity: the Kingdom of the Ryukyus to the south and the lands of the Ainu to the north.38 Although early modern Japan was open in these various ways to the outside world, the shogunate showed little interest in expanding such interaction. Nevertheless, from the end of the eighteenth century into the first decades of the nineteenth, several Western powers began to make increasingly insistent overtures toward establishing commercial and diplomatic relations with Japan, all of which were rebuffed. In 1825, the shogunate even strengthened its seclusion policy by ordering coastal regions to repel forcibly any foreign ships attempting to approach Japan. When Perry entered Uraga harbor with an intimidating show of naval strength in 1853, he was thus flouting the Japanese state’s unambiguous policy in multiple ways. Promptly dismissing the Japanese officials’ insistence that the only place they could even consider receiving him was Nagasaki, he succeeded in his mission’s preliminary goal: the delivery of President Fillmore’s letter demanding that Japan establish commercial trade with the United States. Having conveyed this letter along with several gifts, Perry left Japan, vowing to return six months later to hear the shogunate’s response to the American ultimatum. On February 7, 1854 (01.10), two days before Ryūhoku wrote the above entry, the sailboats in Perry’s advance guard had reached the Izu Peninsula, and his steamships would arrive just a few days later. In this way, just as Ryūhoku was formally beginning his training in early 1854, Edo was abuzz with news of Perry’s return, and Ryūhoku’s diary entries show him preoccupied with noting the latest intelligence about the movements of the American ships. On 01.14, Ryūhoku wrote, “Today, I hear that the barbarian ships were not seen. This is great cause for celebration.” The elation proved only temporary, however, for on the following day he noted, “I hear the American ships have arrived. Whether it is true or false I cannot be sure, but it is worrisome.”39 Finally, on 01.25 (February 22 by the Western calendar), he wrote, “In the light sun of noon, I heard the sound of cannons on the distant water like thunder.” Only later did he learn the source of the cannon fire, jotting an addition to his diary entry in smaller characters: “The cannon fire



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was produced by the barbarian ships, I am told. How shocking!” Though Ryūhoku was almost certainly unaware of the reason, it seems the cannon shots were in commemoration of Washington’s birthday.40 On 01.28, he wrote, “Throughout the castle, there is nothing but talk about the barbarian ships,” reflecting the tense deliberations then under way between those daimyo who saw it as inevitable that Japan would enter into a trade agreement with the United States and a few daimyo who resisted any concessions to the American demands.41 Ryūhoku’s keen interest in the crisis is clear from the frequency with which he notes in his diary the latest developments, but equally evident is his distance from any role in the discussions themselves; the reports he records are consistently framed as hearsay. In spite of this remove, Ryūhoku was not immune to a sense of panic. After reporting for work the following day, he went with his cousin Sugimoto Chūtatsu to “examine the state of defenses” at Shibaura, the coastline just northeast of where the American ships had docked at Ōmori. Rather than provide a detailed account in his diary of the ships’ features, Ryūhoku chose to inscribe his experience in a poem that is contained in the Kankei shōkō manuscript. It was presumably a satisfying intellectual challenge to Ryūhoku to compose a lengthy poem such as this one that uses the same rhyme group, 寘 (Ch. zhi; J. shi), for all sixteen couplets. The work can be divided into two halves of equal length, pivoting naturally on the exclamatory “ah” 吁嗟 that begins the ninth couplet in line 17. In the first half, Ryūhoku offers a quite enthusiastic description of the ships’ features, marveling particularly at their massiveness, speed, and technical sophistication. In the second half, he takes a step back to consider what larger meaning the arrival of the ships holds, and the tone shifts abruptly:

火輪船歌



西洋之人巧製器 奇技妙機紛難記

5 10

就中最巧礟與艦 艦也構成何神異 疾行不借帆楫力 渡海易於踐平地 鑿鐵作輪大丈餘 兩兩相挾如鳥翅 中央有竈焚煤炭 黯煙衝天炎焰熾



軸吼輪怒輾驚瀾



萬里電馳一決眥

15

孰推堅城水上行 鯨鯢駭竄蛟龍避 橫截溟渤西又東 五大洲中靡不至

Steamship song The people from the West are skilled at crafting machines; Their many rare skills and unusual devices defy description. But the most artfully rendered are cannons and ships; The ship! How marvelous is its construction! It speeds along with no power from sail or oar, Crossing the sea more easily than walking on flat land. Iron is carved into a paddlewheel more than ten feet wide; Two wheels are fixed to each side, like a bird’s wings. In the center lies a furnace, where they burn coal; Dark smoke spews into the sky as the flames are stoked high. The axle groans and the wheel angrily churns the frothy waves; It shoots like lightning over ten thousand leagues, wideeyed and intent. What propels this sturdy fortress across the water? The whales cower and flee, and the sea monsters take cover. Cutting a swath across the oceans, running west and east; Of all five continents there is none out of reach.

52

Chapter One



吁嗟斯船何為作 元據通商貪大利



蠻奴貪利固其常

20

邪教蠱人真可惴



別有毒烟啖侗氓



不禁蠧國禁則恚



巨礟霹靂來凌轢 饕虐寔酷於魑魅

25

君不聞夏禹巡行乘四載



周穆盤遊驅八驥



一為濟民一逸樂

30

暴戻如彼世無類 噫我赫赫日本國 神風吹海百蠻悸



火輪船火輪船當速歸 否則爾屍將為鮫鱷餌

Ah, for what ends has this ship been made? Opening commerce after all is how they sate their cravings for profit. And craving profit is surely the nature of these barbarian wretches; Their wicked religion corrupts the people—truly it is terrifying. What’s more they feed a poison smoke to idiots and scoundrels; Unless banned, it will destroy a country—but to ban it angers them. The giant cannons come thundering to menace and bully; Their rapaciousness is truly hideous: worse than ghouls and goblins. Recall how King Yu of the Xia made the rounds on four vehicles; And how King Mu of the Zhou made tours on an eightsteed carriage. One went to save the people, and the other sought diversion; But violence the likes of this has no equal in all the world. If to our splendid Land of the Rising Sun, A divine wind should blow across the sea, the barbarians would shudder. Steamship! Steamship! You had better go home; Or else sharks and crocodiles will feed on your corpse!42

Ryūhoku uses the poem not only to record the visual detail of the scene, but also to penetrate through to what he sees as the menace lurking behind the dazzling spectacle. He articulates what was the consensus of his contemporaries concerning Western greed for profit and incorporates references to recent developments in China. Famous rulers from Chinese antiquity stand in the poem as normative models of propriety, whether in saving the people or in diversion, a standard that the Western aggressors fail to meet. Many of Ryūhoku’s contemporaries in Edo also made special trips to observe Perry’s ships firsthand, and their poetry collections often contain short poems recording their impressions.43 Yet, long before Perry’s arrival, the subject of Western ships was something of an established topic for Japanese kanshi poets. Perhaps the most famous example is the poem Rai San’yō (1780–1832) wrote in 1818 when he visited Nagasaki, a site that caught the interest of many of San’yō’s contemporaries because it was one of the few portals through which Edo period Japan maintained regular contact with the outside world. San’yō’s lengthy poem describes the arrival of a Dutch trading ship at the port and the frenetic dispatch of Japan’s coastal military to meet it. San’yō’s poem, unlike Ryūhoku’s, focuses on the Japanese response, and there is little sense of awe. It concludes with the following two couplets, expressing sentiments similar to those of Ryūhoku but in a decidedly different tone:



A Young Poet Comes of Age

嗚呼小醜何煩憂目蒿 萬里逐利在貪饕 毋乃割鷄費牛刀 毋乃瓊瑤換木桃

53

Ah, the wretches, why do they come to vex our eyes, pursuing ten thousand miles their greed for gain Do we not bear ox-knives to kill a mere chicken, trade our most precious jewels for thorns?44

San’yō’s poem thus ends with both a suggestion that the Nagasaki port’s response to the approach of the ship is overwrought, since the “Red Hairs” are harmless enough, and a somewhat ambivalent statement about foreign trade in general. When Ryūhoku wrote his poem a generation later, however, knowledge of China’s disastrous losses in the Opium Wars and the perception of imminent threat from the United States had made San’yō’s insouciance untenable.45 The American ships remained a source of concern for Ryūhoku, who continued recording information about them in his diary, even when it was merely a confirmation that nothing had changed.46

The Young Ryūhoku’s Poetic Circle Such was the tense backdrop against which Ryūhoku began his new routine of service to the Tokugawa shogunate. Much of his time was taken up with the task of editing Tokugawa jikki (A true record of the Tokugawa), a massive authoritative history of the shogunate over which Ryūhoku’s grandfather and father had both labored for many years. Alongside his engagement in such work, Ryūhoku made further preparations to assume his official responsibilities as a shogunal tutor, took part in regularly scheduled assemblies of officials at Edo Castle, and was also called on to carry out guard duty there several times each month. In this way, the first part of 1854 saw Ryūhoku gradually assume many of his father’s obligations to the shogunate, but it was also a time when Ryūhoku took charge of the academic and literary gatherings that were held at the family’s residence in Edo’s Shitaya district (fig. 1.3). Ryūhoku’s diary says little about the private academy that he ran there, but it does note the occasional entry or exit of some of the students who enrolled to study Literary Sinitic under him. It also records the subject matter of reading groups that Ryūhoku organized and led: gatherings that met regularly to read and discuss a particular Chinese classic text. Such scholarly meetings at his home brought Ryūhoku into closer association with an expanded range of individuals, including figures active outside the shogunate. In addition, Ryūhoku was the host of a shikai, or Sinitic poetry gathering, that met regularly at his home, and it was as shikai convener that he began to make his appearance on the Edo literary scene. The first poem in Kankei shōkō that Ryūhoku composed at one of these gatherings comes immediately after the poem on the American steamships, but its mood could not form a more pointed contrast. Titled “A fine spring day at a pondside pavilion,” the work exemplifies another mode of literary activity that occupied the young Ryūhoku: the com­ position of poetry within a social setting on assigned, often conventional or classically inspired, topics.

Fig. 1.3 Map of the Ueno, Shitaya, and Outer Kanda area (Ueno Shitaya Soto Kanda hen ezu), Kaei 3 (1850). 1. Narushima residence (on Neribei-kōji) through 1854; 2. residence of Yaguchi Seizaburō = Kensai; 3. residence of Seki Tetsuzō = Sekkō; 4. site of Narushima residence after 1855. Collection of the author.



A Young Poet Comes of Age



池亭春霽

春晷將隨柳綿長 暖波又漲舊池塘 遊鱗攪鏡跳蘋渚 嫩鴨學花翻釣航 鋪草換茵供睡美 汲泉注硯覺詩香 更縁吟侶同杯杓 一潰愁城入醉郷

55

A fine spring day at a pondside pavilion Spring sunlight, like the willow strands, grows longer; Warm waters have come again to swell the old pond. Swimming fish disturb the mirror, jumping around the reed islet; Charming ducks mimic blossoms, fluttering about the fishing boats. Spreading grasses instead of cushions makes the rest more lovely; Moistening the inkstone with well water makes the poems fragrant. Blessed with fellow poets with whom I can share a cup, Walls of melancholy tumble down as I enter the realm of tipsiness.47

If the intrusion of American steamships had violently disrupted the tranquility of Ryū­ hoku’s eighteenth spring, we see serenity restored to some extent in the continuity of natural cycles referenced in the poem’s opening couplet. In contrast to the “angry waves” churned up by Perry’s warship, the only disturbance to the placid shimmer of the pond’s surface comes from playful fish, which along with the ducks seem at ease in the presence of the bucolic fishing boats—a far cry from the sea creatures sent “cowering” in Perry’s wake. Whereas the poet seems to stand apart from the scene as an onlooker in the first half, the third couplet achieves his communion with and integration into the elegant setting. Not only is the natural world the object of the poet’s gaze in these lines, but elements from it such as the grasses and well water are physically incorporated into his activity of sociable versification. The sole hint of discontent emerges only retroactively in the final line, but no sooner do these figurative “walls of melancholy” take form than they disappear, as the refined diversion works its effect as antidote. In addition to exemplifying a contrasting form of poetic production, “A fine spring day at a pondside pavilion” and other poems composed at Ryūhoku’s regular shikai also show him beginning to establish a place for himself in Edo’s literary scene. Ryūhoku’s diary notes that this was the first shikai gathering he held that year and also provides the names of the “fellow poets” he makes reference to in line 7 of the poem. The diary entry reads: [First month.] Twenty-sixth day. It was overcast and cold, and the wind blew crazily. I convened the opening meeting of a small poetry gathering. Yaguchi Kensai, Iwa[matsu] Tōsai, Funa[bashi] Seitan, Seki Sekkō, and Okano Kanae came. We drank a bit. 廿六日丙寅陰寒狂風小詩發會矢口謙齋岩董齋舟潭關雪江岡野鼎來小飲 48

Literary Sinitic prose esteems concision, and, in keeping with this traditional stylistic criterion, Ryūhoku often used abbreviations and even codes for proper names in his kanbun diary, making identification of people and places challenging at times. It was, more­ over, a common practice for Japanese individuals writing kanbun in the Edo period to style themselves using a Sinified version of their own family name. The simplest vari­ation

56

Chapter One

would be to use only a single character of the family name, as Ryūhoku does for Funabashi and Iwamatsu, followed by the sobriquet.49 The first man Ryūhoku lists in his diary entry was a shogunal official to whom he was especially close, though, as will soon become clear, this would be the last time Yaguchi Kensai 矢口謙斎 (1817–79) visited Ryūhoku’s poetry gathering. Just one month later, the shogunate ordered him to take up a new post on the country’s northern frontier.50 Iwamatsu Tōsai 岩松董齋 was a poet and scholar who also offered instruction in calligraphy.51 Okano Kanae 岡野鼎 was an artist who lived near Ryūhoku’s home in the Shitaya neighborhood.52 In addition to these three men, Ryūhoku’s shikai had attracted two particularly prominent members of Edo’s literary establishment. Most distinguished among the five attendees was Confucian scholar and poet Funabashi Seitan, whose literary talents had earned him early recognition from the previous generation of poetic luminaries.53 Though originally from Saitama, Seitan lived near Ryūhoku in the Shitaya district of Edo, where he made a living teaching poetry and calligraphy. Seitan was a central member of Ryū­ hoku’s shikai for the next two years, attending it regularly until his death in 1856.54 His stature is evident from the fact that he was one of two poets whom Ryūhoku asked to critique the first volume of Kankei shōkō. The marginal comments and suggestions of Sei­tan appear in Ryūhoku’s poetry journal alongside those of Asaka Gonsai, a distinguished Confucian scholar who taught both men. In addition to Seitan, the calligrapher Seki Sekkō was present at this inaugural meeting in 1854 and would be one of its regular participants.55 Sekkō also provided his calligraphic services for several of Ryūhoku’s works, and the two remained close into the Meiji period. It is difficult to determine when Ryūhoku first became acquainted with Sekkō and Seitan, but it is clear that long before they began to attend Ryūhoku’s shikai, these two men were well known to each other. Seki Sekkō’s poetry manuscripts show frequent interaction between himself and Seitan in the 1840s, and, just as Ryūhoku would later do with Kankei shōkō, Sekkō asked Seitan to correct and comment on his own poetic manuscripts.56 Seitan and Sekkō had also collaborated on several literary projects in the years before their participation in Ryūhoku’s shikai.57 Moreover, both Seitan and Sekkō often went on excursions with and attended the poetry gatherings of Ōnuma Chinzan, who headed the Shitaya Ginsha (Shitaya Poetry Society). Chinzan was probably the most prominent kanshi poet active in Edo at the time, but it would be a few more years before Ryūhoku also began to associate with him as Seitan and Sekkō did. Another individual who was part of Seitan and Sekkō’s circle and who would soon join Ryūhoku’s shikai was the seal carver Kaneko Sakō 金子蓑香 (1815–92), who often appears in Sekkō’s poetry manuscripts as a fellow companion on various excursions undertaken by Sekkō (and occasionally Seitan too) in the 1840s.58 One additional individual apparently not present at this first meeting of Ryūhoku’s shikai but who nevertheless became a regular attendee during its first year was the poet Ono Goin 小野梧陰 (d. 1855).59 Several of Seki Sekkō’s poetry manuscripts have been preserved in the Gakken Bunko at Japan’s National Diet Library, and they can help elucidate how Ryūhoku interacted with Sekkō and other senior poets as he made his debut in Edo’s literary scene. At the time, Ryūhoku had not yet begun to use the sobriquet “Ryūhoku,” but was known instead as “Kakudō.”60 In Sekkō’s most extensive poetry collection, Sekkōrō shishō, the



A Young Poet Comes of Age

57

poem he wrote for Ryūhoku’s inaugural shikai appears with the note “composed at Kakudō-sensei’s gathering.” As with the above poem, it appears under the topic heading “A fine spring day at a pondside pavilion” and reads:

拍拍羽聲鳧作雙 雨餘氷洋水淙淙



文章池面皆花影



歌管枝頭是鳥腔

5

夕照惹紅來酒席



春波分綠上書窓



晴如今日難多遇 莫厭頻頻倒玉缸

With the beat of flapping wings, the ducks form pairs; After the rain comes the trickling flow of the pond’s icy waters. On the written page and the pond’s surface, all is floral splendor; Singing voices, flute music, and from branch-tips the chirping of birds. The evening sunlight brings a tinge of red as I join the banquet; Ripples on spring waters reflect the greenery as I enter the study. A fine day such as this one is rare to encounter; No need to begrudge: pour and pour again from the jade wine cask!61

Like the poem Ryūhoku composed for the gathering, Sekkō’s also opens with reference to the progression of the seasons. Though Sekkō’s speaker is less directly interactive with his environment than Ryūhoku’s, there is a similar emphasis on harmony with the natural scene, as Sekkō draws analogies in the second couplet between visual and aural patterns of the natural and human worlds. Both poems show the complex parallelism required of regulated verse octaves in the middle couplets (lines 3–6), though Sekkō’s is perhaps even more overt. Befitting the auspicious occasion as Ryūhoku’s first shikai of the year, Sekkō’s poem is similarly festive, almost raucous, in tone. Those who attended Ryūhoku’s shikai were informed in advance of the day’s shukudai, or assigned topic(s), for which they would prepare compositions beforehand. The participants would share their poems in turn with the group, which would offer comments. Either at the event itself or more commonly in subsequent corrections to submitted manuscripts, the shikai leader or others might make specific recommendations for improvements to the text. Occasionally these might be so thoroughgoing as to transform the meaning of a line or even the entire poem, but more often they amounted to minor revisions that made the poem better reflect established word usage or brought it into closer agreement with Chinese tonal regulations. The version of Sekkō’s poem that I have cited here is from a text that incorporates two such corrections to the poem’s wording, though it is unclear if these changes were proposed at Ryūhoku’s shikai itself or at some later stage. Another manuscript of Sekkō’s in the Gakken Bunko archive reveals an alternative version, in which the second character of the fifth line is given as 陽 rather than 照, and the final character of the seventh line is first shown as 得, which is then crossed out and replaced in the manuscript with 遇.62 Although the corrections are minor in this case, they nevertheless provide a valuable source of insight into contemporary standards of evaluation and can also shed light on what practitioners of kanshi composition understood their project to be. In the case of

58

Chapter One

the first revision, the contextual meaning of these two characters is virtually identical, and the shift from 陽 to 照 seems to be premised on consideration of the patterned distribution of level (平 Ch. ping; J. hyō) and oblique (仄 Ch. ze; J. soku) tones.63 As explained in the introduction, this formal feature is distinct from the more basic requirement of end-rhyme, a characteristic that can often be identified in Sinitic poetry by even a casual observer who knows only Japanese. Unlike end-rhyme, the distinction between level and oblique tones is a quality almost completely lost in the Sinoxenic pronunciation of Chinese characters. To preserve the level and oblique tone regulations, practitioners would need to depend either on sheer memorization or on reference works that identified a given character’s tone. The correction to Sekkō’s manuscript suggests that such observation of tonal requirements, though virtually inaudible, was nevertheless deemed desirable.64 In the case of the second revision, the shift from 得, “obtain,” to 遇, “encounter,” is not based on tone since both are oblique; rather the change seems motivated by concerns of diction and usage patterns, perhaps the tendency to use the former in association with the acquisition of something tangible and the latter in association with a fortuitous meeting. In addition to the presentation of poems on topics assigned in advance, another regular component of the shikai gathering was the opportunity for participants to compose extemporaneous poems. In contrast to the shukudai topics that were assigned in advance, sekidai topics were revealed at the gathering itself. Often the challenge of spontaneously composing a poem on the sekidai topic would be further heightened by the imposition of some arbitrary formal constraint. The inmoku, or rhyme category, that each participant had to use in his/her composition might be assigned at random by the drawing of lots, for example, or determined by the allotment of individual characters from a famous line of poetry. Though the nearly complete absence of writings by Ryūhoku before Kaei 7 (1854) makes it difficult to be absolutely certain, it is reasonable to conclude that this occasion was not only Ryūhoku’s first shikai of the year, but the first time Ryūhoku had ever convened such a gathering.65 There are roughly a dozen other poems in Seki Sekkō’s poetry manuscripts that are explicitly identified as being composed for “Kakudō-sensei’s gathering,” and another dozen or so can be determined to have been written under such circumstances. Yet, judging from their placement in Sekkō’s manuscripts, all of these poems were composed after the above poem.66 Sekkō’s manuscripts also shed important light on the comprehensiveness of Ryūhoku’s poetry journals. Sekkō’s references to compositional events at Ryūhoku’s that are not reflected in the latter’s poetry journals make it clear that these journals are selective, containing only a portion of the poems Ryūhoku wrote in a given year.67 Such poetry composition sessions were a fixture of the literary scene in Edo and other major Japanese cities during the late Tokugawa period. In one common form, known as a getsureikai, or “regular monthly gathering,” an eminent poet would fix a single day of the month on which the sessions would convene. Often, the poet would circulate an announcement at the beginning of the year listing in advance one or two assigned topics for each monthly meeting.68 Unlike more established figures, Ryūhoku conducted his earliest poetry gatherings on a smaller scale. Participation at Ryūhoku’s



A Young Poet Comes of Age

59

monthly shikai seems to have varied considerably, ranging from one or two guests to well over a dozen. He did not necessarily hold the gathering on the same day each month, nor does he appear to have published a list of assigned topics at the beginning of the year. It is, however, possible to read his poetry journal alongside other extant materials in order to piece together the sequence of poetry gatherings that he held and the topics he assigned during this inaugural year. Some of the poems that Ryūhoku wrote for his poetry gathering are identified as such in Kankei shōkō, but many of them are not explicitly labeled. For example, there is nothing to indicate that a work appearing in the poetry manuscript under the title “An image of Su Wu eating snow” was composed for Ryūhoku’s shikai gathering, and yet a memo that shikai attendee Seki Sekkō pasted into the Kaei 7 (1854) volume of his scrapbook shows that it almost certainly was (fig. 1.4). Addressed familiarly to “Mr. Sekkō” (Sekkō-kun) and presumably written by Ryūhoku, the notice reads: “Twelfth month, sixteenth day. Final meeting [of the year]. Assigned topic: An image of Su Wu eating snow.” Perhaps Ryūhoku distributed such slips of paper at the shikai to inform participants of the assigned topic for the next meeting. In table 1.1, I have tried to recon­ struct the topics and dates of Ryūhoku’s shikai based on the sequence of poems in Kankei shōkō, notations to them, references to shikai gatherings in Ryūhoku’s diary, the sequence of poems in Seki Sekkō’s manuscripts, notations to them, and notices preserved in Sekkō’s scrapbooks. The incomplete and sometimes contradictory information available in these disparate sources means that some of my conjectures are necessarily tentative, especially for the summer months, when Ryūhoku’s shikai meetings grew more sporadic. Nevertheless, the reconstructed list of topics provides an overview to the kind of poetic composition that Ryūhoku pursued at his shikai in this inaugural year. The most prominent feature of the poetic topics in this list is their connection to the calendar. Many topics explicitly mention the seasons, and others invoke them through reference to customs or items associated with a particular time of year, such as enjoying the evening coolness in the peak of summer or putting away the “bamboo wife” pillow (fig. 1.5) once the summer heat had subsided and people no longer needed to sleep with their bodies wrapped around these hollow wicker cylinders to facilitate ventilation. Although conventional, these temporally inspired topics also suggest something of Ryūhoku’s emerging sensibilities. The topic for the intercalary seventh month, for example, is seasonally appropriate because the gathering would have occurred at the time of the annual rice harvest, but interestingly it is the harvested grain specifically transformed into aesthetic object that catches Ryūhoku’s eye. It was not uncommon for urban kanshi poets in the Edo period to use brief excursions into the countryside as occasions to write poems romanticizing pastoral scenery or endeavoring to demonstrate the poet’s familiarity with rural lifeways, but here Ryūhoku brings agrarian practice into focus and contains it within the urban space.69 Ōtani Masao has pointed out the ways in which the first volume of Ryūhoku’s poetry journal shows the poet’s frequent depiction of the small sensory details of the everyday urban setting: an attentiveness that would inform Ryūhoku’s account of the Yanagibashi pleasure quarters a few years later.70 In future years, Ryūhoku’s shikai would increasingly invite participants to compose on particular episodes from Chinese and Japanese literature or history, but, as a whole,

Fig. 1.4 (left) Slip of paper from Seki Sekkō’s scrapbook for the year Kaei 7 (1854). One of the very last items included for that year, it bears Sekkō’s name at left. Courtesy of the National Archives of Japan, Tokyo. Also included as item 308 in SSH, 2:17. Fig. 1.5 (below) Slips of paper with poetry topics, from Sekkō’s scrap­ book for Kaei 7 (1854) listing assigned top­ics that are surely for Ryūhoku’s gathering. The item at right gives “Parting from a ‘bamboo wife’ pillow” as “the as­signed topic for the twentysixth,” and the item at left lists “An image of Hideyoshi” as the “assigned topic for the sixteenth.”Courtesy of the Na­tional Archives of Japan, Tokyo. Also included as items 295–96, SSH, 2:9.



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Table 1.1 Poem topics assigned at Ryūhoku’s poetry gathering in Kaei 7/Ansei 1 (1854) Date Topic Translation KS location 01.26 02.12 02.29 04.15 (05.10) 05.26 06.20 (07.23) 07i.26 08.16 09.16 10.16 11.16 12.16

池亭春霽 柳塘春月 杏村春雨 新夏 題豐太閤像 水軒晩涼 咏螢 別竹夫人 瓶中稻花 湖樓曉望 秋圃 霜曉 聞霰 蘇武齧雪圖

A fine spring day at a pondside pavilion 1:3a–b Spring moon on Willowbank 1:3b–4a Spring rain in an apricot village 1:5a–5b Early summer 1:10a–b On an image of Hideyoshi 1:12b–13b Evening cool by the waterside 1:15a–b On fireflies 1:15b–16a Parting from a “bamboo wife” pillow 1:21a Flowering grain in a vase 1:25b Dawn view at a lakeside mansion 1:26a Autumn fields 1:28a–b Frosty dawn 1:33b–34a Listening to hail fall 1:36a An image of Su Wu eating snow 1:36a–37a

Note: The two italicized translations indicate cases where I am conjecturing about which of the poems in KS was assigned as a topic at that particular gathering. In the case of “Early summer,” for example, another possibility for the assigned topic on this date is “A whimsical composition on an image of the procession of one hundred ghouls” 戯題百鬼夜行圖. It is possible that “Early summer” was actually a topic of extemporaneous composition from the gathering or simply the topic of a poem Ryūhoku composed independently around the same time. Dates in parentheses indicate cases where the documents lead me to hypothesize that Ryūhoku had planned a shikai gathering for that date but ultimately held it a few days earlier. For example, Seki Sekkō’s scrapbook contains two memos from Kaei 7 (1854) that are surely announcements from Ryūhoku’s shikai. One gives “Parting from a ‘bamboo wife’ pillow” as “the assigned topic for the twenty-sixth” (item 295, SSH, 2:9), and the other lists “An image of Hideyoshi” as the “assigned topic for the sixteenth” (item 296, SSH, 2:9); see figure 1.5. A poem on the first topic appears in Ryūhoku’s Kankei shōkō at a point suggesting a date around 07.26 as the likely date of composition, but Ryūhoku’s diary has no reference to a shikai on that day; instead, the gathering was held on 07.23. The position of a poem on the second topic in Kankei shōkō likewise suggests a date of composition near 05.16, but again there is no reference in Ryūhoku’s diary to holding a poetry session that day; instead, the gathering seems to have taken place on 05.09 or 05.10. It is also possible that Ryūhoku held shikai gatherings on 05.16 and 07.26 but did not record them in his diary. The absence of a shikai meeting in the third month may reflect the fact that this was the month in which Ryūhoku’s family formally announced Kadō’s death; as the period of outward mourning would not end until 04.22, holding a shikai in the third month may have been judged unseemly. Sources: KS; KN; SSS; SSH.

the topics in this first year show a comparative lack of reference to specific events or dependence on specific source texts. There are some exceptions, such as the final topic, which required participants to compose on the subject of Su Wu (ca. 140–60 bce), a heroic figure whom Emperor Wu of Han dispatched as an envoy to the northern Xiongnu nomadic tribes. Yet even this topic had a certain seasonal connection in its reference to the snow Su Wu ate while being held captive by the Xiongnu, which symbolizes the toils he endured in carrying out his mission. It was, moreover, not just the shukudai that showed such sensitivity to seasonal progression; the extemporaneous poems composed as sekidai often bore some connection to the calendar and sometimes to the shukudai

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topic as well. From Ryūhoku’s poetry journal, it is clear that, in addition to the preassigned topic “An image of Su Wu eating snow,” those attending Ryūhoku’s final shikai of the year were asked to compose extemporaneously on topics taken from the sequence “Ten kinds of desolation on a cold night” by the seventeenth-century scholar Li Shixiong (1602–86). Beyond the wintry mood these poems conjured, however, there was an unmistakable thematic link as well, for Li Shixiong was a noted Ming loyalist, and he composed this sequence about ten years after the Manchus had seized Beijing.71 Li’s refusal to serve the Qing no doubt made his poetry sequence seem an especially appropriate fit for that month’s assigned topic of Su Wu, whose heroic refusal to submit to his northern captors was the focal point of his narrative and of Ryūhoku’s shikai composition, which contains the couplet 赫赫大漢天子使 強項豈屈腥羶徒

Magnificent, this emissary of the Great Han Emperor! How could his strong neck bend before those rank curs?72

The work singles out Su Wu as a “truly great man” 真丈夫 (Ch. zhen zhangfu; J. shinjōfu) for his steadfast and selfless service to the Western Han emperor, but, in its exaltation of the principled vassal’s loyalty to the state in the face of threats embodied by “rank” ethnic others, the poem resonated not only with the situation of Li Shixiong during the Ming-Qing transition, but with Ryūhoku’s circumstances in mid-nineteenth-century Japan as well.

A Latter-Day Su Wu Ryūhoku’s celebration in this shikai poem of Su Wu’s faithful service to the Han emperor might seem to be no more than a conventional allusive gesture, but the episode was far from a lifeless abstraction mechanically copied from the pages of remote Chinese antiquity. In spite of the chronological distance, Su Wu remained a familiar paragon and exemplar to educated nineteenth-century Japanese.73 His narrative was one of many that gave structure to their referential world. Reaching the climactic couplets of Ryūhoku’s poem, shikai member Funabashi Seitan was so stirred that he wrote in the manuscript’s margins: “Reading these lines makes one clutch his arms in fervor!”—a comment that suggests in its very physicality the forms of overlap and identification produced among heroic referent, poet, and reader. Moreover, the story of Su Wu had a vividness and immediacy that were only amplified by broad correspondences to present-day events: parallels that Ryūhoku was clearly cognizant of, for he needed to look no farther than his own shikai confrères to discover a latter-day Su Wu. Earlier that year, shikai attendee Yaguchi Kensai had been chosen to carry out a mission that Ryūhoku explicitly compared to Su Wu’s. Ryūhoku’s diary records how Yaguchi came to inform him that he had been ordered by the shogunate to go to Ezo, the northern island that is today called Hokkaido but that had an ambiguous and



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contested status vis-à-vis the shogun’s realm in the mid-nineteenth century.74 Since its founding, the Tokugawa shogunate had for the most part been content to leave management of Japan’s northern periphery in the hands of the locally based Matsumae clan. Russia’s southward advance was the principal catalyst that led the shogunate to assume direct control over Ezo and the affairs of the region’s indigenous people at the end of the eighteenth century.75 In so doing, the shogunate asserted its exclusive prerogative to engage in diplomacy, moving quickly to seek better information about the area over which it now claimed unmediated authority. In the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly in response to perceived threats of Russian incursions, the shogunate dispatched various individuals to explore the area, resulting in a proliferation of cartographic and naturalistic knowledge of the northern periphery. In the spring of 1854, Ryūhoku’s friend Yaguchi Kensai had been dispatched to serve on the very front lines of this project. Moreover, a few months after he had taken up his post in Ezo, Yaguchi joined another official, Suzuki Shigehisa, in volunteering to carry out a dangerous exploratory mission of the island of Karafuto, which lies even farther to the north. Their journey is the subject of Suzuki’s Karafuto nikki (Diary of Karafuto), completed later that year.76 When Matsuura Takeshirō (1818–88), one of the period’s most noted northern explorers, prepared his annotated version of Suzuki’s text in 1857, he was so impressed by its accounts of Yaguchi’s bold actions on the expedition that he wrote, “I have not met this Yaguchi, but when I read to this point I was struck by his spirit and wanted to applaud.”77 The details of Yaguchi’s future heroism would not have been known to Ryūhoku at the time he first learned of his friend’s impending departure earlier that spring, but participation in this mission provided Yaguchi a singular opportunity to offer his service to the state. Ryūhoku thus chose a lengthy poetic form in which to extend his farewell, writing on a grand scale that inscribes Kensai’s mission as a matter of paramount national importance. To be sure, such send-off poems often contain some measure of exaggeration or de rigueur politeness, but Ryūhoku’s poem also betrays his ambivalence in watching Yaguchi depart on the kind of exciting adventure for which he yearned. The first part of the poem introduces the mission and Yaguchi’s role in it, framed with references to additional historical exemplars, but in these nine couplets Ryūhoku also touches on his own relationship with Kensai and self-referentially inscribes his own act of presenting the poem to his friend: Sending off Yaguchi Naokai, who has received an official order to go to Ezo 送矢口直養蒙 台命如蝦夷

大島阻海水滔滔 其人狡黠類鼯猱 魯西亞國接其北 地大兵強且貪饕

5

來正疆界請互市 抗衡豈啻尉佗敖

A great island lies across the sea, the waters spread vast; Its people are cunning, like squirrels and monkeys. The country of Russia lies just to the north; Its territory great, its troops mighty, and its avarice insatiable. They come to rectify the borders, to establish trade; Surely it is not only the presumption of Zhao Tuo that you will combat.

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10

廟堂選擇奇材士 此行何異陸生勞 矢口直養在員中 之子元稱黌舍豪 春風二月發東武



杏雲梨雪映錦袍



慷慨平生嗜麹蘖 吸盡百川真鯨鼇

15

臨別吾贐以一語



壯士謬事因酕醄



如今任責重且大 請將苦茗換醇醪

The court has selected men of rare talent; Can this expedition be any different from Lu Jia’s labors? And you, Yaguchi Naokai, are among the members, You are known after all as the hero of the academy. As spring winds blew this second month, you left Eastern Musashi; Apricot clouds and pear snow set off your embroidered garments. Full of spirit, you have always been fond of drink; You might suck dry a hundred rivers—like a whale or a giant turtle! And now as we prepare to part, I give you a word to send you off; When great men have erred, the fault has been in drunkenness. And now your responsibility is heavy and grave; I pray you will give up your wine for bitter tea!

In its focus on military strength and territorial avarice, the second couplet presents a rather conventional view of Russians and other Westerners that resonates with Ryūhoku’s earlier poem on Perry’s steamships. The first couplet, however, does not represent a typical image of the Ainu, whom late Edo period Japanese travelers almost uniformly depicted as naïvely honest, even gullible.78 Indeed the travelogue of Suzuki Shigehisa, who accompanied Yaguchi Kensai on the mission to Karafuto, describes the Ainu as “lovable in their childlike simple honesty.”79 Perhaps Ryūhoku’s depiction of the Ainu as “cunning” reflects an emerging view of them that saw their traditional lifeways as being corrupted by the introduction of commerce with the Matsumae. One alternative possibility is that Ryūhoku’s opening couplet refers not to the Ainu but to the Matsumae clan, for their exploitation of the Ainu was also well known to those in Edo.80 In any case, Ryūhoku goes on to raise the rhetorical stakes in the third and fourth couplets by comparing Tokugawa Japan’s assertion of authority over its northern borders to an analogous situation from the unification of the Han: an episode that would have been familiar to him and Yaguchi from the account in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian.81 The incident began early during the Eastern Han dynasty, when Zhao Tuo of Southern Yue became dissatisfied with the title “king” that had been bestowed upon him by the Han emperor and provoc­ atively adopted the title of “Emperor Wu of Southern Yue.” In 180 bce, Emperor Wen sent Lu Jia to chastise Zhao Tuo for his presumptuousness in assuming the title and in infringing on other imperial status symbols. Lu Jia’s mission was successful, and Zhao Tuo accepted the emperor’s singular authority and renounced his claims to imperial status. Ryūhoku’s analogy thus envisions Yaguchi’s mission as one intended to restore Japan’s rightful dominion over the northern periphery by chastising the Russian interlopers and refuting their spurious claims to sovereignty over the northern islands. In introducing such historical figures into the poem, Ryūhoku not only effects the overlap of Yaguchi and Lu Jia through overt comparison (as in line 8), but by his very act of allusion he reaffirms himself and Yaguchi as members of a shared discursive space



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where such references circulate as readily intelligible currency. Premised on shared familiarity with a textual canon written in Literary Sinitic, the poem shows how kanshi functioned as a common idiom and expression of intimacy between men at the time, especially those who had acquired or refined their skills as readers and writers together. Yaguchi had been appointed an assistant to Narushima Kadō in the editing of shogu­ nal histories in 1849, and it is presumably in this context that he and Ryūhoku became familiar with one another. In spite of the nearly twenty-year gap in their ages, Ryūhoku shows an easy familiarity toward Yaguchi, admonishing him waggishly to trade his sake for tea, for example, joshing him about his idiosyncrasies, and recalling their shared experiences.82 In the remainder of the piece, the poet shifts his attention to the future, imagining what Yaguchi will encounter once he has left Ryūhoku’s side. Ryūhoku begins this section by emphasizing Yaguchi’s self-sacrifice in service to the state and introducing the comparison to Su Wu, who staved off thirst and hunger during his northern captivity by consuming snow and nibbling on the fibers that adorned the staff conferred on him as imperial envoy. The poem continues:

聞之一笑揮鞭去

20

威氣凜凜衝天高 棄軀報國宜努力



慕否雪窖齧節旄



遠征想像武侯表 五月渡瀘入不毛

25

梅林連旬路險澁 山氣滃欝海氣臊 窮境卻覺詩料富



佳句好聯不停毫

30

更知一葦航海夜 月白蝦夷萬里濤 清嘯叩舷獨不寐



吟魂翻應憶吾曹 又知北山大雪曉



老羆怪鶻隔壁嗥

35

魘夢一斷青燈下 郷思如織心忉忉



私情孰與君恩重

Hearing this, you laugh, and with a wave of your whip you are off, Your air is formidable and stern, striking the high heavens. Forfeiting your body to repay the nation, how splendid your effort! Admire you not him who nibbled on the envoy’s staff in the snow? Your distant expedition recalls Wuhou’s memorial, Where he crossed the Lu in the fifth month to enter a barren land.83 Plum groves bloom for weeks, the road treacherous; Mountain airs, dark and gloomy, briny sea mists. But you will find in such remote borderlands rich material for poems; With lovely words and elegant couplets, your brush will never stop. I know when your little boat crosses the sea by night, The moon shining pale, a thousand leagues away in Ezo. Whistling a clear tune and tapping the prow, you alone lie sleepless; As you chant, your spirit will look back and remember us. I also know that when dawn comes to the great snowy north, The old grizzlies and eerie falcons will cry out beyond your walls. Waking from troubled dreams, beneath the pale lamplight; Thoughts of home will weave through your mind and weigh it down. Which burden is heavier: personal feelings or duty to the lord?

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40

忠肝義膽天所褒 男兒須要功名立 千載一時難再遭 既期他日凌雲勢 健鷹一搏脱韝條



請子若遇羶腥輩 勿遺缺腰閒三尺日本刀

Your loyal and righteous guts will be rewarded by heaven. Every man must prove his merit and make his name; Once in a thousand years, the time never comes again. I know your spirit will pierce the clouds some day; A sturdy hawk taking off in a flash from a leather bowstring guard. I ask that if you encounter any of those rank curs, Don’t hesitate to use your sidearm: a three-foot Japanese sword!84

To compose a poem of this length was no trivial undertaking and is thus an index of Ryūhoku’s intimacy with Yaguchi. In this second half of the poem, Ryūhoku repeatedly puts himself in Yaguchi’s position, anticipating the snowy terrain and characteristic fauna the latter could be expected to encounter en route (hawks were an important local product of Matsumae, and bears were central to Ainu material as well as spiritual culture). Ryūhoku further imagines the feelings of doubt and homesickness his friend might have, while also expressing envy at the literary opportunities the journey would afford him.85 Beyond attesting to the strength of his bond of friendship with Yaguchi, Ryūhoku’s parting poem says a great deal about his sense of “repaying one’s debt to the nation” 報 國 (Ch. baoguo; J. hōkoku), a term he uses in line 21 of this poem and elsewhere, and that was emblematic of the period’s yūkoku ethos described above. Ryūhoku does mention his friend’s mastery of the classical canon and his competence as a composer of Sinitic verse, but it is Yaguchi’s “sword” rather than his “books” that attracts the bulk of the poet’s attention. The militant images, such as the sword of the concluding couplet and the whip Yaguchi is imagined to wield as he bids farewell (line 19), form a pointed contrast to the same images in Ryūhoku’s more introspective poems. Whereas Ryūhoku’s own iron whip hung limply at his waist in the New Year poem quoted earlier, Yaguchi’s whip sails through the air with an impressive dynamism. Far from an inert decoration, Yaguchi’s sword (line 44) is imagined in use against “rank” foreign foes. The contrast suggests an almost vicarious quality, as though Ryūhoku imagines fulfilling his own frustrated desires for bold action in the composition of this poem about Yaguchi’s mission. In its diction and extrametrical structure, the line also recalls the final couplet of Rai San’yō’s wellknown poem on the Mongol Invasions; after the “divine wind” has blown and destroyed the invaders’ ships, the poet laments: 可恨東風一驅附大濤 不使羶血盡膏日本刀

How hateful that the east wind has swept them into the giant waves; Not letting any of their rank blood drench the Japanese swords!86

By couching his farewell to Yaguchi in terms that echo such a famous work, Ryūhoku not only underscores the importance of Yaguchi’s mission, but also suggests that he might well see such conflict.87



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In this way, Ryūhoku wrote repeatedly of the foreign threat Japan encountered in 1854 as a call to arms, a moment prompting brave men to rise to the occasion and repay their debt to the state with military valor. Yet Ryūhoku’s poems also reveal an awareness of the impracticality of such a strategy, at least for himself, and a begrudging resignation to the fact that he would not be taking up his sword in service to the state anytime soon. At times the poems show him imagining ways in which he could nevertheless serve the shogun from the sidelines: through his scholarly work and in his future role as tutor. The pride he took in the intimacy he was beginning to be allowed on occasion with the shogun is clear from the following quatrain, composed in the summer of his first year of service:

晩出大城

斜陽送我出城牆 湟水堤楊滿眼涼 一道清風吹徹骨 綠衫時散御爐香

Leaving Edo Castle in the evening The slanting sun sends me off, through the castle gates; The poplars on the moat embankment fill my eyes with coolness. A bracing wind blows all along the road, penetrating to the bone. From my green robes come occasional wafts of the lord’s incense.88

Though he was still in training and by no means had unfettered access, this poem shows the eighteen-year-old Ryūhoku beginning to envision a place for himself at the shogun’s side, where ideally he might serve as learned guide and dutiful advisor. The sensuous imagery in the second couplet underscores not only the physical proximity to power, but the poet’s own pleasant surprise to find himself transformed by the performance of such a role.

In the Shogun’s Service The crisis over Perry’s black ships abated to some extent when the Treaty of Kanagawa, stipulating that Japan would open the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American naval traffic, was signed on 03.03 (March 31) of 1854. Though not directly involved, Ryūhoku had tracked, to the extent that he could, the progress of these diplomatic negotiations.89 Even after the conclusion of the treaty, preparations to strengthen coastal defenses continued, and on occasion Ryūhoku was invited to accompany official inspection tours.90 The closest he came to the actual realm of diplomacy that summer was his invitation to attend a demonstration of one of the gifts made by Perry’s embassy to the shogunate. The American gifts were intended to illustrate recent technological advances and included a telegraph system, various agricultural implements, and a functioning one-quarter-scale model of a railroad that was first set up and demonstrated in Yokohama in March of 1854. In his personal journals, Commodore Perry described the Japanese reaction to the railroad with obvious satisfaction: “In the short time we have been in this bay . . . we have

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conciliated in a great degree the confidence of the authorities and people. . . . We have laid down the entire railroad track sent from the United States, and put the steam engine, tender, and car in excellent practical operation, carrying round the circle many of the astonished natives. We have exhibited and explained the use of numerous useful inventions of our country, especially implements of husbandry, and all without the occurrence of the slightest unfriendly act from either side.”91 Having concluded the treaty and completed his mission, Perry left Japan in late June, after which the railroad was dismantled and reassembled on the grounds of the Takehashi estate. It was here that the shogun Iesada made his inspection of it on 06.27 (July 21, 1854), and Ryūhoku was among those in the shogun’s retinue. In what is surely one of the earliest East Asian poems composed about a steam locomotive, Ryūhoku wrote a lengthy piece recording what he saw and reflecting on its significance.92 Ryūhoku uses the same rhyme throughout: Locomotive song 火輪車歌 I once wrote a poem called “Steamship song.” On a day in late summer, the twenty-seventh day of the sixth month, I accompanied the shogun’s great carriage to see the locomotive that the Americans had presented at the Takehashi estate. I was so overcome by feeling that I wrote another poem: “Locomotive song.” 余既有火輪船歌季夏念七陪大駕觀米利幹人所獻火輪車於竹橋邸感慨之餘又作火輪 車歌 93 5

髤雘畫屋文炳彪 裝以瓊晶飾以鏐 高三尺餘長丈許 製造異常無梁輈 不韁牛又不駕馬 但見火烈而煙浮 初聞蟄雷殷殷響



瞥來勢似騰天虯

10

一條鐵路飛輾過 奔電流星不可留 誰使之者江川子 雙臂趫捷類獼猴 竈戸開闔小鉦鳴



疾風噴地氣颼飀

15

俄頃煙斷火亦燼 轣轆聲罷轉輪休 君不聞米利幹國 幅員廣大冠萬州 蠻帥彼理何狡獪

Dark crimson paints adorn its roof: a dazzling pattern, Outfitted with crystalline glass and decorated with metal. Over three feet high and about ten feet long, Its unusual structure has no crossbeam or pulling shaft. Neither yoked to oxen, nor hitched to horses, You see only the fire burn fierce and the smoke billow up. At first you hear the rumbling sound of early spring thunder, And then it is there, like a dragon soaring toward the heavens. On the single strip of iron rail, its wheels fly past, Unstoppable, like a burst of lightning or a shooting star. And who makes this thing go? Mr. Egawa, with His two arms moving swift and nimble as a monkey.94 When the furnace door opens and closes, a small bell rings, A gust of wind strikes the earth, the steam whistle whooshes. Before long the smoke clears and the flames burn out; The clatter ceases and the wheels come to a stop. Have you not heard that the land of America, Is broad and vast, the biggest of all the nations? And that barbarian general Perry, how cunning is he!



A Young Poet Comes of Age

20

來貢方物好是求



斯車亦其貢中一 機巧精妙愕群眸



温也幸從内班後



賜觀偏拝君恩優

25

退而竊憶巧則巧



畢竟非挑玩器不



在昔姫武克商際 西旅貢厥獒於周

30

召公訓辭赫如日 不寳遠物教化修 況今黠虜心叵測



焉許其請受其賕



蝮蛇蓄毒虎匿爪 吾恐遂釀大邦憂

35

速令有司摧斯車 輪輻爲薪灌膏油



直乘北風急放火 焚盡米夷橫港舟 吾願更借尚方斬馬劍

40

一喝如雷砍彼頭

69

Offering local goods as tribute, he seeks to “establish friendly ties.”95 This train is also one of the tribute items. Its clever mechanism and splendid design dazzle the crowd’s eyes. I, Atsushi, too was fortunate to attend in the shogun’s inner circle; Allowed to observe, I can only thank the lord’s beneficence. But once I withdrew, I thought to myself: yes, the device is well-crafted, But, when all is said and done, is it anything more than a toy? Long ago when King Wu of Zhou conquered the Shang, The Western Lü presented Zhou with their mastiff hounds as tribute. But Lord Shao’s lesson was bright as the sun; “Don’t cherish things from afar,” but establish education. How much more for these wily curs whose minds cannot be fathomed! How can we permit their entreaties and accept their bribes? A viper stores up its poison; a tiger hides its claws, My fear is that we will end up brewing trouble for our great land. Quickly command your retainers to smash this train! Turn the spokes of its wheels into firewood and douse it with oil! Take advantage now of the north wind to light the fire, Torch every last Yankee ship in Yokohama! Oh would that I could borrow the “sword that can cut a horse in two” And with just one lightning thrust, I would lop off his head.96

The poem shows that, in contrast to Perry’s impressions, the response of “the natives” was not simply one of astonishment. To be sure, Ryūhoku noted how impressive he found the technology, but he suggested that it was precisely the seductiveness of such showy trinkets that a prudent ruler had to be on guard against. Also evident in these lines is how Ryūhoku was beginning to fashion a new role for himself (at least in the world of the poem) as advisor to the shogun. Drawing on a three-thousand-year-old bit of Chinese wisdom, he recommended that Japan reject the crafty bribes of these cunning barbarians, for who could fathom what ulterior motives they might conceal? As Perry wrote in his diary, no “unfriendly acts” marred the ceremony, but, in the imaginary world of Ryū­ hoku’s poem, the re-created festivities ended instead with Perry decapitated and his model railroad in flames.

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Like the earlier “Steamship song,” the work breaks naturally into two sections divided by a pivotal phrase, in this case the interjection “Have you not heard?” 君不聞 in line 17. The shorter first section resembles the earlier poem on the steamship in the breathlessness and enthusiasm with which it describes the force and dynamism of the machinery, whereas the second section offsets this wonderment with a more circumspect consideration of the larger implications of accepting such a gift. This latter section can be further subdivided into a three-part sequence that contextualizes the demonstration and Ryūhoku’s participation in it (lines 17–24), offers Ryūhoku’s independent probing of Chinese historical analogues (lines 25–34), and sketches an alternative finale to the day’s events (35–40). There are several similarities between the words Ryūhoku used to describe the model train in the poem (its measurements, its appearance, and so on) and those that he used in his diary entry for the day: so many, in fact, that Sugishita Motoaki characterizes the poem as little more than the product of “taking the prose description [of the diary] and putting it into a fixed form with rhyme.” To Sugishita, this is a literary flaw that accounts for the poem’s exclusion from the posthumous anthology Ryūhoku shishō: “The description is too prosaic, and it lacks poetic feeling. . . . The casual incorporation of a proper noun like Egawa [in line 11] makes the work seem less like a poem than a prose account.”97 Yet the incorporation of proper names referring to living individuals was not unknown even in some of the most celebrated Tang poems, especially in “songs” 歌 such as this one; Bo Juyi’s (772–846) “Song of Lasting Pain” 長恨歌 has several, and Du Fu’s (712–70) “Song of the Eight Immortals of Drunkenness” 飲中八仙歌 is full of them. Furthermore, we should recall that a “prosaic” quality was not necessarily anathema to some of the poetic theorists most influential on nineteenth-century Japanese kanshi composers. For example, Yuan Hongdao held the language of daily life in highest esteem and was known for the proximity of his poetry to his prose.98 Moreover, as will become clear in chapters 3 and 4, Ryūhoku’s ideas about Western technology underwent a dramatic shift in later years, when the spirited rejection that characterizes many of his earliest poems on foreign topics disappeared entirely. More than questions of poetic merit, this about-face may explain why the occasional youthful vitriol he directed toward foreign figures was largely effaced from later collections. Although Sugishita does raise an important point about the similarities between the diary and the poem, his observation assumes the precedence of the diary, which cannot be established. It is possible that, when he wrote the diary entry, Ryūhoku had already begun to think about how to capture the experience in the poem. In any event, what similarities do exist between certain elements of phrasing in the diary and in the poem provide one indication of how natural and unexceptional writing kanshi was for those of Ryūhoku’s educational background. They show how easily such writers used kanshi to express their experiences and perceptions of the world, which were after all informed in many ways by their training in Literary Sinitic. Yet, more than these similarities, it is rather the differences—the particular possibilities that the poetic form afforded—that deserve scrutiny. The diary contains just one evaluative statement beyond the objective description of the model train: “Certainly it is a marvelous device. Nevertheless, it still should be called a mere toy.”99 This is the crux of Ryūhoku’s response to the experience



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of viewing the locomotive and the kernel around which the poem revolves. Yet it was only the poetic form that offered Ryūhoku the latitude to explore more fully the implications of this impression. In the diary, there is no suggestion of what should be done or what consequences accepting the gift might have for the shogunate and for Japan as a whole. It is this set of considerations that Ryūhoku pursues in the poem. In lines 27 through 30, he draws on a famous episode in the Book of Documents in which Grand Guardian Lord Shao advises his elder brother King Wu that a wise ruler should not be so easily taken in by unusual gifts, such as the large dogs the western Lü tribes have presented as tribute to the recently founded Zhou state (ca. 1100 bce): Let him not be enslaved to his ears and eyes. In all measures let him be proper. . . . Even dogs and horses that are not from his land he will not keep. Unusual birds and marvelous animals, he will not raise them in his land. When he does not cherish things from afar, then people from afar will come to him. When what he truly cherishes are worthies, then the people at hand will be at peace. 不役耳目。百度惟貞 . . . 犬馬非其土性不畜。珍禽奇獸、不育于國。不寶遠物、則遠人格。 所寶惟賢、則邇人安。100

The concrete image of the risks attending rare animals that Lord Shao points out here resonates with the metaphor in the subsequent lines of Ryūhoku’s poem concerning the viper’s concealed poison and the tiger’s hidden claws. Moreover, Lord Shao’s larger exhortation that the sovereign not let superficial stimulation of his “ears and eyes” overwhelm his good judgment coincides with Ryūhoku’s reference to the train’s “clever mechanism and splendid design” that “dazzle the eyes of the crowd” (line 22): a group from which he distinguishes himself by using his personal name, “Atsushi,” in the following line. Whereas the diary gives little sense of a missed opportunity, in the poem Ryūhoku highlights the fact that he is unable to make the doubts he has begun to feel known to the sovereign. He describes his own gratitude at the privilege of attending the demonstration but ultimately is left to “withdraw” and “think to himself” about what he has witnessed (line 25). The product of this extended cogitation is the poem, which traces his initial sensory captivation with the spectacle, records his subsequent realization that the train is a mere trinket, and then gives an opportunity to imagine a different outcome. Sugishita characterizes the piece as less a poem than a “prose account” or a documentary record of what happened at the Takehashi estate, but it is rather the fact that the poem records what did not happen at the Takehashi estate that sets it apart; Perry after all was long gone from Japan by the time Ryūhoku imagined his decapitation. Moreover, the poem’s last couplet is a paraphrase of a quotation in the Han shu biography of Zhu Yun, where the lowly Zhu Yun dramatically remonstrates with the emperor: I hope you will instruct your master of implements to lend me his “sword sharp enough to cut a horse in two” so that I may strike down one of these mealymouthed ministers and let that serve as a warning to the rest! 臣願賜尚方斬馬劍、斷佞臣一人以厲其餘。101

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When Zhu Yun goes on to name the obsequious ministers of higher rank responsible for giving the emperor bad advice, he puts his life in jeopardy, only to be dramatically rescued by another official who attests to his earnestness, sincerity, and courageousness in speaking truth to power. In tracing so closely this speech by the righteous critic Zhu Yun, Ryūhoku imagines himself as one who could do just that. Lines 35 through 38 only make sense as speech addressed to the shogun—what Ryūhoku, as an eighteen-year-old apprentice okujusha, thought but could not say directly. The prospects of an interior Confucian scholar assuming such a dramatic admonitory role were dubious even for those who had finished their training. Nevertheless, the specter of foreign interlopers continued to haunt Ryūhoku, making unexpected appearances in his kanshi. A poem written in the summer of 1854 on “the nighttime procession of a hundred demons,” a traditional topic of Chinese and Japanese literature, for example, describes various familiar monsters doing conventionally creepy things only to end with the jarring couplet 別有獰鬼君知否 英倫鄂羅佛蘭西

But there are other crafty ghouls too—have you heard? They’re called England, Russia, and France.102

Faced with his powerlessness to confront these demons with military force, Ryūhoku forged ahead with his studies, his poetry sessions, his reading groups, and various other tasks associated with his apprenticeship. In spite of the prevalence of martial images in Ryūhoku’s poetry journal for the year, the most martial activity he actually participated in as part of his service in 1854 was a falconry expedition with the shogun Iesada. Japanese emperors had used hawks to hunt quail, cranes, and other birds for centuries, but, during the early modern period, falconry became an important symbolic practice that linked the shogun to his vassals and confirmed Tokugawa rule over a united polity. In a recent book, Okazaki Hironori has detailed the complex logistics of these shogunal falconry expeditions, showing how the birds of prey deployed in the shogun’s hunts also circulated as potent symbols not just of martial virtues, but of personal bonds. First presented to the shogun from the daimyo of Matsumae and other northern domains as emblems of their loyalty, the hawks (and sometimes their quarry) were in turn given by the shogun to other daimyo as rewards that could be expected to elicit in the recipients a sense of obligation.103 For Ryūhoku, too, the shogun’s falconry expedition seems to have served a range of purposes. In a poem he wrote commemorating his attendance at a hunt that autumn, Ryūhoku displays unflagging martial zeal, discerning that one solemn aim of the hunt was to consecrate the military spirit. Yet there is an important difference in the point of view apparent in this poem as compared to some of his earlier poems on martial themes, for Ryūhoku portrays him­ self in it not as an agent so much as a spectator and celebrant. The poet seems to discover the possibility of satisfaction simply in being allowed the privilege of joining the men who attended this important rite that reconfirmed their bonds with each other and with the shogun:



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On the twenty-seventh day of the last month of autumn, His Highness conducted military exercises at Komabahara. I also accompanied him and composed this short poem in the old style 季秋念七殿下講武于駒場原予亦扈従賦短古一篇

健士幾隊躍騧騮



綵袍如花簇林丘 前騎電奔後騎叫



蹴破枯篠響癈々

5

駒場原頭霜氣苦 野鶉驚散亂似雨 將軍臂出鷹坊鷹 鼓喙張目睨天宇



素縧千尺迸勁風

10

鴥兮一搏群翼空 奔電投下彩幢畔



百僚拍手奏凱同

15

明主蒐獵非遊戯 昇平講武有深意 治不忘亂古攸箴



況今海寇勞廟議



噫嘻麾下億萬徒 請奮其力若虎貙 鷹也精悍克適用

20

可人而不如鳥乎

Several squadrons of stalwart men make their steeds dance, Their colorful silk robes like flowers gather on the hillside. As the forward men charge like lightning, the rear men raise a shout; Kicking through the old bamboo, and causing a whoosh of wind. At the head of Komabahara, the frosty air is crisp; Quail in the field are startled and scatter like rain. From his shoulder, the shogun releases an aviary hawk; Rapping its beak and opening wide its eyes, it grimaces at the heavens. Like a silken thread arcing a thousand feet, a raging gale bursts forth; What speed! A single flap and all the wing beats are futile. Like a lightning bolt, it drops to the banks of the colored standards; The hundred officials clap their hands, celebrating the triumph as one. The shogun’s hunting trips are no mere diversion; Profound meaning lies in peacetime military exercises. “Do not forget chaos even in time of order”—so the maxim goes;104 Especially now when overseas brigands tax the men at court. Ah, you myriad men beneath the shogun’s banner, Muster your strength like a fierce tiger! The hawk is virile and unyielding, perfectly suited to his task; How can you be a man and yet less than a bird?105

Like the poem on the exhibition of the model locomotive, this one also finishes with an exclamatory apostrophe intended to spur the shogun’s men to action. But, in contrast to the earlier work, where the poet’s spectacular beheading of Perry provided the climax to the incineration of the locomotive and the battleships, there is no sense here of Ryūhoku taking any action beyond exhorting the shogun’s men from the sidelines. Befitting his future role as a Confucian exegete, the poem culminates with the final couplet’s lesson from the Greater Learning.106 Throughout his life, Ryūhoku was plagued by a somewhat weak constitution, succumbing frequently to respiratory ailments. Illness thus became a recurrent topic of his poetry, and it was often in his own compromised physical state that Ryūhoku discovered a metaphor for his weakness and frustrated ambitions. That year, he wrote a

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lengthy poem titled “Late in autumn, the winds and rain continue for days without end. While sick, I happened to write the following twenty rhymes,” which contains the following couplets:

近聞海外殺氣高

25

餓鱷饞鮫互拏攫 男兒各値報國時



提砲舞劍奮而躍 紬衾綿褥吾已矣

30

忸怩豈不獨心怍 但有筆硯供清娯 古籍萬卷眼欲鑿

I hear these days that there are murderous airs from overseas; Hungry crocodiles and starved sharks clutch and grab. There comes a time for every man when he must repay his country; Raising cannon, brandishing a sword, he rises up to act. In pongee quilts and cotton blankets—it is all over with me; Ashamed, how can I alone not be stricken at heart? But I have a brush and inkstone to provide pure pleasure, And thousands of old tomes for my eyes to pore over.107

In the poem he wrote to send off Yaguchi Kensai on his mission to Ezo, Ryūhoku enviously congratulated Yaguchi for meeting with the once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a name for himself, something “every man must do” 男兒須要功名立. The same sentiment motivates the second couplet quoted here (lines 25–26), with its emphasis on a man being able to discern the proper moment to rise and act. Whereas Yaguchi grandly fulfilled this obligation in the early poem, here it lingers as a dream denied the poet. As the contrastive appearance of the first person pronoun in line 27 makes clear, it is distinctly outside of this frame that Ryūhoku places himself: lying prone in his sickbed while the world marches on outside. Nevertheless, the poet does find consolation; unable to wield the “sword” (line 26), he takes refuge in his world of books, with its “brush,” “inkstone,” and “thousands of old tomes” (29–30). The poet’s embrace of these scholarly trappings instead of weapons seems to reflect his gradual turn toward a world more grounded in his lived experience and perhaps reflects also his growing acceptance of the role he was being groomed to play in the shogun’s government as a scholar. Over the course of his eighteenth year, Ryūhoku had commenced his official apprenticeship as an okujusha, succeeded to the headship of his family, begun to lead his family’s monthly poetry gathering, and taken over official responsibilities connected with his post as well. In addition to establishing himself in these various ways as a successor to the Narushima line of scholars, he also declared his emancipation by beginning to keep a new diary and starting to gather his poems in a new series of journals. One further step toward adulthood came when he was married in the winter of that year, almost immediately after the conclusion of the one-year period of mourning for his father Kadō. The arrangements had been made several months earlier, presumably by Ryūhoku’s grandfather and other senior relatives, and the wife they chose for him was in fact a close relative: a woman named Kanō Ryū.108 The two do not seem to have been especially fond of one another, for Ryūhoku’s account of their marriage in his diary is laconic in the extreme. In his entry for 08.25, he records the various gifts of clothing, food, and alcohol brought over by the messenger of the Kanō household as part of their daughter’s betrothal to



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Ryūhoku. Aside from the scrupulously inscribed list, the only comment in the entry is “Today I was a little sick. I had frequent bouts of diarrhea and had to lie down.” When they were married three months later on 11.26, Ryūhoku was similarly terse; the entire entry for the day reads: “The twenty-sixth day of the month. Twenty-eighth day of the cycle. A mistlike rain. Today, we had the wedding ceremony. With all the guests, it was chaotic and rowdy. This evening during the hour of the monkey [around four o’clock], we had the koshiire [palanquin entrance] part of the ceremony, much of which we abbreviated. I drank with the guests, and Aoki spent the night.”109 It might seem odd that Ryū­ hoku says more in this entry about his friend Aoki Ginzō than he does about his new bride, but the brevity of these diary entries concerning the marriage to Ryū was not anomalous. Over the course of their two years of marriage, she seldom appears in his diary entries, and there is little to create an impression of strong bonds of affection between them. On the one hand, Ryūhoku’s apparent reticence may have been simply the product of his sense of propriety; excessive revelation of personal matters might have seemed imprudent or unbecoming. Yet, on the other hand, he certainly did not hesitate to record some rather private matters in the diary. Just a few days after the wedding, for example, he was quite explicit in noting how he purchased some “spring goods” (i.e., “marital aids”) at an Asakusa shop.110 Many of Ryūhoku’s compositions from this pivotal year bespeak his earnest determination to be of service to an embattled state, but equally striking are his profound restlessness and intensive soul-searching about how he might best accomplish this aim. As Ryūhoku’s diary indicates, he was excited and honored to accept his new position as an okujusha trainee, but he was also preoccupied with Japan’s precarious fate. His kanshi were an important site for him to struggle with competing visions of how he might honor his debt to his family and serve the sovereign. Though military glory continued to have its appeal, in practical terms Ryūhoku knew that, for better or for worse, his future lay in scholarship. The best expression of this resignation comes with the poem he wrote at the close of 1854:

歳晩書懐



天妖地孽耳頻驚



驚裏匁々歳月征



春意繰絲晴柳影



曉寒裂帛斷鴻聲

5

嗜書毎笑身同蠹



提劍元期勢截鯨



十八年間成底事 自嘲碌々鯫儒生

Writing my feelings at year’s end My ears constantly struck by news of ominous portents in the realm, The days and months hurry by, while I remain in a state of shock. Wispy signs of spring unravel from the willow in the spring sun; A lone goose calls out in the chill dawn, its cry enough to rend silk. My taste for reading seems funny now: I see I am but a bookworm; Though once, with sword in hand, I sought to sunder mighty whales. What then have I become in these eighteen years? I laugh at my meager self, just a measly student of Confucianism.111

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The “ominous portents in the realm” mentioned in the first line of this poem refer to the appearance of implacable foreign powers on Japan’s shores. In choosing these particular terms to describe the arrival of Perry, however, Ryūhoku implied something unsettling about the Tokugawa regime’s very fate, for the phrase recalls a passage in the Doctrine of the Mean: “When the state is about to collapse, there will certainly be ominous portents” 國家將亡、必有妖孽. Taking stock at year’s end, Ryūhoku seems to have come close to accepting his role as apprentice scholar, however much it fell short of his earliest ambitions. In that sense, it is particularly significant that the poet’s plan to foil Japan’s foes by wielding a sword is clearly stated in the past tense. Nevertheless, Ryūhoku’s dissatisfaction with the status accorded the shogun’s Confucian advisors continued to weigh on him, exacerbating his emerging doubts over the relevance of Confucian learning and his lingering concerns about the realm’s vitality.

Ch a p t er T wo

Book and Zither The Private Realm

A

s the previous chapter has shown, Ryūhoku’s eighteenth year was a time when he struggled to come to terms with the role that he would play in the wake of his father’s death. In his poetry journals, he often framed his future as a dilemma symbolized by the sword, emblem of the samurai as idealized defender of the realm, and the book, representing the contributions he might make as a scholar. Although Ryūhoku’s poems often configured the two as opposing poles, they were also linked in that both were forms of service to the Tokugawa state. The speaker in Ryūhoku’s poems may express frustration at having to abandon his youthful aspirations of achieving military valor, and he may give voice to doubts about the minor role that Confucian scholars were assigned during a time of national crisis, but an assumption underlying many of the poems Ryūhoku wrote during this period was that the poet’s rightful place was as both an engaged participant in the shogun’s administration and an active commentator on the vital questions that confronted it. The tension between the two forms of service he envisioned himself offering would continue to bedevil Ryūhoku in future years, but, alongside this dynamic that he faced as an official in training within the shogun’s government, a countervailing current emerges with increasing prevalence in his writings from the mid-1850s: one characterized instead by imagined disengagement from the political realm. If it was as a shijin (士人, scholar-official in the service of the shogunate) that Ryūhoku wrote of wielding his sword or marshaling his scholarship, it was as a bunjin (文人, literatus or man of letters) that he explored a world untouched by such concerns. The bunjin ethos, which esteemed com­ mit­ment to literary and artistic pursuits apart from political exigencies, emerged in eighteenth-century Japan in cognizance of Chinese models. In his discussion of Chinese literati consciousness, Murakami Tetsumi analyzes the relationship among three closely related terms used to describe such individuals: dushuren (intellectual), shidafu (J. shitaifu;

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scholar-official), and wenren (J. bunjin; literatus).1 Murakami argues that the first term marks a shared middle ground of humanistic cultivation including familiarity with the classics and compositional ability in Literary Sinitic prose and poetry; a greater emphasis on statesmanship characterized the shidafu, whereas a greater emphasis on artistic elegance defined the wenren. Far from positing these as exclusive categories, Murakami sees them as overlapping and notes that a single individual might even embody all three. Rather than being an identity, then, the role of bunjin/wenren is a matter of relative emphasis and orientation. Taking into account the work of scholars such as Yoshikawa Kōjirō and Nakamura Yukihiko, Lawrence Marceau identifies the Japanese bunjin’s salient characteristics as artistic versatility, rejection of the vulgar and commonplace, interest in eremitic themes, and aloof idealism.2 Some scholars have proposed narrow definitions of the bunjin that restrict membership to the commoner class, thereby excluding even retired samurai officials. Yet Marceau makes a strong case for a more capacious understanding of the category that includes those “well-educated, talented, and socially aware individuals” who were able to devote themselves to artistic and literary pursuits apart from the political world. Moreover, decoupling the bunjin from a particular social class also allows one to recognize elements of bunjin affinity within the practices of a still broader array of individuals, including those who maintained some connection to officialdom.3 In this expanded sense, the term can serve not simply as an exclusive or comprehensive category of identity, but also to designate a particular orientation toward artistic and literary pur­ suits observable among individuals of varied life circumstances. Although bunjin does not fully exhaust the young Ryūhoku’s sense of self, it does usefully specify one increasingly significant aspect of his activities: an affirmative devotion to literary arts that he shared with the former patriarchs of the Narushima family.4 By Ryūhoku’s time in the late Tokugawa period, the Shitaya area, lying just south of Ueno, was the site of many sprawling daimyo residences and the homes of the rank-andfile samurai who served them, but it was also densely populated by individuals identified as bunjin. The Narushima family’s official residence was located in this neighborhood, on Neribei-kōji, and it was in this home that Ryūhoku grew up. Having received official permission to transfer residences, the family moved in 1855, but their new home was just two blocks away, on Izumibashi-dōri, still very much in the center of Shitaya’s thriving literati culture.5 As the legend of a map printed at the time for the convenience of those seek­ing contact with Shitaya’s cultural figures put it, “The eastern capital [i.e., Edo] is a place where literati (bunjin) gather, and Shitaya is their den” (fig. 2.1).6 This untitled map, commonly referred to as the “Shitaya bunjin zu” (Map of Shitaya literati), shows an area of just a few square blocks that teems with artists, calligraphers, poets, and scholars: the residences of sixty are identified in Shitaya, and another thirty are listed for surrounding areas.7 The map’s creator, Nagayama Choen, was a local administrator who was also an accomplished poet. Defying rigid definitions of the category, Choen thought of himself as a bunjin while nevertheless having experience as a civil servant and maintaining a keen interest in questions of political import.8 When Choen produced his map of Shitaya bunjin in the late 1850s, he identified the Narushima residence prominently.9

Fig. 2.1 Map of Shitaya literati (Shitaya bunjin zu, ca. 1855–59). 1. Hagura Kandō; 2. Narushima; 3. Washizu Kidō; 4. Sakata Ōkaku; 5. Seki Tokuzō (Sekkō); 6. Okano Teigyo; 7. Narushima former residence; 8. Fujimori Kōan; 9. Ōnuma Chinzan; 10. Uemura Roshū; 11. Kaneko Sakō; 12. Nagayama Choen. Reproduced in Edo kiriezu shūsei 江戸切絵図集成 , vol. 6 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1984), p. 43. Courtesy of Chūō Kōronsha. With the permission of Ana Hachimangū, Tokyo.

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As far as I am aware, Ryūhoku did not use the term bunjin to refer to himself at this time, though, as will become apparent, he sometimes styled himself with the similar term, bunshi 文士, or “gentleman of letters.” Yet, as Choen’s inclusion of the Narushima family on the Shitaya bunjin map shows, Ryūhoku’s contemporaries did place him (and perhaps his grandfather Motonao) among notable local bunjin. Ryūhoku’s principal inclinations at this time were surely more toward the shijin, or scholar-official, but he also had a deep and expanding interest in an array of literary practices that took place largely apart from official circles. In his discussion of the mentality of nineteenth-century writers of kanshibun, Saitō Mareshi distinguishes the constitutive elements of these two complementary domains of shijin and bunjin in terms of a basic distinction between the “public” and the “private.”10 While the former category embraced the individual’s efforts as a scholar-official, the latter embraced his literary and artistic contributions. Whereas themes of official service were dominant in one domain, themes of reclusion were prominent in the other. Textual mastery of the classical Confucian canon was of uppermost concern to one, but proficiency in poetic and prose composition defined the second. In contrasting shijin inclination toward statesmanship with bunjin inclination toward artistry, Saitō’s framework thus broadly parallels Murakami Tetsumi’s analysis of the shidafu and wenren roles in Chinese literati consciousness discussed above, though it divides between shijin and bunjin elements that Murakami identifies as the shared humanistic cultivation of all intellectuals (dushuren): canonical mastery and compositional skill. This chapter examines how Ryūhoku found his footing amid these conflicting pulls in the 1850s. To some extent, one can understand the process in terms of Ryūhoku’s cultivation of connections with two different groups: a shijin-oriented group of shogunal officials, historians, and scholars, and a bunjin-oriented group of individuals operat­ing outside of the government who supported themselves through their literary activities. Yet, as Ryūhoku’s membership in both groups demonstrates, it must also be borne in mind that these worlds were interpenetrating and overlapping. Consider the case of Yaguchi Kensai, the scholar who worked under the Narushima family to compile shogunal chronicles and whom Ryūhoku heartily sent off on his exploratory mission to Ezo in 1854, comparing Kensai to the Han emissary Su Wu. Kensai unquestionably embodied the ideal of service to the state, but he also took part in Ryūhoku’s shikai gather­ ing with men such as Seki Sekkō, who epitomized the literatus. In other words, the various operative distinctions here are of emphasis, affiliation, and orientation, and should not be understood in terms of an unbridgeable discontinuity between two irreconcilable realms. The duality of these possible orientations is evident in the way Ryūhoku made use of the image of the “book” and other material elements associated with textual practice. Recall the poem, discussed at the close of the previous chapter, in which Ryūhoku notes forlornly how he has given up dreams of “brandishing a sword” and instead takes comfort in his “brush,” “inkstone,” and “thousands of old tomes.” In the context of Ryūhoku’s role as an apprentice okujusha and the manner in which he portrays himself in his poems as an aspiring historian and official, the enumerated items betoken the world of the engaged scholar and express the poet’s resigned acceptance of the prospect of using them



The Private Realm

81

in his future status as a Confucian tutor to the shogun. Yet immersion in the textual realm of reading and writing, which these implements represent, also affords the poet a form of escape, and, just a few couplets later, Ryūhoku wonders: 35

何時得携書與琴 山澗縱為考槃樂

When will I be able to take my books and zither, Build a hut by a valley stream, and live as I please?11

Appearing in association with the zither, the term “book” (J. sho; Ch. shu) here calls to mind the world of the recluse, particularly that of Tao Yuanming, a figure to whom Ryū­ hoku, like many literarily inclined East Asian individuals through the ages, felt a special connection.12 Book and zither occur together frequently in Tao Yuanming’s poetry, where they stand as defining elements of his life in rustic retirement. Consider, for example, the following couplet from a poem in which Tao describes how the simple pleasures of this world help him to forget the burdens of official service: 息交遊閑業 臥起弄書琴

I have renounced the world to have my leisure And occupy myself with zither and books.13

We can see a similar linkage of zither and books to a private, interior space set apart from the realm of public administration in the opening couplets of another Tao poem, which begins: 衡門之下 有琴有書 載彈載詠 爰得我娯

Inside the rustic door I have zither and books. I pluck and read aloud And take my pleasure so.14

Tao’s best-known usage of these images, however, was in “The Return,” his celebrated depiction of reclusion; again, the private joys made possible by zither and books are counterposed to the pursuit of success in official circles and its attendant trials: 世與我而相違 復駕言兮焉求 悦親戚之情話 樂琴書以消憂

The world and I shall have nothing more to do with one another. If I were again to go abroad, what should I seek? Here I enjoy honest conversation with my family And take pleasure in books and zither to dispel my worries.15

Even in writing about his life before entering reclusion, Tao uses the paired images of zither and books to suggest the solace of a temporary remove from pedestrian concerns: 弱齡寄事外 委懷在琴書

When young I kept aloof from the world’s affairs And found my comfort in books and zither.16

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Ryūhoku likewise employed these iconic appurtenances of the recluse in other poems from the same period, using them, as Tao had in these last two examples, in the compound kinsho (Ch. qinshu):

暮春

琴書娯了淡生涯 豈望門閭容駟車 細雨微風春欲晩 一棚曉露放藤花

Late spring With zither and books, I enjoy my modest life to the fullest; Surely I do not look toward gates that house a coach-and-four. With thin rains and light breeze, spring nears its end; In a bower fresh with dawn’s dew, the wisteria blossoms.17

As the two examples from Ryūhoku’s poems show, images of reclusion and references to the texts through which such a realm was invoked began to appear with increasing frequency in his writings over the course of the next several years, complicating the tension between “books” and “swords” that he had repeatedly invoked in the poems he composed during his eighteenth year.

An Aspiring Exegete Ryūhoku’s interest in exploring the “private” realm of the recluse as well as the broader literary domain of the bunjin that it typified grew increasingly intense just as he was in the process of establishing himself within the shijin frame: as successor to the Narushima family of scholar-officials. Early in Kaei 7 (1854), even before the shogunate was made aware of his father’s death, Ryūhoku had been appointed an apprentice okujusha. He continued his training according to a strict schedule designed to prepare him for the day he would formally assume the position. From that summer, for example, he began observing the monthly lectures that his mentor Kobayashi Eitarō delivered to the shogun Iesada. He also participated in a variety of study groups focused on particular texts of the Confucian canon: the core of the scholar-official’s erudition. Each session typically met several times a month; the Classic of Poetry group on the fourth, fourteenth, and twentyfourth, for example, and the Zuo Commentary group on the ninth, nineteenth, and twenty-ninth.18 Mainly the texts that participants read together were part of the thirteen Confucian classics, but Ryūhoku also engaged in regular reading groups focused on the Chinese dynastic histories (such as Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian) and models of Literary Sinitic prose style (such as the Eight Great Writers of the Tang and Song). Needless to say, Ryūhoku had already attained an impressive familiarity with the Confucian canon and fluency with Literary Sinitic written discourse from a very early age, but these various study groups augmented and expanded his knowledge while at the same time giving him additional practical experience as an instructor. A masterful command over the Confucian classics was the cornerstone of Ryū­ hoku’s succession to the post of okujusha. As he had acquired his initial training in these



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texts under the tutelage of his father Kadō, it is perhaps not surprising that Ryūhoku’s relationship to this corpus would dominate the elegy he wrote one year after his father died: On the eleventh day of the midwinter month, it is the anniversary of my father’s passing. I cannot overcome my feelings of loss, and so I reverently compose this rambling poem and make of it an offering. 仲冬十一蓂先考周忌不勝悽愴謹裁蕪章一篇以供薀藻 5 10 15

野牛舐其犢 巣燕哺其雛 禽與獸猶然 況亦於人乎 阿爺從生我 撫育百勞劬 豈啻免饑凍 嚴訓矯惷愚 六經親授讀 韓詩嘗誡符 譬諸苛癢處 搔爬倩麻姑 十有七歳月 慈恩深江湖 反哺一不遂

20

慙彼屋上鳥 喬松俄摧折 蔦蘿奈凋枯 手趾頓失措 望望獨迷途 人老父或存

25 30 35

繄吾弱而孤 如何童心在 哀號尚呱呱 昨非悔無及 從今策蹇駑 讀書須黽勉 名利何足拘 隕霜又飛霰 匆匆節物徂 及此小祥日 回腸斷轆轤 綴詩而言志 聊薦飯一盂 噫嘻在天靈 來饗豈敢無 炷香拜謚牌 坐覺雙袂濡

A cow in the field licks its calf, A swallow in the nest feeds its chicks. If even birds and beasts are this way, Then how much more is it true for man? Ever since my old man fathered me, A hundred toils he spent to bring me up.19 Far from just staving off hunger and cold, His rigorous lessons corrected my foolishness. He personally read to me from the Six Classics, And he used to admonish me with Han’s poems.20 One might compare it to a tormentingly itchy place, That Ma Gu’s long fingernails are brought to scratch. For ten-and-seven years, His affectionate benevolence was deeper than a lake. And none of my attempts to return his nourishment went right; I envy those birds atop his roof.21 When the great pine suddenly breaks in two, What stops the mistletoe and dodder from withering?22 Suddenly my grip and footing are gone, Gazing off in the distance, I alone wander lost. Many men grow to old age while their fathers remain alive; But I, alas, have been orphaned in my youth. What can I do about my childish heart? My cries of sorrow are still like a baby’s wails. Despair over the faults of yesterday comes too late; From now on, I will goad this lame horse. In reading books, I must be diligent; Fame and fortune are not worth getting caught up in. Falling frost and flying hail; How hurriedly seasonal things pass away. And now I come to this first auspicious day, My thoughts reel: a severed well-winch. I write this poem to express my thoughts, And offer one little bowl of rice. O, your spirit in the heavens Will come to partake of this feast—how dare we omit it? I light the incense and pray before your altar tablet, Sitting here, I feel the moisture on my sleeves.23

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The centrality of the Confucian classics to Ryūhoku’s world and to his family’s scholarly traditions is particularly evident in lines 5 through 12, where the imparting of knowledge about them is equated with nothing less than the provision of food and shelter.24 Echoing the specific reference in the poem to his father’s instruction in the Six Classics, Ryūhoku draws on distinctive language from the Classic of Poetry in lines 5 and 6 and again in lines 17 and 18. In this way, the poet’s vow to spur himself to greater scholastic diligence in lines 27 and 28 represents not only the affirmation of professional duty, but also a personal obligation to the memory of his father.25 Not long after the conclusion of the one-year period of mourning following his father’s death, Ryūhoku took part in New Year’s rites for Ansei 2 (1855) at Edo Castle. In contrast to the ambiguous position of “private mourning” from which he had ushered in the previous year, Ryūhoku was now able to take his place among the serried ranks of shogunal officials. His pride at being publicly recognized in this way for his succession to his father’s post is clear from the quatrain he composed to commemorate the New Year: 五更春動御溝楊 冠帽如雲簇殿廊 吾亦幸陪鵷鷺列 瑞烟深處賜金觴

At dawn’s fifth watch, spring sways the poplars along His Majesty’s moat; Like clouds, the capped officials gather in the castle halls. I, too, am fortunate to join this retinue of flocking egrets; Deep within the auspicious mists, I partake of the golden chalice.26

Ryūhoku’s consciousness of how he appeared arrayed among the others as a participant in the ritual is evident from his diary’s description of the garments he wore that day: “At dawn, I rose to go attend at the castle. For the first time I wore a lacquered eboshi cap and a crested linen suō robe to offer my congratulations. In the afternoon, I took my place in the ranks and partook of wine.”27 The second of the two quatrains he wrote to mark the New Year continues the celebratory mood but directs its attention outside the shogun’s castle: 一笑春風十九年 囘思往事是奔川 品花評鳥多佳興 不似蘇卿在朔邊

I smile at the vernal breezes that have favored me these nineteen years; Reflecting on past events, they have raced by like a river. Blossoms to enjoy and birds to appreciate: numerous are the delights; Not like Minister Su, far off on the northern frontier.28

The final line’s reference to Su Wu, the Han dynasty emissary long held in captivity by northern nomads, comes as something of a surprise. What does it mean that the poet defines his position in terms of its opposition to that of this paragon of unswerving loyalty and selfless service to the state? Perhaps the poem seeks to extend the previous quatrain’s depiction of Ryūhoku’s proximity to the sovereign by positing a contrast with Su Wu, who endured many years of separation from the Han emperor. But recall how



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Ryūhoku had sent off his friend Yaguchi Kensai to Ezo the previous year, calling him a latter-day Su Wu. Was Ryūhoku echoing here the contrast we have seen him draw between actively engaged officials, who take part in urgent state matters, and the scholarofficials like himself, whose role is narrowly delimited? Is there self-mocking laughter behind the smile in the first line? Or is Ryūhoku instead merely seeking to emphasize the manifold pleasures of springtime Edo that he is free to enjoy by sketching a contrast with the frigid and barren periphery where the captive Su Wu would have met the year’s beginning? In the pairing of these two quatrains, we can see the tension between Ryūhoku’s proud cognizance of his position among the shogun’s officials and his growing expression of interest in partaking of delights available in realms framed as antithetical to such public service.

Joining the Scholar-Officials In addition to his continuing apprenticeship, his regimen of training in Confucian textual scholarship, and other duties he was obliged to perform at Edo Castle, Ryūhoku had been assigned another responsibility by the shogunate on 08.24 of Kaei 7 (1854), when he was ordered to take his father’s place and work under his grandfather to oversee the final stages of editing the regime’s official historical chronicles, the Tokugawa jikki. On the six days every month when he reported to work at the Jikki editorial office, it was Ryū­ hoku’s responsibility to help supervise the large staff of compilers. The task also brought Ryūhoku in close contact with other prominent Confucian scholars in Edo, notably those of the Hayashi family. From the time of their founding patriarch, Hayashi Razan, this scholarly family had served the shogunate as Confucian exegetes, and their academy had enjoyed special patronage. At the end of the eighteenth century, the academy was renamed the Shōheizaka Gakumonjo and brought under shogunal control, becoming Japan’s preeminent center of Confucian learning.29 The editing office of the Tokugawa jikki had originally been situated within the Narushima household, but shortly after Ryūhoku’s grandfather Motonao had finished the initial version of the text in the 1840s, the base of editing had moved to the Shōheizaka Academy, not far from Shitaya. At this stage, responsibility for the project came to be shared between the Narushima (Motonao and Kadō) and Hayashi scholars.30 In addition to interacting with the Hayashi scholars through his editing work, Ryūhoku also became a regular participant in a poetry gathering convened monthly by the eleventh head of the family, Hayashi Fukusai, who had just been appointed rector of the Shōheizaka Academy in 1853.31 There was some overlap between the participants in the Hayashi gathering and the membership of the shikai that continued to meet at Ryūhoku’s residence, but the former was naturally dominated by Shōheizaka Academy faculty, including such luminaries as Satō Issai (1772–1859) and Asaka Gonsai.32 Ryūhoku must have been familiar with Gonsai, for it was Gonsai who gave the young man his first literary sobriquet, Kakudō, a fact Ryūhoku called attention to in a subsequent auto­biographical essay.33 His acceptance of the appellation suggests that Ryūhoku held this eminent

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scholar in high regard, and he would later solicit Gonsai’s commentary on his first volume of poetry.34 Ryūhoku attended the Hayashi poetry meeting just once in the winter of Ansei 1, but his attendance grew more regular during the following year, as he gradually assumed a greater public role. The Shōheizaka Academy, as the primary institution for the education of shogunal retainers, and its curriculum, which was focused on the Confucian classics and the Chinese dynastic histories, were solidly on the “public” end of the shijin-bunjin spectrum.35 The school’s shijin orientation shaped the nature of the Sinitic training it instilled. Although acquiring skill in the production of Sinitic poetry and prose was deemed desirable within the frames of both shijin and bunjin, in the former case such practice was secondary to mastery of the Confucian classics. For the shogunate’s cadre of official scholars at the Shōheizaka Academy, compositional competence was foremost a means to develop one’s capacity to engage with classical and historical texts, and thereby augment one’s capabilities as a statesman. A view that identified the purpose of learning as preparation for statesmanship had been decisively affirmed by the Kansei Reforms, the series of measures implemented in the late eighteenth century under the leadership of Chief Councilor Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758–1829). In addition to according the Hayashi academy its official status and providing special sanction to Zhu Xi learning, the Kansei Reforms had even more far-reaching effects because, by codifying a Confucian curriculum and encouraging formal tests of mastery over it, the reforms ensured that proficiency in Literary Sinitic would become an important skill for a much broader range of men to attain. Yet, in stressing such competence in Literary Sinitic, the reformers were careful to emphasize the shijin orientation to literary matters and to caution against any bunjin frivolousness. Just before the Kansei Reforms were imposed on a national scale, Matsudaira carried out a trial run in the domain of Shirakawa, where he was daimyo, transforming a private academy there into a domain-administered school. The school’s founding statement declared that studying Literary Sinitic poetry and prose might give students insight into “the real meanings of Chinese words” and help them overcome “narrow-mindedness and rigidity,” but it also issued a stern warning that they “must not imitate the elegance of literary men and poets, and lose the honest, simple ways of the warrior.”36 One of the key figures behind these reforms was Confucian scholar Shibano Ritsuzan (1736–1807), whom Matsudaira had appointed to the Hayashi academy in 1788. That same year, Ritsuzan made a proposal that laid out the groundwork for the Kansei Reforms, addressing the purpose of learning amid a wide-ranging list of recom­ mendations. Ritsuzan begins the section of his memorial on scholarship by declaring, “There is nothing more suited to expanding the wisdom of man than learning,” and pro­ ceeds to discuss the benefits of education from the vantage point of its contribution to statesmanship.37 He reserves special scorn, however, for what he considers one particularly nefarious threat to the way of “true scholarship”: “Affecting the ways of Chinamen, composing [Sinitic] prose and poetry, giving private lectures and that sort of thing is nothing more than the superficial learning of elegant fops, a solace for recluses and bohemians; it is not the learning that befits those who will serve the state.



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It cannot be said to have any value, and, if one is not careful, it might instead end up being an obstacle to the path of government.”38 Significantly, the individual whom Ritsuzan singles out for “affecting the ways of Chinamen” 唐人の真似 (J. tōjin no mane) was none other than Ryūhoku’s bunjin ancestor, Narushima Nobuyuki, who served the shogun as okujusha a few decades before Ritsuzan would occupy the post. Nobuyuki’s thinking on Sinitic poetics was informed by the teachings of the Sorai school, and, although his poetic manuscripts are no longer extant (having been destroyed in a fire), a guide he published for the benefit of aspiring poets demonstrates his unambiguous championing of High Tang aesthetics.39 The taint of Sorai’s pronounced Sinophilia may have intensified Ritsuzan’s venomous dismissal of Nobuyuki, but the focus of his critique was on the fact that Nobuyuki devoted himself to this potentially deleterious practice with such eagerness.40 Ritsuzan’s deep suspicion of bunjin-style excellence in the literary arts surprised even Hayashi Kinpō 林錦峯 (1767–93), the rector of the Shōheizaka Academy at the time of the Kansei Reforms. In a 1791 letter to Matsudaira, a dismayed Kinpō complained about Ritsuzan’s excessiveness on this point: “those whose learning is extensive or who excel in such things as poetry and literature he claims are excessively comprehensive or given to idle vanity.”41 Given Ritsuzan’s evident disdain for “affecting the ways of Chinamen,” the fact that he was himself a celebrated writer of Sinitic poetry and prose seems at first puzzling.42 If he condemned poetic composition as superficial foppery or “idle vanity,” why do his collected writings contain numerous essays, forewords, colophons, and other short kan­ bun pieces in which he praises several poets and their collections?43 Part of the answer lies in the distinction between “public” and “private”: spheres that correspond to the respective poles of the shijin-bunjin continuum. Ritsuzan’s official memorial concerns itself entirely with the former end of the spectrum, and, though he recognizes that the composition of poetry and prose can be satisfying (as it seems to have been for him personally), it has no business in the “public” space of government, where serious matters of state are addressed. In his detailed discussion of the educational methods by which early modern Japanese acquired competency in Literary Sinitic, Tsujimoto Masashi sheds further light on this apparent contradiction. He explains how the writing of Sinitic prose and poetry was distinct from the cluster of learning methods, practiced first by students individually and then in groups, that developed their proficiency in reading canonical Chinese texts.44 Consistent with the distinction in Saitō Mareshi’s framework between shibun (poetry and prose), which was the textual focus of bunjin, and keigi (classical exegesis), which occupied shijin, the Shōheizaka Academy’s focus was squarely in the latter realm: The ability to deploy Literary Sinitic to write prose and compose poems was an indispensable part of the cultivation of the Confucian scholar (or, rather, of any intellectual in the early modern period who had a modicum of cultivation). However, because it was what we might call an expressive ability, it was regarded as a kind of technical skill. For this reason, from the original vantage point of Confucian scholarship, an individual’s excessive immersion in the world of Sinitic prose and poetry (shibun) raised concerns that he would lose

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sight of what was essential to Confucian scholarship and was therefore cautioned against. To put it differently, the composition of poetry and prose was an enterprise of active selfexpression, a creative undertaking that was unlike the practice of studying Confucian scholarship, which focused on the reading of a given classical text (and was in that sense passive). Inasmuch as it was an enchanting activity, the instructors warned against excessive absorption in it.45

In spite of this ambivalence toward the enterprise, composition of Literary Sinitic prose and poetry did have a place at the Shōheizaka Academy.46 Student groups met to write and exchange poetry, annual events featuring poetry composition were staged, and anthol­ ogies that contained works of Sinitic poetry were included (though not prominently) in the official curriculum. Academy students who were particularly accomplished at Literary Sinitic composition were even recognized by being awarded the position of shibungakari, or “person in charge of prose and poetry,” meaning that they had been judged capable of critiquing their peers’ work.47 Yet we can begin to get a sense of the ultimate purpose of such training in Literary Sinitic composition by considering the future careers of students who were honored with the shibun-gakari title during their enrollment at the Shōheizaka Academy. Take Shigeno Yasutsugu (Seisai, 1827–1910), for example, who went on to serve the Meiji government as a compiler of official histories and later played an instrumental role in founding the field of modern historical study in Japan as professor at the University of Tokyo and then as president of the Historical Society of Japan. Or consider another academy student who served as shibun-gakari a few years later: Kume Kunitake (1839–1931), who like Shigeno went on to become one of Meiji Japan’s most prominent historians.48 Although Kume published Sinitic verse from time to time in the course of his life, he focused his considerable talents as a writer in other directions, most impressively in the five-volume report he wrote as an official account of the Iwakura Mission’s tour of Europe and the United States in 1871–73. The ornately allusive work is composed in a highly Sinified Japanese style, and though it is an exquisitely wrought document that remains a pleasure to read, the individual self-expressiveness of its author is effaced through various means.49 In this way, the core of education at the Shōheizaka Academy focused not so much on the composition of texts, but on developing skill in reading them, an activity Tsujimoto argues “represents virtually the entirety of what is deemed essential in the scholarship and learning of a Confucian scholar.”50 Accordingly, although the successive heads of the Hayashi family who served as the academy’s rectors convened monthly poetry composition gatherings, the cultivation of participants’ creative talents in literary expression was decidedly subordinate to more scholarly purposes. The topic that Hayashi Fukusai assigned for one of the poetry gatherings he convened in Ansei 3 (1856), “Reading books in the fresh chill of autumn,” was very much in keeping with this overarching focus of the academy on the mastery of canonical texts. By this point, Ryūhoku was already a regular participant, and the composition he prepared for the occasion is particularly intriguing in comparison with the poem, discussed above, that he wrote on the anniversary of his father’s death. Both assign a unique status to the Six Classics, but the poem Ryūhoku wrote for the Hayashi gathering brings other texts into consideration as well:



The Private Realm

Reading books in the fresh chill of autumn—Topic assigned by Mr. Hayashi 新凉讀書 林氏宿課



燈火稍可親

5 10

簡編可巻舒 邈矣昌黎公 慈訓若煦嘘 當此新凉候 吾亦讀我書 我書三千巻 自比萬石儲 唯嗟譾陋學 僅能辨魯魚 麤質須礱磨 六經是礛賭 周孔之遺典



一誦則起予

15

巍々大安宅 應要知門閭 荀韓存固必



莊列尚冲虚

20

紛々百家言 多與聖教齬 偉哉歴朝史 成敗事昭如 扼腕論得喪

25

忼慨氣一攄 讀書廢寢食 雙睛徹五車 是豈衒該博



是豈買令譽

30

仰與古人接 其樂何華胥 漫々輪鞅塵

35

請勿到我廬 我廬甘蕭寂 咿唔興有餘 清風時々起 簷鐸響階除

“One can feel a certain kinship with the fires in the lamps, And one can roll and unroll scrolls of books.” Deep in the past, Changli once gave This tender lesson like a warm breath of sun.51 And now in the fresh chill of this season, I too turn to my books. They number some three thousand volumes; Worth a stipend of ten thousand koku. I only lament my meager and poor learning; Barely able am I to distinguish “fish” 魚 from “foolish” 魯 Uncouth by birth, I require sharpening and polishing; The Six Classics form my whetstone. The canon bequeathed to posterity by the Duke of Zhou and Confucius; As soon as I start reciting these texts, they rouse my spirits. Awesome is this grand “peaceful abode,”52 And one must know where to find the gate. Xunzi and Hanfeizi “insist on certainty” and are “inflexible”; Zhuangzi and Liezi espouse making one’s mind pure and empty. Fragmentary are the words of the hundred schools; Many of them at odds with the Sages’ teachings. How splendid are the histories of the various dynasties; The successes and failures of each revealed clearly. Clutching my arms, I engage in an intense debate on their merits; My spirits roused, it gives me release. Reading books, I forget to eat and sleep; My two eyes pierce through five cartloads of books. How can it be in order to show off the breadth of my learning? How can it be claimed that I am trying to insure my fame? Looking back, I can communicate with men of antiquity: A pleasure no less than the utopia of Huaxu. Dust stirred up by elite carriages and horses coming from far off— Pray, do not bring it to my hut. I am content with the quiet solace my hut offers; Reading aloud to myself is sufficient pleasure in itself. From time to time, a pure wind rises up, Ringing the bell that hangs in my eaves.53

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Like the earlier poem Ryūhoku composed to mourn his father’s death, this one also traces the poet’s intellectual and moral progress as mediated by his exposure to canonical texts. A similar expression of scholarly zeal characterizes both works, but this later poem introduces the question of doctrinal orthodoxy pointedly through its reference to noncanonical texts in lines 17 through 20. Sandwiched in between the poet’s reverent discussion of the Confucian classics as his source of moral cultivation in lines 11 through 16 and his corporeally expressed interpellation as a reader into the world of the dynastic histories in lines 21 through 24, the philosophical works of the “hundred schools” are invoked only to be pointedly rejected as contrary to the Sages’ teachings. There is every reason to think that the poet’s earnestly stated commitment to refining his abilities as an exegete of canonical texts was genuine, but we must also bear in mind that Ryūhoku com­ posed this poem as something of a public statement before Edo’s preeminent repre­ sentatives of Confucian scholarly officialdom. Surely these circumstances affected the vehemence of his denunciation of the “hundred schools” as heterodox, for, just a few months after writing this poem at the Hayashi gathering, he presented a very differ­ent sort of perspective on the matter in a poem composed in the privacy of his own home. Surrounded by his students one evening, Ryūhoku addressed the issue of Confucian orthodoxy in the following whimsical quatrain: 老儒

An old Confucian scholar

歯豁頭童舌尚譁

His teeth missing, his head bald, but his tongue still clamorous; Spending his whole life amid piles of worm-eaten books. Year after year his lectures speak solely of the classics, Never allowing his disciples to recite the hundred schools.54



蠹書堆裏送生涯 多年講説唯經典 不使門徒誦百家

The gap between the narrowly pious rejection of anything outside of the codified Confucian canon in the first poem and the irreverent caricature of the hidebound Confucian scholar in the second poem highlights the distinction between the public world of the shijin and the private world of the bunjin.55 Yet, even in the poem Ryūhoku composed for the Hayashi gathering, there are several discernible signs of the poet’s incipient bunjin inclinations. The ecstatic textually mediated communion he enjoys with the men of antiquity in lines 29 and 30, for example, draws on the story of the legendary Yellow Emperor’s journey in dreams to the “land of Huaxu,” a utopian realm where people dwell in peace without any need for government.56 Moreover, the fact that the source of this anecdote is none other than the Liezi raises questions about Ryūhoku’s dismissal of this and other texts of the “hundred schools” earlier in the poem. Likewise, in the poem’s three closing couplets, the poet elaborates upon the pleasure he takes in reading by deploying the figure of the recluse’s hermitage. The language of lines 31 and 32 in particular recalls the description Tao Yuanming made of his site of reclusion in the second poem of his famous sequence “Returning to the Farm to Dwell”:



The Private Realm

野外罕人事 窮巷寡輪鞅 白日掩荊扉 虚室絶塵想

91

Here in the country human contacts are few On this narrow lane carriages seldom come. In broad daylight I keep my rustic gate closed, From the bare rooms all dusty thoughts are banned.57

In Ryūhoku’s use, the hut appears as the concrete manifestation of the “private” realm and also as a metaphor for the interiority of the reading subject. The “dusty thoughts” Tao mentions banishing from his place of refuge typically refer in broad terms to worldly concerns, but, in line 31, Ryūhoku echoes this idea while linking it to another image from Tao’s poem: imagining the “dust” as that stirred up by the carriages of officialdom. Ryūhoku recorded many of the poems he composed for the monthly Hayashi gatherings in his poetry journals. Occasionally the Hayashi rector assigned topics on comparatively open-ended natural themes, such as “Viewing plums” or “Hibiscus,” but more frequently the topics alluded to specific Chinese texts.58 So far as can be assessed from the poems that Ryūhoku composed for these events and recorded in his journals, the referential terrain traversed by participants at the Hayashi gatherings was decidedly Chinese and historical.59 As the next section will show, this feature marks a pronounced difference from the sort of literary expression Ryūhoku was simultaneously pursuing at his own shikai gatherings, where the topics he assigned to his bunjin confrères ranged broadly over both Chinese and Japanese textual traditions and furthermore drew inspiration from contemporary local practices and material culture. By pointing out this distinction, I do not mean to suggest that participation in the Hayashi gatherings was a stifling ordeal for Ryūhoku, for it is clear that he was perfectly able to function within the more narrowly circumscribed compositional practices that were cultivated as part of the shijin frame. Indeed, he seems to have approached this task with relish. Consider the poem that he composed in response to a topic that the Hayashi rector assigned to participants for extemporaneous composition at another gathering held during the same year: “An image of tending oxen.” The topic itself calls to mind a charming bucolic scene, but Ryūhoku’s poem offers a decidedly different take. Not only is Ryūhoku’s focus on the feelings of the ox itself rather than its human tender, but, far from an evocation of pastoral simplicity, Ryūhoku produces an exposé of cruel exploitation. Ryūhoku’s tone is nevertheless rather light, and his use of allusion is also unexpected. Whereas one or two allusions might have sufficed, Ryūhoku weaves into the middle eight lines of the poem a dense web of references to eight ox stories featured in Chinese literary and historical texts, some better known than others: 牧牛圖 林氏席上

An image of tending oxen; composed at Mr. Hayashi’s



一兒弄笛一兒竿 前牛徐行後牛蟠 問牛汝力能亞虎 奚服勞役不得安

5

巣渇汝口曾嘲許

One boy plays a flute, the other twirls a pole; The ox in front plods along, the one behind curled up. I ask the ox: “If your power is second only to the tiger’s, Why let yourself be worked so hard without a chance for rest?” Chaofu made you thirsty in order to taunt Xu You;60



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甯叩汝角又干桓 安平良籌熱汝尾 文成詐術割汝肝



呉江喘月飢難療

10

滻水運沙意何酸



龔翁新政換兵器



劉家奇賞比牡丹 可憐生涯今古同

15

汝不能言身長癉 一縷青縄穿雙鼻 曠原日聽牧兒讙

Ning Qi struck your horns to impress Huan.61 Anping’s brilliant plans got your tail burned;62 and Wencheng’s deceptions left you with your guts severed.63 You panted under the moon in Wu, your thirst unquenchable;64 You transported sand on the Chan, how miserable it must have been.65 Under Gong Sui’s new administration, weapons were exchanged for you;66 And at Mr. Liu’s house, you were praised as his peonies.67 How pitiful that your plight remains unchanged through the ages; You cannot speak and your body is always tired. A single strand of dark rope pierces both of your nostrils; In the vast fields day after day, you listen to that noisy oxherd.68

Although the poem’s eight ox allusions in lines 5 through 12 may strike a modern reader as equally abstruse, at least three of them would actually have been readily recognizable to a fairly broad range of individuals in late Edo Japan, for they are historical episodes featured in the Mengqiu, a Literary Sinitic primer that had enjoyed wide use in Japan since the ninth century.69 The allusions for the most part contribute organically to Ryūhoku’s theme of detailing the sufferings of the tormented and overworked ox that is unable to voice any protest, though the eighth episode seems a bit tenuously linked. This comparison of Liu Xun’s oxen to black peonies in line 12 presumably found its way into the poem mainly because “peony” rhymed.70 This poem is one of the very few of Ryūhoku’s composed at the Hayashi gatherings to be included in his posthumous anthology, Ryūhoku shishō (1894), and the only one to be designated as such. It appears there with comments from two of Ryūhoku’s distinguished contemporaries, kanshi poets Kikuchi Sankei (1819–91) and Ōtsuki Bankei, who were presumably invited to comment on the poem many years after Ryūhoku had written it: Sankei says, “Whether looking left or right, he ‘finds the source’; each line of his poem has an allusion. The wealth of texts he has internalized is truly enviable!” 三溪曰左右逢源句々用典公腹笥書巻繁富眞可欣羨也 Bankei says, “He has fed himself full of texts. Borrowing one big sacrificial ox, they all come pouring out.” 磐溪曰滿腹書巻借一元大武和盤托出

As these comments show, Sankei and Bankei were especially impressed by the young Ryūhoku’s dazzling display of textual mastery and referential resourcefulness. Fittingly, they both in turn extended the chain of associations by making use of their own allusive phrases, each drawing on expressions rooted in the thirteen classics.71



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In addition to sharing the poems they had composed on the same topics, participants at the Hayashi gatherings engaged in another form of dialogue through the composi­ tion of poems that matched each other’s rhymes. In the introduction, I mentioned how the ten-year-old Ryūhoku’s entry into a community of Literary Sinitic writers had been formalized when Shinmi Bōzan, one of the scholars working with Ryūhoku’s father and grandfather on the editing of the Tokugawa jikki, composed a poem matching the youth’s rhyme characters. Ryūhoku’s poetry manuscripts from the mid-1850s indicate that this sort of poetic engagement was common at the Hayashi gatherings as well.72 In addition to fostering camaraderie among contemporaneous poets, the practice might also take place transtemporally, the best-known example being the set of poems Su Dongpo composed in harmony with each of the extant poems of Tao Yuanming.73 Ryūhoku’s poetry volumes from these years also contain several examples where the Hayashi rectors assigned the participants in their gathering the task of composing poems that matched the rhymes of Chinese poems.74 Whether they composed poems matching each other’s rhymes or those of earlier poets, the participants in the Hayashi gathering thereby affirmed themselves as participants in a shared textual tradition. Though the Hayashi rectors frequently drew on Tang and even Song poetic works, the Confucian classics and the dynastic histories remained the core of the textual world that was explored at their gatherings. Consistent with the “public” shijin orientation of the Shōheizaka Academy, the focus of the Hayashi gathering’s compositional activity lay neither in innovating expressive approaches nor in boldly enlarging the bounds of their textual world. While Ryūhoku was devoting himself to perfecting his mastery of the Confucian canon and enthusiastically taking part in the poetic gatherings convened by the Hayashi, he simultaneously continued to expand his literary activities through the shikai poetic gatherings that he had begun convening in his home the previous year. Inasmuch as the poetry gathering that he held there was a private event not directly connected to his ser­ vice to the shogunate, it was the principal means through which he established himself among the bunjin of Shitaya. Yet even his literati friends deferentially referred to him as “Master Kakudō” and “the scholar-official Narushima” in their own poetry manuscripts, indicating that his contemporaries still saw him foremost as the descendant of an illus­ trious scholarly family and as successor to a prestigious official position.75 On occasion, the reputation he had on account of his post and the stature of his family seems to have been the source of tension. In the following anecdote, Sinological scholar Oka Rokumon (1833–1914) reminisces about visiting Ryūhoku’s shikai during his days as a Shōheizaka Academy student. In addition to providing rare detail about how Ryūhoku ran his shikai gatherings, it also suggests a rift between Ryūhoku’s attitude toward textual precedent and that with which the student Rokumon was familiar. As discussed in the previous chapter, participants in Ryūhoku’s shikai were typically invited to compose a poem in advance of each gathering on an assigned topic (shukudai) and then to compose extem­ poraneously on another topic (sekidai) at the event itself. At the shikai Rokumon attended, the shukudai was apparently “Bring on the tea” 將進茶, a topic Ryūhoku invented through analogy with the established music bureau 樂府 (Ch. yuefu; J. gafu) topic “Bring on the wine” 將進酒.76 The unconventionality of this topic did not go down well with Rokumon, who recounts his experience as follows:

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Adjacent and in back of Hagura’s [Kandō’s] residence was Narushima Ryūhoku, who was a hereditary shogunal Confucian scholar.77 He planned to convene a shikai for the New Year and sent his retainer Takatama Kyōzō (who is from my home province [of Sendai]) to invite [Matsumoto] Keidō, [Ōta] Randō, and myself. Keidō had no wish to meet with a shogunal Confucian scholar, and so he set out instead with three or four others on a plumviewing excursion. At the time, it just so happened that Takahashi Aritsune (from Aizu domain) was visiting to inquire after my eye ailment. And so, I went with Takahashi and Ōta [Randō] to accept Narushima’s invitation. There were twenty or thirty people in attendance, lined up on either side of the room. Ryūhoku was perhaps nineteen at the time. As attendant lecturer to the shogun, he sat in the center. We bowed and gave our names. He asked us about our compositions on the assigned topic: “Bring on the tea.” I said, “There is a yuefu topic called ‘Bring on the wine’; but did the people of old ever compose poems on the topic of ‘Bring on the tea’?” Ryūhoku responded, “Wine is known as kyōyaku (crazy medicine), and thus it is fitting to substitute tea for wine; that is why I have assigned this topic.” I said, “If that is the case, then you should have incorporated that idea into the topic. I wonder if it is really appropriate to substitute tea for wine in an established yuefu topic.” Ryūhoku was silent. The extemporaneous composition for the gathering was “Peach Blossom Spring,” with poems to be composed by dividing rhymes. Since it was the first gathering, I thought wine would be served, but he served only zōni [a soup made with mochi rice cakes and vegetables], saying that it was in honor of the New Year. Everyone left as it grew late. However, Randō had quite a reputation as a drinker, and he was kept back and returned home drunk. The next day, Takatama came and explained with a smile that, because of the controversy the topic “Bring on the tea” had caused, Ryūhoku had decided to serve only mochi and refrain from serving the wine and other items that he had prepared for the occasion, lest it prompt further boorish arguments from the boorish students. At the time, Ryūhoku was known as Kinetarō. He had succeeded to his father’s position as Confucian scholar to the shogunate. Everyone had a laugh that an interior shogunal scholar should be like this.78

Discrepancies between Rokumon’s reminiscences and other extant records suggest that his memory of the occasion was somewhat faulty, making it all but impossible to determine conclusively what actually transpired that day.79 The justification for the novel topic that Ryūhoku seems to be proposing in Rokumon’s account, that “wine” produces folly and therefore “tea” is a more suitable beverage, is difficult to reconcile not only with Ryūhoku’s lifelong fondness for drink but also with Rokumon’s statement that Ryūhoku had already made arrangements to serve wine to his guests that day only to abandon the idea after Rokumon raised his objection. If an aversion to alcohol was not the cause, perhaps Ryūhoku was motivated to propose the variant topic simply for the sake of novelty. Whatever Ryūhoku’s reasons may have been for substituting “tea” for “wine,” however, it is clear that his readiness to experiment with a variation contrasts sharply with Rokumon’s resistance to accepting any deviation from precedent. Ryūhoku’s poems from this period, particularly those he produced in the context of his shikai, show a compositional attitude that was not so restrictive. The poet’s commitment to exploring literary expression for its own sake is clear from these poetry manuscripts, which reveal his ever keener interest in engaging with an array of texts broader than any tightly circumscribed canon. Far from situating his poetic practice in the service of some overarching demand for utility in statecraft or moral cultivation, Ryūhoku also



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sought to incorporate novel subjects into his poems, to enjoy new verbal or creative challenges, and to address the various dimensions of his immediate everyday experience in verse.

Joining the Shitaya Literati If Oka Rokumon’s recollection captures an awkward moment from Ryūhoku’s early efforts to bridge the shijin and bunjin realms, Seki Sekkō’s scrapbook preserves a more whimsical sign of Ryūhoku’s growing presence on the Shitaya literary scene (fig. 2.2). This shireki, or “poem calendar,” comprises two poems that Ryūhoku wrote in celebration of the beginning of the second year of Ansei (1855). Ryūhoku enlisted his friend to provide the calligraphy for these two poems, which Sekkō rendered in reisho, the clerical script for which he is best known. The attractive printed result doubled as both New Year’s greeting and advertising circular, but it also had a further function. The Japanese calendar in use at the time included “large months,” which had thirty days, and “small months,” with twenty-nine days. Ryūhoku’s paired quatrains served as a calendar of sorts because they are labeled “large” and “small,” and each incorporates six numerals corresponding to the year’s “large” (2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11) and “small” (1, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12) months, permitting the recipient to tell at a glance the length of each month:

戲製詩暦

Just for fun, I make a poem calendar

Two years divided at the windy fifth watch of night, When spring’s Green Emperor comes from the east upon his six dragons. 先卜八垠花柳好 I imagine the lovely flowers and willows in the world’s eight corners; 春光九十一瓢中 Ninety days of spring ahead, and all will be spent with one wine gourd.   大    The “large” months. 正値三元各盡歡 Meeting the three beginnings, all enjoy themselves to the fullest; 四絃聲裏七絃彈 Amid the sound of the four-string lute is the pluck of a seven-string koto. 不須十里東郊去 No need to venture ten leagues out into the eastern districts, 春沸家家十二欄 For spring wells up in each house along the twelve balustrades.   小    The “small” months.80 二年界斷五更風 青帝六龍來自東

The practical timekeeping purpose served by such poems notwithstanding, the joy of lexical diversion and the chance to demonstrate compositional craft were the main goals behind their creation. In an article that discusses several poems from Kankei shōkō in an attempt to elucidate selection criteria for the posthumously published anthology Ryūhoku

Fig. 2.2 Ryūhoku’s poem calendar (shireki), which appears in Sekkō’s scrapbook along with a colored drawing of two rabbits; the rabbit is the Chinese zodiac sign for Ansei 2 (1855). Poems by Kakudō (i.e., Ryūhoku), calligraphy by Seki Sekkō. To the right of the poem card is an inserted piece of paper stating that the calligraphy is Sekkō’s “poor [i.e., his own] work.” Courtesy of the National Archives of Japan, Tokyo.



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shishō, Sugishita Motoaki points to these and another pair of poems Ryūhoku com­ posed as a shireki for the following year and observes, “Of course, it is not the case that these poems have a high literary value, and so it is only to be expected that they were not included in Ryūhoku shishō. But can’t we also say that it is precisely this kind of artistry that befits the talent who wrote New Chronicles of Yanagibashi?”81 Sugishita draws an important connection between the love of word play evident in these calendrical poems and the techniques of kanbun gesaku (frivolous or playful writings in kanbun) so fully realized in Ryūhoku’s later work. Yet it is also worth noting that delight in such verbal play was not a trait unique to Ryūhoku, but rather quite widespread among the bunjin of the time. The scrapbooks of Seki Sekkō and Ōtsuki Bankei show how printed shireki circulated among Edo’s literati, almost like the New Year’s greeting cards that are still exchanged in Japan today.82 Whether Seki Sekkō’s beautifully executed poem calendar was the inspiration or not, the attendance at Ryūhoku’s shikai grew over the course of the next few years. Iwamatsu Tōsai, Kaneko Sakō, Seki Sekkō, Funabashi Seitan, and others who had taken part in Ryūhoku’s shikai during its inaugural year remained regular members, and soon Sekkō’s younger brother Tsunezō as well as Funabashi’s son, Gyokkei, began to attend occasion­ ally too.83 Ryūhoku’s shikai also began to attract additional participants who were already well-established figures on the Shitaya literary scene. For example, the poet Uemura Roshū (1830–85) attended once in the summer of 1855 and then began coming regularly the following year. Roshū’s principal teacher in poetry was Ōnuma Chinzan, under whom he began studying at the age of nineteen, and he enjoyed close friendships with Seki Sekkō and other Shitaya bunjin.84 It would be another few years before Ryūhoku developed close ties to Chinzan, who was then the preeminent figure on the Edo kanshi scene, but Roshū’s participation in his shikai indicates how Ryūhoku’s profile among Edo’s men of letters was on the rise. Reading Ryūhoku’s poetic journals from these years alongside the manuscripts of Shitaya-based participants in his shikai such as Seki Sekkō and Uemura Roshū, one is left with a strong impression of the exuberance with which Ryūhoku and his bunjin friends gathered to perform in various ways their membership in a tradition of letters that stretched back for millennia and across the breadth of the Sinosphere. These meetings were at once a chance to declare their affinities for particular figures, to engage with the texts of these predecessors, to interact with each other in verse, and to develop their own literary skills. They employed many of the same practices that characterized the Hayashi gatherings, including social composition on assigned topics, composition of poems that matched the rhymes of classic texts, and dialogic compositions that matched each other’s verses. Yet Ryūhoku and his bunjin friends enjoyed even more elaborate forms of poetic production that were motivated by a host of expressive purposes, including the sheer joy of lexical challenge. In the autumn of 1855, for example, Ryūhoku composed an octave that matches the rhymes of a Du Fu poem, one of the latter’s well-known series of eight titled “Autumn Feelings,” yet with a twist. In composing the matched-rhyme poem, Ryūhoku imposed an additional constraint upon himself, limiting the fifty-six graphs he used for it to those appearing in the original Du Fu sequence of eight poems.85 Compositions written under

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such constraints are known as “poems of gathered graphs” 集字詩 (Ch. jizishi; J. shūjishi), and, on at least one occasion, Ryūhoku made the composition of a jizishi the assigned topic for one of his shikai gatherings. In the spring of Ansei 3 (1856), the members of his shikai composed jizishi on the seasonally appropriate topic of Li Bo’s (701–62) “Banquet in the Peach and Pear Garden,” drawing the graphs each used in his composition solely from those appearing in Li Bo’s preface, which must have been especially challenging given the text’s brevity.86 The poetry collections of shikai members Seki Sekkō and Uemura Roshū each contain a poem written in response to the assignment.87 It seems that the activity of composing jizishi was not uncommon among Shitaya bunjin, for Seki Sekkō’s poetry collection contains a section of several such poems that he composed in the mid-1850s in addition to the Li Bo piece: each sequence was composed solely from graphs appearing in celebrated texts such as Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Poems,” Su Dongpo’s “Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff,” Zhou Dunyi’s “On the Love of the Lotus,” and several others.88 Although engagement in these various forms with celebrated texts by Chinese literary figures was an important feature of Ryūhoku’s poetry gatherings during these years, he also assigned many topics concerning specifically Japanese historical, literary, and geographic subjects. This characteristic marked a comparatively recent development in his poetry, for, as discussed in the previous chapter, only one or two topics among those Ryūhoku assigned during the inaugural year of his shikai had any explicit connection to Japan. The new breadth is evident in the set of topics that Ryūhoku put together for an event he held with several friends in the winter of 1856, a marathon session during which the group composed quatrains in rapid succession through the night: Poems of one night  一夜詩 On the twenty-ninth day of the tenth month in early winter, I spent the whole night composing poems with four or five members of our group. For each theme, we chose rhymes as we pleased. Between the hour of the cock and the hour of the rabbit [around six in the evening to six in the morning], I wrote forty quatrains. They are even more crude and poor than usual, but they are worth a laugh. 孟冬念九與社徒四五名通宵作詩毎題拈韻自酉至卯得四十絶拙劣倍常聊供一噱 89

The sequence of forty poems contains only a few that were included in later anthologies.90 While Ryūhoku and his friends may have been focused more on quantity than on quality, the sequence of forty topics was anything but haphazardly assembled, showing instead a clear sense of parity and associative progression. The list includes topics with a specific literary or historical referent as well as those evoking more general natural settings or urban scenes. For the allusive topics in particular, a balance was struck between Chinese and Japanese referents. The sequence begins with assigned topics on Chinese themes including “An image of Taigong [Jiang Ziya] fishing on the Wei” 太公釣渭圖, “An image of [Tao] Yuanming sleeping soundly” 淵明高臥圖, and “An image of the Brilliant Emperor [Xuanzong of the Tang] astride his horse” 明皇上 馬圖. These are followed by several drawn from Japanese history, such as “An image of



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[Minamoto no] Yorimitsu slaying the monster” 頼光戮鬼圖, “An image of Ushi [no Wakamaru, i.e., Yoshitsune] playing his flute” 阿牛吹笛圖, and “An image of Minister Taira [Kiyomori] watching a dance” 平相國觀舞圖. Likewise, the next portion of the roster of poem topics asks participants to compose “reminiscences on the past” concern­ ing five famous battlegrounds and sites of fallen dynasties in China, including Gusu, Xianyang, Wujiang, the Fei River, and Red Cliff, after which they are to do the same for five Japanese sites of similar significance: Yoshino, Dan-no-ura, Kawa-Nakajima, Seki­ gahara, and Naniwa. Ryūhoku’s robust interest in including domestic subject matter in his versification can be seen as part of a broader trend that started in the late eighteenth century as pro­ fessional kanshi poets became increasingly eager to incorporate uniquely Japanese sites and topics into their compositions. In the popular guides to composing Sinitic poetry that Gion Nankai (1676–1751) wrote in the mid-eighteenth century, he identified dis­ tinctively Japanese place-names and practices as well as “vulgar phrases about money, commerce, eating, and drinking” as topics to avoid in Sinitic poetry composition.91 Yet, beginning in the 1790s, Ichikawa Kansai (1749–1820), Kashiwagi Jotei, and other profes­ sional poets associated with the Kōko Shisha poetry circle heralded a revolution in Japa­ nese kanshi when they turned their attention to these and other domains of expression that their mid-Edo predecessors had shunned.92 The bunjin orientation of Ryūhoku’s shikai is evident in the way he enthusiastic­a lly followed in the footsteps of his pioneering forebears Kansai and Jotei, taking up the chal­ lenge to direct his attention not only to celebrated Japanese sites, but to the more familiar elements of everyday life, including subjects that had once been dismissed as irredeemably vulgar. To mark the beginning of summer in Ansei 3 (1856), for example, Ryū­hoku put a favorite dish of Edo residents, katsuo (skipjack tuna), on his shikai’s com­po­sitional menu. Though long celebrated as a seasonal delicacy, katsuo had caught the expressive attention of Japanese kanshi poets only at the turn of the century.93 Uemura Roshū had recently become a regular participant in Ryūhoku’s shikai, and the following is the poem he com­ posed for the occasion: Katsuo—Topic given at the poetry gathering of the scholar-official Narushima 松魚 成島學士詩會掲題 上市鉛錘趁曉涼 酒廚收拾費商量 碧鮮割玉霜刀冷 紅膾翻花象箸香 隻尾掃空饞客席 片身傾盡俠人囊 他時為脯供時用 骨節如松弱化強

The “lead-sinker” fish are brought to market in the cool of dawn; Drinking houses haggle to gather stock for their kitchens. Verdant and fresh are these jewels when cut, the frosted knife cold; Slices of crimson flesh scatter like blossoms, fragrant on ivory chopsticks. Just one fish can sweep clean the ravenous customers’ seats; A single filet will empty out the gallant’s coin-purse. On another day, the flesh can be dried for future use, Bones and sinews like the “pine” of its name, soft transformed to hard.94

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Stories of outlandishly high prices paid for the first katsuo of the annual season were common in Edo at the time, and Roshū’s poem details the sequence by which the fish enter the stream of commercial goods. He gleefully ignores the advice of earlier kanshi poets like Gion Nankai in both his attention to this sort of market activity and his graphic depiction of the preparation and consumption of a food item. His poem furthermore shows a willingness to incorporate several different Japanese names for the fish, including “lead-sinker (fish)” 鉛錘 and “pine fish” 松魚, terms that would have been shunned as crassly local by kanshi poets of Nankai’s sensibility. Ryūhoku’s poem on the same topic similarly lingers on descriptions of the katsuo as a precious commodity but highlights also the ephemerality of the fish’s value: 5 10 15

松魚歌 四月南海潮連天

An ode to katsuo

In the south seas in the fourth month, where the tide meets the sky; 松魚跳入漁丁船 The katsuo leap up into the fishermen’s boats. 闔浦未嘗新味好 In the whole port city, still none has tasted the fresh flavor, 輕舸載送來市廛 The light skiffs are loaded up and sent to the vendors’ stalls. 一肩雙籃賣且叫 Twin baskets supported on their shoulders, they sell and shout; 聲飛西陌又東阡 Voices flying to the western streets and to the eastern alleys. 豪貴爭先買似奪 The wealthy vie to be first to purchase, or to plunder; 碧鱗三尺値萬錢 Emerald scales three feet in length, and worth ten thousand coins. 呼珍誇美數日耳 Claims of rarity and boasts of freshness can last but a few days; 昨如金兮今如鉛 Yesterday it was gold, but today mere lead. 老來徒入鰋鯉伍 Past its prime, it vainly enters the ranks of mudfish and carp; 滿盤誰敢垂饞涎 Who would salivate over even a full plate? 宛似陳勝一揮耰 Just like Chen Sheng when he brandished his rake in revolt; 霆名殷殷轟八埏 With a thunderous roar, his name resounded in all eight directions. 坐蓐未暖兵威蹙 But before he had even warmed his seat, his military strength was sapped, 容身無復半頃田 Leaving him without even a scrap of land to call home.95

Ryūhoku’s unexpected reference in the closing couplets is to Chen Sheng (also known as Chen She), who mounted an improbable rebellion in 209 bce against the Qin regime. Although the rebellion initially spread quickly, and many peasants rose up with only their farm implements as weapons, the effort was suppressed shortly after it had begun. In addition to humble origins, the katsuo shares with Chen Sheng’s rebels a dramatic rise to prominence and an equally precipitous fall, but Ryūhoku may also be playing upon a Japanese linguistic association of katsuo with military victory.96 The participants in Ryūhoku’s shikai in this way expanded their poetic attention to include quotidian topics and actively incorporated distinctly Japanese themes into their



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expressive palettes. The enthusiasm with which they explored such comparatively novel literary avenues was one feature that distinguished Ryūhoku’s shikai from the more restrained and conventional sort of poetic expression that characterized the Hayashi gathering. Furthermore, Ryūhoku’s interest in composing kanshi not only on themes well established in Chinese practice, but also on explicitly domestic topics marked a distinct departure from the range of Sinitic poetic expression undertaken by his ancestor Nobuyuki (Kinkō). Whereas the elder Narushima was also an accomplished waka poet, the scope of his Sinitic poetic expression was tightly tied to venerable continental traditions. The reference work he published in 1736, Daien (A garden of poetic themes), is a book-length list of hundreds of recommended Sinitic verse composition topics, all of which are drawn from Chinese precedents of the Tang and earlier. As haikai aesthetics that found inspiration in everyday plebeian themes became popular in Japanese-language poetry during the first decades of the eighteenth century, the elder Narushima held true to Sorai-inspired hightone (kakuchō) principles when he wrote a spirited essay decreeing that kanshi and waka poets alike must never allow such vulgarity to mar their elegant verses.97 As the poem on katsuo indicates, Ryūhoku’s poetry journals by contrast abound with the fruits of his endeavors to incorporate specifically Japanese topics and themes in his compositional activities, including not only humble elements of local culture, but even sketchier subject matter that his ancestor would surely have found shocking. For example, around the ninth month of Ansei 3 (1856), Ryūhoku composed a set of three poems titled “Curse in the Hour of the Ox” 丑時詛, which focus on a unique Japanese practice known as ushi no toki mairi. In this rite, an aggrieved woman visits a shrine in the dead of night and hammers a doll into a tree in order to seek vengeance on the one who has wronged her. Although Ryūhoku’s poetry manuscript does not specifically indicate that the sequence of three poems on this topic was written in the context of his shikai, judging from the point at which the poems appear in his journals and from the fact that regular shikai participant Uemura Roshū’s poetry anthology also contains a poem on the same topic that appears at a point suggesting it too was composed around the ninth month of Ansei 3, it seems likely that the two composed their poems for the same event.98 The camaraderie he enjoyed with his shikai partners allowed Ryūhoku the latitude to explore this kind of composition, but we would be wrong to assume that there were no limits on their expression. In the first of this three-poem sequence depicting the woman’s nighttime visit to the shrine, Ryūhoku makes use of a line from the Classic of Poetry to describe the intensity of her vengeful feelings as she hammers a nail into the effigy. On reading Ryūhoku’s poem years later, his friend the Confucian scholar Ōtsuki Bankei, presumably reacting to its supernatural content, wrote, “I fear the use of words from the classics in such a poem is inappropriate.”99 Bankei was one of the most open-minded, broadly learned, and eclectically oriented Confucian scholars active in nineteenth-century Japan; his comment thus reminds us of the genuine reverence with which the Confucian classics were regarded by scholars at the time and affirms the ways in which some of the literary avenues Ryūhoku explored in his shikai departed from those pursued in more conservative contexts, such as the Hayashi gathering. In turning to the Japanese vernacular tradition for poetic inspiration, Ryūhoku often made efforts to frame his assigned topics in such a way as to encourage participants in

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his shikai gatherings to engage with specific scenes in Japanese literary texts and even to invoke particular Japanese verses in their compositions. In the second month of Ansei 3 (1856), for example, Ryūhoku assigned the topic “An image of Saigyō gazing at the peak” to shikai participants, inviting them to recall one of the twelfth-century poet Saigyō’s best-known works: kaze ni nabiku carried on the winds, Fuji no keburi no fading away in the smoke sora ni kiete of the Fuji skies yukue mo shiranu are these feelings of mine waga omoi kana that know no destination100

Saigyō’s poem appears in the Shin kokinshū under the heading “Composed about Mount Fuji when he traveled to the east,” referring to the pilgrimage Saigyō, a former warrior, made after taking religious vows. The poem Uemura Roshū composed in response to Ryūhoku’s assigned topic invokes this compositional context of Saigyō’s waka by alluding specifically to the itinerant monk’s former status as a warrior: 題西行望岳圖 昨日山河橫槊臣 今朝雲水打包身 好開高眼收名嶽 也是當年不二人

An image of Saigyō gazing at the peak Yesterday, he was a vassal trekking across hills and rivers, halberd in hand; Today, he is a wandering monk, his body wrapped in robes. Fitting that he should cast his noble gaze to take in the famous peak, For he too was a “peerless” man of his age.101

Just as he did in the poem on katsuo quoted above, Roshū engages in word play in the final line of this poem, incorporating the word “peerless” (J. fuji) for its homophony in Japanese with the toponym “Fuji.” The poem Ryūhoku composed for the occasion simi­ larly contrasts the realms of the warrior and the monk, but unlike Roshū’s it does not focus on Saigyō’s temporal or spatial remove from battle. Rather, in Ryūhoku’s rendering, Saigyō is corporeally present in a realm where wars continue to rage, attaining a remove that is spiritual: 鞋底山河草木腥 厭看割據鬪雷霆 誰知天半一拳石 獨使渠儂雙眼青

At his feet, the mountains and rivers, grass and trees raw with carnage. Hateful to look at the realm carved up, thunder of battles raging. Does anyone know that this fistful of rocks filling the sky Alone meets with his approving gaze?102

To portray Saigyō’s transcendent vantage point, Ryūhoku’s poem draws on a passage in the Doctrine of the Mean that posits the possibility of adopting a perspective in which even a great mountain may be regarded as nothing more than “a fistful of rocks.”



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Whereas Roshū’s poem configures Saigyō’s transformation as externally visible through his changed garments, the rhetorical question posed by Ryūhoku’s final couplet suggests a transformation that is internal. Occasionally, Ryūhoku’s shikai topics invited participants to engage in even more focused attentiveness to particular works of Japanese poetry. Earlier that year, Ryūhoku invited shikai members to write about the medieval general Taira no Tadanori (1144–84), the brother of Kiyomori, head of the Taira military clan. Tadanori figures prominently in a few memorable scenes from Japan’s most celebrated medieval war tale, Tales of the Heike, which focuses on the Taira’s defeat by the Minamoto during the 1180–85 Genpei War. In assigning the topic “An image of Tadanori lodging under a cherry tree,” Ryūhoku spe­ cifically invoked the following poem, which appears in the course of the text’s account of Tadanori’s death in battle: yukikurete now that evening has come on ko no shitakage o I make my lodgings yado to seba in the shade of tree leaves; hana ya koyoi no the blossoms shall be aruji naramashi my host tonight103

The terms “lodging” and “cherry tree” in Ryūhoku’s topic situate this waka of Tada­ nori’s as the target of compositional attention. At the point in the Heike narrative where this waka occurs, Tadanori squares off against an opponent named Rokuyata. Although Tadanori initially gains the upper hand in the ensuing skirmish, he is seriously wounded when one of Rokuyata’s men attacks him from behind. On searching Tadanori’s body, Rokuyata discovers the above poem, realizes Tadanori’s identity, and laments the death of one so accomplished in both military and literary arts. The poem that shikai member Seki Sekkō composed in response to Ryūhoku’s assigned topic first depicts the retreat of the vanquished Taira forces and then uses this background as the context in which to situate Tadanori’s valedictory verse: 忠度宿櫻下圖 百万軍崩奈一身 銕衣風冷野櫻春 扶桑六十託無地 才借花陰爲主人

An image of Tadanori lodging under a cherry tree An army of thousands in defeat; what can he do with himself? The wind chills his iron garments; but beside the wild cherry it is spring. No place to lodge in all sixty provinces of “this land of great mulberries”; He can only borrow the shade of these blossoms, taking them as his host.104

Sekkō’s phrase in the final line, “taking them as his host,” clearly echoes the last lines of Tadanori’s verse. Ryūhoku’s shikai often left the formal considerations of composition— whether to write heptasyllabic or pentasyllabic verse, a quatrain or an octave, and other such questions—up to individual participants. Fellow shikai member Uemura Roshū

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chose to write an octave in response to the Tadanori topic; like Sekkō, he incorporates an unmistakable allusion to the Japanese verse in line 3: An image of Taira [Lord of] Satsuma lodging under a cherry tree 平薩州宿櫻下圖 5

旗影紅暗春日暮 窮途猶具風流趣 宿向花下花是主 一場春夢和香霧 空桑有戀況名花



詠罷花陰仍小住



明日落花春可惜 鐵衣香惹一夕露

Amid the dark red of battle standards, the spring sun sets; Reaching the end of the road, his tastes remain elegant. Lodging beneath the flowers, the blossoms as his host; A spring dream to complement the fragrant mists. If one can long for a bare mulberry, how much more for these famed flowers; Completing his poem, he makes the shade of blossoms his little abode. The blossoms shall fall tomorrow, the spring to be grieved Robes of iron shall invite the evening dew.105

Whereas Sekkō and Roshū chose jintishi forms, Ryūhoku’s own poem was a longer “oldstyle poem” (gushi). In it, Ryūhoku incorporates references not only to the valedictory verse but to another episode involving Tadanori and his waka poetry. In this earlier narrative, Tadanori returns to the capital after the rest of the Taira clan has frantically fled, stopping in at the home of his poetry teacher, Fujiwara Shunzei (1114–1204), to convey his earnest desire to have one of his waka included in the new imperial anthology that Shunzei is editing: the Senzaishū (Collection for a thousand years). He presents Shunzei with a scroll containing a selection of over one hundred of his best poems and offers his hope that one will merit inclusion. Deeply impressed, Shunzei eventually selects a poem Tadanori had written about the cherry blossoms at the old Shiga capital. Yet, because the Taira have been designated enemies of the court, Shunzei decides to leave the poem unattributed, placing it under the heading “poet unknown.” Ryūhoku’s poem referring to both of these stories about Tadanori’s compositions on cherry blossoms reads: 平忠度宿櫻下圖

An image of Taira Tadanori lodging under a cherry tree



貂蝉豈敵屠沽兒



白旆風怒倒紅旗



蘭闈繁華渾一夢



單騎日暮去何之

5

樹爲逆旅花爲主



金袍夜宿香雲帷



誰圖今夕吟花句

Men crowned in noble regalia are no match for lowly butchers; Descending like a wrathful wind, the white banners topple the red. Glorious days amid the orchid-decked palace are now but a dream; At sunset, a lone soldier rides away on horseback—where does he head? With the cherry tree as his lodgings, the blossoms are his host; In his metal garments, he passed the night amid fragrant cloud curtains. Who knew that his poem praising the blossoms that evening,





The Private Realm



即爲明朝絶命詞 花落更有再開日

10

人逝恨無歸來期



聞説狐川曾旋馬 付屬稿巻泣訣師



應知當時已決死



英懐藻思兩可悲

15

吁嗟千載集中遺篇在 長與芳名傳千載

105

Would become his valedictory verse by morning? Even though blossoms fall, another day comes when they bloom again; But when a man dies, the lamentable thing is that there is no return. I hear that at Kitsune River you turned your horse back; Handing over your manuscript, you wept as you left your teacher. At that moment you must have already resigned yourself to death; Your heroic feelings and poetic skills alike are to be lamented. Alas! One of your compositions is now in the Senzaishū; May it, like your fine name, be passed down for a thousand years.106

The irony that Tadanori had achieved his fervent wish of inclusion in the imperial waka anthology although anonymously became the premise a few centuries later for Zeami’s Noh play Tadanori, which focuses on the grudge of Tadanori’s spirit and his desire to have his poem attributed. There are several reasons to think Ryūhoku may have had in mind not only the two Heike episodes, but Zeami’s play as well. First, the placename “Kitsune River,” which Ryūhoku uses in line 11, does not occur in texts of Tales of the Heike, but seems rather to be an innovation introduced by Zeami to the Noh play.107 Moreover, in both the Noh play and in Ryūhoku’s poem, the waka of Tadanori’s that is the principal focus of attention is the one about taking the cherry blossoms as his host for the evening (which Ryūhoku references in line 5), not the poem on the Shiga cherry blossoms that Shunzei actually incorporates into the Senzaishū. It would not be surprising for Ryūhoku to be referring to Zeami’s text specifically, for he was particularly fond of Noh plays and in his future career as a journalist would in fact advocate for the preservation of the Noh theatrical tradition.108 In any case, Tadanori’s combined mastery of both literary and military arts is an aspect of his character that both the Heike narrative and Zeami’s text emphasize, and Ryūhoku’s penultimate couplet makes this point as well.109 When Ryūhoku’s contemporary Kikuchi Sankei provided evaluative comments on the poem, he stressed this dimension while reiterating Ryūhoku’s polysemous play on the Sen­ zaishū anthology’s title: “All the Taira men were weak and frail, and there was none worth discussion. Tadanori alone was skilled in both literary and military endeavors; his person and name will live on for thousands of years.”110 In addition to these sorts of compositions on established or literarily allusive topics, Ryūhoku continued to write poetry during these years that was inspired by current events, by seasonal occurrences, or by the routines of his everyday life. Unlike the poems he composed in more social contexts, at the shikai gatherings that he oversaw or at other regular poetic meetings in which he participated, these occasional poems sometimes offer a fuller and more personal glimpse of his domestic sphere. Just one month after he was married to Kanō Ryū, for example, Ryūhoku composed the following poem on the topic of ōsōji, the traditional year-end “great sweeping” of the house that is undertaken to prepare for the

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coming of the New Year. Although its topic could not be more mundane, the poem vividly re-creates the scene as Ryūhoku, his family, and the members of the Narushima household carry out this annual custom that is still practiced in contemporary Japan:

掃塵行



嗟我婦子將改歳 掃屋先爲迎春計 蚤起候晴報四隣

5

障戸洞開門扉閉 趫々健兒帯宿酲 素帨短褐身何輕



青竹之竿椶櫚帚 擊席拂柱齊作聲

10

鼠矢蛛網滿幃幔 簸之揚之黔埃漫 茂弘揮扇避應難 史雲甑潔飯可爨

15

寒日向晩人盡痡 垢面蓬頭來聚厨 沽酒慰勞各酣醉 戯謔宛似兒童娯 我家婢僕懶而恣 終歳塵穢積幾簣



一朝掃來屋宇清

20

豈憂東皇促駕至



君不見萬戸年々掃塵人 紛々竟爲北邙塵

Song on sweeping dust Come, my wife, for the new year is upon us; Let us sweep out the rooms and prepare to greet spring! Waking at dawn, I await the light, and report to the neighborhood; I fling open the sliding doors, and close the gate. Our sturdy houseboy has a bit of a hangover, but How nimble he looks with a plain rag and simple work clothes! Taking poles of green bamboo and brooms of hemp-palm, We beat tatami and wipe the pillars, making a racket together. Rat droppings and spider webs lurk behind curtains; We sift through this and lift up that, dark dust everywhere. Even Maohong could not shield himself behind his fan;111 Once as dusty as Shiyun’s, our stove is clean enough to cook rice now.112 The winter day is nearly done, and everyone is weary; With dusty faces and tousled hair, they gather in the kitchen. I buy sake to reward their labors, and everyone gets drunk; Bantering jovially with the mirth of children at play. Our maid and houseboy are lazy and willful; All year long, dust and dirt have piled up: several pans full! In a single morning, we have swept it out and made the house clean; What have we to fear when the god of spring drives his ­carriage forth? But then again—all of us who sweep dust year after year Are in the end just so much scattered dust at Beimang.113

The last couplet of the poem, with its gloomy reference to the Beimang Cemetery, a burial ground located north of the Luoyang capital in Later Han times, is a striking twist to an otherwise lighthearted poem about the pedestrian routines of domestic life. This poem offers one of the few such household scenes appearing in Ryūhoku’s poetry from this time period, and the injunction in the first line is an exceedingly rare reference to his first wife. Her relative absence from his poetry stands in contrast to the frequent attention that the Narushima family legacy and the poet’s memories of his father receive. When Ryūhoku came to be a father himself, however, his progeny (and he fathered some sixteen children) would figure occasionally in his verse.114 Like his bunjin counterparts, Ryūhoku also used Sinitic poetry to comment on contemporary affairs. When a massive earthquake struck the very heart of Edo in the winter



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of Ansei 2 (1855), for example, Ryūhoku was among the host of poets to write a poem about the tragedy. In the composition’s heading, he specifically notes how Edo’s literati had responded to the disaster, identifying himself among their number as a bunshi, or “gentleman of letters”: Earthquake song 地震行 On the night of the second of the tenth month in the fifty-second year of the cycle, the earth trembled mightily, and those crushed to death numbered in the tens of thousands. It was a cataclysm unseen in a hundred years. Various gentlemen of letters recorded the event, exhausting its possibilities in prose and in poetry. What need is there for me to add to it? But friends I met insisted I write a poem, and so I composed this and gave it to them. 乙卯十月二日、夜地大震、壓死者以萬數、盖百餘年來、未有之變也、諸文士記其事、于文 于詩盡矣、余復何贅、會友人強徴詩、乃賦此以贈 5 10 15 20

Behold how Bai Qi [of Qin] crushed the Changping troops [of Zhao]: 四十萬人斃一坑 Sending four hundred thousand men to be buried in a hole. 又不見周郎放火赤壁舟 And behold how Zhoulang set fire to the boats at Red Cliff: 俄頃爛却百萬兵 In an instant a million troops were singed. 干戈之世尚殺戮 A war-torn world kills people brutally; 積屍若山奚足驚 No surprise when corpses pile up in mountains. 如今鞬櫜三百載 But now weapons have been sheathed for three hundred years. 野無枯骼人樂生 No corpses lie exposed in fields, and people enjoy life. 吁嗟乎何物一朝掀大地 Ah! What thing has wrenched up the earth this morning? 地忽立天忽傾 The land jerked upward and the heavens suddenly tilted. 中間人屋紛飛舞 In their midst, people’s homes were smashed to smithereens; 柱礎如鴉瓦如虻 Pillars and cornerstones flew as crows, roof tiles as insects. 廿萬人爲梁下鬼 Two hundred thousand people became ghosts beneath bridges; 粉虀何問貴賤名 When everything is smashed to dust, what does a name matter? 喪親喪兒喪昆季 Losing one’s parents, losing one’s child, losing one’s brothers too; 指不暇屈心惸々 No time to count them up on one’s fingers, just sorrow in the heart. 人叫痛鬼訴冤 People cry out in pain, the spirits protest their wrongful death; 喃々之語啾々聲 These murmuring voices; these mournful cries 共道旻天逞疾威 Together they say: the heavens present a fearsome power, 多殺不辜那無情 Killing the innocent—how cruel! 吾想彼蒼定有意 I think: heaven must certainly have some reason, 故降大戻警侗氓 Some purpose in bringing this tragedy to warn the people. 仰問天々不答 I look up and ask the heavens, but there is no response; 天不答白日明 No response, just the bright white sun.115 君不見白起撃抜長平營

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Fortunately, Ryūhoku and his family escaped the disaster, which left their home uninhabitable for some time. The temblor led Ryūhoku to suspend his shikai for the year, but he continued to write poems about the aftershocks, noting how unsettling the tremors were in his diary.

Reclusion In this way, Ryūhoku’s shikai gathering gave him the opportunity to explore various modes of literary practice that were not so readily fostered within the bounds of his duties as a scholar-official. Whereas classical exegesis was the primary textual focus of his position within the shijin frame, in the private setting of his shikai, where he associated more with those identified as bunjin, Ryūhoku was able to hone and develop his compositional and expressive skills for their own sake. He sometimes willfully deviated from textual precedent simply for the sake of novelty, and he occasionally created compositions that were motivated by the sheer pleasure of word play. He not only drew subject matter from the codified canon of Chinese exemplars, but actively directed his attention toward distinctly Japanese topics, even engaging with specific passages from Japanese literary texts. The bunjin frame also furnished Ryūhoku with an alternative set of thematic frontiers to complement those more closely tied to his status as an apprentice okujusha. If service to the state was the overarching aim that characterized the world of scholar-officials, then withdrawal from the strictures of that service was a recurring preoccupation of the bunjin. Fittingly, the exploration of eremitism was one sustained motif of Ryūhoku’s compositions from the mid-1850s. Moreover, as the poem about Saigyō viewing Mount Fuji discussed above shows, Ryūhoku often portrayed reclusive figures as transcending politically unstable realms. Given that the regime Ryūhoku himself served, the Tokugawa shogunate, found itself beset by both internal discord and foreign threats at the time, this structure surely had personal relevance. Consider, for example, the poem Ryūhoku composed in 1854 about Li Bo gazing at the Lu Mountain waterfall. Li Bo’s compositions on this site in modern Jiangxi province were among his best known in Edo period Japan, included in widely read anthologies of Chinese poetry.116 In particular, the concluding couplet from the first of Li Bo’s two poems was celebrated for its bold use of hyperbole and the extraordinary image of a stellar cascade: 飛流直下三千尺 疑是銀河落九天

The torrent flies straight down for three thousand feet; Perhaps it is the Milky Way falling from the heavens above!

Even before reaching this high level of popular recognition, the poem and Li Bo’s writing of it had been a common subject in works of art produced by Japanese Zen monks. Ryū­ hoku composed his poem as a daigashi 題畫詩 (Ch. tihuashi), or “poem on the topic of a painting,” ostensibly in response to viewing just such an image. He opens by invoking the scene of the poet’s encounter with this awesome natural spectacle but toward the end



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makes a somewhat unexpected comparison. In lines 9–10, the focus shifts for one couplet to the devastation of the 755 An Lushan Rebellion, juxtaposing its carnage with Li Bo’s transcendence:

李白觀瀑圖



天爲謫仙賦才多



界破青山瀉銀河



々々倒瀉萬雷吼

5

騰擲翠蛟躍白鼉 謫仙瞥來聳毛髪



呼奇叫快舞且歌



百篇之詩一斗酒 玉山頽欲壓盤渦

10

君不見漁陽鼓轟如瀑布 潼關積屍山峩々



一片白雲隔塵界



醉鼾靜與泉聲和



嗚呼三千尺水今安在 謫仙々去亦如何

An image of Li Bo gazing at the waterfall Heaven has endowed the Banished Immortal with plentiful talents; The blue mountains divided, and the Milky Way cascading between. A “Silver River” pours downward, howling like tremendous thunder; Making jade dragons leap up and white crocodiles dance. As the Banished Immortal casts a glance, his hair stands on end; “Splendid!” he calls, “Thrilling!” he shouts, dancing and singing. One hundred poems and one gallon of wine; About to collapse, the jade mountain swoons atop the swirling maelstrom. Behold! The war drums of Yuyang beat like the waterfall; At the Tong Barrier, corpses are piled into towering mountains. But a wisp of white cloud separates him from that dusty world; His drunken snoring harmonizes with the sound of the brook. Ah, where are the three thousand feet of water now? And what of the Banished one, now returned to the immortal realm?117

The last lines of the first of Li Bo’s two poems on the Mount Lu waterfall imply the kind of remove from the concerns of the everyday that Ryūhoku depicts in this poem, but, in Li Bo’s original work, there is no contrast to warfare; rather, the poet’s transcendence is nonspecific: 而我樂名山 對之心益閒 無論漱瓊液 還得洗塵顏 且諧宿所好 永願辭人間

I enjoy beautiful mountains, And facing them brings ease to my mind. Who needs to gargle with immortal elixirs, When I can wash my face free of dust here? And it suits the feelings I have always had, I long to forever take leave of the human realm.118

Li Bo did in fact go into reclusion in the wake of the An Lushan Rebellion, but he is thought to have written his two poems on the Lu waterfall in his early career, long before the An Lushan Rebellion took place. In other words, a juxtaposition of the scene at Mount Lu with the Rebellion is not simply preordained by the topic “An image of Li Bo

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gazing at the waterfall.” The departure that Ryūhoku makes in this poem from the content of the image at hand is in keeping with the characteristic features of the tihuashi genre, which Aoki Masaru argues highlights the poet’s subjective response to the visual work and elaboration of themes inspired by it rather than merely objective description or explanation of the image.119 In this poem, Ryūhoku marks the Lu waterfall as a very particular place apart: a site of refuge from a state that verges on collapse. By borrowing the phrase “war drums of Yuyang” from Bo Juyi’s celebrated “Song of Lasting Pain,” the poem points to dimly perceived early warning signs of political catastrophe, amplifying the sense of urgency.120 The original version of the young scholar’s poem also contains the following couplet just before the extrametrical interjection of line 9, crossed out in his manuscript though still legible: 樂山樂水吾有意 屑屑何問丘與軻

Enjoying the mountains, enjoying the rivers, that is where my intent lays; What need is there to ask trifling questions about Confucius and Mencius?

It is unclear when or under what circumstances Ryūhoku decided to strike this poten­ tially inflammatory sentiment from his poem, but it echoes the distinction underlying the complementary spheres of shijin and bunjin: classical exegesis and official scholarly service on the one hand, poetic expression and reclusive retreat on the other. A remarkably similar evocation of reclusion in terms of removal from the turmoil of a state rent by political discord can be seen in a series of poems Ryūhoku composed on the subject of Lin Bu 林逋 (967–1028), a Song dynasty recluse who dwelt near West Lake in Hangzhou. Lin Bu lived on “Solitary Hill” with only two cranes, birds often asso­ ciated with the world of immortals, to keep him company.121 He is especially remembered for being fond of plums, the subject of his most celebrated couplet: 疏影橫斜水清淺 暗香浮動月黃昏

Sparse are their shadows, cast across the clear shallows; Their diffuse aroma drifts through the dim moonlight.

In early modern Japan, the figure of Lin Bu would thus have readily conjured images of a recluse and his cranes living in a hermitage festooned with plum blossoms. In Bashō’s 1684 travelogue, Nozarashi kikō, for example, the hokku poet visits a recluse on the outskirts of Kyoto. Observing the hermit’s plum orchard, Bashō is instantly reminded of Lin Bu, save for one missing element: ume shiroshi The plums are so white; kinōya tsuru o was it just yesterday that someone nusumareshi stole the cranes?122

Like Bashō, Ryūhoku chose the standard association of Lin Bu with plums as the basis of the topic he gave to his shikai gathering participants in Ansei 3 (1856): “An image of Lin Bu looking at his plum blossoms.” Accounts of Lin Bu’s reclusion often state that



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he imagined the plum trees that grew around his hermitage to be his wife and regarded the cranes as his children, metaphors that Ryūhoku incorporated into the first of three poems he wrote on the topic: 林逋看梅圖 長與梅花結好姻 良媒是鶴故相親 湖山數里香雲障 障得羌胡萬馬塵

An image of Lin Bu looking at his plum blossoms Long has he sealed a happy bond of matrimony with the plum blossoms, The crane a good intermediary, bringing them intimacy. For miles within the lakes and hills, a screen of fragrant clouds: Able to stave off the dust of ten thousand barbarian horses.123

Ryūhoku’s early spring assignment of a topic related to plums was no doubt prompted in part by seasonal considerations, and his choice to pair the plums with the recluse Lin Bu makes sense given the latter’s love for the flower. Yet, with the reference to “barbarian horses” in the quatrain’s final line, Ryūhoku attributes an additional political signifi­ cance to the figure of Lin Bu: a recluse who lived during a time when the Song dynasty was threatened by the northern Khitan empire. In a second composition from the series, Ryūhoku further develops this theme: 鳳輦過河萬卒呼 王公束手冠公驅 梅花不語鶴眠穩 春静湖山香版圖

The imperial carriage crosses the river, and the myriad ­soldiers cry out; Lord Wang folds his arms, Lord Kou rushes forward. The plum blossoms are speechless and the crane sleeps peacefully. In the vernal stillness amid these mountain lakes, it is a realm of fragrance.

The specific incident Ryūhoku references here occurred when the Khitan led troops toward the Song capital of Kaifeng in 1004, prompting a division within the Song court over how to respond. The names in line 2 of Ryūhoku’s quatrain refer to the principal exponents of these contending factions: Wang Qinruo 王欽若 (962–1025), who recom­ mended removal of the Song capital to the south, and Grand Councilor Kou Zhun 冠準 (961–1023), who countered that anyone proposing such a cowardly measure ought to be executed. Kou insisted instead that the Song emperor Zhenzong (r. 997–1022) personally lead troops to meet the Khitan army, which had come as far south as Shanyuan (north of the Yellow River). After much debate at court, the emperor decided to follow Kou’s advice, venturing north, crossing the river, and thereby rallying the Song troops: the event Ryūhoku describes in the first couplet. Ultimately, the encounter resulted in the ratification of the Treaty of Shanyuan, which stabilized relations between the Song and the Khitan for a century.124 Surely the possibility of an allegorical reading of the episode in light of contemporary events (the threat posed by foreign powers to the Toku­gawa state and the disparate opinions over what should be done about it) would have occurred to

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Ryūhoku. Especially interesting is the poet’s choice to include references to the ongoing political crisis and the debates of government officials in this series ostensibly focused on a celebrated recluse and his fondness for plums.125 In so doing, Ryūhoku situates Lin Bu’s significance primarily in the fact that he is ensconced in a realm removed from the concerns preoccupying both Wang and Kou. The private disengaged realm of the bunjin takes on a special significance when it is thus defined not only on the basis of its intrinsic features, but as the antithetic complement to the public domain of engaged shijin officials. This second of Ryūhoku’s poems on the theme of Lin Bu was later chosen as the very first poem to appear in the posthumous Ryūhoku shishō even though this gen­ erally chronologically arranged anthology contains several earlier compositions. Presumably the editors found this framing of Lin Bu particularly emblematic of Ryū­hoku’s beginnings as a poet. It was with another paradigmatic recluse, however, that Ryūhoku would have a lifelong association: Tao Yuanming. A poem Ryūhoku wrote in the summer of 1855 is one of his earliest extant compositions to call directly upon the Six Dynasties figure. As the title indicates, Ryūhoku’s poem is inspired by one of Tao Yuanming’s best-known works, “The Return,” which the poet wrote in 405 on resigning from his post as a local magistrate in Pengze after just eighty days in office. Tao Yuanming’s decision to return to till the fields and live out his life in relatively rustic asperity became an iconic scene that has subsequently been depicted in scores of East Asian works of art; like Ryūhoku’s compositions on Li Bo and Lin Bu, this poem is also framed as though it is inspired by such a visual representation of the event:

歸去來圖



松菊三逕屋一窩



樽有濁醪田有禾 歸去來兮爲底事 耘耔斟酌樂亦多

5

醜妻痴兒怡然語 援琴而歌把巻哦



踽々洋々我意適 療得折腰不寧痾



君不見胡馬蹂躪中原草

10

典午社稷一燭蛾 茂弘安石何所爲 建康風雲淝水波



衒功貪名無遠畧



辛苦却成亡國囮

A painting of Tao Yuanming’s “The Return” Pines and chrysanthemums along the three footpaths of his dwelling; There is unfiltered wine in the cask and grain in the fields. “Let’s go home” he said—and do what? Weeding and hoeing, ladling wine—the pleasures are many. His plain wife and dim sons merrily chat; He draws the zither near to sing, taking book in hand, he chants some poems. Treading his own path, wandering free—this fits his mood; Bowing and scraping took their toll, but at last he is cured of this malaise. But, look: foreign horses trample the grasses of the central plain; The altars of Jin are as a moth before the flame. What did Wang Dao and Xie An accomplish in Quelling the disorder at Jiankang and winning the battle at Fei River? They showed their valor in quest of fame, but had no long term plans; And all of their labors just made them dupes of a doomed regime.



The Private Realm

15

爭若先生手中一盃酒 傾來陶々滿顔酡 五株之柳東籬菊



寄奴風塵奈君何

113

How could this compare with the glass of wine in his hand, Downing it, he feels at peace and his whole face flushes red. Five willow trees out front, chrysanthemum in the eastern fence; Why need Liu Yu’s rebellion worry him?126

Though the entire poem is linked by a single rhyme, it can be divided into three thematic subunits signaled by the two extrametrical sequences in lines 9 and 15. With its references to “three footpaths” with their “pines and chrysanthemums,” to “wine in the cask,” to “weeding and hoeing,” and to “stroking the zither and chanting poems,” the first section draws heavily on the diction of Tao Yuanming’s “The Return,” depicting the pleasures of the pastoral lifestyle and the sense of carefree simplicity he idealized in this famous poem and its prose preface. Yet, beyond a vague desire to “give it all up and go back home” and thereby lead a leisurely life in accord with his temperament, neither Tao Yuanming’s preface nor his poem specifies the reasons for his sudden decision to resign his post as magistrate. In the phrase “bowing and scraping” in line 8, however, Ryūhoku pointedly incorporates a reference to an anecdote recorded in the biographies of Tao Yuanming contained in two dynastic histories, which state that the poet resigned his post upon the visit of an officious commandery inspector, saying: “I cannot, for the sake of five pecks of rice, bow before a country bumpkin.”127 This phrase, absent from Tao’s original poem, locates the motive for Tao Yuanming’s return unambiguously in the yearning for an untrammeled mode of being: the life of the bunjin instead of the shijin. Over the centuries, readers have adduced a variety of motives for Tao Yuanming’s retirement, including a sense of political principle or dynastic loyalty.128 Ryūhoku would himself later draw on these and other interpretations in his multifarious invocations of Tao Yuanming’s persona, but neither explanation is evident here. In contrast to the tone of easygoing personal freedom idealized in the first section of Ryūhoku’s poem, the second part introduces a note of desperate urgency with its dramatic references to the dim prospects of the Eastern Jin dynasty in the mid-fourth century. The two statesmen Wang Dao (276–339) and Xie An (320–85), contemporaries of Tao Yuanming’s grandfather and father respectively, appear here as men who achieved great military successes on behalf of the Eastern Jin. As grand councilor, Wang Dao played an important role in subduing the uprising of his cousin Wang Dun from 322 to 324 and then in quelling the uprising of Su Jun in 327 to 329. Similarly, in 383, when Xie An was serving as grand councilor, the Eastern Jin army fended off another threat by defeating a numerically superior force of the Former Qin in the Battle of Fei River. Although Ryūhoku does recognize Xie An’s momentary triumph, the poem’s focus is on the ultimate failure of Xie An’s and Wang Dao’s maneuverings to forestall the eventual collapse of the Jin in 420, several decades after they had both died.129 Instead, the poem celebrates Tao Yuanming for opting out of such considerations entirely. This ominous proleptic glance toward the dynasty’s ultimate demise brings us to the poem’s final section, where Ryūhoku returns to Tao Yuanming, contrasting his insouciant indifference with the fervent engagement of his predecessors. In the final couplet, Ryūhoku incorporates the language of Tao Yuanming’s whimsical “Biography of Master

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Five Willows” as well as a reference to the famous couplet about catching a glimpse of the southern hills while picking a chrysanthemum at the eastern hedge. Ryūhoku thus presents an image of the retired Tao Yuanming safely removed from concern about the upstart warlord Liu Yu’s rising power, a situation that would culminate fifteen years later in the end of the Jin dynasty when Liu Yu installed himself as Emperor Wu of the (Liu-) Song. A reading of Tao Yuanming that posits his overriding sense of loyalty to the Jin dynasty tends to view him as the consummate “leftover vassal,” but such an interpretation is conspicuously absent from Ryūhoku’s rendition. In fact, the poem suggests quite the opposite. As the contrast with those “dupes of a doomed regime” in line 14 makes clear, Ryūhoku here paints Tao Yuanming in terms of his enjoyment of idyllic quotidian pleasures that transcend political realities. In depicting Li Bo, Lin Bu, and Tao Yuanming, these mid-1850s compositions fore­ ground each reclusive figure’s contented separation from official circles during periods of political turmoil and strife. The consistency of the presentation suggests the attraction that the bunjin realm held for Ryūhoku, especially as lingering doubts about his own status as a Confucian official during this time of political crisis continued to fester. Yet it is also important to bear in mind that each of these poems is framed as a tihuashi: an abstracted composition about a visual image. In the following poem from the autumn of 1855, however, Ryūhoku addresses the thematic tension between official service and reclusion in more concrete and self-referential terms, showing how frustra­tions with his own post contributed to his interest in eremitic themes:

忉忉歌



忉忉嘆斯生 斯生無事不不平 堯禹已殂周孔没

5

擧世齪々又營々 大綱堕地人不収



衆耳聾矣衆目盲 儒生殆與僧巫齒



慘毒何異入秦阬



我聞天地即父母

10

父母棄我太無情 痛慨常懐汨羅恨 高蹈難追彭澤名

15

官長嗔我迂 蔑視草芥輕 妻孥嘲我痴 詈言蚊雷轟

Song of weariness Wearily, I lament this life— Nothing in this life isn’t unfair. Yao and Yu are gone, the Duke of Zhou and Confucius dead too; The whole world is so petty and fastidious.130 The great principle has fallen down, and none attempts to right it; Everyone’s ears are deaf, everyone’s eyes are blind. Confucian students are ranked along with priests and shamans; An abject horror, no different from being buried alive in the Qin. If what they say about heaven and earth being our parents is true, Then my parents have heartlessly abandoned me! My sorrows make me recall the grief of Qu Yuan at Miluo, Yet transcending it all in pursuit of Tao Yuanming’s name is difficult too.131 The officials grow angry at my obtuseness; They look down on me as worthless. My wife and child laugh at my foolishness; Scolding words like the thunderous din of mosquitoes.



The Private Realm



茫乎兩相忘

20

心與秋水清 窓燈獨伴影 匣劍空作聲 不得扼腕廟堂議



不得執耒隴畝耕 祗合酣醉縱我志 洋々學彼横海鯨

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But only vaguely do I hear them, and ultimately we forget each other; My heart is as pure as an autumn stream. Alone, facing my shadow before the lamp; My sword in its case makes a vain sound. I cannot join heated court debates, my arms clutched in anger; Nor can I take up a spade and till the fields. All I can do is get tipsy and relax with my thoughts; Learning from the whales that swim free, masters of the whole ocean.132

After denouncing the low status accorded to the shogun’s Confucian scholars in the opening couplets, the poet invokes the first Qin emperor’s brutal suppression of intellectual discourse in line 8: to be ignored by the sovereign, Ryūhoku seems to suggest, is a fate nearly as horrific. The subsequent comparison of his own feelings to those of the stalwart official Qu Yuan (ca. 339–278 bce) at the moment of the latter’s suicide at Miluo is equally hyperbolic, but the point is the same; Ryūhoku constructs himself as the devoted and loyal vassal, the lone voice possessed of clear vision, and yet the one whose wise counsel goes unheeded. Ryūhoku was linking his plight to a tradition spanning two millennia, for it was a well-established fixture of poetry by Chinese officials from the Han onward to compare their own frustrated efforts to those of Qu Yuan.133 What would Ryū­ hoku have said if he had been offered the chance to remonstrate? It is not at all clear from this poem, and Ryūhoku may not have known himself, but, however exaggerated Ryūhoku’s rhetoric may be, the keen sense that he and others in his position were devoting themselves to an enterprise that was dismissed as irrelevant by those who held real power is unmistakable. As a foil to the righteous Qu Yuan the figure of Tao Yuanming is invoked, yet neither the intense passion of the former nor the transcendent disengagement of the latter could serve as a practical model for the young Ryūhoku. In lines 20 and 21, he returns to these figures only to reconfirm his distance from them. The couplet articulates the familiar contrast between the domains of the shijin and the bunjin, but the poet finds complete fulfillment in neither: not only is he thwarted in his attempts to engage in impassioned debate with other officials, but he is at the same time prohibited from escaping into eremitic rusticity.

The Sword and the Book Revisited The previous chapter showed how the “sword” and the “book” represented two contrast­ ing forms of service that the youthful Ryūhoku imagined himself offering to the sho­ gunate. The present chapter has argued that, alongside this dynamic, Ryūhoku was simultaneously navigating a course through another conflicting set of currents: those that pulled him more toward the public realm of the shijin, marked by scholarship and

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official service, and those that drew him instead in the direction of the private realm of the bunjin, marked by literary expression and reclusive withdrawal. As the above poem confirms, Ryūhoku found no easy resolution to the tensions between these competing affiliations. While he continued to engage in the wide range of literary practices asso­ ciated with the bunjin and to cultivate further ties with those identified as such, he remained committed to his role as an official; a full withdrawal into the realm of the recluse was simply not feasible for this apprentice okujusha. Though he often voiced his frustra­ tions about his official position in his poetry, he seems to have been resigned to making the best of the situation and continued to serve the shogunate in earnest. In the two couplets that conclude the above work, the poet proposes the consolation of drink as the sole means available to escape his present quandary and its attendant frustrations. Yet Ryūhoku in fact also sought opportunities for solace within the bounds of his official duties. In line 21, he expresses dissatisfaction at being unable to engage in debates at court with his “arms clutched in anger,” but recall the poem Ryūhoku composed on “Reading books” for the Hayashi gathering discussed earlier in this chapter. In line 23 of that work, he employs the same phrase in connection with the delight he takes in immersing himself within the world of the dynastic histories. This juxtaposition suggests the possibility that Ryūhoku’s frustrations over being ignored in the actual practice of statesmanship could be soothed by redoubling his attention to scholarship: reading the dynastic histories in this way offered him the chance for vicarious participation in such debates from the textual past. Likewise, in line 20 of the poem just above, Ryūhoku makes reference to his “sword,” the other symbol of his service to the shogun­ ate. The fact that the sword is encased suggests its relative remoteness from his daily life, but, as the poet’s perception of its haunting sound shows, military exploits persisted as an object of fascination for Ryūhoku during these years. Around the time he wrote the above poem on Tao Yuanming’s “The Return,” he composed a poem counterposing these two forms of service to the temptations of withdrawal:

彈劍

彈劍還彈劍 讀書復讀書 高人逃世術 何必在樵漁

Tapping my sword Swordsmanship, and then more swordsmanship; Reading, and then more reading. The virtuous man has his own techniques of escape; What need is there to join the woodcutters and fishermen?134

Indeed, Ryūhoku’s “sword tapping” was not entirely in the realm of fantasy. Beginning in the first month of Ansei 3 (1856), he regularly noted carrying out archery “target practice” in his diary.135 Ryūhoku even had the opportunity to put his newly honed skills into practice when he went on hunting expeditions.136 Maeda Ai identifies the irony of a Con­ fucian scholar taking up such pursuits, locating Ryūhoku’s motivation in the political anxieties of the mid-1850s: “Ryūhoku’s station, it would seem, was one of serving the gov­ ernment with scholarship, yet here he was going to the trouble of mastering the military arts. We can imagine that in the background of this development was the tense atmosphere of the time, when Perry’s arrival had suddenly made coastal defense a topic of



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vociferous debate. A time of great upheaval was close at hand, one that would force a literary man to transform himself into a cavalry man.”137 Yet Ryūhoku’s short-lived transformation into a full-fledged “cavalry man” would have to wait for nearly a decade. Though he participated in some forms of military training, visited coastal defense installations on horseback, took his archery lessons, and joined an occasional hunt, for the most part Ryūhoku remained on the periphery of such activities. His teaching duties, studying, and editing occupied most of his time, and, as far as military arts were concerned, he remained largely a voyeur, consigned to the sidelines to celebrate the victories of others. In a poem from Ansei 4 (1857), for example, Ryūhoku writes of attending an archery outing at which his brother-in-law distinguished himself. The heading reads: In winter, the nineteenth day of the tenth month, the shogun went to the former cavalry grounds at Fukiage garden and observed the archery skills of the various officials. I, [Kore] hiro, accompanied him at this time. My elder brother by marriage, Kobayashi Seichi, was also among the ranks. Both of his shots hit their targets, and he was rewarded with two outfits of seasonal clothing. I wrote this heptasyllabic old poem to congratulate him. 冬十月十九日上臨吹上苑元馬場閲冗官射技弘時扈觀姻兄小林正知亦在員中雙發皆中褒 賜時衣二領乃裁七古一篇以賀 138

The poem itself extends to some forty lines but is organized into five eight-line units, each of which has a coherent thematic focus and shares a single rhyme. At the poem’s center is a vivid re-creation of the archery competition, after which Ryūhoku commends his brother-in-law for his feat and lavishes special attention on such details as the proud expressions of “boundless mirth” on the faces of Kobayashi’s parents, who were present among the spectators. In the poem’s final section of four couplets, the scene shifts to a banquet convened to congratulate Kobayashi:

余亦疾走陪賀席 不辭頻擧幾大白

35

醉裁蕪章添君歡



唯憾詞才陋且窄



嗚呼一朝抽雙箭 報君樂親忠孝赫

40

願君日新研斯技 鋭鏃必貫美夷額

I too quickly race to join the celebratory fête And do not hesitate to frequently raise my cup in several toasts. Tipsily I write these humble words to add to your happiness, Regretting only that my poetic talents are poor and meager. Oh! On this day you have drawn two arrows, To repay your lord and please your parents—so splendidly loyal and filial! I pray that you will every day hone your craft, and Sharpen your arrowheads to pierce right through those Yankee skulls!

In the poem about the shogunal falcon hunt discussed in the previous chapter, Ryūhoku argued that such expeditions had a profound purpose in ensuring Tokugawa military readiness. Echoing this solemn observation, Ryūhoku here quixotically connects skill at

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archery to defense against the present foreign threat. In his diary, Ryūhoku gave a brief outline of the event and the subsequent party to which he was invited, though the tone is decidedly less celebratory: “I accompanied the shogunal carriage to the Fukiage garden to see the various officials’ great target practice. Kobayashi Inosuke was among the members. He struck all his targets. He received one seasonal outfit. He invited me and my wife, and we trekked through the snow to attend his party. New snow came fluttering down this afternoon. It was quite surprising indeed. There were many guests from the Kobayashi clan at the party. My teeth hurt, and so I took my leave at around midnight.”139 Whereas Kobayashi was rewarded with silk for his military prowess, it was for scholarly accomplishments that Ryūhoku and his family received shogunal favor. In the same year, the shogun bestowed rewards on Ryūhoku and his grandfather Motonao for their submission of a freshly collated complete version of the Tokugawa jikki: the chronicles the family had labored over for decades. In his diary, Ryūhoku wrote with pride about how the recognition had wiped away any past stains that might temporarily have besmirched the Narushima family honor.140 After some additional amendments to the chronicles were made later that year, Ryūhoku and his grandfather were rewarded monetarily, and Ryūhoku was promoted in rank. Although Ryūhoku’s poems from the mid-1850s express his earnest desire to take a more active part in the actual practice of government, the role of the Narushima family, and Ryūhoku as its scion, was clearly to be an “interior” one, confined to editing the shogunate’s official chronicles and providing basic academic instruction for its leaders. Around the time that Kobayashi made his spectacular display of archery skill, the shogunate was in the midst of negotiations with Consul Townsend Harris (1804–78). As the representative of the United States, Harris was working to finalize the details of the Treaty of Kanagawa, which established the basis of commerce between the two countries when it went into effect the following year. In his diary, Ryūhoku jotted down rumors of the presence of foreigners in Edo, and, a few days later, on 10.21, he recorded with shock the diplomat’s audience with the shogun Iesada: The American barbarians’ mission began. Consul and a certain interpreter came to the castle today for an audience. They received fifteen seasonal items of clothing. Astonishing! Astonishing! 開墨夷使節紺志留通辨官某本日登營拜謁賜時衣十五可愕可愕 141

Part of Ryūhoku’s dismay presumably came from how Harris’s visit had again revealed the shogunal government’s weak position: compelled to receive an insolent foreign envoy at the castle and unable to induce him to conform to familiar behavioral norms. The sho­ gunate had been less than eager to allow Harris such a direct meeting in the first place, and the event required some innovative protocol planning.142 Whereas the shogun was accustomed to receiving Dutch representatives informally, he wore attire appropriate to an official diplomatic meeting for this occasion; Harris had made clear that he would refuse to prostrate himself before the shogun, and so a chair was provided for his use; Harris was also not required to remove his shoes; moreover, since Harris would stand for part of their meeting, it was arranged that the shogun would sit atop several tatami mats



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so as to prevent Harris from looking down upon him. Yet Ryūhoku’s distance from these momentous events is perhaps best revealed by the subsequent annotation he made to the diary page with the above entry: a rare marginal note clarifying that “consul” was in fact the diplomat’s title and Ha-ru-ri-su was his name 官紺志留名波留利須. Ryūhoku does not appear to have been the only Confucian scholar to feel a sense of disconnect between the idealized role of the shijin as statesman and the comparatively limited opportunities that professional scholars actually had to affect the affairs of state. Within Sinospheric modes of diplomacy, the regime’s most erudite Confucian scholars were often called on to prepare documents, engage in Sinitic poetry exchanges, and take part in other forms of interaction with foreign visitors. In keeping with these traditional diplomatic practices, the Hayashi family, who presided over the Shōheizaka Academy, had been involved in initial negotiations with Perry. Yet the Hayashi had a much less prominent role in the deliberations with Townsend Harris. In one of the poems Ryūhoku composed in matched-rhyme dialogue with Hayashi Fukusai at this time, he laments this diminished role: Ten poems to express my feelings on an autumn night. I copy the rhymes used in Mr. Hayashi Fukusai’s “Leisurely chant under the moonlight.” 秋夜感懷十首次復齋林子月下漫唫韻

荐聞火艦泝江流



正是男兒忼慨秋

5

千卷圖書評得失 一篇詩賦説悲愁 少陵豈特工文字 安石原非願漫遊 誰諒鯫儒酬國志



未輸提砲控弦儔

Over and over I hear the steamship has come, bucking the river’s tide. Truly it is an autumn when a man feels intense indignation. A thousand volumes in which strategies are evaluated. But one poem speaks of sadness and sorrow. Surely Shaoling didn’t just tinker with words! And it was not Anshi’s original intention to wander. Who will let a measly Confucian fulfill his aspiration to repay his country? He hasn’t yet lost out to the lot who raise cannon or heft arrows.143

The individuals named in lines 5 and 6 stand as model shijin: Du Fu (Shaoling), whose perfection of his literary craft was intimately tied to his aspiration for an official position, and Xie An (Anshi), the statesman (mentioned above in the poem on Tao Yuanming’s “The Return”) who ventured out of his temporary reclusion in the eastern hills to lead the Jin through a crisis. The last couplet gives voice to Ryūhoku’s wish that Confucian scholars such as himself and Fukusai might fulfill their ostensible role as civil servants even if their tools were not military weapons. By the time he wrote this response to Fukusai, Ryūhoku had already concluded his long apprenticeship for the position of okujusha. On 11.19 of Ansei 3 (1856), he had been officially appointed to the post, and his first instruction of the shogun in his new capacity came on 12.08. As part of the New Year festivities the following month, it was Ryūhoku’s responsibility to listen to Iesada’s recitation of the “Great Learning.” The string of professional successes came amid an emotionally wrenching period for Ryūhoku personally,

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however. In 11.08 of Ansei 3, his wife Kanō Ryū gave birth to a son, but just five days later the infant died. Ryūhoku and his wife had never been on particularly affectionate terms, but the death of their son seems to have provided the impetus for the two to separate, with Ryū leaving for her natal home shortly thereafter. When she returned the following spring, it was only to finalize their divorce proceedings.144 Less than one month later, Ryūhoku was remarried, and, though his second wife does not appear much in his poetry either, as will become apparent in the next chapter, it was in part through his marriage to her that he was brought into closer contact with a group of people who would change the course of his life.

Ch a p t er T h r ee

Discovering New Worlds

T

he years from 1854 to 1857 saw Ryūhoku come of age, succeed to the Narushima family’s headship, and reach maturity as a shogunal official. Through a rigorous period of training in the Confucian classics, he augmented the learning he had acquired as a child under the tutelage of his father and his grandfather. After completing his apprenticeship, Ryūhoku began to serve the shogun as a scholar and tutor, a position he assumed with a mixture of committed zeal, anticipatory pride, and uneasy hesitation. The preced­ ing two chapters have focused on the four extant volumes of his poetic manuscripts from this period, Kankei shōkō, which show how Ryūhoku composed Sinitic poetry not only to hold his own at various poetic gatherings, to commemorate social and other occasions, and to entertain himself and his friends, but also to express the complex range of emotions he experienced during these four tumultuous years. Many of these poems provided venues for Ryūhoku to try on a variety of roles and personae: daring defender of the realm, righteous advisor to the shogun, diligent exegete of the classics, and even aspirational recluse. The poet’s voice as expressed in them is that of a spirited young man often torn between conflicting impulses: brandishing a “sword” in indignation at the unbidden foreign incursion but also unsure of how best to employ the knowledge of the canonical “books” he had mastered as a Confucian scholar; proud as a shijin to succeed to his distinguished family’s position of service to the shogun while at the same time drawn toward the realm of the bunjin with its particular thematic concerns, compositional practices, and arenas of literary expression. These tensions would continue to manifest themselves in Ryūhoku’s poems from the late 1850s into the early 1860s, but, as he attained even greater recognition as both shijin and bunjin during these years, he was all the while immersing himself within newly discovered worlds of experience and new domains of learning that would alter his life’s trajectory. After the death of the shogun Iesada, Ryūhoku was ordered on 07.17 of Ansei 5 (1858) to begin teaching his successor, the teenaged Iemochi (1846–66; r. 1858–66). Ryūhoku’s diary records that his instruction of Iemochi was much more frequent than his work with

Fig. 3.1 Utagawa Kuniteru 歌川国輝 II (1830–74), illustration of Yanagibashi and environs. The Sumida River flows across the image from left to right, and the large bridge that spans it at the illustration’s center is Ryōgoku. Yanagibashi is the small bridge in the midforeground, marked with a small cartouche to its left. Pleasure boats are visible on either side of Yanagibashi, which spans the Kanda River near its confluence with the Sumida. Moto Yanagibashi is the small bridge beneath the willow tree depicted at the extreme right of the image. See also fig. 0.3, where the bridges are identified as no. 5 (Ryōgoku) and no. 6 (Yanagibashi). Page from Ryūkyō shinshi (New chronicles of Yanagibashi; 1871 pirate ed.). Collection of the author.



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the previous shogun had been, presumably on account of Iemochi’s youth. Yet, in between these lessons and the numerous other demands of his busy schedule, Ryūhoku was engaged in an educational program of his own—learning the ways of the Yanagibashi pleasure district. Named after a “Willow Bridge” that once stood near the confluence of Edo’s Kanda and Sumida Rivers, Yanagibashi had emerged by Ryūhoku’s time as a stylish destination for the city’s pleasure seekers (fig. 3.1). A thriving culture of diversion was centered on Yanagibashi’s boathouses, its eating and drinking establishments, and the geisha who could be hired to accompany customers on elegant excursions or entertain them at banquets.1 What began for Ryūhoku as an occasional night out drinking with his study mates or a leisurely float down the river with friends and relatives living nearby became an increasingly important part of his life in the years between 1857 and 1859. The guidance of new acquaintances, including the relatives of his second wife, seems to have facilitated Ryūhoku’s initiation to the quarters, but perhaps the strictures of his official post and the frustrations of being underutilized led Ryūhoku to seek release from his daily routine in this realm of play. As a result of his frequent visits to Yanagibashi, Ryūhoku became something of a connoisseur of its unique cultural forms, writing many poems on themes connected in one way or another to the pleasure quarters. He also made it the subject of his most famous literary work: Ryūkyō shinshi (New chronicles of Yanagibashi), a humorous chronicle of Yanagibashi urban life, the first volume of which he completed in 1860. In composing this text, Ryūhoku drew on his learning as a Confucian scholar, but he did so in unexpected ways. He made facetious use of the canonical erudition he had labored so assiduously to acquire, applying the wisdom of the classics to improbable situations, sometimes to scandalous effect. As discussed in chapter 2, Ryūhoku had actively directed his literary talents in the mid-1850s to the exploration of specifically Japanese themes, but the poems that he and his bunjin friends composed at their monthly gatherings nevertheless adhered closely to orthodox formal expectations of Sinitic poetry. With New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, by contrast, he sought to deform and hybridize his Literary Sinitic text with the occasional insertion of vernacular Chinese locutions and the frequent modulation of colloquial Japanese glosses. While drawing his inspiration in part from Chinese and Japanese predecessors, in the process Ryūhoku staked a claim for a burgeoning field of literary expression and established himself as one of its pioneers. For an official shogunal tutor such as Ryūhoku to pursue an interest in documenting Edo’s demimonde was in some ways a transgressive act. Recall that Ryūhoku had received his first literary sobriquet, Kakudō, from the eminent scholar Asaka Gonsai, an instructor at the shogunate’s official Shōheizaka Academy whom Ryūhoku also asked to provide critical commentary on his first volume of Sinitic poetry. One can get a sense of how Ryūhoku’s experiential and literary forays into the world of Yanagibashi must have been received by official scholars of Gonsai’s temperament from an episode recounted by Ryūhoku’s contemporary Shishido Tamaki 宍戸璣 (1829–1901). One day during his four years of study under Gonsai, Shishido received a sharp reprimand from his teacher on presenting him with a poem he had written about an excursion to view cherry blossoms along the Sumida River. As Shishido later recollected, the poem he presented to Gonsai had “jokingly included some verses toward the end about ‘Red skirts with their silken

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sashes. . . . Behold the golden lotus steps’ or something along those lines,” but Gonsai was not amused by Shishido’s casual reference to consorting with red-skirted geisha and responded with a poetic warning addressing his other students as well:

示諸生



戒君勿見墨陀花



花下美人花遜華



戒君勿見墨陀月 月下少婦月恥潔

5

先哲惜陰勤精研



何暇花月耽流連



吾閲書生三十年 志業多因花月捐

To show my various students I admonish you not to gaze at the blossoms along the Sumida; For the beauties beneath the blossoms make the blossoms lose their splendor. I caution you not to look at the moon along the Sumida; For with young ladies beneath the moon, the moon is abashed of its purity. Our wise forebears valued their time, devoting themselves to study; Surely they had no leisure to abandon themselves to blossoms and moonlight! I have been supervising students for thirty years now; And many are those who have become lost in blossoms and moonlight.2

Even if Gonsai was only dutifully dispensing the proscriptions he felt obliged to offer, the sense that consorting with geisha was a dubious enterprise and certainly not one fit for writing down is unambiguous. Ryūhoku completed the first volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi in 1860, and, though it would be nearly a decade before he sought a commercial publisher for it, the text circulated to some extent among his associates in the early 1860s.3 Although Gonsai and the other senior scholars with whom Ryūhoku interacted in the course of his official duties may have been willing to look the other way as he availed himself of Edo’s nightlife in his private time, for someone in his position to turn Yanagibashi into a central focus of his writings and what’s more to allow these writings to circulate, even on a limited basis, was another matter altogether.4 In addition, the irreverent use he made of canonical Confucian texts in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi cannot have been welcomed by many of the senior scholars with whom he associated. It would be misleading to overemphasize the strictness of Confucian prohibitions on such literary endeavors, but recall how, as discussed in the previous chapter, Ōtsuki Bankei faulted the impropriety of Ryūhoku’s appropriation of a line from the Classic of Poetry in the latter’s poem on the vengeanceseeking woman’s nighttime shrine visit. As the numerous imagined dialogues carried out in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi between the narrator and “upright Confucian gentleman” interlocutors show, there is no question that Ryūhoku was consciously stepping outside the bounds of propriety with this form of writing. If Yanagibashi was one new world that Ryūhoku discovered in the late 1850s, the West was another. From the very late 1850s into the early 1860s, the culture and learning of Europe and America began to take on a new significance in the young scholar’s thinking. Whereas the teenage Ryūhoku’s outright antipathy toward the West in the wake of Perry’s arrival is evident in several of the poems I discussed in chapters 1 and 2, he later



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came to distance himself from this stance of summary rejection. Ryūhoku’s earlier suspicions of Western motives and his often vehement declarations of resistance were hardly surprising responses given the uncertainty of the time, the tenuousness of the shogunate’s position, and the explicitly threatening pressure the United States and other Western powers applied to Japan. Moreover, Ryūhoku was an okujusha whose charge was to draw on his mastery of Confucian learning to teach the shogun, meaning that, in addition to being sensitive to the military danger that Japan faced, he was also aware that rising interest in academic study of the West posed a professional and intellectual challenge to him. Both sets of concerns are evident in a poem he composed in between those he wrote in response to Perry’s menacing ships and proffered gifts: the blustery “Steamship song” and “Locomotive song” discussed in chapter 1. One of the lengthiest pieces in all four volumes of Kankei shōkō, the meandering work is titled “On the day after the full moon in the intercalary seventh month, I was moved by the clear and brilliant shade of moonlight to write these seventy rhymed couplets” and is a protracted meditation on the state of Japan and Ryūhoku’s role in it. Yet what is most interesting about this poem from the autumn of 1854 is that, at some point several years later, the poet scratched out forty lines from its middle and changed the last words of the title accordingly to “fifty rhymed couplets” (fig. 3.2).5 The excised section, still legible in the manuscript, begins by forcefully making the case for honoring Japan’s “ancestral law” and refusing American demands for Japan to open its ports to trade. Pointing to two instances where a radical change in government policy brought about the demise of a state, it concludes with despair over the threat Ryūhoku thought heterodox teachings posed to the Confucian orthodoxy: 80 85 90 95

貢幣多玩器 呈簡雜傲辭 割地及互市 丈夫能忍爲 尺土日本域 斗栗日本資 焉以貴重物 得與胡羯兒 況復祖宗法 赫赫萬世規 臣子有死耳 大義豈可移 憶彼趙宋世 歴歴鑑興衰 熈寧王安石 新政負人訾 偉志雖足稱 誤國非汝誰 紹興秦丞相



冠玉美風姿 惴惴戰是懼

Presenting tribute of so many toys and trinkets, Delivering their missives, filled with arrogant words. Dividing up the land and opening trade; How can a real man bear it? A small plot of land, the domain of Japan A meager measure of millet, the capital of Japan. How can we take these precious treasures And give them to the barbarian curs? And how much more is this true of our ancestral law: The principle that has shown splendidly for myriad ages!6 A vassal has only his death to offer; How can the great principle be changed? I remember back to the Zhao Song dynasty. I ponder its triumphs and failures one by one. Wang Anshi in the Xining [1068–1077] era, His new policies were betrayed by popular slander. Though his noble aspirations deserve praise, If it was not he who lost the country, then who did? Councilor-in-Chief Qin Hui in the Shaoxing [1131–1162] era, In his bejeweled cap and beautiful appearance. Timid, what he feared was war, so he

Fig. 3.2 Section from Ryūhoku’s Kankei shōkō poetry manuscript showing revisions: twenty couplets have been crossed out. On the above pages, three comments from Funabashi Seitan are visible in the upper margins (one at right, two at left), and one comment from Asaka Gonsai is visible at top left (the second from the left). Courtesy of the National Diet Library, Tokyo. See KS, 1:21a–23b.



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和議唱時宜 七廟神靈努 千古英魂悲 賈誼有三策 梁鴻空五噫 大綱一廢墜 風俗日薄醨 儒生陷洋學 詭論失秉彝

110

六經棄不誦 往往譏宣尼 醫老尚蘭術 既違扁倉麾

115

怪藥夭人壽 詾囂稱神治 此輩亂法賊 人面心是魑 邦有常刑在 何不屠戮之

127

Negotiated for peace and proclaimed the proper time. The gods and spirits of the seven temples are angry, The ghosts of the heroes of antiquity are sorrowful.7 Jia Yi had his three policies. Liang Hong sang his “Song of Five Ahs” in vain.8 Once the great principle is abandoned and falls, Customs and manners erode and decline by the day. Confucian students have fallen into Western studies, Sophistry and disputation deprive them of the heavenly path. The Six Classics are abandoned and none recites them, But instead heap scorn on Confucius. The old physicians esteem the Dutch techniques; And have already deserted the banners of Bian Que and Cang Gong.9 Mysterious medicines shorten man’s allotted span; Clamorously, they promote mysterious cures. This lot are villains who pervert the law— Their faces are human, but their hearts are ghoulish. If the punishments the state metes out are constant, Then why are these men not slaughtered?

It is difficult to know when Ryūhoku crossed out these forty lines in heavy ink, but the excision of this section from the poem represents a dramatic shift in his thought. The redaction must have happened after the winter of Ansei 4 (1857), when Ryūhoku received the first volume of Kankei shōkō back from Asaka Gonsai, whose comments he had solicited earlier that summer. In this first volume, Gonsai’s comments can be seen in the upper margins of the pages, and they include his affirmation of verses from the elided section. Above lines 106 through 109, where Ryūhoku lambastes Confucian scholars for “falling” into decadent study of the West, for example, Gonsai wrote the following words of praise: Worshipful reverence of Western studies will certainly bring harm. To abandon the Six Classics and cast aspersions on the Duke of Zhou and Confucius: these are things to be greatly concerned and frightened about. 崇奉洋學其害必至廢六經譏周孔是大可憂亦可懼

If these comments in Ryūhoku’s manuscript are any indication, Asaka Gonsai would not have looked kindly on Ryūhoku’s later enthusiasm for the study of the West.10 Most of Ryūhoku’s diary volumes from the period are no longer extant, making it difficult to trace in precise detail how his interest in the West took shape, but his poetry and other sources document his interactions with a broadening social circle of bunjin, physicians, and scholars of Western subjects from 1859 onward. That these new associations were transformative is especially evident in light of the developments discussed in detail in the next chapter, but, even in the early 1860s, the traces

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of the new ways of thinking to which he was exposed through such contacts begin to emerge. No single pivotal incident stands out, but the fact that Western learning had emerged as a major focus of Ryūhoku’s attention by 1863 is indisputable. In that year, he was dismissed from his position as a shogunal tutor, and, although he was evasive about the precise reasons why, one of the explanations he offered in a subsequent essay identifies his newfound zeal for Western learning: He [Ryūhoku] served the inner court with scholarship for ten years, and, though moved to tears by the lavishness of the sovereign’s beneficence, one morning he was purged and left without a position. Perhaps it was because he was just too suave, perhaps it was because he offended people by being too blunt, or perhaps it was because he advocated study of the West. It doesn’t really matter what the reason was; he spent his three years of confinement devoting himself solely to reading English books under the tutelage of Western scholars. It greatly opened his mind.11

The phrase translated here as being “just too suave” is fūryū no zaika 風流ノ罪過, or more literally “transgressions [in the realm] of fūryū.” The term fūryū (Ch. fengliu) has a long and varied history in East Asian aesthetics, but in Ryūhoku’s time it pointed to a sophisticated sensibility that esteemed elegance and panache, that embodied an apprecia­ tion for the arts, and that was strongly associated with sensuality and amorousness.12 In addition to his ventures into Western study, then, one of the other two factors to which Ryūhoku attributes his dismissal in this passage refers to his simultaneous explorations of another terrain: the Yanagibashi demimonde. This chapter examines how Ryūhoku found his footing within these newly encountered worlds, which in fact overlapped, for one of the main sites where Ryūhoku encountered Western scholars was none other than Yanagibashi.

Ryūhoku’s Introduction to Yanagibashi Ryūhoku had completed the basic text of the first volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi in 1859, when he was in his early twenties.13 How did this rising Confucian scholar in the shogun’s employ come to write such a text? Given the demands his various duties as instructor of the shogun, overseer of reading groups, participant in poetry gatherings, and editor of official historical chronicles made on his time, not to mention the strictures his official position imposed on his behavior, it is surprising that Ryūhoku should attain his first widespread literary notoriety for a work that not only chronicled the decadence of the pleasure quarters, but did so in an irreverent and explicitly non-Confucian style. It seems that there were several factors contributing to the young Ryūhoku’s grow­ ing interest in Yanagibashi, not least of which was geographic contingency. The site of his official residence in Shitaya was not far from Yanagibashi, and his neighbors on Izumibashi-dōri were some of its more seasoned patrons.14 Just a few doors down from the family’s residence lived Ryūhoku’s cousin, Sugimoto Kōseki 杉本恒簃 (1825–84), an



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official shogunal physician.15 About one year after Ryūhoku moved into the Izumibashidōri residence, Sugimoto and Tamura Sōtatsu, a relative of Sugimoto’s and a physician himself, became two of Ryūhoku’s main companions on excursions to Yanagibashi, where they drank, dined, and enjoyed the riverside scenic attractions. One of the first references Ryūhoku made in his diary to such outings comes from 02.03 of Ansei 4 (1857), when he wrote: “Snow was fluttering down. I was on duty at the castle. In the afternoon, Tamura Sōtatsu and Sugi[moto] Kōseki came to visit. We set out aboard a boat on the Sumida to view the snow. In the evening, we went drinking at Kawaguchiya.”16 Ryūhoku also apparently had his first encounter with a geisha, the mainstay of the Yanagibashi economy and the figure at the focus of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, in the company of these two men: “Twenty-first day of the [fifth] month. The eighth day of the cycle. Fine, then cloudy. I set out on a pleasure boat on the Sumida River with Sugi[moto] Kōseki, Ta[mur]a Sōtatsu, [I]zawa Heik[urō], and others. We relaxed in the Kawaguchiya and Hiraiwa. Kokatsu came and joined us” 廿一日辛未晴又曇与杉恒簃田宗達澤兵九等放舟于墨江憩河喉 坦嵓二樓小勝來伴.17 The geisha “Kokatsu” 小勝 mentioned in this entry was one with whom Ryūhoku briefly became romantically involved later that year. As Maeda Ai has discerned, Ryū­ hoku soon began to encode her name as 月劵, separating the left and right sides of the graph 勝. Once the trick of the cipher is revealed, it seems so obvious as to make one dubious that such a simple mechanism could have functioned as a code, but the meaning would surely have been inscrutable to a casual reader.18 Maeda points out that such coding not only had a practical purpose in guarding the details of Ryūhoku’s assignations from the prying eyes of his household, but also was a form of lexical diversion in its own right. Particularly in regard to the geisha of Yanagibashi, Ryūhoku’s diary is replete with such codes and word play.19 Ironically, Ryūhoku’s early ventures into Yanagibashi seem to have been at least partially encouraged not only by his physician relatives, but by the family of his second wife, whom he married in 1857. Known only by her surname, Nagai, Ryūhoku’s second wife was the daughter of a hatamoto, or direct shogunal vassal, and through her Ryū­ hoku met several individuals with whom he began to visit Yanagibashi often.20 Though Ryū­hoku had made occasional excursions to the quarter before his remarriage, his new in-laws seem to have accelerated the pace, for, as Nagai (no relation) Kafū wrote, “[Ryū­ hoku’s mother-in-law] the widow Nagai was a woman who enjoyed a good time and liked having artists and geisha visit her home; she enjoyed excursions to appreciate natural scenery and was also fond of fishing.”21 Yanagibashi was located about halfway between Ryūhoku’s residence and that of the Nagai family, a fortuitous location that Maeda observes gave Ryūhoku an additional opportunity to visit the quarters as well as a potential “alibi.” Ryūhoku’s diary notes parties attended with his Nagai in-laws on multiple occasions in 1858, including some at drinking establishments along the Sumida River where geisha provided entertainment. In their analyses of Ryūhoku’s diary, Nagai Kafū, Maeda Ai, and Inui Teruo all point out the steadily increasing frequency with which Ryūhoku visited the quarters in 1858, the year before he began writing New Chronicles of Yanagibashi. Ryūhoku took to traveling there by himself, rather than with his old drinking buddies Sugimoto and Tamura,

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and there were even extended periods when he visited an average of once every three days. Maeda concludes that this dissipation enabled Ryūhoku to break through the hard shell that enclosed him in his position as Confucian tutor.22 By late 1858, Ryūhoku was portraying himself as something of a hedonist in his own diary; his entry for 10.02 reads: “Cloudy. I reported for duty as usual. At night, I went to Yamaoka’s and Takenouchi’s. We ended up going to drink at Miuraya. I met Kokatsu. I wrote the line ‘Still not roused from my spring dreams in Yangzhou.’ Today, my mother-in-law came to stay the night” 曇直營如例晩如山岡竹内氏遂飲鼎浦與小月劵逢有未覺揚州春夜夢句此日岳母來宿.23 This is one of the first overt references in the diary to Ryūhoku meeting a geisha at a funayado, the boathouses that he describes at length in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi. These establishments were places along the Kanda and Sumida Rivers to which geisha could be summoned to entertain customers and which could also double as houses of assignation should the need arise. Though seemingly oblique, the line of poetry in which Ryūhoku couches his sexual encounter with Kokatsu at Miuraya above is actually quite explicit, alluding to one of the best-known quatrains of late Tang poet Du Mu (803–52), a famed celebrant of sensual pleasures:

遣懷

落托江湖載酒行 楚腰纖細掌中輕 十年一覺揚州夢 贏得青樓薄倖名

Getting out my feelings I wandered carefree around the rivers and lakes with wine in hand; Chu women with their delicate waists, light on my palm. But after ten years I was roused from my Yangzhou dream; Having gained but a name for careless love in its blue houses.24

By invoking the Tang quatrain, Ryūhoku’s diary entry engages in a form of mitate, or “double vision”: he describes his encounter in Yanagibashi but overlays on it the figure of Du Mu in Yangzhou. The practice of mitate (also sometimes translated as “visual allusion” or “metaphoric substitution”) calls on the reader’s referential knowledge in order to create an overlap or extension of a given image.25 Such superimpositions of one world on another were an important component of Japanese visual and literary aesthetics from the Edo period and were particularly prevalent in kanshibun, where Japanese writers often called on resonant Chinese sites to depict local scenes.26 In inscribing his Yanagibashi experiences in his diary, Ryūhoku used this allusive technique as a lens through which to view not only particular sites, but also the individuals with whom he associated there. After a series of short affairs with Yanagibashi geisha, Ryūhoku became involved in 1860 in a lasting intimate relationship with a geisha who appears in his diary with the coded name “Kyō” (喬, Ch. qiao). Ryūhoku referred to her as “Kyō,” it seems, because she had a younger sister, also a geisha in Yanagibashi, and the beauty of the pair prompted Ryūhoku to associate them with the “two Qiaos,” sisters from the early third century who were said to be desired by generals who fought on the opposing sides of the Battle at Red Cliff. Incidentally, the two historical Qiao sisters are also the subject of another Du Mu poem and were furthermore the assigned topic for one



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of Ryūhoku’s poetry gatherings in 1857.27 Maeda Ai makes a convincing argument that “Kyō” was the geisha named Ochō お蝶, who soon became Ryūhoku’s mistress and for whom he built a separate residence in 1861, as we shall see.28 After Ryūhoku’s second wife died in 1864, he married Ochō. In poems written throughout his life, Ryūhoku compared himself to Du Mu, but, even in his own diary, ostensibly meant for no one’s eyes but his own, Ryūhoku made extensive use of such rhetorical strategies. Alongside this sort of imaginative projection of his immediate surroundings into the Chinese past or constructions of himself as a figure from China’s literary tradition, however, a countervailing realistic dimension characterizes Ryūhoku’s poetry about Yanagibashi from this period. Although he frequently gives voice to a strong sense of yearning for the figures memorialized in classical Chinese poetry, there is also a cool distance from which he recognizes their elusiveness. Writing a poem about Yanagibashi might provide the impetus for the poet to imagine himself elsewhere in space and time, but the fantasy was marked as such, as in the following work from early 1857:

夜過柳橋



古柳橋邊春水碧 新柳橋上春月白 夜深酒冷多少樓



穂々殘燭耿簾隙

5

嬌爪換撥曲調低 微風猶傳線線脉 彷彿秋江聽琵琶



身是非否謫居客 多愁未占風流場

10

青春一夢獨自惜 借問月影柳色中 不知何處蘇小宅

Passing Yanagibashi at night By the “old Willow Bridge” flow the spring waters blue; Above “new Willow Bridge” shines the pale spring moon. Late at night now, the wine has turned cold in all the restaurants, Through the curtain gaps, the lingering lantern flames shine bright. Charming nails quickly pluck a samisen, the melody low; A light breeze carries the sound of one string then the next. Just like the autumn riverside where Bo Juyi heard the lute girl’s tale; I wonder if I have not been banished too, a stranger here. With all of my worries, I have yet to fully master these tasteful places; Alone, I can only lament my youthful dreams. Amid the moonlight and the willow trees, I wonder . . . Which of these places is the home of Su Xiaoxiao?29

The riverside scenery of Yanagibashi and the snatches of music carried on the breeze bring to the poet’s mind a similar setting memorialized by Bo Juyi in the “Song of the Lute.”30 The resemblance is enough for the poet to step momentarily outside his present scene, superimposing himself on the person of the exiled Bo Juyi listening to the lute player’s plaintive tale. Yet no sooner is the poet invited to ponder this overlap than he is brought to recognize his own distance from the very sensory stimuli that prompted the comparison. The sense of exile he gives voice to in line 8 is not only a point of similarity with the Tang poet, but also a reminder of his own solitude. Returning his gaze to his environment in Yanagibashi in line 9, but with a heightened sense of his exteriority to it, the poet recognizes that the elegant world of fūryū still eludes him, forcing him to concede

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the youthful naïveté of his dreams and the futility of searching for the legendary Tang dynasty courtesan Su Xiaoxiao in Edo’s demimonde.

Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Its Predecessors Yanagibashi had thus been an important theme of Ryūhoku’s writing, both in his personal diary and in his poetry, ever since he had started to frequent the quarters. But, beginning in the autumn of 1859, Ryūhoku set out to write a different sort of work about Yanagibashi: one that would document its culture as a whole rather than merely his personal experience. The new text would foreground the sort of detached realism seen in this last poem, but the tone would be different: it would be filled with satirical humor. Ryūhoku was not the first to depict such urban entertainment districts in Literary Sinitic; in fact, he modeled his own work on at least two earlier texts: Edo hanjōki (Account of the prosperity of Edo) by Terakado Seiken and Banqiao zaji (Miscellaneous records of the Wooden Bridge) by Yu Huai (1616–96). Seiken’s Account was a popular chronicle of the “flourishing” of Edo that gave rise to its own genre: hanjōkimono, or “chronicles of urban life,” a group of Japanese kanbun texts that detail otherwise overlooked customs and practices of the urban spectacle, often with a healthy dose of satire and social critique.31 Ryūhoku’s work shares similarities of diction, structure, and content with this work by Seiken as well as with Miscellaneous Records, the elegiac celebration of Nanjing pleasure quarters culture that Yu Huai wrote after its destruction during the 1644 Manchu conquest. As Maeda Ai has observed, however, one key feature that distinguishes Ryūhoku’s text from Yu Huai’s is the former’s “cynical realism”; whereas Yu Huai sought to reconstruct an ideal world with his biographies of Nanjing’s beautiful courtesans, Ryūhoku instead clearly saw through the shimmering façade to “the mechanism of the pleasure quarters world that manipulated and toyed with these women, the hollowness of a world of vanity and money.”32 It was with the sober gaze evident in his poem “Passing Yanagibashi at night” that Ryūhoku set out to write his chronicles of Yanagibashi, and, befitting this realistic approach, he found Seiken’s text a model of style, tone, and narratological strategy. Seiken’s Account of the Prosperity of Edo was a great success when it was published and immediately became a welcome source of income to its author, who had been consistently frustrated in his attempt to gain employment as a Confucian scholar with the Mito domain. Internal evidence suggests that Seiken intended to conclude the text after producing the first three volumes, but the series was such a hit that he continued writing, publishing a total of five volumes of the work between 1832 and 1836. Around the time Seiken was preparing to publish the third volume, however, he ran afoul of the shogunal authorities, who in the third month of Tenpō 6 (1835) ordered his publisher to stop selling the two volumes that had already come to their attention and to destroy the text’s printing blocks. The justifications for censoring Account of the Prosperity of Edo focused as much on the text’s form as its content. Indeed, the fact that Seiken had written in Literary Sinitic seems to have played a key role in determining the course of official response and,



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specifically, which authorities were invited to offer their judgment about the text’s legitimacy. In the spring of 1835, City Commissioner Tsutsui Masanori 筒井政憲 (1778–1859) solicited the opinion of Hayashi Jussai 林述斎 (1768–1841), the eighth head of the Hayashi family of Confucian scholars and the rector of the shogunate’s official Shōheizaka Academy. Jussai stated unambiguously that the book should be banned because “it is harmful to the public, weaving the manners and vulgar words of the contemporary city into a kan­ bun narrative.”33 Seiken’s decision to use kanbun to depict Edo’s customs and manners, including such unseemly topics as theaters, marketplaces, and brothels, was a provocative combination, but, in spite of Jussai’s stern verdict, Seiken and his publisher escaped serious consequences for another few years. Once Mizuno Tadakuni’s Tenpō reforms gathered ground in the early 1840s, however, the climate grew decidedly less tolerant, and literary figures, most famously ninjōbon author Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1843), became targets of official censure.34 In 1842, Seiken was once more summoned by the authorities, who again sought the opinion of the realm’s preeminent Confucian scholar official, ­Jussai’s son Hayashi Teiu 林檉宇 (1793–1847): “It records the customs and vulgar tales of the city of Edo in kanbun; it is crude and obscene in the extreme, and it does things that are truly beyond the pale, such as interspersing citations of the words of the Sages as evidence. . . . This sort of work corrupts the manners and hearts of the people.”35 As his father had, Teiu focused on the language of Account of the Prosperity of Edo, singling out the text for recording its vulgarities in kanbun and reserving his sharpest scorn for its author’s misappropriation of the Sages’ words. Seiken was initially ordered confined for one hundred days, but his punishment was later changed to a prohibition on serving in any official capacity. Though he seems to have been the first to suffer official censure for it, Seiken was not the first to write in this incendiary style. In fact, the hanjōkimono genre, of which his Account of the Prosperity of Edo is the founding exemplar and Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles of Yanagibashi a major successor, can be understood as part of a larger category of interrelated texts known as kanbun gesaku, or playful writings in Literary Sinitic. In addition to hanjōkimono, this cluster of genres includes kyōshi (crazy Sinitic poems) and kanbuntai sharebon (books of mode written in kanbun).36 In his pioneering study of such playful Literary Sinitic writings, Nakano Mitsutoshi traces the origins of this cluster of genres to an early eighteenth-century interest in translating Japanese texts into Chinese.37 Although this compositional practice had originally been developed as a tool for attaining a more comprehensive linguistic mastery of Literary Sinitic and thereby facilitating a deeper understanding of canonical Confucian texts, it was soon adapted to quite different purposes. The resulting works came to be appreciated in their own right rather than as indirect exegetical aids. One of the main pleasures of kanbun gesaku texts was the possibility of humor created by the disconnect between form and content. As the Hayashi scholars’ condemnations of Seiken’s offensively inappropriate style demonstrate, there was something almost inherently irreverent in the pairing of crude subjects and Literary Sinitic discourse, a mode typically reserved for serious matters. To discuss excursions into the pleasure quarters in it, as Seiken did in a few sections of his Account and Ryūhoku did throughout his New Chronicles, amounted to a jarring clash of register and subject matter.38 Beyond

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the dissonance created by treating vulgar topics in a refined style, hanjōkimono and other kanbun gesaku genres also featured another form of parodic juxtaposition: misappropriation and willful misinterpretation of readily recognizable lines drawn from Literary Sinitic texts. Moreover, the style of kanbun used in hanjōkimono texts was itself internally discordant, for it gleefully deviated in various ways from the norms of proper kanbun. Nagai Kafū used an instructive metaphor to describe the style of these hanjō­ kimono by Seiken, Ryūhoku, and an early Meiji author who followed their lead, Hattori Bushō (1842–1908): “Bushō’s New Account of the Prosperity of Tokyo, imitating Terakado Seiken’s Account of the Prosperity of Edo and Narushima Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, took proper kanbun and willfully corrupted and domesticated it. As a result, the writing was of course unintelligible not only to Chinese people, but to Japanese who were not well grounded in kanbun. These texts created an unusual form we might compare to a nue.”39 Kafū somewhat exaggerates here the impenetrability of hanjōkimono texts to Chinese readers, for the Qing literati who visited Japan in early Meiji are known to have read and even written about these works.40 Yet the larger point that a defining feature of hanjōkimono is their hybridity, which Kafū vividly captures by comparing their style to the mythical nue beast, offers an important insight. Memorialized in medieval war tales, the nue was an “unspeakably fearsome apparition with a monkey’s head, a badger’s body, a snake’s tail, and a tiger’s legs, and which uttered a cry like that of the golden mountain thrush.”41 As Kafū’s metaphor suggests, the hybridity of the hanjō­ kimono text, the manifestly composite quality of its style, is one of its main appeals. Premised on juxtaposition, these texts are neither fully Chinese nor fully Japanese, neither high nor low; they amuse by their simultaneous embodiment of disparate elements. Texts like Seiken’s Account and Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles incorporate colloquial Chinese, translations of Japanese colloquial works, the parodic misappropriation or mis­ quotation of specific Chinese works, and the playful use of Japanese glosses. Because they are written to the side of characters, such glosses are generally called bōkun (side glosses), and, when based on straightforward correspondence, they are common in a wide range of Japanese texts, functioning to explain the meaning and/or pronunciation of unfamiliar Chinese graphs or terms. In hanjōkimono and other kanbun gesaku, however, such annotations can be more artful or whimsical, hence the term gikun (playful glosses). Often written to the left side of the characters rather than the right, they have an additional range of literary effects that can exploit subtle distinctions between the Chinese graphs and the Japanese readings.42 Consider the following sentence from Seiken’s Account, which introduces a passage summarized from a contemporary work of Japanese popular fiction: rehash

a

book

of

mode

This is a translation of an unofficial history book. シャ レ ボンヤキナホシ

此是稗史本 翻譯

43

Used in distinction to 正史 (Ch. zhengshi; J. seishi), indicating a “proper” or “orthodox history,” the word 稗史 (Ch. baishi; J. haishi) signifies an “unofficial history.” Yet to the



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left of the compound 稗史本 (printed above it here), meaning a book of this type, Seiken gives not the expected Sino-Japanese gloss, but rather the Japanese term sharebon, referring to a particular Japanese genre of popular fiction featuring the humorous depiction of contemporary customs. Similarly, whereas the term 翻譯 (Ch. fanyi), indicating “translation,” would normally be glossed with its standard Sino-Japanese pronunciation hon’yaku, here Seiken provides a slightly different nuance with the gloss yakinaoshi, indicating something more akin to a “remake” or an “adaptation.” Although some of the glosses Seiken and other kanbun gesaku authors inserted into their Chinese texts aimed at straightforward explana­tion of unfamiliar Chinese phrases, the more playful glosses they introduced could be particularly effective in further foregrounding discrepancies between the elegant kanbun style and the humble subject matter. To be sure, a reader could choose to ignore them entirely and simply read the main text—more or less stan­ dard Literary Sinitic leavened by occasional vernacular Chinese turns of phrase—but the Japanese glosses provided additional levels of signification that could be not simply informative but sardonically humorous. In their contents, hanjōkimono overlap with other texts that convey geographic knowledge, such as the gazetteer or guidebook, but one distinguishing feature of hanjō­ kimono is their commitment to focusing on elements of urban life that are omitted from such orthodox genres.44 Another consistent attribute is the critical eye that hanjōkimono direct toward the urban spectacle. Using the technique of ugachi (meaning “digging” or “piercing”) that had been pioneered in Edo period gesaku, hanjōkimono often skewer their splendid subjects, relentlessly revealing that the urban “flourishing” they purport to celebrate has less attractive dimensions.45 As Niina Noriko argues, “Hanjōkimono are not simply urban encomiums, but texts that bear a variety of possibilities precisely because they turn their scrutiny on the ‘flourishing’ of society including its darker aspects.”46 It is this critical commentary that is the key characteristic of the genre and the one that most clearly establishes Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles of Yanagibashi as a successor to Seiken’s Account. That Ryūhoku saw his project as being heavily indebted to Seiken is evident from the effusive praise with which he begins the preface to his own text: “In the past, there was a man called the Retired Scholar Seiken. He wrote Account of the Prosperity of Edo. . . . Not a single famous site or hotspot was omitted, and there was no place left unmentioned. His writing was extremely funny and his account clear and detailed. The text allowed the reader to know what these famous places offered without having to leave his bed.”47 The metaphor that Ryūhoku uses here, that the reader of Seiken’s Account is able to know all about Edo “without having to leave his bed” (literally, “while lying down” 臥), is one often invoked in praise of well-crafted travel accounts. The idea is that the writer has described the places visited so vividly that the reader is able to engage vicariously in what Richard Strassberg has translated as “recumbent traveling” (臥遊; Ch. woyou; J. gayū), seeing the sights depicted in the text almost as though present.48 But in addition to characterizing Ryūhoku’s and other readers’ reception of Seiken’s text, the metaphor of “recumbent traveling” also alludes to the circumstances under which Seiken claims to have inscribed it. In the preface to his first volume, Seiken explains his motivation for writing his Account:

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In the fifth month of the second year of Tenpō [1831], I happened to contract a slight illness that left me unable to sit up properly to read the Confucian classics. In my recumbent and idle boredom, I flipped through some miscellaneous books to ease my listlessness. . . . Then one day, I flung down my book in despair, and sighed, “This year, the harvest is scarce and poor. A hundred mon will only buy a few gō of rice. And yet when I reflect on the fact that a rōnin like me, nursing his ailments in this run-down part of town, is still able to stave off hunger and make recumbent travels through his thickets of books, I see that this can only be because our peaceful realm now bathes in the awesome magnanimity of virtuous rule!”49

Seiken’s narrator introduces here an important distinction between his own text, based as it is on the miscellaneous books he can leisurely peruse while prone in his sickbed, and the Confucian classics he must momentarily put aside since they demand seated studiousness. This self-reflexive motif through which Seiken juxtaposes himself with a Con­ fucian scholar and his own writings with the Confucian classics runs throughout his Account, and, as will become clear, it is a contrastive frame that Ryūhoku also evokes repeatedly in New Chronicles. Moreover, in what is one of the most consistent comic patterns of Seiken’s Account, he couches his reference to an increasingly disastrous contemporary economy in ironic terms that seem to neutralize its negativity. There is in the text a sort of abortive alchemy by which decay is facetiously recast as gilded splendor; Seiken inscribes any and all phenomena as evidence of urban flourishing, from the proliferation of thieves to the increasingly desperate plight of beggars, which in turn prompts his manifestly disingen­uous praise of the realm’s governance. Inasmuch as it purports to record the “splendor” of Yanagibashi, while in fact being more concerned to lay bare the realities of life in the quarter, Ryūhoku’s text shares not only this critical dimension but also its ironic tone. Ryūhoku’s text is often characterized as a nostalgic paean to the erstwhile glory of Yanagibashi.50 Although there are some elements of nostalgia in the text, a more important factor animating it is a journalistic drive to write in the present tense: to document the situation here and now before it fades away: “Ah! Unless someone records its splendor now, then after five or ten years, who is to say that it won’t have withered to an unrecogniza­ ble vestige of its present state?”51 Noting that the passage of time has rendered Seiken’s descriptions inaccurate provides the justification for Ryūhoku to bring the earlier account up to date. The contrast to Yu Huai is particularly pronounced here, for in Miscellaneous Records of the Wooden Bridge the concern is not to record the contemporary, but rather to reconstruct a world that has long since been destroyed. Ryūhoku’s narrator also adopts several elements of Seiken’s persona, such as his poverty, his protests of ignorance about his subject, his claims of inadequacy to the task he has chosen to undertake, and his estrangement from Confucian orthodoxy.52 Ryū­ hoku’s narrator concludes his preface: I am a foolish and empty-headed student; with my worn-down inkstone and my bald brush, I am just barely able to get enough to eat. . . . I have never spent so much as a single day playing in the quarter to investigate its actual conditions. How could I possibly be qualified to write about it? I have, however, eagerly listened to the tales told by the playboys and have looked at the maps of the city, and these have given me a general glimpse of the quarter’s



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workings. . . . If an upright Confucian gentleman were to read this book, with its vulgar language and obscene contents, he would spit upon it and discard it at once. But on the other hand, it is not as though anyone is waiting for me to write something that an upright Con­ fucian gentleman could write. There are some things that an upright Confucian gentleman would be unable to write, and that is precisely what someone like me ought to record. I expect I will only write of those things I know. As for those things I don’t know about, I imagine that there will be someone foolish and empty-headed like me out there who will be able to supplement it.53

As Horio Junko and Maeda Ai have observed, the professional positions of Ryūhoku and Seiken at the time each wrote differed sharply from one another; whereas Seiken really was frustrated in his attempts to transform his knowledge of the Confucian classics into a viable career, Ryūhoku was employed as a high official in the shogunate.54 Not only is it true that the self-description of Ryūhoku’s narrator does not match what we know about the historical Ryūhoku, it is also clear that the narrator is adopting a manifestly false persona in claiming to be a “foolish student” with no experience of Yana­g ibashi: a scribe who relies solely on what he has heard from others to make his account. His knowledge of the quarter is simply too detailed and intimate to be credible as hearsay.55 Moreover, whereas the historical Ryūhoku was indeed a Confucian official, his narrator repeatedly affiliates himself with Seiken, whose distance from officialdom he stresses with the term “retired scholar.” The student narrator’s effort to locate himself outside the strictures of the author’s official position as Confucian scholar is further evident in the way he defiantly imagines that his book would be “spit upon” if read by an “upright Confucian gentleman,” a fate Seiken’s narrator accepts with relish: “Behold! This hanjōki is something comical and obscene, something that knowledgeable men would spit upon. And yet, as soon as it was published, the price of paper in Luoyang rose more than threefold. I wonder just who among the proper Confucian gentlemen of the world would dare to read this book? What elegant and refined literatus would dare read this book?”56 In this way, Ryūhoku’s preface establishes New Chronicles of Yanagibashi as a work that aims to continue the project of Seiken and his Account, albeit within a more tightly circumscribed geographic focus on the pleasure quarters instead of the city as a whole. Though often described as nostalgic in tone, Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles of Yanagibashi is reportage of the present moment. Rather than writing the kind of geographical inquiry that would befit an official gazetteer, Ryūhoku, like Seiken, saw his purpose as writing something else altogether: an account of phenomena traditionally beneath the notice of such treatises. Moreover, just as Seiken wrote ironically about the “flourishing” of Edo, so too does Ryūhoku’s depiction of the elegant world of refined diversion in Yanagibashi focus on revealing its seamy underside. It was in writing New Chronicles that Ryūhoku honed his abilities to observe and insightfully describe current sociocultural practices, that he experimented with various narrative vantage points and strategies (ranging from self-effacing innocent detachment to a withering sardonic tone), and that he perfected his ability to craft a richly intertextual work, surprising in its use of allusion. Above all, he was able to achieve these effects while maintaining a refreshingly light touch, a talent that he would come to capitalize on as a newspaper journalist fifteen years later.

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Beneath the Shining Surface: Unraveling the Mysteries of Yanagibashi It is common in criticism of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi to emphasize the differences between the first volume, completed in 1860 but not published until 1874, and the second volume, completed in 1871 but likewise not published until 1874 (a few months before the first volume). Occasionally this contrastive formulation leads to a dismissal of the first volume altogether, as when Shioda Ryōhei writes: “The first volume is something like a guidebook (annaiki), and it seems it was only with the second volume that Ryūhoku was able to fully demonstrate his true worth.”57 To Shioda, what makes the text as a whole noteworthy is the “mockery” of the contemporary order contained in its second volume, in contrast to the supposed lack of such satire in the first volume, which merely provides descriptive information.58 In one of the most influential articles published on New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, Wada Shigejirō gave a new collective name to the cluster of features Shioda and others had detected in the second volume: “critical spirit.” In pointing out Ryū­ hoku’s critical spirit, Wada’s 1950 article attempted to reevaluate the importance of New Chronicles and of Ryūhoku’s career in general, discerning elements of modernity in it. As had Shioda, however, Wada remained dismissive of the first volume, noting that, whereas one would expect to see some satire given the appeals to Seiken’s legacy in the preface, in fact “little satire or criticism is found in the first volume,” in contrast to the second volume, where “this satirical and critical intent is clearly” visible.59 It is true that the first volume of New Chronicles has some elements of a guidebook. The reader learns, for example, the names of the restaurants and drinking establishments in Yanagibashi, which of them have the best food, say, or the nicest bath; which are known widely in the provinces and which are known only to locals; which restaurants are most celebrated, and which have been skimping on service lately. The inclusion of such topical information and the assertion that the relative merits of the Yanagibashi establishments are in constant flux point to a contrast with the idealized and timeless past evoked in Yu Huai’s Miscellaneous Records of the Wooden Bridge. Needless to say there is little sense in which the latter text, inasmuch as it concerns a lost and inaccessible world, can serve as any sort of practical guide. Yet in spite of the presence of this kind of seemingly uncritical consumer-oriented information in New Chronicles, the ironic stance of the narrator is clear from the beginning of the first volume. Far from being a simple guidebook, the first volume of New Chronicles sets out to probe beneath the veneer of Yana­ gibashi’s splendor, to expose its contradictions, and also to reveal the sometimes unsavory truth of its supposed flourishing. The technique shows Ryūhoku’s debt to Seiken and also demonstrates the greatest difference between Ryūhoku’s text and Yu Huai’s account of Nanjing. In Miscellaneous Records of the Wooden Bridge, Yu Huai is similarly concerned to portray the “flourishing” 盛 (Ch. sheng) of Nanjing, but it is the Nanjing of the past. Describing the luxuriant foliage and elegant temples that surrounded the Qinhuai canal near the Nanjing pleasure quarters, Yu Huai writes:



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Truly it was a place that could delight the eye and please the heart, washing one’s spirit clean of the dust of the world. Every night, when it grew cool and people had settled down for the evening, when the breeze blew crisply and the moon was clear, prominent scholars and devastating beauties, with flowers in their hair and their sidelocks bound, would come strolling hand in hand. Leaning against the balustrade, they lingered. Beauties chanced upon would smile and speak pleasantly. This one would play her flute and that one would sing a lovely song. The whole world grew silent, and the swimming fish emerged to listen. Truly these were affairs of flourishing in a world at peace.60

Immediately after this description, Yu Huai repeats the key term “flourishing” 盛 when he writes “the flourishing of Qinhuai lantern boats had no equal in the world.” By describing these recollected scenes in terms of the “flourishing” of “a world at peace,” Yu Huai highlights the contrast between the idealized past and the authorial present; after the Manchu conquest, such scenes could no longer be glimpsed. The world Yu Huai evokes is a sensory feast of delicacy and refined entertainment: Each brothel had its separate family lineage, and they competed for charm and loveliness, for beauty and rarity. From early morning their denizens would be full in their cups, taking their ablutions in elegant orchid-scented baths, the aroma of incense that infused their clothing filling the room. . . . At night, they would play flutes and zithers, and actors from the Pear Garden would perform skits, their voices resounding to the heavens.61

There is scarcely anything unpleasant to mar the elegant mood of Miscellaneous Records of the Wooden Bridge until the Manchus appear on the scene. Ryūhoku’s description of Yanagibashi similarly invokes the key term “flourishing” 盛, but the term is not the unequivocally celebratory one found in Yu Huai. Ryūhoku’s text exploits the liminal narrative pose of the student observer to describe the quarters from a detached yet penetrating perspective. Although the narrator obviously enjoys sharing knowledge of Yanagibashi with his audience, he cherishes no illusions about it. Beneath his praise of the quarters’ popularity there lingers an unsettling hint of excess: And, in the height of summer, the revelers descend like a herd of giant deer, jostling and floating away, leaving not a single vessel vacant on the shore day or night. Truly it is flourishing 盛. What’s more, the grand and beautiful roof tiles of the drinking establishstylish ments complement each other, and the chic curtains of the teahouses flap together. The aroma of the roasted eel shop assaults one’s nose, and the bright blood from the butcher shop stains one’s sandals. The mochi from the confection shops would be enough to dam up the Yellow River, and the fruit from the green grocer would be enough to strike down all the birds in Qi’s garden.62 With sushi shops, soba vendors, this, and that, no one leaves stock sold out without his appetite sated. The inventory brought in each morning is completely liquidated by evening. One can thus easily imagine how many travel to these parts for food and drink.63

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As the narrator’s gaze takes in the sights and smells of the quarter, his enthusiasm is obvious, but no sooner does he describe some superlative feature of Yanagibashi than he deflates it with a jarring turn of phrase. The contrast with Yu Huai’s description of Nanjing’s Qinhuai pleasure quarters, with its wafting incense and delightful music, is stark. While the narrator marvels at the spectacle of Yanagibashi, a persistent countercurrent relativizes the splendor; although the brightness of the butcher shop’s blood attests to the area’s wealth, it nevertheless stains one’s sandals. The wide Yellow River and the vast garden of the King of Qi are Chinese references indicating immensity, but, when the nar­ rator deploys them to speak of mushy mochi and fruit-struck birds, the effect is an absurd mismatch between form and content. The juxtaposition of splendor and squalor evident in this descriptive passage is just one of the numerous paradoxes presented in the text’s first volume. The discovery and unraveling of such disjunctions and riddles constitutes a dominant motif in the work. Using the ugachi technique, the narrator seeks to probe beneath the surface to reveal a concealed, and often somehow unsettling, truth. The text’s first line, for example, informs the reader that there is more (or perhaps less) to the name of Yanagibashi than might at first be apparent: “The Yanagibashi, or ‘Willow Bridge,’ is named for willows, and yet there is not a single willow growing there.” This observation leads the narrator to consider why the place should still be called “Willow Bridge”: An old gazetteer says that it was so named because it is located at the end of Yanagiwara, or “Willowfield.” However, to the southeast of the bridge is another bridge, and to its side Moto Yanagi Bashi stands an old willow. People call this second bridge “Old Willow Bridge.” Some would old say that, since this bridge has a willow tree, it must be the Yanagibashi of a ntiquity and that what is now called Yanagibashi was in fact built later and stole the name. But this doesn’t square with theory contradicts t hat o f the old gazetteer. It is my considered opinion that the proper name of “Old Willow Bridge” is Naniwa Bridge, though there are few who are privy to this knowledge. When one ponders the pros and contemplates the cons of these two theories, it seems that the account in the old gazetteer is correct.64

On the surface, this seemingly scholarly inquiry into the proper name of Yanagibashi’s central geographic feature and its etymology resembles both the evidentiary approach and content of texts such as Saitō Gesshin’s Edo meisho zue, which in all likelihood is precisely the “old gazetteer” mentioned here.65 Yet, even though the conclusion of the exercise is to affirm the gazetteer’s statement, the narrator’s mock pedantry has an additional significance. In observing that the so-called Old Willow Bridge, which really has a willow growing beside it, is nothing but a misnomer and that the true Willow Bridge, in spite of its name and its proximity to “Willowfield,” nevertheless has no willows near it, the narrator introduces the idea that the appearance of Yanagibashi does not accord with its reality, that popular assumptions about it are wrong, and that there are mysteries and inconsistencies that elude the scope of materials in the gazetteer. Just as the narrator’s survey of the evidence of Yanagibashi’s famed “flourishing” (pleasure boats on the river, pleasure seekers on its shores, popular restaurants) quickly transformed them into



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signs of unpleasant excess (collision, bestial herding, staining, and surfeit), so too does his inquiry into the name “Willow Bridge” reveal that it is not what it claims to be. In this way, the disconnect between the name of Yanagibashi and its reality mirrors several other rifts that the narrator proceeds to tease out, most notable of which is the fact that the place thrives on an industry that is officially nonexistent: the network of businesses organized around entertainment by geisha. Having observed the excess of restaurants and drinking establishments in Yanagibashi, he continues: former

Yet the real reason this area now surpasses its erstwhile splendor lies not in such gustatory matters but rather in something else altogether. What is this something else? In a word, geisha first place courtesans. This quarter takes t he crown in all of Edo for both the number and the loveliness of its geisha.66

But even this seemingly simple solution to the riddle of Yanagibashi’s prosperity soon proves to be problematic, for, unlike the geisha working in the Yoshiwara licensed quarters, female entertainers in Yanagibashi were not officially allowed to call themselves “geisha.” In spite of the proscription, it was nonetheless common for the Yanagibashi entertainers to do just that, though sometimes they were referred to as “town geisha” (machi-geisha) to distinguish them from the geisha proper of Yoshiwara. One contemporary source explains the naming practice as follows: “Machi-geisha are also known as ‘Edo-geisha’; the term refers to those of the city in contrast to the women of Yoshiwara and Fukagawa. There are many in the areas around Ryōgoku and Yanagibashi. . . . The machi-geisha do not differ at all in appearance and dress from those of the licensed quarters. . . . The machi-geisha of Edo are mainly invited to entertain in restaurants, or they accompany pleasure boat excursions. . . . They openly call themselves ‘geisha,’ but this is ultimately just a private term of reference; officially they are ‘drink-pourers.’ ”67 In the passage quoted above, Ryūhoku uses the Japanese term “geisha” to refer to Yanagibashi’s female entertainers, glossing the Sinitic compound 歌妓 (“singing courtesan” or “female entertainer”; Ch. geji; J. kagi) with this Japanese reading. At the same time, however, he frequently points out that, strictly speaking, this is not their official status and that in spite of the actual similarity of their professional duties to the geisha of Yoshiwara, they are nevertheless expected to observe numerous status distinctions. The fact that they seldom adhere to these restrictions and the questions this raises about the restrictions’ meaningfulness are both targets of Ryūhoku’s irony. If the thriving of Yanagibashi is illusory in the sense that it depends on the presence of women who act as geisha and yet are not officially geisha, then a similar mystery confronts the narrator in describing the demand side of the Yanagibashi economy. Affecting a posture of puzzlement, he wonders how to reconcile the purported poverty of contemporary samurai and merchants with the plainly evident prosperity of Yanagibashi and its ever-increasing population of geisha. Adopting the parodic technique that earned Seiken such scorn from the shogunal authorities in their review of his Account, the narrator of New Chronicles first attempts to answer his own question with appeals to the Confucian canon:

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Gaozi once said: “Appetite for food and sex are human nature.” This place is rich in both of coming in droves these. No surprise then that the visitors keep endlessly streaming i n, losing themselves before they know what is happening. Confucius once praised water, saying “Water! Oh, water!” And the Classic of Changes says: “The benefit of boats and paddles was such that one could cross over to where it had been impossible to pass.” This place also abounds in water, boats, and paddles. No surprise then that the visitors who come and immerse themselves in Yanagibashi offer praise for the place! No wonder that uncouth men who would never have passed muster cross over into a quite passable connoisseurship. How could it be anything but flourishing?!68

The reference to Gaozi comes from a debate in Mencius concerning whether benevolence and righteousness are internal, natural characteristics or external, artificial impositions. Gaozi argues that, whereas benevolence is internal, righteousness is imposed externally on humans and is not the innate characteristic Mencius claims it to be.69 The humor of the narrator’s explanation lies in his deadpan appropriation of a line from this serious and wide-ranging philosophical debate on human nature to account for the popularity of a particular contemporary entertainment district in its satisfaction of man’s primal instincts. There is thus an amusing gap here in both weight and scope between the canonical source text and its mundane application, but, at least in this first instance, the logic and general sense of the cited text remain intact. In two additional references to Confucian classic texts in this passage, however, Ryūhoku’s readings grow increasingly specious and absurd. The allusion to Confucius and his praise of water comes from Mencius as well: Xuzi said, “More than once Confucius expressed his admiration for water by saying, ‘Water! Oh, water!’ What was it he saw in water?” “Water from an ample source,” said Mencius, “comes tumbling down, day and night without ceasing, going forward only after all the hollows are filled and then draining into the sea. Anything that has an ample source is like this. What Confucius saw in water is just this and nothing more. If a thing has no source, it is like that rain water that collects after a downpour in the seventh and eighth months. It may fill all the gutters, but we can stand and wait for it to dry up. Thus a gentleman is ashamed of an exaggerated reputation.”70

Whereas in the original text Mencius interprets Confucius’s praise of water from an ample source as a metaphor for the deserved reputation of a gentleman of high character, Ryū­ hoku’s narrator takes Confucius’s words literally, interpreting them to be praise of physical water and, thus, by extension the water of the Sumida River. The final appeal to classical Confucian authority is the most far-fetched since it turns on a pun that presumably would have registered only with a contemporary Japanese audience. The narrator’s textual citation is from a passage from a fourth-century commentary on the Classic of Changes: They hollowed out some tree trunks to make boats and whittled down others to make paddles. The benefit of boats and paddles was such that one could cross over to where it



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had been impossible to pass. This allowed faraway places to be reached and so benefited the entire world. They probably got the idea for this from the hexagram Huan [dispersion]. 刳木為舟、剡木為楫、舟楫之利、以濟不通、致遠以利天下、蓋取諸＜渙＞。71

The narrator gives this classical formulation about the advent of waterborne transportation a preposterous interpretation by arguing that the abundance of boat traffic in Yanagibashi must be the reason why “not passable people” 不通之人 are rendered “passable” 通. In both Chinese and Japanese, the graph 通 (Ch. tong; J. tsū) can mean a conversant expert, but it has a special resonance in the context of the Edo pleasure quarters that is, needless to say, wholly unrelated to the passage from the Classic of Changes. One of the stock sources of humor for early modern Japanese literature was in distinguishing the tsū, or “sophisticated connoisseur,” from such comic types as the yabo, a “country bumpkin” with uncouth manners, and the hanka-tsū, a “half-baked tsū” or “tsū-manqué” who makes pretensions to stylish sophistication but is clueless about his shortcomings. Though they are presented in all seriousness, these far-fetched appeals to the teachings of the Confucian canon cannot, of course, really claim to unlock the secret of Yana­ gibashi’s success. The sustained project of the first volume of New Chronicles is to continue to probe the question of how commerce is transacted in Yanagibashi. Ryūhoku introduces the various characters and businesses that take part in these negotiations: the female entertainers themselves, their customers, the restaurants and boathouses where customers and geisha might interact, the managers of these businesses, and a host of other figures. The perspective shifts constantly, as Ryūhoku’s narrator describes Yanagibashi’s commerce from each participant’s point of view. In the text’s first investigative sequence, the narrator records the operations of the funayado, boathouses that served patrons of Yanagibashi by providing passage on the Sumida River as well as rooms that they could rent for drinking, socializing, or other forms of recreation. What gave the boathouse profitability, however, was the commission it received by serving as a site for patrons to meet geisha, and Ryūhoku’s description quickly seizes on this fact: be

Even if a boathouse sent out several boats every day, it would still not allow them to y ield in the black workmen sufficient revenue. And we need not even mention the paltry take from the f irefighters landlords and superintendents who come to gamble, play go, sleep, or chat, leaving after paying just a seating charge and the price of their tea. This is the reason that the customers who call for geisha are treated so well. The highest of the high are called “rice pots,” perhaps because they are able to keep the boathouse family well fed. What I fear is that those big spenders scrape the bottom of who serve as the “rice pots” of the boathouses will sooner or later completely exhaust their own houses’ rice pots! There are some establishments that are boathouses in name but in fact make their living off of geisha, permitting their customers to sleep with the geisha. We could just as well call these businesses “geisha houses.”72

In a reprise of the narrator’s preliminary speculations about the name “Yanagibashi,” the focus of this description is also on the disjunction between what is true in name and what

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is true in fact, between the appearance and the reality of the boathouses.73 Moreover, just as the “flourishing” of Yanagibashi in the opening passage soon devolved into excess, so too does this description of the boathouse patrons reveal how the largesse of a big spender can verge on self-destruction. Turning his attention to the individuals who run the boathouse, Ryūhoku’s narrator frames the madam as the establishment’s eminence grise. In contrast to the boathouse proprietor who spends his time gambling or “snoozing beside the tea furnace and the cashbox,” his wife is a shrewd strategist, quickly assessing patrons in terms of their intelligence and wealth: In no

time

sized

him up

got it

not

sharp

Straight away she has taken stock, seeing whether he’s wealthy or destitute, intelligent or stupid foolish. Wealthy and foolish is what she seeks. Why? If he is intelligent, then he will be cheat hard to deceive; if he is destitute, then there is no profit to be made. スグニミテトル

アルナイ

リコウバカ

ダマシ

直 看取了其貧富與 慧 愚。富與愚、是彼之所欲也。何也。慧則難欺。貧則少利。74

The narrator momentarily takes on the perspective of this formidable character, viewing the patrons through her eyes. One of the narrative techniques that complements this adoption of the madam’s perspective and helps bring her to life is the text’s use of gikun. In this passage, the vernacular Japanese glosses reveal to the reader the particularities of the madam’s thought process in a way that the high-toned abstractions of the corresponding terms in the Sinitic prose could not. The gikun can also provide a more realistic portrayal of actual spoken dialogue, as is clear in the following passage where the geisha makes her first appearance: shōji

Pardon

me

A geisha arrives. She opens the partition and invariably says, “Excusez-moi,” and when she takes a seat Thanks for having me over tonight assumes her place she always says, “Grateful for t he invitation t his evening.” She first bows flatters to the customer and then bows to the madam. With her beautiful face, she seduces him feelings coyly; with her lovely music, she expresses her sentiments. The madam sits beside, guiding Raising it up bringing it down the rudder on a steady course. Stimulating and steering, she drives their interaction with a deftness that is simply ineffable. She does the boathouse profession proud. The customer mood buoyed finds his spirit soaring and his soul lifted; he is unaware that his own hands have begun to dance and his feet have begun to tap. In the end, he searches his bosom, throwing down a few coins for the geisha and the madam. And thereupon the strains of the shamisen big grow all the more lovely; the rudder is guided ever more expertly. If the man is a profligate spender companions patron, perhaps the geisha’s attendants and the maidservants of the house might likewise tip be rewarded with a gratuity. ショウジ

ゴメン ナサイ

ス ハル

コン バンハ アリ ガトウ

妓至。開 障 、必唱「請 恕 」二字。就 席 、必唱「今 夕 奉 謝 」四字。先拜客、次拜女 セジ ココロイキ カヂ アゲ タリ サゲ タリ 將。既而妍臉獻媚、嬌絃表 情 。女將在傍、使舵于其間。抑揚鼓舞、其妙不可口。可 ウカレヌキ フトコロ ソコ 謂、不愧其業矣。客、魂飛神揚、不知手之舞之足之蹈之。遂探 懷 、抛金于妓及女將若 バク カヂ キバリテ ト モ ハ ナ 干。而後絃益添嬌、柁益加妙。若豪客、則併妓之從者、家之嫗婢、皆受其纏頭。75



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The narrator has thus far set the stage by identifying the geisha as the secret source of Yanagibashi’s flourishing, but what is surprising in her first real scene is that she never succeeds in becoming its star. The apparent crux of Yanagibashi’s economy ultimately yields center stage to the boathouse madam, who remains unquestionably in control, deftly drawing the customer into ever greater expenditure. With each of the narrator’s references to the geisha’s performance, there is a complementary acknowledgment of the madam’s ultimate control, sometimes even phrased in parallel (“the strains of the shamisen grow all the more lovely; the rudder is guided ever more expertly” 絃益添嬌、 柁益加妙). The madam’s efforts are soon rewarded as the customer finds he is “unaware that his own hands have begun to dance and his feet have begun to tap,” an effect described in terms drawn from the “Great Preface” of the Classic of Poetry: “The poem is that to which what is intently on the mind goes. . . . The affections are stirred within and take on form in words. If words alone are inadequate, we speak it out in sighs. If sighing is inadequate, we sing it. If singing is inadequate, unconsciously our hands dance it and our feet tap it.” 詩者、志之所之也。. . . 情動於中而形於言。言之不足、故嗟歎之。嗟歎之不足、故永 歌之。永歌之不足、不知手之舞之足之蹈之也.76 To use what is perhaps the most famous statement about the purpose of poetry in East Asia in this crass context is irreverent, to say the least, an effect that is only heightened by the fact that the result of this stirring of the affections is the production of an extra gratuity for the barmaids rather than some more refined outburst of verse. Although the charms of the geisha may seem to be the staple of the Yanagibashi economy, the narrator’s investigation reveals that her part is only secondary to that of the calculating and beguiling boathouse proprietress. Yet no sooner has the narrator’s depiction of the boathouse madam concluded than he turns his critical gaze on the experience of the geisha, highlighting the constraints placed on her both by the boathouse or restaurant in which she entertains and by the serving girls who attend her there.77 His portrayal consistently emphasizes the treachery of human relations, especially when money and hierarchy are at issue, pointing out the particular gaps between an individual’s formal status and her actual abilities or functions. He notes, for example, how, even among the geisha themselves, seniority-based status distinctions prevent young geisha who are talented musicians from revealing these skills lest they infringe on their elders’ exclusive right to perform on the shamisen.78 Similarly petty rules characterize the rivalry between Yanagibashi geisha (the “town geisha”) and those of the Yoshiwara licensed quarters. Even something as seemingly inconsequential as the wearing of tortoise-shell bodkins is subject to regulations: It seems that the wearing of these bodkins by geisha is the practice of the Northern Quarter in Yoshiwara; it is not something that geisha of other districts can do. But as fashions reach new heights, they are left with no choice but to do what they are actually forbidden from doing.79

The narrator imbues such elaborately articulated status distinctions between Yanagibashi and Yoshiwara geisha with an additional degree of absurdity through his repeated e­ mphasis that the difference between the two types of geisha is only nominal (not to mention the fact

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that the regulations are often violated). Yet the fact that the Yanagibashi women were only “town geisha” also meant, at least in principle, that various secondary businesses depending on them for their livelihood could not describe themselves with the terms reserved for analogous businesses catering to the geisha of Yoshiwara, even though their functions were identical. Intermediary establishments that might otherwise be called “geisha dispatch” agencies, for example, could not use this name.80 Just as Ryūhoku’s narrator argued that some of the Yanagibashi “boathouses” could more accurately be called “geisha houses” since this was their main source of income, so too does he observe that the nominal distinctions between the two districts of Yanagibashi and Yoshiwara cannot withstand scrutiny. Although the narrator of New Chronicles expresses sympathy for the geisha, ultimately none of the figures in the text emerges from his critique unscathed. Nevertheless, the constant shift of the narrator’s focus of attention and perspective insures that his ironic scorn is evenly wielded: In most geisha houses, those with a father are only one in ten and those with a husband are only one in a hundred. By and large, the geisha lives alone with her mother. She may keep a cat or a chin dog as a pet, making a group of three all told. With the obsequious geisha who is as wily as a fox and her mother little more than a badger in human clothing, the ilk cat or dog must wonder, “Mother and daughter are part of our pack. Why are we singled out as beasts?” And, as for the one who enters this bestial lair and becomes intimate with its beastly denizens, would we not be justified in calling him a beast too? And how many there are in that category!81

In her reading of this passage, Horio Junko argues that it represents the narrator’s bestializing gaze toward the “useless” people who lie beneath his superior vantage point in the social hierarchy.82 But the passage is not so unilateral, for, immediately after poking fun at the trickery of the geisha and her mother with bestial metaphors, the narrator turns his gaze on the patrons, undercutting any position that would regard only the “useless” geisha with scorn.83 Though the narrator sets himself apart from the patrons by adopting the inexperienced “foolish student” persona in the preface, his detailed and cynical descriptions throughout the text prevent the guise from being fully convincing. There is thus a healthy measure of comical self-indictment in his suggestion that the patrons themselves are every bit as bestial as the geisha. As Ariyama Taigo has observed, many contemporaneous readers would have known the identity of the text’s author, allowing them to appreciate such passages as Ryūhoku’s self-mockery and also to see in the pose of the stu­ dent the anguish of a young scholar struggling with the constraints of his position.84 Indeed, Ryūhoku’s narrator has his fun at the expense not simply of the lower social orders, but of all who pass through the quarters, even people of high status. In describing diners at a restaurant, for example, he surveys the various classes of patrons, making light-hearted jabs at physicians, priests, palace maidens, and Kyushu samurai in turn.85 In this way, any dismissive scorn that might be leveled at the geisha ultimately comes full circle, undercutting the smug self-satisfaction of those who would consider themselves superior to her. In what is the clearest illustration of this critical gaze directed toward



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members of the social elite, significantly including the specific category to which the author Ryūhoku himself belonged, the narrator poses a question to a friend about the geisha’s merits relative to these higher orders: “A geisha lacking gei [talent] is able to be one because she still has some worthwhile qualities. But what about the jusha [Confucian scholars], the isha [physicians], and the others of the world who have a sha in their name? There is no shortage of Confucian scholars who haven’t a clue about the Way expressed in the Four Books and the Six Classics, or physicians who don’t have any idea what is contained in The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of just the same as Medicine. These two types are comparable to a geisha without any gei. Do they have any redeeming qualities?” He pondered, contemplated, reasoned, and considered, and then No No No suddenly struck his thigh and exclaimed, “Nothing! Not one!”86 Perhaps I do not need to lectures ask others about this matter. If pronouncements on the “cultivation of the person” or the have no use “regulation of the family” serve no f unction, then they are not as good as the geisha’s short ditties and popular tunes, which at least please the ear.87 The physician’s spoon should does not know how to make the medicine supplement yang and adjust yin, but, if he cannot discern t he proper proportions, then it cannot equal the geisha’s ivory plectrum, which heightens the mood and encourages one to drink. What a laugh. Ah! These scholars are supposed to rescue the world by disseminating their teachings, these men are supposed to play God and save the afflicted young, and yet they are shown up by these graceful and delicate young ladies. How intolerably sad!88

The first volume of New Chronicles ruthlessly exposes the quarter’s corruption and pretense, but, as the above passage shows, it also satirizes the world beyond Yanagibashi’s confines. Readers would be able to see the world of Yanagibashi’s geisha, with all of its artifice and hypocrisy, as a microcosm of broader society. The status distinctions that the narrator so carefully details and deconstructs, for example, have parallels in other arenas, including the official circles within which Ryūhoku himself operated as an okujusha.89 Even to compare the arts of a geisha to the teachings of a Confucian scholar is a provoca­ tive gesture, but the narrator’s conclusion about the geisha’s superiority in this passage is even more upending. At the outset of his preface, Ryūhoku’s narrator declares that he is taking it upon himself to write about subjects that a Confucian scholar would scorn or deem beneath his notice. The concern to report on overlooked aspects of contemporary urban life closely parallels that of Seiken’s narrator, who took joy in depicting all facets of everyday experience in Edo without eschewing any subject on account of its vulgarity.90 Yet, unlike his predecessor, the narrator of New Chronicles has a more particular area of urban experience in mind with his steady focus on the stylish world of fūryū: the delightful domain of elegant and amorous diversion that draws pleasure seekers to Yanagibashi. Near the end of the text, the narrator is more direct in specifically staking a claim for such sensual affairs as a subject that merits sincere attention: When it comes to plucking fragrant blossoms from this grove of orchids and chrysanthemums, or pilfering pearls from this pool of beautiful jewels, it is true that these are not the

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teachings of the Duke of Zhou or Confucius. But how can the proper Confucian gentleman manage to shun such amorous matters with a look of horror in the same way that he avoids “violence and heedlessness, lowness and impropriety”? Let us take the case of a vassal. Is it not sufficient for him to be like Xie An, who could subdue a million strong enemy soldiers with a smile on his face and thereby save the state? What right do we have to pass judgment on his happy diversions in the eastern hills? Or, let us look at the case of a literatus. If he has the broad knowledge and vast vocabulary of Bo Juyi, if he can have his name illuminate the annals of history and make his poetry known overseas, that would also be enough. What fault would lie in his inability to forget his passions? The gentlemen of today with their exceedingly minuscule disputations and their extremely suffocating codes of conduct have never had a clue what the feel and charm of refined style and tasteful elegance ( fūryū) are all about.91

Xie An is the statesman from the Jin dynasty whom Ryūhoku alluded to in the poem on Tao Yuanming’s “The Return” discussed in chapter 2. In that poem, Ryūhoku offered tempered praise for Xie as a competent shijin for the timely aid he offered his imperiled dynasty: a point of contrast to the bunjin Tao Yuanming, whom the poet celebrated for retiring to his rustic homestead and opting out of such affairs entirely. In the above passage from New Chronicles, however, Ryūhoku gives a new burnish to Xie’s exploits as an official while at the same time referencing the fact that Xie was also known for consorting with courtesans during an extensive period of reclusion in the “eastern hills” around Lin’an. Before recounting Xie An’s attainment of high office, his grave “concern” for and “complete loyalty” to the Jin, and his triumphs in battle, one popular summary of his career drawn from the History of the Jin explains: “Xie An ended up moving far away to the east, where he lived a free and easy life. He would always go to the mountains at Lin’an, strolling over hill and dale to his heart’s content. Whenever he went for a walk in the wilderness, he would bring along a courtesan.”92 In referencing Xie An’s withdrawal into the “eastern hills” to enjoy its attendant pleasures, Ryūhoku offers a new figuration of the Jin statesman that he will draw on in the future, as will become clear in the next chapter. Here, the narrator of New Chronicles is arguing that Xie An’s service as prime minister and his successful defense against the attack of the Former Qin (351–94) army outweigh whatever private sexual peccadilloes he may have committed. If this is an argument for tolerance of amorous dalliance in the shijin frame, the narrator’s next example shifts discussion to the bunjin frame with its citation of Bo Juyi. In referring to Bo Juyi’s “inability to forget his passions” 不能忘情, Ryūhoku had in mind the song by this title that Bo Juyi wrote when impending retirement forced him to part from Fan Su, a courtesan who had been with him for ten years; it concludes: 乃目素兮素兮 為我歌楊柳枝 我姑酌彼金罍 我與爾歸醉郷去來

Su, O Su, Sing me again the Song of the Willow Branch, And I will pour you wine in that golden cup And take you with me to the Land of Drunkenness.93

As Hino Tatsuo has pointed out, Bo Juyi was not writing here from the generically codified distance of a fictionalized vantage point (as in yuefu poetry), nor about love as an abstraction, but rather about his own intense love for a woman who was, moreover,



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not his wife.94 It is this positive acceptance of human affection as an essential dimension of both literature and life itself that the narrator of New Chronicles seeks to affirm. By invoking distinguished literatus Bo Juyi and statesman Xie An, both of whom were also known for their amorous exploits, the narrator asserts the centrality of sensual and sensuous experience to the human condition. The term fūryū has multiple associations, but in the above passage it implies a refined sensibility that values artistic elegance, natural beauty, and sensual delights. Befitting this aesthetic principle, the first volume of New Chronicles concludes with a richly lyrical sequence in which Ryūhoku’s narrator shifts his tone to imagine the progression of the four seasons in the quarter, painting each in idealized terms that focus in turn on the unique charms each time of year offers. The passage for spring is particularly striking: And when the spring breeze melts the chill and the weather gradually becomes fine, the plum trees blossom in front of the houses along the east of the river, both the northern and southern branches blooming at the same time. One can lead a lovely lady through the fragrance of plums wafting in the darkness or embrace a beauty beside a thin branch. The glazed geta tips of her red skirt flutter, captivating the soul of the flower god; her red lacquered clogs resound in harmony with the song of the warbler. Drinks can be purchased at Yanagi­ shima and amusements enjoyed on the Sumida jetty. And how much more can these pleasures be had when a riot of red peach and white apricot blossoms fills the sky; when clusters of cherry-blossom clouds appear; when the river flows ever more sapphire, and the whitefish sparkles silver. With a golden cask one gets drunk in the evenings; with magnolia oars one paddles upstream at dawn. Five or six senior geisha and six or seven junior geisha, some led on one’s left, others escorted on the right, all vie to have the newest spring clothing. Add to this the pleasures of competing to pick the most distinctive flowers and grasses to adorn the hair. Enjoying the breeze and composing poetry, one loses oneself and be in favor forgets to return. I do not know whether the Master would permit it or not, but this is even superior to Dian’s way.95

The last line draws on the famous passage in the Analects where Confucius asks his disciples what they would do if they one day had their abilities recognized. After three of the assembled young men outline their earnest plans of statecraft, the fourth disciple, Dian, languidly pauses his lute playing to offer quite a different response, but one that favorably impresses his teacher: “ ‘In late spring, after the spring clothes have been newly made, I should like, together with five or six adults and six or seven boys, to go bathing in the River Yi and enjoy the breeze on the Rain Altar, and then to go home chanting poetry.’ The Master sighed and said, ‘I am all in favour of Dian.’ ”96 It was amusing for Ryūhoku to transform the “five or six adults” and “six or seven boys” of the Analects into senior and junior geisha, and still more irreverent to suggest that such pleasures might exceed even those envisioned in the Confucian classic. But there is also a more serious purpose here in Ryūhoku’s attempt to find parallels between the refined recreation celebrated in the canonical text and his own more immediate or personal sources of diversion.

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Given Ryūhoku’s longstanding interest in Tao Yuanming, this analogy takes on an additional significance because Ryūhoku’s invocation of the Analects episode in his own seasonal tour of Yanagibashi echoes the allusion that Tao Yuanming made to the passage in a poem he wrote titled “Progression of the Seasons.” One of Tao Yuanming’s archaic four-character poem sequences, the work records the poet’s late spring outing to an eastern lake, where he bathes himself and imagines a continuity between such personal recreation and the Analects passage. The third stanza of Tao Yuanming’s poem reads: 延目中流 悠想清沂 童冠齊業 閑詠以歸 我愛其掙 寤寐交揮 但恨殊世 邈不可追

Toward midstream I strain my eyes Yearning for the clear Yi River, Where youths and men study together And singing idly go back home. It’s their tranquility I love— Awake or sleeping I would join them; But the times alas are different, Too far away to be revived.97

Just as Ryūhoku frames the re-creation of this canonical scene of sanctioned hedonism as an ideal not yet realized in Yanagibashi, so too does its realization remain elusive in the Tao Yuanming poem. Yet both poets attempt nevertheless to superimpose the hallowed image onto depictions of their own forms of recreation, a gesture endowing the mundane with something of the sublime. In Ryūhoku’s earlier poetic invocations, the figure of Tao Yuanming appeared as the idealized embodiment of a free and easygoing way of life outside of the strictures of government service. With the onset of Ryūhoku’s forays into Yanagibashi, elements of this untrammeled way of life come to be invoked in isolation as discrete qualities to be adopted individually: a kind of piecemeal approximation of eremitic practice. In other words, although the lifestyle of an actual recluse was out of the question for Ryūhoku at this point, his writings declare his attempts to enjoy the simple pleasures of reclusive life in his daily routine. In this regard, it is worth noting that, whereas the starkness of the wild mountains or the rusticity of the rural homestead were often configured as the ideal sites of reclusion, in both China and Japan there was also the tradition of “urban reclusion” 市隱 (Ch. shiyin; J. shiin).98 Ryūhoku’s quest to find elements of the reclusive amid everyday town life can already be glimpsed in his writings on Yanagibashi, but it found its most direct expression in his poetry from this time. In 1860, just as he was finishing the first volume of New Chronicles, Ryūhoku composed the following poem that imagines carving out just such a space of bunjin withdrawal within the city proper: An image of playing a zither under the moon; composed at a Hayashi gathering 山月彈琴圖 林氏席上

城裏豈無山 車馬厭喧豗 城裏豈無月

Surely the city is not without a mountain— For I loathe the clatter of carriages. Surely the city is not without a moon—



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5

清輝沒紅埃 白雲萬重山中山



姮娥有情夜々來



雲爲衾裯月爲妻 隱士生涯亦快哉 好合宛奏房中樂

10

老桐一張橫蒼苔 仙指拂絃清商迸 峭崕草木震欲摧 子期死後世無耳

15

誰解和樂中含哀 鏗爾彈歇山寂寞 猛虎一聲々如雷

151

For its brilliance lies buried beneath the red dust. Billowing clouds rise atop each other, like mountains within mountains; The moon goddess, full of feeling, shows herself every night. Taking clouds for a nightgown, and the moon as his wife, How delightful is the recluse’s life! A perfect match, like a couple making music in the bedchamber; One zither of old paulownia lying on the dark green moss. Immortal fingers strum its strings, pure notes burst forth; The mountainside shrubs and trees shake, about to break; After [Zhong] Ziqi died, there was none in the world with good ears;99 Who understands the pathos that lies within pleasure? Once the final chord is played, the mountains turn desolate; A wild tiger’s howl echoes like thunder.100

The poem takes as its subject the zither, that most reclusive of instruments and an object most closely identified with Tao Yuanming. In the second line, this desire to locate the potential for urban reclusion without total social disconnection is framed in terms of reference to the well-known opening to Tao Yuanming’s poem on picking the chrysanthemum from his eastern hedge: 結廬在人境 而無車馬喧

I built my house in the human realm But hear no clatter of carts and horses.

Moreover, in its use of the relatively obscure term “final chord” 鏗爾 (Ch. keng’er; J. kōji), the last couplet of Ryūhoku’s poem in fact recalls the “spring bathing at the River Yi” scene from the Analects.101 In the first volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, Ryūhoku drew on his Confucian erudition to create many outrageous mismatches between form and content. Yet, beyond such humorous effects, as this poem and the closing lyrical sequence of New Chronicles both confirm, he also marshaled the Confucian canon to legitimate the elegant diversions and amorous adventures he explored in Yanagibashi and to stake a claim for their literary merits.

A “Court Poet” and His Bunjin Associates While Ryūhoku was earning a dubious reputation as a sophisticated celebrant and sobereyed chronicler of the Yanagibashi pleasure quarter culture, he was simultaneously rising to new heights of prestige both as an official and as a bunjin. Yet, even as his accomplishments in the shijin frame were rewarded by the shogunate and recognized by local literary figures, Ryūhoku was also growing frustrated with the strictures of his post. In New

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Chronicles of Yanagibashi, he had written a work documenting overlooked dimensions of urban society, suffusing his account with pointed commentary. His abiding attention to the world of the demimonde and his effort to engage critically with contemporary affairs saw further expression in a poem he wrote in 1861, the year after he had completed the manuscript of New Chronicles: I hear that women of the city have been prohibited from engaging in unauthorized prostitution and painting themselves with makeup. For fun, I compose this to show someone. 聞禁市井女子私賣色及粧飾塗抹戯賦以寄某君

新令一播衆情疑

5

翁媼相訴語街逵 翁言官家心如水 洗盡娘子臉邊脂 媼言市吏手若鎖 鎖吾金穴不許披 薪米貴日忽失業

10

朝餐暮餐何以炊 匹似荒村賣花者 花落葉凋苦凍飢



又似窮海采珠女 龍攫珠去中路悲



人間之欲誰能遏 化民成俗豈在茲

15

諸公鞅掌謀底事 不問豺狼問狐狸

A new law has been disseminated, and the people feel doubtful; Old men and women bewail it as they chat in the streets. The old man says, “The officials’ hearts are like water; They’ll wash away all of our girls’ makeup.” The old woman says, “The city clerks’ hands are like chains; They’ll lock up our goldmines and not let them open.” In these days when firewood and rice are dear, suddenly they lose their living; With what can they cook their breakfast and supper? Like a flower peddler in a deserted village; If the blossoms fall and the leaves wither, he is left cold and hungry. Or like a woman diving for pearls in the depths of the sea; If a dragon snatches her jewel, she will be stranded and sorrowful. In this world, who can suppress human desire? How can “transforming the people and perfecting customs” lie in this? The various officials are so busy, but what do they intend? Overlooking the wicked wolves as they press the foxes and badgers.102

The poet expresses sympathy for the old man and woman whose livelihood is suddenly jeopardized by the ban, but his depiction of their avarice is also unflinching. While recognizing the realities of their exploitation, Ryūhoku reserves his sharpest critique for what he sees as the misplaced priorities of the authorities who ignore greater crimes in their zeal to prosecute the inconsequential. Alluding in line 14 to a passage from the Book of Rites, Ryūhoku calls on his Confucian learning to point out the gap between the course the officials had taken and the ideal conduct of the statesman. In spite of the ostensible role of the shijin official as shaper of government policy, Ryūhoku’s position as scholar gave him little latitude to present this sort of critique concerning contemporary affairs. Instead, the works of poetry that he composed in his capacity as shijin during this time were in the mode of the “court poet,” offering encomiums praising shogunal majesty. In Man’en 1 (1860), the same year that he finished writing the first volume of New Chronicles, for example, the shogunate bestowed an award of silk



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upon him for composing the following poem, commemorating the completion of a new wing of Edo Castle: Offering my celebratory words. The construction of the grand castle is complete, and, with this, the carriage is moved here. 奉賀大城土木功竣爰遷台駕

陾登捄築竣



百堵接蒼旻

5

正殿松迎日 新營柳挽春 熊羆祥始兆 瓜瓞徳愈申



欽仰躋寧後



恩波溢四垠

The rattles and clangs of packing earth and building walls have ended, And ramparts now a hundred cubits high soar up to the sky. In the main hall, a pine tree welcomes the sun’s rays, In the new facilities, the willows usher in spring. Auspicious portents appear of black bears and brown; Like the spread of young melon vines, his virtue will advance. With reverent awe I await the shogun, to ascend the dais and repose, Then warm waves of favor will spread throughout the land.103

The poem is studded with high-toned diction drawn from two works in the Classic of Poetry that celebrate the consolidation of state power through massive construction projects. The opening couplet of Ryūhoku’s poem refers to the onomatopoetic “rattles” and “clangs” created in the process of packing earth and building walls “a hundred cubits” high that the first ode, one of the “Greater elegantiae,” celebrates as part of its narrative of the Zhou dynasty’s founding: They tilted in the earth with a rattling / They pounded it with a dull thud / They beat the walls with a loud clang / They pared and chiseled them with a faint p’ing p’ing / The hundred cubits all rose / The drummers could not hold out. 捄之陾陾、度之薨薨、築之登登、削屢馮馮、百堵皆興、鼛鼓弗勝。104

The same Classic of Poetry ode is also the source for the phrase in line 6 that compares the burgeoning Zhou population to spreading melon vines.105 In both the Classic of Poetry ode and Ryūhoku’s poem, the image is one of thriving and fecundity, but in Ryūhoku’s case the image serves more explicitly as a symbol of shogunal virtue. The “auspicious portents” of line 5 refer to a belief that the appearance of bears in dreams foretold the birth of a male child. Ryūhoku drew the allusion from a second Classic of Poetry ode, one of the “Lesser elegantiae” that also celebrates a state’s founding and the expansion of its population: The diviner thus interprets it: / “Black bears and brown / Mean men-children. / Snakes and serpents / Mean girl-children.” 大人占之。維熊維羆、男子之祥。維虺維蛇、女子之祥。106

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The marriage of the previous shogun Iesada had been delayed for many years, and he ultimately died without a male heir. Ryūhoku was thus expressing the hope that his teenage charge, the recently wed Iemochi, would not face such problems producing a suc­ cessor. The majesty of Iemochi is enhanced with the words “ascend” 躋 and “repose” 寧 in the last couplet, august vocabulary that also derives from this second Classic of Poetry ode (emphasis added): As a halberd, even so plumed / As an arrow, even so sharp / As a bird, even so soaring / As wings, even so flying / Are the halls to which our lord ascends / Well leveled is the courtyard / Firm are the pillars / Cheerful are the rooms by day / Softly gloaming by night / A place where our lord can repose. 如跂斯翼，如矢斯棘；如鳥斯革，如翬斯飛。君子攸躋。殖殖其庭，有覺其楹。噲噲其正， 噦噦其冥。君子攸寧。

Incorporating so many phrases from the Classic of Poetry odes heightened the piece’s tone by lending to its topic the grandeur of celebrated scenes of state founding from the furthest reaches of the poetic past. The second couplet of Ryūhoku’s poem, the only one that does not make overt reference to these two odes from the Classic of Poetry, contains a further instance of ingenuity. Here, Ryūhoku incorporates the graphs for “willow” 柳 and “barracks” 營 as two separate words, though as a compound (J. ryūei) they mean “the shogun’s barracks”; the same couplet also features the pine (J. matsu), signifying the Tokugawa house (which grew out of the Matsudaira clan), and the “sun,” suggesting Japan. In the comments printed in the posthumous anthology Ryūhoku shishō, Ryūhoku’s bunjin associates Ōnuma Chinzan and Kikuchi Sankei both used the term 臺閣 (J. taikaku; Ch. taige) in their praise of the poem, comparing Ryūhoku to Chinese “court poets” who were distinguished for their skill in praising imperial majesty in verse. Ryūhoku’s service as a Tokugawa “court poet” was one way of fulfilling the expectations placed on him as the descendant of a distinguished line of shogunal tutors. This sense of familial duty was especially acute with regard to Ryūhoku’s great-great-greatgrandfather Nobuyuki (1689–1760), the third Narushima family patriarch, also known as Kinkō, who had been responsible for first establishing the reputation of the family when he was made a shogunal tutor. On the one hundredth anniversary of Kinkō’s death, the same year that he wrote the above poem about Edo Castle, Ryūhoku wrote the following poem to commemorate his ancestor. Because Kinkō used the name Hōkei 鳳卿, which might be loosely translated “Sir Phoenix,” the poem abounds in imagery of this auspicious bird whose appearance was thought to coincide with the presence of an enlightened ruler. As in the previous poem, this piece is also heavily dependent on an allusion to an ode from the Classic of Poetry, which contains the lines: The phoenix sings / On that high ridge / The dryandra grows / Where it meets the early sun. 鳳凰鳴矣、于彼高岡。梧桐生矣、于彼朝陽。107



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Ryūhoku’s poem takes this image of the phoenix singing on a high ridge as well as the reference to the dryandra tree (the only tree in which the phoenix will roost) as its point of departure: An image of the phoenix singing on a high ridge. On the hundredth anniversary of the death of the patriarch of my family, Hōkei, I wrote this to express my feelings. 鳳鳴高岡圖 家祖鳳卿先生百年祭辰賦此寓懐

憶昔中興徳輝光



千仞梧桐生朝陽



鳳兮々々奮飛起



羽儀粲然呈文章

5

朝鳴賀世夜善哉



高岡高處常舞翔



梧桐已枯鳳亦逝 一百春秋夢一場

10

不肖嗟吾類鷽鳩 決起僅能搶楡枋



尾翛々兮音嘵々 舊巣只怯風雨傷

15

嗚呼何世無梧桐 何世非高岡 願變毛羽成五彩



喈々復使家聲揚

I think back to how you revived the family’s glory, making it shine; A thousand foot dryandra tree grew in the morning sunlight. The phoenix! The phoenix! It rises up and springs into flight: Like the wild goose, its plumage offers a brilliant and exemplary pattern.108 In morning, its cries celebrate the world, at night they say that all is well; In its high perch on the ridge-top, it was always dancing and soaring. But the dryandra has decayed and the phoenix is gone; One hundred springs and autumns have passed like a dream. I lament that I am just a meager “little dove”; Barely managing to clutch the elm and sapanwood limbs when I fly up.109 My tail is all bedraggled, my only song a cry of woe;110 In the old nest, I can but cower in the onslaught of wind and rain. Ah, in what age is there no dryandra? In what age is there no high ridge? Would that my downy plumes molt into resplendent color, And my piercing song lift my house’s fame again.111

In contrast to the auspicious phoenix and the brilliantly plumed wild goose, Ryūhoku describes himself as nothing more than the comic “little dove” of the Zhuangzi parable, unable to fathom matters beyond its narrow ken. But alongside this humble pose is an assertion that the poet’s opportunities for success have somehow been thwarted, for the dryandra tree itself, the important post that was the locus of his illustrious ancestor’s scholarly distinction, has also disappeared. Left exposed to the elements in the shabby “old nest,” the poet wonders how it can be that such a prominent role is foreclosed to him. Taken together, these two poems suggest that, even as Ryūhoku received recognition from the shogunate for his literary talents, his desire to have a greater professional role remained undiminished. In this celebratory poem, there are thus hints of the simmering frustrations that would boil over the following year when he lost his post.

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As discussed in chapter 2, Ryūhoku’s reputation in Edo’s literary circles steadily expanded in the mid-1850s, and increasingly prominent figures came to take part in his monthly poetry gatherings. By the late 1850s, the gatherings organized by the Hayashi family assumed a less prominent place in his schedule, while the poetry sessions he convened in his home became a more important base of his activities.112 Ōnuma Chinzan, the leader of the “Shitaya Ginsha” kanshi circle, was one of the most distinguished figures to join Ryūhoku’s gatherings. Though Chinzan first participated in the group in Ansei 6 (1859), he would have known about Ryūhoku long before this. Beyond Ryūhoku’s fame as scion of the Narushima house, Chinzan was also well acquainted with longstanding members of Ryūhoku’s monthly poetry session, such as the calligrapher Seki Sekkō and his own disciple Uemura Roshū. The poetry collections of Roshū, Sekkō, and Chinzan show their frequent interaction with each other in the 1850s. Around the time Chinzan joined Ryūhoku’s shikai, so too did other prominent Edo literati such as Chinzan’s cousin (Nagai Kafū’s grandfather) Washizu Kidō as well as Ōtsuki Bankei. Though twenty years Ryūhoku’s senior, Ōnuma Chinzan was apparently so taken with the young poet’s literary gifts that, not long after he began to participate in Ryūhoku’s session, he asked Ryūhoku to write a preface for his forthcoming poetry collection. In his diary, Ryūhoku recorded the poetry session where Chinzan had made this flattering request, using a deferential suffix for Chinzan’s name in accord with his high status in contemporary poetic circles.113 Chinzan may have seen something of his younger self in the twenty-two-year-old Ryūhoku, for his talents had been similarly lauded by his seniors when he was Ryūhoku’s age.114 Although Chinzan and Ryūhoku shared a passion for composing Sinitic poems, they trod very different life paths. Chinzan is often described as a stalwart antiquarian: one who rejected the Meiji Restoration and all it represented. Calling Chinzan “a gentlemanscholar of the old school,” Donald Keene observes: “There is a note of strong conservative disapproval in Chinzan’s poems. Because he had lived comfortably under the old regime, he understandably tended to deplore any changes. Although the end of the Tokugawa period had been turbulent, he himself had led the life of a bunjin of the past, a life which included the enjoyment of saké and moon-viewing.”115 The fact that he continued to wear his hair in the traditional topknot long after men of his status began to crop their hair and the fact that he published a book of poems titled Edo meishōshi (Famous scenic places in Edo) a decade after “Edo” had ceased to exist are symbolic indications of how Chinzan clung in many ways to a fondly yearned-for past. Although it is simply inaccurate to say, as many do, that he was “the last kanshi poet,” he was certainly exemplary of the last of a certain type of kanshi poet.116 As both Keene and Hino Tatsuo have suggested, it was probably for this reason that Chinzan was such an attractive figure to Nagai Kafū, whose own literary interests and nostalgic inclinations made him somewhat out of step with the times. Even before their life paths diverged so noticeably in the post-Restoration era, however, the difference in orientation between Chinzan and Ryūhoku was readily apparent in their poetry. Take, for example, the responses of these two poets to the return of Perry’s ships in Ansei 1 (1854). Though no “Steamship song” survives from Chinzan, an absence that is itself suggestive, he did compose a poem that obliquely refers to the tense



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state of affairs in Edo that spring. What is interesting about the poem is how Chinzan’s world seems virtually untouched by such concerns of national security: Poem of spring feelings; following the rhymes of Han Yu’s “Poem of autumn feelings” 春懷詩次昌黎秋懷韻 5

嘉樹將抽芽 雪虐沒薿薿 一晴風尚峭 剪剪吹不已 好鳥獨及時 宛轉醒愁耳 催成感遇詩

10

曉窗推枕起 瀕海今有虞 豈與舊春似 黄閣列夔龍

15

生理庶可恃 春宅無人顧 門前絶車軌 劈柑斟斗酒 聊占小歡喜

The fine trees should be sending forth their buds, But the snow cruelly smothers their burgeoning. The skies have cleared, but the winds are still fierce, Blowing their ceaseless piercing chill. The charming birds alone are in keeping with the season, Their mellifluous songs rousing my somber ears. They prompt me to compose these poems to record my feelings; By the window at dawn, I push away my pillow and rise. Worries present now along the coastline; How can this be the same spring as old? But in the “Yellow Pavilions” of the shogunate, there are Kui and Long; I hope we can count on them to insure our livelihood. No one pays a visit to my spring cottage, The carriage tracks have stopped coming before my gate. I peel a tangerine and pour myself some wine; Just indulging myself for a while in simple pleasures.117

The foreign threat makes a brief appearance in lines 9 and 10 of Chinzan’s poem but disappears just as suddenly. At the same time that Ryūhoku was penning his fiery calls to expel the barbarians by force, the bunjin Chinzan was content to leave the matter to the shogun’s able shijin counselors, men he was sure possessed the wisdom of “Kui and Long,” legendary wise ministers to the sage ruler Shun in remote Chinese antiquity. It would be possible to read the poem as a more complicated pose of affected indifference, a political statement cleverly cloaked in apolitical language, but the sense one gets in perusing Chinzan’s poems as a whole is that, in fact, he was not invested in debating political matters, but was perfectly willing to let the officials handle the affairs of state while he went about his business. In other words, Ōnuma Chinzan was a poet whose affiliation was almost exclusively with the bunjin frame, largely separate from the shijin frame in which Ryūhoku had been educated and raised. Although Chinzan did not serve in a shogunal post, he never­ theless respected those such as Ryūhoku who did. Hino Tatsuo observes that Chinzan’s somewhat unusual request for Ryūhoku to compose a preface for his poetry collection can be explained in part because of Chinzan’s desire to align himself with the prestige of the Narushima house.118 Both his respect for the house and his conviction regarding Ryūhoku’s literary promise are evident in the poem Chinzan composed the following year, when he paid a visit on the occasion of the ceremony commemorating the centennial of Narushima Kinkō’s death.119 As in the poem Ryūhoku composed at the time,

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cited above, the dominant motif is the phoenix and the Classic of Poetry image of it singing on a “high ridge.” Yet, whereas Ryūhoku portrayed himself humbly as a “little dove” failing to soar to his ancestor’s lofty heights, Chinzan praised Ryūhoku as a budding phoenix, reborn to rekindle the family fortunes first established by his illus­trious ancestor: The nineteenth day of the first month was the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Mr. Hōkei Mei. I reverently composed this long poem and presented it to his successor, the scholar Kakudō. 新正十有九日丁鳳卿鳴先生百周忌辰恭賦長句贈後嗣確堂學士 120

鳳卿先生人中鳳 美譽芳聲殊于衆 遭逢聖朝比朝陽 青雲之上祥風送

5

臺閣乃是彼高岡 其鳴之大在文章 一枝彩筆勝錦翮



曾助中興功業昌

10

鳳兮鳳兮原非一 百年仍見鳳連出 雛鳳今日聲愈清 厚禄有如萬竹實



宛似謝氏世世榮



超也偏占鳳毛名

15

又似賈氏鳳池濱 至也重能掌絲綸

Mr. Hōkei was a phoenix among men; His honor and fame set him apart from the masses. Meeting with the sagely court like the morning sun, An auspicious wind carried him to the tops of the azure clouds. The shogun’s court was his “High ridge”; The greatness of his song lay in his writings. With his single iridescent brush he exceeded the plumed brocade; He once helped revive the family fortunes, a magnificent feat. But, Phoenix! Phoenix! There is not just one. A hundred years later, behold: a phoenix emerges again. A baby phoenix today whose song grows ever more pure. With a handsome stipend, like ten thousand bamboo seeds.121 Just as the Xie family prospered for generation after generation; This Chao can also lay claim to the name of “phoenix feather.” Or, like the Gu clan, on the banks of Phoenix pond; This Zhi, too, will handle silk.122

Chinzan threaded through this poem references to the ode on the phoenix from the Classic of Poetry, such as the “morning sun” 朝陽 of line 3 and the “high ridge” 高岡 of line 5, but he also concluded it with two allusions that not only further elaborate the “phoenix” image, but also underscore the idea of a family enjoying favor, literary success, and an important role in the business of state through multiple generations. In lines 13 and 14, Chinzan praises Ryūhoku as a latter-day Xie Chaozong, whose literary skills were said to be like a rare “phoenix feather” inherited from his distinguished literary ancestors.123 The final couplet alludes to an octave Du Fu wrote in praise of Gu Zhi (718–72), who like his father before him held the position of Secretariat drafter, responsible for submitting memorials to the emperor. The “silk” that Zhi handled in his office at the bank of the Secretariat’s “Phoenix pond” was an elegant term for these memorials and echoes the final couplet of Du Fu’s poem:



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欲知世掌絲綸美 池上於今有鳳毛

159

I know that your generation will handle beautiful silk The Secretariat now has another phoenix.124

Chinzan may have had a concrete reference in mind with this allusion to the Gu family’s tradition of literary service, for Ryūhoku had been put in charge of completing the editing of the Nochikagami (A later mirror), the official chronicle of the Ashikaga shogunate that his father had been unable to finish.125 Though Ryūhoku and Chinzan might be grouped together as kanshi poets who lived across the late Tokugawa–early Meiji transition, they responded to the turbulence of the period in decidedly different ways, a contrast obvious even in their 1854 poems. Another factor that helps to account for their disparate trajectories is the fact that, at the same time he was associating with Chinzan and other such “gentleman-scholars of the old school,” Ryūhoku was interacting with another group of gentlemen, scholars all the same, but of a different school.

Early Contacts with Western Scholars The emergence of Ryūhoku’s enthusiastic interest in learning about the West is one of the most striking shifts of his career. In lines 110 through 113 of the poem discussed at the beginning of this chapter, for example, the eighteen-year-old Ryūhoku dismissed the practitioners of Western medicine as dangerous quacks who brazenly departed from paths blazed by pioneers of traditional Chinese medicine Bian Que and Cang Gong. Yet just five years later some of his closest friends were physicians who employed Dutch medical techniques. Inui Teruo’s analysis of Ryūhoku’s diary shows that, through the late 1850s, he was particularly friendly with shogunal physicians who were experts in tradi­ tional Chinese medicine. By the summer of 1860, however, meetings with physicians trained in Dutch medical techniques become more numerous in his diary, a shift that reflects in part the increasing prominence and influence that the Dutch group came to have in the shogunate of the late 1850s. Among Ryūhoku’s neighbors were several physicians responsible for promoting vaccination against smallpox, and the Shitaya district became the site of one of Edo’s first vaccination clinics in 1859 (fig. 3.3).126 Takenouchi Gendō 竹内玄同 (1805–80), a former pupil of the German physician Siebold (1796–1866) and a noted advocate of vaccination, was one such shogunal physician who became a close friend and regular drinking companion of Ryūhoku in the very late 1850s.127 The transformation in Ryūhoku’s own thinking was surely gradual, but one particularly emblematic moment came in the winter of Man’en 1 (1860), when he chose to have his first daughter, Hata, vaccinated against smallpox.128 Through Chinese medical texts, Japanese physicians of the eighteenth century had known of immunization techniques using human sources, but vaccination was still a controversial practice in the midnineteenth century, for it conflicted with Confucian teachings that drew clear distinctions between humans and other animals.129 Inui Teruo has singled out Ryūhoku’s choice

Fig. 3.3 Map of the Shitaya area (Owariya tōto Shitaya ezu), original printing Kaei 4 (1851), the revised Bunkyū 2 (1862) version is reproduced here. 1. Yaguchi Kensai; 2. Ōtsuki Shunsai; 3. Narushima (former residence on Neribei-kōji); 4. Hagura Geki (Kandō); 5. Narushima (residence on Izumibashi-dōri); 6. Sugimoto Chūtatsu; 7. Itō Genboku; 8. Seki Senzō; 9. vaccination clinic. Collection of the author.



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to vaccinate Hata as symbolic of Ryūhoku’s realignment away from his earlier uncritical rejection of the West to a more nuanced and intellectually curious position.130 Another significant figure among the new friends that Ryūhoku had begun to associate with at this time was Katsuragawa Hoshū 桂川甫周 (1826–81), a scholar whose family had been renowned practitioners of Dutch studies since the mid-eighteenth century.131 Owing to Holland’s longstanding trade relationship with Japan, Dutch was still one of the major languages through which Japanese learned about the West (the other being Chinese), and the Katsuragawa were at the forefront of the field. Hoshū’s grand­ father, for example, had helped to prepare one of the most influential texts of the Toku­ gawa period: Kaitai shinsho, a translation of a Dutch anatomical atlas that was completed in 1774.132 In the 1850s, Katsuragawa Hoshū had assembled a group of young scholars of Dutch, including Yanagawa Shunsan 柳川春三 (1832–70), Mitsukuri Shūhei 箕作秋坪 (1825–86), and Kanda Takahira 神田孝平 (1830–98), to help prepare an authoritative dic­ tionary of Dutch for publication.133 These and other young men constituted what Imaizumi Genkichi and Maeda Ai have called the “Katsuragawa salon,” and many became Ryūhoku’s lifelong friends. Ryūhoku briefly went into business with Katsuragawa after the Restoration and later hired him to work at the Chōya shinbun; when he traveled to Europe in 1872, he supposedly disclosed his plans to Mitsukuri alone; and, near the end of his life, Ryūhoku published a condensed version of Kanda’s translation of a Dutch mystery novel.134 Although Yanagawa Shunsan died shortly after the Restoration, he and Ryūhoku were partners in various literary and leisure activities for a decade; Shunsan contributed an afterword to the first volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, and the second volume of the text makes reference to how the two collaborated to assign each of twenty-four Yanagibashi geisha a representative flower in the summer of 1862 (fig. 3.4).135 As will become clearer in the next chapter, these encounters expanded Ryūhoku’s world tremendously and changed the course of his life irrevocably. Ryūhoku’s contacts with these young Western scholars began around Ansei 6 (1859) and mostly occurred in the context of excursions along the Sumida or trips to Yanagibashi.136 In a diary entry from the summer of the following year, Ryūhoku notes that Katsuragawa Hoshū joined Ōtsuki Bankei, Ryūhoku, and two others for drinks, pleasure boating, and poetry composition.137 Ryūhoku’s contact with Katsuragawa’s group inten­ sified over the next several years. On one occasion in the third month of 1862, Ryūhoku met up with Hoshū and Bankei by chance while in the Yanagibashi area. Ryūhoku, Ōnuma Chinzan, Washizu Kidō, and Uemura Roshū were drifting down the Sumida appreciating the cherry blossoms at their peak when they happened upon another pleasure boat bearing Katsuragawa, Ōtsuki Bankei, and several geisha.138 The two groups proceeded to bring their boats alongside one another and engage in several rounds of poetry composition and matched-rhyme exchange, followed by a late night of drink­ing at one of Yanagibashi’s preeminent establishments, the Yūmeirō. Both Maeda Ai and Inui Teruo attach a symbolic importance to this encounter as the time when the center of Ryū­ hoku’s social circle shifted away from his Shitaya literati friends and toward Katsura­ gawa’s group of Western scholars.139 Yet it is also important to note that the world of the Shitaya literati, centered on Chinzan but also including Bankei, was not totally disconnected from the world of the Western scholars associated with Katsuragawa. Ōtsuki

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Fig. 3.4 Narushima Ryūhoku and Yanagawa Shunsan, “Evaluation of the TwentyFour Flowers of Yanagibashi,” is written in the center band, above which appears the date: the fifth month of the fiftyninth year of the cycle: Bunkyū 2 (1862). Across the top are written the names of ten flowers, beneath each of which is written the name of a geisha in darker ink. Another ten flowers appear diagonally beneath the band, with the corresponding geishas’ names inscribed at bottom. Four additional pairs are written inside the center band, including Kokatsu, who is paired with the apricot blossom. Courtesy of Waseda University Library, Tokyo.

Bankei, who had begun occasionally attending Ryūhoku’s poetry sessions at least two years earlier, was, after all, in the other boat. Ōtsuki Bankei was, in other words, something of a bridge between the world of the Shitaya literati, with whom Ryūhoku had become familiar through poetry composition sessions, and the world of young Western scholars with whom he was beginning to associate. Bankei was born into a distinguished family of Dutch scholars; his father Ōtsuki Bansui (also known as Gentaku, 1757–1827) had studied under pioneers of Dutch studies Sugita Genpaku and Maeno Ryōtaku, the publishers of the famed Kaitai shinsho, and had later overseen a revised version of this foundational text. Bansui believed that the future of the emerging discipline of Dutch studies depended on the literary abilities of its practitioners, specifically their ability to produce clear, accurate, and intelligible translations into Literary Sinitic. For this reason Bansui encouraged his son to pursue a traditional path of Confucian scholarship at the Shōheizaka Academy, thereby laying the essential foundation for a future career translating Dutch materials.140 After five years of study there, Bankei had distinguished himself enough to be rewarded with a tutorial position.



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Having acquired a solid Sinological background, Bankei went to Nagasaki to pursue Dutch learning, but his studies there were suddenly cut short.141 One unexpected outcome of his Nagasaki visit, however, was that it engendered Bankei’s abiding interest in the importation of Western military technology. After returning to Edo, Bankei worked there as a Confucian scholar in the employ of Sendai domain, while at the same time con­ tinuing to learn about and even provide instruction in the basics of modern weaponry and military techniques. Though Bankei was an accomplished Confucian scholar, his family’s interest in Dutch studies gave him a perspective that was unusual, though not unique, among his Confucian contemporaries.142 In two important articles on this figure, Shōji Sōichi and Umezawa Hideo characterize Bankei as “eclectic” in his scholarship, and Umezawa in particular shows how Bankei’s knowledge of Western science and technology did not threaten his worldview, which was based on a quite accommodating interpretation of Zhu Xi.143 In his associations with Bankei from 1859 to 1862, Ryūhoku encountered a man who had attained similar distinction as a scholar of the Confucian classics, who was intensely concerned about and invested in the future of Japan, and who was equally disconsolate over the direction of the shogunate’s leadership and the fact that he had been deprived of a viable role in guiding it. Moreover, Bankei moved easily between the worlds of the official Confucian scholars centered on the Hayashi family, the Shitaya literati associated with Ōnuma Chinzan, and the physicians and Western scholars gathered around Katsuragawa Hoshū.144 As Ryūhoku began to move in these circles too, he may well have seen Bankei as a model; certainly that is the way he spoke of Bankei in later years.145 Bankei and Ryūhoku enjoyed drinking, composing poems, and floating down the Sumida River together with geisha in tow, but, beyond such revelry, they shared a keen sense of mission, and, in his poems addressed to Ryūhoku, Bankei was unambiguous about what he saw as the young shogunal tutor’s duty. In Bunkyū 2 (1862), when Ryū­ hoku had just received an increased stipend and moved into a new residence, Bankei was among the chorus of eminent kanshi poets who offered congratulatory praise. In his poem, Bankei emphasized the importance of Ryūhoku’s role as okujusha in guiding the shogun: At the first of the year, I congratulate the tutor scholar Mr. Narushima on his new residence. 春初賀侍講學士成島君新築 大廈就新春來 竹苞松茂歌幾回 講筵多年啓沃力 特恩増禄亦榮哉 我來為唱輪奐辭 且不以頌而以規 滿朝不乏薛居州 致君堯舜非公誰

The great house complete; a new spring comes; Bamboo budding, pines flourishing, and song after song. Years spent in the lecture hall, opening your mind to enrich the lord’s; Special favor has increased your stipend, how splendid! I come to offer these words for your grand house, Yet I do so not to praise, but to provide a model. The halls of court do not lack for Xue Juzhou, But if you do not lead the lord to Yao and Shun, then who shall?146

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Like the poem Ōnuma Chinzan composed on the centennial of Narushima Kinkō’s death cited earlier, this one also celebrates Ryūhoku’s position in somewhat grandiose terms. But, whereas Chinzan’s poem depicted Ryūhoku mainly as a successor to his esteemed household’s literary fame, there is a much greater sense of urgency in this poem, a sternness evident in the penultimate couplet’s explicit statement that the poem is not mere hollow praise, but has an important prescriptive function. The impression it leaves is that nothing less than the fate of Japan itself is resting on Ryūhoku’s shoulders. Bankei alludes to two classic statements of the ideal attributes of advisors to the sovereign. In the third line, the word 啓沃 (Ch. qiyao; J. keiyoku) makes reference to a speech recorded in the Classic of Documents in which King Wu Ding of the Shang instructs his new prime minister Yue on how he hopes to be guided: He charged him, saying, “Morning and evening present your instructions to aid my virtue. Suppose me a weapon of steel;—I will use you for a whetstone. Suppose me crossing a great stream;—I will use you for a boat with its oars. Suppose me in a year of great drought;—I will use you as a copious rain. Open your mind, and enrich my mind.” 命之曰、朝夕納誨、以輔台德、若金、用汝作礪、若濟巨川、用汝作舟楫、若歳大旱、用汝作 霖雨、啓乃心、沃朕心。147

The idea that the sovereign’s closest advisors ideally have a transformative and sculpting effect on him is reiterated with the final couplet’s allusion to a story in the Mencius (3B.6). In the passage, Mencius emphasizes the importance not only of the personal tutor to the sovereign’s son, Xue Juzhou, but of all the men around the sovereign. Bankei bends the Mencius reference to his own purpose, acknowledging that there may well be numerous capable advisors gathered around the sovereign but concluding that the final responsibility for guiding the sovereign to the domain of the sages rests with Ryūhoku.148

The Frustrations of Office As we have seen, Ryūhoku was thriving in many respects during the early 1860s, attaining ever greater prominence and recognition within both shijin and bunjin circles. He was surely satisfied with developments in his private life as well, for he ultimately proved able to redeem the contract of the geisha Ochō: the woman appearing in his diary as the elder Qiao sister, whose affections he and a certain priest had vied for over the course of Man’en 1 (1860). Having welcomed Ochō as his concubine, Ryūhoku established a residence for her north of Yanagiwara, naming it the Yūtaisha 有待舎, or “Cottage of Expectation.” He explained this unusual name in a kanbun account that also provides insight into how Ryūhoku viewed his own professional success at the time, how he was perceived by those around him, and what goals he had for the future. The essay focuses on a house-warming party to which Ryūhoku has invited his friends Takenouchi Gendō and Katsuragawa Hoshū:



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My two guests were already drunk when one looked up and saw the plaque where the cottage’s name is inscribed. Turning back toward me, he pressed me with questions: “How surpassing is your avarice! You possess things that most men could not easily obtain. And you partake of some of the finest pleasures of the world. Having already reached this level, what other ‘expectation’ can you possibly have? ‘When the tailorbird builds her nest in the deep wood, she uses no more than one branch. When the mole drinks at the river, he takes no more than a bellyful.’ Zhuangzi said these words thousands of years ago. Now your nest is already complete. Your belly is already full. Of what else can you be in ‘expectation’?” I replied, “Well, it’s not that I disagree with you. And yet in this world, when one tires his body and exhausts his thoughts always expecting things that he ought not to expect, always seeking things that he ought not to seek, we call this avarice. But what I have in mind in saying ‘expectation’ are not things that are laborious to expect but rather things that are enjoyable to expect. In regard to all things in a person’s life, there is none that he has no expectations about. And, for me, this cottage is where my expectations are most numerous. I have made a small door that opens on its eastern side, and this is because I expect the moon there. I raise up the thin blinds on the western side, and this is because I expect the wind there. Because I expect rain to fall, I have laid planks to cover the roof. Because I expect snow, I have put bamboo on the windows. I planted flowers and made plans, and this is in expectation of springtime pleasures for the eye. I put parasol trees and plantains around the door, and this is in expectation of autumnal delights for the ear. I have put an iron inkstone on the desk and placed volumes on the shelves, and these are in expectation of literary men. There are silken strings on the cushions and dancing fans in the closet, and these are in expectation of beautiful women. In addition, there is wine, tea, paintings, games, and all manner of diversions, and there is none of these for which I have no expectations. That my learning and talent will advance by the day, that my repute will grow ever more renowned, that a grand carriage will park before our high gate, and that with a triumphant spirit she will never again wait longingly before the willow at the roadside—these are the things that Ochō expects of me. That when she is not busy with needlework, she can attend to my papers and exchange poetry with me, that my library will benefit from her assistance; and what’s more that the augurs will be auspicious black and brown bears and that there will be no shortage of successors to my family’s profession—these are the things that I expect of Ochō.”149

The account goes on to describe the carefree amity that Ryūhoku expects to enjoy with his male friends and the momentary diversion from worldly cares that they can expect when visiting him. Yet, although this account clearly focuses on the joys of Ryūhoku’s private world, situating the cottage as a “secluded” refuge from the “dust” of society and its attendant concerns, the final section of the above passage also reminds us how deeply Ryūhoku was imbued with a sense of himself as the bearer of his family’s scholarly legacy. In the poem about Edo Castle for which Ryūhoku had received an award of silk from the shogunate the previous year, he had used the same high-toned Classic of Poetry language of “black and brown bear” portents to convey his hope that Iemochi would produce a male heir. It would be a few more years before Ochō in fact bore him a son, but Ryūhoku’s enthusiasm and delight that he had been able to make her presence in his world more formal is readily apparent from this account.150 In spite of these positive developments in his personal life, the awards and recognition he received from the shogunate for his writings, the acclaim that fellow bunjin lavished

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upon him, and the earnest exhortations that shijin such as Bankei offered to spur him on in his role as okujusha, Ryūhoku seems to have been growing increasingly frustrated at the limitations of his post during this years. Perhaps Ryūhoku’s conviction that he was custodian of an important tradition and his concurrent sense that his present role did not fully exploit this potential stoked his discontent. Ryūhoku’s diaries from 1861 to the autumn of 1863 are not extant, which means that his poems are among the few sources from which to piece together the transformation that was taking place. It seems Ryūhoku was growing increasingly disenchanted with the direction in which the shogunate was lead­ing the country, an escalating estrangement that culminated in the autumn of 1863, when he was removed from office and ordered confined to his home. As the next chapter will show, Ryūhoku’s actions in the wake of his dismissal as well as his and others’ subsequent accounts can further illuminate what must have precipitated his purge, but it is clear from the extant poems that Ryūhoku was becoming disgruntled at his inability to have the sort of guiding role in the shogun’s administration that the post of okujusha, at least in ideal terms, ought to entail. Ryūhoku’s mounting desperation was already apparent in a poem he composed near the same time that Bankei offered the words of encouragement quoted above. In the piece, Ryūhoku questioned the value of his Confucian learning in the face of the national crisis with a newly trenchant tone and unprecedented directness:

賣書買劍歌



六經廿一史 口誦而手刪



勸君莫誦經 辛苦誰得爲孔顔

5

勸君莫讀史 遷固才筆不可攀 書生徒有靦面目 畢生無手援惸鰥 一朝翻然倒筐簏

10

千卷換得錢幾鍰

15 20

去向東市購孤劍 老鐡之鍔古銅鐶 此物不知果何用 提舞自欲振贏孱 霜鋩澟兮吾氣奮 心兵出沒天地間 有時乎秘之匣底 有時乎加之百蠻 休道一劍不足學 方今無人力拔山

Song on selling my books to buy a sword The Six Classics, the Twenty-One Histories With my mouth I have recited them, with my hand I have made editions. But I urge you not to recite the classics— Your labors are in vain, for who can be like Confucius or Yan Hui? I urge you not to read the histories— You cannot aspire to Sima Qian and Ban Gu’s literary skill. Students vainly acquire haughty airs, Never once extending a hand to the downtrodden. One day I made up my mind and tipped my book bag upside down, Exchanging a thousand volumes for a few dozen ounces of silver. I went to the eastern market to buy a single sword, With an old steel shell and a bronze hilt-loop. I don’t know what use it will be, But brandishing it helps to shake off my weakness. The tip glistens like chilly frost, stirring my spirits; A steeled resolve that pervades the realm. At times I might stow it away in its case; Other times I will wield it against the hundred barbarians. Don’t say that a single sword is not worth studying, Since no one these days has the strength to uproot a mountain.151



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Ambivalence over the place of Confucian studies in Japan’s present crisis had been a consistent theme of Ryūhoku’s poetry ever since he had succeeded to the headship of his family at eighteen. Although he oscillated over the years between the two poles of the “book” and the “sword,” for the most part, Ryūhoku had defended his scholarly position and the learning he had mastered, arguing that he and other Confucian scholars should have a greater hand in shaping shogunal policy. The speaker of this poem seems to have given up entirely on the project. Though the piece is polemic, it stops short of a complete rejection of the Confucian tradition. Ryūhoku instead recommends expanding the bounds of learning beyond the well-established “Six Classics and Twenty-One Histories.” In making an argument for the need to “study the sword,” Ryūhoku was drawing close to the position of Ōtsuki Bankei, who had repeatedly memorialized the shogunate on the pressing need for it to actively pursue the acquisition of modern military technology in order to face its present challenges. Ryūhoku’s disaffection stemmed from his distress over the unprecedented unrest that was destabilizing Japan, his growing doubts about the relevance of his official role as a Confucian scholar, and his frustration over his inability to help resolve the crisis. As the poem quoted above critiquing the ban on unlicensed prostitution shows, Ryūhoku believed the priorities of the government were misplaced, but there seemed to be little he could do. The sense of hopelessness in the face of what he had come to regard as a stultifying environment is most suggestively expressed in the following poem, one of the last he wrote prior to his dismissal:

化石谷

5 10 15

北方有奇谷 暗黑深千尺 投物于其中 瞬頃化爲石 狐兒失脚陷 留得茸而赤 鳥卵從巣墮 長見圓而白 化來碌碌然 無用幾塊積 不類初平羊 再起歸牧柵 君見麾下兒 往往有氣魄 一列御史班 口啞手加額



匹似入彼谷 一化異曩昔

20

谷也胡爲然 石也眞可惜

The valley of petrification There is a strange valley in the north; A dark abyss a thousand feet deep. If you throw something in, It turns to stone in the blink of an eye. Should a fox cub lose its footing and fall, It forever retains its soft red fur. If a bird’s egg should tumble from the nest, It will always remain round and white. Turned to run-of-the-mill rocks, strewn In piles and left unused. Not at all like Chuping’s sheep, That rose to return to their pasture gates.152 Look there at the men beneath your banner: They all have strong spirit and mettle. But once they join the ranks of the officials, Their mouths turn mute and they put hand to brow. Just as though they have fallen into that valley, Instantly becoming something different from their past form. The valley—why is it so? The rocks—what a shame!153

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This mysterious image of a “valley of petrification” that instantly renders all animal visitors to it lifeless serves as an evocative metaphor for the shogunate’s rigid observation of traditional practices, its inflexible modes of thinking, and its resistance to dissent and new proposals. Just as the vitality of the youthful fox cub or the hatching bird is snuffed and silenced, so too is the “strong spirit and mettle” of the opinionated and eager young men rendered mute and feckless. What particularly did Ryūhoku see the shogunal officials prohibiting with their stolidity? Though he does not give an answer here, as will become clear in chapter 4, Ryūhoku’s actions in the wake of his dismissal as well as his later reminiscences suggest that his encounters with Western scholars including Bankei and the Katsuragawa salon members had led him to push for a variety of more active forms of engagement with the Western world.

Ch a p t er Fou r

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R

yūhoku’s dismissal from his post in 1863 came in the wake of a sharp curtailment in shogunal prestige and power. The Tokugawa shogunate had functioned since the early seventeenth century as Japan’s central political authority, but, inasmuch as it was the emperor who had nominally delegated to the shogun the task of defending the realm militarily, it might seem that the shogun had always occupied at least a symbolically subordinate position. Yet in practice even the shogun’s symbolic authority was arguably superior to that of the emperor for much of the early modern era. This peerless status was reinforced through various ritual protocols governing his relations with the court, including the very ceremony by which each successive shogun was entrusted with the position: from the time of the fourth shogun, Tokugawa Ietsuna (r. 1651–80), it was the imperial emissaries who had to make the journey from Kyoto to Edo in order to confer the title, during which time these representatives of the court were seated physically beneath the shogun.1 In the final years of the Tokugawa era, however, the shogunate’s decision to conclude treaties that opened Japanese ports to trade with the Western powers over the imperial house’s explicit protests galvanized a coalition of antagonistic forces. As the court, some daimyo, and a range of samurai activists coalesced in their opposition to the shogunate in the early 1860s, the shogunate became increasingly compelled to demonstrate its obedience and deference to the imperial house. At the same time, far from relinquishing the concessions they had already extracted, the Western powers sought to expand their presence, placing the shogunate in an intractable situation. Edo officials were divided in their thinking about how to resolve the crisis, but ultimately a strategy of appeasing the court prevailed. As part of these conciliatory efforts, the shogun Iemochi welcomed the emperor’s sister, Kazunomiya, as his wife in late Bunkyū 1 (1861) and performed his new subordinate status through altered protocols for receiving court emissaries the following year. Even more significantly, the shogunate formally agreed that winter to its domestic opponents’ principal demand: that it commit to close the treaty ports that had been opened in 1859, to prevent the opening of others,

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and ultimately to expel the Westerners entirely.2 Although some shogunal officials earnestly agreed with these goals of sakō 鎖港 (closing the ports) and jōi 攘夷 (expelling the barbarians), many saw provisional adoption of this so-called sajō 鎖攘 position as a stalling tactic that might allow the shogunate the time in which to secure domestic sta­ bility and shore up national unity. That the Western powers were unlikely to accept the closing of the ports and their own expulsion was obvious to most, but perhaps the shogun’s nominal acknowledgment of the sajō agenda was the least bad option for the time being, they reasoned. Others within the shogunate saw such a strategy as no strategy at all—untenable temporizing that not only would fail to achieve its objective, but could endanger Japan and deprive it of an important opportunity. By the eve of his dismissal, Ryūhoku had become one of these officials who vehemently rejected the sajō stance. This was a remarkable shift, for the youthful Ryūhoku had repeatedly espoused such positions himself, as we have seen. Yet Ryūhoku’s thinking had undergone a radical evolution from the late 1850s into the 1860s as he developed a keen interest in the Western world and devoted himself to learning more about it. As chapter 3 has shown, Ryūhoku was interacting with practitioners of Western medicine among his Shitaya neighbors by the late 1850s and before long had also come to associate with some of Edo’s most prominent scholars of Western subjects in the course of his frequent excursions to Yanagibashi. In particular, Ryūhoku’s encounters with the group of Western scholars clustered around Katsuragawa Hoshū, the eminent Dutch lexicographer whose circle included Yanagawa Shunsan and Ōtsuki Bankei, were transformative. The poetry collections of Ryūhoku, his bunjin friends, and Bankei that I discussed in the previous chapter amply attest to growing familiarity between Ryūhoku and several Western scholars in the 1860s, preserving a range of works they wrote in the context of regular compositional gatherings and for various formal commemorative events, as well as during the leisure outings that they undertook together in the company of Yanagibashi’s geisha. That Ryūhoku’s early 1860s transformation emerged from his expanding affiliations with these Western scholars is clear from what I have presented, but one important piece of evidence, also in the form of a poem, has proven difficult to reconcile with this narrative. As understood by scholars thus far, this poem seems to reveal that a full decade earlier, at a time long before he showed anything but a categorical rejection of the West and its learning, Ryūhoku was already friendly with Katsuragawa Hoshū and Ōtsuki Bankei.3 But does this ostensible evidence of early amity between Ryūhoku and Western scholars really hold up to close scrutiny? The poem in question has come down to modern-day scholars as part of a work of calligraphy that Ryūhoku inscribed and presented to Katsuragawa Hoshū (fig. 4.1). Traditionally dated to Kaei 5 (1852), when Ryūhoku would have been sixteen, the poem concerns the vendetta of the Soga brothers, a twelfth-century episode that has inspired countless retellings and reworkings in a wide variety of literary and dramatic genres from the medieval period onward. The Soga vendetta story is ultimately rooted in a complicated inheritance dispute among the members of the Itō warrior clan, but the key precipitating event was the 1176 killing of one of these warriors, Kawazu Sukeyasu, by the retainers of another, Kudō Suketsune.4 Over the next seventeen years, Suke­ yasu’s two sons, Jūrō and Gorō, looked for an opportunity to avenge their father’s

Fig. 4.1 Ryūhoku’s Ballad of the Two Soga, calligraphy scroll. Ryūhoku’s poem appears at center along with the postscript at left. Ōtsuki Bankei’s poem is written after the postscript (it is not reproduced here). Courtesy of Waseda University Library, Tokyo.

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death, which finally came in 1193, when Suketsune participated in a hunt that shogun Minamoto no Yoritomo staged in the fields at the base of Mount Fuji. In the darkness of a rainy night, the Soga brothers stole into Suketsune’s bedchamber and succeeded in killing him, but they also ended up slaughtering several of Yoritomo’s men who had rushed in to investigate the disturbance. Moreover, after his elder brother, Jūrō, died in the fight­ing, Gorō entered the shogun’s quarters to confront Yoritomo but was overpowered and captured. After weighing the legitimacy of the brothers’ grievance against the criminal repercussions of their vengeance, the shogun reached a difficult judgment and ordered Gorō’s execution. Ryūhoku’s poem focuses on this tension between the virtue of filial piety that drove the brothers to extract their revenge and the virtue of loyalty to one’s lord that they violated by striking within the shogun’s encampment and in such a way as to harm innocent men among his retainers. The poem closes with the contrastive example of another medieval warrior, Minamoto no Yoshitomo, praising him for placing fealty to his lord above filial piety toward his father.5

二蘇行



吾聞君親冠五倫



孝子之門出忠臣



十郎五郎何爲者 美名特傳七百春

5

富山雲霧晩送雨 遶麓篝燈青於燐

10

黑夜分明認虎穴 劔光迸上仇人茵 斬仇仇死汝事了 餘怒敢欲刺何人 牙帳有賊銀燭亂



夜刃垂及將軍身 嗚呼君可弑乎父可殺

15

吾對青史兩囘瞋 請見保元左典厩



亦爲其君斬其親

Ballad of the two Soga I hear fealty to one’s lord and piety to one’s parents crown the Five Relations; It is said that a loyal official emerges from the gate of a filial child. Who are these men Jūrō and Gorō? Their repute has been singly extolled for seven hundred springs. Clouds and mist atop Fuji, nightfall brings rain; Around the mountain, the lamps in wicker baskets are paler than phosphorus. The night is dark, but the tiger’s den clearly glimpsed; A gleaming sword thrust upon the foe’s bed cushion. Your father avenged, his foe cut down: your work is done; But with your excessive wrath, who else will you strike? In the bejeweled curtains lurks a scoundrel, silver lamplight scatters; At night, a blade bears down upon the general’s body. O! Can one’s lord be murdered?! Can one’s father be killed?! When I look at the chronicles, I glower at them both. I bid you consider the director of the Left Horse Bureau in the Hōgen era: For he acted for his lord and cut down his father.6

In lines 11 and 12, Ryūhoku’s poem parallels the popular Soga monogatari account in which Gorō sneaks in through the “curtains” of Yoritomo’s chamber, is apprehended there, and subsequently confesses that he had in fact sought to kill Yoritomo as well.7 As the pivotal fifth couplet (lines 9–10) makes clear, the poem praises the Soga brothers’ act of vengeance against Suketsune while faulting this subsequent violence: a departure from



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typical Edo period treatments of the Soga vendetta in which “the brothers’ moral rectitude as loyal avengers was never questioned.”8 In the note that Ryūhoku inscribed after the poem, he explains that he composed it in response to another poem on the same topic by Ōtsuki Bankei and then wrote out both poems to present to Katsuragawa Hoshū. Ryūhoku’s poem on the Soga vendetta thus clearly attests to the poet’s familiarity with Bankei and Hoshū. The problem lies in the fact that scholars have so far read the explanatory calligraphic postscript he appended to it as follows (emphasis added): The piece at right is something that I recorded for my dear friend in elegance, Getchi [i.e., Katsuragawa Hoshū], while drunk on the twelfth day in spring during the forty-ninth year of the cycle; I also wrote down old Bankei’s poem afterward. 右壬子春十二日 醉中爲月池雅契録併書磐翁之詩于後 9

The first two underlined graphs of this reading indeed indicate the forty-ninth year of the cycle, or Kaei 5 (1852), but surely it is puzzling that, two years before writing several poems stridently denouncing the study of Western subjects, the sixteen-year-old Ryūhoku should be so chummily in his cups with Dutch scholar Katsuragawa Hoshū, going so far as to refer to him as his “dear friend in elegance.” A careful look at the scroll’s calligraphy, however, makes it clear that the discussion among scholars to date has been based on an erroneous reading of the inscribed graphs. What they have read as two discrete components of the sexagenary cycle dating system, 壬子, written vertically are in fact a single graph, 季, which, when used with a seasonal graph such as the one that follows it here, “spring” 春, indicates its last month (fig. 4.2). In other words, the underlined portion of the English translation above should read “in the third month of spring.” This means that, rather than indicating the twelfth day of an unstated spring month in 1852, Ryūhoku’s inscription indicates that he wrote the calligraphy out on 03.12 but does not specify the year in which he did so. I have determined that Bankei wrote his poem in early Meiji 5 (1872), and Ryūhoku likely made his response shortly thereafter.10 The work is thus not the composition of Ryū­ hoku at sixteen, but rather of Ryūhoku in his mid-thirties. Furthermore, the corrected read­ing of the inscription resolves the various mysteries and inconsistencies produced by the traditionally ascribed date. At sixteen, Ryūhoku had yet to become a close friend of these Western scholars who would prove instrumental in changing his worldview and whose influence became a central factor behind his loss of an official position in 1863.11 Having been dismissed from the shogunate, Ryūhoku spent more than two years in domiciliary confinement: a time during which his connections with Katsuragawa Hoshū and the latter’s coterie deepened further. Recall Ryūhoku’s specific mention of these Western scholars in the 1868 autobiographical essay in which he recounts being driven from office: He [Ryūhoku] served the inner court with scholarship for ten years, and, though moved to tears by the lavishness of the sovereign’s beneficence, one morning he was purged and left without a position. Perhaps it was because he was just too suave, perhaps it was because he

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Fig. 4.2 Detail of fig. 4.1 showing the first graphs of Ryūhoku’s postscript. There are three graphs, 右季春, not four, 右壬子春.

offended people by being too blunt, or perhaps it was because he advocated study of the West. It doesn’t really matter what the reason was; he spent his three years of confinement devoting himself solely to reading English books under the tutelage of Western scholars. It greatly opened his mind.

As the essay indicates, one of Ryūhoku’s central occupations during his time of confinement was the acquisition of English and other Western languages, but he also read broadly in the scholarship, geography, history, and culture of the West. His studiousness was rewarded late in 1865, when the government suddenly sought him out to take part in a new project to modernize the shogunal military forces under European guidance. Although Ryūhoku had served the Tokugawa with his Confucian scholarship for a decade, it was in this new capacity as a military man that he would spend his final days as a Tokugawa vassal. As chapters 1 and 2 have demonstrated, Ryūhoku had long explored fantasies of military service in his poetry, and he even had a few chances to take part in hunts, archery practice, and other such forms of training. However rhetorical his expressions of latent military ambitions may have been, this unexpected promotion in 1865 meant that Ryūhoku at last joined the officers’ ranks, in spite of having suffered a major setback to his career in government. In a further irony, the very interest in and knowledge about Western learning that seems to have been a leading cause of his dismissal now became the cause of his advancement. Yet Ryūhoku reentered shogunal service at a time when the Tokugawa’s days were numbered. His final ascent to a series of high positions in the central government coincided with the shogunate’s lurching steps toward its 1868 collapse. This chapter examines Ryūhoku’s activities during these tumultuous years of withdrawal and resurgence. Although Ryūhoku never offered a single definitive answer



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to the question of why he lost his post, his actions immediately after his dismissal can offer some further insight into the events that must have set the stage. As in the biograph­ ical essay quoted above, Ryūhoku often referred to this period in his life as his “three years of confinement,” but it seems that Ryūhoku was only officially assigned to domiciliary confinement for fifty days.12 That he largely secluded himself in his home for more than two years seems to have been at least to some degree a choice he made in the absence of an official posting. Ryūhoku had long exhibited a sincere interest in the realm of the bunjin, as his constant experimentation with new avenues of literary composition, his cultivation of connections with literati unaffiliated with the shogunate, and his extensive exploration of reclusive themes in his poetry all demonstrate. Yet even as he maintained these abiding affiliations with elements of the bunjin frame, his overriding sense of commitment to offering service to the Tokugawa had never seriously flagged. On being purged from his post, however, Ryūhoku for the first time was in a position temporarily to wash his hands of official matters in the manner of the very reclusive figures he had often idealized in his poetry and other literary works. Recall the allusion Ryūhoku makes near the end of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi to Xie An, the Jin dynasty figure who spent years outside the strictures of political ser­ vice, consorting with courtesans at his hermitage in the “eastern hills.” In some ways, Ryūhoku’s years of withdrawal can be seen as such a period of disengaged diversion, for, like a latter-day Xie An, he invited many Yanagibashi geisha to the frequent gatherings of disenfranchised Western scholars that he convened at his residence. One of the major products of this period is a work of poetry and prose, Itsumadegusa (Endless ivy), that showcases Ryūhoku and his Western scholar friends’ conviviality with these geisha. A consummately playful text, Endless Ivy proudly asserts its own frivolousness and uselessness at almost every turn. Yet, even during his withdrawal from official circles and his immersion in such literary amusements, Ryūhoku also applied himself to the pursuit of more obviously “useful” knowledge. Just as Xie An ultimately emerged from his reclusion to serve the Jin, Ryūhoku would also be summoned forth from his hermitage to return to official service. The familiarity with Western languages and the Western world that he acquired during his time of confinement not only led to his promotion in the final days of the shogunate, but provided a key foundation for his activities as a teacher, translator, and writer in the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration. Moreover, the connections that he deepened with members of the Katsuragawa salon during these years would likewise prove important in shaping Ryūhoku’s direction as a writer, helping to set him on his future career path as a journalist.

Ryūhoku’s Dismissal and Confinement Ryūhoku’s dismissal from his official position as shogunal tutor and confinement to his residence were ordered on the ninth day of the eighth month of Bunkyū 3 (1863). In the absence of the detail his diary volumes from the preceding few years would presumably have provided, it is difficult to say definitively what, if any, specific acts triggered the

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punishment or why Ryūhoku chose this particular time to carry them out. Yet it may be significant that Ryūhoku’s dismissal came just days after the first anniversary of his grandfather Motonao’s death. Motonao had died on 08.02 of Bunkyū 2 (1862) at the age of eighty-five, leaving Ryūhoku as the sole bearer of the Narushima family legacy. If some set of specific actions was the cause of his punishment, perhaps Ryūhoku had waited for the year of mourning to conclude before undertaking them. In the biographical essay quoted above, Ryūhoku identifies his advocacy of Western study as one of the factors that might have prompted his dismissal. Later reminiscences attest to one particular event that offers support for this explanation: an episode that took place in the context of Ryūhoku’s role overseeing the education of the shogun Iemochi. In this capacity, Ryūhoku is known to have recommended expanding his charge’s curriculum to include a text called Oranda biseiroku (A record of Holland’s beautiful government), a translation of two episodes from a Dutch book focused on criminal cases that was made by Katsuragawa salon member Kanda Takahira.13 Over a decade later, when Ryūhoku published a condensed version of one of these translations in his literary magazine Kagetsu shinshi, he prefaced the serialization with a brief recollection that links the text to his professional downfall: A Record of Holland’s Beautiful Government is a marvelous book that Kanda Takahira translated over ten years ago. . . . When I borrowed this book to read, I found it so interesting that I asked Kanda if I might show it to the shogun Iemochi. But unfortunately, when I did this, I suffered a catastrophe within the shogunal ranks, and the manuscript was lost. I was profoundly upset, but there was nothing to do. However, my old friend Yasuda Jirōkichi was able to purchase a manuscript copy of the text in Yanagiwara . . . and he has treasured it since. Just before he passed away, Jirōkichi sent me several of his volumes, and A Record of Holland’s Beautiful Government was among them.14

Ryūhoku does not unambiguously indicate a strictly causal relationship between showing the manuscript to Iemochi and suffering his catastrophe, but that is the implication.15 The title of the translation, A Record of Holland’s Beautiful Government, seems to have been Kanda’s invention, and, as Yoshida Sakuzō has argued, it suggests that, beyond the text’s sheer entertainment value, Kanda was impressed by its depiction of officers in the Dutch judicial system working efficiently to solve complicated legal cases: “I suspect that he did not read it simply as a novel, but rather was driven to translate it by a desire to show it to the officials as an example of fine governmental practice that ought to be emulated.”16 Perhaps the information about European criminal and judicial institutions that could be glimpsed from these Dutch detective stories also made Ryūhoku consider it a “marvelous” text and compelled him to show it to Iemochi. Ryūhoku would later go on to publish translations of several texts written in European languages in the course of his career as a journalist, including many focused on criminal cases.17 In addition to the concrete and detailed depiction of European legal institutions that such texts provided, one of the consistent responses Ryūhoku had to them as a reader and a point he repeatedly made in justifying his dissemination of them as a publisher was that these texts showed European judicial officials endeavoring to balance the application of the law



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with due consideration of human feelings.18 At a time when information about Western culture available in Japan was heavily weighted toward geographic, historical, and technical matters, such stories struck Ryūhoku and other early readers as affirmations of the universality of human sentiment. Perhaps he also intended to impart such a perspective to Iemochi. The second possibility that Ryūhoku offers in the autobiographical essay as an explanation for his dismissal, that “he offended people by being too blunt,” may indicate the manner in which he made such proposals about the shogun’s curriculum.19 The comment has traditionally been interpreted, however, as a reference to one or more satirical couplets that Ryūhoku is said to have written to criticize the political vacillation of the shogunate or the intransigence of its convention-bound senior officials. Some accounts even state that he scrawled the verse directly on the wall of a government office. In an octave written about two months after his dismissal, Ryūhoku himself seems to suggest a connection between his poetry and his present punishment. He calls attention in its opening couplets to the irony that what he now writes is also a poem:

偶得

深鎖衡門經幾旬 自甘天地一閑人 計非未覺詩爲崇 酒竭始知錢有神

Spontaneous composition Locked deep within my hermit’s gate, I have passed several weeks; Contenting myself with being an idler in this world. My plans come to naught, I have not yet learned that poetry can be a curse; But now that the wine has run out, I see the power of money.20

If the third line does indeed refer to events leading to his dismissal, then what was this cursed poem? There are several conflicting theories. One asserts that Ryūhoku wrote: 君看千載上 二卵棄干城

Behold! Over one thousand years ago, For just two eggs, an officer was forsaken.21

The couplet refers to the story of Gou Bian, a figure from Warring States era China who was a competent general but had also committed a minor indiscretion during his earlier career as a local official. The following version of the episode comes from Kong cong zi (Kong family masters’ anthology), a third-century text of anecdotes concerning Confucius and his disciples, in which Confucius’s grandson Zisi recommends the general Gou Bian in spite of his foibles: When Zisi dwelt in the state of Wei, he spoke of Gou Bian to the lord of Wei, saying: “His abilities make him fit to be a general in command of five hundred chariots. If you take this man, you will have no enemies under heaven.” The lord of Wei replied, “I am aware of his qualifications as a general, but, when Bian was a local official, he requisitioned two eggs from the locals for his personal consumption. This is why I do not employ him.” Zisi said, “Now then, when a sage seeks to employ someone as an official, he does so just as a master carpenter

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makes use of wood. He takes the strong parts and discards the weak parts. For this reason, when it comes to a willow or catalpa tree of several arm-spans in girth, though there might be several feet of rotten wood, a good craftsman does not abandon the whole tree. Why? Because he knows that the impediments are minuscule and that it can become a great vessel. Now you live during an era when states are at war with one another. You must not allow the neighboring states to hear that you have discarded a general for the sake of two eggs.”22

Typically Ryūhoku’s couplet is understood to target both the shogunate’s general stagnation and its misguided devotion to antiquated policies. According to this reading, the shogunate was like the lord of Wei in its fixation on inconsequential matters and its inability to discern true talent.23 This interpretation is consistent with the sentiments articulated in “Valley of petrification” and other poems discussed at the close of chapter 3, where Ryūhoku expresses his frustrations with precisely such misplaced priorities on the part of the shogunate. Yet the argument that an official’s minor indiscretions should be overlooked in favor of a more holistic appraisal of his character also resonates with the passage at the close of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi in which Ryūhoku’s narrator extols Xie An: “How can the proper Confucian gentleman manage to shun such amorous matters with a look of horror in the same way that he avoids ‘violence and heedlessness, lowness and impropriety’? Let us take the case of a vassal. Is it not sufficient for him to be like Xie An, who could subdue a million strong enemy soldiers with a smile on his face and thereby save the state? What right do we have to pass judgment on his happy diversions in the eastern hills?” That Ryūhoku felt a special connection with Xie An is clear from the numerous references he made to this Jin dynasty figure in the poems and other literary works that he wrote throughout his life. Moreover, Ryūhoku’s affinity for Xie An extended beyond, for just prior to his death in 1884, Ryūhoku made a concise list of instructions for his funeral arrangements, and one of the few points he insisted on was that Xie An’s posthumous name, Wenjing 文靖 (J. Bunsei), be incorporated into his own.24 Ryūhoku’s allusive choice of posthumous names confirms his close identification with this fourthcentury official who had served the state with honor but who also enjoyed a robust leisure life outside the halls of government. Although Ryūhoku’s provocative couplet is typically read as a criticism of shogunal policy in general, it is worth considering as a statement of more personal relevance. If we take the first possibility offered in Ryūhoku’s autobiographical essay seriously, that he ran into trouble because he was “just too suave,” perhaps the poem condemns the shogunate for punishing him on account of some minor transgression in the realm of amorous dalliance. In other words, the poem may be a satirical riposte on his dismissal rather than the critique that prompted it. Another version of events likewise holds that Ryūhoku wrote a satirical verse that incurred official ire but supplies a different text. In contrast to the accounts that posit a couplet alluding to Gou Bian, this version holds that his poetic provocation was rather less erudite: 權官評議臭於屁 大府威光輕似塵

The debates of the officials are more odious than farts; The majesty of the great shogunate is as light as dust.25



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The earliest accounts that offer this couplet as the reason for Ryūhoku’s dismissal see it as symptomatic of Ryūhoku’s frustration at the shogunate’s lack of response to the crisis that confronted it both internally and externally: hostile sajō forces led by the court, Mito, and the southwestern domains calling for the closing of the ports and the expulsion of foreigners, on the one hand, and foreign powers demanding expanded access to trade and settlement, on the other. According to these accounts, Ryūhoku made several proposals regarding how the shogunate might address the situation, but these suggestions were ignored. Having formally capitulated to the sajō agenda in late 1862, the shogu­ nate took additional steps to demonstrate its fealty to the imperial house the follow­ing year. In spring, Iemochi set out for Kyoto, marking the first time the shogun had visited the imperial capital since the time of the third shogun, Iemitsu (1604–51).26 There, Iemochi was compelled to agree formally to a date for the expulsion of the foreign presence and the closure of the treaty ports, a position that shogunal officials knew would never be acceptable to the implacable Western forces. According to Maeda Ai, Ryūhoku accompanied Iemochi on this journey, and, in Maeda’s view, the weakened position of the shogunate that the trip symbolized may be the referent of the couplet’s phrase about dwindling “majesty.”27 Although these accounts often frame Ryūhoku’s frustration as the result of his policy proposals’ falling on deaf ears, Ryūhoku left no detailed record of what specific measures he may have recommended at the time. However, the sajō faction was in ascendance just before his dismissal, and they managed to purge antiexpulsion retainers from the shogunate.28 Ryūhoku’s opposition to the sajō advocates of expulsion is clear from the scorn he shows toward the Mito domain in his diary entries as well as from his own later reminiscences. Shortly after he began his period of confinement, Ryūhoku notes in his diary a visit from the shogunal physician Takenouchi Gendō (Seiha), from whom he learned about recent developments on the port issue: “Seiha came and told me that today the scoundrels in the shogunal cabinet are in discussions with the envoys from foreign countries to close the port of Yokohama. What a shame, what a shame!”29 The entry’s vehemence confirms Ryūhoku’s striking about-face from his teenage years, for he now defines himself as an antagonist of the sajō agenda. Over a decade later, Ryūhoku wrote an essay titled “On the harm of the sajō argument,” in which he reminisced about his days as a shogunal official: “Those who forced the shogunate into its precipitous demise were also sajō types. I had longstanding personal experience being vexed by these sajō types within the shogun’s government.”30 If making blunt recommendations was a factor in Ryūhoku’s dismissal in 1863, perhaps countering such sajō efforts to close Japan off was the focus of his attention. In all likelihood there were a variety of factors behind Ryūhoku’s dismissal. The plu­ rality of proffered explanations may indicate that officials gave one reason for punishing him but that Ryūhoku believed the root causes lay elsewhere. In the absence of further documentation, it is impossible to single out any one of the various possibilities he and later scholars have suggested to the exclusion of all others. There are good reasons to think that some combination of his advocacy of Western study, his blunt expressions of opinion, and perhaps even his personal indiscretions in Yanagibashi laid the groundwork for his dismissal. Assuming he indeed wrote the provocative verses that are attributed to

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him, it is still uncertain whether they were the spark that triggered his dismissal or rather his response to it.31 Whatever the reasons for his dismissal may have been, it is clear that Ryūhoku took the punishment in stride. Befitting the abrupt change in his life circumstances, he immediately began a new volume of his diary. The volumes of his diary corresponding to Bunkyū 1 (1861) through the first eight months of Bunkyū 3 are no longer extant, but the first volume of his postdismissal diary survives. Ryūhoku called it “Tōkan nichiroku” 投閑日録 (Diary of one “thrown an idle empty post”), alluding to a passage from “An Explication of ‘Progress in Learning’” by the Tang literatus Han Yu. Han Yu’s essay is a humorous dialogue between a professor at the Imperial University and his students, who are dubious of their teacher’s exhortations to study since a lifetime of scholarship has left him without success in officialdom. The professor responds by arguing that each individual has a proper role to play in a larger scheme, that many eminent figures were likewise misunderstood by their contemporaries, and that, though he has indeed suffered, he is nevertheless content with his lot: “To be thrown this idle empty post is thus for me a proper fate.”32 In the diary’s first entry, Ryūhoku quotes the phrase from Han Yu’s essay directly: “I served in the inner court for ten years, and then one morning I was driven out. How can I not feel a sense of regretful attachment? But then I also think that my abilities are meager, and my learning is rotten. To be thrown this idle empty post is thus for me a proper fate. I must express my thankfulness and gratitude for the magnanimity of this sagely benevolence.”33 The seemingly sarcastic tone of Ryūhoku’s entry may seem at odds with his punctilious observance of scribal conventions that express deference to the shogun by placing words concerning him at the head of new lines of text. Yet the entry may not be simply facetious. Ryūhoku’s sense of pride in serving the shogunate is consistent throughout his writings, whether public or private. Perhaps Ryūhoku saw his loss of a post as a temporary setback along the lines of Han Yu’s professor, who experienced exile and slander in the course of his career but took comfort in his scholarship and in the idea that ultimately he would be judged by its legacy. Although Ryūhoku’s attachment to his post was genuine, he also seems to have been determined to make the best of his newfound freedom from it. When the first fifty days following his dismissal had passed, he received word that he had been excused from domiciliary confinement, noting in his diary his joy at hearing this news. But the very next day he seems to have petitioned to have the order of domiciliary confinement reinstated, a request that was promptly rejected. It was only then that he told his relatives that the order had been lifted.34 As will become clear from his writings during this period, Ryūhoku nevertheless framed his “three years of confinement” as a fate imposed upon him. His apparent reluctance to inform his relatives about the order’s revocation raises the possibility that he saw in mandatory domiciliary confinement a pretext that would allow him to pursue other goals for the time being. The conflicting set of responses that the above diary entry suggests received further expression in a pair of quatrains he composed immediately after his dismissal. As chapter 2 argued, Ryūhoku often drew on the twin images of the “book” and the “zither” in his poetry as iconic appurtenances of the bunjin lifestyle. As he was compelled to sever his ties temporarily with the realm of the shijin and to enter into a period of withdrawal,



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it is fitting that these objects associated with reclusion should figure prominently in the first two poems he composed in the wake of his dismissal. In them, Ryūhoku strikes a tone both alienated and defiant:

感懷

失意翻悲得意時 仰看秋月有餘思 幽琴欲撫誰能聽 流水高山欠子期

Feeling my emotions My hopes dashed, but I lament instead the time when all seemed right; Looking up at the autumn moon, my thoughts are endless. I wish to play the low-toned zither, but who will hear it? “Rolling river” and “high mountains,” but I have no Ziqi.35

Ryūhoku alludes in the final couplet to the story, mentioned in the previous chapter, of master zither player Bo Ya and his true friend Zhong Ziqi, who was so in tune with Bo Ya’s feelings that he could discern the images in the latter’s mind—whether a “rolling river” or “high mountains”—simply by listening to the tone he played on his zither. In its lament that the world is deaf to his song, the reference echoes the sense of being unappreciated that is contained in the Han Yu essay while also bringing to mind the silencing and stultifying atmosphere of the shogunate depicted in the “Valley of petrification” poem discussed in the previous chapter. The second poem continues the almost insolent tone of the first but expresses a curious kind of optimism: 一脱朝衣臥草盧 俸多未要學樵漁 天公賜我閑如許 讀得平生欲讀書

I take off my court robes and rest in this grass hut; My stipend is plenty; no need to take after the fishermen or woodcutters. Heaven has presented me with such tranquil respite, Now I can read the books I have been wanting to.36

The “grass hut” and the reference to “taking off my court robes” in the first line are common elements in the rhetoric of reclusive poetry, but the second line’s statement about not needing to emulate “fishermen or woodcutters” specifies the poet’s mode of withdrawal as shiin (Ch. shiyin), or “urban reclusion.” Rather than idealizing escape to the unpeopled wilderness or to agrarian rusticity, the poet retreats to a private space within the city setting. It is in this interior realm that the poet can immerse himself in the reading of his “books,” though, in comparison to Ryūhoku’s earlier uses of the image, the content of the particular books he seeks to read has shifted. The “books” of this poem are no longer a metonym for the studious mastery of the Confucian canon (in contrast to the “sword” of military service), nor do they refer primarily to the world of literati poetic expression. Although the poem does not state so explicitly, it is clear from Ryū­ hoku’s diary as well as from the 1868 biographical essay’s reference to “reading English books under the tutelage of Western scholars” that Ryūhoku devoted himself to reading introductions to Western languages, geography, and history during his confinement. Perhaps, in naming his diary with the reference to Han Yu’s essay, Ryūhoku was looking to emulate the professor who had endured travails and was underappreciated but who

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was nevertheless content to make use of his “idle empty post” to pursue his studies. Ryūhoku commenced this new phase of his scholarship at a transitional time, just as Dutch was yielding to English its longstanding place as the predominant Western language studied in Japan. Ryūhoku’s diary shows that, immediately after his period of confinement began, he started reading a Dutch grammar but within four months had switched his attentions to English, studying under the guidance of Kanda Takahira.37 By the following year, he had begun studying a Hong Kong textbook that featured model English sentences translated into Literary Sinitic. Another Kasturagawa affiliate, Yanagawa Shunsan, later published a Japanese edition of the text, using the corrected second printing he borrowed from Ryūhoku.38 Ryūhoku also began to read world geographies imported from China such as Xu Jiyu’s 1848 Yinghuan zhilüe (A short account of the maritime circuit). Along with Wei Yuan’s 1842 Haiguo tuzhi (Illustrated treatise on the sea kingdoms), Xu Jiyu’s text was widely read by Japanese intellectuals during the late Tokugawa period.39 Xu drew mainly on Chinese translations of Western geographies but also supplemented these extensively with information gleaned from his own conversations with Western missionaries resident in China. According to Charles Drake, what made Xu’s text distinctive in the Chinese context was its presentation of a radical view of a “pluralistic world of competing states” that also provided “a potent statement of themes for modernization.”40 Although such a worldview may not have been quite so radical to a Japanese audience, Xu’s text undeniably provided Japanese readers a readily accessible scholarly framework for understanding the “West” as a congeries of individual nation-states rather than simply a mono­lith. The text’s survey of South Asia, the Americas, and Africa also provided a clearer picture of European colonial administrations than had previously been available. The fact that the text was written in Literary Sinitic allowed Japanese intellectuals to rapidly assimilate the basic information that it contained. Editions of Xu Jiyu’s text printed with kunten reading marks that further expanded its audience were available in Japan from 1861.41 In addition to the evidence provided by these diary entries, Ryūhoku’s newfound fervor for Western learning is also apparent in a farewell poem he wrote sometime around late 1863 for another Katsuragawa salon member, Yasuda Unpeki (d. 1873):42 On sending Yasuda Unpeki off to Kanagawa to study English books with a Western visitor 送安運甓之金川就洋客學英書 君業成如我業成 祖筵何説別離情 請君他日若思我 讀課爲添多少程

When you succeed, I will feel as though it is my own accomplishment; At this farewell banquet, why need we express our feelings of parting? I ask that, if on some day in the future you think of me, Then add a few more lessons to your curriculum.43

The request for Unpeki to make the most of the rare opportunity and redouble his efforts at English study for Ryūhoku’s benefit is striking. The poem marks a dramatic shift from the 1854 farewell poem I discussed in chapter 1, in which Ryūhoku sends Yaguchi Kensai



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off to Ezo. In both, Ryūhoku enviously anticipates the experiences that await his friends at their respective destinations, but, whereas in the earlier poem scholarship served as the lackluster counterpart to Kensai’s daring military mission, here scholarship is configured as an object of fervent desire. Ryūhoku portrays Unpeki’s study of English as an extension of his own efforts; the vicariousness is the same, but the addressee’s mission now coincides with the poet’s own. It is also worth noting that the heading of this poem uses the term “Western visitor” (Ch. xike; J. seikaku) for Yasuda’s instructor, a sharp departure from the teenage Ryūhoku’s consistent references to Westerners as “barbarians” of one form or another. Consider the poem Ryūhoku composed when visiting Kanagawa himself seven years previously, in the summer of 1856. In this octave, Ryūhoku alludes to Kanagawa’s recent historical significance as the site where Perry’s expedition to Japan had landed a few years earlier: 五月九日遊金川臺 去帆白來帆紅 半江夕陽半江風 總山房山翠幾株 影沈烟波浩蕩中 始來豈得不停佇 聊買鮮鱗酌清醑 店丁時指松外洲 説是蠻艦曾泊處

Ninth day of the fifth month, excursion to Kanagawa-dai The departing sails are white; those coming in are red; The setting sun in the midst of the water; wind blowing over the bay. The hills of the Bōsō Peninsula are blue, thick with countless trees; Their shadow sinks amid the obscured waves. My first time here, how could I not stop for a while? I buy a little fresh fish and drink clear filtered sake. Just then the bar boy points toward the island through the pines; And says: that is the place where the barbarian ships docked.

At some point after writing this poem, however, Ryūhoku returned to the manuscript to change the wording of the final line, eliminating the phrase “barbarian ships” 蠻艦 (Ch. manjian; J. bankan) and substituting “Perry” 彼理 (Ch. Bili; J. Peruri) instead (fig. 4.3). The corrections also include the addition of an explanatory note identifying the newly added proper name: “Perry is the American officer who first came to our land.”44 It is unclear when Ryūhoku made this change, but, in replacing the pejorative “barbarian ships” with the surname of the admiral who captained them, Ryūhoku effectively human­ ized Perry. Moreover, in supplementing the poem with a rather understatedly objective note, Ryūhoku demonstrated his new attitude toward the treaty port issue and toward contact with the West in general. That Ryūhoku took the trouble to revise the poem’s word­ ing in this way confirms his own sense of the magnitude of the change he had undergone between 1859 and 1863, when his contacts with Katsuragawa salon members in Yanagibashi and his interactions with Ōtsuki Bankei, a Confucian scholar who was also knowledgeable about Western subjects, were both increasing. These examples unmistakably indicate Ryūhoku’s transformed views of Perry in particular and the opening of Japan’s ports more broadly. One factor that may well have contributed to this shift was a project that Ōtsuki Bankei was undertaking in the 1860s:

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Fig. 4.3 Ryūhoku, poem from Kankei shōkō showing revisions. The only other change is in the first two characters of the sixth line, from 聊買 to 喚取, “I call for some. . . .” See KS, 3:10b; the poem is also included in RS, 1:16; and RZ, 319. Courtesy of the National Diet Library, Tokyo.

a translation of Perry’s Japanese travelogue, which had been published in the United States in 1856.45 Bankei had asked Kimura Yoshitake, an acquaintance who was part of the shogunate’s first diplomatic mission abroad in 1860, to purchase the book while in the United States. After receiving the text, Bankei hired two students of English to do the actual work of translation, which he then submitted to the Sendai daimyo and the shogunate in the fourth month of Bunkyū 2 (1862) as Peruri Nihon kikō (Perry’s Japan travelogue) 彼理日本紀行, using the same two graphs that Ryūhoku used in his revision of the Kankei shōkō manuscript to represent the name Perry.46 Ryūhoku would likely have had access to the translated text through his association with Bankei, and his proximity to it is further suggested by the fact that Ryūhoku’s grandson mistakenly believed



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Ryūhoku to have translated the book himself.47 In his preface, Bankei argued that Perry’s arrival was a turning point for Japan, compelling it to decide whether to be open or closed to the outside world. Bankei also marshaled classical Chinese poetic theory to recommend Perry’s travelogue as a useful external perspective for engaged statesmen: The Classic of Poetry says, “There are other hills whose stones are good for grinding tools.”48 Perry’s words will not necessarily all be medicinal stones; but we can take them and make them “good for grinding tools” we can make them “good for working our jade.” The commentary also states, “The one who speaks [criticism] has no culpability, yet it remains adequate to warn those who hear it.”49 Though what Perry says certainly is not without culpa­ bility, we can listen to it and be warned. How can it be inadequate to supplement our deficiencies?  .  .  . There is one more thing I just cannot stop myself from saying. Once a country opens, it cannot close up again. . . . This is because, once it opens, it discards its old ways and plans new things. . . . Right now there are individuals who are about to transform the national polity (kokutai) and reform the military and the government with a great stimulation of wealth and strength. And who will it be? Who will stimulate this project of wealth and strength? Every day I stand on tiptoe gazing in expectation.50

In this 1862 preface, Bankei not only asserts the irrevocability of Japan’s opening, but also optimistically paints it as an opportunity for a restructuring of the shogunate and a revitalization of the nation as a whole. It was in this same year that Bankei presented Ryūhoku with a stirring exhortatory poem, quoted at the close of the previous chapter, stressing the momentousness of his role as the shogun’s tutor. The diary entry cited above, in which Ryūhoku scorns those shogunal officials who insist on trying to close the ports, indicates that he had approached Bankei’s position by 1863. Similarly, just as Bankei stressed in this preface the value of Perry’s travelogue as an illuminating alternative perspective, so too did Ryūhoku attempt to introduce translations of Western materials into the shogun’s curriculum. Along with interactions with scholars such as Bankei and the Katsuragawa salon members that helped to instill Ryūhoku’s interest in learning more about the West, one additional factor that should not be overlooked was Ryūhoku’s longstanding hobby of coin collecting. In addition to his literary and journalistic accomplishments, Ryūhoku was an avid numismatist, publishing several specialized works on Japanese, Chinese, and European coins in the Meiji period.51 In later years, travel domestically and abroad gave Ryūhoku the opportunity to meet fellow enthusiasts and to acquire rare currency specimens. The famous enlightenment thinker and Katsuragawa associate Fukuzawa Yukichi argued that Ryūhoku’s interest in coin collecting brought about nothing short of a revolution in his thinking: There was a hatamoto samurai named Narushima Kinetarō [Ryūhoku]. Originally he was a student of Confucianism and was accomplished in Sinitic poetry and prose, but he had an idiosyncratic fondness for admiring old coins. . . . He had amassed an exhaustively full array of Japanese and Chinese coins. Having done that, he was looking at various foreign items, it being the time of the country’s opening, and, thinking that these coins were also quite attractive, he got interested in them. He began to collect contemporary and ancient currencies

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from the various Western countries, and, amid his delight, he began to inquire about these coins’ countries of origin and what conditions were like there. It was only natural for him to then want to learn about their history, and, since he was good at learning and did not find it difficult to read translations [into Literary Sinitic], he became ever more familiar with conditions in the West, ultimately giving up the old ways of Confucianism for the principles of civilization, becoming famous as one of the leaders in Western ways at the time.52

Fukuzawa’s retrospection describes how Ryūhoku’s burgeoning attention to foreign coins drove him to learn more about their countries of origin, but it is vague in dating this development. Contemporary documents, however, indicate that Ryūhoku was pursuing these interests enthusiastically in the months immediately before his dismissal from his shogunal post. By the fourth month of Bunkyū 3 (1863), Ryūhoku had created a fivevolume album, currently held at the Seikadō Bunko in Tokyo, featuring rubbings of the recto and verso of more than two hundred coins from Europe, the Americas, and Australia, as well as several colonies in Asia and Africa (fig. 4.4).53 In the album’s preface, he explained how the opening of Japanese ports to trade had brought a surge in “overseas” currency, by which he meant coins from beyond the Sinosphere: “I happened to acquire one or two specimens, and so I put them after those from Korea and Annam. At first I was quite dismissive and had no interest in them. But recently I suddenly came to regret this and thought that, even though they may not be countries with the same structures and culture as ours, nevertheless they are countries that lie between heaven and earth; they have sovereigns and vassals, fathers and sons. They eat and drink, live and die in just the same way.” The preface goes on to emphasize the seriousness of its author’s purpose in contributing to knowledge about the world. For each coin depicted in the album itself, Ryūhoku gave a brief description, deciphering inscriptions as best he could, identifying historical figures, and supplementing his account with information drawn from Xu Jiyu’s Yinghuan zhilüe and other published sources. Ryūhoku had obtained some of these coins from officials chosen to travel abroad on the shogunate’s first overseas missions in the early 1860s, and he occasionally added supplementary information gleaned from conversations with them or from their writings. As colleague Kikuchi Sankei wrote in a preface he composed for the work, the album allowed one “to apprise himself of the peoples and conditions overseas, to observe the historical development of those lands, and to assess their wealth and poverty, their strength and weakness.”54 Sankei’s preface is dated 06.19 of Bunkyū 3, less than two months before Ryūhoku’s dismissal, providing additional confirmation of Ryūhoku’s newfound focus on learning about the West and his desire to spread such awareness at this time. In a quatrain that Ryūhoku composed about his coin album in Bunkyū 3, he echoes the point made repeatedly in Sankei’s preface that one might use its concrete details to extrapolate larger conclusions: 題西洋各國貨幣帖

On an album of coins from various Western countries

指從西域及東陬

My finger traces from the Western regions to the corners of the East. Round coins made of three types of metal, like a little globe.

三品圓圓小地球

Fig. 4.4 Pages from Ryūhoku’s Kaigai kahei shōfu 海外貨幣小譜 (An album of overseas coins), 1:4b–5a. At right, Ryūhoku describes a silver polupoltinnik (quarter ruble) coin minted during the reign of Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), explaining the meaning of terms on the coin’s legend. He quotes exten­ sively from Xu Jiyu’s Yinghuan zhilüe, which describes Catherine as a “licentious” figure while also highlighting her promotion of learning and the arts. At left is shown a one-kopek coin minted by Nicholas I (r. 1825–55) in 1843. Ryūhoku notes that the prominent decorative initial on the coin’s face is the first letter of the monarch’s name, beneath which appears the numeral I. He goes on to cite the numismatic notes of his contemporary, the scholar Nishio Shōkei 西尾松渓, which explain that the Cyrillic letter Н corresponds to the Roman letter N. Courtesy of Seikadō Bunko, Tokyo.

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To establish equal tribute, who needs the efforts of Wenming? The wealth and poverty of each of the five lands is right before your eyes.55

The reference to Wenming in the third line is to the sage King Yu, who, as the Classic of Documents notes, traveled to the various localities of Xia dynasty China to assess their wealth or poverty and thereby determine the amount of tribute they should submit. Whereas Ryūhoku’s earlier poems that touched on Western subjects had somberly referred to figures from Chinese antiquity as universal standards by which to prove the inferiority of the West, this poem shows the absence of such a hierarchical polarity. Ryūhoku even had the latitude for a bit of humor, joking that the new method might save some time; simply looking at the relative qualities of metal used in the three types of coin (gold, silver, and bronze) would obviate Yu’s need to travel. Although Ryūhoku had grown up in a world largely structured by the canon of Literary Sinitic texts, his study of Western languages, his reading of treatises on world history and geography, and his collecting of foreign coins all brought realms beyond the Sinosphere closer to him. Terms like “globe” and “five lands” (referring to the five continents) in the above poem reflect his new interest in world geography, and one further indication of Ryūhoku’s expanded worldview is that, at the beginning of his diary for Genji 2, he inscribed the year using two other calendric systems: “West 1865; Qing Tongzhi 4.” He also started to head each daily entry with the day of the week written in English.56 As a teenager, Ryūhoku knew no one who had ever traveled abroad, but, by the 1860s, the outside world was steadily becoming something less abstract to him as several individuals with overseas experience on the shogunal missions to the United States in 1860 and Europe in 1862 appeared among his associates and extended circle of acquaintances.57 In the process of interacting with these individuals in the early 1860s, Ryūhoku’s world had enlarged, as it would continue to do even as he remained confined to his Edo residence.

Endless Ivy During his more than two years of seclusion, Ryūhoku’s home was a frequent gathering place for various Western scholars. Ōtsuki Bankei had been reassigned to Sendai in the winter of the previous year, but Katsuragawa Hoshū, Yanagawa Shunsan, Kanda Takahira, Mitsukuri Shūhei, and other students of Western subjects remained fixtures of Ryūhoku’s social circle.58 Ryūhoku had first associated with many of these individuals in the context of leisure excursions to Yanagibashi, and, even as he looked to them for guidance in undertaking his postdismissal program of diligent study, the mode of playfulness that had characterized their earlier interactions continued. One product of his exchanges with these scholars during his confinement is Itsumadegusa 伊都滿底草



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(Endless ivy), a collaborative work composed in fragments between 1865 and 1866.59 This miscellaneous collection of occasional writings in a vast range of styles and languages took shape over the course of the group’s numerous social gatherings, many of which found them in the company of geisha from Yanagibashi. Ryūhoku wrote an inscription at the head of the text explaining its title and suggesting something about its contents: “The reason this booklet is so named is that a certain person once offered the following reproach: ‘What is it that makes you all like this: so endlessly (kaku itsumade mo) fond of frivolous matters?’ Recollecting these words, I made them the title. Inscribed on New Year’s Day of the second year of the cycle [1865], in the Hall Where Spring Voices Are Faintly Heard, by the Master of Whose Garden.”60 Aside from the final graph, 草 (J. kusa; meaning “grass” but conventionally used as a metaphor for “writings”), the graphs Ryū­ hoku used in the title are unusual. The itsumade portion of the botanical term itsuma­ degusa, or “Japanese ivy,” is usually written with phonetic kana or with Chinese graphs that indicate its additional sense of “until when?” 何時迄, presumably a reference to the ivy plant’s luxuriant growth. Ryūhoku likely chose the Chinese graphs 伊都滿底 to write itsumade on the basis of their phonetic values, for all of them are commonly used Man’yō­ gana. However, considering the baroque word play that suffuses the text and the preface’s explicit declaration that its contents are “frivolous” or “empty,” there may be an additional level of humor here. Without straining the limits of plausibility too far, the remaining graphs could (somewhat imaginatively) be interpreted on the basis of their semantic value to convey a similar sort of defiant declaration: “this is all writing replete with baseness” or perhaps “writings of those who all occupy the bottom.” Whether or not such meanings were intended, it was a difficult and dispiriting time to be a scholar of Western subjects, with the shogunate’s fortunes at low ebb and sajō-oriented activists increasingly bold in their antagonism. From late 1863 through the summer of 1864, the Kantō area saw a full-fledged insurrection as militants placed unrelenting pressure on the shogun­ ate to honor its repeated commitments to close the ports. The shogunate’s attempts to renegotiate the terms of the treaties proved largely fruitless, with the Western powers demanding instead that it punish the domains whose men attacked foreigners.61 While this stormy antiforeign atmosphere raged outside, these scholars learned in Western languages gathered in Ryūhoku’s home to share in convivial camaraderie. Yet occasionally their disaffection at being underutilized surfaces in Endless Ivy. Consider an early passage in which several of them compose Japanese poems to answer the question of what each would do if given a tainin 大任: a “great task” or “impor­ tant duty.” Kanda Takahira’s waka begins the sequence: tainin o Do you intend to kudasu tsumori ka grant me a great task? tsumori nara If that’s your intent, ware mo sono ki de then I’ll bide my time hito gaman semu with that in mind

Ryūhoku was the next to contribute a verse, writing:

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tainin o If you are going to grant me kudasaba kudase a great task, then grant it! soremade wa Until that point, ware mo yururi to I’ll just take a hito neiri semu leisurely nap.62

The word tainin derives from the teaching of Mencius that, whenever heaven prepares to entrust a man with a great responsibility or appoint him to an important office, it first subjects him to a period of trial.63 Though Ryūhoku could not be certain at the time just how his own trial would end, the poem announces his readiness to endure this temporary idleness gamely and through its allusion to Mencius further suggests that he foresaw his own eventual return to an official post. As the prefatory statement indicates, Endless Ivy is largely a collection of ephemera; in later years, Ryūhoku would look back on the text and describe it as follows: “Endless Ivy; four volumes. When I was a young man, every time I would get together and drink with Yanagawa Shunsan, Katsuragawa Getchi [Hoshū], and the others, we would each take up a brush and write down things we had seen or heard, and this book is the detritus.”64 The phrase “take up a brush and write down” is significant, for much of the text’s humor relies on its visual impact, on particular scribal choices that could only be partially appreciated when vocalized. Many of the individual entries in the work are attributed, but the text makes such heavy use of pseudonyms and other forms of coded reference that it is often difficult to know who the author of any particular passage might be. As in the above example, the entries are often explicitly dialogic or collaborative, and frequently their humor turns on the punning incorporation of a geisha’s name. For example, the following two compositions are attributed to someone identified only by the name Hayaki 早樹: 呉竹のうきふし茂き世の中をよそにのみして澄る月影    Indifferent to the world’s ups and downs, many as the segments of dense black bamboo,    shines the clear light of the moon. 江東第一風流地 In this, Edo’s premier place of panache, ° 涼宵時擁竹夫人  In the cool of night, I occasionally embrace my bamboo wife65

Recall that a “bamboo wife” is a kind of wicker body pillow that people slept with in the hottest days of summer to facilitate ventilation. Given the emphasis marks that call atten­ tion to the word “bamboo” in both verses, not to mention the specifically sexual implica­ tions of the second verse, however, it seems almost certain that these poems were written by or about Katsuragawa Hoshū, who was known for being fond of a geisha named Otake (bamboo).66 Many of the names that the group members used were invented on the spur of the moment, as when a geisha’s expression of sympathy over Ryūhoku’s confinement prompts



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him to adopt her consoling words as a new moniker: “Kawaisō” 可愛叟, meaning both “poor thing” and “lovable old man.” He even composes an explanatory song: The song of Kawaisō 可愛叟歌 There was a geisha named Otori, and every time she would pour wine for me, she would say Kawaisō (“You poor thing”). I adopted it as an alternative sobriquet, but my comrades all raised questions about the name, and so I wrote this song to explain its sense. 有校書玉鸞者。每來侑酒。喚余可愛叟。余以爲別號。社友皆詰其説。乃作歌以解之

可愛叟可愛叟 問汝何縁獲此名 汝貌非有宋朝美 汝才亦能比長卿

5 10

饒舌罵人聞者熱 橫行悖世觀者瞠 可愛之實果安在 可愛之名真可驚 叟笑曰唯唯否否 公等那識此名成 天公一朝與奇疾 有脚三年不得行 滿城花柳長江月



傷心春雨又秋晴

15 20

小齋寂寞向誰語 濁醪三盃獨自傾 有人嫣然入我夢 喚我可愛豈無情 可愛叟可愛叟 長將此名送此生

“Lovable old man; lovable old man I ask you: how did you acquire this name? In your appearance, you lack the ‘good looks of Song Zhao’ In your talents, can you really be compared with Sima Xiangru? You prattle on insulting people, upsetting all who hear; You run wild, flouting the world, astonishing all who see. Wherein, pray tell, does your ‘lovability’ lie? This ‘lovable’ name of yours is truly shocking.” The old man laughed as he said, “Well, yes and no . . . How could you know how my name came to be? The Creator has presented me with a strange illness; I have legs, but, for three years, I have been unable to walk. Filling the city are flowers and willows, the moon shining on the long river; Paining my heart, the rains of spring and the fine weather of autumn. My little study is lonely, with whom can I talk? Three cups of clouded sake, I down them alone. A woman smiling coquettishly appears to me in dreams, Saying I am ‘lovable’: how sensitive she is!” Lovable old man, lovable old man May you live out a long life holding true to this name!67

The charges voiced in lines 5 and 6 seem to refer to the general lack of restraint (in speech, writing, and conduct) that was at the root of Ryūhoku’s dismissal. As he would in many of the poems in Endless Ivy, Ryūhoku refers in line 12 to “three years” of being “unable to walk,” although the order forcing him into confinement had long since lapsed by the time he wrote this poem (and Ryūhoku occasionally snuck off to Yanagibashi during these “three years” of alleged immobility). In any event, the proliferation of whim­sical appellations, the exploitation of their polysemy, and the ubiquitous punning on the names of geisha are examples of the exuberant lexical play that is Endless Ivy’s most consistent motif. Readers frustrated with the difficulty of deciphering this daunting text can take comfort in the fact that Kishigami Shikken, the late-nineteenth-century editor of Ryūhoku’s collected works, frankly conceded that there were many names and expressions in Endless Ivy that remained baffling to him.68 The meaning of some sections was probably clear only to the participants, and the text’s obvious cheer yet frequent

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opacity allows the reader to imagine the in-group atmosphere that enlivened their gatherings. In one sequence, for example, Yanagawa Shunsan and Ryūhoku exchanged essays on the meaning of their signature seals. Shunsan first explains why he uses a set of two characters that might be read “prone Mencius” before speculating about the meaning of Ryūhoku’s seal: My signature seal is “Gūdomen”—the two words: Good man. “Good man” is English. If you translate it into Chinese it means “good person.” This is what naturally sets me apart from the evil men of the world. I once saw [Suien] Sensei’s [i.e., Ryūhoku’s] signature seal. It is composed of three letters: C, B, and P . I imagine that C is an abbreviation for shēpuru (chaple, or butterfly), that B is an abbreviation for birudo (bird), and that P is an abbreviation for puromu (plum). The meaning is clear: he dominates these three beauties. グード メン

僕之花押。即 臥 孟 Good man二字也。臥孟者英語。漢譯爲好人物。蓋所以自別于世 シー ビー ピー

之 惡 漢 也。僕 嘗 認 先 生 之花 押。爲 西 彼 皮 三字、 ビー

ビル ド

B i r d

ピー

プ ロム

シー

シェー プル

cha ple

。按 西 爲 洒 孛 【 玉 蛾 】之

P l um

略。彼爲彼獨【于飛】之略。皮爲 𠱀啉【梅花】之略。是占三美之義明矣。69

It is clear from other usages in Endless Ivy that the “three beauties” of butterfly, bird, and plum do not refer simply to charming flora and fauna. Instead, Shunsan is joshing Ryūhoku about his fondness for three geisha: Ochō, for whom Ryūhoku had built the “Cottage of Expectation” in 1861 and who had become his third wife after Nagai’s 1864 death; Otori, over whom he and Hoshū had a longstanding rivalry; and a third named Oume. In the next installment, Ryūhoku mounted a mock defense against these allegations of flighty philandery. Shunsan had got it all wrong, he argued, explaining the real meaning of his CBP seal as follows: And in his [Shunsan’s] essay, he understands the letter C to be an abbreviation of chaple. This is truly a mistaken interpretation. He does not realize that C is an abbreviation of cloud. It means that like a cloud drifting along or water flowing by, I and the world shall have nothing more to do with one another.70 And, as for B and P, these are abbreviations for book and poetry. All of them, you see, are very literary and elegant things. シー シェー プル シー Cloud 且篇中解西 字爲 洒 孛 之略。實爲謬解。不知西 即 雲 之略。蓋閑雲流水與世相遺之意 ビー ピー B o o k Poe t r y 也。若彼與皮亦即書冊 詩學之略。皆係文雅之事矣。

Much of Endless Ivy proceeds in this light and extemporaneous vein over a range of languages and styles. In addition to Sinitic verses, there are several Japanese poetic forms, popular ballads, prose tales in the style of Tales of Ise, various bawdy parodies, and even texts in Man’yōgana.71 Although these men who gathered at Ryūhoku’s home all shared an interest in the potential applications of Western learning, Endless Ivy also demonstrates that there was more to their study of Western languages than simple utility. In his discussion of this text, Maeda Ai devotes special attention to an evening when Fukuzawa Yukichi, a leading advocate of “practical studies,” paid a visit to Ryūhoku’s home. Maeda focuses on the



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contrast apparent between the others’ silly playfulness and what he sees as Fukuzawa’s unrelieved seriousness.72 The entries to which Maeda refers open the second volume of Endless Ivy, from the summer of Keiō 1 (1865). In his guise as “The immortal of Wuchang who eats mist” 武昌喫霞仙士, Yanagawa Shunsan wrote the following entry and kyōshi about the evening: On a certain day in the sixth month, Kei Seisa [Katsuragawa Hoshū], Fuku Shii [Fukuzawa Yukichi], Kara Kayō [Kanda Takahira], and others gathered at the lotus flower pond of Suien [Ryūhoku]. The geisha Otori had a prior engagement and could not come. Another geisha called Ofuji came instead. In her ugliness, she resembled a monkey or perhaps a toad. The guests were all displeased, and so I wrote a quatrain on the topic. Seisa drew a picture on Mr. Shii’s fan. 六月某日、桂晴簑福緇衣唐華陽等、會于誰園之荷花池上、妓阿鳥有約不來、有小藤者至、 其醜似猴又似蟾、坐客皆不懌、因題一絶 晴簑作畫于緇衣氏之扇 三鞭美酒幾杯傾 談志開襟到二更 只是今宵有遺憾 不聽鳥語聽蛙聲

I tilt back several glasses of delicious champagne; I speak my mind, unburden myself, and already it is late. There is but one thing this evening that I regret: I do not hear the bird’s chirp, but instead the frog’s croak.73

Shunsan’s joke pivots on the word tori 鳥, meaning both “bird” and the name of the other­ wise engaged and thus absent geisha Otori.74 Ryūhoku did not weave the name of the slighted substitute geisha, Ofuji (wisteria), into his response, but instead picked up on Shunsan’s assertion that Ofuji looked like a monkey, retorting with a kyōshi composed from the woman’s point of view and using the female first person pronoun 妾 (J. shō; Ch. qie): 代妓小藤解嘲

Composed on behalf of the geisha Ofuji to dispel the scorn

誰君呼妾作獼猴 妾面肖猴何足憂

Gentleman, which of you calls me a monkey? Even if my face resembles a monkey, what is there to lament in that? Behold our magnificent “state of gentlemen”— In the past, it was not shameful even for a monkey to wear the crown.75

請看堂堂君子國 猴而冠者不曾羞

The “crowned monkey” is the sixteenth-century general Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was nicknamed saru (monkey) by his mentor Oda Nobunaga. That evening’s boozy badinage concludes with the following entry by Kanda Takahira, which notes the departure of Fukuzawa: This evening we had an exciting party. Everyone begrudged Mr. Fuku’s departure. We tried to force him to stay, but he wouldn’t permit it and left. 此夜盛會。衆惜福郎之歸。強留不可而去矣。76

Maeda observes that “Fukuzawa left no witty poems that evening. Perhaps he departed prematurely because he shrank from the crude revelry of the Endless Ivy society.”77 It may well be difficult to imagine the earnest and studious Fukuzawa enjoying such a night of

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goofiness. Yet given the interlinear note that follows, which Maeda omits in his quotation of the passage, the motivation for Kanda’s comments on “Mr. Fuku’s departure” and his “leaving” seems like nothing so much as another opportunity to make a silly pun. Though the key characters for “depart” and “leave” (歸 and 去) are underlined in Kanda’s above comment, it would be easy to miss his joke, especially if one were reading the text without considering double meanings in these graphs. Lest the reader overlook the witticism, Kanda takes pains to explain it: In Japanese pronunciation, “depart” and “frog” share the same sound [kaeru]; “leave” and “monkey” share the same sound [saru]. 邦音歸與蛙通去與猴通 78

It is almost as though this interlinear note is necessary to answer the reader’s question about why Kanda has made reference to Fukuzawa’s departure in the first place. Certainly Fukuzawa admitted to being a man who “lacked panache” ( fufūryū 不風流).79 Nevertheless, Maeda’s portrayal of him as a wet blanket, out of his element amid the wackiness of the Katsuragawa salon, is exaggerated. It was, after all, on Fukuzawa’s fan that Katsuragawa drew the picture that evening, and Fukuzawa was even known to compose Sinitic doggerel on occasion.80 In any case, Fukuzawa’s own reminiscences of the time he spent with Ryūhoku and others associated with the Katsuragawa salon make him seem less of an interloper than Maeda’s portrayal suggests. In his autobiography, Fukuzawa describes a party held at the home of Katsuragawa Hoshū’s brother, Fujisawa Shima-no-Kami, at which both he and Ryūhoku were present. Far from a sense of disconnect between the two, the impression one gets reading the account is of a sense of camaraderie instilled by the fact that they both pursued Western studies at a time when such an interest was uncommon, even dangerous. The covert gather­ ing took place in “1863 or 1864,” at a time when zealots threatened those who evinced any interest in the West: Fujisawa Shima-no-Kami . . . was a general in the army of the Shōgun and a great enthusiast for foreign ways. One day he held a party at his residence and invited several of the scholars of foreign culture, including Koide Harima-no Kami and Narushima Ryūhoku and other doctors of Dutch medicine. I was also there among the seven or eight guests. This was in the dangerous period when I did not venture out at all in the evenings. And I was taking particular care to keep my swords well polished. The party was very pleasant, and we kept on talking in spite of ourselves until it was nearly twelve at night. Then suddenly all the guests began to wonder about going home. Not that we had any guilty consciences, but in those days the scholars of foreign culture were all out of favor with the society at large. Our host rose to the emergency and hired a covered boat for us on the neighboring river. In this craft we were to be carried to various parts of the city along the rivers and canals.81

Fukuzawa’s reminiscences testify to just how perilous daily life in Edo was during these years when anyone perceived as being knowledgeable about Western subjects had to be on his guard.



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The binary that Maeda constructs to juxtapose Fukuzawa’s seriously engaged usefulness to Ryūhoku’s and the others’ playfully disengaged uselessness has influenced understandings of Ryūhoku since it first appeared in the mid-1970s. Although the framework has shed a great deal of light on the whimsical spirit that motivates writings such as Endless Ivy, if it is extended much beyond Ryūhoku’s period of confinement or used as a lens for understanding Ryūhoku’s career as a whole, Maeda’s framework becomes untenable. As will become clear in the final chapters of this book, the last decade of Ryū­ hoku’s life saw him emerge as an active journalist engaged in a program of “enlightenment” of his own, one that was, although not identical with Fukuzawa’s, not entirely antithetical to it either. It is only by ignoring Ryūhoku’s hundreds of essays in the Chōya shinbun and the Yomiuri shinbun from 1874 to 1884 that it becomes possible to view Ryū­ hoku and Fukuzawa as polar opposites.82 Moreover, one of the key figures who instilled in Ryūhoku a burgeoning interest in embarking on such a career in journalism was Katsu­ra­ gawa salon member Yanagawa Shunsan, whose regular translations of Dutch materials in the late Tokugawa period were some of the first publications to be produced as “newspapers” in Japan.83 How then can we account for the silly mood of Endless Ivy? Given the almost alarmist intensity of much of Ryūhoku’s poetry leading up to his dismissal, not to mention the ultimately fatal zeal with which he seems to have made his policy suggestions to the shogunate, it is ironic that he should produce a text that appears so lacking in engagement with contemporary affairs. Maeda sees it as evidence of a different sort of spirit—a love of play that contrasts with Fukuzawa’s practicality. But the silliness of the Katsuragawa salon members that is documented in Endless Ivy does not reflect their total severing of any ties to statesmanship. Regular salon participant Mizushina Rakutarō, for example, was called on to join a shogunal mission to England and France in 1865, and Endless Ivy includes the farewell poems with which salon members sent him off as well as references to the letters that he sent to Ryūhoku, Hoshū, and other salon members from Hong Kong and Marseilles.84 While Endless Ivy shows Ryūhoku having fun with Western scholars, it is also clear from his diary that he worked to acquaint himself with Western history and geography during these years. He attained a level of linguistic competence that enabled him to read and write in English and would shortly acquire basic proficiency in French. Rather than constructing a binary between practically minded individuals like Fukuzawa and playminded individuals like Ryūhoku, it is more instructive to focus on the links between their situations. Hino Tatsuo emphasizes the “convoluted mental state” shared by “Ryū­ hoku and the Western scholars” and writes that “behind the seemingly carefree crazy poems and prose gathered in Endless Ivy lies this kind of anguish.”85 As Inui Teruo points out, these budding Western scholars, many of whom had positions in the shogunate, were thwarted in their efforts to make use of the knowledge of the West that they had acquired, causing them to seek to release their frustrations through farce: In the time before the era of “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika), public hatred for Western scholars was intense, and furthermore the shogunate certainly did not treat them well. We must appreciate how they were forced into a state of confining spiritual

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oppression. This group had come into contact with new knowledge and was aware of con­ ditions in the world, and those among them who had ambitions felt that the prevailing political situation was absurd and even hateful. They had no freedom of speech, and under that condition they could not help but become frustrated. It is little wonder that this kind of “public indignation” in them became twisted and thus transformed into the kind of nonsensical diversion that we see in Endless Ivy. Ryūhoku’s situation could be said to be the same as that of these Western scholars. Moreover, it seems that for Ryūhoku, who had advocated Western studies when he served the shogunate as a Confucian scholar, the indignation he felt now toward the government and society would have been even more intense than it had been in the past because of the Western learning he had acquired [through his studies at the Katsuragawa salon].86

It has been a commonplace to see Ryūhoku as a “critic of bunmei kaika,” the program of “civilization and enlightenment” that the Meiji government and numerous public intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi promoted in the first decade of Meiji. Yet, as will become clear in the next chapters, Ryūhoku targeted not the idea of undertaking various multidimensional modernization efforts so much as the superficial way in which many Meiji leaders went about introducing such reforms. Inui’s characterization provides a useful counterpoint to the standard view of Ryūhoku as a stalwart bunmei kaika opponent by focusing instead on the similarities between Ryūhoku’s position during the years he wrote Endless Ivy and that of the Western scholars who went on to promote “civilization and enlightenment.”

Taking Up the Sword: Cavalry Commander in Yokohama, 1866–68 Ryūhoku’s burgeoning linguistic ability and his interest in and advocacy of learning more about the West were undoubtedly the main reasons that he was unexpectedly called back into official service in late 1865 for a high post in a new military training program. Modernizing its military forces had been a goal of the shogunate for several years, and recent conflicts with the southwestern domain of Chōshū, which had already begun to introduce more modern weapons and fighting techniques, had made the need to act seem more acute. Hoping to pursue this course, Army Commissioner Oguri Tada­ masa began to push the shogunate to seek more actively the advice and training of Western troops stationed in Japan.87 Exploratory overtures to the British in late 1864 met with only a lukewarm response, but, around the same time, the shogunate approached the French. At first the French displayed only marginally more interest, but by 1865, when Ryūhoku was appointed for his position, France had become more amenable to the idea and had entered into negotiations with the shogunate to implement various advisory programs. One of the key participants in these negotiations was Kurimoto Joun (1822–97), an official who had long been engaged in diplomatic work for the shogunate. Most accounts



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state that it was he who recommended Ryūhoku for the military post, but some sources instead emphasize the role of Matsudaira Norikata 松平乗謨 (1839–1910).88 Matsudaira’s biography in fact cites his selection of Ryūhoku as a shining testament to his ability to judge character.89 Yet, even if Kurimoto was not the sole party responsible for tapping Ryūhoku for the military post, he was a major architect of the various collaborations between France and the shogunate, including the instructional mission in which Ryūhoku participated. In his reminiscences, Kurimoto describes the state of the shogun’s military in 1865 and the part he played in arranging for a French instructional mission at the request of Oguri and another army official, Asano Nagayoshi 浅野長祚 (1816–80): They both told me: “. . . it was in Bunkyū 2 [1862], after all, that the shogunate decided to eliminate the old military system and copy the Western system to form a three-part army of cavalry, infantry, and artillery. Already four or five years have passed, but . . . the project has not yielded any results. Today, not only is there no single standard of regulations, but they have yet to even determine their goals. . . . We have come to you regarding our desire to invite army teachers from some nation, whichever is the most suitable, to introduce a systematic program to instruct our soldiers.” It was only at this time that I realized our country had a three-part military force in name but not in fact and, moreover, that it was in such a shambles and did not follow the system of any particular nation.90

After hearing Oguri and Asano elaborate the various spotty efforts to incorporate Western military techniques into the shogun’s forces, most of which had failed, Kurimoto pondered the question of which country could offer the best blueprint for a modern army. Based on his exchanges several years earlier with the French missionary Mermet de Cachon (1828–89), he concluded that, whereas the British might be the strongest naval power, the French were the best model for the shogun’s army.91 After this visit from Oguri and Asano, Kurimoto embarked on negotiations with Cachon and French consul Léon Roches to seek French expertise and oversight in the construction of a modern shipbuilding facility in Yokosuka and to invite a group of French soldiers to Japan for the sole purpose of training the shogun’s troops. Realizing that it would be essential to produce Japanese officers who understood French in order to ensure the success of these major projects, he also began planning the Collège Franco-Japonais, a French academy in Yoko­ hama that opened later that year.92 About half a year after Kurimoto became involved in the negotiations with Roches, Ryūhoku was named lieutenant colonel in the infantry on 09.28 and granted a stipend of one thousand koku: over three times the stipend he had received as okujusha.93 Understandably the appointment was a great source of joy, and the salon members threw a party for him at the residence of Katsuragawa Hoshū. Both Endless Ivy as well as Hoshū’s own notebook, Zuishin kanzu (Vade mecum), contain accounts of Ryūhoku’s promotion and the festivities held to commemorate it.94 In addition to Hoshū and Ryūhoku, Fukuzawa Yukichi, Mitsukuri Shūhei, Yanagawa Shunsan, and Ryūhoku’s biological brother Kusuyama Kōsaburō were in attendance, along with two of Ryūhoku’s favorite geisha, Oume and Otori.95 Many of the poems exchanged that evening are reproduced in Endless Ivy, including the following quatrain by Yanagawa Shunsan:

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Presented to Master Suien to congratulate him on his glorious advancement and also to give him a chuckle 呈誰園先生奉賀榮轉且博先生一粲 丹鳳啣書夜入夢 閑人忽作忙中人 從此紅桃白梅底 阿誰占斷柳橋春

A cinnabar phoenix, missive in its beak, entered your dreams one night; A man of leisure is suddenly transformed into a busy person. From this moment on, beneath the red peaches and the white plums, Who will dominate the springs in Yanagibashi?96

To reflect the august source of the summons, Shunsan replaces the wild goose, traditional bearer of letters in Sinitic poetry, with an auspicious phoenix. At the same time, he casually ribs Ryūhoku in the final couplet about how his departure from Edo will mean his separation from the geisha Oume (and perhaps one named Momo, or “peach”). In discussing the celebration, Katsuragawa family historian Imaizumi Genkichi calls it “a moment of victory for the group that had advocated the importation of Western culture.”97 Near the close of Endless Ivy is the following quatrain, in which the reinstated Ryūhoku frames his “three years” of idleness as a period of drifting on the social periphery: 白雲三歳護閑人 夜鶴曉猿伴此身 今日偶然入城市 風塵猶似往年春

A white cloud for three years, I have maintained the life of an idler; The cranes by night, the monkeys by dawn have been my companions. Today I happened to venture into the city, And found the dusty wind just as it was in the springs of the past.98

Although urban dust and the burdens of public life that it signifies are usually depicted as loathsome, the poet’s rejuvenation in the final line suggests instead a desired return to the familiar. In a sense, Ryūhoku had been not only redeemed but also vindicated, for he was now given a chance to be closely involved in putting into effect a modernizing program along the lines that he previously advocated. He would also have the opportunity to fulfill his youthful ambition to serve in a military post. A few months after taking up his new position in the infantry, Ryūhoku was reassigned to a post of the same rank in the cavalry.99 Unfortunately, his diaries from these years are missing, but, just before they were lost, Ryūhoku’s grandson Ōshima Ryūichi transcribed an entry from this period in his wartime biography: Ninth day of the first month. Sixth day in the cycle. Friday. Fine weather. I went on horseback to inspect the terrain of the military training grounds. I came back by way of Maita, Idogaya, and Hodogaya, and the Frenchman Buland served as my guide. Kawano Eijirō came to visit my guest lodgings. At night, I went to the lodgings of Asano Mimasaka-no-kami [Nagayoshi]. 正月九日 己巳 Friday



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晴 騎而觀練兵地形經蒔田井戸谷程谷歸佛人比蘭爲導河榮來訪客舍夜赴淺作州宿 100

Recently arrived at his new post, Ryūhoku was presumably getting the lay of the land in the company of Charles Buland, an officer in the French diplomatic corps. The site chosen for the training mission was the Ōta barracks, located at the foot of Mount Nogeyama.101 It had recently been enlarged and converted into a site for shogunal troops to train. Part of Ryūhoku’s responsibility was thus to oversee preparations for the French military mission, which arrived in Japan early the following year. Kurimoto Joun and Léon Roches were still hammering out the details at the time Ryūhoku assumed his position, but sending a military mission was a project that Roches had come to see as a good strategy for building stronger Franco-Japanese relations. In a letter to Foreign Minister Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys dated 16 February 1866, for example, he stressed the long-term benefits of cultivating amity between Japan and France, and suggested the importance of selecting men for the task who could command the respect of the Japanese.102 Though the shogunate had asked for a mission of thirty-four officers, Minister of War Marshal Randon reduced the number to fifteen, choosing Charles Chanoine (1835–1915) to lead the group. The roster of mission members was confirmed in October of 1866, and, on November 19, the group set sail from Marseilles. In honor of their departure, the following article appeared in the Le monde illustré, introducing the principal members and the mission for which they had been selected: Since the recent war fought by Commodore Jaurès [the Sino-French War in China], the government of the Taïcoun has steadily come to recognize the advantages it can derive—as much from a scientific and commercial as from a military point of view—through a solid alliance with Emperor Napoléon III. For quite some time now, French influence has had a positive impact on Japan. . . . The military mission sent to Japan is intended to begin instructing the troops, known as taïcounales, and organizing regular military hardware. The mission is composed of five officers and ten noncommissioned officers. The chief of the mission is a staff officer whose name is very well known from the recent campaigns in Africa and those in China. He is M. Chanoine, the young captain whose sangfroid and knowledge of the Chinese language helped him to avert the treachery for which the mandarins of Tongtcheou are so notorious. . . . [He has been assigned] four adjunct officers, one from each army, and ten noncommissioned officers. They are: M. Brunet of the artillery guard . . . M. Messelot of the twentieth battalion of light infantry . . . M. Descharmes, the brilliant officer of the imperial cavalry; and M. Dubousquet of the thirty-first regiment, who also served on the China expedition and who was asked to offer his services to the mission because of his knowledge of Asian languages.103

As the article suggests, the men chosen to go to Japan had all distinguished themselves in various overseas campaigns, and they undertook the Japanese mission with a similar dedication. Determined to make the most out of the more than fifty days they would require to travel from Marseilles to Yokohama, for example, they apparently conducted a series of lectures and study sessions en route. A letter Chanoine sent on December 26, 1866, to Marshal Randon indicates that Brunet gave lectures in geometry and applied

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mathematics, Messelot reviewed shooting practice, and Dubousquet introduced the men to East Asian history and geography.104 Dubousquet in fact went on to become an important negotiator and advisor for the new government, and Brunet’s earnest commitment to the task of aiding the “taïcounales” ultimately led to a court martial for the role he played in aiding their last-ditch resistance efforts in the War of Hakodate.105 Chanoine and the other mission members arrived in Yokohama on January 13, 1867 (12.08 of Keiō 2). In a letter to his uncle back in France, cavalry instructor Augustin Descharmes wrote approvingly of the facilities that Ryūhoku had helped to make ready, expressing his surprise at the series of lavish receptions, almost excessive in number, that awaited the mission. He also mentioned meeting Ryūhoku (Kinetarō) as well as several other officers eager to commence their training: I have found, to my great surprise, a hundred horses in stables that are quite well tended, fitted with saddles of French manufacture, and three officers who speak at least a little French and comprehend it very well. The chief of the cavalry is named Norori-ShinaKiritaru, and the premier lieutenant Narushima Shintaro. They gave me their cards on which were written French letters. Their intelligence is extremely vivid, and their polite behavior can only be compared with that of true gentlemen from past centuries. They are very enthusiastic to begin their studies. In general, the men range from sixteen to eighteen years, some mere children, but they are Samurai, men of two swords.106

Ryūhoku spent nearly two full years working as a military man in Yokohama. Though he enjoyed learning French and interacting with Chanoine and the other French officers, a number of factors, not the least of which was the Tokugawa shogunate’s precipitous slide toward collapse, combined to make the tripartite military training program end in failure before the year was out. In addition to the larger intractable problems facing the shogunate in its relations with the hostile southwestern domains, there was a disparity between the goals of the French military mission and those of the shogunal bureaucracy, a disconnect that thwarted Ryūhoku and the other mission participants’ efforts. At the same time, Ryūhoku also seems to have discovered during his term in Yokohama that, even under the best of conditions, he was probably not cut out to head the cavalry (fig. 4.5). In later reminiscences, what some of his former students remember most clearly about him was that he was always getting thrown from his horse.107 Even Ryūhoku self-mockingly confessed his equestrian shortcomings; one retrospective essay features an imaginary interlocutor who describes Ryūhoku’s service in the cavalry: “With your frail body you rode astride Arabian horses, the commander of the Dragon Battalion. Every day, you would train the armored cavalry. In three days’ time, you would fall off of your horse on three occasions.”108 What few poetic compositions do survive from this time in Ryūhoku’s life suggest a rift between his personal sensibilities and the military mission. Written in the second month of Keiō 3 (1867), the following quatrain is one of Ryūhoku’s most widely anthologized compositions:

Fig. 4.5 Futakida Nozomu 双木田臨, Kihei renpei no gazu 騎兵練兵之畫圖 (Image of cavalry training), 60 cm × 138 cm. The inscription indicates that the painting was made in the tenth month of Meiji 1 (1868). Courtesy of Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo.

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Training cavalry in the Ōta encampment; composed on horseback 太田屯營調馬々上所得 東風二月未歸家 老馬夕陽鞭影斜 憐殺野毛山下路 鐵蹄日々蹴飛花

Mid-spring winds blow from the east, but I cannot return home; Riding my old horse in the evening sun, the whip casts a sideways shadow. Pitiful the road beneath Nogeyama, where Every day iron hoofs trample fluttering blossoms.109

In many of his youthful compositions on martial themes, Ryūhoku had exhorted his friends to carry out their duties boldly, sacrificing personal considerations to the goals of the larger mission, but Ryūhoku gives voice here to the same feelings of homesickness about which he had cautioned them, with little solace offered by one’s role in a larger purpose. The poem’s final couplet suggests a conflict between the harsh rigors of military life and the poet’s sensitivity to the delicate beauty of the natural world. In one of the few later essays Ryūhoku wrote about his two-year stint as a military man, he recounted an incident that reveals a similar mismatch: When I headed the cavalry, I arranged with the commanders of the army’s artillery and infantry units to get up early one morning and for twelve or thirteen of us to go for a ride. We went to view the cherry blossoms along the Sumida River and rode as far as Mokuboji temple, at which point we turned our horses around and headed back to the base. A metsuke (the office of inspector, they had a great deal of authority in the shogunate) reported us to the senior councilors, saying that “the heads of the army units and several others set out on a leisurely ride; such monstrous misbehavior!” The accusation made things very difficult for us.110

As this anecdote suggests, the rigid discipline of military life does not seem to have accorded with Ryūhoku’s sensibilities. His health was apparently deteriorating during this period too, and his poor physical condition may have exacerbated the situation. Nevertheless, there were aspects of the post and elements of the new world it opened to him that Ryūhoku found agreeable. For one thing, returning to an official position that put him in contact with French advisors had further expanded the borders of his world. Later that year, Ryūhoku sent three poems to Katsuragawa Hoshū’s brother Fujisawa Shima-no-kami, the shogunal military officer whom Fukuzawa Yukichi described above as a “great enthusiast for foreign ways.” In spite of the personal discomforts of his physically compromised state, Ryūhoku portrayed himself as quite comfortably at home in a newly international environment: In mid-autumn of the fourth year of the cycle [1867], I suffered from diarrhea and wrote three octaves in bed, sending them to Fujisawa [Tsugikane], Shima-no-kami 丁夘中秋患痢、枕上賦三律、寄藤志州 南隣弄笛北隣箏 恰是中秋放好晴

My neighbors to the south play a flute and to the north a koto; And just now, the mid-autumn skies have cleared and are fine.



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病客不眠燈一穗 孤雁有信月三更 故人書寄倫敦府 新聞紙傳巴勒城 雲海茫茫天地濶 鏡圓能向幾州明

203

Yet taken sick, I cannot sleep, a single flame in the lamp beside me; A lone goose delivers a message, the moon at third watch. The letter comes from an old friend in London, A newspaper article talks of Paris. The sea of clouds above is vast and the world broad, I wonder how many places the round mirror shines down on tonight.111

As the heading makes explicit, the poems memorialize a somewhat unfortunate occasion, but they unambiguously show Ryūhoku’s new cosmopolitanism. Beginning with a survey of immediately local scenery in the first couplet—the snatches of koto music from next door, the clear autumn skies—the gaze of the poem steadily expands to encompass lands on the other side of the world by its final couplet. It was conventional to link the arrival of a letter from far away with the image of a wild goose, and here the specific referent is probably to a letter from one of the members of the 1867 shogunal mission to the International Exhibition in Paris or perhaps from one of the students of the Yokohama Collège Franco-Japonais who had recently been sent to study abroad in France.112 This poem allows us to glimpse not only the presence of new elements in Ryūhoku’s daily life, but a broadening of his very worldview. It suggests that Ryūhoku was already looking beyond the immediate issues facing the French military mission in Japan. In light of his future career as a journalist, the poem is also significant for indicating that the term “newspaper” had already become a thoroughly familiar point of reference for him. From its inception, the French military mission was hindered by a variety of obstacles. Charles Chanoine, who bore responsibility for the entire operation, felt that the training space allotted to the mission at Ōta was too small, the number of trainees inadequate, and the infrastructural support deficient.113 British consul Harry Parkes, who had for the most part maintained a more neutral position than his French counterpart, Léon Roches, was able to observe the progress of the Chanoine’s military mission from the sidelines. Reporting to his superior about a conversation he had with Roches just a month or two after the mission had begun, Parkes noted that the French officers’ frustrations stemmed from a con­fl ict between their ambitions and the role that the shogunate allotted to them: “In the matter of the military mission, Roches explained that the Japanese government seeks to place Chanoine and his officers in an ‘inferior position.’ . . . The Japanese idea appears to be that these officers should train such bodies of men as may be sent down to Yokohama from time to time for the purpose, while the object of M. Roches and the French officers is to undertake the entire reorganization of the Tycoon’s forces.”114 At Chanoine’s urging, the training mission was relocated to Edo in stages over the next few months, but the move did not ultimately solve the French mission’s problems. Some of the French officers’ dissatisfaction with the way in which the military training program had been treated by the shogunate is echoed in a poem Ryūhoku wrote that year when the cavalry relocated to Edo. In it, Ryūhoku praises the striking progress that the men in his charge had made over the course of their training only to underscore the disappointment he felt at the lack of recognition the program received from shogunal bureaucrats:

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On the twentieth day of the ninth month [October 17], I led soldiers and horses out of the Ōta encampment and into Edo; I was moved to compose this poem. 九月二十日率兵馬發太田營歸江城有感而賦

旭日旗頭旭日明 兵馬肅々發山營 劍鋩射人秋霜凛 銃聲連雲晨雷轟

5

一將有令萬卒應



宛似鐘鼓随撾鳴 命行則行止則止



靴尖齊揚歩々輕

10

憶起往年來此地 荊榛壓路屋宇傾



今日捄築功已峻



牙帳轅門氣崢嶸

15

來時兵員不為伍 去時整然大隊成 規律存心李廣訣



衣食同苦呉起情

20

將家方今張其武 焉知一夫亦干城 俗吏動執紙上議 寸衷未竭百謗生



男兒千載同感慨 竹帛當要身後名



秋風爽涼去飮馬



六合河冷水無聲

The morning sun shines down on the Rising Sun flag Soldiers and steeds solemnly depart the mountain camp. The blinding flash of light on a sword, crisp as fall frost A rifle report resounds to the clouds, like a roll of thunder at dawn. A single general’s command prompts the myriad soldiers to respond Like bells and drums sounding when struck. If ordered to “March!” they march, if ordered to “Halt!” they halt The tips of their boots rise in unison, their steps brisk and light. I think back to when they came here: Brambles and hazel weeds covered the road, the buildings dilapidated. Now that the task of clearing and packing the land is complete, The fierce shogun’s banner and the camp’s gates stand imposingly. When they first came, the soldiers could not form ranks; Now they leave in perfect order, a great battalion born. Discipline lies in the mind, not in rules—that was Li Guang’s secret; In equipment and rations, I shared their bitterness, learning from Wu Qi. Elite generals may boast of their own martial skills, Unaware that each and every man can help defend the land. Petty officials are apt to pursue their paper disputations; Still unable to show our sincerity, we suffer a hundred calumnies. Men have endured these feelings for a thousand years; One can only aspire to leave his name in the pages of history. The autumn winds bring a soothing cool as I lead my horse to drink; The Rokugō river runs cold, its waters flowing in silence.115

Ryūhoku portrays himself as having followed the models of two exemplary Chinese generals, but his focus lies not in their battlefield exploits but rather in their attitude toward the men serving under their command. As recorded in the epigraph to his biog­ raphy in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, Li Guang was a general admired by his subordinates for not giving “petty orders.” Similarly Wu Qi’s biography in the same text tells of how he eschewed the finer treatment that his office permitted in favor of sharing the same equipment and rations as his men. In the poem’s first half, the poet



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boasts of having employed these principles to transform a ragtag group of men into a disciplined fighting force. Yet even these successes are lost on the “petty officials” of the latter half, who exasperatingly abandon the program prematurely. Even after the program had relocated to Edo, it encountered a new set of problems. Efforts to recruit new soldiers did not proceed as hoped, especially as the outbreak of war seemed increasingly imminent, and it was also difficult to integrate men who had received different forms of training into cohesive units. In addition, they were short on adequate arms, the treasury was tapped out, and the French-trained military officers even encountered armed opposition from local farmers when they commandeered new training grounds on the periphery of Edo.116 Yet whatever difficulties Ryūhoku and the others involved in the Yokohama training program had faced in coping with the strictures imposed upon it paled in comparison to the tumult unleashed by the dramatic events that followed rapidly over the next few months. Far away in Kyoto, and thus largely removed from the counsel of his Edo advisors, the shogun Yoshinobu (1837–1913) decided on 10.14 to accept a proposal from the domain of Tosa to relinquish the authority with which the Tokugawa house had been entrusted by the emperor for over 250 years. Although Yoshinobu probably saw this as a means to preserve not only the holdings of the Tokugawa house but also its preeminent position over the domains, within half a year the era of Tokugawa rule was unambiguously over in fact as well as in name.117

Burying the Sword: Ryūhoku and the Meiji Restoration On 12.09 of Keiō 3 (January 3, 1868), less than two months after Yoshinobu’s cession of authority to the emperor, Ryūhoku resigned his post as colonel in the cavalry, citing illness. It was, in fact, the same day that Yoshinobu took the further step of resigning his position as shogun, but reliable reports of the shogun’s surrender in Kyoto would not reach Edo for another several days.118 What Edo did know about on the day of Ryūhoku’s resignation, however, was the outbreak of a rebellion in its own backyard, as Satsuma vassals who called themselves “the Satsuma vanguard of the imperial army” were fomenting an uprising in the Kantō region.119 Only the latest in a series of disturbances around the shogun’s capital, this new intelligence, coupled perhaps with ominous rumors from Kyoto, must have made the situation seem hopeless to Ryūhoku. Yet, whatever part these events played in prompting Ryūhoku’s resignation, the autobiographical essay that Ryūhoku wrote shortly after the end of the Tokugawa era, the 1868 “Bokujō inshi den” (Biography of the Sumida River Recluse), focuses instead, like the poem above, on his initial successes and his ultimate frustration in achieving his aspirations as a commander: In the autumn of his twenty-ninth year [1865], he was suddenly chosen to be lieutenant colonel in the infantry. He was given a stipend of one thousand koku, such that his house had never enjoyed. That winter, he became lieutenant colonel in the cavalry and recommended the training of the cavalry by the French. Receiving an order to this effect, he set up a base

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in Yokohama beginning the next year and oversaw the training of troops. Both the construction of the base and the supervision of the three branches of the army were in his hands. He became very familiar with the French instructor Chanoine. In the summer of his thirty-first year [1867], he was promoted to the post of colonel in the cavalry and his stipend was increased to two thousand koku. That autumn he was ordered to assume responsibility as commissioner of the cavalry. Though he had established himself with a brush and inkstone, he was profoundly stirred by the tide of the times and focused his utmost attention solely on the army. In the end, however, he became upset that his ambitions were thwarted, fell ill, and resigned his position.120

In an essay he wrote several years later, Ryūhoku was only slightly more explicit about his resignation of the post and how he spent the days following it: In the fourth year of the cycle [1867], because of various things I was thinking, I resigned my post in the army and was without a position for twenty days. At the time there was nothing for me to do, and, since I had nothing to feel ashamed about, I hired a boat from Izumibashi near my private residence and went to the Hashimoto-tei on Yanagishima. It being the first time I had gone on such an excursion in three or four years, the delights were considerable. When I came back that evening, I heard that soldiers had suddenly been deployed that morning at the suggestion of Oguri Kōzuke [Tadamasa] and others. They burned down the domain residence of Satsuma and apparently killed several domain men. I was astonished.121

Ryūhoku refers here to the attack on the Satsuma daimyo’s official residence in Edo that took place on 12.25 (January 19), a plan that had been devised by French military advisor Captain Jules Brunet as a punitive measure against the southwestern domain.122 Maeda Ai suggests that Ryūhoku’s claim of “astonishment” is disingenuous and that he probably resigned his post specifically in order to escape the imminent chaos.123 Yet, as the poems quoted above indicate and as Ryūhoku’s emaciated appearance in contemporary photographs suggests, his claims of “illness” may not have been simply a pretense. In the above passage from the biographical essay and in several other writings, Ryūhoku emphasizes his friendship with Chanoine; it cannot have been an easy choice for him to step down, as the letter, written in English, informing Chanoine of his decision shows (fig. 4.6): To Mr. Shanoine I have a honour to writ the letter to you, I announce it to you that I had returned my duty of cavalier to the government today, I am glad of it because my weak body is unsuitable to a army, but am sigh of it because my place shall be to keep at a distance from you, I hope to you that you will give a unchanging friendship to me, and especially wish that you will rais [raise] diligently the army of the government, Among all the officers is many fool and obstinate, they will drow [draw] always your anger. I hope that you educating them with a bearing mind and **** [post? heart?] to finish your great object. I shall see you and speak my expectation in a few days, K. Naloushima

Fig. 4.6 Letter from Narushima Ryūhoku to Charles Chanoine. Courtesy of the Christian Polak collection.

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Ryūhoku may not have predicted it at the time, but he would have the chance before long to renew his ties of “unchanging friendship” with Chanoine when the two reunited in Paris. Yet Ryūhoku’s days of service to the Tokugawa had not ended with his resignation. Within days of the attack on the Satsuma residence, the shogunate, divided between its base in Edo and the group of advisors gathered around Yoshinobu in Kyoto, peremptorily converged on a new course of action; they would go to war. The battle of Toba-Fushimi was fought in the southern outskirts of Kyoto over the course of four days from 01.03 to 01.06, and the shogunal forces were soundly defeated. The defeat did not, however, settle the question of what would happen to the Tokugawa clan and its holdings. Ryūhoku was still on sick leave as the vanquished shogunal forces were making their retreat, and his 1868 autobiographical essay notes the twist of an ending that came in the form of a final tour of duty: He lay down in his house for just thirty days, and then, in early spring of the fifth year of the cycle during the Keiō era [1868], he was promoted to commissioner of foreign affairs, received the title of lower fifth rank, and was appointed Ōsumi-no-kami. At the end of that month, he advanced to the vice-director of the treasury and joined the core of government advisors. This was already after the defeat at Osaka. He encountered a time when the treasury was depleted, and there must have been things he strove to do. The details are unknown.124

Ryūhoku’s service to the shogunate thus ended with a rush of unexpected promotions to a series of high offices, and, in a letter to his biological brother written at the time, Ryūhoku could only express his bewilderment at the “extraordinary promotion, like a dream, what could have brought it about?”125 In the wake of the devastating defeat at Toba-Fushimi, Yoshinobu raced back to Edo, where opinion was divided into two main groups: those who supported resistance, even if it meant enlisting foreign assistance, and those who supported the course of reconciliation. Occupying a position at the highest advisory levels, Ryūhoku was undoubtedly involved in these debates, but it is difficult to know what plans of action he might have proposed since his diary from the period is missing. Some sources portray Ryūhoku as an advocate of resistance; Ryūhoku’s friend, occasional poetry partner, and fellow shogunal official Tanabe Taichi states that he discussed with Ryūhoku the idea of having Yoshinobu’s younger brother Akitake, who had met with Napoléon III while studying in France, succeed to the headship of the Tokugawa house, thereby securing French support.126 Fearing that such a course of action might well touch off a bloody conflict in Japan between France and England, Ryūhoku rejected the idea, but Tanabe states that Ryūhoku offered his own alternative proposal: to employ former Civil War soldiers from the United States, at least one of whom he had encountered in Yokohama and found to be itching for a fight.127 Tanabe and Ryūhoku apparently discussed these schemes with Yoshinobu during the latter’s period of retreat at Ueno’s Kan’eiji temple, only to have the proposals rejected. Perhaps reflecting Ryūhoku’s evolving thinking as events rapidly shifted, other sources portray him instead as a supporter of appeasement and conciliation. Yoda Gakkai (1833–1909), a Sinologue and theater critic who was Ryūhoku’s neighbor and friend



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during the Meiji period, recalled how Ryūhoku himself claimed to have “vehemently argued the infeasibility of” the plan to enlist foreign military aid in order to stop the imperial army’s advance.128 Citing Gakkai, Maeda Ai observes: “Ryūhoku’s role as an overseer of the tripartite military training program placed him within the inner circles of the Francophile faction, and, if Gakkai’s testimony is accurate, it would mean that in these final stages of the shogunate’s collapse, Ryūhoku was at the furthest remove from Oguri Tadamasa and Chanoine, both of whom refused to abandon their fervent prowar stance to the bitter end.”129 As further evidence that Ryūhoku had embraced the strategy of appeasement, Sasaki Hidejirō reports one account stating that Ryūhoku fervently remonstrated with Yoshinobu in the early spring of 1868, urging him to go immediately back to Kyoto and apologize to the emperor: “You cannot stay sequestered here in Ueno; you should immediately go to the capital yourself and make a formal apology. . . . Only by doing this can you assuage popular sentiment in the Kantō region and calm unrest in Edo.”130 Sasaki states that in the third month, just as imperial armies were rapidly approaching Edo, Ryūhoku heroically defended Yoshinobu against suggestions by some of his advisors that the shogun should commit suicide to atone for the outbreak of war, exclaiming: “We have enjoyed the benevolent favor of the Tokugawa family for the last three hundred years. And now, when our lord is facing this time of crisis, you propose to save your own skins by having our lord make amends for the transgression with his life. Even if you could do this, it would be the height of disloyalty and the epitome of impropriety. Perhaps some of you can bear to go along with such a scheme, but I for one cannot.”131 Yet some scholars dismiss Sasaki’s account; Inui Teruo, for one, calls it just a “good story.”132 The 1868 essay “Biography of the Sumida River Recluse” sheds little light on the details of Ryūhoku’s final months in the shogunate. Written in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration, it could only end with a question mark. The future was opaque to Ryū­ hoku when he wrote the biography, but, if nothing else, he knew that his service to the Tokugawa was over. Yoshinobu’s self-imposed sequestration at Kan’eiji constituted a turning point, one that spurred Ryūhoku to resign completely from the shogunate; the biographical essay concludes: After the shogun went into confinement in the Eastern Terrace [Kan’eiji], he [Ryūhoku] returned his stipend of three thousand yen, resigned his post as director, and went into reclusion. At the time he was thirty-two. It is said that he yielded his house to his adopted son Nobukane and became a commoner. As for what will happen from now on—whether he will become a beggar, or join the ranks of officials, or die of starvation in the fields, or be reborn in the Pure Land paradise—it is difficult to say.133

These are the last words of the main text of the biography, but perhaps the best-known phrase associated with it, one cited in almost all scholarship concerning Ryūhoku, comes from the appended note that follows, an evaluative statement by “the Master of Foolish­ ness” 大痴公 that concludes: “The Recluse once said, ‘Having resigned the post that allowed me to serve the lord whose favor I have enjoyed for generations, I have truly become a man useless to the realm. For this reason, I do not wish to do anything useful.’

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Perhaps it is so. Perhaps it is so.” Just as Ryūhoku wrote this biography about himself in the third person, he may well have written this evaluative statement too. Yet, before we take the declaration of uselessness to be definitive and irrevocable, it is important not to forget that this statement is presented as hearsay. There is also a tension between the uncertainty of the biography text proper, which at least holds out the possibility that even after his resignation the Recluse may serve the government again, and the appended note, which forecloses that option. As the essay notes, Ryūhoku resigned not only his position but his samurai status as well. To accomplish this, he divided the Narushima household in two, passing the headship and its shizoku status to an adopted successor, while taking a status of heimin (commoner) for himself and later passing this household to his biological son Matasaburō 復三郎 (1865–1920). For the samurai branch, Ryūhoku adopted the son of a family he knew from his military service, renaming him Nobukane and establishing him as the household’s tenth patriarch.134 Nobukane was sickly, however, and died that winter.135 Ryūhoku’s eldest daughter, Hata, for whom Nobukane had been adopted, was still just a girl at the time of his death, and, in the following month, Ryūhoku adopted Osada Ken­ kichi 長田謙吉 (1854–1910), another man whom he knew from his work in the military program, to be her husband and his successor. As the house’s eleventh patriarch, Naru­ shima Kenkichi traveled to Shizuoka with many other Tokugawa vassals, securing a post teaching French at the Shizuoka Gakumonjo. In a poem Ryūhoku presented to this successor to the Narushima family legacy in 1871, he reflected on his career and dispensed some fatherly advice:

示兒敏二十韻

5 10

阿敏年十八 苦學自不已 朝誦周漢文 夕讀法英史 喜爾咿唔聲 終日上我耳 雖然螟蛉子 風貌與我似 乃翁有一言 殷勤以告爾 吾昔僅弱冠 内筵列學士

15

才鋭而氣昂 不屑雕蟲技 致君聖賢域 管樂豈敢擬



更畫挽回策 兵馬學郭李 宿志竟蹉跎

Twenty rhymes to give my son Bin My dear Bin, you are eighteen now; Your diligent studies know no end. In the morning, you recite Zhou and Han prose; In the evening, you read English and French history. I take pleasure in your voice reading aloud, The sound reaching my ears all day long. Although you are a “mulberry child” that we have adopted, Your appearance is similar to mine. Now your father has something to say— Something to tell you with all candor. In the past, when I was just capped as a young man, I took my place in line with the scholars in the shogun’s inner chambers. Sharp in my talents and roused in spirit, I would waste no time carving insect miniatures. Rather I’d conduct my lord to the domain of the sages, But how could I dare compare myself to Guan Zhong and Le Yi? I also designed a scheme for recovery, In military matters I studied Guo and Li. But my long cherished ambition ultimately foundered,



Withdrawal and Resurgence

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百事泰之否 國亡又家破 此身獨未死 鱣鯨江湖心



奈制於螻蟻

25 30

故舊及門徒 反復難得恃 始知氣與才 誤人本如此 家儲無儋石 窮盧對爾耻 不學彭澤叟 呶呶責其子 願爾師古人

35 40

孜孜惜寸晷 葆光仍蠖屈 平素戒汰侈 世間多猜妬 動難免謗訾 乃翁既一悔 爾其無再矣

211

And everything went from order to chaos. The state fell and our family was destroyed, And I alone am left alive. Great eels and whales may yearn to swim in rivers and lakes, But they are bound to the whims of meager mole crickets and ants. Old friends and even disciples too, Might turn on you—they cannot be relied on. It is only now that I understand how high spirits and talent Can lead a man down a mistaken path. Without the merest amount of food in the larder, I stand ashamed before you in this humble home. I won’t take after old Tao Yuanming, Who shouted blame on his sons. But instead hope that you will take the ancients as your teacher, Work hard and don’t fritter away your time. Conceal your gifts, like an inchworm recoiled, And be on guard against profligacy. The world is full of treachery and envy, And it is often hard to escape careless slanders. Your father has already had his regrets, Don’t you make the same mistakes.136

Ryūhoku appeared confident that diligent efforts, wide-ranging study in traditional Chinese as well as new Western subjects, and circumspect personal conduct would insure a bright future for Kenkichi, and it seems he was right. A little over one year after writing this poem, Ryūhoku found himself reunited with Kenkichi in Paris, where each of them was actively preparing for a future career. Kenkichi was there to study, and Ryūhoku’s connections through various Foreign Ministry officials helped to insure his son’s smooth adaptation to life abroad. On his return to Japan, Kenkichi went on to a career in the Meiji government, serving primarily in the Ministry of Agriculture, a post that even had him traveling to international conventions on occasion.137 The civil servant tradition continued in the next generation as well, with Kenkichi’s son Tomoichi 朝一 (1877–1926) becoming a diplomat to France and later a consular secretary in Saigon. Although Ryūhoku was an enthusiastic supporter of his son Kenkichi’s advancement through the hierarchy of officialdom, serving the new Meiji government was not an option that he sought out for himself. Having resigned his shogunal office in 1868, Ryūhoku vacated his official residence. Shortly after quitting, he relocated with his family to a home in the Mukōjima district. His career as a shijin having come to its apparent end, Ryūhoku embraced the bunjin frame, naming the new residence Shōkikusō, or “Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage,” a reference to Tao Yuanming’s “The Return.” In a kanbun essay he wrote at the time to dedicate his new home, Ryūhoku explained the significance that its name held for him:

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When a man makes his home somewhere, it is generally true that, if there is something about the place that does not allow him peace of mind, then even a splendid garden and a spacious house do not qualify as beautiful. But, if there is something about it that allows him peace of mind, then, even if it is a humble house, he can still take pleasure in dwelling there. In the past, I had a wealth of places to reside . . . but now these have all become the possessions of others. I lost my post, and I lost my home. Taking my wife and children, my zither and books in hand, I came to live here in a cottage among the willows on the eastern bank of the Sumida River. The cottage faces the Ushi shrine, and Akibayama rises behind it. There is a garden to cultivate and a pond in which to fish. In addition, there are a few kei of paddy lands, and this will be enough to cover a year of tax payments. In the middle, I built a small house. I can sit and gaze at the flowers along the bank. And, as for the wind in summer, or the moon in autumn, or the snow in winter—there is none of these that is not lovely. At first, the cottage had no name. Remarking on how beautiful the snow, flowers, wind, and moon were from the cottage, people urged me to name it in accord with such spectacular natural scenery. I did not agree, however, and so I named it for pines and chrysanthemums. This is taken from “The Return.” Long ago, Tao Yuanming resigned his position upon the demise of the Sima family, abandoned his salary, and went to spend the remainder of his days in agrarian rusticity. Tao was a model gentleman. Although he did not engage in debates about current events, we can understand his decision not to serve and to go into reclusion instead. Yet Tao was not one who strove to insure his future fame by turning his back on the world and forsaking human society in an ostentatious display of his own uncommon fidelity. He simply lived out his days, enjoying what he found enjoyable. I believe that what was pleasing to Tao’s heart could very well also be pleasing to mine. I will make what I have written here the account of this cottage. Ninth month, Meiji. The fifth year of the cycle [1868], the Recluse Ryūhoku.138

As Hino Tatsuo argues, Ryūhoku was surely aware that Tao Yuanming had resigned his office while the Jin dynasty was still in existence; his portrayal of Tao as having “resigned his position upon the demise of the Sima family” should thus be understood as a very particular, if not tendentious, reading.139 It enabled Ryūhoku to suggest a parallel between the demise of the Jin dynasty emperors (the Sima family) and the end of the Tokugawa, and thereby to link his own status to that of Tao Yuanming as fellow vassals of deposed dynasties. This amounted to an invocation of Tao Yuanming significantly different from that seen in Ryūhoku’s earlier works, for no longer was the focus so much on the intrinsic pleasures of Tao Yuanming’s reclusive lifestyle, but rather on a new assertion of his dynastic loyalty. It was around the same time that Ryūhoku wrote the autobiographical essay “Biography of the Sumida River Recluse” that I have already quoted from several times in this and the previous chapter. In it, he looked to Tao Yuanming’s example again by modeling the account after the latter’s famous “Biography of Master Five Willows.” A whimsically evasive tone characterizes Tao Yuanming’s autobiographical “biography,” a refusal to provide definitive information about its subject clearly captured by its opening line: “Who the master is, no one is certain, nor is his name clear. There are five willow trees beside his dwelling, and thus he is called ‘Master Five Willows.’ ”140 Though Ryūhoku did identify himself by name, he nevertheless remained vague about certain key details in his autobiography, most notably his refusal to explain what



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had led the shogunal authorities to dismiss him from his post in 1863. In copying the intentionally oblique style of the “Biography of Master Five Willows” and in using the name “Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage” for his new dwelling, Ryūhoku was claiming a further connection to Tao Yuanming. Although we may assume that Ryūhoku’s figu­ ration of Tao as a vassal of a deposed dynasty was inevitable, Xiaofei Tian has pointed out that there is “nothing in Tao Yuanming’s own poetry and prose that suggests such loyalist sentiment” and argues that the loyalist reading paradigm emerged under the influence of Song Neo-Confucianism.141 Even while asserting the loyalty reading more strongly on this occasion, Ryūhoku also clearly stated that Tao Yuanming had not resigned because he wished to make an “ostentatious display of his own uncommon fidelity.” To put it differently, although Ryūhoku’s emphasis in invoking Tao Yuanming temporarily shifted here to emphasize the loyalty reading, his yearning for and celebration of the unfettered personal freedom Tao Yuanming was held to have enjoyed in his postresignation life did not entirely vanish from the picture, as the reference to the “zither and books” in the passage above reveals. Ryūhoku’s figuration of Tao Yuanming as a loyal vassal would give way to new configurations in later years. As discussed above, even when he wrote his biographical essay, he had not entirely rejected the possibility of official service. As his enthusiastic support for Kenkichi’s government career reveals, he did not regard it as unseemly for the successor to the Narushima lineage to serve the Meiji state. Moreover, Ryūhoku’s ambivalence about the prospect of his own official service by no means indicated his decision to withdraw from society, nor did it indicate his indifference to public affairs. One of the first things he did in the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration was to take up his brush to comment on contemporary events in a new medium. In the year after the Restoration, he produced a handwritten “newspaper” called Tōkyō chinbun (Strange news of Tokyo), a newsletter that he sent occasionally to his brother-in-law Nagai Shuzen in Shizuoka.142 In the dozen or so brief items that composed each issue, Ryū­ hoku focused mainly on present economic difficulties, depicting the ironic reversals of fortune that the Restoration had visited upon former shogunal vassals and occasionally poking fun at the extravagant behavior of the new government’s officials. Only two editions of the newsletter are extant, from the spring and summer of 1869, but the last of these ends with the promise of future issues, which may or may not have materialized.143 Although this short-lived “newspaper” was extremely rudimentary, it nevertheless gave Ryūhoku an outlet for sharing his witty observations on contemporary affairs. When the new government declared that coins and paper notes would henceforth circulate at the same value, for example, Ryūhoku wrote about the ensuing confusion and the mass arrests of money changers who violated the new trading rules: Although the penalties meted out are severe, since paper and metal are naturally of different values, commodity prices suddenly shot up 25 percent. And as soon as that happened, the rice dealers and others were berated, caught in a pinch where they could neither sell nor buy. What a pitiful situation! But, upon considering the matter carefully, it seems to me that, since our country is the land of the gods (kami no kuni), it is simply fate that has made our hard currency become paper (kami), and thus we ought to resign ourselves to it.144

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Word play such as this as well as satirical poetry complemented Ryūhoku’s reporting of current events in Tōkyō chinbun. Throughout his journalistic career, Ryūhoku tended to devote his attentions more to perfecting his literary style than to simply gathering and transmitting the news. Nevertheless, even in these early experiments he attempted to cover a wide range of recent events, addressing not only current economic conditions, but also the latest developments in Hakodate, where fighting between the imperial army and Tokugawa loyalists continued. As Inui Teruo has pointed out in his study of Tōkyō chinbun, although the actual information reported may have been erroneous on occasion, the paper is nevertheless surprisingly accurate given the restrictions imposed on the press and the paucity of sources available to Ryūhoku at the time. However limited its audience, the newspaper demonstrates Ryūhoku’s keen desire to seek out this information and convey it to others.145 Moreover, the production of the Tōkyō chinbun confirms the appeal that the newspaper format had come to hold for Ryūhoku, whose interest in the medium had germinated through contacts with Yanagawa Shunsan and others during the years he spent confined to his home “reading Western books” in the mid-1860s. As chapter 5 will show, Ryūhoku would spend the next several years in search of a viable career path in the new world of Meiji, but his ambitions to serve as a journalist were already beginning to take shape. Indeed, Ryūhoku’s earlier reportage on Yanagibashi demonstrates his keen interest in chronicling contemporary society and offering wry commentary on the issues of the day; just a few years later, he would explicitly compare the work to a “newspaper.” In the immediate term, however, Ryūhoku needed to find a means to sustain his livelihood.146 He first entered business with his friend Katsuragawa Hoshū, establishing a pharmacy in Asakusa that sold medicines prepared according to family recipes. Hoshū’s daughter recalls that her father had little business sense, and the venture did not last long.147 In another commercial endeavor, Ryūhoku ran an “overseas goods” shop in Bakurōchō between Meiji 2 and Meiji 3 (1870). As literary scholar and anti­ quarian Awashima Kangetsu 淡島寒月 (1859–1926) later reminisced, the shop offered a motley array of items that instilled in him an early interest in the Western world, including an illustrated edition of Paradise Lost and a portrait of Isaac Newton.148 This business was not particularly successful either, and, according to Nagai Kafū, it was closed within a year. As Ryūhoku groped his way in the first years of Meiji toward a new avocation, he was compelled to come to terms with the icons of the profession to which he had thus far dedicated himself. Consider the following poem from the beginning of Meiji 3 (1870):

庚午元日

婦子朝來掃甑塵 蕭條破屋又新春 賣書賣劍家貲盡 幸是先生未賣身

New Year’s Day in the seventh year of the cycle Since dawn, the wife and kids have been sweeping our dusty hearth; As another spring comes to our desolate broken-down house. Sold the books, sold the sword—all our property gone; One thing to be glad about: I still haven’t sold myself.149



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In many of Ryūhoku’s earlier poems, the images of “sword” and “book” function as symbols of two contradictory paths of service between which Ryūhoku struggled to strike a balance. With this poem, he portrays himself as having abandoned both, uncertain what the future would hold, financially strapped, and sustained only by his family and his sense of personal integrity. Ryūhoku returned to the image of the sword, if only to bid it farewell, in a poem he wrote the following year. As a whole, the piece shows Ryūhoku taking stock of his brief stint of military service, coming to terms with the ignominy of a bloodless defeat, and ultimately making peace with what was now but a relic of a distant past:

古劍篇



昔從法國謝能彎 學兵三年在橫灣



書生忽當鞭弭任

5

牙營築起野毛山 古劍三尺提在手 飛龍隊頭鳴金鐶



揮之作風按作雨 縱陣橫陣方又圜



氷刄未濺一滴血

10

西風吹破函嶺關 城下兵散降幡白



忼慨負劍隱市闤



屠兒爭笑淮陰怯

15

長大帶劍却羸孱 敗將自古不語勇 寒鋩空照忸怩顔 君不見鏌邪干將天下利



靈物豈久在人間

20

風雨廷平津頭水 一化龍去不復還

Poem on an old sword Long ago, under the tutelage of the Frenchman Chanoine, I studied military operations for three years on Yokohama Bay. A student of books suddenly assigned to work with whips and bows, We built an imposing military garrison in Nogeyama. With my three-foot old sword in hand, I stood at the head of the Flying Dragon Troops, my swordrings whistling. With a wave, winds would blow; in my grip, rains would fall; Horizontally, then vertically, I arrayed the troops; in squares, then circles. Yet before even one drop of blood had been spilled upon its icy blade, The Western Winds blew, breaching Hakone Barrier. The troops fled the castle, and the flag of surrender shone white. Sadly indignant, I shouldered my sword and became an urban recluse. The butchers outdid themselves in scorning the cowardice of Huaiyin; Tall and big, wearing a sword, and yet weak and timid.150 From antiquity, defeated generals cannot speak of bravery; The tip of my icy sword vainly illuminates my shamed face. Behold the unparalleled sharpness of the Ganjiang and Moxie swords. How could these divine objects remain long in the world of mortal men? Wind and rain at the Yanping Crossing; Once they turned into dragons, they did not return again.151

From the very beginning of this work, one of the last he composed on the topic, the sword is far removed from the poet. It is explicitly an “old” sword, and the recollected times when the poet made use of it effectively are set deep in the past, rehearsing for a conflict that never came. Having been vanquished, the poet is further alienated from the sword

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as it comes to serve only as a shining reminder of defeat. Like Han Xin, the hulking yet cowardly Marquis of Huaiyin, the poet describes himself outfitted with a weapon he never managed to use. The reference in lines 17 through 20 is to a pair of fabulous swords named after the famous swordsmith Ganjiang and his wife Moxie. According to the story in the Jin shu, these swords are separated and one of them lost for many years until by chance they are brought together again; reunited, the swords transform into dragons and disappear. Like this pair of otherworldly swords, by the end of Ryūhoku’s poem, his old sword has also mysteriously transformed itself only to vanish completely, revealing perhaps that it was a phantasm all along.

Ch a p t er Fi v e

Wandering

T

he collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate understandably brought initial dejection and uncertainty to Ryūhoku and the other men who had devoted their lives to serving it. They trod a variety of paths in the first years of Meiji, many struggling to balance their ties to their former lord, the last shogun Yoshinobu, with the realities of his new status and the tenuousness of their own. Not only were the drastically diminished holdings of the Tokugawa insufficient to support them all, but Yoshinobu had also been branded an “enemy of the court” on the eve of the battles that broke out with imperial forces in early Keiō 4 (1868). In that year, thousands of Tokugawa vassals relocated to Fuchū, the castle town of Suruga province, a Tokugawa stronghold since Ieyasu first claimed the area in the late sixteenth century. It was there that Yoshinobu would spend the rest of his life in exile. Having renounced the title of shogun, he had become little more than one daimyo among many others, but he made an additional expression of contrite obeisance to the court by retiring from this position as well and appointing his five-year-old adopted son, Iesato (1863–1940), as the successor to the Tokugawa house and the daimyo of Sunpu domain. Though the castle town had been known as Fuchū 府中 for more than two centuries, this long-established name was abandoned shortly after the Tokugawa influx in order to eliminate its associations with the homophonous fuchū 不忠, meaning disloyal. The birth of “Shizuoka” in 1869 is thus one sign of the extent to which issues of allegiance weighed on the minds of Tokugawa vassals as they came to terms with recent events and tried to define a place for themselves in the new Meiji order.1 Although Shizuoka was one major destination for former vassals, many Tokugawa men remained behind in Edo, now renamed Tokyo, where they attempted to establish themselves, with varying degrees of success, in new enterprises. In a sense, Ryūhoku took both of these courses when he divided the Narushima house into two branches. The young men he adopted to become his samurai successors, first Nobukane and then Kenkichi, relocated to Shizuoka, while Ryūhoku himself became a commoner and remained in the capital, trying his hand at

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the short-lived commercial ventures mentioned in the previous chapter. Some other Tokugawa vassals refused to accept defeat and instead headed north to Ezo with the forces of Enomoto Takeaki to establish a Tokugawa bastion there, one they hoped would become the basis for developing the island. Still other Tokugawa vassals cast their lots with the new Meiji government, accepting offers of employment in its administration, a strategy that Tokugawa officials overseeing the shift of power in fact encouraged as they sought to reduce the house’s obligations. Within a year or two, the Meiji government began zealously recruiting former Tokugawa officials, having realized it could benefit from their experience and expertise.2 Ryūhoku received several such invitations, including a proposal that he serve in the national legislative body known as the Chamber of the Left, but official service was not a path he would pursue again. In choosing to resign his position when the situation in Edo was rapidly deteriorating, Ryūhoku managed to steer clear of subsequent hostilities attending the TokugawaMeiji transition. Yet, as in the case of other former shogunal officials, taking stock of his life thus far and carving out a viable place for himself under the new regime would demand his focused attention over the next several years. Ryūhoku had renounced his samurai status, but reflecting on his past service as a shogunal vassal persisted as a par­ ticularly acute concern for him, in part because some of his former colleagues were slain in the skirmishes that erupted in Edo in 1868. Other friends of his, including Asano Naga­ yoshi, Enomoto Takeaki, and Yaguchi Kensai, would be taken prisoner when their shortlived “Republic of Ezo” was defeated by Meiji government forces in the summer of 1869.3 Although Ryūhoku resolved to bury his sword in the aftermath of the Restoration, even as he took up his brush to write the handmade Strange News of Tokyo newspaper, he demonstrated his continued attentiveness to the fates of his former colleagues by reporting on the battles that raged in the north. Several of Ryūhoku’s poems from the first years of Meiji likewise show him trying to reconcile himself with the sacrifices of those who had chosen a different course of action from his own. In the spring of 1871, for example, he addressed some of the most famous martyrs of the Meiji conflict, a group of young Aizu men known as the Byakkotai, or “White Tiger Brigade.” The northern domain of Aizu had been one of the few to fight steadfastly alongside shogunal troops during the Boshin War. Though its motives were not necessarily so uniformly pro-Tokugawa, the domain came to be a symbol of loyalty to the shogunate, and the dramatic suicide of the White Tiger Brigade became an emblem of selfless fidelity.4 The incident took place in the heat of battle, when the young men are said to have seen flames engulfing Aizu castle; taking it as a sure sign of defeat, they committed mass suicide: A song on seeing a picture of the suicide of the sixteen men from Aizu 觀會津十六士自盡圖引

丹青傳世豈小技



不畫草木與蟲豕 誰歟當日描斯圖

Who says that painting something for future generations is a trivial craft? This is no painting of plants or insects. Who painted this picture back then?

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5

使人毛髮森然起 滿幅淋漓血髑髏 殺氣鬱勃溢於紙 吾初一展眼忽眩 神定恍然重諦視

10 15

會津壯士十六人 金子仔細注姓氏 齡自十五至十七 無復弱冠以上子 想起孤城苦戰日 一夫能當萬虎兕 砲裂丸殫刀亦折 屠敵食肉可以止

20

瀧崎高峙辨天山 先公墳前來拜跪 彼蒼憒憒渾不省 臣等報恩一死耳 仰天慟哭白日昏 熱血濺地地如燬



烈節唯見北地王



生虜豈折睢陽齒

25

白骨可朽名不朽 知君嚇嚇上青史



怪鴟夜啼風雨淒 林樾慘澹鬼燐紫

30 35

今日敵愾氣益旺 冤魂無人寄一誄 桀狗吠堯何足辜 其臣各爲其主死 吾作長歌吊英靈 蘋蘩聊以享一祀 嗚呼對斯圖而不流涕者



毋乃不忠不義士

It makes the viewer’s hair stand on end. The whole scroll drips of bloody skulls. A murderous air wells up and spills out of the paper. When I first unrolled it, my eyes were dizzy at once As I grew calm, I was transfixed and pored over the image again. Sixteen young men from Aizu Their full names inscribed in fine gold letters. In years, they range from fifteen to seventeen, None of them had yet been capped and come of age. Recalling the lone castle on the day of that bitter battle, Each man had the might of ten thousand ferocious beasts. Rent by cannon, struck by bullets, swords broken in two, They’d stop at nothing short of butchering the enemy and eating his flesh. At Mount Benten soaring high above Takizaki, They come to kneel before the graves of their daimyo. The heavens have grown dark and pay them no heed, Only with their deaths can they repay their obligations. Looking heavenward, they cry out as the sun sets; Their boiling blood spills on the ground, scorching the earth. Their fierce integrity can only be seen in the Northern prince; How could they bear being taken alive and grinding their teeth in curses? Their white bones may decay, but their names shall not; I know that your magnificent feat will adorn the pages of history. The cry of a horned owl at night amid a fierce storm, In the dark shadows of the forest, the fire of your spirits glows violet. Today the spirit of enmity grows more intense by the day; And for your wronged souls, none will offer an elegy. How can we fault Jie’s dog for barking at Yao? Each vassal dies for his lord. I make this long song to mourn your heroic spirit, And with it submit my meager offerings. Ah, if there is anyone who faces this picture and doesn’t shed tears He must surely be a disloyal and unrighteous man.5

Hino Tatsuo observes that the new Meiji government would still have been concerned with the potential threat posed by the northern domains at the time Ryūhoku composed this poem. For this reason, he suggests that the discrepancies between the details of the incident as presented in the poem and the actual facts might be the result of controls still in place over free dissemination of information regarding the matter.6 Though it may be

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the result of such strictures, it is nevertheless noteworthy that the focus of Ryūhoku’s poem is not so much on the rightness of the pro-Tokugawa cause in the Boshin War as it is on a more universal virtue of loyalty. In posing the question in line 31, Ryūhoku constructs a metaphor in which the young Aizu men are vassals of the infamous tyrant Jie, whereas their opponents in the imperial army are represented by the sage ruler Yao. According to the logic of the poem, regardless of the lord’s objective worth, the loyalty of his men is to be commended. Indeed the poem seems to say that anyone, no matter which side of the conflict he may have been on, can be moved by the values of loyalty and righteousness the Aizu men exemplified. In a more personal vein, Ryūhoku wrote the following retrospective poem around the same time, recalling his friend Oda Fusanosuke (d. 1868), with whom he had worked in the Yokohama French military training program: In the fifth month of the fifth year of the cycle [1868], my friend Oda Fusano[suke] died in battle at Shinobugaoka. When the memory happened to recur to me I wrote this poem. 友人織田房之戊辰五月戰死干忍岡偶憶及之作此詩 碧血曾埋此水濆 看蓮人吊夜臺雲 池呼不忍岡呼忍 也似當年我與君

True-blue your blood, interred in these watery banks; I gaze at the lotuses and mourn; clouds shroud your grave tonight. A pond called “Unbearable” and a hill of “Forbearance” Fitting somehow—it’s how you and I were back then.7

The conflict to which Ryūhoku refers here is better known as the “Battle of Ueno.” In the second month of 1868, while Ryūhoku was still serving as a core advisor in the shogunal administration, around two thousand diehard shogunal loyalists formed an army called the Shōgitai to resist the new imperial government.8 Three months later, shortly after Ryū­ hoku had resigned his last post, the imperial army engaged the Shōgitai near Kan’eiji, the temple where the former shogun Yoshinobu had gone into seclusion before his removal to Shizuoka. Ryūhoku’s poem pivots on the multiple significances of the names of the pond and the hill at this battle site: shinobu means “to endure,” and shinobazu means “not to endure.” It is in this sense that the poet finds the names “fitting,” for, whereas he somehow bore the demise of the Tokugawa and the rise of a new regime, his friend Oda could not. Moreover, shinobu also has the sense in Japanese of “to remember” or “to think back on poignant past events or departed persons,” and again it is Ryūhoku who stands at the bank of the pond three years later, recalling his deceased friend. As discussed in chapter 4, it was in the early autumn of Keiō 4 (1868) that Ryūhoku named his Mukōjima residence the “Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage” in honor of Tao Yuanming’s “The Return” and wrote his “Biography of the Sumida Recluse” in the style of the latter’s “Biography of Master Five Willows.” But even by the fifth month of that year, just as Oda and his comrades were fighting with the imperial forces in the Battle of Ueno, Ryūhoku was beginning to settle into this new role as urban recluse. In the first of two quatrains that he wrote that month, Ryūhoku frames his residence as a little “Tuqiu,” referring to an area in modern Shandong where the Lord of Yin retired after withdrawing from office in the eighth century bce:

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Miscellaneous poems from the fifth month of the fifth year of the cycle 戊辰五月所得雜詩 竹笠芒鞋小莵裘 逍遙遊耳後何求 人間到處青山在 那地能埋閑髑髏

Bamboo hat, straw sandals, and my own little Tuqiu. I just stroll about free and easy, what more could I seek? “In this world, wherever he goes, ‘blue mountains’ there will be”; Where will make a good burial place for these idle bones?

The items of clothing mentioned in the poem’s first line would be appropriate for a journey, but the “free and easy” wandering described in the second line seems rather confined in its scope. In this poem’s third line, Ryūhoku quotes a phrase almost verbatim from a well-known contemporary quatrain by the priest Gesshō, one that became a spirited anthem for other “men of high purpose” in the mid-nineteenth century who sought to establish themselves within the shijin frame of scholarship and official success: 男兒立志出郷関 學若無成不復還 埋骨何期墳墓地 人間到處有青山

One born a man stakes out his ambitions and leaves his hometown behind; Unless his studies are complete, he shall not return. Why should he hope to have his bones buried in a graveyard? In this world, wherever he goes, there will be blue mountains.9

While echoing Gesshō’s grand transcendence of mundane matters, Ryūhoku’s poem shifts the temporal focus to the end of the statesman’s career, long after he boldly declares his aspirations and fearlessly leaves behind the safety of home. Whereas the speaker of Gesshō’s poem mentions the grave only to exclaim the irrelevance of its ultimate location, the speaker of Ryūhoku’s poem begins to ponder the question in earnest. That Ryūhoku distinctly relegates the dynamism of Gesshō to his own past is further underscored by the word “idle” in the poem’s final line. If this first quatrain announces a turning away from shijin concerns, the second quatrain Ryūhoku composed on the occasion expresses his embrace of bunjin pursuits, specifically the orientation toward sensual and literary delights savored by devotees of fūryū: 如今何處説功名 天地若眠人若醒 綠酒紅裙花月雪 風流幸未負先生

In times like this, where can I speak of my deeds, my fame? The world is as though asleep, its inhabitants as though intoxicated. But green wine and red skirts, blossoms, moon, and snow These elegant diversions (fūryū) fortunately have not betrayed the Master.10

The poet’s reference to himself as “Master” in the fourth line brings to mind Tao Yuanming (Master Five Willows), and the third line’s “green wine” also recalls Tao Yuanming’s couplet:

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清歌散新聲 綠酒開芳顏

To the high song we sing fresh words Green wine relaxes the youthful face.11

As the reference to red-skirted geisha in the same line of his poem suggests, Ryūhoku would spend a fair amount of time in the first years of Meiji renewing his attention to the demimonde. Yet, rather than disappearing entirely into the private pursuit of amorous diversions, he used the opportunity to write a second installment of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, one with even sharper social commentary than the first. Perhaps the second line’s portrayal of the world as “asleep” and of society as “intoxicated” subtly suggests that, even at this stage, when Ryūhoku appeared most ready to sever his ties with the world, he still had not entirely given up on the project of rousing it to sober wakefulness through his writings. This chapter focuses on Ryūhoku’s quest to discover a place for himself in the new Meiji world, an aim evident in the above two poems’ invocation of the dual frames of shijin and bunjin, the affiliations that had given structure to the scholarly and literary pursuits of his youth. With the exception of the interval of apparent “idleness” between the decade he worked as a Confucian scholar and his final years of service to the Tokugawa as a military officer, the shijin frame had consistently dominated. In these first years of Meiji, however, we can glimpse his re-orientation toward the realm of the bunjin and its ostensibly disengaged literary pursuits. Yet, just as he had spent his earlier “three years of confinement” acquiring the knowledge that would ultimately enable his return to office, so too did Ryūhoku manage over the next several years to seek out the experience and skills that eventually allowed him to recast himself in a new role. As these two quatrains indicate, part of this quest involved sustained self-examination. In one of the most intensively introspective poems he would ever write, Ryūhoku looked back on his life in Meiji 4 (1871), tracing the route he had followed over the previous thirty-four years and trying to find out where it would take him next:

對鏡嘆



客窓秋氣動敗蕉



曉捲疎簾立清飈



筐裏古鏡老猶冏

5

團團似月在中霄 掲向窓前照我影

10

一驚我影忽蕭條 癯如仙鶴洞中立 寒若殘柳霜後凋 憶起距今廿餘年 爺孃膝前徒舞跳 猩猩扮戯獅子蹲 此鏡當時照垂髫

Lament while facing the mirror Fall comes to the window of these lodgings, rustling the old plantain; At dawn, I raise the thin curtain and take in the refreshing breeze. Cradled in its case, the antique mirror is old but still bright; It is round like the moon looming in the heavens. I hang it in front of the window, and take a look at my reflection; A shock to see my image, so barren now. Gaunt as an immortal crane standing in a cave; Cold, like an emaciated willow withered after a frost. I recall a time, more than twenty years in the past; At the knees of my parents, I pranced and hopped about. Performing the Shōjō play, doing lion dances— Back then, this mirror showed my youthful hanging hair.

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15

爺道汝貌類乃祖 小禽意應期遷喬 孃道汝身傾而健



成立幸能承宗祧



烏兎不停椿萱枯



負米百年恨迢迢



駑才謬登廟堂側

20

殊遇奚圖超群僚



此鏡亦在香案上 朝衣日日整冠貂



黑頭未及而立歳



揚揚自愧意氣饒

25

金甌一缺天地變 沈淪作客迹飃飃



紅顔朱袍渾一夢 憔悴今日伍漁樵

30

鏡兮鏡兮爾休嘆 人老人死器不銷 古鏡雖古猶似舊 憐我餘生太蕭蕭

My father said: “You look like your grandfather; We can expect this little bird to find a high perch.” My mother said: “You should exert yourself, but stay healthy; When you grow up, you will be able to carry on the family tradition.” In the ceaseless passage of days and months, the cedar and daylily withered; Having hoped to “bear rice” for a hundred years, my grief is endless. Though of meager abilities, by some accident I ascended to the court; Who foresaw that I would emerge from the crowd, recipient of special favor? This mirror also stood atop the fragrant table then, And every day I would don my court robes and adjust my cap plumes. A high official with my hair still black, not yet thirty years old: Embarrassing now, yes, but triumphant then was my abundant spirit. Yet once the golden bowl cracked, everything changed; Fallen on hard times, now a wanderer buffeted here and there. My youthful face, my colorful robes, all just a dream; Dispirited, today I take my place with the fisherman and the woodcutter. Mirror, mirror, do not sigh— People grow old; people die; but ornaments do not decay. Though the antique mirror is old, it looks as it always did; Pitying me, whose remaining years are so desolate.12

Using the motif of an antique mirror that remains constant while the poet matures and the world undergoes ceaseless change, Ryūhoku scrutinizes by turns his relationship to his family’s tradition of scholarship (lines 9–16), his career as an official (lines 19–24), and his present reduced circumstances. Line 25 draws on a term from Chinese dynastic histories that refers to a state’s collapse. Coupled with the iconic images of reclusion in the subsequent lines, the phrase resonates with the “vassal of a deposed regime” framework through which Ryūhoku read Tao Yuanming’s reclusion in the essay he wrote to dedicate his “Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage.” But the term “wanderer” in line 26 had an additional significance in Ryūhoku’s life during the first years of Meiji, for this was a period when he traveled extensively, both domes­tically and abroad, exploring places known for their natural beauty or historical sig­ nificance, encountering unfamiliar manners and customs, and engaging with local scholars and literati. If Ryūhoku undertook a metaphoric journey inward from 1869 to 1874 to discover a place for himself in the new order, it was an odyssey made possible through these several literal journeys outward. Ryūhoku’s wanderings began with a six-week trip

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to Okayama, his first opportunity ever for extensive travel, and continued with shorter excursions to visit former students and fellow former shogunal officials in the Kantō area. By far the most significant travel he undertook during these years was his tour around the world, from 1872 to 1873. In the course of all of these journeys, Ryūhoku composed poetry extensively and left behind numerous travelogues documenting his experiences and providing his lyrical responses to the scenes and individuals he encountered. These writings reveal him experimenting with several literary styles, honing his craft as a writer, and taking the steps that would in various ways enable him to embark on his career as a journalist. As the handmade newspaper from 1869 and his earlier reportage about the demimonde both show, Ryūhoku’s journalistic inclinations were longstanding, but the most important result of the journeys he made during the first seven years of Meiji was to transform his inchoate interest into a specific and concrete avocation.

Journeys Within While the extant volumes of Ryūhoku’s diary testify to his fondness for making frequent leisure excursions around Edo and enjoying day-trips to its environs in the mid-1850s, he had little opportunity to travel more widely until the Restoration brought his official career to an end.13 The first three years of Meiji saw him take advantage of his newfound freedom to explore Japan, as he noted in the account he made of his first extended journey: “In the past I submerged myself in the sea of official service and was unable to gaze upon the mountains and rivers of the realm. I could only know about famous sites from their appearance in poetry and illustrations. Since my withdrawal, I have been able to travel to various sites as I please.”14 Ryūhoku visited sites of scenic beauty and historical importance, including several utamakura, places singled out for particular celebration in the Japanese poetic tradition.15 He reunited with several old friends and also made new acquaintances, interacting with regional literary figures and recording his impressions of local customs. In his future career as a journalist, Ryūhoku would publish well over a dozen travel essays, and the three travelogues that he wrote to record these earliest journeys gave him the opportunity to develop the approach that would help him secure his later renown.16 These three works show him experimenting with a variety of different literary styles and techniques, but they are also significant because they reveal his evolving perspectives on Japan’s present and his own place within it. The first of these travelogues is titled Kōbi nikki (Diary of a journey to Bitchū) and records a journey Ryūhoku made in the winter of Meiji 2 (1869) with Togawa Seisai, his late wife Ms. Nagai’s brother-in-law, who had been staying in Ryūhoku’s residence in the wake of the Restoration.17 When Seisai made plans to travel to his hometown in Seno’o, Okayama, he invited Ryūhoku to join him, giving Ryūhoku the chance to explore not only Okayama, but Shikoku, Kobe, and Osaka as well. After departing Tokyo, the men first stopped in Yokohama, where Ryūhoku met up with Yasuda Unpeki, the Katsuragawa salon member whom he had enthusiastically sent off to pursue his English studies there with a “Western visitor” six years previously. In his earlier farewell poem, Ryūhoku had

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urged Yasuda to study English diligently on his behalf, but clearly the poet had made substantial progress on his own in the intervening years, for he now seized the opportunity to ask Yasuda to order him “a copy of Napoléon’s biography, newly imported from abroad.”18 During his brief stay in Yokohama, Ryūhoku also met with several former col­ leagues, and his memories of the shogunate were further stirred when he paid a visit to the studios of two pioneering Japanese photographers: “I stopped by the shops of Uchida Kyū[ichi] and [Shimooka] Renjō, where I purchased some photographs of old friends to comfort the weariness of travel. Among them was a photograph of Enomoto Takeaki, which made me deeply saddened.”19 Ryūhoku knew Enomoto Takeaki, formerly a high official in the shogun’s navy, from his time as a cavalry officer in Yokohama, but the grief he now experienced on purchasing his old friend’s portrait came from the fact that Enomoto had become the new government’s prisoner-of-war just a few months earlier, when his holdout forces were defeated in the Battle of Hakodate. Ryūhoku and Seisai departed Yokohama aboard an American steamship, the Oregonian, bound for Kobe. If Ryūhoku thought back on the spirited depictions of American steamships he had made as a young man, no trace of these recollections appears in the poem he wrote to commemorate the voyage: On the seventeenth day of the tenth month, I board an American steamship and leave the port of Yokohama 十月十七日乘米國蒸氣船發金港 風怒海門霜氣澄 滊船萬里去如鵬 長天一望毫無物 皎皎當檣大月昇

Winds roar at the ocean’s gate, clear in the crisp frosty air; The steamship flies ten thousand leagues like the great Peng bird. Gazing out far on the horizon, nothing meets the eye; Just the giant moon rises brightly over our mast.20

Comparing the ship to the massive Peng bird mentioned in a Zhuangzi parable, Ryūhoku focuses on its speed and his own excitement as its passenger, responses he expresses in the other two quatrains he wrote in the course of this first steamship journey.21 Travel by steamship was still a novel experience at the time, and, while these poems show Ryūhoku marveling at the new technology, Diary of a Journey to Bitchū also consistently depicts Ryūhoku at ease with and knowledgeable about the Western world, as his predeparture purchase of the Napoléon biography suggests. No sooner has he arrived in Okayama, for example, than he reports going to observe soldiers training in Western military tech­niques, and the travelogue also notes his conversation with the proprietor of a foreign goods shop about circumstances in Yokohama.22 A week later, while staying in a seaside inn awaiting a ship bound for Shikoku, Ryūhoku notes how the innkeeper’s son asks him about conditions in the West and how the detailed comments he offers in response keep them talking long into the night. In the course of narrating his interactions with the innkeeper and his son, however, Ryūhoku also writes about how their conversation leads him to recall his own status as the retainer of a deposed military clan. On hearing that the innkeeper’s house, which traces its descent from a prominent local warlord, “perished during the Ashikaga period,

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leaving its descendants to scatter and take up farming and commerce,” Ryūhoku writes that he “could not help but be stirred emotionally, foolish though that is.”23 As the implicit parallel to his own situation as well as his purchase of Enomoto’s portrait both show, Ryūhoku’s travels in western Japan presented him with numerous opportunities to reflect on the shogunate’s collapse and his own fallen position. In some cases his presence at a historically important site triggered such musings, as when he sees Osaka Castle, the base from which Yoshinobu commanded the Tokugawa forces that were defeated in the battles of Toba and Fushimi in early Keiō 4 (1868). In the poem he composed on viewing the castle, Ryūhoku laments the fall of the Tokugawa, but his focus is on Yoshinobu’s ignominious decision to desert his stronghold and flee to Edo under cover of darkness, leaving his men to surrender the castle peacefully the next day: 片帆東去大牙傾 一夜麕奔十萬兵 客子訴誰何限恨 凄風吹涙浪華城

A little boat escapes to the east and the great banner falls; In one night, thousands of soldiers descend in hordes. To whom can the wanderer address his endless grief? Fierce winds blow his tears outside Naniwa Castle.24

On returning to the site nearly a month later, Ryūhoku contrastively recalls the “grand strategies” of another former resident of Osaka Castle, the sixteenth-century unifier Hideyoshi, and notes being “moved to shed secret tears at recent events.”25 Apart from such places of recent personal relevance, historical sites celebrated in classical literature attracted Ryūhoku’s sustained attention during this tour. As chapter 2 argued, when choosing assigned topics for the shikai gatherings he held in the 1850s, Ryūhoku often directed participants to compose Sinitic poems concerning specifically Japanese themes, even encouraging them to engage with particular works of Japanese poetry. Episodes from Tales of the Heike had been a particularly important focus of Ryūhoku’s attention at these events, and the journey to western Japan offered him the opportunity to see sites associated with the death of Atsumori, the battle of Yashima, and other famous episodes from the medieval war tale. Though it was his first time visiting these sites, Ryūhoku’s knowledge of the Japanese literary canon meant that he was traveling through a textually familiar world, and he made a point of commemorating the historically and poetically resonant sites that he encountered. This feature of the diary is apparent even before Ryūhoku disembarks the Oregonian at Kobe. In describing the steamship’s early morning approach to its destination, he writes: At dawn, I saw the mountains of the province of Izumi to our right and Awajishima to our left. The scenery was like a landscape painting, and I heard the cries of the plovers in the distance. na ni takaki Having come now Awajishima yama to the famous hills kite mireba of Awaji Island, mukashi nagara no I hear the plovers crying, chidori naku nari just as they did long ago.

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The waka that Ryūhoku composed on the occasion appeals to the classical literary associations of the site by alluding to a famous poem on the crying plovers of Awajishima included in the popular thirteenth-century Hyakunin isshu (One hundred poems by one hundred poets).26 In a similar manner, when he arrives in Shikama, Ryūhoku wonders if the market he sees before him is the same one celebrated in court literature; on reaching Ushimado, he frames his description in terms of a well-known Japanese poem about the site; and, when he reaches Takasago, he describes the pines for which the place is famous. Yet, in paying homage to the textual tradition in his commemorations of these sites, Ryūhoku’s responses were not simply formulaic, but both personal and present-tense. In the last instance, for example, he concedes that the Takasago pines are indeed lovely but asserts that, given their present appearance, they must have declined somewhat over time and furthermore that there were in fact more impressive pines standing elsewhere.27 On purchasing a Takasago fisherman’s freshly caught octopus and finding its taste exquisite, he drolly composes a hokku wondering why this particular local attraction has thus far escaped everyone’s attention: Takasago ya Takasago— utabito mo shiranu the poets don’t appreciate tako no aji the flavor of its octopus

Ryūhoku later went on to describe in detail the methods by which octopus and other fish were caught by the locals, noting also the etymologies of several regional expressions for particular fauna. As these examples suggest, Ryūhoku was not content in his travel diary simply to add his affirmation of received wisdom, but instead gave his own idiosyncratic evaluations of well-known sites and furthermore sought to describe hitherto unsung local products and practices. In seeking to communicate new and unfamiliar information to his readers, in basing his account closely on his own direct and individual observations, and in shifting narrative attention away from cataloging established sites and recapitulating orthodox responses to them, Ryūhoku partook of an approach to travelogue writing that had first emerged in Japan in the eighteenth century and that came to characterize many of the most widely read accounts of the late Edo period.28 Occasionally, he offered wry commentary on local customs and manners that departed from his expectations. When he first arrived in Kobe, for example, he was struck immediately by the differences in contemporary fashions, writing: “Since this is my first time to the western provinces, everything that meets my eye seems unusual. The women’s hairstyles in particular leave me astonished.” After enumerating the names and features of various Kansai coiffures, Ryūhoku confesses that several of them left him “unable to con­tain my laughter.” On joining a banquet with geisha in Osaka, Ryūhoku notes his shock at how the house crests emblazoned on their kimono are much larger than any he has seen, “aside from firemen’s uniforms.”29 The kabuki play that he saw in Osaka was “every bit as good as in Tokyo,” and he was positively impressed by the theater’s lighting and by the ways in which the audience showed its appreciation for the actors, but he did find it “quite obnoxious” that some of the geisha among the theater­goers incessantly whipped out pocket mirrors to reapply their makeup during the performance.30

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Ryūhoku was not simply an external observer of the curious spectacle, for his immersion amongst these unfamiliar forms of dress, adornment, and self-presentation in the Kansai region had dire ramifications for his own body. Following his six weeks in Kansai, Ryūhoku headed back for Tokyo, and, once he had made it as far as Yokohama, he invited a barber to groom him, a necessity because, “in the western lands, from Osaka on down, none of the barbers trims a man’s nose or ear hair. I have found this most annoying, but today I got a good trim and feel refreshed in spirit.” He even composed a whimsical kyōka to commemorate his tonsorial purification: Kamigata ni Cleanly shorn nobishi hanage o of the nasal hair sori sutete that grew out west, Azumaotoko ni I return now with tachikaeru kao the face of an eastern man.

As Ryūhoku’s construction of himself here as “an eastern man” indicates, Tokyo was the standard by which he judged one Shikoku udon shop where he dined as “amusingly countrified” but also the basis for his happy discovery a few days later that another local shop served udon that was “more delicious than any in Tokyo.”31 Whether he visited major cities like Osaka or rural towns in Shikoku, Ryūhoku employed a consistent rhetoric in which he situated himself as a sophisticated and normative urbanite, and the individuals he encountered outside of Tokyo as dojin (locals or natives). This opposition between center and periphery remained in place not just in Diary of a Journey to Bitchū but in the domestic travelogues he composed throughout his life. Yet, as in the elaborately staged trimming of his nasal hair, there are moments when Ryūhoku’s Tokyocentric dismissal of Kamigata practices seems to have a dimension of self-mockery. When he recounts the performance of local songs by geisha in Kobe, for example, he remarks that they were “quite accented” and observes that “I have often heard Kamigata songs in Tokyo, yet when I came here [to Kamigata] and heard them, I found that they sounded strikingly different.”32 On a later excursion to an Osaka theater, Ryūhoku saw Chikamatsu’s Shinjū ten no Amijima (The love suicides at Amijima) and was impressed by the lead actor who portrayed the ill-fated Osaka paper merchant Kamiya Jihei: a gorgeous “beautiful youth” whose “dashing charms would be rare even in Tokyo.” In commenting, however, that the performance as a whole nevertheless disappointed because the actors’ speech was “so accented as to be difficult to listen to,” Ryūhoku was surely having a bit of ironic fun, for it is difficult to think of a more consummately Osaka kabuki play than this one, first performed in the city in 1721.33 Ryūhoku’s earlier writings about Yanagibashi had established him as a connoisseur of urban culture and of the demimonde in particular. In Diary of a Journey to Bitchū, he devotes substantial attention to writing about local geisha districts, noting their unique features and describing his literary and sexual interactions with several of the entertainers he meets. Yanagibashi itself recurs in the text as a standard of comparison but also as an object of longing, with Ryūhoku recalling the friends he left behind there and imagining their revelry in his absence. In the following poem, for example, he employs a

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familiar gesture of mitate, casting himself as a latter-day Du Mu (Fanchuan) and Yanagi­ bashi as the Tang poet’s beloved Yangzhou: 他郷一日永如年 且對金樽却悵然 昨夜楊州興多否 豪歌獨缺杜樊川

A day spent away from home seems as long as a year; A golden cask before me, yet my feelings grow melancholy. Last night, I wonder, were the diversions in Yangzhou plentiful? They surely sang out with abandon but lacked one Du Fanchuan.34

Ryūhoku expresses homesickness a few times elsewhere in the diary, including the poems that he writes for his son Matasaburō, his wife, Ochō, and his favorite geisha, Otori, the woman who had named him Kawaisō (Lovable Old Man / Poor Thing) during his years of confinement.35 Yet urban entertainment districts are far from the only focus of Ryūhoku’s attention in the text. Alongside the wry comments he makes about contemporary city life are several highly lyrical accounts of his encounters with the natural world in less populous areas. In his quantitative analysis of the poetic content of Diary of a Journey to Bitchū, Inui Teruo finds that appreciation of scenic beauty is by far the most common theme in the text’s Sinitic and Japanese poems alike.36 As he departs Osaka and heads by ship through the Seto Inland Sea toward Okayama, for example, Ryūhoku writes a poem that emphasizes what a refreshing new experience it is for him to undertake a journey allowing him to appreciate natural beauty:

發天保山

5

晨發天保山 直入播淡間 山色翠且紫 海容曲又彎 噫我結髮三十年 頭有冠冕腰佩環 榮枯一夢乾坤變



青簑白笠身始閑 江山明媚天付我

10

唯應漫遊探仙寰



縱令故園日相望 片帆未要容易還

Departing Tenpōzan In the morning, we left Tenpōzan behind, And soon were between Harima and Awaji. The mountains green and purple, The shoreline crooked and angled. O, I have bound my hair these thirty years, Worn a cap on my head, rings of office on my belt. Rise and fall—all a dream now since the whole world changed; In a simple robe and hat, I feel at ease for the first time; The beautiful rivers and mountains like a special favor from heaven; My only wish is leisurely to wander in search of an earthly paradise. Even if the people back home are wondering after me, This little boat does not need to turn back so soon.

The poem frames Ryūhoku’s trip and its “leisurely wandering” (line 10) as a liberation from the strictures and burdens of office, a point on which he elaborates in a prose entry: “In recent years, I have fallen on hard times, and, though it seems unfortunate to have descended into the dust of the world, I realize that to be able to drift and wander freely like

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this and encounter such beautiful scenery is anything but misfortune; it is rather the height of fortune.”37 During his travel to Shikoku in particular, he was struck by the unspoiled scenery he found there, repeatedly noting in his travelogue that he had simply never seen anything like it. Moreover, as the phrase “earthly paradise” in line 10 of the above poem indicates, throughout the text Ryūhoku portrays his travels through the wilderness of western Japan as an exploration of a completely unfamiliar realm, one that offers communion with the otherworldly. The clearest expression of this idea comes with his ascent of Mount Kankakeyama on the island of Shōdoshima, about which he writes an entry that is several times longer than any other in the travelogue. Ryūhoku’s emphasis on the unique scenery around him is evident from the outset of his account: Unlike mountains in other countries, Japanese mountains tend to have a sort of warm and gentle feeling about them. But these strange and marvelous peaks [of Mount Kankakeyama] are not like that. Looking around, they appear in all shapes and sizes: one juts out like the point of a sharpened sword blade, another looks like a folding screen; one looks like a growling lion, while another looks like a seated yodeling giant. Some have caverns; others block the flow of valley rivers: there are aspects of their kaleidoscopic transformations that are difficult to describe in words. For the first time, I have seen before my very eyes the marvelous peaks and curious mountains that Chinese people paint.

There is a pointedly exotic quality in Ryūhoku’s reference here to the dramatic mountain scenes depicted in Chinese shanshuihua, visual representations that were part of his referential palette but that he had never actually experienced. Ryūhoku climbed Mount Kankakeyama at the invitation of a local physician, Kishida Kandō, with whom he composed linked Sinitic poetry in the course of their ascent. Yet, as his account of their journey continues, Ryūhoku stresses again how he has entered an otherworldly realm that challenges his expressive powers: The more we climbed, the more marvelous the scenery was; as we advanced, we saw ever more wondrous views. Even in observing a single peak or valley, with each of our steps its appearance changed. Kandō had once said to me that the reason the scenery at Kankake was superior to other places was that each step brought a new scene. I had suspected he was exag­ gerating, but today I saw the truth of his statement. . . . It would be hard to describe even in poetry. We could see nothing but the monkeys and deer: a true realm of the immortals.38

When the group reached the summit, they sat and drank for a while, relaxing as a misty rain fell. Just as the surrounding scenery during their ascent had delighted the travelers with its unpredictable shifts, so too did the view from the summit furnish a final moment of drama for their journey: Suddenly clouds billowed up from the ranged peaks and for a moment, the entire mountain was engulfed in a dark fog such that we could not see even a foot in front of us. But no sooner

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had this thought occurred to us than a gust of wind came to scatter the clouds, revealing the mountain clearly. A truly astonishing scene entered our eyes, for we could see for a thousand leagues.

In Inui Teruo’s view, Ryūhoku’s ascent of Mount Kankakeyama was a pivotal moment of catharsis: “This experience was epoch-making for him in the sense that, by scaling this precipitous and dangerous mountain path himself and having a kind of mystical experience at its summit, it transformed his ‘tale of exile.’ ”39 Although it is difficult to see any single event bringing about an instantaneous shift, Inui is surely justified in arguing that Ryūhoku’s tour of western Japan helped him to transcend his status as a former shogunal vassal and to “discover new possibilities.” One such possibility that begins to emerge in Ryūhoku’s earliest travelogue is the idea that his skills as a poet and writer can secure his livelihood. There are numerous references within Diary of a Journey to Bitchū to Ryūhoku being sought out by local residents to evaluate their Sinitic poetry, to take part in literary exchanges with them, or to compose commemorative texts for them. The production of the travelogue itself is evidence of how this incipient interest was starting to take shape, and Ryūhoku specifically refers to his own act of writing at several points within it, noting that he is spending time indoors working on his poems, for example, or writing his travelogue while others sleep. Echoing the above passage’s foregrounding of the writing act, Ryūhoku concludes his account of ascending Mount Kankakeyama with another reference to his own inscription, one that explicitly postulates a readership: “The Kankake mountains are unlike those of other provinces; this splendidly delightful scenery, chiseled by the divine and sculpted by otherworldly forces, is impossible to describe with brush and ink. If literary figures and poets make a trip there, they will see that it is a thousand times more spectacular than I have been able to convey.”40 After just over six weeks in western Japan, Ryūhoku returned home to Tokyo, and the travelogue closes with another reflection on how its author has endeavored to write something to record the full range of his experiences rather than the stereotypical literary travelogue excessively tied to convention: “I imagine there are many writers under heaven who are interested in polishing their prose and adorning their poetry to show off their literary talents, writing only what should be written and concealing what should be concealed, but I have no interest in joining their number.”41 As the following chapters will show, one of the features readers most enjoyed in the essays Ryūhoku later published as a commercial journalist was the idiosyncratic literary persona he created through them, one already beginning to emerge in the sophisticated, opinionated, yet disarmingly self-mocking urban subject whose travels are documented in this work. In this way, Ryūhoku repeatedly focuses in the travelogue on the act of inscription and on the process of his own self-fashioning as an aspiring professional writer. One symbolic indication that this path might be viable as an avocation occurs on the return ship: “There are four or five Chinese who have come from Shanghai. They chatted with me and asked for a poem. I wrote one out that I had composed in my travels and pre­sented it to them. Because I am fond of coins, they gave me five old Chinese coins.”42 In addition to narrating

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the suggestive transformation of his writings into money, this encounter indicates that Ryūhoku was beginning to think in broader terms about his potential audience. The following year, he would in fact assemble a volume of his Sinitic poems for the specific purpose of soliciting a preface from a Chinese literatus. Having entrusted the volume to a China-bound friend, Ryūhoku eventually received a preface written by Xu Qianshen 許鈐身. In his preface, Xu notes the writing, dress, and other customs that Japan shares with the “Central Land” before explaining how Gong Shenfu 龔慎甫, a Chinese resident of Nagasaki, gave him the rare chance to read poems from this distant eastern realm: Mr. Gong took out a volume called Ryūhoku shishō by Narushima [Kore]hiro Yasutami from Tokyo in Japan that he had brought with him. Most of its poems were composed as exchanges or in the course of travel. Some have a feeling of lofty transcendence. They deserved acclamation. There are various countries across the seas that share our written language, such as Korea, the Liuqius, and Vietnam, and there are numerous learned men of letters in these places. . . . Japan lies several thousand li away in the middle of the eastern sea. It is no easy matter for scholar officials to reach its shores. . . . If one wishes to investigate carefully and glimpse how splendidly the Way is one and customs are shared, then take this volume in hand! . . . The tenth year of the Tongzhi era [1871] of the Great Qing.43

The 1869 shipboard encounter is, to my knowledge, the first time that Ryūhoku interacted with Chinese readers of his poetry, though such exchanges would soon be a common part of his experience as a commercial publisher. Poetic exchanges with Chinese literati were something he enjoyed, but, in soliciting such a preface for his poems, Ryū­ hoku’s focus was presumably on his domestic audience as well. Securing a Chinese preface does not seem to have been a mere passing whim, for Ryūhoku made a second similar request around the same time.44 In composing Diary of a Journey to Bitchū, Ryūhoku had chosen to use Japanese for the sequence of dated entries and to weave into this narrative thread the poems he had occasion to compose, whether Japanese or Sinitic. As his abundant use of native Japanese vocabulary as well as tense and aspect markers that are uncommon in Sino-Japanese texts both show, the narrative’s style is wabun, rather than kundokuchō, and, befitting this choice, the script is a mixture of hiragana and kanji rather than the katakana and kanji combination used for Sino-Japanese. When he made two additional trips the next year, he chose to experiment with a different format, writing each travelogue exclusively in Literary Sinitic. The first, Jōsō yūki (Record of a journey to Hitachi and Shimōsa), records his travel in the spring of 1870 to Koga domain (what is now Ibaraki) to visit his former student Funabashi Gyokkei, who had been hired to teach English to the domain’s samurai.45 In the course of his ten-day trip, Ryūhoku also ventured to neighboring Shimodate, where he reunited with his old friend Ishikawa Fusakane 石川総管 (1841–99), the former daimyo of the domain, who had recently become its governor. The second travelogue, Shimodate yūki (Record of a journey to Shimodate), records Ryūhoku’s return visit to the area that winter. One consequence of Ryūhoku’s choice to write both of these travelogues in Literary Sinitic is that, even when the narrative’s focus extends to Japanese poetic composition or

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the appreciation of utamakura, the travelogue itself contains no waka. For example, in the first travelogue, when Ryūhoku arrives at the “Koga Ferry,” a place made famous in the Man’yōshū and also well known from the Japanese poetry of Saigyō, he writes simply: “This place is none other than the Koga Ferry, which has been told of in Japanese poetry.” He does not cite any famous Japanese poems on the site, nor does he record any Japanese poems he might have composed at the time.46 In the second travelogue as well, Ryūhoku notes being particularly impressed with Governor Ishikawa’s mother, a woman who is “fond of Japanese poetry” and has him “write several poem cards.” 47 Yet the travelogue’s kanbun form means that none of the Japanese compositions Ryūhoku wrote on the occasion is included in it, a sharp contrast to the rich assortment of both Japanese and Sinitic poems that appears in Diary of a Journey to Bitchū. As in the earlier work, the appreciation of natural beauty figures in these two kanbun travelogues too. In narrating his journey north along the Nikkō highway in Record of a Journey to Hitachi and Shimōsa, for example, Ryūhoku fashions a particularly evocative mitate: “The scenery is charming, with the colors of the yellow rapeseed blossoms and green sheaves of wheat blending together in the fields. It is as though a Western visitor has laid out a carpet in a hall.”48 To compare the pattern of the foliage to a specifically Euro­ pean carpet was a strikingly novel conception in Chinese poetics at the time, indicating how Ryūhoku’s own referential world had enlarged and also suggesting his ease and familiarity with Western material culture. These two early kanbun travelogues also offer insight into Ryūhoku’s evolving views on Japan’s present moment and his own position in it. Ryūhoku reunited with several of his former students and colleagues, men who had responded to the Meiji Restoration in a variety of different ways, and his interactions with them prompted further reflection on his own status. One man he was surprised to encounter was Kikuchi Sankei, who had taken over as a tutor to the shogun Iemochi on 08.09 of Bunkyū 3 (1863), the very day that Ryūhoku had been dismissed from the office. Noting that Sankei “also lost his house and his stipend” in the Restoration before taking a post teaching in the governor’s office, Ryū­hoku emphasizes their shared situations, presenting a quatrain to his old friend that ends: 與君相見先揮涙 同是天涯淪落人

Meeting again with you, I first wipe away my tears; Both of us ruined men, here far from home.49

In its entry for the following day, Ryūhoku’s travelogue notes the arrival of an octave from Sankei that draws on the language of the last line of Ryūhoku’s poem: 一別天涯乍古今 萍蹤相値涙沾襟 林花經雨紅全老

Since parting, we scattered far apart, and suddenly it is a new day; My tracks have drifted, but now we meet and tears wet my collar. After the rains, the red of the trees’ blossoms has entirely faded;

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山色拖煙青欲沈 窮後忘窮詩克巧 客中送客感偏深 旗亭有酒聊沽醉 話盡十年淪落心

Drawn into the mist, the blue of the mountains’ hue is about to disappear. Once destitute, a man forgets his destitution, and his poems grow marvelous; Sending you off while a traveler myself, my feelings are deeper. There is wine in this tavern, and we can purchase our tipsiness; And talk to our hearts’ content about ten years of being brought low.

Ryūhoku’s response matches the rhyme graphs of Sankei’s octave and also replies to its content, drawing more explicit connections to the events of the Restoration: Sankei invited me to Itokuri River and we drank heartily all day. He gave me an octave and I matched it. 三溪誘余遊繰川快飲竟日三溪似一律乃次某韻 綿綿愁緒去來今 繰水無由洗客襟 暗涙何唯係離別 窮詩動欲説升沈 春城經雨飛花少 晩閣對山蒼靄深 君老桑麻吾市井 一樽濁酒兩般心

An endless strand of melancholy past, future, and present; The Itokuri River cannot wash clean the traveler’s breast. How can my secret tears be simply because of our parting? Poems written in destitution often speak of rise and fall. Spring in the city, falling blossoms are few after the rains; Late in a tavern, we face the mountain, thick with a dark mist. You will grow old amid mulberry and hemp, and I in the urban center; One cask of unfiltered wine between us and two different minds.50

Ryūhoku refers in the octave’s final couplet to the two different lifestyles that he and Sankei have chosen, “mulberry and hemp” referring to the ideal of retiring to a rustic idyll and “urban center” to the shiyin model of reclusion in the midst of the marketplace. Although Ryūhoku portrays himself here as an urban recluse and declared else­ where his intent not to serve again as an official, this stance did not signal his indifference to public affairs, nor did it mean that he cast himself solely as a critic or opponent of the Meiji state. As these two early travelogues indicate, he continued to interact with several former shogunal officials who now served at various levels of government. Beyond such personal connections, Ryūhoku made note during his travels of political and social developments he found praiseworthy in spite of the disengaged pose. Observing travelers on the road near Koga station, for example, he writes: We arrived at the village of Akatsuka. The locals were coming and going in a line carrying children on their backs. They were all on their way to get vaccinated at the Koga medical clinic. The process of civilizing these remote areas advances by the day; it is truly something to be celebrated.

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村落無家哀夭殤 欽他王化及遐郷 朝來種痘城中去 襁負兒來雁々行

In the village, no family need mourn the death of a child; How admirable that regal suasion reaches even these ­distant areas! From daybreak, they go to the city to get vaccinated; Children strapped on their backs, they file by one after another. 51

In the prose passage, Ryūhoku frames the implementation of prophylactic vaccination as evidence of the influence of “civilization,” or kaika 開化. In the poem, he describes the same phenomenon as the gradual spread of “regal suasion” from the imperial center to the rural periphery. Ryūhoku’s attempt to situate the application of modern Western medical knowledge within the framework of traditional thought is particularly clear in the last couplet, which alludes to an Analects passage describing the effect of a virtuous ruler: “the common people from the four quarters will come with their children strapped on their backs.”52 At least insofar as its vaccination policies are concerned, Ryūhoku portrays the Meiji state here as the Confucian ideal. The keen interest that Ryūhoku had in commenting on contemporary affairs is also evident in his second kanbun travelogue, in which he observes recent flood damage and writes this quatrain: 堤可築兮湟可穿 汽機運土不勞肩 滿城官吏有何策 墨守河渠書一篇

A jetty can be built! A canal can be dug! A steam engine will move the earth without tiring one’s arms. The whole city is full of officials, but what are their plans? Just to cling to what it says in the “Treatise on Rivers and Canals”!53

The text Ryūhoku mentions in the fourth line is part of Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, the first of the dynastic histories, and here he uses it in opposition to hydro­ logical methods employing modern technology. Reading this poem alongside the earlier poem that marshals an Analects passage to praise the equally modern technology of vaccination shows the distinctly eclectic use Ryūhoku would continue to make of the canonical texts it had been his responsibility to teach as a shogunal official. The pair also demonstrates his unflagging interest in engaging in commentary on contemporary events.

New Chronicles of Yanagibashi Volume 2 and the Critique of Bunmei Kaika Ryūhoku’s travels to western Japan and to visit his friends in Koga and Shimodate had exposed him to new realms of experience, given him much to write about, and also provided him with an opportunity to reflect on his future. In a poem that he composed in the autumn of 1871, the year after his return from Shimodate, Ryūhoku indicates his

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annoyance at the hauteur of the ascendant Meiji state but also expresses a new transcendence of old grudges:

秋懷十首



餘生只合老風塵



不把恩讎來問人 邏卒時時訊郷貫 幕僚往往列朝臣

5

竹存故宅三三逕 鮮撃澄江六六鱗



舊府東山餘妓在



向吾猶説昔年春

Ten poems on autumn feelings In what remains of my life I shall only grow old in this dusty world; I will not press others about their loyalties and enmities. Patrolmen frequently come to inquire about my status; Former shogunal men now take up places in the government ranks. On the nine paths of my old dwelling, bamboo still grows; With their thirty-six scales, carp can be caught fresh on the Sumida River. At my old haunt in the “eastern hills” there are still many courtesans; They can still talk with me about the springs of long ago.54

Recall that line 7’s “eastern hills” refers to the site where statesman Xie An consorted with courtesans during his withdrawal from office. Although he evokes the world of the recluse here, Ryūhoku’s undiminished interest in writing about and commenting on contemporary society is clear from the journalistic orientation, observational detail, and critical commentary of his early travel writings. Even as he returns to his “old haunt” of Yanagibashi ostensibly to talk about “long ago,” his focus on chronicling the present moment never wavers. Ryūhoku finished the second volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi in Meiji 4 (1871), but it was not until 1874 that he was able to publish it.55 Needless to say, much had happened in the years between 1860 and 1871, and it was the changes that the Meiji ­Restoration had brought to Yanagibashi that provided Ryūhoku with the bulk of his new material. The new era ushered in a wide-ranging set of social and cultural transformations that could be glimpsed through the lens of Yanagibashi’s leisure institutions, from new hairstyles to new manners of behavior, from new topics of conversation to new fields of study. In addition to describing these new manners and modes, the second volume of New Chronicles also devoted attention to a new class of patrons barely hinted at in the first volume. With the shogunate’s demise came an influx of rural samurai from Satsuma and Chōshū, the southwestern domains that had been the main victors in the Meiji Restoration. Given that Ryūhoku was a recently deposed Tokugawa official when he wrote the second volume, his mockery of the new arrivals’ crude behavior can readily be inter­ preted as both a nostalgic lament for the shogunate’s end and a resentful indictment of those who had toppled it. It was in this context that Nagai Kafū proposed to read the text in an article he wrote in 1927: “[The first volume] consists of Ryūhoku using descriptions of popular customs in order to celebrate the pleasures of his youth. . . . The second vol­ume, written after the shogunate collapsed . . . is an emotive document in which he relates his middle-aged sorrow and his despair at the times.”56 In a piece published shortly thereafter, Ishikawa Iwao made virtually the same comment about the first installment,

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noting that it was “a lyrical scenic poem celebrating the pleasures of youth through a depiction of popular customs in Yanagibashi” in contrast to the second volume that detailed the decline of both the geisha and their patrons after the Meiji Restoration.57 Kafū, Ishikawa, and many later critics have tended to see the first volume as a relatively simple descriptive or celebratory account of Yanagibashi and the second volume as a more complex critique of the changes the Meiji Restoration had visited upon the district. Yu Huai’s re-creation of the late-Ming Nanjing pleasure quarters, Miscellaneous Records of the Wooden Bridge, was a major inspiration for Ryūhoku in writing about Yana­ gibashi. Although Kafū and other earlier critics had noted several connections between the texts, it was Maeda Ai’s groundbreaking 1964 article comparing them that established in detail the ways in which Ryūhoku drew on and departed from the earlier work. As Maeda points out with regard to the second volume of New Chronicles, the radically changed political environment that the Meiji Restoration had brought to Edo, now Tokyo, gave Ryūhoku a new appreciation for Yu Huai’s position vis-à-vis Nanjing, destroyed in the Manchu conquest. While taking note of this historical parallel, however, Maeda discerns a subtle difference: The pleasure quarters of Jinling that Yu Huai loved were caught in the fires of war and reduced to nothing, but Ryūhoku was forced to become an eyewitness to the false flourishing that the conquerors introduced to Yanagibashi. For Yu Huai, lurking behind his sentiments of mourning for the lost splendor of Jinling was something quite negative: a stern rejec­ tion of the Qing dynasty that had destroyed it. But for Ryūhoku it was ironic observation that dug up the crudeness and brashness of the rural Satsuma and Chōshū samurai who had destroyed the atmosphere of Yanagibashi that came first. By peeling bare the false flourishing, by exposing the true conditions in the elegant Yanagibashi that now lay in ruins, what welled up in Ryūhoku’s mind was nostalgic sentiment.58

This reading of New Chronicles, like so much of Maeda’s pioneering scholarship on Ryūhoku, has come to be the basis for virtually all subsequent work on the text. It is true that a major concern of the second volume of New Chronicles is to unmask the “false flourishing” of post–Meiji Restoration Yanagibashi. But unmasking “false flourishing” was also a central concern of the first volume. This should come as no surprise given that such a satirical point of view is a defining feature of the hanjōkimono genre of which New Chronicles is an exemplar. Although the conquerors from Satsuma and Chōshū may have introduced a particular kind of false flourishing into Yanagibashi, Ryūhoku’s concern to deconstruct Yanagibashi’s ostensible splendor by “digging up” its base details preceded any destruction wrought by the Meiji victors. To overemphasize the nostalgic elements of the second volume of New Chronicles thus tends, on the one hand, to minimize the critical or ironic dimensions of the first volume and, on the other hand, to caricature Ryūhoku in his humorous portrayal of the new Meiji culture as obstinately oppositional. Much of the text’s humor cannot be ascribed solely to embitterment over the Restoration’s outcome. Many of the satirical comments Ryūhoku makes about various fashions and practices in Yanagibashi are similar to those he makes about the other entertainment districts he visited and wrote about, such as those from Diary of a

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Journey to Bitchū discussed above. There is, moreover, a quality of circumspection in the narrator’s point of view that makes the work difficult to read merely as an expression of loyalty to the deposed Tokugawa or nostalgia for some paradise lost. Ryūhoku had written the first volume of New Chronicles over a decade before the second, but it was actually the second volume that he was first able to publish commercially. Some readers would have been familiar with the pirate edition of the first volume, but, for most, the inverted order meant that the second volume gave them their introduction to Ryūhoku’s Yanagibashi. Beginning with two poems by Kikuchi Sankei, the former shogunal tutor with whom Ryūhoku had reunited during his journey to Shimodate, the second volume’s prefatory material created high expectations. Set in a panegyric tone, the poems promise that the elegance of famed Chinese sites could be discovered around the “Willow Bridge” of Tokyo’s Yanagibashi:

燈火樓臺蘸晩潮



湘簾深祕幾嬌嬈



四時無日不三月



十歩有華爭一橋

5

才子聲明歸白傅 美人色藝壓紅綃



秦淮情事揚州説



也入新篇添幾條

Lantern flames and tall buildings play on the evening current; How many charming ladies do the bamboo curtains conceal? In all four seasons, not a day unlike the three months of spring; A lovely flower every ten paces, all vying near one bridge. The fame of this talented young man recalls Bo Juyi, The looks and arts of the beautiful women exceed Hong Xiao. Amorous tales of the Qinhuai River and anecdotes of Yangzhou Will surely fill out a few lines of this new volume.

Using the technique of mitate, the poem paints the scene at Yanagibashi in terms that invoke the world of “scholar-beauty” Chinese romances: a place populated by talented young men who recall Bo Juyi and beautiful women who bring to mind the literarily skilled Tang courtesan Hong Xiao. The man in line 5 could refer generally to male visitors to Yanagibashi, but the reference to composition in line 8 suggests the possibility that it is the author Ryūhoku whose talents and sensibilities Sankei is comparing to the Tang poet. The superimposition of specific Chinese scenes onto the local Japanese site continues with the poet’s invitation in lines 7 and 8 to envision the world of Yanagibashi in terms of the pleasure quarters along the Qinhuai River that Yu Huai celebrated in Miscellaneous Records or in terms of the urban delights of Yangzhou memorialized by Du Mu. Robert Campbell uses the illuminating metaphor of the palimpsest to express the way in which this poem projects the poet’s immediate surroundings onto the unseen but textually familiar Chinese sites, allowing the latter to emerge into readerly consciousness.59 In this first poem, the perspective Sankei adopts is of a spectator viewing the Yana­ gibashi scenery either in person or as a reader of Ryūhoku’s text. In the second poem, however, his position corresponds to Ryūhoku’s own as the text’s author. As in the first poem, the standard of comparison derives from Chinese precedent, specifically the

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yanshi 艷史 (J. enshi), or “erotic history,” genre of which Yu Huai’s Miscellaneous Records is an exemplar: 竹枝聲在水樓間 春入嬌波洗碧灣 柳線織成鶯羽色 雲鱗疊得鯉魚斑 板橋記裡多紅袖 畫舫録中收翠鬟 我亦明窻脩黛史 欲將彤管寫眉山

“Bamboo branch” ballads resound from the waterside inns; Spring pervades the charming ripples, bathing the emerald bay.60 Sinuous streams of willow interwoven like the warbler’s feathers, Cloud-stippled roof tiles recall the scales of spotted carp. Many red-sleeved beauties grace Miscellaneous Records of Wooden Bridge; Emerald-coiffured ladies adorn Painted-Boat Records.61 Beside my clear window, I too will write a sensual history; With my colorful brush, I will depict their beautiful brows.

The scenery evoked verbally in these poems is complemented in the published edition of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi by a woodcut of the eponymous “Willow Bridge” spanning the Kanda River. Numerous boats float between its banks, where countless restaurants and boathouses are tightly clustered.62 Although this refined prefatory material offers nothing that might lead the reader to suspect it, the second volume of New Chronicles turns out to be every bit as satirical as the first. Like the hanjōkimono, which promises with its title to record the “flourishing” of the urban scene and yet consistently delivers a reality that falls short of the mark, the poems and the illustration set the stage for the comic revelation of discrepancy between ideal and actual conditions. That the text might contain something more complex than uniform praise is first hinted at in the prose preface of a certain “Recluse of the Azure Clouds,” thought to be a pen-name of Tanabe Taichi, a man of scholarly tempera­ ment who served both the Tokugawa and Meiji regimes as a diplomat: The prose is amusing and brings an irrepressible smile.  .  .  . However, a more discerning appreciation of its flavor shows that there are satirical comments lodged within. . . . Not only does it allow the reader to understand the charms of Yanagibashi, but it also informs him of the prevailing circumstances in today’s Tokyo. Not only does he learn the current state of today’s Tokyo, but he can also infer from it the future conditions of the realm. . . . However, inasmuch as the Immortal himself calls this a useless book, those in the world who read it will likewise certainly regard it as a useless book.63

In this description, the preface author introduces the idea that the real meaning of the work extends beyond the confines of Yanagibashi and that as such it has a utility that its self-proclaimed “uselessness” belies. The preface develops this paradox by tracing Ryū­ hoku’s career, devoting particular attention to various useful aspects of it that contradict his purported “uselessness,” including his prominent role as a cavalry official and his skillful management of dwindling shogunal finances as its treasury secretary. Having demonstrated Ryūhoku’s “usefulness,” the preface offers a mock lament of Ryūhoku’s choice to live a “useless” existence:

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After the Boshin War [the 1868 conflicts], the Immortal resigned his post and became an urban recluse. . . . Ah, Immortal What-of-it! You are possessed of useful abilities, and yet you choose to squander them. Surely it is sad indeed for such a man to write useless books just to please himself! That being said, it is nevertheless the case that the Immortal Whatof-it’s discarding of usefulness to enjoy uselessness is the very factor that makes him the Immortal What-of-it.64

The analogy linking Ryūhoku to Yu Huai has led to a view that regards the second volume of New Chronicles as primarily a nostalgic lament, but Ryūhoku’s gaze in the later volume was decidedly on the present. Far from a melancholy retrospection, the second volume attested to the fact that the author’s whimsical sense of humor remained intact. The “uselessness” that the Recluse of the Azure Clouds begrudgingly recognized in the preface as the sine qua non of Ryūhoku’s literary persona gave him the latitude to write freely; it was no longer necessary to adopt even the transparently fictional guise of the “foolish student,” as he had in the first volume. In the brief authorial preface that follows, Ryūhoku begins by situating his second installment in relation to the first. In the preface to the first volume of New Chronicles, Ryūhoku’s narrator had praised Terakado Seiken’s Account of the Prosperity of Edo as the definitive depiction of the city, but he had also noted that the passage of time had rendered the work outdated. Ryūhoku draws on the same rhetoric to situate his second installment: I once wrote a book called New Chronicles of Yanagibashi.  .  .  . At the time, I believed I had skillfully captured the “new” elements of the place. . . . But, since then, the times have changed and things have shifted; the pleasures of Yanagibashi have been transformed and old these “New Chronicles” are now quite stale. After the Tokugawa clan went west, it has not been unusual for daimyo compounds, with their vermilion gates and white plaster walls, to be transformed into mulberry and tea fields.65

The passage’s last sentence is foremost a reference to official policy in early Meiji; after the Tokugawa relocated to Shizuoka, some former daimyo compounds were left vacant, and the government encouraged their development as sites for mulberry and tea cul­ tivation.66 Yet it also brings to mind a well-known literary idiom about the world’s vicissitudes: “the azure sea transforms into a mulberry field.”67 These changes were what necessitated the new volume, and the sense of impermanence expressed here resonates to some degree with the preface of Miscellaneous Records. Both Maeda Ai and Hino Tatsuo draw attention to Ryūhoku’s “the world has changed and things have shifted,” a slight variation on a phrase in Yu Huai’s preface: Along the long Wooden Bridge, I would compose poems and chant them, feeling rather proud of my accomplishments. The poems and songs that I composed would be recited and transmitted from the lips of one girl to the next. . . . I half suspected that I was Secretary Du

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[Mu] back in those pacific days. Ever since the rise of the new dynasty, the times have changed and things have shifted. For ten years now, my old dreams have remained clinging to Yangzhou, but all of those places of pleasure are now overgrown with weeds . . . the buildings have turned to ashes, and the beautiful people to clay. I am saddened by the sense of rise and fall.68

Like Ryūhoku, Yu Huai styles himself as a latter-day Du Mu in this passage, referring to the latter’s famous poem, mentioned in chapter 3, about being roused from his “Yangzhou dream” after “ten years” gaining “a name for careless love in its blue houses.” Although both Ryūhoku and Yu Huai express a sense of transience, the tone of the two prefaces, and of the works themselves, is strikingly different. There is little in Ryūhoku’s preface to compare to the dolorous tone of Miscellaneous Records, which simultaneously exalts the beauty of the late-Ming world and laments its disappearance in the early Qing. Something of a eulogy, Miscellaneous Records is virtually bereft of any humor or ironic comment. Whereas Yu Huai describes contemporary conditions only as a means to heighten the contrast with the idealized past, documenting the present is one of Ryūhoku’s stated motives: And yet, the geisha of Yanagibashi have not lost their livelihood. They keep on, employed as before playing the flute or plucking the strings while they cavort about in places of elegant diversion. Surely their lot is superior to that of the former shogunal officials, who cling to life by fleeing like rabbits or hiding like mice. Since the monarchical government has been completely renovated, it only makes sense that Yanagibashi would also have been completely renovated. But there still has not appeared a connoisseur of the curious to document these new changes. I hear that in recent times someone has stolen and printed my New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and that many young stylish and sophisticated lads purchase and read it. I lament the fact that they are reading a book that has already gone stale in these days of renewal and Restoration. Thus, I have produced this second volume.

Though Ryūhoku notes the changes that have occurred since the Meiji Restoration, he also notes that Yanagibashi has continued to thrive. In comparing himself and other former shogunal officials who had remained in the capital to “hiding mice” (as opposed to the “fleeing rabbits” like Ryūhoku’s adopted sons who followed the Tokugawa to Shizuoka), Ryūhoku was engaging in a sort of waggish self-mockery utterly unlike the unrelieved grief of Yu Huai. More than his own fallen status, it is the fact that an out-of-date chronicle was circulating with his name on it that Ryūhoku laments in this preface. Whereas the first volume of New Chronicles tended to focus on detailing the oper­ ation of Yanagibashi’s businesses, tracing how money flowed through the boathouses, the restaurants and the hands of their waitresses, the hakoya porters who transported the geisha’s instruments, and the various other figures who made their living in the quarters, the second volume gives more attention to its patrons (especially new arrivals who were ignorant about proper decorum in Yanagibashi). In one sequence, apparently

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inspired by actual incidents of rough behavior, a group of these western samurai visits a Yanagibashi drinking establishment and their captain imperiously demands a certain geisha be summoned to entertain them. When told that the geisha is otherwise engaged, the captain proceeds to verbally abuse the barmaid and even throws a wine cup at her. Following the account of the brawl, Ryūhoku’s narrator intercedes to comment: I, the Immortal What-of-it, declare, “When peace prevails in the realm for a long time, the battle way of the warrior lapses into lethargy. But, after a skirmish, martial spirits are naturally reinvigorated. The murderous air has not yet been quelled since the eruption of the 1868 Boshin War. Under the right conditions, men like Xiang Zhuang and Xiang Bo might find themselves carrying out a sword dance in a brothel. And, even though decrepit, a man like Fan Zeng might very well become so infuriated that he smashes some jade dippers.69 Such momentum is difficult to resist. In recent years, there is a new code for banquets. When you present a person with a wine cup, you often throw it into his palm. In Li Bo’s preface to the ‘Peach and Apricot Garden,’ he writes of ‘letting fly the winged wine cups and becoming intoxicated with the moon.’70 Among today’s samurai are many with a special fond­ness for the past. Perhaps the so-called new ways find their legitimating precedent in this word ‘fly.’ I imagine it means ‘to let fly the wine cups’ or ‘let fly the goblets.’ In a certain sense, then, this practice is old, and in a certain sense it is new. Marvelous and novel? Perhaps. in the end Carefree and uninhibited? Sure. But, a ll t hings considered, a transformation has occurred so that now people are injuring their foreheads and wounding their eyes. (Such behavior flies in the face of decency i s what might b e called far-flung). These vessels are easily broken; wouldn’t we be better off if we followed traditional etiquette and used them to pour sake for one another? I heard this from a venerable geisha.”71

The tone the narrator adopts in this discussion of samurai swagger resembles the indirect criticism of the first volume. Rather than simply scorn their behavior outright, the narrator adopts a form of classical Chinese historical prose known as the lunzan 論贊 (J. ronsan). With its origins in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, the mode featured an objective enumeration of facts followed at the very end by the historian’s judgment about them. Here, Ryūhoku’s narrator makes a point of taking similar pains to be authoritative, justifying his reasoning through measured appeals to Chinese precedents. That his pedantry is meant in jest becomes clear as the passage draws to its conclusion, where his conjectures grow increasingly far-fetched and his interpretations more strained. The idea that these hotheaded rural samurai are modeling their behavior on a mistaken reading of the character “fly” in Li Bo’s evocation of convivial drinking is absurd, but the narrator expounds the interpretation in all seriousness. It was not just the boorishness of western samurai that Ryūhoku targeted in the second volume of New Chronicles. One of the text’s most salient characteristics is its criticism of the superficial way in which Meiji authorities pursued their bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) agenda. Part of Meiji Japan’s modernization program involved the introduction of political, social, educational, and cultural institutions based on Western models, and Ryūhoku was decidedly in favor of many such reforms. What

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rankled him, however, was that some of those now advocating this course had only recently abandoned their erstwhile xenophobia. Furthermore, Ryūhoku satirized these arrivistes for failing to grasp or pursue more significant and thoroughgoing reforms and instead directing their attention solely to the affectation of comparatively inconsequential trappings of Western culture, such as hairstyles, cuisine, and habits of dress, as though these were the true marks of “civilization of enlightenment.” Perhaps the most famous episode that pokes fun at this tendency concerns a student who flaunts his English abilities one evening: There was a student who went to school and became extremely fluent in English. One evening, he went drinking at Ryūkōtei, but, when he spoke to the geisha, half of his words were in English. The geisha said, “Only you, my dear, understand English. We have a clue don’t comprehend what you’re saying, and that’s no fun at all. Won’t you teach us some Pleased with himself English?” Delighted t o oblige, the student said, “You’re a genius, I tell you, a genius! If you study for a few months, I guarantee you’ll become a master. I know everything there is to know about English. But I’m not sure where you would like to commence your studies.” The geisha replied, “When we women address each other, it’s so boring to use the usual terms. Why don’t you first teach us how to say our names?” “A novel idea!” replied the student. The geisha asked how to say “Otake,” and the student answered “Bamboo.” She asked, “Oume?” “Plum,” came the reply. She asked, “Otori?” “Bird,” said the student. She asked, “Ochō?” “Chaple,” he replied. The answers came back instantly like an echo. Then she asked, “Misakichi?” The student lowered his head and thought intently but could not think of what to say. Then, “Ochara?” The student grew even more perplexed. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he said, “Today I haven’t brought my dictionary. Next time I’ll come with a copy of English Vocabulary Notes in my breast pocket, and I shall answer your myriad queries.”72

The student fails to understand that the proper names “Misakichi” and “Ochara” will be impossible to translate no matter what dictionary he brings. In contrast to some of his literary contemporaries, who believed that the study of the foreign tongue was misguided, Ryūhoku did not parody this aspiring English student out of insularity or ignorance. Rather, Ryūhoku used the student’s humorlessness and the cursory nature of his learning to suggest the superficiality of the bunmei kaika program that was sweeping Japan in the 1870s. It is particularly suggestive that Ryūhoku drew the specific foreign words that appear in this episode from a brief piece in Endless Ivy, the playful text composed by Ryūhoku and his comrades in the Katsuragawa salon that I discussed in the previous chapter, for the Meiji student’s intensity is the very opposite of the relaxed fun memorialized in the earlier work.73 In articles that focus particular attention on this episode, Okada Kesao and Mizumoto Seiichirō illuminate additional dimensions of Ryūhoku’s satire. Okada notes that Eigosen (English vocabulary notes, 1861) was never more than a rudimentary introduction to English words and phrase structure. Ryūhoku’s choice of this text thus amplifies the outrageousness of the student’s misplaced assurance that such a basic text

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would be a panacea for any lexical problem. Moreover, inasmuch as the Eigosen was produced by Japanese scholars of Dutch, the text still bore the traces of Dutch terminology and pronunciation. Okada suggests that Ryūhoku targets the student’s obliviousness to the historical antecedents of his own English studies.74 Taking the developmental history of Eigosen into consideration, Mizumoto argues that Ryūhoku deliberately used the term chaple as the student’s attempt to translate “butterfly” in order to expose the tenuousness of the student’s grasp on English, his ignorance of the long tradition of Dutch studies in Japan, and his lack of awareness about the outdatedness of his tools.75 A similar episode portrays a debate between two young men over the political structure that the new government should adopt. Like the overwhelmingly serious student of the previous episode, the two men are completely insensitive to their surroundings, carrying on their interminable discussion even though it bores the two geisha present to the point of desperation. Finally, one of the geisha interrupts to ask what they are discussing, and they respond in a way that suggests she will be unable to grasp the topic. Undeterred, the geisha seizes the moment to offer her own analysis of the term “republic” 共和 (J. kyōwa; Ch. gonghe), literally meaning “collective harmony”: “How mistaken you are! This debate about the merits and demerits of the feudal and feda long eral systems has been exhaustively argued by eminent earlier philosophers from t he Qin long time ago chatter and Han dynasties. What need is there for you two to prattle on about it now? I hear that in the United States, they have a kyōwa, or ‘republican,’ form of government, and kyōwa means ‘collective harmony.’ So fair, so enlightened, so just, so grand, even the governance of those sage kings of antiquity could not surpass it. You two would do well to cease your dregs ruminations over these residual lees of the ancients, abandon your debate on feudalism versus federalism, and promulgate the beauty of collective harmony. After all, when you have fun, more than anything you need to collectively harmonize in order to enjoy yourself. Here you are in a drinking house, and yet you leave your food and drink untouched, you eschew the flute and shamisen, relegating them to silence, and you leave us in the corner while you pursue these empty arguments and absurd assertions that only put us to sleep! Is this what you call the pleasure of ‘collective harmony’? You two really don’t know the first thing about having fun. Now I’ll become your president and do my best to repair tediously argumentative invigorate this ruinously d ecrepit mood. So, please, first have a sip from this chalice as your punishment!” At this, the two customers were greatly embarrassed, and both of them lowered their heads contritely, saying, “We will reverentially attend Your Royal Highness’s commands.”76

The geisha’s explanation and her clever word play deftly shift the direction of conversation to something more suitable. The term kyōwa itself would have had a special significance to Ryūhoku, for the scholars who had established it as the standard gloss for “republic” were his close associates.77 That the self-important men depicted in the episode bow before their new “President” and refer to her as “Your Royal Highness” confirms, however, that the geisha’s political lesson remains lost on them. Just as he mocked the

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earnest English student for his shallow knowledge and humorless attitude, so too does Ryūhoku’s satire here point out the men’s lack of sophistication not only in political theory but in how to enjoy themselves in Yanagibashi. The prevalence of such critical depictions of recent reforms and social changes means that it is possible to imagine the narrator of New Chronicles as a stubborn antiquarian or an insular curmudgeon. Emanuel Pastreich, for example, writes that Ryūhoku filled “the second installment of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi with criticisms both lightly veiled and direct of the efforts of the Meiji leaders to remake Japanese society in a European mold” and “defended accepted customs against demands for the wearing of Western clothing, the implementation of the Western calendar, and the adoption of Western modes of discourse.”78 Rather than taking a position on any of these specific issues, however, the narrator’s broader critique is of the assumption that simply introducing such changes would ensure “civilization and enlightenment.” To put it differently, Ryūhoku was not so much an antagonist of bunmei kaika as he was a critic of the particularly superficial way in which it was being advanced. While Ryūhoku lamented the replacement of the curtains that once fluttered in Yanagibashi’s pleasure boats with solid shōji, in doing so he was not “poking fun at the pell-mell flow of Western culture into the Yanagibashi district,” but rather targeting the boat owners’ desire to acquire status symbols without considering the charms that might be lost in the process.79 The critique resonates with those in the first volume concerning the size of pleasure boats or the use of particular hair ornaments.80 Given the criticisms of the boorish Satsuma and Chōshū samurai in the second volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, it might seem that the narrator expressed nothing so much as sour grapes. His jokes at the expense of those affecting new Western manners may seem to indicate a defiant resistance to change. The apparent similarities in the historical situations of post–Qing conquest Yu Huai and post–Meiji Restoration Ryūhoku may suggest a reading of Ryūhoku’s work as a nostalgic lament for a vanished world. But seeing New Chronicles in this way tends to overlook the important similarities between the two volumes and to attribute too much of the text’s inspiration to disaffection with the Meiji Restoration. In spite of differences in the particular targets of narrative scrutiny in each installment, the penetrating ugachi gaze that reveals shallowness and exposes contradictions between name and reality, the ironic tone that offers florid praise while undercutting it at the same time, and the text’s various humorous devices, such as pedantic consideration of manifestly absurd “forced interpretations” of the classics, the disjunction between form and content, and the use of playful glosses, were common to both. The major structural difference between the two installments is that Ryūhoku organized the second around a series of self-contained emplotted episodes.81 Yet, although a fully developed episodic structure is a distinguishing feature of the second volume, its embryonic prototype can already be glimpsed in the first, which contains a few emplotted episodes, such as the scene of the geisha’s arrival at the boathouse that I discussed in chapter 3. Ryūhoku exploited and further developed the conventions of the hanjōkimono genre to produce these two volumes that were not only informative and provocative, but entertaining too.

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The World beyond Yanagibashi Just months after completing the second volume of New Chronicles, Ryūhoku turned his learning to new ends when he was appointed the inaugural principal of Shinshū Tōha Gakujuku 真宗東派学塾, an academy that the Higashi Honganji Shin Buddhist sect was founding at its Asakusa branch temple. Ryūhoku actually took up residence on the temple grounds during this time, and the Meiji state’s 1871 memorandum recording its fruitless attempt to induce him to serve in the Chamber of the Left lists the temple as his domicile (fig. 5.1).82According to papers that Ryūhoku, “a commoner,” filed with the edu­ cational authorities, the academy provided instruction to 142 boys and girls in Japanese, Buddhism, kanbun, and English. In his study of early Meiji Tokyo academies, Kanbe Yoshi­ mitsu describes Shinshū Tōha Gakujuku as “the private academy that had the most comprehensive curriculum at the time.”83 Ryūhoku taught kanbun and English, and it seems that half of the faculty had studied under him or his father or grandfather, including Funabashi Gyokkei, whom Ryūhoku had visited in Koga the previous year. The makeup of the academy’s staff roster indicates the key role Ryūhoku must have played in recruiting its teachers.84 The new post brought Ryūhoku financial stability, put him into contact with a new circle of friends, and reinvigorated him with a new sense of purpose, but, most important, it presented him with an array of unexpected opportunities.85 The following year, he was given the rare chance to travel abroad when four priests from the temple decided to embark on a nine-month world tour and invited Ryūhoku to join them as their treasurer and translator. The group traveled by ship first to Hong Kong, where they transferred to another vessel bound for Marseilles. Along the way, they called at various colonial ports and traversed the newly opened Suez Canal before arriving in France. Paris was their base for the next five months, and, on his arrival Ryūhoku recalled the time “ten years” earlier when he had first taken an interest in Western studies: 十載夢飛巴里城 城中今日試閑行 畫樓涵影淪漪水 士女如花簇晩晴

In my dreams these past ten years, I have flown to the city of Paris; Today I seized the chance for a leisurely stroll through its streets. Picturesque buildings cast their shadows on the rippling water; Men and women in floral splendor gather in the clear ­evening air.86

While in Europe, the group extensively toured Western legal, educational, industrial, and cultural institutions in addition to religious sites. They returned by separate routes; one priest continued his studies in England, two others returned along the route by which they had come, and Ryūhoku and the fourth priest continued to England, crossed the Atlantic, and made their way back home via the United States. Ryūhoku’s travelogue, Kōsei nichijō (Diary of a journey to the West; hereafter Diary), records his observations and impressions during the journey and also contains dozens of Sinitic

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Fig. 5.1 Record of summons to Narushima Ryūgo 成島柳吾 (surely a mistake for Ryūhoku 柳北) to serve in the Chamber of the Left, dated the tenth month of Meiji 4 (1871). The address at right is in Baku­rōchō, where Ryūhoku ran a Western articles store called Shimaya, a name that appears at the top of the second line. Lines 3 and 4 identify the recipient of the summons as “a former samurai of Shizuoka prefecture who has entered into commerce of late and resides within the grounds of the Asakusa Honganji temple,” all of which matches Ryūhoku’s personal and professional circumstances at the time. Courtesy of the National Archives of Japan, Tokyo.

poems like the quatrain quoted above that capture his lyrical responses to his experiences abroad.87 During this tour, Ryūhoku was especially struck by the publishing organizations he visited, and, on his return to Japan, he worked for roughly one year as the head of the temple’s newly established Translation Office, publishing translations of Western materials on world history and religions. But it was in 1874, when Ryūhoku became president of the Chōya shinbun, that he finally settled into his post-Restoration role. For the remain­ ing decade of his life, Ryūhoku defined himself as a journalist, contributing popular columns not only to the Chōya, but also to the Yomiuri shinbun, as well as founding one of Japan’s first literary journals, Kagetsu shinshi. Ryūhoku’s plans for his career as a modern newspaper journalist acquired a new degree of concreteness with the tours of printing presses he made in Europe and through his practical experiences running the Translation Office on his return, but the first inklings of this future path were evident much earlier. In the second volume of New Chronicles, for example, is a passage that not

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only demonstrates this still inchoate identity, but also forges a link between Ryūhoku’s earlier and later activities as a writer. The narrator recounts a dialogue with an interlocutor who vehemently dismisses New Chronicles as “useless prose,” to which the narrator retorts, “I am, after all, a useless person. Where would I find the leisure to do useful things?” As the passage continues, he defends his own “useless” writing by invoking Tera­ kado Seiken but proposes a new connection: “Long ago, Old Seiken wrote his Account of the Prosperity of Edo. At the time, the shogunal officials were angered by his slanderous words, and so they tied him up in jail, burned his limited book, proclaimed his crime, and ultimately banished him. The world scoffed at the petty capacity intolerance of those officials, and Seiken’s book is still popular today. Moreover, haven’t you heard? The newspapers printed in the various countries of the West carry libelous and insulting words, but the sovereigns do not fault them, nor do the officials criticize them. Gentlemen do not become angered, and petty men do not begrudge them. Instead, they all vie to read them, thereby expanding their knowledge and vigilantly keeping abreast of conditions. Something like my book is nothing more than a kind of useless newspaper. How unwonted is your concern!” The visitor retreated in silence but muttered as he walked out the door, “There is no medicine to cure stupidity.”88

The passage points out similarities between the hanjōkimono and the newspaper, both of which share a concern to record present affairs, to realistically depict quotidian or ephemeral matters that might otherwise be lost, and to offer current critical commentary. By adopting the mantle of “uselessness” and closing the work with his interlocutor’s insulting dismissal, Ryūhoku showed a playful aspect of self-mockery that Seiken shared and that would come to characterize Ryūhoku’s journalism. More than anything else, it was this sense of ironic humor that linked Ryūhoku’s work as a hanjōkimono author with his later career as a journalist. The hundreds of miscellaneous essays that he wrote for the Chōya shinbun and the Yomiuri shinbun during the next decade ranged over a wide variety of subjects, from education to foreign policy, from literature to fashion, but one of the recurring characteristics in the most memorable of these was their ironic tone. In offering effusive praise for a new government policy while simultaneously undermining it, in facetiously misconstruing the meaning of the classics, or in entertaining the most specious arguments in regard to some social phenomenon with a solemnly straight face, Ryūhoku was drawing on techniques he had learned from the hanjōkimono and perfected in New Chronicles.

Ryūhoku’s Western Journey and Higashi Honganji The question of how to fit Ryūhoku’s Western experiences into the context of his development as a writer is one that has been explored extensively by Japanese scholars. One early treatment of the subject is a 1935 article by Ōno Mitsutsugi, which argues that the journey

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to the West “brought about the culmination of his status as a recluse. . . . It was in this period, we might say, that the preparations for his escapist lifestyle were completed.”89 With its emphasis on Ryūhoku’s withdrawal, estrangement, and disengagement, Ōno’s analysis fixed a constellation of themes that would come to be the dominant frame used to understand Ryūhoku and his Western sojourn. The key term underlying these related themes was muyō, or “uselessness,” a word most often associated with the declaration attributed to Ryūhoku in the wake of the shogunate’s collapse: “I have truly become a man useless to the realm. For this reason, I do not wish to do anything useful.”90 Ryūhoku’s statement that he did not intend to accept a post in the new Meiji government is read to mean that he had forever washed his hands of any active role in guiding or shaping Japan’s development. Under such a view, Ryūhoku’s activities on his return to Japan, notably his tenure overseeing the successful Chōya shinbun from 1874 to 1884 and his contributions to the Yomiuri shinbun, are deprived of any political or social investment. Ōno continues: “It is difficult to think that he entered the Chōya shinbun with the intention of, say, reforming the contemporary social system or rectifying the shortcomings of society. Nor was it the case that he regarded the powerful government officials from Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa, and Hizen as his eternal enemies whom he must forever oppose for the role they played in the shogunate’s demise.”91 Such a view accepts Ryūhoku’s claim of “uselessness” at face value, minimizing the importance of even such apparently “useful” activities as Ryūhoku’s work as a journalist and social critic. This once dominant interpretation, which regarded Ryūhoku as ultimately no more than a retrogressive antiquarian, a throwback or “a leftover child of Edo,” later underwent an important modification. The work of Wada Shigejirō in 1950, followed by a series of articles published in the late 1960s and 1970s, identified certain modern elements in Ryūhoku’s works, such as a “critical spirit” in the second volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi. Yet, in spite of these revisions, the basic view of Ryūhoku as an indifferent onlooker remained intact; the newly recognized “critical spirit” could still be incorporated into the accepted paradigm by seeing it as the spleen of a disenfranchised former official rather than as politically or socially engaged commentary. The best-known statement of this view came with Maeda Ai’s important 1976 monograph on Ryūhoku. While Maeda called attention to the existence of a particular kind of “modernity” in Ryūhoku’s Western travelogue, he characterized it in terms of “uselessness,” antithetical to serious tasks of state building. Specifically, Maeda contrasted Ryūhoku’s European journey to that of the Iwakura Mission, the massive observational and investigational tour of Western political, social, cultural, technological, and legal institutions undertaken by the Meiji government in 1871–73. The chronological overlap in these two Western journeys enabled Maeda to develop a comparative framework that is now very well known. Using their respective travel accounts, Maeda compiled a list of the various sites visited in Paris by each in the course of one week in January 1873, arranging them in a table, and analyzing the list as follows: On the side of the Iwakura Mission was the Paris of fortresses and factories, whereas on Ryūhoku’s side was the Paris of theaters and art galleries. To what extent did these men understand the almost symbolic significance that these two Parises thrust upon Meiji Japan?

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In accordance with the program of a “rich nation and a strong army,” the Iwakura Mission was busy enthusiastically assimilating the items on its agenda, while Ryūhoku had still not realized that the world to which he had abandoned himself was linked to another “modernity”—one that was the reverse of the “rich nation and strong army.”92

Subsequently, this view has been regarded not only as the key to understanding Ryūhoku, but as a useful point of contrast to illuminate the nature of the Iwakura Mission as well. Tanaka Akira, the scholar who edited the standard edition of the Iwakura Mission report, for example, cites the above passage from Maeda and notes that “these two Parises are interesting because they bring into relief the fundamental nature of the [Iwakura] mission by means of its contrast to Ryūhoku, who assumed the title of a ‘use­ less man.’ ”93 Likewise, Izumi Saburō, the author of several works on the Iwakura Mission and presently the director of an organization that researches its activities and even sponsors tours of the sites it visited abroad, introduces Ryūhoku as part of the “leftover faction from the Edo shogunate” that “visited art galleries, strolled through the Bois de Boulogne . . . enjoyed themselves in theaters . . . and indulged themselves in the city’s pleasure districts” while the mission carried out its tour.94 Ryūhoku thus has a role to play in both Tanaka’s and Izumi’s accounts principally as counterpoint to the practically focused, politically engaged Iwakura Mission members.95 Whether articulated in terms of “usefulness” versus “uselessness” or in terms of “official” versus “private,” the basic binary framework and the view of Ryūhoku as a disengaged “tourist” uncommitted to any serious project remain the same.96 One of the first scholars to question the idea that Ryūhoku was, above all, a “useless man,” was Kobayashi Shigeru.97 In 1985, Kobayashi pointed out that not only does a “code of the ‘useless man’ ” appear in Ryūhoku’s Diary, but there is also a “countervailing force, one that might be called the code of the ‘useful man,’” present in the text. In other words, in addition to the “aspect of Paris as a site of cultural enjoyment,” a parallel “aspect of Paris as an instructive model of administration and reform” could be discerned in Ryū­ hoku’s travelogue. Rather than comparing the descriptions in Ryūhoku’s Diary to those in the Iwakura Mission’s True Account, Kobayashi looks within the Diary to compare the sections that illustrate these two distinct aspects of Paris. This internal comparison shows that the records of “useful” observation are frequently longer and more detailed than the records of presumably “useless” cultural enjoyment. For example, on January 22, 1873, the day following Maeda’s sample week, Ryūhoku joined the Iwakura Mission members for a tour of the Luxembourg Observatory, detailing in his diary the functions of the astronomical instruments he saw; a courthouse, in session at the time, which allowed him to sketch the basic forms of French legal proceedings; and a prison, which prompted Ryūhoku to provide a rich description of the institution’s architecture and organization as well as the educational, religious, and medical services it provided to its inmates.98 Nor was it simply on those occasions when Ryūhoku accompanied members of the Iwakura Mission that he showed an interest in such obviously “useful” sites; Diary also notes how he visited several modern factories, observed a school for the blind, and sought special permission to tour the Mint.

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Inui Teruo has also problematized Maeda Ai’s comparison from a different point of view, one that demands a rethinking of assumptions about “uselessness.” Ryūhoku’s visits to many museums, art galleries, parks, and ancient ruins while in Europe have traditionally been dismissed as “useless” leisure activities, but Inui shows instead that the impression these sites left on Ryūhoku can be correlated with his later career as a journalist. In other words, for Ryūhoku, museums were evidence of “just how much the Western countries care for the cultural heritage of humanity,” parks were “symbols of a rich and free civilized society,” and the well-preserved condition of ancient ruins was testimony to the “spirit of preserving the cultural legacy of antiquity.”99 Inui’s work thus demonstrates the roots of Ryūhoku’s frequent assertions in his newspaper columns that such sites and facilities were necessary and useful for a modern nation. One aspect of Ryūhoku’s Western travels that has been left relatively unexamined is the particular set of circumstances that allowed him to make the journey in the first place. Below, I consider the context of Ryūhoku’s Western journey in terms of his role as treasurer and translator for the group of four priests from Higashi Honganji. Some have cynically dismissed the early Meiji efforts of Higashi Honganji and its counterpart Nishi Honganji to send priests abroad as a wasteful expenditure or even as “a comical struggle of vanity.”100 Yet these men undertook their journey out of an earnest sense of mission born of the crisis that Buddhist institutions faced at the time. Attacked on ideological grounds by adherents of nativist Shinto and on practical or economic grounds by some Confucian scholars, Buddhist institutions were already embattled at mid-century, and the influx of Christian foreigners in the late 1850s only added to their challenges. Whereas Christianity had been strictly forbidden in Japan for over two centuries, the Western powers were uncompromising in their demands for reform or repeal of the prohibition. A treaty approved in 1858 permitted churches and clerical staff to serve the foreign population, but the missionaries attempted to propagate Christianity among the Japanese as well. Finally, the fledgling Meiji government dealt Buddhism another blow with its shinbutsu bunri policy, which sought to impose a new “separation of Shinto and Buddhism” and to raise the status of Shinto to a national religion. The culmination of these various developments was a diffuse yet geographically widespread movement known as haibutsu kishaku (lit., “expel the Buddha and crush Shakyamuni”) that swept through Japan in the first years of Meiji. Facing vandalism and even violence, some temples were forced to close, and some priests returned to secular life.101 It was against this background, in which the very existence of Buddhism was thought to be in jeopardy, that four priests from Higashi Honganji—Abbot Gennyo, Ishikawa Shuntai, Matsumoto Hakka, and Seki Shinzō—departed with Ryūhoku for their tour of Europe. Paying closer attention to the objectives of the Higashi Honganji tour affords an alternative perspective to complement the comparison with the Iwakura Mission that has dominated readings of Ryūhoku’s Diary. Even during the one week of January that Maeda selected, several of Ryūhoku’s more clearly “useful” activities are omitted, including his pursuit of Sanskrit study, recorded in the diary’s January 17 entry. Although Ryūhoku may have lacked the burning sense of mission to protect Buddhism that drove the four priests who were his traveling companions, situating Ryūhoku among these men

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clarifies the journey’s context, shedding light on what he learned from the experience and how he represented it in his travelogue. Gennyo, identified in the preface to Ryūhoku’s Diary as the originator of the plan to go to Europe and India, was Ōtani Kōei 大谷光瑩 (1852–1923), the twenty-second abbot of the temple and a student of Ryūhoku’s at the Asakusa academy. Following the Restoration, he had gone to Hokkaido to oversee more than one hundred priests from Higashi Honganji who engaged in missionary and development work there.102 On his return to Tokyo, Reverend Gennyo had taken up a post at the Kyō­bushō (Ministry of Religious Affairs), where he worked until departing for Europe. Founded in early 1872, this new department incorporated Buddhist advisors as well as Shinto, marking a shift away from the aggressively exclusivist policies of its predecessor, the Jingikan (Department of Shinto).103 Like Gennyo, the second of Ryūhoku’s traveling companions, Ishikawa Shuntai 石 川舜台 (1842–1931), was also employed at the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Born in Kaga domain, Shuntai studied kanbun and the Buddhist canon at the Takakura Acad­ emy, Higashi Honganji’s exegetical school in Kyoto. In addition to these subjects, however, Shuntai is said to have “distinguished himself as an early student of the Bible and Christian literature.”104 As a young man, he purchased a Chinese translation of the Bible for the considerable sum of ten ryō and wrote a fervent refutation. After returning from Europe, Shuntai pursued missionary activities at home and abroad. On the basis of information he gained from Ogurusu Kōchō 小栗栖香頂 (1830–1905), whom he dispatched to Shanghai in 1873, Ishikawa devised a plan to establish schools that would train Japanese in the Chinese language so that they could teach in China and spread the Shin sect. In August 1876, the temple opened a branch annex on the grounds of the British concession in Shanghai, followed by schools in Jiangsu, Beijing, Korea, and Taiwan. Shuntai was also an important force behind Higashi Honganji’s Translation Office, which Ryūhoku directed.105 At the time of his departure for Europe, Ryūhoku’s third traveling companion, Matsumoto Hakka 松本白華 (1838–1926), was also employed with Gennyo and Ishikawa Shuntai at the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Born in Mattō, Kaga domain, Hakka went to Kyoto in 1855 and studied calligraphy and the Chinese classics before becoming a student of kanshi poet Hirose Kyokusō in Osaka. Hakka studied under some of the same Shin priest instructors as Shuntai, and he also joined Shuntai in responding to antiBuddhist incidents. Active in missionary activities as well, he eventually served at the Higashi Honganji annex in Shanghai. The final member of Ryūhoku’s traveling party was Seki Shinzō 関信三 (1843–79), also known as Kira Yūryū. Born in Mikawa, he pursued Sinitic studies at the Kangien in Bungo province, after which he entered the Takakura Academy. In 1868, he was dispatched to Nagasaki as part of Higashi Honganji’s activities to defend Buddhism. Seki’s mission at the time was to infiltrate a Christian church, observe its activities, and report back to Higashi Honganji. Through the first few years of Meiji, he pursued English and other Western subjects in Osaka and Tokyo while continuing his activities as a spy in Yokohama. In 1872, the year in which he departed for Europe with Ryūhoku and the others from Higashi Honganji, Seki was also a frequent visitor to the home of

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James Hepburn (1815–1911), who was then in the midst of his multiyear project of translating the Bible into Japanese. Hepburn seems not to have suspected that Seki, whom he employed as one of many linguistic advisors, had in fact been dispatched by the Council of State (Dajōkan) to monitor the progress of his translation. Seki even underwent baptism from a Western missionary, though he seems to have originally intended this as a subterfuge to facilitate his surveillance.106 In the midst of his time in Europe, Seki left his traveling companions in France, heading to England, where he enrolled in the London Protestant Seminary to study English and Christianity. After his return to Japan in 1875, Seki became a pioneer of early education, establishing Japan’s first kindergarten. In light of the historical context, it is easy to see why these men—all of whom had engaged in the strategic study of Christianity for the purpose of protecting and propagating Buddhism—would embark on a tour of Europe. Yet it is also important to realize that their journey was not, in fact, a mission openly sponsored by the Higashi Honganji temple, but rather a plan the members formulated and carried out surreptitiously. Ryūhoku suggests the covertness of their plans in the first entry of his Diary, where he states that he had not mentioned his impending departure to anyone. The former abbot Gonnyo even claims in his diary to have learned of his son Gennyo’s plans to travel abroad only after the latter had left Yokohama.107 Yet other documents show that Gonnyo was part of early discussions about the group’s planned European tour, indicating that he and perhaps other high officials in the temple’s administration knew about it but claimed ignorance to avoid being criticized for authorizing the tour. Although the journey was not openly sponsored by the temple, it did have another official sanction: the Meiji government’s. Three of the four priests from Higashi Honganji, after all, were serving as officials in the Ministry of Religious Affairs when they departed, and the fourth, Seki Shinzō, was an intelligence officer monitoring Christian activity for the Council of State. As will become clear, their plans to travel abroad were not only facilitated but even invited and encouraged by high government officials. The letters the men sent to Gonnyo as they prepared to leave shed light on the course of their planning, the ostensible motivations for the journey, and the factors necessary to its realization. 108 Given that Gonnyo seems to have known about the tour already, the letters were presumably intended to justify the men’s apparently rash action to a broader audience at Higashi Honganji and its branch temples. In Gennyo’s letter to his father, he frames the purpose of his Western journey as a chance to observe Western customs and learn more about Christianity with the goal of protecting Buddhism. Ishikawa Shuntai’s letter shows that he and the other priests went so far as to use aliases to maintain secrecy: their assumed names appear in contemporary newspaper reports of departing ship passengers (fig. 5.2). These letters also note the role of several government officials, chiefly Chancellor of the Realm Sanjō Sanetomi and Justice Minister Etō Shinpei, in the plan’s genesis. According to Ryūhoku’s letter: When we made inquiries into the schedule, we learned that there was to be a French ship setting sail the fourteenth, tomorrow. Since officials from the Ministry of Justice would be

Fig. 5.2 Shipping report in the Japan Weekly Mail. Ryūhoku’s departure with the four priests appears in the section for departing passengers: “Per Godavery, for Hongkong.—2 Chinese. For Marseilles . . . Messrs. . . . Naroussima, Séki, Foujiwarra, Ichikawa, Matzumoto.” Rev. Gennyo used the alias Fujiwara Mitsunaga, Matsumoto Hakka altered the reading of his name to Matsumoto Kiyoteru, and Ishikawa Shuntai called himself Ishikawa Tsunehiro. Japan Weekly Mail, October 19, 1872 (09.17 by the lunar calendar), p. 687. Courtesy of the National Diet Library, Tokyo.

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traveling aboard this ship too, it was deemed convenient, and the matter was settled; I set out for Yokohama to make the arrangements. . . . I went to see Lord Sanjō, and also had an audience with Foreign Minister Soejima, who was extraordinarily kind and solicitous, leaving us without any anxieties whatsoever. Thanks to Ishikawa Shuntai’s efforts at the Ministry of Finance, we were able to borrow the necessary funds.

Ryūhoku’s letter makes clear that the group chose its date of departure to coincide with the Ministry of Justice’s dispatching of eight officials on an investigative tour of Europe on 09.14, that Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–91) and Foreign Minister Soejima Taneomi (1828– 1905) facilitated their departure, and that the Ministry of Finance cooperated to secure the necessary funding.109 Other documents confirm that the Higashi Honganji group was encouraged to make its tour by Sanjō Sanetomi and that Matsumoto Hakka coordinated its plans with the approval of Etō Shinpei (1834–74), who was slated to lead the Ministry of Justice’s tour but ultimately stayed behind.110 Although Etō Shinpei was not driven by their fervor to defend Buddhism, he shared the Higashi Honganji priests’ conviction that learning more about Christianity would be useful in preventing its spread in Japan, a goal he believed to be of paramount importance, and he also saw the priests’ tour abroad as the first step in a long-term regional strategy.111 It is a commonplace to conceive of the Iwakura Mission’s Western tour as a “public” undertaking and that of Ryūhoku and the other four from Higashi Honganji as a “private” one, yet such a tidy division is misguided. The only reason Ryūhoku and his companions were able to travel to Europe was that they had the sponsorship of the Meiji government, whose involvement went far beyond clerical assistance. It is instructive to consider the example of Nishi Honganji, the other major Shin branch, which had sent a group of five priests, including the prominent scholar and reformer Shimaji Mokurai, to tour the West earlier that year.112 The Nishi Honganji tour was also conceived and realized with the extensive support of key Meiji officials, and the group was in fact initially scheduled to undertake its travels with the Iwakura Mission, though various factors delayed their plans. Just before the Iwakura Mission’s departure, its vice ambassador Kido Takayoshi noted in his diary: “The abbot of Honganji arrived today and came by to talk. It is because I had previously urged him to visit the West.”113 In record­ ing his reunion with Mokurai in London, Kido referred to his earlier encouragement of the temple’s Western tour: “I have often done all I could to argue the need to send priests to Europe. Moreover, in consultation with Mokurai and others, I sent a letter last winter to the abbot of Honganji. On the night before our ship departed, he came to Tokyo but was not unable to accompany us. Honganji was later able to leave Japan with three priests, and now it turns out we are meeting here.”114 Like Higashi Honganji, Nishi Honganji had been urged by Meiji officials to send priests abroad, and, just as Higashi Honganji accompanied the Ministry of Justice investigative group to Europe, so too did Nishi Honganji travel with a group dispatched by the Chamber of the Left. The two investigative groups that were sent in 1872 and in the company of which both Honganji groups traveled are sometimes called “later departure groups” of the Iwakura Mission itself.115

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Ryūhoku the Publisher The established view tends to emphasize Ryūhoku’s “uselessness,” contrasting it with the compelling sense of purpose—specifically the drive to observe and study those institutions and technologies that would be useful for the new state—that is thought characteristic of Iwakura Mission members. Yet, as I have argued, the Higashi Honganji tour was supported by the Meiji state, and, as will become apparent, neither Ryūhoku nor the Higashi Honganji priests lacked a sense of purpose in meeting with various Western scholars and translators, perusing ancient texts, visiting ruins from antiquity, and inspecting printing facilities during their time abroad. All of these activities bore fruit with the Translation Office they established on their return. But, whereas the founding of the office was, for the priests, part of a larger strategy to defend and modernize Japanese Buddhism, for Ryūhoku, it was his first foray into publishing. The eight months spanning the years 1872 and 1873 that are the subject of his Diary preceded his debut as a full-fledged newspaperman, but his handmade Strange News of Tokyo, his early Meiji travelogues, and his comparison of New Chronicles to a newspaper all confirm his longstanding interest in the emerging domain of modern print journalism. The group’s attention to publishing is clear from the fact that one of the first inspections it made, just a week after departing, was a tour of Hong Kong’s Ying Wa College, where Sinologist James Legge published Chinese translations of Christian texts and English translations of the Chinese classics. At the college, Ryūhoku and his traveling companions purchased Chi­nese biblical trans­ la­tions and “had a look at the typesetting department.”116 In the course of his Diary, Ryū­ hoku frequently mentions other translators, scholars, publishers, and newspaper men he meets, contacts that gave new concreteness to his latent interest in journalism. Ryūhoku and the others in the Higashi Honganji delegation spent the first few weeks after their arrival in Paris visiting the city’s parks, gardens, and zoos, sampling its cuisine, theater, and nightlife, and also exploring palaces and museums located outside the city, such as Versailles and Saint Germain. As the New Year approached, however, they turned their attention to matters more obviously germane to their project: Ryūhoku arranged for a tutor to give him daily English lessons, and the group also began to meet with several Western scholars of Asia. Ryūhoku’s Diary reveals that in early January he initiated contact with Léon de Rosny (1837–1914), one of the few French experts on Japan at the time. 117 Ryūhoku’s Buddhist traveling companions had their own reasons for seeking out Rosny, but to Ryūhoku it was Rosny’s activities as a scholar, translator, and publisher with a passion for Japan’s traditional culture that proved most alluring. In the memorable words of Ryūhoku’s friend Kurimoto Joun, who had traveled to Paris as a diplomat in the late Tokugawa period, Rosny was “one peculiar student.”118 Rosny was indeed eccentric; a man with seemingly limitless enthusiasm for the esoteric, he was also a Japanophile who surprised his fellow Parisians and the Japanese alike with his affectation of Japanese manners.119 Rosny first began studying Chinese at the École des langues orientales but soon became interested in Japanese. Undeterred—or perhaps even spurred—by the fact that he could find no systematic textbooks for the study of Japanese, Rosny devoted himself to deciphering the language. Drawing on his own knowledge of Chinese, he

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pored over the vocabulary prepared by the Portuguese Jesuit João Rodriguez (1561–1634) and a Japanese dictionary of Chinese compounds to teach himself. The result of this autodidactic effort was his 1856 Introduction à l’étude de la langue japonaise, one of the first comprehensive textbooks of the Japanese language written by a Westerner. Having never visited Japan, Rosny leapt at the rare opportunity to meet with those Japanese who came on the shogunal missions to Paris in the 1860s, pursuing them all the way to Russia to continue his interactions. In 1863, Rosny began teaching Japanese at the École des langues orientales vivantes, though he was not actually compensated for his labors until several years later. By the time Ryūhoku arrived in Paris, Rosny had finally become an official professor at the school, though apparently he arranged to forgo half of his salary to hire Japanese native speakers to teach there. Kurimoto Joun’s son Teijirō served as Rosny’s first native speaker, and from 1873 Imamura Warō took over. Ryūhoku met with both Japanese men many times in the course of his European travels. Another important aspect of Rosny’s career in regard to Ryūhoku is his work in journalism and publishing, which included the production of publications in Japanese. As a child, Rosny had worked as a typesetter in a printing house, an experience that he later drew on to create the kana type necessary for incorporating Japanese orthography into his Japanese textbook and other writings. Perhaps in part because his work as a professor of Japanese was originally on a volunteer basis, Rosny relied on his job as a newspaper reporter for income. Beginning in 1862, Rosny even started sending occasional reports on current affairs to the Tokugawa shogunate, and in 1865 he entered into a more formal relationship in which he would be compensated for his role as “correspondent of the Edo Foreign Ministry.”120 In addition to reporting for established newspapers such as Le temps, Rosny was also the main force behind the founding of Yo no uwasa (News of the world). This unusual publication, the first overseas newspaper written in Japanese characters, appeared in Paris only twice: in 1868 and in 1870. In the founding issue, Rosny explained the meaning of the newspaper’s name and stated its mission: “In Japan at present, propagating news about the various events occurring in the five great lands, especially Europe, will provide the foundation for enlightening the people. The reason that Europe is becoming more refined as time goes by is because the people are aware of the news of the world. If one is unaware of affairs in the world and merely remains content in his present circumstances, then he cannot hope to expand his wisdom.”121 Rosny’s emphasis here on how the newspaper’s transmission of knowledge concerning conditions in the world would foster Japan’s steady enlightenment echoes the way in which Ryūhoku framed Japan’s development as irreversible in his writings as a journalist a decade later, focusing specifically on the role his and other newspapers played in achieving it: A host of social transformations have brought us to this present day, and they cannot be controlled by force of will. Though some would frown or cry over this state of affairs, agonizing over how they might turn back the tide of the times and return the world to the way things were in the past, the fact remains: this simply cannot be done. Especially now that the people’s knowledge is advancing every day, they are broadly aware of circumstances in various countries and keenly perceptive of the principles of humanity—to try to take them and return them to the simple and obedient subjects of yesterday is an utterly unfulfillable aspiration.122

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The range of Rosny’s publishing activities, including his expertise in printing, his work as a journalist, and his output as a scholar, must have provided a suggestive model to Ryūhoku. From a scholarly vantage point, it is easy to see why one eminent French Japanologist would dismiss Rosny as “un savant doué de plus d’imagination que de rigueur.”123 Ad­mittedly, the reminiscences of early Japanese travelers who had a chance to interact with Rosny share a sense that his unusual zeal for the Japanese language was a bit bizarre. Yet Rosny was one of the few scholars in contemporary Europe who was both keenly interested in and knowledgeable about Japan.124 Moreover, to caricature Rosny’s eccen­ tricity risks losing sight of the important role he played for Japanese travelers to France at the time. Many Japanese intellectuals of the period, beginning with Fukuzawa Yuki­ chi, used their conversations with Rosny as an expedient way to get a handle on current events, international relations, current trends in scholarship, and the principles of Western social and cultural institutions. Ryūhoku and his traveling companions did as well. The first member of the Higashi Honganji delegation to meet with Rosny seems to have been Matsumoto Hakka. After his first meeting with Rosny, Hakka made an unusually lengthy entry in his diary, recording the broad range of topics they discussed; though scattered, it refers to recent ethnological theories, gives excerpts of Voltaire’s satirical commentaries on the Bible, and also notes the gist of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859).125 Hakka’s entry also mentions that he made the visit in the company of Shimaji Mokurai from Nishi Honganji, who had begun to meet frequently with Rosny just two weeks after arriving in Paris that spring. Mokurai often made his visits in the company of an interpreter, for his purpose was to “receive instruction.”126 He learned from Rosny and other scholars about the history of Christianity, the relationship between religious institutions and governments in the West, and the differences among religious doctrines, but, as he commented in a diary entry after one visit with Rosny, he also “learned a great deal about the course of development of recent trends in the world.”127 Both the Nishi Honganji and Higashi Honganji delegations embarked on their tours with the aim of learning more about world religions as a means to defend Buddhism. According to Rosny’s own account of his encounters with Mokurai and Shuntai, his Japanese visitors sought to learn about European religion as part of their efforts to reform Buddhism so as to make it compatible with modern scientific thought.128 In particular, they sought knowledge about recent Western critiques of Christian doctrine by Ernest Renan and others. Notto Thelle describes how they were “delighted to discover that major currents of Western science and philosophy challenged the authority of Christianity.”129 The role that scholars such as Rosny played in this inquiry is evident from Shuntai’s account of discussing his own efforts to refute Christianity with Rosny: “I traveled abroad to France, where I made inquiries of the great Doctor Rosny of the Eastern School. Dr. Rosny approved of my ideas but also gave me some further instruction using books by Mr. Voltaire and Mr. Renan. At this point . . . I realized that my theories had only scratched the surface. . . . My joy was inexpressible. . . . When I went back to look at the thesis I had authored previously, its puerile pugnaciousness made me turn red in shame.”130 Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus was creating a sensation in Europe at the time for its skeptical treatment of several points of Christian doctrine as “legends.” Mokurai hired

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Sakata Kan’ichirō to translate the text, and the Higashi Honganji Translation Office later produced a Japanese edition. For Ishikawa, the familiarity with current Western rational challenges to Christian doctrine that he acquired from interaction with Rosny enabled him to fortify his defenses of Buddhism. In addition to modern Western criticism of Christianity, a second major focus of the Higashi Honganji delegation’s research while abroad was the study of Buddhism in its Indian origins. Although the priests from Higashi Honganji indicated their intent to visit Buddhist sites on the Indian subcontinent in their departure letters, their goals became more academically focused once the men learned more about Western scholarship of Sanskrit. In a letter Matsumoto Hakka wrote to Gennyo while the two were in Paris, this emerging interest is clear: Having made a pilgrimage to a series of ancient ruins associated with the Buddha in one corner of India [Sri Lanka], we were able to obtain a great many pattra leaf scriptures, and we were also able to collect some of the sacred scriptures and darani that are still extant today. . . . My breast bursts night and day with the desire to now pursue Indian studies abroad, directly clarifying the meaning of the scriptures and darani, while on the domestic front making it clear that our religion is without equal in all of the world and communicating this to the various peoples of the world.131

This fervor for pursuing “Indian studies” would soon be realized with the founding of the temple’s Translation Office and its dispatch of Kasahara Kenju 笠原研寿 (1852–83) and Nanjō Bun’yū 南条文雄 (1849–1927) to England in 1876 to begin studying Sanskrit at Oxford University. In this way, Ryūhoku and the Higashi Honganji delegation met with scholars such as Rosny while they were in Europe, undertaking the necessary preparations for the Translation Office they would found upon their return. At the same time, they made preliminary plans to foster the scholarly development of figures such as Nanjō, who went on to become a founding figure of modern Buddhology and Indology. The scope of Ryūhoku’s interaction with Rosny, however, was slightly different from that of his fellow travelers. According to his Diary: “The [English] teacher came. Harada came and invited me to visit Mr. Rosny. Mr. Rosny’s house is outside the city gate at Porte de Courcelles. Mr. Rosny took out scores of books from his library and showed them to me. Harada and I enrolled in Mr. Rosny’s ethnography society and will receive its new publications.”132 The “ethnography society” that Ryūhoku notes joining here was the Société d’ethno­ graphie, founded by Rosny in 1858.133 A subsequent diary entry records Ryūhoku’s formal entry to the society and also shows Rosny’s contributions to Ryūhoku’s studies and his interest in publishing: “The teacher came. I visited Mr. Rosny with Ono and Ishikawa, and enrolled in his society. I paid the fee and received a certificate. . . . Mr. Rosny was an exceedingly generous host. I asked him several questions I had concerning Indian scripts. We also had a tour of his society’s typesetting facilities.”134 Ryūhoku started studying Sanskrit during the second month of his stay in Europe and soon began to translate an English Sanskrit textbook.135 The temple’s Translation Office would go on to publish several Sanskrit primers, and the tour of the typesetting facilities of the Société

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d’ethnographie that Ryūhoku mentions in the second entry may have been arranged with an eye toward that goal. Having joined Rosny’s society, Ryūhoku appears in its 1873 membership roster, but what is striking about the listing is that it reads “Narusima, publi­ ciste, à Yédo” (fig. 5.3). The listing suggests that Ryūhoku already thought of himself as a publisher and that this is how he identified himself to Rosny when they met in 1873.136 In addition to their tour of the typesetting facilities at Rosny’s society, Ryūhoku and the Higashi Honganji priests sought out other publishers. They met with Edoardo Sonzogno, the owner of the Milan newspaper Il secolo, during their three-week journey to Italy, for example, and Ryūhoku noted being impressed when he inspected the news­ paper’s printing operation.137 In the course of visiting England, Ryūhoku also refers to visiting a Sinologist and publisher of an “Eastern newspaper.” In all likelihood he met James Summers, who published several English-language periodicals concerning Asia and also Tai Sei shinbun 大西新聞, which along with Rosny’s Yo no uwasa was an early overseas newspaper printed in Japanese.138 Having toured these various publishing facilities, the Higashi Honganji group put what it had learned into practice on its return to Japan in the summer of 1873, moving quickly to establish its Translation Office. Even before leaving for Europe, the Higashi Honganji delegation had formulated the basic plan for establishing a translation office. According to Kataoka Takaaki, “when the Ministry of Religious Affairs was opened, Ishikawa Shuntai went to Tokyo to repre­sent Higashi Honganji. It seems that, while he was living in the temple’s Asakusa annex, he became acquainted with Ryūhoku, with whom he then planned and implemented the project.”139 That the plans for the Translation Office were taking shape during the course of the group’s tour of Europe is suggested by Ryūhoku’s correspondence with future staff members while in Europe.140 Ryūhoku’s activities during the tour abroad as well as his work upon returning to Japan demonstrate the important role he took in furthering Higashi Honganji’s efforts in both scholarship and publishing. On August 15, 1873, he became the office’s director, and Ishikawa Shuntai was named one of its leading officers. Until it was closed in 1878, the Higashi Honganji Translation Office was a large operation, supporting a staff of some twenty people.141 According to Kataoka, “the office published only four texts (in ten volumes), but if the materials that were left in manuscript form are included in the count, there were some thirty-odd texts (in 136 volumes).”142 Among the published texts were Sansuku tangohen (A vocabulary of Sanskrit), a twovolume edition published in 1876, and Sansuku kobunten (A small grammar of Sanskrit), a three-volume translation of Sanskrit Manual by Monier Monier-Williams. Both of these texts were edited by Ryūhoku’s student Funabashi Gyokkei, and the second includes a preface by Ishikawa Shuntai that stresses how essential the knowledge of Sanskrit is for Buddhist study. Shuntai’s preface goes on to explain how the Higashi Honganji delegation acquired books about Sanskrit during their trip to the West.143 The Translation Office also began to publish a complete Japanese translation of Theodor Benfey’s 1866 A Sanskrit-English Dictionary but was only able to complete one-fifth of the task, which was published in three volumes as Sansuku jiten (Dictionary of Sanskrit). In addition to these materials related to Sanskrit, the Higashi Honganji Translation Office also planned to translate a variety of Western studies of world religions. For example, the office completed translations of several chapters from James Freeman Clarke’s 1871 Ten Great Religions:

Fig. 5.3 Société d’ethnographie membership roster, 1873. Ryūhoku’s name is second from the bottom. His friend from the Katsuragawa salon, Dutch scholar Mitsukuri Shūhei, Kurimoto Joun’s son Teijirō, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and several other associates are also listed. Mémoires du Congrès international des Orien­tal­ istes. 1re session—Paris—1873 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie, 1876), vol. 3, appendixes, p. cxlvi. Courtesy of University of Michigan.

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An Essay in Comparative Theology, but, by the time the Office closed down, they had only published the part of the text concerned with Buddhism, in 1877–1878, as Bukkyō ronpyō (Commentary on Buddhism) in two volumes. As for the translations that were still in manuscript stage when the Translation Office shut its doors, several concerned the classic languages and literature of India, such as a retranslation of the Rig-Veda based on H. H. Wilson’s English version and A Bengali Grammar by William Yates. In addition, seven of the office’s translators were at work on a version of James T. Wheeler’s massive The History of India from the Earliest Ages. There were also a few titles based on French works concerning Christianity, such as Ernest Renan’s 1863 Vie de Jésus and J. M. Cayla’s Jésuites hors la loi. The office also published translations of a few works of J. B. Marsden’s including a partial translation of his History of Christian Churches and Sects from the Earliest Days of Christianity. Finally, the office had prepared three titles on Mormonism, drawn from such works of Thomas B. H. Stenhouse as Rocky Mountain Saints: A Full and Complete History of the Mormons. This list of publications confirms that one of the main purposes of the group’s departure for Europe was in fact to deepen their understanding of Christianity and to learn more about other world religions. To this end, while the group was in Paris, they met frequently with European Asianist scholars and bought the books they recom­ mended. The diaries of both Matsumoto Hakka and Ryūhoku indicate purchases of dictionaries, translations of Asian sacred texts, and other materials from an “Oriental Bookstore,” probably Maisonneuve, which published several of Rosny’s books.144 At least two of the titles the Higashi Honganji group purchased at this bookstore (Renan’s Vie de Jésus and Wheeler’s History of India) would be translated by the temple’s Translation Office as soon as the group returned to Japan. It was as an employee of Higashi Honganji that Ryūhoku visited various publish­ ing offices abroad, had extensive interactions with Rosny and other European scholars, and began his studies of Sanskrit. Yet, in contrast to his traveling companions, there is nothing in Ryūhoku’s Diary that even remotely depicts these activities as part of a larger effort to preserve Buddhism or refute Christianity; on the contrary, Ryūhoku saw Christianity in a benign light. After returning to Japan, he became the director of the temple’s Translation Office, but his time there did not last long. Before one year had elapsed, he resigned his post, taking up leadership at the Chōya shinbun in September 1874. Although Ryūhoku did receive some instruction in Sanskrit from Rosny, what he emphasizes in his Diary is instead Rosny’s activities as a publisher and as the founder of the Société d’ethnographie, an organization Ryūhoku joined while his traveling com­ panions who also met with Rosny, Ishikawa Shuntai, and Matsumoto Hakka, did not. In Ryūhoku’s case, the experience abroad seems to have nurtured his eventual entry into a different sort of publishing enterprise. Even while he was serving as the director of the temple’s Translation Office, the goals he saw for it went beyond the apologetical purposes of his traveling companions in preparing a defense of Buddhism. When the office opened on November 5, Ryūhoku delivered an address titled “On the opening of the Translation Office and the ancient languages of India,” in which he asserted the necessity of introducing the study of Sanskrit and the Indian classics to Japan:

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Indian historical, geographical, as well as philosophical texts from antiquity to the present will be translated into Japanese, and the course of Indian history and its topography will be explained. In this way, believers in Buddhism will be able to thoroughly learn about the sites and features of the country in which the religion arose, so as to put an end to the feeling of trying to scratch an itch through one’s shoe. . . . Now is a time when the various countries of Europe and America are all making thorough efforts to research the learning of other countries, thereby expanding their own countries’ knowledge. Needless to say, our country too should likewise investigate the scholarship of other countries. How much more so for believers in Buddhism. If a Buddhist does not keep up with the scholarship of India, he will end up being laughed at by Westerners as someone who doesn’t understand the fundamentals.145

More than expanding knowledge of Buddhism for its own sake, Ryūhoku emphasizes how such knowledge will offer Japan’s Buddhist scholars parity with those of the West and thus give their scholarship international currency.146 That Ryūhoku was himself think­ ing about Buddhism in such a comparative and international context is evident from the essays he submitted to the Yūbin hōchi shinbun while still employed at Higashi Honganji’s Translation Office. In one of these, he intervenes to comment on a discussion that has been taking place in the newspaper’s pages about the status of Confucianism, Shinto, and Buddhism in Japan, arguing against one nativist letter writer’s position that Shinto is Japan’s single true religion: If one considers the matter deeply, he sees that these two paths [of Shinto and Confucianism] are . . . not religious. Confucianism is something that instructs one in the way for living his daily life ethically. It is what they call in the West a morality. Everyone knows that there is a difference between a religion and a morality. . . . What is called Shinto is simply respect for the ancestors of the emperor. It is not the case that the term “Shinto” existed in the past. . . . In recent years, there are those who propose all manner of new theories. Out of a desire to make it into a religion like Buddhism, they worship the three gods of creation. We would not be unjustified in suspecting that they are just copying the worship of God in Christianity. . . . This amounts to taking something that is not a religion and forcing it to be one. . . . They no doubt intend to revere Shinto by making it into a religion but in fact they end up slighting it. My countrymen: who among you does not revere the ancestors of your emperor? Who among you does not love the country of your parents? These two can also be found in Western teachings. “Respecting the divine” is part of gratitude. And “loving one’s country” is known as patriotism. How can these be called religions? Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam: these all have the proper form of religions. . . . How can Shinto even be compared to a religion? The fact that foolish men and women do not believe in Shinto in the same way that they believe in other religions is proof of this.147

Ryūhoku’s use of the three English terms (italicized above) reveals the impact of his Western journey on his conceptualization of these basic cultural issues, giving him new vocabulary with which to discuss even the Confucianism that he had spent half his life teaching. In a follow-up essay printed not long thereafter, Ryūhoku addressed himself again to society at large, drawing on his overseas experiences to state that, whereas there was no country lacking a religion, there were many countries with nonreligious people.

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That Ryūhoku counted himself among their number is perhaps implied by the closing words of the above passage but made explicit in the following passage from the later essay: My neighbor to the east is an old man who believes in Buddhism. My neighbor to the west is an old woman who believes in Christianity. And I dwell in between, reciting the texts of our land, reading Confucian texts of China, and studying the sciences of the West. I don’t have any connection to religion, but what is the harm in that?148

Although his perspective differed from the priests with whom he traveled abroad, the exhortation he gave to Japanese Buddhists during his address at the Translation Office’s opening, to acquaint themselves with Indian texts and with Western scholarship on Buddhism, can be seen as a manifestation of the eclectic framework that Ryūhoku came to advocate in his career as a journalist, the catholic quality of his approach apparent even in the brief self-description above. He may not have had a clear vision of the precise path of publishing activities he would pursue on his return, but Diary of a Journey to the West demonstrates his engaged quest toward it. These two essays contributed to the Yūbin hōchi shinbun while he was still in the Translation Office’s employ show how he was taking active steps to realize his own goals of becoming a newspaper journalist less than a year after his return.

Ch a p t er Si x

Ryūhoku the Journalist

I

n the summer of 1874, Ryūhoku resigned his post as the head of Higashi Honganji’s Translation Office in Kyoto, made his way back to Tokyo, and embarked upon a career in a rapidly emerging new domain: the world of modern print journalism. Several Englishlanguage newspapers had flourished in the treaty ports during the 1860s, and some early Japanese-language prototypes based on them had begun to appear sporadically in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, but it was not until after the Meiji Restoration that full-fledged Japanese papers were established.1 Beginning with the late 1871 founding of the Yokohama mainichi shinbun, the first daily newspaper printed in Japanese, the next several years saw a truly explosive proliferation of new Japanese media. Though many of these papers ultimately proved to be quite short-lived, there were already several dozen competing for readers by 1872. Even before assuming this new role, Ryūhoku had already demonstrated a marked interest in newspapers and publishing activities in general, and, as chapter 5 argued, one of the major effects of Ryūhoku’s tour abroad in 1872–73 was to make his incipient inter­est in newspapers and other modern print media more concrete. Reading through his travelogue, one notices the numerous visits he made to newspaper offices, bookstores, and printing shops, as well as the interactions he had with professional translators, journalists, and other publishers. In the short term these can be understood as part of his preparation for directing the Higashi Honganji Translation Office, but, in the long term, they prepared Ryūhoku to become a newspaper journalist himself. In addition to identifying himself as a publiciste to the Parisians he met in 1873, Ryūhoku had even begun to make contributions to some of the earliest Japanese newspapers around this time, his first appearing while he was still in Europe. Among the items in the May 1873 edition of the Yūbin hōchi shinbun was one headed “An abridged excerpt from a letter sent from a certain Mr. Narushima now in the French capital of Paris to a certain Mr. Kusuyama.” Kusuyama was Ryūhoku’s biological brother, and, judging from the letter’s contents, the dispatch was composed at some point in late February.2 In the letter, Ryūhoku gives a

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brief outline of his various nocturnal adventures in Paris, including a recent trip to the theater. Ryūhoku attended several plays, musicals, and other public performances while in Europe, but in his travelogue Diary of a Journey to the West he made a particularly detailed record of one in particular: a theatrical version of La dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. It was Ryūhoku’s response to this production that formed the bulk of his letter to Kusuyama, and, when the letter was published in the Yūbin hōchi shinbun, it provided the paper’s readers with their first introduction to what would later became a well-known story in Japan: The night before last, I went to see a play at a theater called the Gymnase. The play they per­ formed, if one were to put it in Japanese terms, was about a geisha who falls in love with a playboy but who is forced to break up with him when the man’s parents disapprove of her; after this, she remains tormented by her love and ends up falling ill and dying; the man meanwhile goes mad. This is based on actual events, and the courtesan’s name is Camellia. Her grave is within the city of Paris, and the playboy is apparently an old man now but still alive. It had closed after a smashing success the other day, but, the night before last, it was performed just one night more at the man’s request. Since it had been very highly regarded, I also went to see it. The play truly had me in tears. People’s feelings are exactly the same no matter where you go; the West is absolutely no different.3

Aside from Ryūhoku’s 1869 experiments with Strange News of Tokyo, this dispatch from Paris was his first newspaper publication. Ostensibly it was intended as private correspondence with his brother, but the letter actually shared several features in common with the essays he would soon begin writing in a more official capacity as the editor of the Chōya shinbun. Ryūhoku’s forte lay not so much in the reporting of hard news as it did in writing a regular column that incisively and humorously commented on government policies, social trends, and cultural phenomena. Many of his essays began by narrating some bit of recent news or some event from his daily life about which he then offered a more wide-ranging set of observations.4 In the case of this letter from the Yūbin hōchi shinbun, the enthusiastic description of the play he had recently seen led to a general conclusion about what he saw as the universality of human emotion, a theme to which Ryūhoku would return repeatedly in essays he published in the Chōya shinbun and elsewhere.5 It is unclear how Ryūhoku’s letter found its way into the Hōchi news­ paper, but it is worth remembering that the gap between remote news dispatches and letters to the editor was not so clearly demarcated at the time. Professional reporters had yet to make their appearance in Japan, and newspapers were therefore still reliant on their readers to contribute information.6 In printing Ryūhoku’s letter, the Hōchi made no special distinction, simply including it among a series of several other news items. As is clear from the two letters to the editor concerning Japanese religious life that I discussed at the close of chapter 5, Ryūhoku’s role of occasional correspondent for the Yūbin hōchi shinbun continued even once he had returned to Japan and resumed his work at the temple. In the spring of 1874, as Ryūhoku divided his time between teaching at the Higashi Honganji academy in Tokyo and supervising the temple’s Kyoto Translation Office, readers of the Yūbin hōchi shinbun were able to follow his travels and



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observations from the dispatches he sent from time to time to the Tokyo paper. In the course of one letter he posted while en route to Kyoto in March of that year, he noted new transportation options available along the Tōkaidō highway and described the stations thronging with westward-bound travelers making a pilgrimage to the Great Shrine at Ise. Although the inns were crowded, conditions were on the whole improved from the past, he noted, and he credited this to the “efforts of Transport Ministry and prefectural officials.” This comparison of past and present in Ryūhoku’s prose account took on a larger significance, however, in the three quatrains that he included at the close of the letter. The first of these touches on his experience entering Shizuoka, where many of his fellow former Tokugawa vassals had taken up residence after the Restoration: 東府霸圖今已非 滄桑欲説聽人稀 七年不過函關路 依舊嵐光映客衣

The grand plans of the eastern government have all now come to naught; One may speak of “azure seas becoming mulberry fields” but few will listen. For seven years, I have not passed along this road at the Hakone barrier; But, as in former times, the mountain mist shines on my traveler’s garments.7

The second line alludes to the idiom about the world’s vicissitudes that Ryūhoku had used in the second volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi to describe the changes that the Meiji Restoration brought to the capital, as discussed in chapter 5. Ryūhoku’s last visit to Shizuoka (then still known as Fuchū) had been in 1868, for the funeral of his first adopted son, Nobukane. Although Tokugawa era domains, including the newly created Shizuoka, survived through the first years of Meiji, they were eliminated in 1871, when prefectures were instituted by the central government. Perhaps the new symbolic finality that this brought to the Tokugawa’s demise is the referent of the poem’s first line. The second quatrain in the sequence also touches on the fates of former Tokugawa vassals but significantly situates Ryūhoku in a separate position. Recall that Ryūhoku had renounced his samurai status just after the Restoration and was now a commoner: 稚兒善學讀新聞 寒士躬耕記古君 爭問東京頃年事 先生笑指富山雲

A young child good at learning reads the newspaper; An impoverished samurai tills the fields himself, recalling his former lord. All race to ask about recent events in the Eastern Capital; The Master laughs and points at the clouds on Fuji.

Framed in parallel with the “old lord” of the second line is the “newspaper” of the first: the very medium to which Ryūhoku is addressing himself with his correspondence and through which readers would have encountered the poem. The image of the child reading the newspaper draws on a passage from the prose portion of Ryūhoku’s dispatch, in which he notes seeing several children reading newspapers at the postal stations along the Tōkaidō highway, remarking that they attest “to the steady progress of civilization

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even to these remote villages.” The phrase closely recalls the observation Ryūhoku had made on seeing parents carrying their children to be vaccinated during his trip a few years earlier to Koga, but now it is the newspaper that stands as the index of civilization. This particular view of the newspaper would in fact become a recurring motif in the travelogues Ryūhoku wrote in the course of his journalistic career. His attention to the transformative effects of the daily newspaper and the modern communication infrastructure that supported it are further evident from the final poem in the sequence: 自出家山幾日程 征鞍僅過掛川城 郵丁健脚飛如鳥 偏恐郷書先我行

Since leaving my hometown, I have journeyed for several days; This traveler’s saddle has only now passed the city of Kakegawa. The postal carrier’s legs are sturdy: he flies like a bird; Perhaps letters from home will arrive before I do!

Even after arriving in Kyoto, Ryūhoku continued to submit occasional dispatches to the Yūbin hōchi shinbun reporting on conditions in the old capital, evaluating the extent to which Western books were available, for example, describing the conditions of Kyoto’s new public schools, and judging the success of its recent industrial exhibition. As might be expected, Ryūhoku found Kyoto lagging behind, and perhaps his Tokyo readers took pleasure in receiving confirmation that they were indeed on the cusp of progress. During these months, Ryūhoku was also hard at work on the research and writing of a Kyoto counterpart to his Yanagibashi reportage (both volumes of which had been published in the spring of 1874), but it would be several more years before he found a way to circumvent the Meiji authorities’ refusal to allow the publication of Keibyō ippan (A glimpse of the capital’s cats).8 It is uncertain how formally defined Ryūhoku’s relationship with the Hōchi was. Clearly he enjoyed a more than incidental affiliation with the paper, for he would later describe himself as an “escapee” from it, but he was surely not a regular staff member.9 Ryūhoku left Kyoto in July 1874 for a tour of several weeks through the Hokuriku region. When he arrived back in Tokyo in late August, the Hōchi alerted its readers of the return of “Narushima Ryūhoku, a friend of our company,” promising to publish material from this northern journey.10 Yet these writings never materialized in its pages, for, just a few weeks later, Ryūhoku had dissolved whatever ties he had to the Hōchi and launched the Chōya shinbun, which would quickly become one of its significant rivals. Until his death ten years later, Ryūhoku occupied a leading role in the founding of modern journalism in Japan, serving in a variety of key positions at the Chōya shinbun, including editor and president. Ryūhoku established the Chōya as one of the outspoken voices of criticism against various Meiji policies. This chapter addresses Ryūhoku’s first years at the Chōya shinbun, focusing in particular on how he fashioned a new identity for the newspaper and for himself as a “newspaperman.” The oppositional stance that Ryūhoku often adopted toward the Meiji government could sometimes be a boost to sales, but it could also cost the paper severely in an era when increasingly restrictive press laws were used against newspapers the Meiji regime found troublesome. On numerous



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occasions, the Chōya was ordered to suspend publication, resulting in a devastating loss of revenue and readership; its reporters and editors were regularly fined and not infrequently incarcerated. As an individual, Ryūhoku was by no means exempt from such risks, and, in 1876, he served time in jail for a particularly critical piece he had written. Part of what made the Chōya shinbun distinctive was its high literary quality. Under Ryūhoku’s leadership, the paper became an important forum for Sinitic poetry, one that offered a regular venue for well-known and aspiring poets alike to publish their works but that also stimulated new forms of literary interaction among its readers. Beyond its attention to Sinitic and other forms of poetic discourse, the Chōya shinbun kept the literary fires burning with another innovation: the “miscellany” column (zatsuwa, or, as it soon became known, zatsuroku).11 Both contemporary readers and later scholars have identified Ryūhoku’s zatsuroku columns as the single most important factor behind the early success of the Chōya shinbun. These zatsuroku columns—well over one thousand in number—provided Ryūhoku with a forum to address a genuinely staggering array of topics, from the mundane (how the streets of the Ginza might best be kept free of snow) to the arcane (whether the character 嘶 could properly be used not just for the whinny of a horse, but for the cry of a goose).12 But, behind the occasional frivolousness, Ryūhoku also addressed larger questions in these columns, the majority of which feature analysis of current events both domestic and foreign, commentaries on recent social and cultural phenomena, and periodic satirical jabs at the policies of the Meiji oligarchy. Aimed at an educated readership, these columns were mainly written in a heavily Sinified form of Japanese derived from kundoku reading practice. Some of Ryūhoku’s most well-regarded and indeed popularly successful compositions demanded considerable background knowledge and included several intricate parodies of classical Sinitic texts. In these essays, liberally leavened with his characteristically wry observations, Ryū­ hoku explored issues as diverse as the direction of educational policy, the development of public space, the timetable of governmental reform, the preservation of traditional cul­ ture, and even recent political movements by Japan’s East Asian neighbors. Through them, Ryūhoku consistently made the case for a highly eclectic approach to modernization. While he viewed the adoption of certain elements of Western societies as unambiguously positive, he also pointed out the dangers of being blinded by ersatz enlightenment and therefore urged Japan to be critical and selective in applying Western models. Even as he remained committed and engaged in shaping the course of Japan’s modernization from his outside position, Ryūhoku retained his sense of humor, addressing these topics with a light touch that insured his enduring popularity.

The Founding of the Chōya shinbun The Chōya shinbun is remembered today as one of the most important and widely read newspapers of the early Meiji period, but it had rather unpromising beginnings. Originally founded in 1872 by Ukai Nagisa and Otobe Kanae as the Kōbun tsūshi (Bulletin of official writings), its pages were filled for the most part with the furigana-glossed texts of

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government directives. Over fifty newspapers were being published in Japan at the time, but, in the words of Maeda Ai, the Kōbun tsūshi was “one of the dullest.”13 By its second year, the Kōbun tsūshi was at least able to publish on a more or less daily basis, but its lack­ luster content doomed it to perpetually sluggish sales. Struggling to make the paper viable, Ukai visited the home of Ōtsuki Bankei to solicit suggestions for a writer who could attract readers. As described in chapters 3 and 4, this elderly Confucian scholar with knowledge of Dutch studies had served as a key model for the youthful Ryūhoku’s own intellectual transformation in the early 1860s. In response to Ukai’s inquiry, Bankei recommended his old literary associate and drinking companion, and, a few weeks later, Ryūhoku took over the paper, relaunching it on September 24, 1874, as the Chōya shinbun.14 Perhaps to commemorate his indebtedness, Ryūhoku decorated the offices of the newspaper with a plaque reading Chōya shinbun in Bankei’s hand.15 That the Chōya would enjoy such success was unknown at the time of its launch, but it was clear to all involved that they faced a formidable challenge to hold their own against two more established papers whose circulation figures towered above those of their competitors: the Yūbin hōchi shinbun that Ryūhoku had recently left and the Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun.16 In the new paper’s inaugural issue, former Kōbun tsūshi editors Takahashi Kiichi 高橋基一 (1850–97) and Sawada Chokuon 澤田直温 (1834–96) sought to clarify their aspirations, couching their campaign in military metaphors: At present, the government is endeavoring to spread the institutions and teachings of enlightenment in order to purge the entire populace of its inferior old customs. This autumn is the time when the people should likewise rise up and exert themselves to respond to this transformative nourishment. In recent years, the various newspaper companies have competed to hire men of broad learning who are skilled at writing to disseminate reports of unusual events and news. Outstanding among these companies are the Nippō and the Hōchi, which have established their opposing fortresses, outfitted with battle drums and flags; their fiery vigor grows more robust by the day. They might be called two great countries. When it comes to our little company, we are but a newly founded minor country, weak in its military forces and impoverished in rations. How can we possibly hope to match the power of these great countries? We have, nevertheless, received the same permission from the government to publish our paper and have raised up our company’s name. It is our hope to record news from all over the land, and we aspire for the longstanding patronage of the public.

As Takahashi and Sawada defined it in this opening salvo, the mission of the Chōya shinbun was to proceed in parallel to the Meiji government’s enlightenment efforts. Nevertheless, they clearly located the newspaper within the private sector; the newspaper was, in other words, a response originating from the people that would play a complementary, though not identical, role to the government’s program. The distinction would later become much more pronounced, but the emerging sense of journalistic independence that is detectable here is significant because the year of the paper’s launch in 1874 coincided with a pivotal point in the trajectory of relations between the newspapers and the Meiji government. Yamamoto Taketoshi has characterized the shift as one in which the dominant vector of communication in the newspaper world shifted from “top-down” to “bottom-up.”17 In other words, until that point, the Meiji government had looked



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upon the papers as an expedient means to disseminate information and educate the masses, a favorable attitude articulated in an 1871 official memorial it sent to newspaper publishers: “The newspaper’s purpose is to open and expand the people’s knowledge. The opening and expansion of the people’s knowledge will smash their stubborn eccentricities and lead them to the domain of civilization and enlightenment.” To facilitate their “top-down” model of information transmission, the Meiji government at first actively encouraged the expansion of newspapers through a variety of means, including assistance in establishing new papers, provision of financial support, waiving of postage fees, underwriting of distribution to the rural periphery, and construction of various “newspaper reading rooms” (shinbun jūranjo) to make the papers more widely accessible to the populace. Local governments, for their part, also took various steps to make newspapers available to rural populations, reprinting selected articles and holding periodic oral recitations of newspaper content.18 Yet, in January of 1874, when a memorial advocating the establishment of a popularly elected Diet appeared in one of the government affiliated newspapers, writes Yamamoto, “the honeymoon between the government and news­papers was over.” By the following year, many newspapers had forged a newly adversarial relationship with the Meiji government and become the target of its zealous censors, the Chōya shinbun foremost among them. In the remainder of their inaugural essay, Takahashi and Sawada introduced the new staff, the “men of broad learning who are skilled at writing” who would define the new Chōya: Recently our company has entreated Mr. Ōtsuki Bankei with pleas of “O Sir, help me!” Fortunately, he has agreed to lend us a hand. What’s more, Narushima Ryūhoku has recently left the Hōchi company, and so we have asked him to become the head of our paper. . . . Moreover, since our former name was not a good one, we have asked the government’s permission to change it, and we have also given the paper a new look.19

The word chosen for the paper’s new name, chōya 朝野 (Ch. chaoye), literally means “court” and “field” (that is to say, the government and the common people). Metonymically, it refers to the realm as a whole, a sense captured in such English renditions of Chōya shinbun as The Universal or The Nation. As they note here, Takahashi and Sawada had pro­cured Ryūhoku as a new weapon—freshly plundered from their opponents—one they hoped would give them an edge in the battle among the various newspapers. The tactic worked, for Ryūhoku proceeded to deploy a variety of stratagems that made the Chōya competitive, giving it not just a new name and a “new look,” but an entirely new identity. From the moment he joined, Ryūhoku sought to take what had been an unexceptional conduit of government information and transform it into a reputable public forum for commentary and debate. To that end, he made editorials on political topics a regular feature of the paper. Moreover, since the newly constituted Chōya aspired to have an educated readership, he decided immediately to eliminate the bōkun ( furigana glosses appearing beside Chinese graphs) that had made its predecessor, the Kōbun tsūshi, more readily intelligible to a less educated population. Those comfortable with the basically Sino-Japanese (kundokuchō) style that dominated the Chōya’s editorials and who also

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Table 6.1 Features associated with two different categories of newspaper in Meiji Japan Ōshinbun (large newspaper)

Koshinbun (small newspaper)

four pages folded in two

two pages printed on both sides

furigana used only for difficult characters

furigana added to all characters

political editorials in every issue

absolutely no political content

lack of interest in criminal incidents

emphasis on reporting criminal incidents

lack of interest in stories about the pleasure quarters, the theater, wrestlers

investigative reports about topics such as the pleasure quarters, the theater, and wrestlers

no serialized novels; no illustrations

illustrated serials in each issue

reporters are students, scholars, or experts in politics, law, or economics

reporters are gesaku writers, nativist scholars, or writers of diverting literature

overseas news column

indifferent to overseas news

subscribers are middle class and above

subscribers are middle class and below, or middleclass women and children

many ads

few ads

Sources: Inui 2003, 255; Nozaki 1927, 2–16.

appreciated Literary Sinitic poetry and prose (kanshi and kanbun) thus became the paper’s target audience. In addition to marking a new chilliness between the newspapers and the Meiji government, 1874 was also a time when newspapers were gradually coming to be differentiated into two basic categories: the ōshinbun and the koshinbun (table 6.1). Originally referring literally to the physical size of the paper, whether “large” or “small,” these terms eventually came to be shorthand for a variety of other characteristics beyond simple appearance, including article content, authorship, and readership. The classic articulation of the distinction between these two categories of newspaper was put forth by Nozaki Sabun (1858–1935), a protégé of Ryūhoku at the Eiri chōya shinbun, in his reminiscences about the early Meiji literary scene.20 In her pioneering study of koshinbun, Tsuchiya Reiko points out that the attributes held to be constitutive markers of these two categories were subject to change over time and moreover that the gap between them has perhaps been overemphasized by historians of the Japanese press.21 Tsuchiya makes an important point in noting that Nozaki’s highly specific framework is a much later retrospection; we should not imagine that these two categories were so clearly and elaborately delineated in the minds of early Meiji press pioneers. Nevertheless, Nozaki’s description of the respective features of the ōshinbun and koshinbun provides a useful starting point for understanding the changes Ryūhoku introduced when he relaunched the Kōbun tsūshi as the Chōya shinbun. Under Ryūhoku’s leadership the Chōya shinbun soon came to embody virtually all of the features that would eventually define the ōshinbun category. From early on in its history, for example, the paper included a “foreign dispatch” section with translations of news from abroad, and, though sensational stories of crimes were by no means absent from



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its pages, such topics were not the focus of the paper’s news coverage. Likewise, although Ryūhoku had established himself as a connoisseur of life in the pleasure quarters in his previous publications, as a rule the Chōya shinbun was not preoccupied with reporting gossip about its denizens and patrons. The host of reforms Ryūhoku introduced in typography, format, and content on assuming control of the Chōya shinbun thus reshaped it and allowed it to stand alongside the Yūbin hōchi and the Nichi nichi, the two leading newspapers that would later be classed along with the Chōya as Tokyo’s representative ōshinbun.

The Emergence of the “Newspaperman” When Ryūhoku was invited to lead the Chōya shinbun in the summer of 1874, he was already well known to his early Meiji readership in numerous guises. Ryūhoku had first attained prominence as the successor to a distinguished scholarly family; as chapters 2 and 3 have shown, even his literary associates in the 1850s referred to his status as the Narushima family’s scion, and by the 1860s they were routinely describing him as a Tokugawa “court poet.” In addition to his reputation as a scholar, his service as a commander for the shogun’s cavalry unit in the final days of the Tokugawa period was also well known, for it was mentioned in the preface to the second volume of New Chronicles. Alongside these roles of eminent Confucian scholar and dutiful military vassal, the content of New Chronicles had given Ryūhoku a reputation as a sophisticated connoisseur of the capital city’s nightlife and also as a critic of the shallow or superficial Westernization that characterized the period of bunmei kaika, or “civilization and enlightenment.” Though written (and to some extent circulated) years before his newspaper debut, the first and second installments of his New Chronicles of Yanagibashi had only been published that spring. This prior proliferation of authorial images meant that, when the first issues of Chōya shinbun appeared in September 1874, the paper’s readers might have held any of several presumptions about Ryūhoku and the place he would occupy in the new post-Restoration society: he could best be understood as an old-guard Confucian scholar, for example, or an antiquarian devotee of Edo customs, a traditional literatus, an opponent of Westernization, a loyal Tokugawa vassal, an urban sophisticate, and so forth. As president of the Chōya shinbun, Ryūhoku would situate himself with a new identity, indicated by his early use of the moniker “Shinbunshi” 新聞子, or “Newspaperman.” Yet, although this new appellation shared the same pronunciation as the neologism for describing the newspaper medium itself, shinbunshi 新聞紙, its precise referential content was still inchoate. One of the first “miscellaneous” essays Ryūhoku published in the paper appeared about three weeks after the Chōya shinbun had been launched. “Lament of the Loincloth” begins by introducing readers to “Fundoshi-sensei,” the suicidally morose undergarment of the piece’s title who is particularly distraught to have recently discovered that he may be cast off amid the whirlwind of cultural changes in early Meiji:

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Late at night, Master Loincloth crawled out from under his futon and beneath the faint lamplight, stretched and crunched and heaved a great sigh to himself, saying, “Alas, it has been said since antiquity that the vicissitudes of the world are manifold, with mulberry fields transforming into seas and deep valleys turning into mountains, but who would have thought the changes would be so momentous?! The shogun has become a daimyo; the daimyo have become nobility; the shogun’s banner-men have become rickshaw-men; and the domain samurai have become potato farmers. The malign winds of the West have blown across our nation, becoming telegraphs, steam engines, elementary schools, bricks, cropped hairstyles, straight sleeve garments, newspapers, beef-bowls, the Keiō Academy, the Representative Assembly, postage stamps, and stock certificates. I had been watching this strange and marvelous procession with absent-minded amusement, like a raccoon dog tapping its belly. Who could have imagined that these things I had viewed until now as other people’s affairs would end up becoming a disaster that came crashing down even upon my very person? In the past, there was no one— aside from callow youths and loafers—who did not enlist my services. But these days, with the Western winds raging harder and harder, the loquacious pundits of the world have begun to say that any state employing me is barbarous, and it seems that increasingly this idea has gained hold. Just this morning, while at the bath, I heard my master say to his wife, ‘According to the officials in my ministry, there are no places among the various nations of the West that employ Loincloths. I think I am going to give that Master Loincloth the boot straightaway.’ As soon as I heard this, my mind was made up. I would strangle myself from a roofbeam or throw myself down a well. Rather than bearing this shame, it would be preferable to cut an X into my belly and die!” Wriggling and writhing, he gave a miserable sigh.

At the outset of the piece, the loincloth notes that he has watched with dismay as those who held high positions under the Tokugawa shogun have all been brought low by the regime’s collapse. Given Ryūhoku’s own status as a former shogunal vassal, many readers would at first tend to identify the loincloth with the author, seeing it as an exponent of the grief shared by dispossessed former Tokugawa officials, many of whom, like Ryūhoku, became the founding figures of early Meiji journalism. Indeed, the initial content and even some of the phrases used in this essay recall passages from Ryūhoku’s own earlier works, such as the “mulberry fields” idiom discussed in the poem above. Yet soon the reader discovers that “newspapers” are in fact one of the cultural institutions and artifacts that the aggrieved loincloth scorns contemptuously as having been blown into Japan by the “malign winds of the West,” thereby introducing a gap between Ryūhoku’s emergent construction of him­ self as “newspaperman” and the position of the embittered loincloth. Deprived of a place in the new order, the loincloth’s hardened resolve to commit suicide recalls the uncompromising integrity of the idealized samurai vassal, another figure that readers might well have associated with Ryūhoku but that is here painted in absurdly comic terms. The essay introduces a new twist with the appearance of Master Loincloth’s humble interlocutor: a louse, who invokes another figure with whom Ryūhoku could easily be identified: Just then, an old louse quietly crawled out from Master Loincloth’s body, smiled, and said, “Master, how your words resemble those of an old Confucian scholar! You always go into reclusion, stubbornly clinging to the old notion of ‘withdrawing and concealing’ yourself,



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and what’s more you know nothing of the world. Though you might chance to glimpse the sun when it is time to do the laundry, otherwise you do not venture beyond the back door or the vicinity of the outhouse. As a result, you see nothing of the flourishing city out front and perceive none of the enlightenment of the world. You are content simply to lap the dregs from the ancients’ scrotums and cling to tight-assed narrow views. Having met with this upheaval, you have lost your station, but it’s entirely too late now for you to become indignant about it. That being said, perhaps you could make a complete transformation of your intentions; I suggest you entrust yourself to those washerwomen and make a clean purge of all your old mustiness. Even if you cannot return to your old occupation, how hard could it be for you to become a bellyband for a maid in a tenement house? How can you be so cavalier about destroying your six-foot body?” Master Loincloth shook his head and said bitterly, “No, no. . . . What dignity would I have left if I were to bow and scrape to the Dutchmen, draw­ ing close to their foul artifacts of enlightenment and seeping up their odors?” The old louse then suddenly smiled and burst out into song: “If the water from the tap is clean, you can use it to wash away your dirt; if the water from the tap is cloudy, you can use it to wash away your oil.” So saying, he crawled away under the futon.22

Many of Ryūhoku’s contemporaries would have known that he had once lost his position as a Confucian scholar and that he had also briefly declared his intent to go into reclusion immediately after the Restoration: both of these incidents were noted in the preface to the second volume of New Chronicles. In the image of Master Loincloth, then, are overlapping figures of the loyal vassal, the stouthearted samurai, the Confucian scholar, and the principled recluse, caricatures of positions that Ryūhoku had occupied in the past and against which the journalist Ryūhoku, through the unlikely intervention of the louse, articulates a new position of resourceful adaptation and social engagement. Just as the louse emerges from the loincloth’s body, so too does Ryūhoku effect in this column an extrication from the carapace of these overlapping former identities. At the end of the piece, as the disgruntled loincloth remains unconvinced by the louse’s suggestions of how he might make a go of life in Meiji, the louse is left to conclude with a final bit of admonition in the form of a song. The louse’s song parodies a famous scene associated with the figure of Qu Yuan, the paragon of the banished yet righteous vassal. One of the best-known sequences in the Chu ci (Songs of the South) is the encounter between Qu Yuan’s persona, “the sober old man,” and a fisherman: “The fisherman, with a faint smile, struck his paddle in the water and made off. And as he went he sang: ‘When the Canglang’s waters are clear, I can wash my hat strings in them; When the Canglang’s waters are muddy, I can wash my feet in them.’ ”23As this exchange shows, the fisherman’s parting words to the Qu Yuan figure suggest two alternatives for a righteous man who encounters political setbacks. If the Way is being upheld and the Canglang stream is clear, one should wash his hat strings and serve at court; if the Way has fallen and the stream is muddy, he should wash his feet and go into reclusion. Ryūhoku’s parody adheres closely to the form and rhythm of the original while transplanting it to a humorously local, urban, contemporary, and earthy context. Unlike the original, however, the louse’s song presents the loincloth with no real alternative. In this day and age, the louse seems to be saying, one must make the best of the situation: complete withdrawal from

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the world is not feasible. Taking a step further and applying this bit of advice to Ryūhoku’s situation, it seems that becoming a journalist was Ryūhoku’s means of making the best of the situation in which he found himself under the Meiji regime. In China and in Japan as well, there was a long tradition of invoking Qu Yuan and the Chu ci in times of duress, and not surprisingly his figure surfaces in the works of many of Ryūhoku’s contemporaries. Ryūhoku’s friend and former colleague Kurimoto Joun, for example, wrote the following quatrain in the wake of the Restoration, likening his own position as a “vassal of a deposed regime” to that of Qu Yuan: 門巷蕭條夜色悲 鵂鶹聲在月前枝 誰憐孤帳寒檠下 白髮遺臣讀楚辭

The city streets outside the gate lie still this cheerless night; A horned owl’s cry from a branch bathed in moonlight. Who will pity him, alone in his curtained room beneath the cold lamp, The white-haired vassal of a deposed regime who reads the Chu ci?24

As former high shogunal officials, both Ryūhoku and Joun qualified as ishin 遺臣 (Ch. yichen), or “vassals of a deposed regime,” but, as the homely dialogue between the louse and the loincloth suggests, such an identity was one from which Ryūhoku now explicitly sought to distance himself. If, as the louse suggested with his sendup of Qu Yuan’s fisherman, principled disengagement in the manner of reclusive figures of yore was not a viable option for the loincloth, it was clearly not practicable for someone aiming to be a journalist. Less than a month after he published “Lament of the Loincloth,” Ryūhoku made this point in the similarly titled essay “Lament of the Newspaperman.” In this dialogue, the “Shinbunshi” of the title relates to his interlocutor at length his frustration in attempting to satisfy the conflicting demands of his varied readership. Midway through, the “Newspaperman” emotes: I have already sold myself into slavery, and even if I were to make myself the embodiment of purity, make my conduct noble, and make my arguments just and proper, I would certainly be presented with the verdict of “Boring!” from my readers. And so even supposing that I might content myself in becoming the Bo Yi of the newspaper world, sure I might be able to avoid eating the “grain of Zhou,” but what would I do about the fact that the company owner’s rice pot would be empty!?25

The allusion here is to Bo Yi, who, along with his brother Shu Qi, was a vassal of the Yin who believed it dishonorable to accept a grain stipend from the new Zhou dynasty after the Yin’s demise. The two fled to Mount Shouyang and literally starved themselves to death on a diet of fiddlehead ferns. As in the earlier “Lament of the Loincloth,” Ryūhoku invokes an extreme exemplar of fidelity to principles only to humorously undercut it as impractical in light of present circumstances. Yet there is an additional level of humor in this second piece since the “newspaperman” is himself the explicit object of parody. Reversing the roles of the loincloth-louse



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dialogue, the newspaperman’s interlocutor politely listens to his lament but then chides him for his somewhat precious petulance, reminding him that, for all his ostensible preoccupation with selling newspapers, he is certainly not doing a good job of entertaining his readers in this column. The self-importance that the “newspaperman” has unwittingly revealed is skewered in the column’s conclusion, in which he shakes his sleeves and cries, “Those who understand me will do so through the newspaper. Those who condemn me will also do so because of the newspaper!” This line would have been recognizable to many in Ryūhoku’s audience as an allusion to a passage in the Mencius, in which Confucius explains the significance of his editing of the Spring and Autumn Annals: When the world declined and the Way fell into obscurity, heresies and violence again rose. There were instances of regicides and parricides. Confucius was apprehensive and composed the Spring and Autumn Annals. Strictly speaking, this is the emperor’s prerogative. That is why Confucius said, “Those who understand me will do so through the Spring and Autumn Annals; those who condemn me will also do so because of the Spring and Autumn Annals.”26

Confronted with a disordered world, Confucius is said to have given up his immediate hopes of official service; but, rather than going into reclusion, he began editing the Chunqiu, one of China’s first histories. The parallel drawn between the newfangled newspaper and one of the Five Classics as well as the Newspaperman’s comparison of himself to Confucius is outlandish, but recalling the context of this parodied line from Mencius leads one to appreciate how Ryūhoku’s journalistic activities served as his own strategic recourse in troubled times.

Literary Arts in the Age of Bunmei Kaika As a result of the changes Ryūhoku implemented, the Chōya established itself as a serious news source, but it was equally important to him that the paper foster the development of literary expression, that its contributors exemplify high standards in their own writing, and that its audience find the Chōya a pleasure to read. Even when his writings offered trenchant political or social critique, Ryūhoku gave them a high degree of stylistic polish that made them enjoyable as literary works in their own right. One of his first major commercial successes, for example, took the form of a short play script set aboard a “mountain sightseeing boat,” the latest invention to appear amid the ceaseless technical marvels of the “present age of kaika.” The boat’s crew and its sole passenger, having grown tired of locomotives, are all besotted by the novel craft, but the inept captains cannot navigate a consistent course, and the boat ends up stranded atop Mount Fuji. Just before the entire episode is revealed to be a dream, those aboard wonder distractedly if the commotion they notice below them might have something to do with “what you often read about in the newspapers these days: the ‘35 million people’ or whatever.” The edition of the Chōya containing this fanciful allegory of political incompetence and official

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obtuseness ultimately scuttling the ship of state was reprinted repeatedly and sold a record number of copies.27 In firmly fixing the place of literary practice in the Chōya, Ryūhoku was mounting a challenge to one dominant trend of the bunmei kaika era, when Japan pursued a rapid course of modernization in an attempt to attain parity with the Western powers. As more obviously practical domains of learning such as science, technology, law, and economics received overwhelming interest and government sponsorship, less obviously practical scholarly pursuits, the study of literature foremost among them, came under threat. One direct articulation of this concern came in an editorial Ryūhoku wrote in the summer of 1875 that discussed the two components of the bunmei kaika catchphrase separately: Has kaika advanced in the world? Yes. Has the world attained the level of bunmei? No. If someone asked me why I offer these curious answers, this is how I would reply. Locomotives charge along, steamships race by, telegraphs send messages, and gas lamps shine; the people’s knowledge has also at last taken a few steps beyond the confines of ignorance. It is in regard to these developments that I say kaika has advanced. But when I consider the moribund state of humane learning (bungaku) in the realm and the low level of its writing, I see nowhere that I might describe with the word bunmei. Now then, doesn’t bunmei refer to the flourishing state of affairs in which the literary culture of a country thrives; where its distinguished scholars and gentlemen are circumspect and proper in their conduct; where they are dignified and elegant in their words? When it comes to the so-called masters and great scholars (for the rest are not worth criticizing), can they write excellent and artful Japanese? I would not vouch for it. Can they use Chinese words with skillful precision? I would not vouch for it. For that matter, are they able to draft Western prose that would not embarrass them before scholars of the various Western countries? Again, I am afraid I cannot vouch for this. That being the case, then, even if a person has diligently studied practical learning and attained thorough comprehension of politics, the law, or any of the various other technical arts, can we call him a master of humane learning?28

Implicit in Ryūhoku’s editorial is an understanding of kaika (enlightenment) that refers primarily to material culture and technical advancement, and a definition of bunmei (civilization) that focuses more on literary and humanistic scholarly achievements. Ryūhoku’s usage of bunmei and kaika as discrete terms would evolve somewhat over the next several years, but his larger critique remained consistent: the Meiji authorities and many common people alike often understood bunmei kaika in an excessively narrow manner that confused superficial material changes with fundamental reforms, that dismissed traditional culture as backward or useless, and that failed to discern the value of artistic endeavors that offered no immediate tangible utility. He repeatedly singled out the disregard for written culture, arguing in one essay, for example, that the dominant slogan of the age should simply be meikaika in order to reflect its lack of attention to literary style (bun).29 Alongside his own creative efforts and the arguments that he wrote in defense of literary practice, Ryūhoku also established in the paper a forum for others’ literary activity. He introduced the first regular poetry column to appear in a Japanese newspaper, a



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section over which his mentor Bankei initially presided.30 Ryūhoku’s zatsuroku essays often incorporated his own and others’ poetry, and the prose essay was usually followed by a space devoted to printing poetry that was mainly Sinitic but occasionally Japanese too. Though individual poetic compositions sometimes appeared in isolation in Ryūhoku’s zatsuroku columns, often the published poems showed the poets engaged in some sort of literary interaction. To give one illustration, on November 26, 1875, Ryūhoku invited nearly twenty poets to observe the fall colors in a garden along the Sumida, encouraging them to compose Sinitic poems inspired by a well-known line from a Du Mu verse. Two days later, he began to serialize the compositions that Ono Kozan, Mukōyama Kōson, Yoda Gakkai, and the other participants had produced on the occasion in the paper’s zatsuroku column.31 In addition to this sort of literary exchange premised on a shared social experience, another form of poetic interaction on regular display in the zatsuroku column was neither temporally nor spatially bounded, but rather mediated solely by textual interaction: one poet would compose a response to another’s poem, making use of the same rhyme characters. Just a day earlier, for example, the November 27 Chōya included several rounds of such harmonizing poems exchanged between Nakamura Keiu (1832–91) and Ōtsuki Bankei, a series that was then harmonized upon by Ryūhoku, whose poem was in turn commented on by Bankei. The zatsuroku section in this way provided its readers with an opportunity to closely observe traditional forms of literary interaction among some of Tokyo’s best-known kanshi poets. The Chōya shinbun’s zatsuroku section went one step further in allowing aspiring poets among the paper’s readership the chance to participate as well, writing themselves into these exchanges by contributing their own verses to the newspaper. Those whose works were selected for publication received not only public recognition, but also evaluative commentary from Ryūhoku, Bankei, and other regular contributors, and their submissions might even prompt other poetically inclined readers to continue the conversation by submitting their own responsive verses. The forum thus brought together in one place a community of geographically dispersed readers and composers of Sinitic verse, offering them the opportunity to interact and engage with one another. These forms of Sinitic poetic exchange would come to characterize the literary journals founded in quick succession in the mid-1870s, such as Mori Shuntō’s Shinbunshi (1875–81), Sada Hakubō’s Meiji shibun (1876–80), and Ryūhoku’s own Kagetsu shinshi, but they were pioneered by Ryūhoku in the poetry corner of his Chōya shinbun “miscellany” column beginning in 1874. In many ways, the collective discursive space created by the Chōya shinbun’s zatsu­ roku section was a new phenomenon, but it was not without some precedent in the Edo period. In his book-length study of Kikuchi Gozan’s Gozandō shiwa (Gozandō’s talks on poetry), Ibi Takashi makes the argument that this serial anthology of and commentary upon Sinitic verse, which appeared in fifteen volumes between 1807 and 1832, marked the founding of journalistic criticism in Japan.32 Gozan’s anthology included compositions by both Chinese and Japanese poets, but, in keeping with broad trends in late Edo kanshi practice, it focused overwhelmingly on the compositions of Japanese Sinitic poets and in particular on contemporary figures. Moreover, as a reflection of the popularization of the form, the Japanese poets whose compositions Gozan chose for inclusion came from

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an impressive range of social groups. Ibi argues that, inasmuch as it was directed toward a nonspecific plurality of readers, was published periodically, contained contemporaneous information and criticism, and provided its editor with his main source of livelihood, Gozandō shiwa can reasonably be considered one of the earliest examples of Japanese commercial journalism. The space for poetry that Ryūhoku created in the zatsuroku column of the Chōya shinbun was thus not the first instance of kanshi-based commercial journalism to appear in Japan, but it developed the potential of its predecessor further and moreover fostered certain novel forms of poetic expression. At its most frequent, Gozandō shiwa had been published only once every year, but the Chōya shinbun appeared daily, making it possible for readers to engage and interact with one another almost in real time. Another important difference was that, whereas Gozandō shiwa showed a strong preponderance of poets drawn from Gozan’s own poetry school, the Kōkosha, the Chōya shinbun aimed to include a wider array of poets, not only those with some personal connection to its editor. This comprehensiveness distinguished the Chōya shinbun also from the kanshi magazines that emerged after 1875, many of which were tied to particular schools. The list of poets that Ryūhoku invited to the fall foliage viewing mentioned above, for example, includes a number who were affiliated with various of the most prominent poetry schools in Tokyo at the time: figures such as Mori Shuntō (who presided over the Matsuri Ginsha), Suzuki Shōtō 鱸松塘 (1823–98) (who presided over the Shichikyoku Ginsha), Seki Sekkō (a longtime member of Ōnuma Chinzan’s Shitaya Ginsha), and so on.33 Amid these factional rivalries, Ryūhoku’s Chōya shinbun provided a forum in which all could participate. Though the paper itself quickly developed a reputation as staunchly oppositional to the Meiji state, the Sinitic verses of government officials were by no means uncommon in its zatsuroku column. Ryūhoku was in fact quite explicit in his attempts to situate the paper above his own private alliances and affiliations; in one of his earliest essays, published just six weeks after the paper’s launch, he wrote specifically about how he was “borrowing some empty space in our company’s newspaper” to publish an open letter, pointedly clarifying that he had “no choice but use the word ‘borrow,’ for the news­ paper is not my personal property.”34 One final distinction between the Chōya shinbun poetry forum and its late Edo predecessor is that, although Gozandō shiwa did draw together Sinitic compositions by both Chinese and Japanese poets, the interaction was unidirectional: Japanese poets responded to Chinese verses. Chōya shinbun added a new dimension by taking advantage of the presence of Chinese (and Korean) literati in Japan to occasionally include their Sinitic poetic and prose compositions and interactions with Japanese poets and government officials. For example, after reading the published exchange of harmonizing poems between Ōtsuki Bankei and Nakamura Keiu, Luo Xuegu 羅雪谷, a Qing painter and calligrapher residing in Tokyo, contributed a letter to the paper containing several poems he had been moved to compose in harmony with the Japanese poets’ rhymes.35 The Chōya shinbun zatsuroku section also published poems composed by Japanese dwelling abroad, conveyed back to Japan through letters they sent home. In several cases, these poems chronicled the poets’ interactions with non-Japanese producers of kanshibun, including scholars in China, Qing literati traveling in Europe, and Korean officials.36



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These various forms of contemporaneous interaction between geographically dispersed Sinitic poets, both professionals and amateurs, both Japanese and non-Japanese, both government officials and private citizens, would characterize the Chōya shinbun poetry forum throughout its existence. As his regular featuring of Sinitic poetry in the zatsuroku column shows, Ryūhoku sought to defend the importance traditionally attached to literary proficiency. Yet he did so not as a reactionary antiquarian who rejected any deviation from classical modes nor as a partisan zealot convinced of the superiority of traditional Confucian studies. Rather, Ryūhoku drew on his own eclectic model of modernization to caution against simply discarding the past in a rush to embrace new forms of utilitarian learning. On the basis of his travels abroad, he had concluded that Western countries also esteemed the literary arts, and he thus argued that any modernization program failing to include literary and other ostensibly “useless” domains would be incomplete. Among the paper’s early features was a series of columns Ryūhoku composed that self-effacingly, yet nevertheless defiantly, met the accusation of “uselessness” head on. Ryūhoku called it Chinpu kango 陳腐閑語, which literally means something like “stale old idle chatter” but also plays on the term chinpunkan, meaning “nonsense” or “gobbledygook.”37 The series appeared from 1874 to 1875 and featured reports and observations on miscellaneous subjects such as language, ancient history, and poetry: a scattered array of topics linked mainly by their shared lack of obvious and immediate practical application. In one installment of Chinpu kango, for example, Ryūhoku traced the origins and diachronic shifts in usage of several official titles in China and Japan. In the following week’s installment, he introduced the findings of a recent book by an American archaeologist about the extent of commercial trade in Egyptian antiquity. And, a few weeks later, he enumerated several references to homoeroticism culled from the Con­ fucian classics, the dynastic histories, and other Chinese sources.38 Not surprisingly, poetry, especially the embattled status of Sinitic poetics in Japan’s new era of “civilization and enlightenment,” was another focus of Ryūhoku’s interest in this series. As he wrote in one column, Ryūhoku tried to chart a middle path between two extremes—those who rejected Sinitic poetry and all other domains of Chinese learning as antiquated and useless, on the one hand, and those who could see nothing else worthy of their attentions, on the other: In present times as well as in the past, those who are fond of poetry have looked upon it as a useful art, and they have come to abandon all other activities to devote their entire lives solely to its pursuit. Those who are not fond of poetry regard it as a profitless diversion, and they have come to look down on it and even ridicule it. As for me, I laugh at the unbalanced obstinacy of both types. Ever since Western studies entered this country, most people in the realm, from great scholars on down to students, have not given Chinese studies a second glance, regarding it as something irrelevant and old-fashioned. For this reason, when it comes to poetry, they reject it, seeing it, as the saying goes, as nothing but “Chinese sleeptalk.” Poetry anthologies of Li Bo, Du Fu, Han Yu, and Bo Juyi cost just pennies, and yet they gather dust on bookstore shelves—to say nothing of my “stale old idle chatter.” Nevertheless, when I traveled in the West and observed the customs there, I found that, among all the civilized nations, there is no place that does not regard poetry as something valuable.

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Although our written and spoken languages may be different East and West, if we really stop to savor the feelings, how can it be that there is a night-and-day difference? I certainly do not think that their poetry is useful while ours is useless. These days, Western studies are grow­ ing more prosperous by the day, and sooner or later the scholars of the world will become intimately knowledgeable about their poetry. (Kikuchi Dairoku, who is now studying in England, is extremely skilled at Western poetry.) When we reach that point, then I will pre­ sent my tuition and ask for instruction, but, until then, I guess I will have no choice but to join the ranks of those who talk of “the setting moon and the cawing crows.”39 Since I too indulge in “Chinese sleep-talk” from time to time, I hope that the great men of the world will have a little patience and not laugh at me.40

When he visited London two years before writing this essay, Ryūhoku had been given a tour of London’s University College School by the young Kikuchi Dairoku 菊池大麓 (1855–1917), whose accomplishments not only in his chosen field of mathematics, but also in Latin had astonished his English peers and become an occasional subject of newspaper articles in Japan as well.41 Yet, no matter how impressed he may have been with Kikuchi’s learning, Ryūhoku was obviously being facetious in suggesting that the pursuit of classical Sinitic poetry in Japan was no more than a temporary expedient until the bright future when everyone would learn to compose in Latin. As his rejection of the idea that “their poetry is useful while ours is useless” suggests, his aim was to discover universal points of commonality between “East and West” both in poetic expression itself and in the privileged place it occupied in learning. He pointed out that literary knowledge, including knowledge of the classics, was emphasized in Western countries, just as it had traditionally been esteemed in Japan. To shun these domains of study as irrelevant or “useless” pursuits was not only lopsided, but a distortion of the very model to which the proponents of “civilization and enlightenment” claimed to adhere. Ryūhoku’s indirect targets were those who, in their ignorance of the past, entirely rejected it, erroneously believing that they had broken free and embraced something entirely new. In another essay from this period, Ryūhoku criticized such a view, using the piquant metaphor of sake dregs to suggest that there was in fact nothing new under the sun: There is no thing that is not the dregs of another thing, no person who does not suck the dregs of another. . . . The Confucian scholars content themselves with the dregs of Confucius, the Buddhists with the dregs of Shakyamuni, the followers of Western religions with those of Christ, Muslims with those of Mohammed. As for those who study the principles of nature, though their “principle” may be different, they are in the end delighting in the dregs of Zhu Xi and Newton. As for poets, though the tone may be different, they are in the end savoring the dregs of Li Bo, Du Fu, and Byron. In the hundreds of other domains of technology, the arts, and manufacturing, there are some new ideas and discoveries, but in truth these are just based on dregs that are embellished, expanded, and supplemented. Alas, this is why we can never break free of dregs. Nevertheless, ever since the first year of Meiji, which should be called the dawn of our imperial nation’s age of civilization and enlightenment, I have noticed that there has appeared a constant stream of great men who do not savor the dregs of the ancients.42



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Offering extravagant praise of these “great men who do not savor the dregs of the ancients,” Ryūhoku sarcastically argued that they deserved the reverent obeisance of all. These men were “utterly peerless on the whole planet,” he observed, for not only had they managed to make their actions and words discordant with the models transmitted from antiquity, but they behaved in a manner incongruous with the “true principles of civilization and enlightenment in the West.” In many of his columns, Ryūhoku offered emphatically positive affirmations of the idea of progress, but, as his assertion that “we can never break free of dregs” suggests, he believed progress was necessarily built upon the past. Making appeals to his experience in the West and to what he perceived as cultural universals was one technique Ryūhoku used to argue for the importance of literary study and to justify his undiminished interest in it. Poetic practice, especially the Sinitic forms that he self-effacingly referred to as “Chinese sleep-talk,” would also figure prominently in the Chōya and Ryūhoku’s other journalistic ventures. The Chinpu kango column quoted above, for example, was followed by a series of nine quatrains exchanged among three Chōya writers: Ōtsuki Bankei, Sawada Chokuon, and Ryūhoku himself. Unified by the use of the same rhyme characters, several poems in the sequence thematized the new paper’s literary orientation. One of Bankei’s contributions painted the newspaper as the basis for Ryūhoku to reclaim his literary renown: 累世儒官幕府豪 一逢國變奈心勞 如今參得新聞社 朝野才名仍舊高

For generations a Confucian official, and a great man in the shogunate, How vexing it must have been for you to meet with the national uprising. But now that you have been able to join this newspaper company, Your reputation will attain its former height throughout the land.

The incorporation of the word chōya (Ch. chaoye) into the final line permitted a variety of meanings: not only would Ryūhoku’s reputation again resound throughout the entire realm (of “court” and “field”), but the Chōya would serve as the site for this revival, and furthermore the paper itself would enjoy fame based on literary “talent.” As Bankei suggested in a second quatrain, Ryūhoku’s literary skills would be the means by which he distinguished the Chōya from its competitors: 本以詩豪兼酒豪 風華狂卻十年勞 日知二報誰優劣 輕妙爭如君筆高

You have always been a great poet, not to mention a great drinker; With your elegant air, you have laughed off ten years of toil. Compared to the Nippō and Hōchi papers—which is better, which worse? In lightness of touch, how can they compete with your brush?43

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Maeda Ai has argued that “the flame of literary tradition that was being drowned out by the pragmatic thinking sweeping through the reform era was kept burning by one newspaper alone: the Chōya shinbun.”44 It would be an exaggeration to think of Ryūhoku’s role at the Chōya shinbun as completely antithetical to the pragmatism of the period, but there can be little doubt about Maeda’s observation that the paper distinguished itself by valorizing literary tradition.

The Essays of the “Miscellaneous Records” Column As many contemporaries noted, perhaps the most important factor underlying the popular success of the Chōya shinbun was Ryūhoku’s literary skill. Ōtsuki Bankei went so far as to say that the paper might as well have been renamed the Ryūhoku shinbun.45 Although the forum Ryūhoku established for his own and others’ poetry within the zatsuroku column was one important part of the paper’s success, the short prose essays that he published there were also immensely popular. Indeed, so famous did they become that the term zatsuroku, which literally means just “miscellaneous records,” soon came to be used specifically to indicate the essays Ryūhoku published there, and Ryūhoku began to refer to himself occasionally in these columns as “Zatsurokushi” (Mr. Miscellany). As the “Lament of the Loincloth” and “Lament of the Newspaperman” pieces discussed above show, these essays were typically brief, allusive, and amusing, but they also shared a few additional structural and stylistic features. Rather than approaching an abstract topic directly, Ryūhoku would often begin with a concrete example drawn from recent events, his own personal experience, or shared cultural knowledge familiar to his readers. From such unassuming and often quite mundane points of departure, he would gradually tease out a larger point, one that usually had some relevance to a contemporary topic of public debate. His tone was often similarly indirect; if he wished to criticize something, he would frequently adopt an ironic tone, heaping lavish praise upon it, for example, or he might pretend to argue a particular point of view that he would ultimately reveal as foolish or short-sighted. Sometimes his humor could be more scathingly sarcastic, but, even when he played it straight, Ryūhoku’s distinctive style earned him a devoted readership. One of the first of the miscellaneous essays Ryūhoku wrote as editor of the paper was titled “Shichifukujin setsu” (A theory of the Seven Gods of Fortune). Appearing less than three weeks after Ryūhoku had joined the staff and the Kōbun tsūshi had become the Chōya shinbun, the piece provides an excellent illustration of these characteristic features of Ryūhoku’s short essays. At the time the essay was published, the most violent incidents of vandalism associated with the anti-Buddhist haibutsu kishaku movement had largely subsided, but the Meiji government’s policy of shinbutsu bunri (separating Shinto and Buddhism) remained in effect. This policy was the ultimate target of Ryūhoku’s musings, which were couched in an ostensibly serious investigation into the “Shichifukujin,” the Seven Gods of Fortune traditionally depicted as riding on a treasure ship and thought to bring prosperity in the New Year:



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In recent days, the argument to separate the Shinto gods and the Buddhist deities has again become the subject of vociferous debate. I suppose that, because these are, after all, as incompatible as ice and burning charcoal, their separation is an urgent matter. Oh, how taxing this must be for the gods and deities! But there is one case in which their admixture is most pronounced and yet the authorities do not dare to prohibit it: a case in which their separation should be effected with the utmost haste and yet none dares to call for it. Of what do I speak? The Seven Gods of Fortune. When these Shinto gods and Buddhist deities encountered the tempestuous clamor concerning mixture and separation, they just continued on their merry way, floating along harmoniously on their treasure ship. But, when we make an analysis of their races, we find that Daikoku and Ebisu are men of this country, Fukurokuju, Jurōjin, and Hotei are Chinese, and Bishamonten and Benzaiten are from India. Oh, how extremely muddled and mixed they are! There is nothing that calls for separation so much as these seven gods. It is the custom of ignorant youths to play with these seven gods as they would a toy, and it seems that none has yet made a detailed investigation of their races and official registries. So I will now provide a rough account of these seven gods.46

Ryūhoku went on to explain at length the physical characteristics of the seven gods, sketching the complicated origins of each and offering some conjectures about their interrelations. In his attempt to unravel their tangled lineage, Ryūhoku concluded that the two known as Fukurokuju and Jurōjin were actually variant names for a single Chinese deity, leading him to observe that really there should be “Six Gods of Fortune,” not seven.47 As the mockingly earnest tone suggests, Ryūhoku’s point was not to clarify the provenance of these deities definitively, but to challenge the very idea that the disparate traditions that had over centuries been amalgamated into a particular longstanding Japanese cultural icon should or even could be meaningfully separated. Any attempt to arti­ ficially impose coherence would be misguided, he argued, and it would be better to leave well enough alone; he closed the essay: “As I said at the outset, these seven gods of fortune now find themselves in this world of ours where admixture and separation are bruited about in such a bothersome fashion. How truly lucky for them that they have not been made the target of people’s debate! I suspect that this might well be the very thing that makes these gods of fortune so fortunate.” Though he did not explicitly declare the shinbutsu bunri policy misguided, that was the serious implication of this light-hearted essay. In addition to advancing an argument relevant to a specific contemporary debate, this essay also demonstrated the overarching orientation that came to characterize Ryū­ hoku’s subsequent writings as well as his general outlook on culture. In this instance, Ryūhoku pointed out the folly of those who attempted to rid Shinto of any Buddhist taint according to anachronistic and untenably rigid ideas of sectarian purity. In later columns, he would make similar arguments not only about religion, but about a host of other topics. On occasion, his advocacy of such positions was personally motivated. Some of Ryūhoku’s earliest writings show his desire to break free of the strictures imposed by his own membership in certain categories, specifically the presumptions about his beliefs that these affiliations generated. As the discussion above showed, in establishing himself as a “Newspaperman” Ryūhoku wrestled in his earliest columns with an array of identities and images associated with him, foremost of which was his status as a former

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Tokugawa official in the new world of Meiji. Whereas “Lament of the Loincloth” and “Lament of a Newspaperman” had approached the topic obliquely through allegory and allusion, Ryūhoku soon addressed the question of his own lingering Tokugawa loyalties more directly. Within two months of launching the Chōya, he published a column ostensibly written as a letter to Kurimoto Joun, author of the quatrain mentioned earlier about intoning the Chu ci as a “vassal of a deposed regime.” A fellow former shogunal vassal, Joun had recently assumed the position of editor at the Yūbin hōchi shinbun. Ryūhoku began, as was often his practice, by narrating a recent personal experience: On the third of this month, it was Emperor’s Birthday. Since we were favored with splendid weather, I wished to make some celebrations myself and took my son to a drinking house in Asakusa. Next to us were five or six customers (from their looks they appeared to be students, but, judging from their words, they may have been officials); they were wrapped up in conversation evaluating the newspapers. Because they were disparaging some and praising others, I pricked up my ears, and, making their conversation my repast, I downed four or five drinks. One of them then said in a low voice that, “in the opinion of Mr. Soand-So of our ministry, the Hōchi and the Chōya newspapers are always debating political matters and insulting the officials. Inasmuch as this takes place in the newspapers, we cannot very well censure them, but isn’t it truly hateful! This is precisely because at the Hōchi there is Kurimoto and at the Chōya there is Narushima. These two men were employed by the former shogunate, and so they are forever feeling grateful to the Tokugawa; the way they vent their grievances about how they have fallen in the world and wage resistance against the government truly marks them as an intractable lot. We have no wish to read their newspapers. And for that reason in our ministry. . . .” Just as he was saying this, it seemed that a geisha had arrived, and along with shouts of “You’re late! You’re late!” the whole place became quite clamorous and the man’s words trailed off, making it impossible for me to hear the end.48

In humor that shared much with his mockery of the newly empowered Meiji government officials in the second volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, Ryūhoku got in a few dismissive licks with this narrative, feigning confusion over whether these men he overheard at the Asakusa tavern were in fact students or officials, for example, and poking fun at their image of propriety by depicting them decadently consorting with geisha. In the remainder of the piece, however, Ryūhoku set about trying to exonerate himself of the allegations of rigid Tokugawa partisanship that had been leveled against him. Rather than attacking his accuser directly, he facetiously suggested that the man he overheard had surely concocted his report of the official’s comments in jest, for, “in this age, how could it be that such foolish officials would people the halls of our august government?” Drawing on the self-effacing rhetoric of the narrator of New Chronicles, which was itself an echo of Seiken’s narrator in Account of the Prosperity of Edo, Ryūhoku went on to portray himself not as an enemy of the enlightened Meiji government, but rather as a beneficiary of its magnanimous solicitude. How else could he manage to make a living from his nonproductive literary work? His choice not to serve the new regime came not from antipathy toward its officials, he took pains to note, but rather from an all too keen awareness of his own meager abilities.



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As for his loyalty to the Tokugawa, Ryūhoku conceded that his family’s long service to the clan had indeed made him feel indebted but that this was fundamentally no different from a sense of loyalty that any vassal might feel toward his former lord: My personal opinion is that the samurai from Shizuoka should not forget their indebtedness to the Tokugawa, and the samurai from Kagoshima should revere the virtue of the Shimazu. This is the way of sincerity and loyalty, and, writ large, it is simply patriotism. “Civilization and enlightenment” is certainly nothing other than this. (To be stubborn and know only of one’s former master while being ignorant of the government or to know only of the government while being ignorant of the nation of Japan—these are things that I detest and shun.)

In this early piece, Ryūhoku was articulating a sense of “loyalty” that, insofar as it was universal, would not lead to divisive factionalism, but could instead be the basis for a new unity. In pointing specifically to the common ground he shared as a former Tokugawa vassal with the former Satsuma vassals who now dominated the Meiji government, Ryūhoku was trying to find a bridge to the future. Although he did argue that the clan affiliations of the past could not simply be forgotten, he nevertheless asserted that at some point they had to be transcended in order for him and other former Tokugawa vassals to get on with their lives. He closed the piece by pointing out the absurdity of the official’s insistence on continuing to view him as nothing but a diehard Tokugawa loyalist: Just suppose that what this fool says is true. Since it is my custom to change my occupation from time to time, imagine what would happen if I became an arms dealer. He would certainly look at me and say that I was plotting treason. Or what if I became a mountain priest? He would certainly say that I was going to cast a hex upon the court. Alas, how difficult things are for people like me! Given that the samurai of the land think it is the way of sincerity and loyalty to have a sense of gratitude to their former lords, when it comes to commoners like me, as long as I reverentially accept the emperor, observe the laws, and do not forget to be patriotic, then whether I feel grateful toward my village headman, or feel grateful to my bankroller, or feel grateful to a sardine’s head, or feel grateful to a monkey’s ass, there is certainly no reason why I should suffer the censure of the government or the scorn of the officials: to say nothing of feeling grateful to my former lord! Thus, these foolish words cannot be what the official actually said, but must be a fiction fabricated by the bar patron.

Just as he would make the case for freedom of religious affiliation in his later columns, Ryūhoku here envisioned a world where the object of his feelings of gratitude, no matter how absurd, would not be a matter of public concern. As an individual, he was trying to disengage himself from the cluster of assumptions generated by the label “former Toku­ gawa vassal” and secure an independent position. In the same column, Ryūhoku wrote of the similar role he foresaw for the newspaper as an independent forum for a multiplicity of voices in the nation: A newspaper . . . may make disparaging comments about the sovereign, the officials, and the aristocracy, and by the same token it may praise the common men and women. And how much more so for the letters to the editor submitted by various people, in which those that

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criticize outnumber those that flatter a hundred to one, and for every ten who are happy there are a thousand who are indignant? To regard each and every one of these as the opinion of the newspaper president and editor shows an extreme lack of consideration.

Though Ryūhoku could not have predicted it at the time, the potential for the press to act as this independent forum and specifically to “make disparaging comments about the sovereign, the officials, and the aristocracy” was one that would soon face a rigorous test.

The Showdown over the Press Laws By the mid-1870s, the publication of arguments advocating fundamental reforms in the structure of the Meiji government, not to mention the radical calls for its very overthrow, had made the authorities grow increasingly wary of the power of an independent press. After a series of measures that progressively restricted the freedom of publishers, the government passed sweeping legislation in June 1875, making “it nearly impossible to criticize the government or government officials—or the regulations themselves— without fear of prosecution.”49 The new laws, a revision of the existing Newspaper Ordinance and a new Defamation Law, marked the beginning of the so-called Reign of Terror for the newspapers; with their explicit specification of fines and penalties, the new press regulations represented a qualitative change from previous more vaguely worded injunctions. Just two days after the laws were promulgated, the Chōya shinbun published the text of the ordinances, alongside a statement on behalf of the newspaper written by Ryūhoku: “Inasmuch as these are laws that have been promulgated by the Great Council of State of our august government, like it or not, we cannot but reverentially comply with them. And how much more so is this the case because these laws are exceedingly more tolerant and less harsh than had been thought; they certainly will not be sufficient to gag the mouths of the commentators of the realm.”50 By no stretch of the imagination could the new laws be considered so magnanimous and benign, and the sarcasm of these lines, initially quite measured, became increasingly apparent as Ryūhoku’s commentary continued: “Although I have lifted up the text of the new ordinances and recited it over and over, perhaps because of my innate folly and obtuseness, there are still places where I am unable to completely understand its meaning. Nevertheless, I will make every effort to be circumspect and not violate the law. From this day forward, I shall eschew eating and sleeping, and shall hone my mind for deep contemplation.” Going through several articles of the laws point by point, Ryūhoku reiterated his pose of meek obedience, informing his readers how the Chōya shinbun would alter its policies and procedures in order to comply with the new restrictions. But he also indirectly ridiculed the infeasibility of some of the laws’ stipulations. The eighth article of the Press Ordinance, for example, outlawed the use of pseudonyms or aliases by both newspaper staffers and authors of letters to the editor. It would be logistically impractical for the Chōya shinbun to verify the identities of those submitting letters,



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which made it imperative, Ryūhoku wrote, that they “kiss a Bible and send us their actual names and addresses.” When Ryūhoku protested confusion over the meaning of these new laws, he was not, however, simply being facetious. The consequences of violating the laws were elaborated in detail, but the precise scope of their injunctions was unclear; just what sort of discourse would be deemed illegal was anyone’s guess. Though intended to weaken the press, these laws had the unexpected effect of galvanizing and at least temporarily unifying the editors of Tokyo’s newspapers, who had thus far been splintered along ideological lines. At the urging of Fukuchi Ōchi of the Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun, Ryūhoku and the other editors of major papers began to meet regularly to discuss the laws and their strategies for responding to them. The assembled editors at first agreed to tread gingerly while seeking the government’s clarification. To ascertain what would be permissible under the new laws, some composed unsigned editorials, whereas others prepared several hypothetical test cases: • Would the argument “Because the Newspaper Ordinance and the Defamation Law are incompatible with the precious freedom of expression, they should be abandoned at once” be considered “criticism of established laws”? • Would the argument “An autocratic system of government cannot preserve the peace and stability of our nation in perpetuity, and we should establish a popularly elected Diet quickly” be considered a call for a change of the polity?51

Fukuchi’s Nichi nichi colleague Kishida Ginkō compiled these and other questions the editors had posed and submitted them to the authorities, yet no guidance was forthcoming. Although Ryūhoku was an active participant in these meetings and gave a great deal of attention to the new press laws in the Chōya shinbun, his responses tended to depart from these lines of direct interrogation and argumentation that his fellow newspaper editors pursued. As the extravagant praise he offered in the passage quoted earlier shows, Ryūhoku often favored an indirect approach. Yet sarcasm was by no means the only weapon in his arsenal. One month after the promulgation of the new press laws, for example, Ryūhoku wrote an essay that exemplifies both the obliqueness of his critique and his resourcefulness in deploying his erudition. Set in a rustic Confucian scholar’s academy, the piece turns a canonical passage from the Chinese dynastic histories to a new purpose: A rustic scholar, his topknot like a tea whisk, sat sternly facing his lectern with his shoulders squared in indignation. Lecturing on the Selections from the Eighteen Dynastic Histories, his great voice rang out like a bell. Seven or eight students sat facing their books. Some had nodded off, and others gave every appearance of pricking up their ears to listen attentively while secretly they were thinking about O-tama, the girl at the archery stand. The lecture topic was the “Chronicles of Zhou,” and their teacher had come to the reign of King Li. “King Li Hu was enthroned. He had lost the Way and was given to tyrannical brutality and extravagant

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opulence. He obtained the services of a shaman from the state of Wei and had him spy on those who criticized the state. Whenever the shaman reported someone, the king would have that person killed. On the streets, people [were afraid to speak and so] could only exchange glances with each other. The king was delighted and said, ‘I have stopped their criticism.’ Someone said, ‘Yes, you have stopped them. But stopping up the mouths of the people is more dangerous than stopping up a river. Once the river’s flow is stopped up, then, when the dam breaks, the damage people suffer is even more severe.’ ” Reaching this point, the teacher suddenly cocked his head and seemed to ponder something. A frown on his face, he said nothing. The teacher’s booming voice having suddenly broken off, one of the students asked, “Why not continue the lecture?” The teacher replied, “It is burning hot today, and suddenly I have a stomachache. I will end the lesson here so that I might convalesce.” Those students who had been dozing awoke with a start to find that they had drooled all over their books.52

The text recited by the teacher in Ryūhoku’s essay is a kundoku rendition of a passage quoted almost verbatim from the dynastic histories. Ryūhoku made no direct comparison to the silencing effect of the Meiji government’s new press laws, leaving the implied parallel to speak for itself. In a subsequent column, Ryūhoku chose to capture the sense of fear and confusion gripping the newspapers at the time with a different sort of technique: In the year 1875, the eighth year of Meiji, at the end of the sixth month, I met with the promulgation of the Newspaper Ordinance. The purpose was to reform the old laws. Various terms of incarceration were determined, monetary fines prescribed in detail. There were also slander and libel, instigation and agitation; and using aliases and pseudonyms too—each of these prohibited. They took this and made a fixed law that would stand in perpetuity, and the gist of it was disseminated widely. True, it did not have the sternness of decapitation or hanging, but a look and a perusal of the law served well enough to make me terrified. 明治八年、歳乙亥ニ在リ。六月ノ末、新聞條例ノ發行ニ會フ。舊律ヲ改ル也。禁獄聢ト定マ リ、罰金細カニ記セリ。此外、讒毀、誹謗、教唆、煽起有リ、又變名、假名有テ、逐一ニ禁止 ス。引テ以テ後來ノ定法ト爲シ其旨ヲ布達ス。梟首斬絞ノ嚴ナル無シト雖トモ一見一讀、亦 以テ我輩ヲ恐怖セシムルニ足レリ。

As these opening sentences suggest, the piece could stand on its own as an evocative account of the sense of personal dread journalists felt as they struggled to make sense of the new laws—and indeed it is often discussed in accounts of Ryūhoku’s early journalistic career as nothing more than that.53 But to the well-educated members of Ryūhoku’s audience, it would have been enjoyable for another reason. They would have recognized the piece as a cleverly constructed parody of “Preface to the ‘Orchid Pavilion Poems’ ” by Wang Xizhi (321–79), a well-known meditation on life, death, transience, writing, and remembrance. Below is the beginning of this text followed by a kakikudashibun (SinoJapanese) rendering: In the year 353, the ninth year of Yonghe, at the beginning of last month of spring, we met at the Orchid Pavilion on the northern slope of Kuaiji. The purpose was to carry out purification ceremonies. Various men of worth came there, young and old alike all gathered. There



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were mighty mountains and towering ridges, lush forests and tall bamboo; and a clear stream with swirling eddies—these casting back a sparkling light upon both shores. We took this and made a winding channel in which to float our wine cups, and around it everyone took their appointed seats. True, we did not have the harps and flutes of a great feast, but a cup of wine and a song served well enough to free our deep feelings. 永和九年、歳癸丑ニ在リ。暮春ノ初、會稽山陰ノ蘭亭ニ會ス。禊事ヲ脩ムル也。羣賢畢ク 至リ、少長咸ナ集フ。此地、崇山、峻嶺、茂林、脩竹有リ、又清流、激湍有テ、左右ニ暎帯 ス。引テ以テ流觴ノ曲水ト爲シ、其次ニ列坐ス。糸竹管弦ノ盛ナル無シト雖トモ、一觴一 詠、亦以テ幽情ヲ暢叙スルニ足レリ。54

The syntax of Ryūhoku’s text mirrors Wang Xizhi’s famous preface so closely that, when read aloud, their rhythms would have been nearly identical; to take just the first few lines of each as an example: Meiji hachinen, toshi itsugai ni ari. Rokugatsu no sue, Shinbun jōrei no hakkō ni au. Kyūritsu o aratamaru nari. Kingoku shikato sadamari, bakkin komakani kiseri. (Ryūhoku) Eiwa kyūnen, toshi kichū ni ari. Boshun no hajime, Kaikei san’in no Rantei ni kaisu. Keiji o osamuru nari. Gunken kotogotoku itari, shōchō mina tsudou. (Wang Xizhi)

Inversely proportional to the proximity of the structure and sound of the two texts was the amusing irreconcilability of their contents, a dissonance to which contemporary readers would have been keenly attuned. This parody of Ryūhoku’s, the first of several that would appear in the Chōya shinbun and Kagetsu shinshi, made full use of the techniques of kanbun gesaku that I discussed in chapter 2, including misquotation, misappropriation, and juxtaposition of the elegant and the vulgar. Ryūhoku’s readers would have known Wang Xizhi’s preface from its inclusion in numerous anthologies of Sinitic prose, and many would have encountered it also as a model for calligraphy, for it is one of the most celebrated works of calligraphy in East Asia. The weightiness of the four sequential binomes that Wang uses in the preface to describe the scene’s topography and vegetation, sūzan 崇山 (Ch. chongshan), shunrei 峻嶺 (Ch. junling), morin 茂林 (Ch. maolin), and shūchiku 脩竹 (Ch. xiuzhu), gives the natural scene an extra layer of formidable majesty and auspicious grandeur. In Ryūhoku’s parody, however, these metamorphose into four equally formidable though decidedly more ominous binomes of newly codified legal jargon: zanki 讒毀 (Ch. chanhui), hibō 誹謗 (Ch. feibang), kyōsa 教唆 (Ch. jiaosuo), and senki 煽起 (Ch. shanqi). Wang Xizhi’s depiction of a group of literati gathered together to compose poems, float wine cups down a stream, and enjoy the wonders of their natural surroundings conveyed a consummately refined atmosphere and became a paradigmatic model for literary gatherings in future generations. On the whole, Ryū­hoku’s parody transforms this elegant scene free of worldly concerns into a grimly drawn realm that is defined by such secular constraints as the dictates of law and the threat of state punishment. Ryūhoku sustained his tight parodic mimicry of Wang Xizhi for the remainder of the column. Whereas Wang Xizhi went on to speak of how he and his friends “delighted” in the “immensity of the universe” and “nature’s infinite variety,” Ryūhoku’s narrator

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wrote instead of his “terror” and desperation at the “imperiousness of the officials” and his newspaper “staff’s bitter consternation”: After that moment, my energy was sapped and my spirits dashed; a cold shiver ran through my guts. Above me, I looked on the imperiousness of the officials; then, lowering my eyes, I saw my staff’s bitter consternation. I thus cast my brush aside and tore up the paper, and this was enough to let me understand the pain of our Newspaper’s Publisher. This was truly lamentable. During this time that people spend living together in the human realm, some survive by taking money from the state, enjoying themselves in places of wealth; others follow their fancies and engage in arduous labor in the newspaper enterprise. They have a million different forms; the high and the low man are unlike; but still, when one gives himself up to his desires and savors a sustained moment of fulfillment, he is cheerfully selfcontent and has scarcely a thought of the penalties coming on. Then, even having reached the point where he has written all he can, the brush moves in accordance with his thoughts, and farce inevitably follows. In the flick of the brush, the things that one knows suddenly become novel theories. Yet of course it is not that he does this to please his readers. Even more his arguments, which are stored up within him, so how can he worry about them coming to an end? The people of the world say, “The newspaper is a splendid thing.” How can it not be amusing?

Secular concerns may not have impinged upon the world of Wang Xizhi’s preface, but it was nevertheless undercut by the author’s keen awareness of mortality. The satisfaction of a chance encounter with a like-minded person might allow a temporary release in which one “has scarcely a thought of old age coming on,” Wang wrote, but ultimately one had to recognize the supreme importance of life and death. Ryūhoku’s concerns, however, lay not in such ultimate questions, but in more immediate worries such as whether or not he would be punished for following his aspirations into the newspaper business. In Ryū­ hoku’s formulation, it was as an individual caught up in the pleasures of writing, rather than through social interaction, that he was distracted from these anxieties. Since writing was, in a certain sense, also the source of Ryūhoku’s anxieties, it was an ironic observation, one made even more surprising by the fact that the relief it provided was much more long-lasting. At the outset, Ryūhoku’s timid terror contrasted with Wang Xizhi’s carefree mirth, but the two make opposite journeys in the course of their meditations. Whereas Wang Xizhi comes to the “painful” realization that “life and death are the greatest concerns,” Ryūhoku is instead amused to discover the splendor of the newspaper. In the final section of his preface, Wang Xizhi explains how an awareness of the congruity between his own feelings and those of past generations of writers and rememberers has motivated him to compose a commemorative text. Ryūhoku’s parody ends with a similar justification of writing but one that is motivated by the experience of reading the editorials of his contemporaries on the staffs of various newspapers: Each time I examine the editorials propounded by the various papers, it is as though they have all proceeded from the same mouth. Never have I read them without thumping my stomach with satisfied joy, nor am I able to tell others about this. But this I have learned: fondness for oppressive systems is an outmoded way; suppressing speech is an old custom.



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People laugh at me just as I laugh at them—there is the delightfulness. For this reason, I have spewed this big talk and recorded my thoughts. Though my talents are poor and my learning shallow, what I have said is true in principle. And those who read this will also be moved by what is in these words.

Whereas Wang Xizhi is led to a renewed awareness that “the belief that life and death are the same is a grand deception,” Ryūhoku is led to the more humble realization that stifling free speech and limiting the freedom of the press are “outmoded . . . old customs.” This intricately crafted criticism of the government’s new laws seems to have hovered just below the threshold necessary to bring down its wrath upon him, and Ryūhoku avoided any penalty for the time being. It was a different story for more direct attacks on the press policy, the most significant of which came a few weeks later from the editor of the Akebono shinbun, Suehiro Tetchō 末広鉄腸 (1849–96). In the July 20 Akebono, Tetchō published a reader’s letter titled “On the subject of the Newspaper Laws” in the editorial column of the paper with a note explaining that he decided to place it there because he agreed with its contents and that, “if there is anything in it that violates the laws, then the editor alone will bear the responsibility.” As he anticipated, Tetchō’s presentation of this sincere argument against the laws landed him in trouble with the authorities. Though Ryūhoku did not personally wage the kind of direct battles that Tetchō did, he nevertheless made public his admiration for Tetchō’s courage in doing so, albeit in his characteristically indirect style. In fact, in the contrast between Ryūhoku’s “lateral” attacks and Tetchō’s “head-on” attacks lay the potential for the dynamic synthesis they would achieve a few months later as collaborators.55 Before they banded together formally, however, Ryūhoku cultivated ties with Tetchō, inviting him out on the very day that Tetchō had published the problematic letter. Two days later, Ryūhoku turned their excursion into the topic of his column: I don’t particularly care for the fireworks and yet I enjoy the “River Opening festival”—it must be because it is the first day on which pleasant excursions can be taken to enjoy the evening cool. I have turned my back on the River Opening festival for quite a while, for in 1873 I was in the United States, and in 1874 I was in Kyoto. On July 20 of this year, they were just about to launch the fireworks festival downstream from Ryōgoku Bridge. It was burning hot that day, as though we were being roasted. I was dripping with sweat, my spirits fatigued, my eyes dark—it was as though I was on death’s door. The owner of the newspaper said, “You are tired. I am going to hire a little boat, buy a barrel of sake, and reward you for your days of toil.” I got up with glee and said, “Without good friends, how can one make a pleasant excursion?” And so I dashed off a letter to the Akebono office to solicit some companionship. Mr. Akebono [Suehiro Tetchō] came at once and said, “I had also been intending to wash off the heat in the great river; how marvelous that our plans should coincide so perfectly!” And so, we went off together, boarding a boat at Shinbashi and floating merrily along. We let fly great wine cups, shared some fresh fish, and enjoyed ourselves in humorous banter to the hilt, losing all sense of how far we had come along the river. By the time our boat had passed Hakozaki, the horizon where the river met the sky was only dimly visible in the distance, and the twilight scenery had turned to haze. A wind rose up from the southern seas and wiped away all the bothersome heat of daily life. It was so refreshingly delightful that not only did I no longer perceive the poisonous heat of deepest summer, but I also completely

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forgot about such personal matters as the fact that my amusements with brush and paper had brought me to the very door of the jailhouse.56

In referring to the “marvelous” and “perfect” coincidence of his own leisure plans with Tetchō’s, Ryūhoku hinted at other affinities the men shared in their work as embattled journalists. Tetchō had boasted to friends who tried to dissuade him from publishing the critical letter that “there is only one thing to do: go to jail and rouse the minds of the people of the realm,” and, as Ryūhoku jarringly noted midway through the essay, the same fate was a very real possibility for himself as well.57 What started off seeming to be a mere leisurely chronicle of an annual summer event had thus quickly revealed itself to be a politically charged statement of solidarity and an occasion to argue for the special role of the newspaper reporter in a hostile environment. Ryūhoku continued: The creator in heaven must have regarded our lot with some special favor since he bestowed upon us a great freewheeling and uninhibited brush—a lavish gift for which we dare not fail to express our gratitude. And, that being the case, we ought to spur ourselves on to even greater efforts to argue and debate over the advantages and disadvantages of all the issues facing the realm, thereby repaying our indebtedness to the munificence of the pacific realm and the special favor of the creator. Mr. Akebono smiled and did not respond. The geisha all said, “Sensei, you are drunk, and your boastful words and loose talk are as clamorous as ever. Three wine cups as punishment!” I could offer no words in response and humbly contented myself with receiving this punishment.

Since Ryūhoku had developed a public persona as a sophisticated connoisseur of pleasure quarters culture, and Tetchō had made his name as a boldly outspoken critic of the new press laws, Ryūhoku’s readers would presumably have been surprised to read this scene in which it was Ryūhoku, not the silent Tetchō, who became most impassioned in arguing about the mission of the press. Yamamoto Yoshiaki has observed that this sort of “kaleidoscopic” transformation and reformulation of his public persona helped to keep the miscellany column fresh and interesting for Ryūhoku’s readers.58 Nevertheless, Ryūhoku insured that his arguments would not seem too humorlessly earnest by including a self-mocking moment of chastisement, inverting the scene from New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, discussed in the previous chapter, in which the two young men receive a political lesson from a geisha on the meaning of the “collective harmony.” As Tetchō had foreseen, just a few days after he joined Ryūhoku for this boat trip along the Sumida, he was indeed ordered to appear before the court for printing and endorsing the critical letter to the editor. On August 4, he was sentenced to house arrest for two months and ordered to pay a fine of twenty yen. Ryūhoku quickly made good on the resolution he had expressed in the above essay to wield his “free-wheeling and uninhibited brush” and composed an editorial in the August 9 paper that sarcastically praised the punishment of Tetchō and the interrogation of two other reporters as unmistakably “auspicious signs of an enlightened age.” Quoting the words of Confucius in the Analects— “When the Way prevails in the state, speak and act with perilous high-mindedness; when the Way does not prevail, act with perilous high-mindedness but speak with self-effacing



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diffidence”—Ryūhoku concluded that Tetchō’s outspokenness could only mean one thing: it was a welcome sign that the Way prevailed in early Meiji Japan.59 On August 15, it was Ryūhoku’s turn to receive a summons for violating the press laws with this editorial. Not sharing Ryūhoku’s sense of humor, the authorities charged that his praise of the arrests was an “incitement” to others to commit similar crimes. Perhaps emboldened by the sense that punishment was now inevitable, Ryūhoku began to write even more witheringly sarcastic criticisms of the new laws.60 His tone remained light and his prose witty, however, and, just two days later, Ryūhoku published what quickly became one of his most celebrated columns. Titled “Hekiekifu” 辟易賦 (Poetic exposition on shrinking in fear), the piece was an elaborate parody of Su Dongpo’s “Chibifu” 赤壁賦 (Poetic exposition on Red Cliff), the Sinoxenic reading of which is “Sekihekifu.” As in his earlier parody of Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the ‘Orchid Pavilion Poems,’ ” Ryūhoku mimicked the syntax, structure, and sometimes even the pronunciation of the Sino-Japanese rendition of the base text precisely. It may seem a pedantic or esoteric form of humor to readers today, but the contemporary audience would not have seen it this way, especially since Su Dongpo’s work was even better known than Wang Xizhi’s, to which it was thematically and formalistically indebted. Not only would “Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff” have been instantly recognizable to Ryūhoku’s audience, but, because it was a popular text for recitation, many of them would have known it by heart. Moreover, it was also an especially fitting time to invoke the work, which records a journey that took place that same night, nearly eight centuries earlier: It was the autumn of 1082, the night after the full moon in the seventh month, when I, Su Dongpo, together with some companions, let our boat drift, and we were carried beneath Red Cliff. A cool breeze came gently along, but it raised no waves in the water. I lifted my wine and toasted my companions, reciting the piece on the bright moon and singing the stanza on the woman’s grace.61

Although Japan had not been using the lunar calendar for nearly three years, “August 16,” the night described in Ryūhoku’s parody, happened to coincide that year with the sixteenth day of the seventh month by the lunar calendar. In a testament to just how widely intelligible and popular such humor was at the time, the Chōya shinbun sold an unheard of ten thousand copies on August 17, the day that Ryūhoku’s parody appeared:62 It was the autumn of 1875, the night after the full moon in the eighth month [August 16], when the Publisher, together with me, sat at our desks, gathered beneath the lamp light. Letters to the editor came frequently along, but we had not finished editing them. I spread the papers and clutched my brush, investigating the Law on Libel and reciting the text of the Press Ordinance. After a while sweat did indeed come forth from my armpits and dripped to the middle of my abdomen. Worries stretched across my mind, and bitter fatigue impressed itself upon my very innards. I had lost all sense of what to do with myself, and I felt as though cast adrift among a thousand bewildering things. Shivering with fear, I felt as though I had imbibed ill winds, caught a malignant air, and been rudely awoken from sleep. I was cowed into trembling terror, as though trying desperately with all my concentration to walk across a tightrope.

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At that point I tossed my brush aside and sighed for quite a while. I tapped the desk, and sang a song: “Theories of cats, talk of badgers, I produce empty arguments in accord with fleeting fashion. At long long last, I transcended it, looking in all directions for a patron.” I have a tendency to blow smoke. I wrote down the words just as I sang them. The words were vague and ambiguous, as though uttered by one talking in his sleep, or drunk, or sobbing, or possessed by some terrible nightmare. The leads were few in number, but, like a thread, they did not break off. I wrote groundless tales of ghosts, recorded passionate stories of double suicide. The Publisher too grew melancholy, furrowed his brow, and asked me in a low voice: “What makes you so troubled?” I answered: “The penalties are heavy, the punishment is rapid, and Suehiro is confined to his house. Isn’t that the punishment for Nisshindō [Akebono shinbun]? Here we face Nippō to the north and Hōchi to the east, both of them lined up and utterly lacking in vigor. Isn’t this because their editors were both summoned to the district courthouse? And once it became a criminal complaint, they were made to give a deposition. And when they left in accordance with the instructions, the fine was set at a certain number of yen, and the confinement sentence followed. They attempted to discuss the matter and protested their innocence, arguing defiantly with logic. But it was indeed all without gain, and what was the point? And how much more so for you and me—who have established this impoverished paper and entreated the government for permission to publish it. We wield a worndown brush and receive reports that we rework into articles: silly ideas that we unleash to all under heaven. And, as for these strict new press laws, I lament that my temperament is so cowardly, and I am impressed with the limitlessness of the august government’s majesty. I would turn to the district headmen but in so doing would just end up speechless; I would take up the matter with the officials, but I am too afraid. And, knowing that I could never succeed against such formidable opponents, I can only compare them to wailing infants or strongmen.” The publisher replied, “And do you, my friend, indeed understand the farts and the pimples? ‘The farts come out just like this,’ and yet somehow there has never been an end to them. The pimples expand and swell like this, and yet they have never suddenly vanished altogether. If you look at them from the point of view of one who hates them, then they cannot be tolerated even for a moment. But if you look at them from the point of view of one who does not especially hate them, then neither you nor I have committed any great offense. So then what is there to be worried about? Between heaven and earth each person has his own mind. If something does not accord with my thoughts, then I should not accept it even for a moment. There are, however, the old habits of oppression along with the stubborn curmudgeons. The ears overhear them, and one gets angry; the eyes see them, and one’s face flushes. There is nothing to be gained in trying to convince them. We can say what we will, but they will never hear it. This is the intractability of the ‘Expel the Barbarians’ types, and it earns the scorn of both you and me alike.” I was stunned into silence, and, grinding my ink, I wrote down his words. The wax of the candle had dwindled to nothing, and the room was cloaked in total darkness. We all nodded off against our desks, unaware that we were being stung frequently by mosquitoes.63

Like his rendition of “Preface to the ‘Orchid Pavilion Poems,’ ” Ryūhoku’s version of “Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff ” plays upon the juxtaposition of the refinement of the orig­ inal with the crudeness of the parody. Su Dongpo’s dynamic excursion down the Yangzi, in which he and his companions pass near soaring cliffs that bring to mind the heroes of



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ancient battles, becomes in Ryūhoku’s parody a stationary dialogue in the cramped and dingy interior of a newspaper office, in which the remembered battles are anticlimactic legal proceedings pursued by the Meiji state against a few outspoken reporters. In addition to this disparity in the scales of the narrated scenes was an analogous gap in the momentousness of the ideas articulated. In order to assuage his companion’s melancholy, the broad-minded and self-assured Su Dongpo has recourse to Daoist arguments of relativity and equivalence, explaining them through such elegant metaphors as the cycles of the moon and the flow of the river. He even uses the latter as an opportunity to incorporate a famous quotation from the Analects. The metaphors of Ryūhoku’s parody offer a sharp contrast in their crassness, and, although an allusion is similarly incorporated, it is not to the words of the sages, but rather to a vulgar Japanese saying: demono haremono tokoro kirawazu (farts and pimples pop out everywhere). As Yamamoto Yoshiaki has argued, this parody is another instance of Ryūhoku’s kaleidoscopic manipulations of his public persona. Whereas, in Su Dongpo’s original, it is the persona of the author who is grandly imperturbable and can offer reassuring consolation to his troubled companion, in the parody, it is Ryūhoku’s persona that is in need of such reassurance from the publisher. The parody thus surprises the reader by casting Ryūhoku in the role not of elegant fūryūjin, but of his foil.64 “Poetic Exposition on Shrinking in Fear,” along with several other pieces critical in various ways of the new press laws, appeared while Ryūhoku’s legal case was still pending. No matter how technically impressive these works were, they surely did not aid his position. Yet Ryūhoku was unfazed and continued to write periodic reports to the news­ paper even once his trial had gotten under way. Readers of the Chōya were able to follow the proceedings closely through the published installments of Ryūhoku’s “handwritten diary,” a detailed account of the interrogations he underwent and the confession he eventually signed. The latter document specifically quoted the mischievously appropriated line from the Analects (heralding Tetchō’s punishment as the sign of an enlightened age), singling out that passage from Ryūhoku’s August 9 essay as the violation for which he would be punished. The published diary also recorded Ryūhoku’s “shock” at learn­ ing from an inmate the extent of prison overcrowding (a five-tatami-mat cell held some eighteen men), not to mention his “shock” at being threatened with the possibility of being led away in rope restraints. Yet, for this first infraction at least, Ryūhoku suffered no such ordeals and ultimately got off with a relatively light sentence. The presiding judge who found him guilty of “incitement” ordered Ryūhoku to spend just five days in prison. In a further stroke of luck, Tokyo’s new prison was still under construction, which meant that he could spend the five days of his sentence in domiciliary confinement rather than incarceration. On his return to the Chōya, Ryūhoku did have to endure one further trial, however, as his staff staged a mock parliamentary hearing to enumerate his various faults and debate whether they should accept the return of such a troublesome character—or at least that is the account of the episode that appeared in the “miscellany” column.65 All in all, Ryūhoku emerged from his first confrontation with the authorities largely unscathed, and if anything the controversy had helped the paper’s sales. Just

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one year had passed since he became editor of the Chōya shinbun, and the transformation he had waged in that time was truly remarkable. The entire staff gathered late in September for a banquet to commemorate the day one year earlier when the Kōbun tsūshi had been renamed the Chōya shinbun. In what became an annual custom at the paper, this kaishōsetsu (name-changing day) banquet provided an opportunity to reflect on the past year, and the speeches delivered there were published in the following day’s paper. On that first anniversary, the publisher congratulated Ryūhoku for “having turned around the fortunes of the paper and brought about a flourishing success that increases with each day,” allowing the Chōya “to stand shoulder to shoulder with the famous newspapers.”66 The goal articulated in the paper’s first issue had been realized. Buoyed by the paper’s steadily increasing popularity and especially by the enthusiastic reception of his earlier parody of Su Dongpo’s “Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff,” perhaps it was inevitable that Ryūhoku, like Su Dongpo himself, would stage an encore performance. Su Dongpo’s sequel “Later Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff” commemorated the author’s return to Red Cliff two months after the original excursion, and so when October 15 rolled around, Ryūhoku composed a sequel of his own: When I composed my “Poetic exposition on shrinking in fear” on the night after the full moon of the eighth month, although it was a poor work, I received such high acclaim from the various people of the realm that the newspaper sales for that day exceeded ten thousand, and even today there are still people who come asking to buy that issue. This is truly a marvelously fortunate thing, but the days and months fly by with such speed that already it is the night of the full moon of the tenth month. And so, once more, I have composed a “Later poetic exposition on shrinking in fear” for the pleasure of my readers.67

Ryūhoku’s second installment was not, however, simply a retread of the first. Rather than reiterating his swipes at the press laws, he took another topic of contemporary political debate as his target: the seikanron 征韓論, or the “argument to punish Korea.” The idea of using military force to compel Korea to open its doors to trade with Japan had been bruited about since the late Tokugawa period, but lingering resentment over Korea’s rebuffs of Japanese diplomatic overtures coupled with isolated maritime skirmishes in the early Meiji period provided new pretexts to those who advocated dispatching some sort of punitive mission. The situation had boiled over in 1873, when Saigō Takamori and other prominent oligarchs who supported the so-called seikanron position resigned their posts in the Meiji government after their plans to send a mission to Korea had been thwarted. Even after the mass exodus, however, the seikanron issue continued to fester, becoming something of a cause célèbre for disgruntled samurai and even garnering some adherents among those commanding the military. Presumably Ryūhoku was inspired to write his parody because of renewed tensions in the wake of the Ganghwa-do Incident of Septem­ ber 20, 1875, in which a Japanese warship provoked an exchange of fire with Korean coastal defenses. Following this flare-up, Ryūhoku tried various strategies in his essays to lampoon the bellicose provocateurs of conflict with Korea, assuming in one piece the voice of a geisha penning a plaintive letter to her patron, a seikanron supporting official.68



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Whereas Su Dongpo’s sequel began by recording how the poet and his friends secured the wine and other refreshments necessary for an impromptu second outing to Red Cliff, Ryūhoku’s parody instead finds the author in a harrowing and indeed lifethreatening confrontation with a hostile opponent. Ambushed by a hotheaded swordbearing thug, Ryūhoku is forced into a fruitless debate on the Korea issue: This same year, on the day of the full moon of the tenth month, I was walking back from the office to my humble home. A ruffian had followed me as we passed beside Kyōbashi. Once his murderous air was apparent, the hair on my head stood on end. A giant sword was at his side, and with anger he stared into my face. Glancing around I was afraid, and, as we walked along, we argued back and forth. After a while, I sighed and said, “Here we have a country, and there’s no military. And even if we had a military, there’s no money. Even if the enemy is weak and we are strong, how are we to wage this distant campaign!?” “Now,” the ruffian said, “the samurai throughout the nation are going to become soldiers. Martial bravery is at its peak, with a force to rival Kiyomasa. But let me think where we can get some money. . . . We’ll just issue an order to take it from the people!” I said, “The people have taxes that they’ve been paying for a long time. That is how you’ve been getting the stipend that allows you to eat without doing any work. And now you take their money and rice and dump it into the sea of Korea. There are limits to the people’s capacity, their frustrations numbering in the thousands. Their expenses are numerous, their income small. Their resources have been exhausted, leaving catastrophe to emerge. In the past was the failure of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, so how can we be sure there will be victory now?” Letting my mouth run free, I talked to him, picking apart his obstinate arguments, enlightening his deluded ideas, explaining principles to him, admonishing him with the pros and cons. I enumerated the dangers of the proinvasion argument and compared it to the old case of the “Expel the Barbarians” types. It seems the ruffian could not answer. Suddenly, he gave a great deep cry, and even the stone bridge shook and swayed. He clutched his arms, tensed his eyes in anger, unsheathed his sword and brought it forth. Then I too felt a shock of astonishment, a trembling fear, and I knew with a shudder that I couldn’t stay there any longer.

Ryūhoku compares the present plan to attack Korea to Hideyoshi’s invasion of Chosŏn in the late sixteenth century, a campaign commanded by Katō Kiyomasa. But the essay focuses on a parallel in more recent memory, the continuity between those who presently supported the belligerence of the seikanron and those who had argued for sakō, “closing the ports,” and jōi, “expelling the barbarians,” in the last years of the Tokugawa. In some cases the same individuals who had prominently called for these policies (known collectively as sajō) were those who pushed the seikanron, but Ryūhoku’s larger point was to criticize what he saw as the shared stubbornness, impracticality, and lack of perspective and judgment about international conditions that characterized both positions.69 Su Dongpo’s second trip to Red Cliff ends with an eerie sighting of a swooping crane, a figure that the poet’s subsequent dream suggests is actually a Daoist immortal.70 In the parody, the graceful and mysterious crane appears as a policeman on patrol, and Su Dongpo’s dream encounter becomes another nighttime ambush. Yet, in spite of these shifts, Ryūhoku’s narrator experiences a similar epiphany, recognizing the true identity of the samurai ruffian who accosts him as none other than a member of the sajō faction that had bedeviled him a decade earlier:

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Hastily I ran as fast as my legs would go and hid in an alley, standing to see where he would go. It was nearly the hour of the dog, and all around was deserted and still when a patrolman appeared, dangling a baton and approaching from the south. His form looked like the Deva King, and he wore a dark robe and a black coat. Walking slowly and leisurely along, he glowered at me and headed north. Soon afterwards, the ruffian went away, and I got into a rickshaw. On the way back, there was a strapping young samurai with an angry and indignant air, and he made the rickshaw driver stop. He threatened me and said, “So will you surrender to the might of the seikanron faction?” I asked his name, but he was silent and didn’t answer. “Ah, wait, of course, now I know! Ten years ago, those guys who gave me such a headache because they wanted to close the ports—that was you, wasn’t it?” The strapping young samurai shamefacedly withdrew, and I was able to escape from peril. I turned my head and looked back after him, but I could see no trace of him.

In the end, the Ganghwa-do Incident that inspired this parody did not trigger a full-scale military conflict between Korea and Japan, but it did indirectly lead to an agreement on diplomatic relations that the two countries signed the following year. As he would make clear in future columns, Ryūhoku wholeheartedly supported the “opening” of Korea and argued that Japan should make efforts to encourage it, but it was not an issue he believed should be advanced by force and bluster.71 After he had been found guilty of “incitement” and sentenced to domiciliary confinement, Ryūhoku had kept up his taunting attacks on the Meiji oligarchs and their policies. In spite of this undiminished satirical output, Ryūhoku had managed to avoid additional punishment. Before year’s end, however, he had exhausted the authorities’ indulgence. The showdown was ultimately precipitated through the collaborative effort of Ryūhoku and Suehiro Tetchō, who had recently quit his job editing the Tōkyō akebono shinbun to join Ryūhoku at the Chōya. In late December, this newly formed coalition authored a piece that landed them both in jail for several months. The offending article was an ostensibly retrospective essay concerning two men named Inoue Saburō and Ozaki Kowashi, Tokugawa era officials who had supposedly frustrated the authors in their youth a decade earlier:72 Having encountered this age of civilization and enlightenment, when we gaze far back into the barbarous times of the past, there are truly things that make one troubled and sorrowful. When we were young, we enjoyed meeting with our comrades to discuss the laws of the realm and to debate its institutions. At that time there were two distinguished men, one named Inoue Saburō and the other Ozaki Kowashi. They were both learned and talented but also quite skilled in the arts of cunning and craftiness. They knew how to curry favor with the high officials of the time, all the while working solely for their own advantage. Every time we would discuss and debate the pros and cons of various legal systems, those two would always treat our arguments as slander and defamation, and endeavored to still our tongues and oppress our ambitions. . . . However, there were those among our fellows who shared our opinions, and they all shunned those two, striving to prevent them from spreading their poison among our group. And now, those two have already passed away, and their odious names are buried beneath a clump of earth. Alas, how pitiful it is! If those two were still alive today and could see the present world of civilization and enlightenment, would



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they be flabbergasted and die in shame? Or would they instead cling to their cunning and crafty arts, cleverly dressing up their ideas to confuse the high officials and cause us to face difficulties? It cannot be said for certain.

It may not be immediately evident why this particular article about two deceased preMeiji officials should have proven so objectionable. Whatever difficulties they may have stirred up in the past, Inoue Saburō and Ozaki Kowashi were, after all, no longer living. The problem, however, was that Inoue Kowashi 井上毅 (1844–95) and Ozaki Saburō 尾崎三良 (1842–1918), two Meiji officials who had been instrumental in designing and promulgating the new press laws, were very much alive and not particularly amused by this thinly veiled fiction. The switch of names was at once a strategy to defend the paper from the possibility of legal action as well as another instance of Ryūhoku’s infamous word play. Moreover, the suggestion that Inoue and Ozaki had stifled the free expression of ideas by vilifying the speech of those who disagreed with them as “slander and defamation” proved prescient, for these were the very grounds on which Ryūhoku and Tetchō were charged with violating the press laws. In the remainder of the piece, the authors continued their covert attack, suggesting that the press laws were draconian and should be struck down: That uncivilized and unenlightened era of the past, when we young comrades pursued our studies together and debated contemporary affairs, has with the passage of the months and years transformed itself into the civilized and enlightened era of the present. And when we turn our thoughts to the future, then who is to say that there will not come a day when we look back with sorrow upon the present, having realized that it too was an uncivilized and unenlightened time? Might it indeed be that there are things about today that in later years will make us look back with sorrow? What evidence could I possibly point to that would prove today is an uncivilized and unenlightened time? Above stands our sagely sovereign with his wise ministers, and below our good friends and beneficial comrades are numerous. The laws of the realm are exceedingly fine and the institutions all surpassingly marvelous. Even if there are one or two malign and deleterious ones, still there is the Genrōin [Council of Elder Statesmen]. Its chairman, officials, and ministers will immediately purge the malign and deleterious and follow the wishes of the people. What could I possibly point to? Nevertheless, there being thousands upon thousands of laws, what guarantee is there that there are not one or two that are not benign and beneficial? If we reflect and consider this deeply and carefully, we might very well discover some before we know it.73

The two journalists’ whimsically disingenuous protests that Inoue Saburō and Ozaki Kowashi were in fact two men with no connection whatsoever to Inoue Kowashi and Ozaki Saburō failed to sway the judges who decided their case. Even more sober assertions that the embattled journalists were motivated by noble and “patriotic” aims proved futile, and Ryūhoku and Tetchō were sentenced on February 13, 1876, to serve prison terms of four months and eight months, respectively, and also to pay fines of 100 yen and 150 yen.74

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Imprisonment and Beyond Ryūhoku had continued to write and contribute essays to the Chōya even while he was under investigation, and the final poem he published before being placed under house arrest while awaiting sentencing was a somewhat somber work depicting himself alone amid Tokyo’s bleak wintry cityscape: A blizzard has continued for days. I write a short poem in the old style to show friends of our organization 連日風雪賦短古一篇似社友

天將大雪壓京城 馬僵車覆人不行 朱門翠帳皆失色

5

千里一白雙眼明 況有封姨援滕六



銀鏃射樹鏘鏘鳴 喚酒禦寒力難敵

10

雪片如拳撲巨觥 吾人唯解鼓其舌 一枝老毫凍欲折 豪吟無復陸劍南 閑却城中三日雪

Heaven has covered the capital city with a great snowfall; Horses down, carriages overturned, and no one walking. The vermilion gates and jade curtains have all lost their color Pure white for a thousand leagues, bright before my eyes. What’s more the wind goddess, taking the snow goddess in hand, Shoots silver arrowheads into trees with a tinkling sound. I call for wine to ward off the cold, but it is not strong enough; Snowflakes big as fists strike against my great wine cup. I know only how to flap my tongue; My old brush has frozen, about to break. I grandly chant the lines, but I am not Lu Jiannan [Lu You], Who shrugged off “three days of snow” in the city.75

In response, Ryūhoku’s confrères quickly and publicly registered their attention to his predicament by contributing poems to the Chōya shinbun with a traditional gesture of affinity, echoing his poem structure and matching his rhymes. The first harmonizing compositions to be published in the paper came from Mori Shuntō and Ōtsuki Bankei, both of whom conveyed this sense of kinship while also echoing the desolate mood of Ryūhoku’s original poem.76 Perhaps because Ryūhoku’s fate still hung in the balance, these two poets were cautious about voicing much overt criticism in their matchedrhyme poems. Yet, once the verdict had been pronounced and Ryūhoku and Tetchō had been fined and jailed, contributors grew less cautious. In matched-rhyme poems that appeared in response to these first two, other poets expressed their sympathy with Ryūhoku’s incarceration in markedly more direct terms while also advancing a larger conversation about the wisdom of the laws that had been the basis of his arrest. For example, the final lines of the matched-rhyme composition that Okamoto Kōseki submitted to the paper read: 朝野先生鼓筆舌 不撓百千受挫折

The master of the Chōya works his brush and tongue; Unyielding a hundred, even a thousand times, he endures this setback.



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文章想見放奇彩 暎發長安滿城雪

His writings lead us to behold marvelous patterns; Shining upon the snow that fills the capital city.77

A few days later, Kobe-based poet Haraguchi Nanson likewise conveyed his dismay at Ryūhoku’s confinement, and, while he preserved the same twelve-line structure and rhyme characters, he adopted a strikingly different tone in making the following ironic suggestion at the end of his poem: 嗟乎宜緘以口以卷舌 硯兮可碎筆可折 文章言語盡禍機 忍使妻兒泣風雪

O, you should seal your lips and bite your tongue! The inkstone—smash it! The brush—break it! Writing and speech are inevitably the cause of disaster; How can you bear to make your wife and son cry in this blizzard?78

Even readers who were not professional poets showed a keen interest in taking part in this forum, joining a collective show of support for the imprisoned journalist. During Ryūhoku’s four-month sentence, the newspaper published occasional updates furnished by those who had recently been released from the prison where he remained captive. The reports they delivered to the Chōya shinbun often included recent Sinitic poetry composed by Ryūhoku and the other imprisoned journalists that was committed to memory by these messengers before their release, for they were denied writing implements while in prison. One early quatrain that Ryūhoku wrote from jail was published in the context of an inter­view with him: 情懷何事太悽然 禍福從來皆在天 誰識北窗高臥客 獄中夜伴盗兒眠

What can have caused my feelings to be so desolate? Blessings and tragedies have always been decided by heaven. Who could have known that ‘he who slept high by the northern window’ Would now spend his nights in jail, lying beside thieves.79

In line 3, Ryūhoku alludes to his well-known affinity for the figure of Tao Yuanming. Readers raced to compose matched-rhyme compositions in response to this and other poems by Ryūhoku that appeared in the newspaper’s pages, and several of their engagements appeared in turn in the Chōya. On March 28, for example, the paper published a poem from a reader dwelling in far-off Yamaguchi headed “One tedious evening I lay down but could not sleep. I arose and trimmed the candle wick, spreading out the Chōya shinbun to read. There was a poem written by Ryūhoku-sensei in prison. As I recited it, I sighed, my tears falling down and wetting the paper. I used his rhyme to compose this quatrain.” It reads: 莫説獄中思寂然 人間甘苦是皆天

Do not say that you feel lonely while incarcerated; Sweetness and bitterness in this world are all up to heaven.

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須如野鶴投林裏 自若伴他群雀眠

Chapter Six

You must be like a wild crane taking refuge in the forest’s depths; Self-assured as you go to sleep in the company of sparrows.80

The matched-rhyme poem closely answers the sentiments expressed in Ryūhoku’s original, while using imagery associated with reclusion to suggest one means by which he might transcend the circumstance. This pattern of readerly harmonization with the poems of Ryūhoku and other imprisoned journalists continued throughout the “Reign of Terror.” A similar sort of exchange took place on Ryūhoku’s release, when the Chōya ran three quatrains by Ryūhoku celebrating his return, followed by several days of readers’ poetic responses. The next day, Ryūhoku’s Sinitic poems were even reprinted in the Yomiuri with additional furigana and reading marks to make them accessible to an audience less familiar with kanshibun and with kundoku reading practice.81 Harmonizing with the poems written by Ryūhoku and other imprisoned journalists was one way that readers of the Chōya shinbun declared their shared stake in the literary space that the paper’s zatsuroku column provided. The sense of a common purpose is further evident from prose contributions that the newspaper published while Ryūhoku was under house arrest and thus no longer able to write zatsuroku columns. On February 13, the Chōya shinbun published an essay submitted from a reader who wrote: “The following piece is a dialogue written in the style of your zatsuroku; if you have empty space, please use this to fill it.” As in the piece discussed above, the short vignette is set in the academy of a rustic Confucian scholar and plays on the appropriation of canonical Chinese texts. Like a prose analogue of the matched-rhyme poems that readers submitted in dialogue with Ryūhoku’s compositions, this contribution from a reader echoed the framework and rhetorical strategy of some of Ryūhoku’s prose essays marshaling a canonical kanbun source in order to legitimize the institution of the newspaper.82 Perhaps the clearest sign of the embattled condition under which writers were forced to work was the institution of fuseji: the circles and squares that writers, especially those employed by politically oriented newspapers, began to use in place of certain potentially inflammatory words.83 These ciphers were marked silences: tangible reminders of the press restrictions and evidence of journalists’ struggles to publish nevertheless. Shortly after Ryūhoku’s imprisonment, an essay appeared in the zatsu­ roku column that addressed the embattled situation in which writers found themselves under the Meiji press laws, again using the familiar setting of the rustic scholar’s academy. The piece alludes to one of the best-known Chinese works by a political prisoner, Wen Tian­x iang’s “Song of the Righteous Spirit,” a lengthy poem that was recited and reworked by numerous Japanese poets from the early modern period onward.84 One of the poem’s central elements is a gallery of historical figures whose trials the imprisoned Song loyalist calls to memory in order to strengthen his own resolve. Among the gallery of heroes were historians, scribes, and other writers who had dared to write what they believed to be true even when it meant certain punishment. The anon­y mous essay reads:



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One of the master’s disciples was reciting “Song of the Righteous Spirit” by Wen Tianxiang of the Song. When he got to the part that read: 在齊太史簡 在晉董狐筆

In Qi, it was the Grand Historian’s bamboo slips [that told of Cui Zhu’s assassination of Duke Zhuang]; In Jin, it was the brush of Dong Hu [that attributed blame to Zhao Dun for Duke Ling’s murder].

He struck the desk and shouted out: “O, how honest and how brave were the historians of Qi and Dong Hu of Jin! The newspaper writers of present-day Japan are gutless cowards who only talk big! They are like weak dogs who just bark away at people. Dong Hu and his ilk are dead and buried, but if they knew about this lot, they would have nothing but scorn for them.” Overhearing his disciple, the master said, “Tsk! What you are saying overlooks the distinction between the splendor of a pacific and tranquil realm, and the decadence of a disordered and contentious state. Don’t you think your words are excessive? Now that our world is pacific and tranquil, the rites can be established and music can be enjoyed. It seems that newspaper writers have succeeded marvelously here. We might fairly say that, among the numerous iron vessels, it is they who emit the most pleasing sound.” The disciple asked, “What are you saying?” His teacher responded, “I mean that the journalists understand that the brush of Tō Ko 董狐 [Ch. Dong Hu] is a useless encumbrance in the present world. For this reason, when they write about affairs, they aspire to emulate the prose of tōko 投壺 [Ch. touhu].” The student was still unable to follow, and so the teacher added, “Haven’t you ever read the “Tōko” chapter in the Book of Rites? It says, ○□○○□□.”85

The chapter of the Book of Rites that is referenced here consists entirely of an elaborate description of the highly codified protocol governing the game of touhu, or “pitchpot,” an elegant amusement that dates from the sixth century bce in which participants compete to pitch arrows into a pot.86 The essay trades on the fact that the name of the paradigmatic righteous writer, Dong Hu, and the pitchpot game, touhu, were both pronounced tōko in Japanese, but one wonders what possible connection there could be between this ritualized game, which is something like the ancient Chinese antecedent of lawn darts, and the struggles of modern Meiji journalists. A look at the text of the Book of Rites reveals the answer, for it concludes with a representation of pitchpot being played and a diagram show­ ing the proper musical accompaniment, the signs for two different types of drum beats looking for all the world like the fuseji used in Meiji newspapers (fig. 6.1). It was of course with biting irony that the essay author discovered auspicious portents within these signs that stood both as reminders of the restrictive state and as tokens of journalistic resistance to it. In its clever appropriation of a canonical Chinese text to speak to a present-day concern, the essay confirms the continued vitality and political utility of kanshibun in early Meiji discourse. Ryūhoku’s four-month absence from the paper created a noticeable gap in the zatsu­ roku section of the Chōya shinbun, but the combined efforts of the newspaper, his fellow poets, and readers alike kept his figure alive on the paper’s pages. With dozens of newspaper writers (not to mention a few contributing readers) jailed in the winter and spring of 1876, the vitality of early Meiji papers like the Chōya shinbun was imperiled, and the role that readers played in defending the space through their own writings merits attention. Given the significance of fuseji as a potential tool of writerly resistance, it is significant

Fig. 6.1 Book of Rites (Li ji), chapter 40, “Pitchpot.” From an 1841 edition of the Five Classics (Gokyō), edited by Satō Issai 佐藤一斎. Courtesy of Waseda University Library, Tokyo.



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that contributors to the zatsuroku column of the Chōya shinbun also made use of it. Consider this poem, submitted by a reader of the paper: ○○豈可縛精神 反激卻教○○頻 請見新聞諸社外 江湖別有張鬚人

How can – – restrain the spirit? On the contrary, they rouse it; instead, they cause – – to proliferate. Behold the world beyond the various newspaper companies: Among the general public there are also those who sport heroes’ whiskers.87

Imagining that the circles represent particular words that have been obscured by fuseji, one might conjecture that the first two circles represent “the laws”: a word such as 條令 (Ch. tiaoling; J. jōrei) or 法律 (Ch. falü; J. hōritsu). Likewise, the characters missing from the second line might be “criticism” 批判 (Ch. pipan; J. hihan) or “argument” 議論 (Ch. yilun; J. giron), or perhaps even “slander” 讒謗 (Ch. chanbang; J. zanbō) or “attack” 攻撃 (Ch. gongji; J. kōgeki). Yet it is also possible to read the circles as directly marking the act of elision itself and the harsh press controls that give rise to it; if we read the circles as circles (“How can ○○ restrain the spirit?”), the poem seems to say that, far from effectively quelling dissent, the press controls will only lead to the deployment of more fuseji (“They cause ○○ to proliferate”). In either case, the poet’s use of fuseji, the circulating token of journalistic resistance, declares his sense of shared purpose, a camaraderie that is only underscored by the closing line’s assertion that heroic men of kindred spirit exist within the public sphere at large. Within days of his release, Ryūhoku started serializing a work titled Gokunaibanashi ごく内ばなし (Super secret tales from the slammer), an extended essay about his prison experience. Even before this account appeared, Ryūhoku had telegraphed his intent to write such a piece, telling a newspaper reporter who interviewed him in prison that he would refrain from being too specific lest he lose good material for future publications.88 As soon as it appeared, Ryūhoku’s work became another hit for the Chōya shinbun, attracting the attention of an exceptionally high number of readers for its humorous and occasionally graphic descriptions of the life and daily routine of inmates at Tokyo’s new prison: Aside from reading books and eating and drinking, there are three pleasures to be had within the prison. The first is exercise. The second is bathing. And the third is cleaning the chamber pots. Now then, the chamber pot is something that is the height of filthiness. Why is it that one handles it with even more care and reverence than he would use in carrying a fine piece of jade? It is for fear that he will overturn its contents. (It is fortunate that even those men who have been found guilty of advancing arguments to overturn the state have never once overturned the chamber pots.) But can there be a man who enjoys reverently handling something filthy, who likes to deferentially clean an unsanitary vessel? What does it mean to place this act among the pleasures of prison? When several men (as many as seven or eight) live together in a cramped room that measures nine feet square, with one person breathing in what another person exhales, the air inside the room turns into one

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great poisonous atmosphere. Even if one periodically gets up and tries to breathe in fresh air at the barred window, it is located high up and the air flow is far away. For this reason, a man enjoys the two occasions during the day when he can lift up the chamber pot and venture out of doors to take in the pure and refreshing air. This is why he puts aside the matter of its filthiness.89

In addition to the chance to get a breath of fresh air, there was perhaps another reason that latrine cleaning ranked high among the joys of prison life. The inmates were forbidden to write and interact with one another, but Ryūhoku nevertheless managed to compose and circulate a “newspaper” while in jail: a handmade newsletter similar to the Strange News of Tokyo that he had produced in the aftermath of the Restoration.90 Written on scraps of paper that he managed to find here and there, Kingoku eiri shinbun (Illustrated jailhouse newspaper) was “published intermittently” according to its subheading, though regularly enough that one surviving example is numbered seventh.91 Under the strict prison rules, the emptying of cell latrines provided the only opportunity for Ryūhoku’s newspaper to be smuggled from one cell to the next. Life in the prison was certainly not a pleasant experience, but it was not as bad as it could have been. As Ryūhoku admitted at the outset of the piece, Super Secret Tales from the Slammer would have made a more gripping account if his prison life had been a more miserable ordeal, but, in the course of his sentence, there had apparently been a “revolution” in administration, and conditions had improved dramatically. Inmates were granted more freedoms, allowed more time to exercise, and the attitude of the guards became less overbearing. Ryūhoku’s essay praised such changes and suggested others, but even in proposing the most mundane and narrowly specific policy recommendations he did so with a flourish, indulging in witty word play and surprising classical allusions that self-mockingly undercut his ponderously belabored argumentation: Though the jail is a formidably frightening place, it is not the case that poisonous snakes and malicious scorpions dwell there. The only thing one has to fear is lice. However, lice can be apprehended and then executed. Compared to lice, what are several hundred times more fearsome are mosquitoes. Mosquitoes have wings and can fly. They cannot be apprehended; they can only be defended against. This is why human beings have developed mosquito netting but not lice netting. When I was in prison, the heat of summer was still not so intense, and yet the thunderous din of mosquitoes was already erupting inside our cells. Because of this, I was tormented every night and sometimes found it impossible to sleep. One night, at the time of the second watch [around 9–10 p.m.], I smashed with my palm a mosquito that had alighted on my forehead. It just so happened that a patrol guard was passing by at the time, and he asked me, “Have the mosquitoes come out already?” I responded, “It seems that way.” “Mosquitoes are a real nuisance,” added the guard. I asked him, “Can’t we string up mosquito netting even during the hot months of summer?” He said, “Such a practice has not been established.” I said, “I only have a few more days left, but those who are going to be in prison for a long time will truly be unable to endure the torment. I would like to kindly request that the matter be considered.” After that, the assaults of the mosquitoes grew more intense by the day, but I was able to bear it by thinking that for me it would only last a short while. . . . Long ago, Nie Zheng and Jing Ke cast their own lives aside in order to stab the sovereigns of other states.92 This is why the Grand Historian, Sima Qian, wrote his “Biographies of the



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Stabbers,” and ever since then there have been more than a few who have followed in the footsteps of these assassins. Thus even powerful officials and aristocrats quake in fear of being stabbed in the dark, and, in order to prevent such assassination, they construct reinforced barriers and high walls, adding further protection by employing guards and patrolmen. We must recognize the depth of their vigilance. Now then, these mosquitoes are also the “stabbers” of us prisoners, but, whereas those other assassins stab in secret, these assassins stab right out in the open. Whereas those other stabbers come only at a particular time, these stabbers come every night. How can you not permit us to erect a sheet of mosquito netting that can serve as our “reinforced barriers and high walls”?

The word play that permits the seemingly far-fetched link between these famous assassins of pre-Han China and the prison’s mosquitoes is rooted in the fact that the terms ci 刺 in Chinese and sasu 刺す in Japanese have a range of meanings that includes not just “to stab,” but also “to penetrate,” and, here, for a mosquito “to bite.” In the following day’s installment, Ryūhoku used the prison’s apparent reluctance to install mosquito nets as a springboard to caricature the flawed approach to Westernization that he tendentiously asserted was behind their dithering: Recently, whether in the halls of government or in the private sphere, there is nothing that does not take the West as its standard and model. This is true not just in the world of academia, the military system, and the various technical and artistic pursuits. It has reached the point that in everything from clothing styles to food and drink, no matter if they are talking about bean paste or human waste, everyone is clamoring about “Western” this and “Western” that! I suspect that, in legal circles, there are some scholars who have advanced a type of argument that in fact confuses bean paste with human waste: that one can find no precedent in Western prisons for the installation of mosquito nets. True, but the reason for this after all is that the cities of the various Western metropolises have neither filthy gutters nor debris piled up in their streets and gardens; there are, moreover, few trees in their cities. Whence would the rumbling thunder of mosquitoes arise? The people may have mosquito nets, but they are not a necessity as they are in our Imperial Nation of Japan. Why should we even ask whether the inmates in their countries have them or not? This is something where the situation will inevitably be different East and West. Moreover, as for things being different in their particulars, we should not focus solely on conditions in the Western countries tens of thousands of miles away.93

As Super Secret Tales from the Slammer shows, Ryūhoku’s four months in prison had robbed him neither of his sense of humor nor his interest in publishing provocative columns. The establishment and maintenance of the Meiji press as a vibrant forum for debate was a collective effort by professional writers and an actively contributing reading public. Shortly after his release, on the occasion of the anniversary of the press laws’ promul­ gation, Ryūhoku seized upon this public dimension by staging a massive event at one of Tokyo’s most public sites: the Sensōji temple. In this mock Buddhist ritual, which he called the “Shinbun kuyō ōsegaki” (A memorial service for the spirit of the newspaper), Ryūhoku and some two dozen speakers from the various newspapers delivered sharp criticisms of the government’s press laws couched in the form of facetious memorials atoning for the

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Fig. 6.2 Tōkei shinshi poem, “Shinbun segaki” (Feeding the hungry ghosts of the newspaper [at Sensōji]), at left. Ōhashi Roshū 大橋蘆洲 and Kita Tōkō 北稲香, Tōkei shinshi 東亰新詞 (1875). Collection of the author.

sins of the newspaper.94 Some thirty-six priests recited sutras, representatives of the major newspapers offered incense in front of a giant stūpa, and individuals offered their own extemporaneous prayers. In a sermon he delivered there, Ryūhoku grandiloquently celebrated the promise of the newspaper as a mechanism of enlightenment but then histrionically chastised it for its sins against the magnificent laws and “benevolence of our wise government.”95 The memorial service could have been seen as a facetious ritual of atonement or even exorcism, designed to rid the newspaper of its grievous sins. At the same time, these memorial rites doubled as a pointed statement that the newspaper had died one year before, killed by the Meiji government’s stifling press laws.96 The festivities that day still lingered in the minds of the poets who two years later published Tōkei shinshi, a collection of kanshi inspired by the distinctive material culture



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and practices of early Meiji Tokyo. Each poem in this collection closely follows the structure of an extremely popular poem by the late Edo Sinologue Rai San’yō, echoing its rhymes but also its exuberant visuality.97 This is their poem depicting the newspaper memorial service that Ryūhoku organized (fig. 6.2): 論耶説耶記耶文 觸○獄罰不間髮 編者罪業施餓鬼 願因觀音他力沒 瞥見去年發例日 即是新聞當厄月

Editorials? Essays? Articles? Columns? Encountering the –, imprisonment follows not a hairsbreadth behind. Guilty of a litany of sins, the editor must appease the ­hungry ghosts; Hoping to call upon Kannon’s power to dispel them. Behold, the day last year when they released this law— That was the month of the newspapers’ misfortune.98

This is the sole use of fuseji in the three hundred poems that comprise the collection’s two volumes, but the poem is actually far less critical of the government than many others in the collection. Its content is simply not sufficiently incendiary to require the use of fuseji. Given that the poem’s subject matter is the struggle between the contemporary press and the Meiji state, the visually jarring employment of fuseji seems amusingly apt. From the context, one can surmise that the effaced character must refer to the Meiji government’s harsh press restrictions, specifically, I think, the Shinbunshi jōrei (which could be abbreviated to the single character rei 令). Moreover, there is an additional level of humor here because the circle, if read as a zero, would also be pronounced rei.99 Such typographical witticism may seem trivial, but there is something more significant at work here. Although the poem seems to focus on the swiftness with which punishment is meted out to the editor for his “litany of sins,” the fuseji seems to tell a different story, aligning the poet with the embattled editor in his determined efforts to continue publishing in spite of the consequences. James Huffman has argued that the emergence of daily newspapers in early Meiji Japan was instrumental in “creating a public.” To recognize the transformative effect of newspapers on the Meiji populace is not to deny the existence of nascent conceptions of collective public identity in the early modern period, but, as Kyu Hyun Kim points out in his study of the emergence of the public sphere from the late Edo period into Meiji, the “vibrant critical discourse aimed at political authorities” that characterized the late Toku­ gawa period nevertheless remained “ephemeral” and “transient.”100 It was only with the establishment of enduring institutions such as daily newspapers, Kim notes, that there emerged “an open public space in which literate readers, staff writers, and reporters could commingle and exchange information and opinions.”101 Although it is common to think first of the role that the press played in the standardization of the vernacular language, this chapter has shown that kanshibun was very much part of this new mode of public interaction, and Ryūhoku’s Chōya shinbun contributed significantly to creating a public of kanshibun readers and producers.

Ch a p t er Sev en

After the Wake

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ntil quite recently, it was customary in studies of Ryūhoku to narrate the newspaper memorial service that he held in the summer of 1876 at Asakusa’s Sensōji temple as the peak of his journalistic career. After the grand spectacle, Ryūhoku was supposed to have turned away from the role of the passionately engaged journalist, quickly extricating himself from duties at the Chōya shinbun and instead devoting his attentions solely to Kagetsu shinshi, the new literary journal showcasing traditional poetry that he founded in January 1877. In his influential monograph, Maeda Ai characterized the end of Ryū­hoku’s career as a period in which he cast off his former combativeness, with­ drawing from political debates into a realm of aesthetic pursuits: “Ryūhoku could foresee that the role he enthusiastically played as a tocsin (bokutaku) to awaken the world regarding the Newspaper Ordinance and Defamation Law—a role that he had stepped outside his temperament to play—was already coming to an end. . . . It was to his original role as the suave sophisticate ( fūryūjin) that Ryūhoku sought to return.”1 The time when Ryūhoku is supposed to have disengaged from newspaper journalism coincided with a difficult transitional period for the Chōya shinbun. At the end of 1876, the paper celebrated the relocation of its operations to a new base in the Ginza district, where the offices of Tokyo’s major newspapers were all densely clustered.2 As 1877 began, the Chōya was enjoying its highest circulation figures ever, but, in the following year, its popularity suffered a setback. The blame is traditionally placed on Ryūhoku’s supposed retreat, his distractions with the new literary journal, and his reluctance to embrace a new model of the newspaper’s role as first and foremost a conveyor of accurate and up-to-the-minute information especially at a time of unprecedented national crisis. The outbreak of the Satsuma Rebellion (Seinan sensō) early that year plunged Japan’s newspapers into a new era in which their success depended principally on how quickly and thoroughly they published late-breaking news. As we saw in the previous chapter with Ryūhoku’s second “Red Cliff ” parody and its pointed critique of saber-rattling bluster, the wisdom of Japan’s adopting an aggressive diplomatic policy toward its East



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Asian neighbors had been debated within the government through the mid-1870s. Domestically as well, several small-scale uprisings (such as the Shinpūren and Hagi rebellions of 1876) had been staged by disgruntled men of the samurai class ( fuhei shizoku) who were frustrated with Meiji reforms that had curtailed and eventually eliminated their stipends, banned the carrying of swords, and in other ways eroded their traditional privileges. In 1877, however, the Meiji government faced its first major existential threat when hostilities erupted between its troops and fuhei shizoku from Satsuma (Kagoshima prefecture). These dispossessed samurai were led by erstwhile Restoration hero Saigō Takamori (1828–77), who had resigned his post and returned to Kagoshima a few years earlier, having failed to mobilize official support for mounting a punitive expedition against Korea. The conflict that played out in Kagoshima through the end of that summer was the first in which reporters on the frontlines relayed news of the battle to a spellbound national audience. The Chōya shinbun initially failed to send reporters to the scene of the Satsuma Rebellion as other Tokyo newspapers had, dealing a blow not only to the public’s perception of the paper’s reliability, but to its bottom line as well. When the Chōya shinbun finally did decide to send some staff members to investigate and write about the disturbance, Ryūhoku was one of the two reporters dispatched, but he only made it as far west as Kyoto. Serialized from March to April of 1877, Ryūhoku’s “Rambling notes from a journey” formed a personal travelogue with only the most oblique connection to the Satsuma Rebellion. In describing his passage through a customs inspection in Kyoto, for example, Ryūhoku noted his pleasure that one of the agents recognized him from his earlier stay and therefore knew he “was no samurai hothead and had not a whiff of sweet potatoes about” him.3 Filled mainly with observations about Kyoto’s customs and interwoven with poems he composed on local topics, these reports provided virtually no insights into affairs in Kyushu beyond such humorous asides and the vaguest of personal impressions. Insofar as he remained in the Kyoto area for the duration of his tour, Ryūhoku did face a somewhat legitimate problem in obtaining information on the rebellion that was worth reporting. As he noted numerous times in his dispatches, the Meiji government observers in Kyushu telegraphed their battlefield updates directly to Tokyo, meaning that for Ryūhoku to attempt to supplement these press releases with his own reporting would amount to offering his readers a “Liaodong piglet”—something unexceptional and commonplace that the bearer presents as rare and novel. Interesting though they were, Ryūhoku’s musings on Kyoto’s eating, drinking, and dancing establishments did not stand a chance at this critical juncture against the vivid frontline reports of Fukuchi Ōchi at the Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun and Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855–1932) at the Yūbin hōchi shinbun. Before the end of April, the paper had recalled him to Tokyo and sent two others in his place.4 Ryūhoku had better success addressing the Satsuma Rebellion in his distinctive roles as literary craftsman and editorial commentator than he did as battlefield correspondent. Just a few weeks before Saigō’s death brought an end to the uprising, he wrote a short essay titled “New Zhuangzi” that began: The autumn heat looms oppressively, and all of the newspaper staff nod off to sleep; fluttering along in their naps, they have already become butterflies. I, the author of the miscellany, also

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had no energy to edit letters to the editor, so I moved my desk beneath the southern window and resoundingly read out the lines of a newly published book. It said: “In the western regions there is a thing and its name is Potato. The Potatoes are so numerous I don’t know how many thousand there are. They change and become rebels whose conduct is Outlawry. The disciples of Outlawry number I don’t know how many tens of thousands, and, when they rise up and revolt, their force is like waters of the vast sea. When they are victorious in battle, these Potatoes set off for the Eastern Capital; the Eastern Capital will be in a fix.”5

The humor of the piece, as suggested by its title and the reference in its preface to dreaming of becoming a butterfly, was that this treatment of the Satsuma Rebellion was a parody of the first chapter of Zhuangzi, which begins: In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is Kun. The Kun is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is Peng. The back of the Peng measures I don’t know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. When the sea begins to move, this bird sets off for the Southern Darkness; the Southern Darkness is the Lake of Heaven.6

As he had with Wang Xizhi, Su Dongpo, and others, Ryūhoku mimicked the typical Sino-Japanese rendition of the source text almost exactly, weaving in numerous amusing juxtapositions in the remainder of the parody. For example, whereas Zhuangzi had quoted ancient textual authorities to describe the mysterious Peng (“The Universal Harmony is what records wonders”), Ryūhoku’s parody cited more modern sources of information on the inscrutable Potato (“The Telegraph is what reports the rebellion”).7 Ryūhoku’s weak sense of responsibility to investigate the rebellion personally is perhaps most evident in this line that establishes the “telegraph,” not the frontline reporter, as the definitive source of information. Once the dust of the Satsuma Rebellion had settled, it was clear to all that Ryūhoku was a commentator and an essayist, not an investigative reporter. As Suehiro Tetchō, who had taken over as the paper’s editor soon after his October 1876 release from prison, later recollected: The Chōya shinbun achieved its momentary popularity from the brilliance of its miscellaneous essay section and the trenchant quality of its political commentary. However, its investigative journalism was spotty, and the incompleteness of its news reports section put it far beneath other papers, making it deficient as a newspaper. For this reason, I warned Narushima and the publisher that we needed to eliminate the old staff members and reduce our needless expenses, putting our energy into news reports and investigative journalism, but my ideas were not accepted.8

Many have raised questions about the reliability and impartiality of Suehiro’s memoirs, but the debacle in covering the Satsuma Rebellion does seem to have cost the paper readers, at least temporarily. The Chōya shinbun’s circulation figures had consistently charted rapidly increasing growth since its founding, but in 1878 the numbers dipped slightly. To



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make matters worse, the newspaper also again ran afoul of the Meiji authorities that year and was ordered to cease publication for ten days. Yet, in spite of these problems, the Chōya quickly bounced back, and, by 1879, its circulation was a close second to the Yūbin hōchi’s. In the following year, the Chōya regained its title as the ōshinbun with the highest circulation, a status it would maintain for every year until Ryūhoku’s death in 1884. During these last years of his life, Ryūhoku remained an absolutely central figure at the Chōya shinbun (fig. 7.1), writing hundreds more essays for the zatsuroku column, which continued to be one of the paper’s most popular features. Far from retreating meekly into the safety of his inoffensive literary journal Kagetsu shinshi, Ryūhoku boldly branched out in new directions: helping to launch Dekinei sōdan, a new magazine that featured political and social commentary; seeking an ever broader audience for his views by also contributing essays to multiple other media venues that catered to less educated readers; and undertaking more aggressive and systematic political and social activism as well. For these and other reasons, Maeda’s description of Ryūhoku’s last several years of writing as “tracing a curve of rapid decline” is simply inaccurate.9 Even more problematic is his characterization of this period as one in which Ryūhoku had renounced his role of “tocsin to awaken the world.” It is a formulation that has been immensely influential in studies of Ryūhoku but one that over the last fifteen years has been completely rejected. In October 2001, Hino Tatsuo, one of the most prominent scholars working on Ryū­ hoku at the time, highlighted this revised view of Ryūhoku in an essay he wrote to commemorate the launch of Iwanami Shoten’s new series of annotated versions of classic texts from the Meiji period. According to Hino, scholars had so diligently mined primary materials from the late Edo period that it was now unlikely that any truly “dramatic new development in research” would take place to reveal heretofore neglected dimensions of texts or authors. Yet such revolutionary discoveries were still possible for the comparatively less exhaustively studied body of Meiji literature, he observed, and Ryūhoku was a case in point. Hino went on to summarize the traditional understanding of Ryūhoku’s later career as articulated by Maeda and noted how he had previously subscribed to a similar view: “I had completely accepted [Maeda’s] line of thinking and once wrote, ‘The Ryūhoku who applied himself so passionately to editing Kagetsu shinshi was a Ryūhoku who had grown weary of his struggles with the government. Losing himself in suave leisure pursuits became tantamount to resisting the government insofar as both involved turning his back on the modernity that the government provided.’ Mr. Maeda, and I, were spectacularly wrong.”10 The newly excavated primary materials that changed Hino’s mind were a series of over one hundred columns Ryūhoku wrote for the Yomiuri shinbun in the last four years of his life. Brought to light by Inui Teruo and Yamamoto Yoshiaki, these essays demonstrated that Ryūhoku remained a committed cultural commentator and a trenchant critic of the Meiji government right up until his death: further elaborating his eclectic model of modernization by advocating a variety of cultural preservation policies, lobbying for a rapid timetable in introducing parliamentary government, and aligning himself with the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement. These newly reconsidered columns were not, it should be noted, an aberration unique to Ryūhoku’s work for the Yomiuri shinbun, but instead reiterated themes Ryūhoku had addressed con­ sistently in his other journalistic endeavors. In fact, even before Inui’s and Yamamoto’s

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Fig. 7.1 Utagawa Hiroshige III, The Chōya Newspaper Company Building on the Ginza, from the series Famous Sights of Tokyo, polychrome woodblock print, 1880. A cartouche identifies Ryūhoku as the individual in the right foreground seated in the rickshaw. Courtesy of Waseda University Library, Tokyo.

transformative research on the Yomiuri shinbun columns, a few other critics had gestured toward similar conclusions about Ryūhoku’s later journalistic career based mainly on his columns in the Chōya shinbun and Kagetsu shinshi. In a largely ignored (though somewhat problematic) series of articles published just after Maeda’s 1976 monograph, Imamura Eitarō argued that the selection of essays appearing in several of Ryūhoku’s posthumous anthologies was slanted to overrepresent those in which he posed as the fūryūjin, or “suave sophisticate,” and that this bias had produced an inaccurate image of Ryūhoku’s decade as a journalist.11 The new attention to the Yomiuri shinbun columns simply made this distortion more apparent. In this final chapter, I examine the last years of Ryūhoku’s career, looking at the essays he published across a wide range of media from 1877 to 1884 and surveying the various causes to which he directed his advocacy and activism. In many of these pieces, Ryūhoku took up concerns that he had explored in his earlier writings, and one of the aims of the chapter is to highlight thematic continuities while also identifying further evolutions in his thinking. I begin by considering how Ryūhoku argued Japan might best address its martial legacies as it transitioned to a more egalitarian society in which the shizoku had no further hereditary role to play in governance. As groups of dispossessed samurai emerged to present new challenges to the Meiji state, Ryūhoku had occasion to reflect on his own decision to abandon his samurai status at the Restoration and to explore anew the images of swords and scenes of martial valor that had figured so con­ sistently in his youthful poetry. In his many essays for the Chōya, Ryūhoku continued to comment on and offer suggestions about a vast array of particular state policies, social practices, and cultural forms: providing detailed recommendations on the government’s currency and foreign debt strategy in one editorial, for example; proposing in another



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essay that Japanese street addresses be systematically renumbered to make them function more practically; or calling on Japanese cycling enthusiasts to refrain from riding through pedestrian areas.12 But, alongside these pieces targeting single issues, Ryūhoku also often addressed more wide-ranging questions about Japan’s modernization efforts, reflecting on the models and approaches that were most appropriate to adopt and the pace at which reforms should be pursued. Just as he had during his first years at the Chōya, Ryūhoku continued in the last stage of his career to be a strong advocate of the literary arts and other traditional cultural forms, but he also outlined more specific measures that could be taken to protect and foster their development. As discussed in the previous chapter, when Ryūhoku decided to feature Sinitic poetry prominently in his Chōya shinbun columns, he declared himself an opponent of the dominant contemporary under­standing of bunmei kaika, which tended to slight such pursuits as useless. Yet, as Sinolo­gical studies came to enjoy renewed popularity in the 1880s, Ryūhoku had a new opportunity to ponder the value of traditional learning. Finally, I consider how Ryūhoku built on his earlier self-fashioning as a “newspaperman” to further flesh out a role for journalists as public figures who could contribute to the common good in ways complementary to the roles of civil servants and soldiers. Rather than a period of precipitous decline for Ryūhoku, these years saw his activities expand and proliferate. His involvement in several publications beyond the Chōya shinbun from 1877 onward should not be understood as indicating his withdrawal or distraction from his role as a journalist, but rather should be seen as evidence of his continued engagement and ongoing development as a writer and social commentator.

Taking Stock of Saigō, Swords, and Samurai Although Ryūhoku’s reluctance to venture farther west beyond Kyoto during the Satsuma Rebellion was lamented by some of his contemporaries and criticized by later scholars, it would be wrong to assume that he was simply indifferent to Saigō’s uprising. On the contrary, Saigō’s significance and the issues raised by the Satsuma Rebellion figured prominently in many essays and editorials that Ryūhoku wrote in 1877. In the weeks leading up to his departure for Kyoto, Ryūhoku frequently cast an anxious eye toward the gather­ ing signs of conflict and the reemergence of traditional martial values that they seemed to portend. In one piece, for example, he asserted that, while the rising domestic tension had dealt a blow to almost all of Tokyo’s businesses, sword traders alone were enjoying a prosperity they had not seen in years. Yet, to Ryūhoku’s mind, far from an occasion to celebrate, the sword merchants’ putative prosperity was no more than a worrisome first slip in a backward slide through which “reckless samurai would return to their former habits . . . of oppressing the good citizenry,” ultimately bringing about “reversion to the old feudal customs . . . and the barbaric ways of the past.”13 That the samurai had been stripped of their special privileges and the warrior-centered polity dismantled was, in Ryūhoku’s mind, a positive development that could be sacrificed only at Japan’s peril. A few days later he published an essay that mischievously imagined Saigō and other leaders

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of fuhei shizoku rebellions as deceptive purveyors of confections, writing “in the western hamlet is a sweet potato dealer” 西ノ郷に芋屋有リ and “in the field out front is a bota­ mochi shop” 前ノ原ニ牡丹餅屋有リ. Although these thinly veiled references to the family names of Saigō 西郷 (from Satsuma with its famed sweet potatoes) and Hagi Rebellion leader Maebara Issei 前原一誠 (1834–76, from Hagi, another name for botamochi, a glutinous rice confection made with sweet beans) may seem frivolous, Ryūhoku’s call for his readers to resist these former samurai leaders’ self-serving attempts at ingratiating themselves with the general public was sincere. As he wrote in the rousing conclusion to this essay, “Conditions have changed from what they once were, and our nation of Japan is decidedly not a Japan that belongs to the samurai class. It is the nation of Japan that belongs to all of us, the people.”14 It may seem that Ryūhoku is merely settling old scores in this piece by targeting the shogunate’s former antagonists, Satsuma and Chōshū (Hagi), but we also see him clearly grounding his own identity as one of “the people” of Japan, condemning samurai privilege, and articulating his support for the newly constituted modern Japanese state.15 In another essay written during the conflict, Ryū­ hoku creates a dialogue with an irate sword-wielding shizoku interlocutor who faults him for tarring all members of his class with the same brush: “Among the shizoku,” insists the man, “there are also righteous and proper gentlemen who earnestly want the best for the people and the nation, who are working to expand popular rights (minken) and eliminate tyranny.” After listening to this objection and acknowledging that there are indeed some small number of shizoku who advocate for popular rights, Ryūhoku’s persona, the “Newspaperman” (Shinbunshi), counters by questioning the belligerent tactics of such shizoku and then going on to posit a fundamental contradiction between the egalitarianism of minken thought and the hereditary basis of social class distinctions: But just think. Surely these so-called supporters of popular rights need not accomplish their aims by antagonizing the government and forcefully overwhelming the officials. To have the shizoku in a position superior to the citizenry at large greatly hinders popular rights. If they truly seek to expand popular rights, then they ought first to leave the shizoku class. . . . Why don’t those purposeful men among the shizoku class who support popular rights petition the government to eliminate the name shizoku at once? Once they have done that, they’ll just be regular citizens (heimin). . . . And once they are regular citizens, then they will enjoy the same rights that we do. This will lead to there being more men of vitality among the commoners, which will help expand popular rights.16

Other editorials that he wrote during the conflict would even more pointedly declare his solidarity with the Meiji government in its suppression of the fuhei shizoku uprisings.17 The position that Ryūhoku defined for himself in these essays, in other words, was not one of unbridled enmity toward his erstwhile foes: the oligarchs from the southwestern domains that had toppled the shogunate. He advanced his arguments about the dangers of shizoku privilege from a position that was no longer yoked to the narrow partisan affiliations of 1868, but was instead based on a broader sense of national collec­ tivity. As he would point out in a subsequent essay arguing against the perpetuation of earlier status hierarchies in present-day speech, a new national consciousness had



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replaced former ties: “The love and respect that those of the old domains have for their former lords is by no means a bad thing. . . . But the former lord surely knows in his heart that, today, these people of his old domain are now subjects of the imperial state.”18 Beyond the fact that Ryūhoku had abandoned his own shizoku status, his transcendence of former loyalties is further evident from the critical ways in which he recollected his own experience as a shogunal officer in essays he published in the aftermath of the Satsuma Rebellion. In a signed editorial that he wrote after the Meiji government’s new conscript army had managed to suppress the uprising, for example, Ryūhoku praised the inclusiveness of the modern military while noting that Tokugawa samurai had also been reluctant to accept the integration of commoners: Looking back over ten years ago, when the former Tokugawa clan was in its final days, they rejected the old spear-and-sword-toting samurai units and instead actively recruited peasant soldiers from all around, forming several large infantry battalions. The shogunal soldiers at the time were benighted and stubborn, prattling on about how farmers were not fit for combat and vying to heap scorn upon them. However, in the campaign at Tsukuba and at the battle in Chōshū, all the shogunal samurai were dispirited and hesitant; it was only the peasant soldiers who were able to have any impact. In the battles of Fushimi and Utsuno­ miya, too, those who fought the best were the peasant troops. Back when I burned my scholarly robes and spent three years with whip and bow in hand commanding soldiers, I clearly saw for myself that peasant troops could be put to use but shizoku could not.19

By explicitly adducing the Tokugawa past, Ryūhoku clarifies that the target of his critique is the “benighted and stubborn” exclusivism shared by both Tokugawa samurai and Meiji era fuhei shizoku, rather than shizoku of a particular region or background. While Ryūhoku praised the new Meiji army repeatedly in his editorials, acknowledging the soldiers’ sacrifices and extolling their success in suppressing Saigō’s rebellion, he also called his readers’ attention to the possibility of other complementary paths of service. At a time when the Seinan conflict raged and celebrations of military valor were ubiquitous in popular media, Ryūhoku made the provocative argument that becoming a soldier was not the only way to contribute to the greater good. In one essay, for example, he dismisses as folly the misguided patriotism of a hypothetical man who commits suicide when he cannot join the military: “After all, how can it be that the only means by which the people can repay their debt to their nation is by military service? . . . If one is unable to offer military service, then he ought to think hard and come up with another way to do something of benefit to the nation.”20 Significantly, Ryūhoku understood his own path as a committed journalist in precisely these terms. One essay that he published in the zatsuroku section shortly after the government’s successful suppression of the Satsuma Rebellion argues that public commentators had helped curtail the uprising’s spread: Just imagine if they had staged their uprising in the early years of Meiji, when civilization and enlightenment had not progressed to their present-day levels. Frightful though it is to say, I imagine Shimonoseki, Osaka, and Kyoto, certainly, and perhaps even Tokyo as well,

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would have fallen into the hands of the disgruntled samurai. . . . That it has instead become an age in which the bulk of the Kagoshima shizoku were put down, their leaders Saigō and Kirino [Toshiaki, Saigō’s deputy] ultimately gritting their teeth and clenching their arms as they made their glorious passage into the great beyond at Mount Shiroyama is, needless to say, in large part owing to the government’s educational efforts. . . . That the other disgruntled samurai of the realm realized that they could not rely on violence and that they refrained from raising the fist they thought to raise is because they were kept in line by the restraining force of public opinion. Where does public opinion come into being? Not in the fish market, nor in the ward office, nor in the yose theater. Rather, it comes into being in the brush that the commentator (ronsha) holds in his hand. Though the brush of the commentator may be worn down, though his prose may be poor, even so, inasmuch as he speaks on behalf of public opinion, the effects that he subtly works upon people’s minds are no small matter. Along with the official decrees that the government disseminates to the public, these arguments enter into the minds of the people of the realm—who knows which penetrates deeper or more rapidly? Alas, that Saigō and Kirino died unable to amass greater might is because the power of the commentators’ brushes restrained them from building alliances nationally— though of course the hard work of the imperial army was also important.21

The essay argues that a newspaper commentator is one whose published writings both reflect and also sway public opinion. As we saw in chapter 1, the poetry Ryūhoku wrote in his youth configured the “book” and the “sword” as two alternative forms of public service: one representing the contributions Ryūhoku made in his capacity as an official scholar and the other signifying the military service he imagined offering the Tokugawa polity at a time of national crisis. In this essay, we see him articulate a third possibility. By discussing the writings of engaged commentators alongside statements issued to the public by the government and by furthermore asserting that writers such as himself shared with the imperial army soldiers at least some of the credit for quelling Saigō’s rebellion, Ryūhoku was arguing that the committed journalist could serve the greater good in ways that paralleled the more conventional efforts of the government official and the military man. Saigō’s rebellion had brought to the fore a host of issues beyond the matter of shizoku privilege, and, in the columns that Ryūhoku wrote after the government’s victory, he attempted to take stock of Saigō’s failed rebellion, drawing from it lessons that might have broader relevance to Japan’s present situation. Ryūhoku viewed Saigō as a heroic though tragically flawed figure.22 In a column that appeared not long after “New Zhuangzi,” he adapts another parable from the Daoist classic to probe the significance of Saigō’s recent death. Rather than Zhuangzi’s “frog in a well,” Ryūhoku compares Saigō to a “fish in a pond”: A fish that lives in a small pond, though the fish be large, is ultimately not as good as a small fish that lives in the great sea. This is because what it sees is small. A fish that lives in a pond might grow to be one or two feet in length, and, if this fish were to fight with a smaller fish from the great sea, even one no bigger than a needle, then the pond fish would certainly devour him in one gulp. But the pond fish would never know about steamships going across the ocean’s surface or about telegraph cables traversing its floor. He would just swim about, self-satisfied within the narrow confines of his pond. Suppose a malicious person were to



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dump poison into the pond. The fish would have no place to flee and would die in moments. What a pity. But just think. Saigō Takamori was a hero for this generation. In bold determination, in discerning wisdom, in martial bravery, in noble austerity, in widespread popularity, is there anyone who was his equal? And that is why, when he ran wild in the realm, people could not bring themselves to resist him. When he raised his rebellion and with his few troops took on the great army of the entire nation, he was able to hold out for eight months. That is something no mediocre man could even think of doing. And yet, having waged this ignominious campaign, he was ultimately defeated and died. What was the real reason that this happened? Could it be that his folly brought him to this point? No, it was because what he saw was small. Although he was a great man, he was not acquainted with conditions abroad, nor did he like to hear about them, and that was his fatal mistake. If he had been proficient in foreign studies, thoroughly familiar with conditions overseas, and had actually been to visit foreign lands, then how could he have ended up as a headless ghost in Iwasaki valley? Alas, what a shame. And so I say, a fish that lives in a pond, though it be large, is not as good as a small fish that lives in the great sea. Even a great man like Saigō, when his knowledge is so narrow, can lead a mistaken life. Those extremely stubborn types who cling to one branch of Shinto, Buddhism, or Confucianism; those military men, physicians, poets, artists, artisans, and all people of the hundreds of professions: they should direct their attention across the seas and not model themselves after the humble pond fish. Those who think they alone are right; those who believe only in themselves and do not know how to take “stones from other hills” and turn them into “sharpening tools” will unavoidably end up like Saigō.23

The metaphor of “stones from other hills” with which Ryūhoku closes this piece comes from the Classic of Poetry and suggests an eclectic orientation that would permit and indeed promote the critical use of alternative perspectives.24 It was precisely this sort of eclecticism that Ryūhoku had encouraged in his early miscellaneous columns and that would continue to be a central theme in his writings for the remainder of his career.

The Chōya and Beyond While he saw in Saigō’s putative indifference to conditions abroad a tragic lesson, Ryūhoku was nevertheless sympathetic to his former Satsuma adversary. He had no such feelings, however, for Saigō’s onetime friend Ōkubo Toshimichi, another Meiji oligarch from Satsuma who took a very different path after the Restoration. Although they interacted on only a few occasions, Ōkubo had actually been in Europe at the same time as Ryūhoku. He returned to Japan having wholeheartedly embraced not only the trappings of Western culture, but a model of authoritarianism and centralized power inspired by Prussia’s Bismarck. The modernizing policies that Ōkubo forcefully imposed earned him the scorn of disgruntled samurai, and he was assassinated in May of 1878. Ryūhoku certainly did not share the assassins’ wariness of Ōkubo’s threat to their traditional status, but he was a vocal critic of Ōkubo for other reasons, namely, the latter’s suppression of the press and overzealous strengthening of police powers. Although Ryūhoku did not countenance the assassination, he later observed that life had improved after Ōkubo’s

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death because the consolidation of power in one man’s hands was inevitably harmful to the people: Let us turn to the situation overseas. Bismarck, the premier of Germany, is a man who has distinguished himself throughout Europe. He holds the reins of government of Germany in his hands alone, and none dares to oppose him. But has this brought about a peaceful and stable society for Germany? Though Prussia was able to subdue France in a single battle, the country’s internal affairs are unstable, and it seems that only a few are content with their policies. This is precisely because one man’s uncompromising force is being used to quell the populace.25

Ryūhoku’s grievances against Ōkubo only partially overlapped with those of his assassins, but, the day after they struck, Ryūhoku printed excerpts of their allegations in the Chōya shinbun, a decision that landed the paper in predictable trouble with the authorities. The government punished the Chōya and ordered it to cease publication for ten days.26 Ryūhoku took responsibility for the lapse and resigned his position as company president. As always, he had fun with the demotion, making it the subject of his next column, an “advertisement” that narrates how he would henceforth embrace a new role at the Chōya: I had removed the seal and braid of my office as president and returned them to the newspaper owner, and was just about to go back to my humble cottage along the Sumida (though I still cannot entertain guests), pull the covers over myself, and lie down to rest, hoping that I might thereby ease the weariness that has affected me these past four or five years. The staff of the paper came one after another and said, “You are intensely passionate; even if you resign your position, how could you bear to abandon the Chōya company just like that?” Or they said: “The Kagetsu company that is your bailiwick still occupies space within the Chōya company offices. Even if you wish never to report to work again, how will you manage to do it? . . .” I said, “The staff at this company, heedless of my incompetence, have recklessly made me wear the chop and braid of president—and that was a misplaced gesture from the first. Moreover, I have come to loathe this troublesome post, and, now that I have stumbled upon a chance to surrender these marks of office, I have done just that. Stop bothering me, for I have no wish to be president again!” The staff said, “We are not asking you to be the president again; we are merely asking you to do what you can. Have you no desire to be editor?” I responded, “I am a poor man and just suppose I slipped up: I could not pay the fine.”27

Notwithstanding Ryūhoku’s actual ongoing role in overseeing the Chōya as well as his pursuit of a variety of publishing and other ventures during the late 1870s and early 1880s, the figure of the indolent man of leisure constantly desiring to escape the burdens of work that we glimpse in the above exchange was a persona that Ryūhoku constructed and invoked frequently to the delight of his readers.28 In the remainder of the dialogue, Ryūhoku persistently refuses to accept a string of proposed titles at the Chōya, including pressman, accountant, deliveryman, receptionist, and proofreader. The rejections leave his imaginary interlocutor only one final possibility: the “Fire Guard,” whose responsibility



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it will be to insure that no conflagrations break out on the paper’s premises. This, Ryūhoku finally agrees, is a sinecure that he will be pleased to occupy, and, in the following day’s column, he wrote about how he delivered the news to his wife and his maid, whose reactions range from misgivings to misapprehension: “Both of you can rest assured, for I have gainful employment again.” My wife was pleased, bowed twice, and said: “Dear husband, if I may be so bold as to ask, what job did you accept today? Have you been appointed president again? Or will you be editor in chief? Or perhaps pressman?” I said, “I will be the Fire Guard (hinoban).” My wife was astonished and said, “That won’t be very good for your reputation. Why don’t you resign the post at once? Wouldn’t it be better for you to stay at home and nap all day than to perform some lowly occupation like Fire Guard?” I said, “What do you know? I personally wished to accept the responsibility of Fire Guard. . . .” My wife was silent. The maid then raced out to tell one of my students the news: “The master has today been appointed the Hired Bard (shinoban).” The student said, “That is fitting. Our teacher has always been fond of poetry, and so he has become the Hired Bard. I imagine he will be correcting the poems that people send in to the company and choosing some to publish. That is an appropriate job for him. I will compose a congratulatory ode for him right now!”29

The maid’s mistake comes from the Tokyo dialect’s confusion of the sounds hi (fire) and shi (poetry), and, once that matter is straightened out, Ryūhoku spends the remainder of the piece invoking a variety of hoary Chinese precedents for important fires to facetiously buttress the momentousness of his new position. There was truth to his claim that he would remain a key figure at the paper, however, for even after Ryūhoku stepped down as president of the Chōya shinbun, his columns continued uninterrupted. Though such self-mockery might seem to suggest that Ryūhoku’s role at the newspaper was diminished or nonexistent in the 1880s, this is simply not the case.30 As the popular late-Meiji collection Marvelous Anecdotes about One Hundred Great Figures of Our Times observed in the headline of its essay on Ryūhoku, this new post was a strategic misrepresentation to avoid further punishment: “Nominally the ‘Fire Guard’ but in fact its lead writer.”31 Moreover, in this period Ryūhoku’s involvement in additional publication activities only expanded and diversified. As the “advertisement” itself makes clear, Ryūhoku’s newly founded literary journal Kagetsu shinshi was published by the Chōya Shinbun company, had its offices in the same building, and can be more accurately seen as an outgrowth of the material the Chōya had featured in its zatsuroku section since the paper’s 1874 launch. Established in 1877, Kagetsu shinshi (New journal of blossoms and the moon) was one of Japan’s very first literary magazines. The journal, which ran continuously until Ryūhoku’s death in 1884, was a collaborative undertaking to which several of Ryūhoku’s long-standing literary confrères contributed, including Kikuchi Sankei, the Confucian scholar who had taken over the position of official shogunal tutor when Ryūhoku was dismissed from his post in 1863. Published usually two or three times a month, it featured Sinitic and Japanese poetry and prose works composed by Ryūhoku, Sankei, Ōtsuki Bankei, Ōnuma Chinzan, Suzuki Shōtō, Ono Kozan, and other wellestablished figures but also provided a forum for newly emerging talents. Several travelogues, including Ryūhoku’s own Diary of a Journey to Bitchū and Diary of a Journey to

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the West, appeared in its pages, alongside various translations and essays.32 The inaugural issue of Kagetsu shinshi featured Ryūhoku’s epigraph explaining the multiple meanings of the titular “blossoms” and “moon” and outlining the journal’s purpose, content, and imagined audience: In speaking of “blossoms” need we only refer to plum, apricot, and peach blossoms? In discussing the “moon” need we only speak of the light of the crescent or full moon? Are there not also blossoms that understand words in the red mansions? Or blossoms that bloom at the brush tips of blue-shirted youths? Can’t these also stir people with their exquisite charms? The lunar luminescence of a young talent’s heart or the round orb of a delicately refined woman’s makeup mirror: don’t these also cast their pure light upon us? If that is the case, then during any of the four seasons, where could one possibly go that flowers and blossoms are not to be found? We can spread a bejeweled mat for a banquet; we can let feathered wine cups fly! This is why we have founded New Journal of Blossoms and the Moon. . . . We have established our headquarters within a corner of the Chōya Shinbun company. I am extremely lazy by temperament and on top of that am already the head of the Chōya, so how can I withstand the burden? Nevertheless, when it comes to the delights of sitting beneath blossoms or wandering tipsy in the moonlight, I have enjoyed these for forty years now and still have not exhausted my karmic bond. When a flower with heavenly fragrance and superlative charms manifests herself before me, when the moon’s jade light shines upon me like a golden dragon, it makes me drool with anticipation. And so I dispatched a letter some thousand leagues away to my old friend Kikuchi Sankei to consult with him. As one who shares my affliction, he can commiserate with me, and he was delighted to join this effort, agreeing to lend me a hand. I also urged luminaries such as [Ōtsuki] Bankei and [Kawada] Ōkō to let me plunder their brocade bags for the verses they have stored up secretly within that I might dazzle the people of the realm. Is this not one of the delights of our peaceful era? But since I have already been entrusted by the owner with management responsibility, the items we print shall be in accord with my preferences. I ask that those of you who read this magazine do not look upon it as an anthology of Sinitic poetry and prose; nor should you look upon it as a newspaper. Moralistic types will ridicule it as foolishness and superficial sorts will spurn it as old-fashioned, but I shall pay them no mind. If there are those who seek to understand true artistic charms, then pole a little boat out on the Sumida River, raise your gourd flask on the eastern hill, and make your inquiry of the flower god and the moon goddess.33

Ryūhoku repeatedly plays here on the polysemy of “blossoms,” referring to flowers, to beautiful women (especially courtesans, as in the conventional phrase “blossoms that understand words”), and to poetic activity. This set of associations is complemented by the various figurations of the “moon,” conjuring visions not only of aesthetic appreciation of natural scenery, but romantic assignations (the term “red mansions” suggesting elegant homes as well as geisha houses) and the written expression that might accompany these and other activities. It is, in short, a world dominated by the aesthetics of fūryū, and, just as Ryūhoku had staked a claim for the importance of such sensuality-affirming literary exploration against the anticipated objections of moralistic scholars in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, so too does he defiantly declare his indifference here to those who would dismiss the project as mere outdated “foolishness.” By explicitly drawing a distinction at the epigraph’s close between Kagetsu shinshi and a newspaper, Ryūhoku also echoes his earlier declaration in the second volume of New Chronicles that the latter



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work might best be understood as “a kind of useless newspaper.” In the intervening years, the “newspaper,” with its steady focus on practical matters and engagement with current events, had become a familiar fixture of Japanese daily life, and Ryūhoku’s achievement in making the Chōya one of the most widely read ōshinbun was an important aspect of that shift. At the same time, his zatsuroku column had proven such a popular feature of the Chōya shinbun in its first several years because Ryūhoku was committed to maintaining the high literary quality of the essays he published there, to showcasing traditional poetry, and to addressing matters that might seem “useless” from the utilitarian standards that shaped the content of the newspaper’s other, more clearly “useful” sections. Rather than diminishing or replacing the zatsuroku column, Kagetsu shinshi built on these dimensions of its success, and both newspaper and magazine thrived. An essay Ryūhoku wrote for his Chōya miscellany column just a few months after launching Kagetsu shinshi suggests this reciprocity and also sheds some light on what he saw as the new journal’s distinctive features. The essay is an imagined late-night dialogue between anthropomorphic avatars of the two publications that takes place in their shared offices after all employees have gone home and the only sound to be heard is the clatter of the printing press. The Chōya initiates a conversation with the Kagetsu, who is diligently editing the next issue, and, after they exchange some compliments, it asks the Kagetsu to compare itself to other magazines: “Now then, I imagine that, among the magazines of the world, there must be some you regard as models. Why don’t you tell me about your ambitions? How do they compare to those of Bunmei shinshi or Kōko shinpō?” Kagetsu replied: “Journals like those two are full of indignation and grim resolve. They use their fiery blood for ink and their swords for brushes. It’s not really the sort of thing that a literary gentleman (bunshi 文士) like me enjoys.” The Chōya said, “Well, in that case, how about Kinji hyōron?” Kagetsu replied, “Kinji is thorough in its investigative reporting and swift in mounting arguments in editorials. It’s not really something that a person who keeps a certain distance from the world as I do can compete with.” The Chōya said, “Well what about journals like Katei sōdan or Bungaku zasshi?” Kagetsu replied, “Those two discuss moral matters and see education as their primary goal. That’s not something that one who is fond of humor like me can accomplish.” The Chōya said, “Does that mean you should be classified with Shinbunshi or Meiji shibun?” Kagetsu replied, “Those two are collections of Sinitic prose and poetry. But I don’t merely include Sinitic prose and poetry. Moreover, Shinbunshi takes its contributions mainly from taikaku poets with poets among the general public being secondary. But I take most of my contributions from the general public and also include some written by taikaku poets. Meiji shibun is fond of lengthy works of epic scale, but I prefer smart and refined pieces. Those are the differences.”34

The two periodicals’ conversation continues at some length in this vein, with Kagetsu highlighting its differences from several additional publications before the Chōya concludes with an air of resignation: “In the end, there aren’t any journals that you take as your model.” From this dialogue it is clear that Ryūhoku understood Kagetsu shinshi to be distinctive by virtue of its literary orientation and its light tone, eschewing the zealous engagement in political debate, earnest commitment to newsgathering, and moralistic aim of didactic instruction evident in the approaches of its many competitors.

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Moreover, Ryūhoku frames Kagetsu shinshi as broader in scope than the other early literary journals that were its closest counterparts, noting that it included poetry and prose in a range of forms, both Japanese and Sinitic, and also highlighting the fact that its con­tributors were drawn mainly, though not exclusively, from the citizenry at large, rather than being dominated by government officials (taikaku, or court poets). The new literary journal quickly became a favorite of many aspiring writers of the next generation, including Mori Ōgai, who referred to it in several of his novels. In Vita sexualis, for example, the narrator recalls reading Kagetsu shinshi with his friend Eiichi as a teenager: Eiichi . . . excelled at Sinological studies and was partial to Kikuchi Sankei. I read the copy of Seiunrō shishō that I had borrowed from him and then moved on to Honchō gusho shinshi. And when he would tell me that something by Sankei was coming out, I too would go to Asakusa to buy Kagetsu shinshi and read it. We tried composing Sinitic poems ourselves, and we also tried our hands at short pieces in kanbun. That was mainly how we would spend our leisure time.

Later in the text, the novel’s narrator goes on to mention Ryūhoku specifically: In those days, there was something in the newspapers called the zatsuroku. The Chōya shinbun enjoyed good sales on the basis of Narushima Ryūhoku’s zatsuroku. It was serious scholarship mixed with sophisticated wit, and the argument endeavored to be unique. You could glimpse the tight logic in the words, and occasionally an aphorism that appeared in the column would suddenly be on everyone’s lips.35

Ōgai’s novel demonstrates the significant overlap between the readership of the Chōya shinbun and that of Kagetsu shinshi, and the columns Ryūhoku published in each shared several similar themes as well.36 These columns helped the paper reach new heights of popularity in the 1880s.37 In the nighttime dialogue quoted above, Ryūhoku emphasizes Kagetsu shinshi’s lack of contentious political commentary, its indifference to reporting current events, and its absence of didactic purpose as some of the literary journal’s distinctive features. Defining the journal’s orientation in this manner did not mean that Ryūhoku was simultaneously declaring his own personal lack of commitment to undertaking such roles in other contexts, for Kagetsu shinshi was only one of many publishing ventures that occupied his attentions during these years. In 1878, he banded together with several other colleagues at the Chōya shinbun to found Dekinei sōdan, a new journal that specialized in politi­ cal and social commentary. The title is nearly homophonous with a colloquial phrase (dekinai sōdan) that indicates an “impossible proposition” or perhaps a “tall order,” but the magazine’s founders wrote dekinei with characters that suggest a meaning more like “drowning in muck” or perhaps “wallowing in ordure” 溺濘, an image of defiant resistance in the face of apparent futility that Ryūhoku explained in an essay appearing at the front of the magazine’s first issue:



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One who is drowning in a flowing river can still swim and manage to escape. But one who is drowning in muck is not free to wave his hands nor can he use his legs to get a footing. He just becomes stuck and buried and that’s the end of it. Those who dwell in this vast world of ours are free to swim like fish in the great sea, weakly and timidly at first perhaps but then grandly and proudly. Why would any man choose to bring trouble upon himself by drowning in muck? Nevertheless, everyone has his own idiosyncratic preferences. The wise worthies employed by Emperor Wen of the Han dynasty were second only to those of the Three Ages of antiquity. Although the realm was governed peacefully, a man named Jia [Yi] alone shed tears and sighed deeply, saying he could not be at ease. Ultimately he died of his worry and sorrow. Why did he refrain from taking joy in the peace of his times and living out his life in comfortable merriment? It must have been because he chose a life of tears and sighs in accord with his preferences. People called him a fool and a madman, but he didn’t stop. Sometimes my associates and I cast aspersions at society or satirize a person with intemperate words and arguments. Though our friends urge caution, we do not listen. Though our wives and children warn us, we pay no heed. When people in the world hear our words, it is like a Buddhist prayer intoned in a horse’s ear. In extreme situations, the listener may even cover his ears and flee. Nevertheless, we are unfazed. O, why do we not take joy in the peace of our times, merrily swimming our way through life? What reason can we have to adopt such a poor strategy of becoming stuck and buried as we drown in the mud? It must be that we are following our own idiosyncratic preferences. Recently Sakai Kakuzuisō has gathered together some editorial essays and miscellaneous writings by our group and has also selected some pieces contributed by letter writers in the general public, making them into a magazine called Dekinei sōdan. He has asked me to contribute some words for the epigraph. I am an old man, lacking my former strength, but I have been friends with Sakai for a long time, so how could I refuse to lend him a hand? To say nothing of the fact that I spend night and day facing these men across my desk, exchanging wine cups with them, and together discoursing and debating. Rather than just offering a single epigraph, then, from this first issue through the hundredth, the thousandth, the millionth issue, I shall take up my worn-down brush and spill my frank and innermost thoughts on these pages. I will hope to be so fortunate that readers in the general public will permit me this folly and madness. Inasmuch as this magazine amounts to the groans and sighs of those who have already invited their own suffering by getting themselves drowned in mud, it is obviously of a different nature from those that extoll the peacefulness of the realm and provide embroidered accounts about how well everything is governed. It is certain that people in the world will not enjoy hearing what we have to say, and much of it will be like the Buddhist prayer in the horse’s ear. Nevertheless, the sage gathered the words of the brush cutters. Who is to say that our Dekinei sōdan may not, sooner or later, circulate in society and transform into a Dekiru sōdan [A viable proposition]. This, I record with a laugh.38

The title playfully indicates the Dekinei sōdan writers’ attitude of stubborn commitment to continuing to engage in spirited political commentary in spite of seeming indifference on the part of many potential readers of the magazine in society at large. In addition to the literal meaning of deki as “drown,” a metaphoric sense of the word as “infatuation” (and thus a title meaning “wallowing in muck”) is evident in this passage, further suggesting that these writers relished the task of rendering their unwelcome critiques. As the reference to constantly “facing these men across my desk” indicates, the “group” of Dekinei sōdan writers to which Ryūhoku refers above consisted mainly of staff members

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of the Chōya shinbun, including Suehiro Tetchō, Takahashi Kiichi, Sawada Chokuon, and others. The man alleged to be the new journal’s organizer, Sakai, was employed in the Chōya shinbun’s accounting department and may have served as something of a figurehead. It was a common strategy during these years of tight legal restrictions for Japanese publications to appoint individuals (often sturdy young men) to positions of nominal responsibility with the idea that they could sacrificially accept the consequences (and potential incarceration) should the publication run afoul of the press laws. Most of the pieces appearing in Dekinei sōdan were argumentative essays addressing some aspect of political, economic, or social policy. For example, the magazine’s writers issued regular calls for Japan to prioritize the negotiation of a fairer set of treaties with the Western powers, to engage more deliberately in robust industrial development, to establish more representative forms of parliamentary government, to draft a constitution, and to adopt protective trade agreements. The magazine also frequently devoted attention to the issue of press freedom, serializing, for example, translated excerpts from Erskine May’s The Constitutional History of England that trace British historical suppression of contrarian discourse and narrate the development of protections for publication and expression.39 True to his intention stated in the epigraph discussed above, Ryūhoku remained a consistent contributor through the life of Dekinei sōdan, publishing essays in its pages on fiscal policy, the role of elected officials, and other matters in keeping with the political and economic focus of the magazine in addition to pieces addressing more broadly cultural topics. That Ryūhoku had in no way retreated from his engaged role as public commentator is clear from the hundreds of pieces that he published in Dekinei sōdan, the Chōya shinbun, and Kagetsu shinshi over the next several years. These multiple commitments to overseeing and contributing material to the Chōya shinbun as well as the two magazines published under its auspices placed significant demands on Ryūhoku’s time, a situation that he humorously described in an essay that imagines avatars of the three periodicals furtively meeting and conspiring to take control of his movements: The Chōya shinbun said: “I have an urgent matter to discuss with you. Your company president is the Fire Guard for our company. However, he tends to be lazy and self-indulgent, careless in carrying out his duties as Fire Guard. Sometimes lamps break or stoves tip over, and no one knows where he is. Isn’t this the height of dereliction of duty? For this reason, I thoroughly chastised him last winter. And he said he would work diligently this year. Never­ theless, he often talks a lot of hot air, so we can’t really take comfort in these words. But fortunately, you could do us the favor of being careful to monitor his moves minute by minute and make sure that he pays due attention to his Fire Guard duties. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in a terrible situation. And who is to say that such a catastrophe might not affect you as well?” Kagetsu shinshi replied: “It is true, our company president is an avaricious man who is prone to get himself involved in all manner of concerns: charging off one way in the morning and racing another by night. I have been worried about this myself and decided that this would be the year that I would nail his feet down and bind his hands, not allowing him to escape. I would be appreciative if you would grant us your permission.” The Chōya shin­bun beamed with delight, but just then someone draped in an old black cape and holding a Buddhist rosary appeared bowing before them. This was none other than the Abbot



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Dekinei of the Baji Nenbutsu-sha (Prayer-in-the-Horse’s-Ear) Company. The abbot came forward, offered his congratulations on the New Year, and said, “So you are going to tie up the Fire Guard and not allow him to get involved in anything else? That is an excellent plan. However, my Nenbutsu Company cannot be deprived of this preacher. I would be pleased if you would sometimes lend him to us.” The two looked at each other and smiled saying, “The Nenbutsu Company’s sermons only come out once or twice a month. And since the position of kyōsei moral instructor is of course completely uncompensated, there should be no problem in lending him to you.”40

While Ryūhoku invokes here his well-known fictive persona as the lazy occupant of a meaningless post at the Chōya, the essay also reveals just how involved he was in a variety of publishing ventures during these years: multiple forms of engagement cast him in a range of roles far beyond the suave sophisticate indifferent to contemporary affairs. At the same time, Ryūhoku also pursued new forms of civic engagement, such as serving on a planning committee that welcomed former United States president Ulysses S. Grant (1822– 85) during the latter’s three-month visit to Japan in the summer of 1879.41 Moreover, Ryū­ hoku was also flooded with requests from private individuals to provide his calligraphy for a plaque, to offer a celebratory poem, to write a commemorative prose account, or to give his commentary and criticism of their submitted compositions. Ryūhoku occasionally transformed these endless solicitations into amusing fodder for his own columns, depicting with a light touch his exasperation and belaboring his intent to receive due payment for such services. In 1880, he tried a new strategy to reduce such requests, writing a column that declared his own demise by exhaustion from these worldly toils.42 Yet, in spite of this whimsical death announcement, Ryūhoku’s activities as a writer expanded even further in the 1880s as he directed his attention beyond the elite readership of the Chōya shinbun, Dekinei sōdan, and Kagetsu shinshi. Though he had occasionally praised the efforts of more accessible news outlets in earlier columns, from around this time Ryūhoku became increasingly vocal in his support of contemporary media that aimed to cultivate political consciousness among the less educated: those who read illustrated newspapers or who depended on phonetic glosses to understand Chinese characters.43 More than once in Dekinei sōdan, for example, he called attention to the role that such newspapers could play as vehicles of enlightenment, urging them not to lose sight of their mission to inform and to avoid devoting unnecessary attention to crimes and scandals.44 In Chōya shinbun as well, Ryūhoku championed the efforts of such publications to spread understanding of constitutionalism and parliamentary government among their readership: “Oh, how vigorous are the efforts of my colleagues at the Eiri shinbun [Illustrated news] published by Ryōbunsha. Even furigana newspapers are committed to working hard from this point forward toward achieving popular rights.”45 Far from simply offering his encouragement from afar, Ryūhoku also forged ties with such popular media, including the Eiri chōya shinbun (Illustrated national newspaper). In spite of the similarity of their names, this illustrated paper initially had no connection whatsoever to its more famous ōshinbun counterpart: the Chōya shinbun. Yet, in 1882, the illustrated newspaper took steps to initiate a new relationship with the Chōya, eventually moving in to an annex that the Chōya had recently acquired. In an essay that

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Ryūhoku wrote to explain the incorporation of the Eiri into Chōya’s operations, he invited his readers to read the Eiri themselves or recommend it to their families: “We hope simply that the gentlemen who are fond of reading our paper will let their wives and children have a look at our nephew or become members at our branch temple.”46 Ryūhoku’s commitment to expanding his readership to include those who found the Chōya shinbun, Dekinei sōdan, and Kagetsu shinshi inaccessible is further evident in his cultivation of relations with one of the leading koshinbun—the Yomiuri shinbun, for which he began to write several essays every month in January 1881.

An Eclectic Approach to Modernization In agreeing to contribute regular columns to the Yomiuri, Ryūhoku gained a new audience, but the issues he wrote about for this broader readership overlapped in many ways with those he pursued in other venues and furthermore shared a consistent approach with some of his earliest newspaper work. When he launched the Chōya shin­ bun in 1874, one of the first essays that Ryūhoku published in his “miscellany” column was a humorous piece tracing the lineages of the Seven Gods of Fortune. As discussed in the previous chapter, Ryūhoku’s facetious exercise in disentangling the deities from one another was a satirical commentary on attempts to impose doctrinal purity in early Meiji. Now, seven years later, on being invited by Koyasu Takashi 子安峻 (1836–98) to write a regular column for the Yomiuri shinbun, Ryūhoku chose to deploy the Seven Gods again. In the very first essay to appear in the new column, Ryūhoku discovered in these deities not only cross-cultural universals, but also a vivid illustration of the eclectic model of modernization that he had come to advocate: In every country, in every village, there are things that are regarded as good, and there are things that are regarded as bad. Though the world with its five great continents may be such a vast place that it is difficult to understand even with the aid of pictures, there are nevertheless no differences in human feelings and physical principles.47 In accordance with the customs of each country, there are, however, various differences in how people behave and what they revere, and thus there are many things that a person must be thoughtful about when deciding what to adopt and what to leave behind. Just look at the gods of fortune. As for Daikokuten, who is their captain, the god of our country has a hood on his head and wears shoes; he is dressed warmly in a thick cotton kimono and stands atop a bag of rice. As is clear from the Daikokuten shinkyō, the Daikokuten of India has the same power as a bringer of great fortune and contentment, but Lord Mahākāla (the Daikoku of that country) wears light and short clothing, sits in a chair, wears nothing on his head, and leaves his hairy shins exposed. Inasmuch as both are manifestations of fortune and contentment, there is no difference between the two, but, if we were to take the Indian god, put a cap on his head, and make him wear a heavy kimono, then he would immediately be quite troubled by the stifling heat. If, in contrast, we were to leave the god of our country half naked and barefoot, then it would be difficult for him to avoid catching a cold. If even the gods of fortune who want for nothing are like this, then we mere mortals surely ought to use our minds to consider matters carefully. When it comes to the things of foreign countries, there are some that are good,



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and there are some that are bad. There is also a difference between those that can be easily adapted to our country and those that are more difficult to adapt. That being the case, we should make an effort from this moment forward to revise our stubborn old habits and make the transition to the ways of civilization. And when it comes to the calls for “enlightenment,” as long as we are careful not to forget who we are and just copy what others do, which might make us do some silly things that just don’t suit us, then it is surely a wonderful thing.48

Ryūhoku saw the world from a pluralistic perspective, and he consistently wrote about the dangers of doctrinaire thinking. In their motley amalgamation, the Seven Gods of Fortune served well as a symbolic manifestation of such eclecticism. Ryūhoku is often called a “critic of bunmei kaika,” and that is partially true; he frequently pointed out the shallow and selective grasp of Western civilization that drove some of the era’s excesses. Yet to describe him as an “antagonist of Westernization”49 simply misses the mark. As he explains at the end of this passage, Ryūhoku was convinced that bunmei kaika had the potential for being an undeniably positive thing.50 Likewise, he argued repeatedly over the course of his career that a thorough knowledge of the West was indispensable for Japan and moreover that appropriation of certain Western models was also desirable. Such a position was nothing new for Ryūhoku, whose insistent attention to promoting greater awareness of the Western world had been the principal factor behind his dismissal from his shogunal post in 1863. A decade later, when post-Meiji Japan was awash with enthusiasm for Western modes and material culture, Ryūhoku called attention to what the self-styled advocates of this sort of bunmei kaika were overlooking: literary practices, artistic endeavors, and scholarly disciplines that did not readily yield practical benefits. In mounting this critique, however, never once did he frame it in terms of outright antagonism to Western forms or to the idea of bunmei kaika itself. A few years into the second decade of Meiji, when Japan saw something of a backlash against the extreme zeal for Western learning that had characterized the 1870s, Ryūhoku remained consistent in arguing that knowledge of the West was imperative for Japan to pursue. Given his role in championing more traditional forms of scholarship and literary endeavor throughout the 1870s, we might predict that Ryūhoku would have welcomed the restored attention to Sinology, but he was in fact suspicious of the factors that lay behind this development: Over ten years ago, Western learning suddenly arose and academies of Western learning, Keiō University foremost among them, were opened all around. At that time, there was hardly a single young man who did not aspire toward Western learning. People tucked away their Japanese and Chinese books and devoted themselves solely to the study of English and French. Out of this mass of students, there thus emerged some who established a name for themselves as great scholars. In particular, more than a few of them achieved impressive results after venturing overseas to study and to undergo several years of rigorous training. This trend continued for a time, to the point that some even argued that our literature and learning should be abandoned and that we should make use solely of Western languages. But beginning about three or four years ago, for some reason the momentum of Western learning diminished markedly and now seems substantially weaker than it once was. There are some youths who have abandoned their studies halfway, and the prices of Western books

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have dropped, falling to just one-third of what they once were. Although the great masters and earnest students of course continue to pursue their work with diligence, if we nevertheless are to describe the general national trend in a succinct phrase, it is that people have lost interest in Western studies. O, how frivolous are the vicissitudes of time! But just think for a moment. Though some might say that Western studies have now been established in our land, how many Japanese individuals are familiar with the learning of various countries and the languages of various lands like the scholars in Europe and America are? How many Japanese are there who can write their [Western] prose with precision and elegance, or produce their poems with delicate skill? Putting aside two or three great masters, certainly it is true that the Japanese who can freely wield a brush in this way, as a Japanese Sinological scholar writes the poetry and prose of China, are few indeed. Sinology declined after the Restoration and nearly became extinct, but recently, with the turn away from Western learning, students have realized that they must master Chinese learning. In city and countryside alike, gradually things are returning to the way they were in the past, and those who flip through volumes of the Chinese dynastic histories and Confucian classics, who clutch books of Sinitic prose and poetry, are becoming more numerous all the time. Many people say that this marks the start of the flourishing of Sinological study, but I think it is but a momentary fad. It is definitely not something that merits celebration. Moreover, the Sinological learning that is being pursued now is but a temporary makeshift and does not reflect a deep commitment on the part of the students to establish sturdy foundations of learning that will enable them to become great scholars.51

In keeping with his mid-1870s argument that literary study, and poetics in particular, was a discipline unjustly overlooked in Meiji Japan’s early modernization efforts, Ryūhoku provocatively posits here the ability to compose poetry and prose in a foreign language as an index of scholarly achievement. In observing that only a tiny handful of Japanese scholars of Western subjects were able to write Western poetry and prose with ease, whereas analogous skills were nearly universal among Japan’s professional Sinologists, Ryū­ hoku reminds his readers that Western learning was still in its underdeveloped infancy in Japan and also highlights a glaring omission from the agenda of its practitioners. While this comparison attests to the relative depth of Japan’s longstanding Sinological tradition, the close of the passage shows too how students’ sudden embrace of Sinological subjects struck Ryūhoku as not only fickle, but fundamentally flawed. Here and elsewhere Ryūhoku was adamant that an exclusive focus on either Western or Sinological study was detrimental. Just a few weeks later, he published another essay in Dekinei sōdan that lamented the loss of humanistic well-roundedness as a goal of education, writing: The proverb states that “if you seek mochi, go to the mochi maker.” I imagine it means that a mochi maker produces especially good mochi. But I am always saying that even a mochi maker should cast his gaze toward the wine merchants and restaurants, for there is more under heaven than mochi. . . . If one surrounds oneself with legal texts and pursues them with diligence, he might not know anything about the role that Han Yu’s prose or Su Shi’s rhapsodies play in the world. He might mistakenly assume that the whole country has been transformed into one made of legal codes. Or consider a devotee of the New and Old Testaments who thinks of nothing but reciting them; he would be unaware of how popular Shinto and Buddhism are among the people; he would delude himself into thinking that the whole nation is composed of Christians. If a man does not open his eyes, striving to observe day and night the actual



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circumstances of the world; if he is always content to curl up within his own desktop theories; if the others with whom he happens to converse are only those who share his tastes, then surely he is not one with whom to discuss present conditions and ponder future outcomes.52

In addition to urging students to be broad-minded in exposing themselves to a wide range of academic disciplines, Ryūhoku’s essay also argues for striking a balance between such book learning and practical experience. Several years earlier, in the mid-1870s, Ryūhoku had frequently decried how the period’s narrow focus on utilitarian benefits and practical criteria threatened literature and other humanistic disciplines. Yet with the resurgence of Sinological study in the early 1880s, traditional poetic practice came to seem less endangered, and it became more common for Ryūhoku to also point out the hazards of erring too far in the other direction by dismissing practical concerns altogether. The broad and comprehensive approach that he proposes here with respect to scholarship was of a piece with the selectivity and eclecticism he advocated in his more general considerations of the modernization agenda of bunmei kaika. What was essential, Ryūhoku argued, was that the agents of “civilization and enlightenment” be critical and contemplative, using situation-specific criteria to evaluate the discrete components of any set of practices or system of beliefs rather than adopting it indiscriminately in its entirety. Ryūhoku’s eclectic approach led him to poke fun at narrow academic zealotry of any kind, whether practiced by those who dismissed Western learning out of a misplaced allegiance to Confucian tradition or conversely by those devotees of Western learning who unilaterally discarded traditional scholarship as irrelevant and outmoded. Consider the following essay, in which he asserts the importance of familiarity with both forms of learning: The scholars today who are fond of what is rare and novel rush headlong like runaway horses and never look back. Their fault lies in rashness and superficiality. The scholars today who cling to what is old and familiar curl up like frozen snakes and never extend themselves. Their fault lies in obstinacy and narrowness. When obstinacy contends with rashness, they are as incompatible as fire and ice: thus, the rash lose themselves in rashness, and the obstinate descend into ever greater obstinacy. What a shame! If only both could restrain their tenaciousness and instead strive to tolerate and learn from each other. If those fond of novelty would read the old classics and those who cling to tradition peruse new books, each of them maintaining a level head and a humble spirit as he seeks to understand the purport of these texts, then both would surely benefit. How can it be that the Six Classics and the Three Histories are of no use to us today? Is it not the case that mastering the learning of Europe and America is something we must focus our efforts on now? And yet they insult and scorn each other, like housewives in some humble part of town gathered around a well to trade boasts: “My husband is the most talented in the city.” “My child is the handsomest in the quarter.” Isn’t this a foolish state of affairs? Neither Confucius nor Mencius had such a narrow point of view. Neither Socrates nor Bacon spoke such nonsense. . . . Now then, among the sayings of Confucius and Mencius, there are surely some that are not applicable to today’s world. And among the laws and systems of Europe and America, there are certainly some that are ultimately not suitable for our country. But what possible logic dictates that if I am fond of a particular person it means I have to think his shit doesn’t stink? Or that I must drink what I know to be poison just because he offers it?53

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Although he chose earthy imagery to make the point in this instance, the basic contention that it was essential to be critical and selective in one’s engagement with another individual, culture, or school of thought was an argument that Ryūhoku would advance in myriad ways during these years. Moreover, his commentary had special piquancy because the command of the Confucian canon that he had acquired in his youth occasionally made it possible for him to buttress his own eclectic approach with appeals to precedents within the Confucian tradition itself. Consider, for example, the following essay, which cites the Book of Rites to show that Confucius was similarly selective, adopting practices and recommending models on an ad hoc basis: At this moment, when with each passing day the territory of this nation is becoming more developed and the wisdom of the people is becoming more advanced, we should endeavor to make a clean sweep of our bad habits. But, that being said, when it comes to the old practices within the cities and the traditional customs in the neighborhoods, we ought to consider what would be most advantageous, giving due attention to actual conditions; for those things that are just fine as they are, they ought to be left alone. Since the Great Restoration, there have been changes in all dimensions of life, and needless to say it would be difficult to enumerate all of the ways in which we the people have greatly benefited. Nevertheless, among these manifold changes, we are not devoid of cases in which the practice under the old shogunate was also quite good. For these, it would be best to leave them as is, without reforming them. . . . Confucius of China was a sage. He was born during the Zhou dynasty and revered the Duke of Zhou deeply. Nevertheless, when he discussed the rules of ritual, the following is recorded: “Under the Yin, they presented condolences immediately at the grave; under the Zhou, when the son had returned and was wailing. Confucius said, ‘Yin was too blunt; I follow Zhou.’ ” And this is also recorded: “Under the Yin, the tablet was put in its place on the change of the mourning at the end of twelve months; under the Zhou, when the (continuous) wailing was over. Confucius approved the practice of Yin.” Ritual practice of the Three Dynasties of antiquity reached perfection in the Zhou, and thus, in determining ritual systems, none was superior to the Duke of Zhou. Nevertheless, Confucius still thought that there were good aspects of the earlier systems, saying: “Follow the calendar of the Xia, ride in the carriage of the Yin, and wear the ceremonial cap of the Zhou.” This is a faculty of insightful discernment that in all matters aims to adopt the strong points and abandon the weak points.54

Even within Japan, the essay goes on to argue, different geographic areas have distinct sensibilities and needs, and thus political figures would be wise to refrain from imposing any uniform policy without regard for such regional variation. In the course of the early 1880s cultural retrenchment, some thinkers who had long been active on the fringes of Meiji society began to attract more interest and attention from the mainstream. A Buddhist priest named Sada Kaiseki 佐田介石 (1818–82), for example, had been calling for a ban on the importation of Western goods for years, but in 1880 he made new inroads with his Hokokusha (Preserve the Nation Society), which aimed to rid Japanese daily life of all Western influence. Although Ryūhoku agreed with Sada that reducing needless imports of luxury items from abroad was a reasonable step for Japan to take, he dismissed Sada’s intolerance. An essay he published in the zatsuroku column urged a more eclectic and less doctrinaire approach:



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The famed Sada Kaiseki has recently founded a group called the Preserve the Nation Society and has already enrolled several hundred comrades in Osaka. The use of all Western products is forbidden for society members; they are not to use the solar calendar; if they eat beef, they are fined; and if they read newspapers or magazines, then they are expelled from the society. . . . In our world today, everyone pursues the dregs of civilization, taking delight as they race to purchase imported trinkets and decorative items that serve no function at all. This results in a trade imbalance. It would be a good idea to curtail this, and so if Mr. Kaiseki’s purpose in founding his Preserve the Nation Society is to bring this message to the ignorant in society at large, then I would have to agree it is a good method. . . . It is only good sense to make do with domestic products to the extent possible. However, is it not obstinate folly of the most extreme kind to say things like “You must not use imported products, and if you do you will be fined”? If one really tried to put his argument into practice, then one would not be able to travel aboard speed boats, for those boats are all of Western manufacture. One would also not be able to ride in locomotives, for the rails are all made of foreign iron. . . . The nutrition and medical care of the human body are also vital matters, and yet the members of the Preserve the Nation Society are prohibited from even eating beef. It goes without saying that they would also be prohibited from using foreign medicines. Alas, has their extreme lack of concern for their own lives reached this point? Since it is up to each individual to decide whether or not he wishes to read newspapers and magazines, I will not even bother to consider their stance on this matter and shall merely take pity on their folly. But the ultimate impropriety of the Preserve the Nation Society is that they call for the elimination of the solar calendar. Mr. Kaiseki! Preserve the Nation Society! What nation are you from? If you are Indians or Chinese, that’s one thing, but if you are citizens of our nation, then is it permissible for you to abandon our nation’s calendar? Is it acceptable for you not to follow the legal systems that our nation has established? According to the logic of antiquity that you are all so fond of, you are no more than rebellious subjects who refuse to recognize the imperial calendar. If you are saying that you wish to engage in parallel use of the lunar calendar out of custom so that you might pound mochi rice on the Lunar New Year too, that might perhaps be tolerable, but if instead you are calling for the abandonment of the solar calendar that has been officially decreed our national law, then there is no reason not to call you rebels. Alas! For all things, there are elements to adopt and elements to discard; in all matters there is a question of degree. Please reflect on this!55

In the same way that he marshaled passages from the Confucian classics to argue against the exclusivity of staunch conservatives, so too does Ryūhoku here adduce the solemn significance traditionally accorded to the state-sponsored calendar in the Sinosphere in order to point out Sada Kaiseki’s inconsistent observation of the ancient conventions he claims to be protecting. As humorous caricatures of Sada Kaiseki and other contemporary figures who might in fact accurately be described as “antagonists of Westernization” show, Ryūhoku regarded such dogmatic rejection of Western civilization as narrow-minded, misguided, and even delusional. Shortly after the conservative Meiji Nippō newspaper was founded in July 1881, Ryūhoku published a column critiquing their anti-Westernizing agenda with the following analogy: Imagine that a madman appears in the stifling heat of a midsummer day, his hair covered and his face powdered, wearing a brocade coat and outfitted in a suit of iron armor. He

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wipes away the sweat that drenches his body, waves the naked blade in his hand, and says, “I am a divine soldier descended from the High Plain of heaven! I have come because all of you mortals here in the world below have adopted the customs of the barbarians, but I will convince you otherwise and bring you into submission!” . . . If such a man appeared, shouting as he walked through the town streets, could any passerby not fail to be astonished and scorn him? Even little children would laugh at his madness, and they might even surround him, whooping as they gleefully tossed pebbles at him. This would only excite the madman further, and he would start in raving about how he was Masashige ready to encircle Mount Kongō, or Zhang Xun about to endure bitter fighting at Suiyang. But supposing he said this, could anyone listening believe him? Far from it: they would double over laughing as they realized his craziness was a pathology beyond any cure. The sort of arguments that the Meiji Nippō writer has been presenting of late bear some resemblance to those of this madman.56

Many commentators in other periodicals recognized the shortcomings of the Meiji Nippō’s “insistent outpouring of its obstinate and benighted ideas,” argued Ryūhoku, but since the Meiji Nippō had “intermixed them with just a tiny dash of enlightenment flavor,” the other papers felt obliged to take the trouble to refute them rather than simply ignore them. In Ryūhoku’s mind, however, the Meiji Nippō did not merit such engage­ ment. Like passersby encountering a street corner lunatic, he suggested, readers of the ostentatiously anti-Western paper might find some momentary diversion but would quickly lose interest and come to simply ignore it. Yet what made the retrenchment of the early 1880s worrisome to Ryūhoku was not the effect it might have on the customs of daily life and the trappings of material culture. Rather, Ryūhoku was concerned that the trend risked dismantling or derailing more significant aspects of the emerging Meiji order. An essay he published at the time offered unambiguous praise of the striking pace of Japanese development since the Restoration before expressing these anxieties: “That we have been able to achieve our present level of kaika in just over ten years shows just how agile we have been in our advancement: unparalleled by any other nation. But it is also difficult to guarantee that there won’t be a backlash in which we suddenly retreat for a time.” The essay goes on to praise recent attention to Japan’s trade imbalance with overseas powers and to laud efforts to curtail expenditure on imports but notes that there are other worrisome signs: Look at those gentlemen in the first years of Meiji who suddenly became enamored of European and American customs, cut their hair in the Western manner, wore Western clothes, sat in chairs, ate Western food, read English books and talked about French texts, discoursing about freedom and autonomy and talking about rights and duties, discarding their old customs overnight. Who knows how many millions there were in the nation. But now a backlash has occurred and twilled cloth is being abandoned for Ogura weave, Western lamps discarded for Aizu candles, “stoves” eliminated in favor of kotatsu. . . . There is nothing wrong with this, and we too are in complete agreement with this idea. But what if the retreating goes a little farther, and people start to think that the nutritious value of beef is not as high as eel or that the efficacy of quinine cannot compare with ginseng? Or what if things retreat farther still and people start to say that, since theories of autonomy, freedom, rights, and responsibilities are imported from abroad, we ought to eliminate them and



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return to how things were in antiquity, when notions of universal justice were summarized in sayings like “The ruler is a ruler and the subject is a subject” and “You can make the people follow a path but you cannot make them understand it.” Is it not an alarmingly grave matter to return even our theories back into the uncivilized past?57

The essay concludes by calling for circumspection and deliberation in charting the nation’s future course, making a critical evaluation of when to “advance” and when to “retreat,” rather than simply following the momentum of the era. This passage adduces two quotations from the Analects to point out elements of Confucian traditional thought that stood in tension with democratic principles. In keeping with the selective approach he outlined in the essays we have seen, Ryūhoku offered these two quotations as evidence that the Analects should not be the sole source of guidance for structuring present-day Japan’s political order. In another column, he found fault with those who attempted to assess the prospect of popular sovereignty from a position of rigid adherence to ancient texts: “They are ignorant of the fact that popular rights and liberty were concepts that Confucius and Mencius never dreamt of, but are rather the great principle and true way created in our enlightened age.”58 Yet, though he insisted upon a contextualized understanding of these recently developed political ideas, Ryūhoku immediately went on to argue that a less literal and more eclectic reading of the Confucian classics might nevertheless yield support for them: “If Confucius and Mencius were alive today, it is clear that they would certainly be tocsins (bokutaku) for the cause of popular rights and liberty. The reason is that there are a great many points in the writings of Confucius that happen to agree with the tenets of popular rights thought, though that system of thought would have been inconceivable at the time, thousands of years in the past; and, when it comes to the ideas of Mencius, there are also many elements that are worth adopting.” Although Maeda imagines that the role of “tocsin” was one that Ryūhoku abandoned in the late 1870s because he was temperamentally ill-suited for it, in fact the position of the committed commentator motivated by a profound sense of duty to engage with, offer guidance to, and advocate on behalf of the reading public was central to Ryūhoku’s very identity. In this passage, we see him imagine no less than the Confucian sages in the same role. Whether he was discussing intangible cultural practices, the concrete artifacts of daily life, systems of thought, or domains of academic inquiry, Ryūhoku consistently advocated a posture of judicious selectivity and broad-minded eclecticism. Recognizing a plurality of viable alternatives, he drew attention to the similarities that underlay superficial differences, affirming the importance of individual autonomy and deliberative agency. Religious affiliation was one readily intelligible constellation of individual beliefs, and, as in the column on the Seven Gods of Fortune discussed at the opening of this section, Ryūhoku used it often to illustrate this eclectic framework: Whether it is the bells of a Shinto shrine with its kamigaki fence gently jingling in the frost of dawn or the sound of the mokugyo woodblock being struck at an old Buddhist temple on a rainy evening, people devote themselves to the religions they believe in according to their individual temperaments. However, to decide that one is right and the other is wrong, and force them into opposition with one another is sheer folly. Confucian scholars arch up their

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shoulders and refute Buddhism as the mistaken religion of barbarians, and Shinto priests talk themselves blue in the face portraying Christianity as a great enemy that seeks to deprive the nation of its territory. Not only that, but Protestants scorn Catholics, and the Nichiren sect insults the Shin sect. Their tongues are as sharp as knives and their arguments louder than thunder. To a bystander, it all seems strange and bizarre, and what point it all serves in the long run is anyone’s guess. Just think for a moment. Even if a hundred Han Yus appeared in the world now, would they be able to so impress the Buddhist faithful with “Memorial on the Buddha Bone” that they would be convinced to smash their bells and destroy their drums? Or, if a thousand Motoori Norinagas appeared, would they be able to make the missionaries from abroad vacate the foreign concessions at once? This is something that certainly cannot be done, nor is it something that should be done. Whether one is a wise man or a fool, his faith should be free. It is fine for me to choose not to believe in those things I do not like, so why should I go so far as to interfere with what someone else is doing? There are people who go on pilgrimages to Ise and Sanuki, or offer their alms to Ōtani and Minobu, and there are also people who wish to travel all the way to far-off Jerusalem. These are all up to the whim of each individual. How can we make a fool out of one or ridicule the other as outrageous? If I say this, no doubt people will scorn me and say that, when it comes to religion, I am delivering a sermon with no principles. But I am not, after all, in the business of doctrinal instruction (kyōdōshoku). Moreover, the occupation of doctrinal instructor has not one sen of salary, and that is why I want nothing to do with it. All I do is write down what I think from day to day and inform the people of the realm. No matter what faith, no matter what creed, there is certain to be some logic to it. That being the case, it is best to observe the tenets of one’s personal faith without insulting or attacking others and without interfering with their beliefs. There is no faith that teaches “Don’t do good, do evil instead!” so no matter whether one is gently jingling the Shinto bells, or striking the Buddhist wood block, or reading the Bible, or reciting the Koran, he will be a good believer so long as he is circumspect about his personal behavior and endeavors not to cause harm to other people. If you doubt my words and do not believe them, then take up your objections with the sect patriarch at once.59

From his thoroughly eclectic point of view, Ryūhoku had just as much fun making light of those who affected Western manners or advocated the uncritical adoption of Western models as he did caricaturing hidebound Confucian scholars and conservative Buddhist priests. In a world rent by fractious partisanship, Ryūhoku attempted to call such dogmatic exclusivism into question. As he acknowledges in this passage, Ryū­ hoku’s relativistic position might draw criticism as being no more than a “sermon with­ ぷりんしぷる out principles” (主義なき説教 purinshipuru naki sekkyō), but the phrase was in fact an apt description and one that Ryūhoku positively accepted for himself. As Yamamoto Yoshiaki has pointed out, Ryūhoku frequently referred to his personal philosophy as one of “principleless principles.” In one column Yamamoto discusses, for example, Ryūhoku responded to a reader who had faulted him for his apparent incoherence in criticizing the excesses of Japanese Europhiles one day only to heap scorn on their stodgy opponents the next; Ryūhoku’s accuser exclaimed: “How unfixed and inconsistent your position is! You contradict yourself and want to have it both ways. We might say that you are lacking in what is known as principle (shugi). What kind of opinion is that!?” Ryūhoku defused the charge by affirming it, explaining that his goal was to transcend the false dilemma of mutually exclusive “principles” or “-isms”: “To cause people to abandon these principles: that is the principle of my argument.”60



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Traditional Culture in the Era of “Progress” As we have seen, one of Ryūhoku’s aims on beginning his journalistic career had been to strengthen the place of literature, which he believed was getting short shrift as something superfluous in the era of “civilization and enlightenment.” Ryūhoku pointed out that it would be a mistake for individuals, and the Meiji state as well, to focus attention solely on cultivating expertise in the sciences, technology, industry, economics, law, and other domains of knowledge that had obvious and immediate practical benefit. This was a recurring theme for Ryūhoku, but when he broached the topic in an 1881 column, he made a more concrete recommendation for official policy: the government should offer financial support for literary studies in the same way that it provided support to those pursuing the standard array of utilitarian subjects. To make his point, Ryūhoku referred to his recent meeting with Shiramine Shunme 白峰駿馬 (1847–1909), a pioneering naval engineer, who showed him an elaborately conceived and precisely rendered diagram of a torpedo-equipped steam-powered battleship that he had drawn up while abroad. Ryūhoku was duly impressed with Shiramine’s ship but even more so by his observation that the only reason he had been able to complete such a painstakingly executed design was that he had received a generous stipend from the government during his overseas studies that enabled him to devote himself to his craft without the interference of financial and other concerns: I was struck by the honesty of his words, and, when I took my leave of him, I reconsidered carefully what he had said. All of the myriad industrial arts and technologies are like this— there are no exceptions. But when we consider the path of literature, the learned men of the past all had a stipend, whether great or small. Their needs of food and clothing were fulfilled, and, that being the case, they were able to devote all of their energies to scholarship with no need to attend to other matters. And for this reason they were able to nourish their talents unhurriedly, in expectation of great success. But now things are no longer this way. Once a young man reaches maturity, assuming he is not the offspring of wealthy aristocrats, he cannot just cling to his parents’ shins forever but must quickly go out and make his own way. . . . Looking at trends in the present age, it seems that it will be difficult for the world to produce erudite and broadly learned men again. Isn’t it the case that those young people who pursue commerce, industry, and other such enterprises and who have the promise of providing great profit to the world are supported by the government and compelled to success? Literature should also follow this pattern. It would be good if we could devise a policy by which those whose distinguished talents set them apart from the run-of-the-mill and who appear promising would be carefully selected and supported, allowed to nourish their talents unhurriedly and ultimately achieve great success.61

In spite of his image as a sophisticated literatus without worldly concerns, Ryūhoku had in fact taken an active role in encouraging “commerce, industry, and other such enter­ prises” from the beginning of his journalistic career. In 1878, for example, Ryūhoku extolled the “practical and profitable” business strategy of Fūgetsudō, a manufacturer of traditional confections in Tokyo that had recently branched out and become the first shop in the Kyōbashi area to begin making and selling Western confections. Ryūhoku apparently

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felt the confections were “practical and profitable” because they were designed to be more easily digested and thus did not exacerbate his chronic gastrointestinal woes.62 The following year, he wrote about touring Shinsuisha, Japan’s first modern match factory, detailing the laborious process by which the matches were made and praising the contributions of its founder, Shimizu Makoto 清水誠 (1846–99), to Japan’s national economy; not only would Japan save money by not having to import matches from abroad, but it would also create a huge export market. Ryūhoku even briefly noted labor conditions at the factory, effusively praising Shimizu for constructing educational facilities on site, enabling “the children of the poor to learn without spending a cent.”63 In addition to introducing individual entrepreneurs from present-day Japan, Ryūhoku occasionally took a longer historical view to consider how ideas about commerce had evolved: Now then, commercial enterprises are one of the great foundations for the wealth of a nation and are something that must not be slighted. In the past, when our country was not yet inclined toward civilization and enlightenment, everyone revered the samurai and looked down on merchants, regarding those engaged in business almost as though they were slaves. Is this not an extraordinarily mistaken point of view? Now everything has changed and, because it has become common for people throughout the country to discern the true nature of things, they realize that agriculture, commerce, and manufacture are the most important enterprises, and those benighted souls who regard being an idle samurai as a peerless glory have disappeared. We can only say that this is our country’s great fortune.64

He also wrote repeatedly in his columns of the benefits of continued commercial and industrial development, praising industrial exhibitions, celebrating the expansion of rail networks and the postal system, and encouraging the introduction of new businesses, such as insurance companies. Upon attending the Second Industrial Exhibition in March of 1881, for example, Ryūhoku wrote positively about the progress in industry that Japan had witnessed in the last several decades but encouraged his readers to set their sights on even greater achievement: Although only a few dozen years have passed since our country opened relations with nations overseas, the thinking of our people has been suddenly transformed, industrial and technological arts have become more refined by the day and advance each month, and we have come to the present state: isn’t this more fortunate than we could have imagined? Nevertheless, it is not the way of the gentleman to be happy with a minor accomplishment. The refinement and beauty of our country at present is still insufficient to be called refined and beautiful. Our technical skill is still insufficient to be called technically skillful. When compared to industrial and technical arts in the countries of the West, there are many that are several hundreds of steps behind. . . . My personal hope is that my countrymen will make ever-increasing efforts from this day forth to make unstinting progress. That way, when the opening day of the Third Industrial Exposition comes, the exhibits will be a thousand times more refined and beautiful than those today.65



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As these essays and activities show, it was not that Ryūhoku was antagonistic toward or even indifferent to the pragmatic goals of “civilization and enlightenment,” but rather that he believed literature and other disciplines deserved to be pursued with every bit as much alacrity. Another of these seemingly “useless” subjects neglected by those to whom “civilization and enlightenment” had only utilitarian dimensions was the study and preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage. This too was a concern that Ryūhoku had consistently expressed from the beginning of his journalistic career, but his interest only intensified over time. In an early essay from Kagetsu shinshi, he argued that, although they might not be immediately apparent, there were in fact such “useful” dimensions to the preservation and study of antiquities: To view old relics is not simply a matter of aesthetic appreciation, but also allows one to investigate the circumstances of the time, observe local customs and natural features, and consider the progress of industry. This is why they are especially prized in the various countries of the West, where people come in droves to places like museums. Up until the present, our country has regarded them simply as aesthetic curios.66

In the same column, Ryūhoku referred to his experiences abroad, narrating his visit to the home of a Parisian naval officer who was also a connoisseur of japonaiserie: Among the antique collectors of France are some who are fond of Japanese objects. I visited the home of one of them once or twice. He had a simply astonishing array of items in his collection, from ancient vessels to magatama and kudatama. Moreover, they were all fine pieces that deserved to be treasured. When I asked how he had managed to obtain these items, he told me that he had purchased them in Osaka and Yokohama at the time of the Boshin War, after the old homes had been destroyed. He added that the cost had been very inexpensive. . . . There is nothing about such dealings themselves that should be criticized, and yet I feel that it is a pity from the point of view of revering the past.

Although Ryūhoku stresses the need to prevent the loss of precious Japanese artifacts to foreign countries, he also insists that “there is nothing about such dealings themselves that should be criticized.” In other words, rather than faulting foreigners’ desire to acquire Japanese antiquities, the thrust of Ryūhoku’s condemnation is the lack of a comparable investment by Japan in preserving its own cultural tradition. On learning from a reader’s letter a few years later that a foreigner had made off with several relics that he unearthed on the outskirts of Tokyo in spite of the presence of a government official nearby who looked on indifferently, Ryūhoku wrote: “How foolish it is for us to be robbed of precious items from our antiquity without obtaining even a pittance and yet spend a fortune stocking up on goods from abroad as adornments of superficial enlightenment.”67 Pointing out the irony that visitors to British museums could see rare Indian relics that were not available for viewing in India, he urged Japan to devote its resources to preserving and displaying its antiquities. As Inui Teruo has argued, “Through his

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Western experience, Ryūhoku keenly sensed that there was a spirit in so-called civilized countries of taking care of cultural heritage, and, after his return, he argued from a global perspective that preserving famous sites was the duty of all humanity.”68 In addition to the attention he devoted to the issue in his columns, Ryūhoku also put his ideas into action, becoming involved in efforts to preserve famous historical sites including Nikkō’s Tōshōgū. By advocating protection for this ancestral shrine of the Tokugawa clan, Ryūhoku left himself open to the accusation that he was merely motivated by latent feelings of loyalty to his former masters, but in a signed editorial he answered the charge head on: “I do not make this argument because of personal sentiments as a former vassal of the Tokugawa clan. Rather, I have concluded that such a course [of protection] is in keeping with the sensibilities common to people throughout the entire world and in accord with eternal principles.”69 He closed the editorial by arguing that the government should take charge of preserving not just Tōshōgū but other ancient sites as well. In addition to his activities on behalf of such historically significant places, Ryūhoku also highlighted in his columns the efforts of private individuals to protect and improve access to places of scenic beauty, raising awareness of them as potential sites of recreation.70 Ryūhoku’s investment in preserving Japan’s heritage extended to the protection of intangible arts as well. In a column from 1880, for example, he wrote of being seized one day with the desire to hear a lutenist’s recitation of the war tales in Tales of the Heike, a pleasure he had enjoyed as a boy. Members of his household who were dispatched to search for a lutenist had no luck at first, but Ryūhoku urged them not to give up: “In all of vast Tokyo it simply cannot be that there are no lutenists.” Finally, they located a blind man named Kiun who came to give Ryūhoku a private recital. After a delightful performance that Ryūhoku described at length in his essay, he asked if this was how the man made his living; Kiun replied: “In the more than ten years that have passed since the Restoration, aside from you, Sir, I have been invited by people who want to hear my lute no more than two or three times. This art has already faded away. I manage to survive by providing acupuncture.” Ryūhoku noted how depressed this made him and concluded that traditional culture deserved protection even if it did not conform to contemporary tastes.71 In fact, he contended, what made such forms worth preserving was not their inherent superiority, but rather the very otherness that distinguished them as classical arts. In a column from the same period on the traditional theater, for example, Ryūhoku faulted certain Noh and kyōgen performers for pandering to contemporary tastes: It struck me that their language and gestures were very different from those [in Noh] of the past. It seems that this is because they have introduced some reforms in recent years to make the performance more intelligible to the common man’s ears and eyes. Some would surely praise this, calling it an instance of seizing the moment to follow contemporary preferences, but I do not agree. Why? Most Noh and kyōgen works date from the Muromachi period, and, as for their old-fashioned style, it ought to remain old-fashioned. That silly old-fashioned style is what makes Noh and kyōgen charming.72

As these examples show, Ryūhoku frequently used his column as an opportunity to impress upon his readers the importance of cultural preservation and its indispensability



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to Japan’s modernization. Though it might seem that Ryūhoku’s antiquarianism made him a conservative antagonist of change, he saw the preservation of traditional arts as an issue that was separate from the question of social and political reforms: I am one who stridently rejects the conservative platform and one who advocates for reform and progress. Nevertheless, I without exception support efforts to preserve ancient ruins, protect ancient relics, and prevent the disappearance of traditional art forms. The reason is that these are two completely distinct issues. Just look: isn’t it the case that, in the West, even those who highly revere daily progress and advancement still preserve ancient relics in perpetuity, subjecting them to academic consideration and using them as evidence of the path of development over time? Recently in our country as well, there are many who are working to prevent ancient military arts, ceremonial forms, music, and Noh from disappearing, and this is simply a splendid thing.73

Far from being inimical to progress, the preservation of material culture was, in Ryūhoku’s eyes, essential in order to appreciate its course. It was this logic that made it necessary for formless traditions from earlier eras, such as Noh and kyōgen, to be preserved intact. To carelessly tinker with them risked destroying the “old-fashioned style,” however “silly” it might seem, that identified them as products of a former time.

Political Engagement As Ryūhoku observes in the above column, his own and others’ calls to promote the preservation of traditional culture had begun to have an impact, evident in the appearance of a wide variety of movements to protect historical artifacts, noteworthy sites, and specific traditional crafts. In some ways these emerging efforts gained strength from the conservative retrenchment of the early 1880s, but they can also be seen as a recognition of some of the arguments Ryūhoku had long been making about a more balanced, less exclusively utilitarian, form of “civilization and enlightenment.” The roots of the “preservation” movements lay in the transmission of Western models of cultural preservation, Ryūhoku wrote, a fact that “no one, no matter how much he hates the West, could deny.” Lest he be mistaken for a conservative, Ryūhoku took pains to distinguish between the necessarily different approaches needed for “preserving” art forms and “preserving” the country: It has gotten to the point that people are clamorously calling out to “Preserve! Preserve!” everywhere you turn. As one who is fond of old things, I fling up both hands to express my support for this preservation argument. The thing I can’t figure out is why, quite in contrast to the popularity of this preservation argument, there are so many people who give not a thought to preserving our important nation of Japan. Some scamper after short-term profit, others get bogged down in the obstinacy of old customs, making no plans whatsoever to preserve the independence and wealth of our nation. Oblivious to the fact that we are under the watchful eye of mighty foes surrounding us on all sides, ignorant of the fact that in order

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to oppose them we must boldly embark upon the path of reform, they spend all day caught up in stultifying and outmoded ways—isn’t it a pity? Alas, to preserve (hozon 保存) ancient ruins and relics it is best just to conservatively protect (hoshu 保守) them, but, in order to preserve our nation for eternity, the only means lies in the path of reform. To attempt today to preserve the nation with conservatism is no different than trying to preserve the life of a febrile patient by sealing him up in an infirmary and cutting off the circulation of fresh air.74

The rather alarmist language about needing to preserve Japan’s national sovereignty in the face of foreign threats, not to mention the concluding metaphor that threatens Japan’s death by suffocation, is characteristic of many of Ryūhoku’s columns from this period.75 If nothing else, it shows that Ryūhoku had not abandoned his role of “tocsin to wake the world.” But what were these “reforms” upon which he believed Japan’s fate hung? Consistent with his longstanding criticism of the Meiji oligarchy, a major focus of Ryūhoku’s journalistic activity from the late 1870s into the 1880s was to call for reforms that would allow a more representational form of government. In 1879, his newspaper company had published a translated history of the British parliament, and the preface Ryūhoku wrote for the volume heartily endorsed it as a timely guide for Japan.76 Not only did he support the establishment of a constitutionally based parliamentary government, but he pushed for a speedy timetable, a position that is sometimes called kyūshinshugi 急 進主義, or “rapid-progressivism.” Other prominent journalists, notably Fukuchi Ōchi, advocated a position called zenshinshugi 漸進主義, or “gradualism,” reasoning that the time was not yet ripe for such a radical change in political structure. Fukuchi’s adherence to this position came not because he opposed the basic principle of popular sovereignty, but because he thought it was more likely to be achieved if Japan proceeded in an orderly and unrushed manner.77 Ryūhoku, by contrast, had been calling for immediate change since the late 1870s, and, even after his supposed withdrawal into the world of suave sophistication, he did not abandon the issue. It was a common practice of Ryūhoku’s to incorporate pointed political commentary into accounts of his leisure travels and other ostensibly disengaged literary essays. In one piece from the summer of 1880, a time when debate about the timetable of governmental reforms was starting to heat up, Ryūhoku wrote a record of his journey to Ryōgoku for the annual “river-opening” festival. Just as he had done five years earlier, when he used an essay about this event to publicize his support for Suehiro Tetchō’s challenge to the press laws and to articulate his own sense of mission as a reporter, Ryūhoku now used his account of the excursion to vent his disapproval over the slow pace of progress on the Diet question. Ryūhoku began the piece with effusive praise for the lavish fireworks display that marked the beginning of the “river-opening” festival and voiced his apparent delight with the social changes that had allowed a new range of spectators to attend this signature event of summer: Oh, how grand it is, an excursion to view the fireworks! Compared to the situation a dozen years ago, the difference is truly great. In the old days, those who hired a pleasure boat and brought some geisha along with them to view the fireworks were for the most part the great merchants and wealthy men of the city. Though there might have been some retired nobles



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or wives of high officials who went, they would have to dress down and conceal their identities. And, when it came to the officials, they could only gather someplace such as at the residence of a colleague who lived near the river from which they would surreptitiously peer out on the festivities. But, in these enlightened days, everyone—from the officials and dignitaries on high down to the impoverished folks like me below—goes out on the river in the same way, taking geisha with us, drinking, and singing songs. It must be that our world now is one in which those above and those below have the same rights, and the high and low are equal. If the fireworks knew this, they would certainly think that it had been worth being shot up into the sky, and they would be grateful for having received the utmost protection of the deities.78

The note of sarcasm that is audible toward the end of this passage grows steadily louder in the remainder of the essay, as the fireworks come to seem less a satisfying spectacle than a hollow consolation for the lack of truly progressive reforms. Ryūhoku introduces doubts about whether the fireworks on Tokyo’s Sumida are really all that grand by quoting from a recent poem on Nagoya’s apparently even more impressive Toyohashi fire­ works display: Lately, Sekine Chidō has written a poem on the Toyohashi fireworks with this couplet: 東來少年膽先落 The lads from the east are in for a disappointing blow: 道我開河無此豪

saying, “Our river-opening festival isn’t as grand as this!”

Leaving aside the question of whose fireworks are bigger or smaller, I say that, when it comes to the aristocrats and the high officials deigning to attend and the many beautiful geisha gathered together here, how can it be that other places have even a one-thousandth part of our grandeur? Our country has already opened up, and, if other things open up one after another, then I offer my guarantee that we will have a splendid national polity. I hear that there are many people who have come to Tokyo from other areas to petition for the foundation of a National Diet and that they have vowed not to return to their hometowns until their petitions have been successful. I do not know if those people came here tonight to see the fireworks and thereby assuage the gloomy frustrations they must be feeling on their journey. But they will be able to prolong their stay in Tokyo and pass through who knows how many summers and winters, seeing who knows how many fireworks festivals, and each time they will be able to assuage their gloomy frustrations just as they have done today. When I thought about how many dozens of years it might take, I too couldn’t help feeling a little depressed. Just then, a geisha came over from the side with a sake pitcher and said, “Sensei, this is a party, and it is forbidden to engage in that kind of argumentation. If you do not cease and desist, a fine will be imposed.” I quickly became quiet and put down my brush in silence.

The structure of this column, in which Ryūhoku apparently gets “sidetracked” in the course of narrating a leisure excursion and ends up turning his attention to political issues, was by now a well-established pattern—even down to the final scolding by the geisha. In addition to literary accounts of refined outings such as this one, fantastic voyages to other worlds provided Ryūhoku with another unlikely frame in which to couch his

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political commentary. Half a year later, for example, he wrote of a mysterious dream in which he had taken a trip to the celestial realm only to find the immortals busily engaged in an unexpected task: devising an ideal form of representational government. Perhaps inspired by Su Shi’s encounter with the Daoist immortal in “Later Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff,” Ryūhoku’s dream began when a crane, its plumage identical to the Red Cliff crane’s “black robe and a coat of white silk” 玄裳縞衣, swooped down from the skies: It came to me and allowed me to get up on its back. I may not have had “a hundred thousand cash tied to my waist,” but I made up my mind to go with it to Yangzhou anyway. And just while this thought was in my mind, we suddenly flew up and entered the realm of a ninefold celestial palace compound, surrounded by five layers of clouds. I was amazed, and I dismounted from the crane’s back, prostrated myself at the base of the staircase, and stole a peek at the top of the dais. I saw an eminent person standing atop a jade couch and speaking in a marvelously warm tone: “Though it is true that the realm is now governed in peace, and the seas on all four sides are becalmed, nevertheless, we still cannot be said to be satisfied. We must continue, more and more following the will of the people, making plans to insure the public benefit. We must endeavor to lighten the burdens of taxes and tariffs to promote the wealth of the people, and we must work hard to lessen punishments and put more value on the lives of the people. We must transmit the will of the people to those above and insure that nothing hinders the people’s speech down below. Although there are two laws governing the newspapers and the authorship of books, we will do nothing more than punish those things that are truly extreme, and we certainly shall not recklessly use the laws to interfere with free­ doms of thought and debate. Although there are laws governing assembly and speechmaking, we will also use these only to stop those that are truly extreme, and we will certainly not use them frequently to suppress the free speech of assembled people. Even if there are those who disagree with your opinion, do not look on them as enemies. Even if there are those who are less intelligent and capable than you, do not regard them as children. Do not pursue unnecessary construction projects to decorate the halls of government. Do not waste money supporting superfluous staff. Each and every one of you, make your best efforts!” All of the people seated on the dais bowed their heads at these words, saying, “We will reverently follow your sacred order and cause your wise transformative virtue to illuminate the land.” They all exhausted their minds as they worked to stimulate and organize myriad matters, and then the solemn constitution had suddenly come into being, and the redoubtable Diet was established. All of the people throughout the land had their long cherished ambitions fulfilled. . . . Witnessing these events, I was so delighted that I found myself shouting out “Banzai!” Those on the dais heard this and exchanged glances with one another. Unbeknownst to them, a newspaper reporter from the human realm had entered the innermost recesses of their celestial palace. And so they quickly ordered the crane to take me back to the world below. When I returned to the green pines of my gate, my wife, children, and friends were all pleased to welcome me home. When I told them what I had seen, they all said: it was a dream, just a dream. I still do not believe them. But even if it really was just a dream, then an auspicious dream such as this one should be written down and communicated to the people. A dream? A dream? Making it a reality is up to us—how can it be difficult? 79

Ryūhoku’s dream did prove prescient in a sense, for, in October of that year, the Meiji gov­ ernment, hoping to distract popular attention from a scandal in which official malfeasance



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had been exposed in the sale of public lands in Hokkaido, announced that a National Diet would be established. The catch, however, was that it would happen in 1890, nine years in the future. Ryūhoku reacted to the news with predictable disappointment. Just over one month after this protracted timetable had been promulgated, Ryūhoku used a column in which he reflected on the approach of New Year’s Eve and the passage of time to comment ironically on the government’s schedule. The officials had better get ready right away, he wrote, for “the founding of the National Diet in Meiji 23 may still seem to lie in the distant future, but won’t the moment be upon us before we even know it?”80 His tone was slightly more withering in a column from spring of the following year, but again the piece was, on the surface at least, no more than a meditation on the shifts of seasons inspired by a pleasure boat trip: Since the passage of days and months is so fast, I set out at dusk this evening in the company of a close friend seeking to enjoy an evening of leisure. We poled our little boat alongside the riverbank, going up the river as far as Ayase. It made sense what someone of old once said 綠陰幽草勝花時 Shadowy verdure and dark grasses are superior to spring blossoms for the scenery there was such that we could not express it in words. We enjoyed ourselves so much that we did not even realize that the moon had come out. But then again, while we compose poems on the green foliage, or are moved by a vine of ivy, how long can they remain? They grow more and more luxuriant as the days pass by, but then the autumn winds arise, their colors fade with dew and showers, and in the end they wither and scatter, floating along the ripples of the Sumida to places unknown. When that happens, we will already be waiting in our hearts for the first plums. And when I think in this way about how time shoots by like an arrow in flight, that span of eight years that people are waiting and waiting for, it too will pass by as if in a dream—we probably will not even have to wait at all.81

Ryūhoku did not explicitly state what the people were “waiting and waiting for” eight years hence, but it went without saying that it was for the founding of the Diet. In many of his columns from these years, Ryūhoku exploited an array of rhetorical strategies to entertain his readers while at the same time reiterating his call for a speedier timetable. He wrote, for example, about a newly available “Diet pill” that energized those working for parliamentary government; he parodically appropriated lines from Confucian texts such as the Doctrine of the Mean to suggest ways to speed the creation of the Diet; and he had fun with “famed despot” Bismarck’s advice to Itō Hirobumi when the latter visited Germany: “If you’ve decided to open a Diet, just open it.”82 Ryūhoku’s commitment to weaving political commentary into his columns cut across all of his journalistic endeavors. The above column about the Sumida River boat trip, for example, appeared in the Yomiuri shinbun, the most widely read of the koshinbun, and, as an open letter he wrote that year to the paper’s staff confirms, Ryūhoku believed it essential for the Yomiuri to expand its coverage beyond its typically sensational and scandalous fare:

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Nowadays, those who explain rights and explicate freedoms, who strive to communicate political thought to the readers of the furigana newspapers are still few, like the stars of the dawn sky. Nevertheless, you have no choice but to apply your minds to the task and find a way to instruct the youthful people about these precious principles. Time passes quickly, and the advance of human knowledge is fast. Surely it is not acceptable for the furigana newspapers to forever occupy themselves with writing about love-suicides, hangings, theft, rape, and other such matters. . . . The Defamation Law has been revised, and the situation appears increasingly grave, but this is also a point of opportunity for the furi­ gana newspapers.83

To help propagate basic knowledge of “these precious principles,” Ryūhoku occasionally wrote columns explicitly designed to explain a certain political concept with a readily intelligible metaphor. One column explained the concept of “independence,” arguing that it was natural for a person to succeed on his own just as a plant grew and supported itself: Since intercourse began with various foreign countries, the outstandingly knowledgeable among our countrymen took notice of this point quite early, appreciating that each and every human being has certain inherent rights and realizing that being independent was man’s natural state. This is truly a great fortunate thing for the people of our nation. Nevertheless, people whose brains are imbued with old customs misunderstand these ideas of rights and independence; they regard them as things that will disturb the order of superior and inferior—which is quite foolish. A nation can only succeed as such when everyone from the sovereign at the top to the commoners below preserves his rights and is independent. If the people of the nation all attempt to live their lives with dependence and servility, then how will we possibly be able to hold our own against the nations overseas?84

More often, however, he incorporated politically meaningful messages even into columns that superficially purported to be about completely apolitical topics. On occasion the effect could seem quite jarring. In one column from this period, for example, Ryūhoku observed that, whereas tourists thronged to the Sumida in the spring, few were aware of the area’s equally enjoyable winter scenery. After describing its subtle beauties and understated charms, he wondered: How can I explain its attractiveness to people who only enjoy viewing spring blossoms? All they will do is hurl an insult at me, asking, “What’s interesting about a desolate village of frost and decay?” So I will just appreciate the scenery with my like-minded fellows.

Thus far, the column seems to be a somewhat elitist critique about the vulgarity of popular taste and the inability of most tourists to savor more subtle pleasures.85 Yet, in its final line, the column strikes out in a totally unexpected direction: Behold! The people who focus their minds only on the rights of the government and completely forget about the rights of the people are just like those who are so keen on the splendor of spring floral scenery and who have no interest in wintry scenes of frost and decay.86



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Though the link between a sophisticated aesthetic sense and a belief in popular rights might seem tenuous, there was, in Ryūhoku’s eyes at least, an underlying connection. Far from retreating from his erstwhile activism into the discontinuous other world of “suave sophistication,” Ryūhoku had forged a new understanding of fūryū that embraced political dimensions. In a column printed in the Yomiuri shinbun the following year, Ryūhoku made the point unambiguously when he opined on the true meaning of fūryū. Observing that some would hold that fūryū lay in unadorned dishevelment or in decadent romanticism, in obscurantist iconoclasm or in ostentatious consumption, Ryūhoku instead countered that none of these four types could be called true fūryū: What then is the principle of fūryū? I say, it is freedom that is the principle of fūryū. Fūryū comes from freedom. In Asian regions, even in the ancient world when no one knew what “freedom” was, those who understood the true meaning of fūryū had—all unknowingly— grasped the principle of freedom. And thus, I declare: those who do not understand the rights and freedoms of human life are not qualified to discourse on fūryū.87

Ryūhoku’s search for universal points of common ground between East and West had led him to discover in fūryū an analogue of the concept that was now being bandied about as “freedom.” To Ryūhoku, “freedom” was not an entirely new and completely unfamiliar idea, but rather a latent principle that had recently been brought into clearer relief. Around the same time, he illustrated this point with an instructive metaphor: the discovery of jade, believed to exist only in China, in the Japanese town of Oyabegawa: Ah, this jade of Oyabegawa was undoubtedly in the earth all along—all the way back to the time of Emperor Jinmu—but the people of our country just didn’t realize it. And it is only after several thousand years that it has seen the light of day. That being the case, is it any wonder that it is also only after several thousand years that we have at last been able to recognize that the people of our country have always had innate rights and freedoms? I was overcome with feeling when I gazed upon these jade ornaments and wished to write this essay to share my thoughts with everyone.88

To write so consistently of “freedom” and “rights” in the 1880s was to use loaded language. Ryūhoku was pointedly signaling his allegiance with the aims of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, the diverse array of activists that had been pushing with increasing insistence for the establishment of representational government since the mid-1870s.89 As we have seen, Ryūhoku had written many essays over the course of his career on the true nature of bunmei kaika, seeking to shed light on neglected dimensions of the Meiji modernizing program. Whereas many of his previous essays had focused on the importance of literature and traditional cultural practices, Ryūhoku also began to incorporate more overtly political ideas into this longstanding line of critique. In one zatsu­ roku essay from the 1880s, he described an exchange that had taken place when he visited

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a friend’s house that was decorated for hina-matsuri (Girls’ Day), a traditional holiday in which sets of elaborately costumed dolls are exhibited. No sooner has Ryūhoku’s persona (Zatsurokushi) praised his host’s dolls than a “bewhiskered” guest (a government official) scoffs at such “unenlightened” preoccupation with “useless playthings” and declares, “In our present age of civilization and enlightenment, these things should all be smashed!”— an outburst that prompts Ryūhoku’s persona to retort: What exactly do you have in mind when you speak of civilization and enlightenment? There are both material and spiritual components to civilization and enlightenment. I would entreat you to distinguish the two. Now then, if you live in a brick house, use Western carpets for your cushions, dress in a wool suit and an otter skin hat, drink beer and eat beef, sit astride an Arabian horse, carry a Swiss watch, listen to English music, and dine with French utensils, these are all no more than the material manifestations of civilization and enlightenment. They are not its spirit. Even if you are grandly outfitted with this dazzling array of material accoutrements, if you lack the spirit, they are nothing but empty ornaments. What do I mean by spirit? I mean that people are able to fully realize their innate rights, that they are able to live at ease in the paradise of freedom; it is only in this way that one partakes of the spirit of civilization and enlightenment. If one lacks this spirit, then material accoutrements will inevitably be mere playthings. How are you able to criticize these dolls?90

The passage locates the essence of bunmei kaika not in surface manifestations (whether traditional dolls or newfangled Western fashions), but at a deeper, intangible level. Whether or not the incident recounted actually took place, the piece vividly shows a more politically pointed version of Ryūhoku’s well-established critique of superficial bunmei kaika. As his persona concludes, “Even though a gentleman may proudly wear Western clothes, eat Western food, and know some Western words . . . if he detests discussion of rights and freedoms . . . he is a hidebound barbarian” and not a true devotee of “civilization and enlightenment.” Ryūhoku’s engagement in contemporary political discourse went far beyond giving popular sovereignty an occasional plug in his columns. Political parties had begun to emerge in Japan after the Diet announcement, and Ryūhoku frequently turned his attention to evaluating the aims of these new parties in his Chōya shinbun columns. When a conservative group calling itself the Kin’ōtō (Imperial Loyalist Party) emerged late in 1881, Ryūhoku wrote a witheringly sarcastic attack: Is there any person among our Japanese citizenry who does not respect the imperial house? Is there anyone who does not love the imperial house? It is precisely because we love and respect it that we must make enduring plans on its behalf. That is why we have declared that establishing constitutional government is the most important task before us, and furthermore it is why our Sagely sovereign has also indicated his support for this form of government. Thus, while we may not make a point of showing off our “imperial loyalism,” this much is implicit in our love and respect, and we have seen no need to hang out a sign to advertise it. But, recently, I hear that a group of purposeful men styling themselves in the manner of Gamō Kunpei and Takayama Hikokurō have formed a party and raised up a sign



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proclaiming themselves “Imperial Loyalists.” This is truly a splendid thing. Nevertheless, we would like to ask what exactly the principles of this party are. If it’s just something like “Japanese swords are really sharp,” or “Mount Fuji is the best mountain in the whole world,” then I still just don’t quite understand what the party’s main principles are. If, out of respect for the Sagely wisdom of our sovereign they are little by little abandoning their bad habits, progressing and developing their knowledge, and working to establish a constitutional form of government with the hope that the imperial house can enjoy fortune in perpetuity, then bravo, this is a loyal party indeed! But what if, perish the thought, this is not the case? Just suppose that instead this party is like the expel-the-barbarians party from old times: reckless fight-a-tiger-with-my-bare-hands wade-through-the-river types who occasionally sent foreigners’ heads flying and triggered ridiculous national crises? Or what if they are a party that in violation of the Sagely rescript does not think highly of constitutional government? If so, then we have no choice but to conclude decisively that they are in flagrant violation of the phrase “imperial loyalists” that they have put up on their sign.91

Just a few days later, Ryūhoku published an essay lampooning the new party’s hawkish and jingoistic rhetoric: “I shall soon raise Kusunoki Masashige from the dead, place him in command of a million crack troops, and conquer all of Asia! Before long we shall be able to forge a Japanese sword measuring several thousand leagues and use it to decapitate all the Europeans!”92 Even though he mocked and dismissed them in this piece, Ryūhoku nevertheless closed the essay with the idea that even the loyalist party might offer “stones from other hills” that could be useful, if they would provide a concrete out­ line of their vision instead of mere sloganeering. Beyond continuing to contribute to political debate and discussion in his capacity as a newspaper commentator, Ryūhoku began to participate in politics himself. When Ōkuma Shigenobu 大隈重信 (1838–1922) founded the Rikken Kaishintō (Constitutional Progressive Reform Party) in April 1882, Ryūhoku joined at once. The party was not the most radical, but it was one of the major outgrowths of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement. From the earliest planning stages, Ryūhoku served it in a number of capacities, even participating in the committee that drafted its bylaws. He also promoted the Kaishintō in several of his Chōya columns, inviting anyone who shared their desire to “make reforms and advance the nation” and achieve the “freedom of the people” to join. Ryūhoku’s allegiance to this party created a division at the Chōya shinbun, for Suehiro Tetchō had joined the more aggressive Jiyūtō (Liberal Party) the previous year. More sig­ nificant than the internecine strife between these two comparatively like-minded parties, however, was their shared opposition to more conservative parties such as the Rikken Teiseitō (Constitutional Imperial Party) with which Fukuchi Ōchi had aligned himself.93 In columns that showed an undiminished zest for word play and delight in biting sarcasm, Ryūhoku continued to voice his suspicions of gradualism.94 Ryūhoku’s political activities in the 1880s were the concrete manifestation of his commitment to play a part in shaping the course of Japan’s future. Such engagement with the key issues of contemporary debate was a consistent theme throughout the ten years of his journalistic career. Far from turning his back on the world and retreating into the familiar comforts of “suave sophistication,” Ryūhoku attempted toward the end of his life to expand the scope of fūryū, making it relevant to contemporary political discourse.

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Con­sistently incorporating political commentary into his literary essays, he found unexpected parallels and forged dialogue between apparently disconnected domains. Yet, in spite of the flurry of journalistic and political activity that dominated Ryūhoku’s life in the 1880s, he ultimately did not live to see his goals of representative government realized. Taken sick with a lung ailment, he died in 1884, the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution and the founding of the National Diet still more than five years in the future.

Conclusion

O

n December 3, 1884, some five hundred individuals joined the procession that transported Ryūhoku’s coffin from his Mukōjima home (the Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage) to the Honpōji temple, where the Narushima family graves were located. Contemporary reports in Japan’s leading newspapers marveled at both the number of people who came to pay their respects that day and at their diversity, for the mourners included high-ranking officials, distinguished scholars, actors, and even sumo wrestlers. The lengthy cortège formed an “astonishing” spectacle “not seen in recent years,” said the Yomiuri, and the Tōkyō nichi nichi judged it “proof of the breadth of Ryūhoku’s social interactions.”1 Just before his death, Ryūhoku had prepared his own grave inscription, a brief text that was reprinted widely and suggests some of the ways in which he wished to be remembered. His name was [Kore]hiro, and his courtesy name Yasutami. He was commonly known by his sobriquet [Ryūhoku]. He served the shogunate, occupying the posts of official tutor, chief editor of annals, lieutenant colonel in the infantry, colonel in the cavalry, commissioner of foreign affairs, and vice chair of the treasury. He received the lower fifth rank and the title of Ōsumi-no-kami. At the Meiji Restoration, he resigned his office and returned to the fields. In 1874, he became the president of the Chōya shinbun. He took it as his sole responsibility to work for the benefit of the nation and the happiness of its people. He was born on the sixteenth day of the second month of Tenpō 8 [1837] in an Asa­ kusa residence. He died on the [–] day of the [–] month of Meiji 17 [1884] in his home on the Sumida River. He was buried beside his family’s graves in Honjo Koume-mura. He was forty-eight years old.2

The terse inscription’s dispassionate rehearsal of the most basic facts of Ryūhoku’s life makes the single sentence “He took it as his sole responsibility to work for the benefit of the nation and the happiness of its people” stand in sharp relief, leaving a lasting

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impression on the reader. The phrase not only functions as an elaboration of the previous sentence, explaining Ryūhoku’s aims at the Chōya, but also stands as a larger summation, proposing a continuity of civic-mindedness between his career as a journalist and his earlier work as a shogunal official. As he argued in multiple essays, Ryūhoku believed that, while a location in the “field” was essential for journalists, they could nevertheless promote national (as distinct from strictly governmental) interests in ways that paralleled the more traditional forms of service offered by those within the “court,” such as government officials and military officers. Ryūhoku’s early writings, particularly his poetry, demonstrate his keen attentiveness to contemporary events but reveal also his frustrations at being unable to have much impact on these matters. When he took over control of the Kōbun tsūshi and relaunched it as the Chōya shinbun, it became Ryūhoku’s professional responsibility to assume an active role in public discourse, engaging in critical commentary and debate about current affairs. It was a role he relished and one that he never relinquished. Ryūhoku’s highlighting of his own enduring orientation toward public service and consistent commitment toward statesmanship broadly defined is echoed in the additional instructions that he left for his funeral, at the head of which is this request: “Ryū­ hoku’s Buddhist name shall be Bunseiin 文靖院. The rest is up to the priest’s discretion, though it would be nice to have the two graphs Ryūhoku 柳北 incorporated too.” As mentioned in chapter 4, Bunsei (Ch. Wenjing) is the posthumous name of Xie An, the fourth-century general who emerged from his temporary reclusion in the eastern hills to aid the state of Jin at a time of crisis.3 Ryūhoku had alluded to Xie An’s signature act of rising to the occasion when his contribution was necessary for the state’s very survival at the close of the first volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi. He wrote: “Let us take the case of a vassal. Is it not sufficient for him to be like Xie An, who could subdue a million strong enemy soldiers with a smile on his face and thereby save the state? What right do we have to pass judgment on his happy diversions in the eastern hills?” In a column he published more than two decades later, Ryūhoku again made reference to this episode from Xie An’s life as a rare instance of one who came from the “field” and was able to achieve his aims within the halls of “court”: “The concern was raised, ‘If Xie An does not come forward, what will happen to the people?’ And when he did come forth, in fact he worked hard and was able to repel the enemy. Men like him have talent that is truly hard to find. . . . Most are tigers in the field but mere cats at court.”4 Yet for Ryūhoku Xie An was no simple icon of single-minded state service. While extoling Xie An’s heroic ability to “save the state,” the passage quoted above also refers to the “happy diversions” he enjoyed while consorting with courtesans during the years he spent outside of government employ. In incorporating Bunsei into his posthumous name, Ryūhoku thus invoked not just the commitment to public-mindedness that he shared with Xie An, but also his comparable love of private diversions, including his longstanding attraction to reclusive themes, his great fondness for geisha, and his unapologetic celebration of sensual pleasure as a focus of literary expression. Ryūhoku had surely chosen Xie An precisely because he embodied this range of associations, but the question of whether Ryūhoku should be seen as primarily serious or primarily ludic and the relative extent to which his more public-oriented elements and private-oriented elements

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should be emphasized would become contentious issues among Ryūhoku’s friends and associates in the years following his death. Indeed, they remain so today. In 1885, the Sinologue Shinobu Joken 信夫恕軒 (1835–1910) completed a draft of the kanbun text for a stele that was to be erected at Mokuboji temple to commemorate Ryūhoku. Just before Joken submitted the text to the engraver, he showed it to Ōtsuki Bankei’s son Joden. The result was a protracted contretemps in which these two scholars and several others debated the relative significance of Ryūhoku’s various accomplishments and how his legacy should be recounted. In particular, Joden argued that the frequent references that Joken made to Ryūhoku’s enjoyment of the company of geisha were unseemly and that his prolix and somewhat frivolous tone was inappropriate for a memorial stele. Others raised questions about specific phrases; Ryūhoku’s widow, Ochō, for example, was said to object to Joken’s hyperbolic nod to Ryūhoku’s distinctive physiognomy: “His face was three feet long” 面長三尺.5 Subjected to this barrage of criticism, Joken sought the advice of Ryūhoku’s next door neighbor and long-time poetic collaborator, Yoda Gakkai.6 Gakkai urged Joken to make a few changes but reassured him that he did not need to rewrite the entire text. Although Gakkai took Joken’s side in the dispute and publicly praised Joken’s memorial, he also confessed in his diary that he thought Joken a poor choice for the task of writing the text, given his penchant for jocularity. The inscription that was finally engraved on the stele erected at Mokuboji reflects several of the proposed revisions, such as the excision of this phrase about Ryūhoku’s long face and the elimination of a few references to geisha.7 Although the engraving of Joken’s revised text marked a provisional accord, the debate continued to simmer, with Joken later defensively printing the unrevised stele text in a collection of his prose and Joden publishing a critique of it in subsequent years.8 Even several decades later, the questions that this disagreement raised about Ryūhoku’s legacy were still alive. In late 1933, a group of individuals gathered on the anniversary of Ryūhoku’s death for a memorial service. One of those in attendance was Kokubu Seigai 國分青厓 (1857–1944), a leading Sinitic poet of the era, who composed the following quatrain that foregrounds the conflicting assessments of Ryūhoku: 雜録聲名噪士林 一言雙語貴千金 漫稱携妓謝安石 誰識先生憂國心

The fame of his zatsuroku resounded in the scholars’ grove; Each word and every phrase was worth a thousand in gold. With all this loose talk of taking geisha in hand like Xie Anshi Who discerns that concern for the state occupied the ­master’s mind?9

I have interpreted the third line of Seigai’s poem to refer to general speculation about the significance of Ryūhoku’s choice of Xie An for his posthumous name, but it might also be understood to refer to Ryūhoku’s own self-effacing adoption of this affiliation. In other words, the couplet could be interpreted “Since he was always talking about taking geisha in hand like Xie An, who could discern that concern for the state occupied the master’s mind?” The competing visions of Ryūhoku’s legacy that are in tension here arise from the inherently multidimensional quality of the allusion to Xie An, Ryūhoku’s own playful

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efforts to fashion a plurality of public personae, and commentators in turn placing emphasis on different aspects of his career and temperament. At the same time, they also reveal variant understandings of the role of journalists in society. The status of journalists in Japanese society was still undergoing rapid transformation in the 1880s, as Ryūhoku noted at the decade’s outset: Just five or six years ago, people looked upon newspaper companies as more trivial than producers of comic books. They treated reporters with less respect than they accorded gesaku writers. In extreme cases, they looked on us as barbarians, or scoundrels, or rebels. . . . But with the movement of heaven’s cycles and culture’s steady advance, at last we have come to the point that, with each passing year, an atmosphere of respect for reporters has become common throughout the land.10

Consider Yoda Gakkai’s response to learning of Ōtsuki Joden’s principal objection to Joken’s text: Gakkai wrote in his diary that Joden’s “position seems to take as its focus Ryūhoku’s efforts on behalf of the nation, but I don’t think that’s right. Ryūhoku was an eccentric figure (kijin). His strength lay in the newspaper.”11 In contrast to Ryūhoku’s efforts to forge a broad conception of statesmanship that could include contributions by those outside of public office, Gakkai appears to conceive of the journalist’s role as categorically distinct from “efforts on behalf of the nation.” Yet, far from discounting Ryūhoku’s significance as a journalist, Gakkai in fact believed that these contributions should be more explicitly articulated. When the grave inscription that Ryūhoku himself had written just before his death became public at the end of the previous year, Gakkai recorded his objections to the sentence it contained about Ryūhoku single-mindedly working for the benefit of the nation and the happiness of its people; he lamented that for Ryūhoku “to simply claim this kind of fine-sounding reputation is not very interesting and fails to convey his true worth.” Whereas Ryūhoku’s ancestors had distinguished themselves primarily as scholars, it was Ryūhoku’s accomplishments at the Chōya that merited attention, Gakkai felt, and he instead proposed a fuller explanation of Ryūhoku’s journalistic approach: “He was most skilled at humorous satire and would use this to com­ ment on contemporary events. Whenever he wrote a piece, it would be recited throughout the realm.”12 In a later kanbun biographical essay, Gakkai added that “no paper could match the Chōya when it came to pointed debate about contemporary events, incisive and precise but leavened with humor to retain the reader’s interest. And who founded that paper? Ryūhoku.”13 Ryūhoku’s own inscription, Gakkai’s proposed version, and Kokubu Seigai’s poem all emphasize Ryūhoku’s role as a journalist. It was likewise his contributions to the Chōya that were central to the extensive treatment Ryūhoku received in Charles Lanman’s Leading Men of Japan, the volume I discussed at the beginning of this book. Just one year before Ryūhoku’s death, Lanman’s collection of biographies was published in Boston, and a copy soon reached the Chōya shinbun offices, prompting Ryūhoku to write: A line from Bo Juyi speaks of “the mind of an old friend, two thousand leagues away.” But now a man in a foreign land has compiled and released to the world short biographies to

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praise the accomplishments and scholarship of leading men of Japan, though he doesn’t know them as “old friends” and is moreover separated from them by far more than “two thousand leagues.” His intention is truly moving. . . . But what was most surprising to me was to find myself included in the biographies! I was so astonished that sweat ran down my spine. And especially when I read to the point where he says that the reputation of the Chōya shinbun in Japan is comparable to that of the London Times in England, it was really beyond any expectations. Nevertheless, this phrase is not solely to my honor but is rather an incomparable glory for our entire company.14

Ryūhoku concludes the essay by stating that inclusion in Lanman’s book is a source of delight for him and that it has renewed his intent to strive hard so as not to lose his place on the roster. The role of journalist was one that Ryūhoku sought out as an alternative to service in the Meiji government. In the early 1870s, just before beginning his post as a teacher for Higashi Honganji, Ryūhoku was offered a position in the Chamber of the Left but promptly refused the invitation. A few years later, when he was traveling in Europe, he met repeatedly with Kido Takayoshi and other prominent Meiji leaders and was reportedly offered an even higher position as Minister of Education, but again he declined. Given his family’s history of service as okujusha to the Tokugawa shoguns, Ryūhoku’s decision not to serve the Meiji state might seem to have been motivated primarily by a sense of loyalty to the Tokugawa—the fidelity of the imin, or “leftover vassal,” of a deposed dynasty. In the immediate aftermath of the Restoration, Ryūhoku may have seen himself in such terms, but if he did it was only temporary. At the very least, it was not an affiliation he sought to perpetuate in Meiji public consciousness. Ryūhoku was not a vestige of the Edo period that survived into Meiji, but very much a man of his time, defined principally by his engagement with the present rather than his affiliations with the past. As a letter from a few years later suggests, Ryūhoku specifically rejected the identity of imin: Under the old shogunate, I was one who supported the platform of opening up and making rapid progress, and I worked to smash the old deleterious customs. After a succession of defeats, I was finally able to realize my aspirations, ascending from the position of student to that of general. But, just as I was trying to administer medicine to treat the malaise, the shogunate grew weak, its energy waned, and it expired. Truly it had suffered a case of acute cholera, where no intervention could be made in time. We had urged the promotion of international intercourse, and, just as we were reforming the military, those officials who are now promoting civilization and enlightenment were instead at work on the imperial court, convincing it with arguments to “expel the barbarians,” and harassing us quite frightfully. As soon as they took over, just as we had expected, they changed their tune and began to promote civilization and enlightenment. We had taken such pains, and yet in the end were plundered by hawks. For this reason, I think the whole civil service racket is ridiculous, and I want nothing to do with it for the rest of my life. What I am saying is not groundless talk. There were many times when I was nearly killed by stubborn men in the old shogunate, and I am truly glad today that the shogun’s palace has been ceded. And when I die, if I were have to have “Ryūhoku—imin of the Tokugawa clan” inscribed on my grave, I would probably earn praise from some ancient Chinese people, but heaven forbid

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that I should have such warped feelings. The idea of being run ragged by that pack of men who bully you and then change their minds hardly appeals to me, and so I have elected to become a newspaper reporter.15

Far from nostalgia for the Tokugawa shogunate, Ryūhoku vividly recalled his frustrations under it, and these experiences had made him able to predict with a fair degree of certainty that he would be frustrated if he went to work under the Meiji regime as well. True to his declaration, Ryūhoku had nothing to do with the “civil service racket” for the rest of his life. But that does not mean he lost interest in the issues of the day or that he eschewed a role in actively shaping them. Having rejected the identity of imin and loath to enter official service again, Ryūhoku embraced the identity of journalist. In the first three decades of his life, Ryūhoku had distinguished himself mainly as a Confucian scholar, a composer of kanshi, and a masterful stylist of humorous kanbun. When he took up his new career as a journalist, however, the fate of the kanshibun literary tradition in Japan seemed threatened by the overwhelming emphasis placed on utilitarian Western subjects. Ryūhoku breathed new life into Japanese kanshibun by establishing the poetry section of the Chōya shinbun newspaper and also by writing the zatsuroku columns he published in its pages, many of which incorporated or alluded to Sinitic texts. Some of these essays explicitly made the case for the importance of literary study, whereas others demonstrated the possibilities of adapting classical texts and traditional literary forms to comment on contemporary affairs in an innovative, entertaining, and popularly successful manner. As Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957), perhaps the most prominent Japanese journalist of the next generation, would later write, “Even for youths like me, putting all other things aside, reading the zatsuroku section of the Chōya shinbun was something we would never fail to do. . . . Though very short, the zatsuroku was more than able to draw readers in. . . . Ryūhoku’s prose . . . sparkled with wit and irony.”16 As Tokutomi’s reminiscences attest, Ryūhoku’s amusing style was an essential component of his success as a writer. In one zatsuroku column, Ryūhoku directly addressed this aspect of his popularity by outlining a “theory of the comic.” He explained that people frequently asked him to write something funny for them but that this was an impossible request in part because much of the charm of his humor lay in its indirectness. To illustrate his point, Ryūhoku made reference to a Hyottoko mask, which depicts a man’s face with such caricatured features as pursed lips, a twisted expression, and asymmetrically sized eyes: Just think: if someone asked to have a text written to accompany a Hyottoko mask, would it be funnier to have a comical text for this purpose? Or would a serious text instead be more amusing? We would find the serious one much more amusing. Why? Because a Hyottoko mask is funny by itself. To apply comic techniques to it would be like adding legs to a snake. It would be the same as a woman of pale complexion going to the trouble to powder her face; what would be the charm in that? People in the world do not appreciate that I, Zatsurokushi, am by nature a very serious man. That they all vie to view me as a wholesaler of comedy is nothing but an unwelcome favor. If someone can understand that Chunyu Kun and Dongfang Shuo are serious men and that Zeng Dian and Tao Yuanming are comic types, then they can also appreciate what makes me Zatsurokushi.17

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Chunyu Kun and Dongfang Shuo were renowned jesters of Chinese antiquity, both of whom were known for their ability to use parables, metaphors, and satire to offer indirect remonstration. Ryūhoku had already developed such a satirical approach in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, but the revision of the Press Laws of 1875 gave him a new impetus to perfect it. In one piece he wrote for the zatsuroku section of the Chōya shinbun not long after these laws had been promulgated, he imagined several volumes of canonical Chinese texts glumly commiserating on a bookshelf one night as they share their fears about what the new laws mean for them. The Classic of Poetry worries that it will be banned for obscenity, Mencius is concerned that it will be brought up on charges of inciting revolution, and The Spring and Autumn Annals frets that it may be found libelous. Yet their collective despair is met with laughter by Zhuangzi, which states, “You’ll all be made criminals, but one such as myself who speaks in parables need never fear prohibition!”18 Indirection could thus function as a pragmatic survival strategy for journalists, especially during the early Meiji crackdown on the press, but Ryūhoku also argued that such rhetorical subtlety and complexity made the writing both more effective and more likely to attract an audience. To write stiffly and with flavorlessly straight­forward didacticism would be like offering readers “a stale dango rice dumpling. . . . Who would buy it?”19 As in this instance, Ryūhoku made occasional reference to the practical considerations of commercial viability that inevitably affected him as a newspaper writer, but he also argued that focusing merely on entertainment value was insufficient: You ought to try reading the humorous texts of antiquity. Does the humor that they intend to convey stop with mere humor? Or is it rather that within what they recount and what they do that there are naturally elements that subtly offer benefit to the world and profit to people? If one has discerning eyes, he will certainly be able to understand this. . . . Even if one makes comedy his principle and humor his main aim, he must also attend to other matters in his writing. With the right frame of mind, the author might well insert some didactic elements. Or he could add some elements of admonitory allegory. Or he could incorporate some academic learning. Or he could offer some sparkling wit. But if he doesn’t aspire to include any of these and merely thinks that people will buy what he writes as long as it is entertaining, that people will read it as long as it is funny, then this is a base conception.20

Beyond simply relaying objective information to the public, Ryūhoku understood the journalist to have a critical role as a commentator and educator, one who could reflect but also shape public opinion. Ryūhoku saw himself as neither entertainer nor moralizer, but as one who could marshal his rhetorical skills to sway his readership and ultimately affect contemporary events. Throughout his writings, Ryūhoku operated out of neither inflexible allegiance to classical models nor antipathy toward Western learning. Rather, he sought to blaze a middle path of fusion and amalgamation. Ryūhoku’s own experience abroad had convinced him not only that there were cultural universals, but that there was tremendous value in sampling and combining disparate points of view:

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Just suppose that someone fond of novelty had some patience and read a bit of the Confucian classics and dynastic histories. He would certainly say, “I see, there are some reasonable things written there.” Alternatively, if someone who clings to old ways were to branch out and read some Western books, then there is no doubt that he would say, “I had never realized that there were such ideas in the world.” But instead they don’t read these other books, don’t think about them, and just resolve in their minds that “it is in my nature to hate them.”21

After the Satsuma Rebellion, Ryūhoku had concluded that Saigō’s tragic flaw was precisely this blindness to alternative perspectives: an inability to follow the ancient dictum in the Classic of Poetry to take “stones from other hills” and use them to “work our tools” and “polish our jade.” It was only through such a dynamic eclecticism that innovation and reform could take place. In 1868, when he relocated to a new residence in the wake of the Meiji Restora­tion, Ryūhoku named it the “Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage” in homage to Tao Yuanming, who had abandoned his official position for a life of carefree reclusion. Tao Yuanming’s famous couplet on picking chrysanthemums captures this pastoral life of easy contentment: 採菊東籬下 悠然見南山

Picking chrysanthemums at the eastern hedge; Relaxed as I catch a glimpse of the southern hills.

Though Ryūhoku did spend the remainder of his days enjoying the freedom of being outside of official service, unlike Tao Yuanming, he did not choose to live a life of sublime disengagement. Instead he remained a committed commentator, as his active pursuit of a broader audience in the Yomiuri shinbun and his undiminished contributions to the Chōya shinbun both show. From early in his career as a newspaper journalist, Ryūhoku’s particular fondness for Tao Yuanming was well known to his readers. In addition to Ryūhoku’s many references to Tao Yuanming in his earlier writings, several poems and prose works linking him with Tao Yuanming appeared in the pages of the Chōya shinbun during its first years, encouraging readers to identify the two.22 When Ryūhoku was first found guilty of violating the press laws in 1875 and it initially seemed that he might actually spend the five-day sentence in jail, for example, he told his staff that among the deprivations that would surely kill him was the inability to recite Tao Yuanming’s poems.23 In the same year, a kanbun letter from a reader in the countryside published in the newspaper’s zatsu­ roku section drew the connection in a summary of Ryūhoku’s career: “Recently you have followed in the steps of Tao Yuanming, resigning your post and taking the transcendent high ground.”24 And, when Ryūhoku fell ill in the summer of 1880 and published a few sickbed poems in the pages of the Chōya shinbun, Tao Yuanming references were common in the matched-rhyme responses that several Sinitic poets submitted to the newspaper. 25 The Qing literatus Wang Zhiben 王治本 (1835–1908), for example, prefaced his poem by apologizing for not paying a visit to Ryūhoku, explaining, “I had no means to knock upon County Magistrate Tao [Yuanming]’s gate.”26 Yet, during his years as a newspaper man, Ryūhoku’s invocations of Tao Yuanming

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underwent new developments. In the winter of 1876, for example, Ryūhoku wrote “A record of chrysanthemum viewing” for the Chōya shinbun, offering an image of Tao Yuan­ ming as an imin but pointedly contrasting such a status with his own position: My colleague at the newspaper Mr. Tetchō has written and published an essay recording his trip to Kinryūzan to view the chrysanthemums. Of late, I have been consumed with a host of bothersome mundane duties and have not yet been able to venture there myself. But on this day, the twenty-fifth, I had a bit of free time in the evening, and so I went there at once by carriage. The weather was fine and the winds pleasantly warm. It also turned out to be the third day of the rooster, when they hold the market. This meant that everyone had rushed off to the market grounds, leaving the gardens at Kinryūzan with only a few visitors. I was very pleased with this and proceeded to make a place to sit down before the blossoms so that I might gaze upon them. The warden of the park greeted me and said, “Aren’t you the Recluse of the Sumida River?” “Indeed I am,” I replied. The warden then said, “I hear that you have named your residence the Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage and that you style yourself after Tao Yuanming. So why have you abandoned the chrysanthemums in your eastern hedge and come to see the chrysanthemums here?” I replied: “Mr. Warden, you are mistaken. In the past Tao Yuanming loathed the dust of Liu Yu, and so he went into reclusion and cherished his own private patch of chrysanthemums. But now I find myself living in this enlightened age of sages. For this reason, I have ventured out to gaze upon the public patch of chrysanthemums for which you serve as warden. Surely there can be nothing wrong with that! . . . The reason I have come to view your chrysanthemums is because I want to ask your secret in cultivating them, Mr. Warden. But, if the chrysanthemum is not a prisoner, then what need has it of a warden? Your chrysanthemums, dear Warden, are also my chrysanthemums. Why do you think it odd that I should come here?” The Warden said: “So be it.” And we proceeded to talk and laugh, enjoying ourselves to the fullest.27

Ryūhoku clearly portrays Tao Yuanming’s motive in entering reclusion as contempt for the usurper Liu Yu, who supplanted the Eastern Jin dynasty that Tao had served. In this sense Ryūhoku’s portrayal is consistent with the narrative of Tao Yuanming that he employed in the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, when he wrote a prose account for his “Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage” (discussed at the end of chapter 4). What is strikingly different is Ryūhoku’s situation of himself in opposition to Tao Yuanming’s subject position: whereas Liu Yu drove Tao Yuanming to withdraw, Ryūhoku wryly notes that he lives in the enlightened world of the Meiji sages. However facetious the line may be, however critical Ryūhoku may have been of the government, he nevertheless was claiming an affiliation not to the “private” world of reclusion, but to the “public” world of journalistic discourse.28 The “public” park with its chrysanthemums open to all provided a particularly appropriate setting for this discussion; elsewhere Ryūhoku would call his readers’ attention to the new sense of “public” 公 as “shared in common by all, high and low,” that had replaced earlier uses of the term in reference to the government or its leaders.29 In his youth, Ryūhoku had imagined the bunjin-oriented realm of the recluse and the shijin-oriented realm of the civil servant as opposing poles, but the possibility of being a publicly engaged journalist provided a third path. In one essay, Ryūhoku argued against the assumption that a man of learning who did not aspire to serve in the conventional role of government official must be a frustrated malcontent:

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Those gentlemen who dwell outside the realms of government and have no intention whatsoever of entering the civil service . . . may have their own principles to maintain and their own means of enjoyment. Because they take pleasure in their own autonomy and independence, they may refrain from trying to curry favor with those in power. It is simply that they do not wish to stoop for five pecks of rice. Why would they torment themselves stewing over their own discontent? There are many lines of work in this world, and it is simply laughable to imagine that, unless one serves as a public official, he will have no fame, will make no money, and will not be respected by people.30

The phrase in this passage about not wishing “to stoop for five pecks of rice” alludes to a biographical tradition about Tao Yuanming that sees such yearning for an untrammeled mode of life outside of government service as the motive that led him to resign his post, write his famous “The Return,” and relocate to the countryside to adopt a reclusive lifestyle. Ryūhoku shared Tao Yuanming’s desire to be free of the strictures of officialdom, but, even at late stages in his career, he was not ready to enter reclusion. In 1882, he published an autobiographical essay titled “A boat at midstream” in his zatsuroku column, reflecting on the domiciliary confinement, imprisonment, and other shoals he had navigated in his years as a journalist before announcing his intention to remain engaged in spite of increasing political tensions: I once wrote the following couplet: 世味漸濃吾漸澹 The mood of the world just intensifies while I grow ever more calm; 唯當歸臥故江村 The only thing to do is return to rest in my old riverside cottage. Nevertheless, if one is to advance, he needs a reason to advance. If one is to retreat, he needs a reason to retreat. It is the height of heartlessness for someone to look out only for his own ease and comfort, dismissing the rest with “après moi le déluge.” And thus the days and months have passed, one after another. Irresolute and dilatory, I have still not come to the point where I will write “The Return.”31

Ryūhoku never arrived at the point when he felt ready to write his own version of Tao Yuanming’s declaration of reclusive intent. Though sick with a lung ailment and struggling with eye problems during the last few years of his life, Ryūhoku continued to write, to undertake new forms of direct political organizing and activism, and even to become involved in the founding of a life insurance company.32 Though Ryūhoku explained on his sickbed that he was unable to write much poetry because it gave him a headache, the zatsuroku essays were a different matter: “The myriad words just come gushing forth. The idea appears out of nowhere, and the brush races to follow it. I don’t begrudge the labor in the slightest.”33 Ryūhoku’s consistent self-definition as an engaged journalist is also evident in the many domestic travelogues he published in the Chōya shinbun and Kagetsu shinshi from 1877 to 1884. Inasmuch as many of them record leisure trips or journeys to convalescence

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at spas, these travelogues may seem to epitomize Ryūhoku’s retreat from the contentious world of newspaper journalism. Yet Ryūhoku devoted substantial attention in these travelogues to the status of newspapers in the sites he visited. Even the travelogue that is held to symbolize Ryūhoku’s withdrawal from active journalism, the 1877 Kyoto travel diary that he wrote during Saigō’s uprising, shows this attention to the spread of newspapers: “What really stands out is how newspapers are getting more and more popular. When I came here four years ago, eight or nine people out of ten thought that newspapermen were nothing so much as charlatans and scoundrels. But now the situation is much more civilized. This is something that calls for celebration not just for us, but for the people of the western capital as well.”34 When he visited other locations in Japan, it was common for Ryūhoku to mention whether that area had a newspaper or not, positing this as a convenient index of its degree of civilization. His 1878 “A travelogue of spa bathing,” for example, records Ryūhoku’s visit to Miyanoshita, a town on the periphery of the Atami resort area, where newspapers printed in Tokyo could nevertheless be obtained. In the text, Ryūhoku praises the efforts of Kobayashi Bunshi, who was able to establish a newspaper reading room there.35 Similarly, in “The winds of Hamamatsu,” a travelogue from 1879, Ryūhoku singled out the success of a Shizuoka local newspaper as the one redeeming feature of an otherwise lackluster and declining provincial town.36 When he visited an area where no newspapers could be found, by contrast, Ryūhoku wrote as though the residents of the area were living not in another place, but in another time. In a travelogue called “A sedge hat,” for example, Ryūhoku records his 1883 visit to the Shūzenji hot springs on the Izu Peninsula, noting that among the locals “there are hardly any people who read things like newspapers. But this is not worth faulting them over. This is because it cannot be said that there are many who read the paper among the travelers who come to bathe in the spa, either. Is this a ‘little peach-blossom spring’ 小桃源? An ‘undeveloped country’ 未開國?”37 Likewise, when he had visited Atami the previous year, Ryūhoku took a short trip to a seaside town called Fukuura, writing in strikingly similar terms about how the local “women and children looked at us visitors from the capital with evident curiosity. I wonder if this is a little peach-blossom spring.”38 Needless to say, this expression derives from Tao Yuanming’s “An Account of PeachBlossom Spring,” which tells of how a Jin dynasty fisherman walks along a peach-treelined riverbank, following the watercourse to its origin.39 After finding that the river flows out of a mountain cave, the fisherman enters the cave only to discover a harmonious village on the other side. So well known is the story that the term “peach-blossom spring” came to be used in Chinese as a general term for “utopia” (taohuayuan 桃花源). In Japan as well, allusions to this tale of Tao Yuanming’s can be found throughout the kanshi tradition, from the eighth-century Kaifūsō all the way down to the modern era. Ryūhoku himself wrote two kanshi on the topic of “Peach-blossom spring” in 1855, and there are also instances in his earliest domestic travelogues where he uses the allusion to suggest a peaceful setting removed from mundane affairs.40 When Ryūhoku journeyed to Hakone in 1868 to escape the tumult and turmoil that continued in the Restoration’s wake, he invoked Tao Yuanming’s story in a poem he composed about his stay in a hot springs inn, the concluding couplets of which read:

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雖無紅袖堪呼酒 自有白雲常護門 戎馬方今滿天地 斯郷亦是小桃園

There are no red-sleeved girls from whom we can request sake, But the white clouds hovering outside the door are enough. Nowadays the horses of war can be seen everywhere; But this place is like a little peach-blossom spring.41

A similar sense of physical distance from worldly concerns marks Ryūhoku’s use of the phrase in the course of his 1870 travelogue Record of a Journey to Hitachi and Shimōsa. A poem describing his stay in Sōdō-mura (present-day Ibaraki) begins: 遠客寄身葱道村 桑麻春靜小桃源 亂來天地夢如蝶 塵外山林朋是猿

A traveler from far away lodges himself in Sōdō-mura; Hemp and mulberry, vernal peace in this little peach-­ blossom spring. Ever since the war, all has been like Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, In mountain groves beyond the dust, monkeys are my companions.42

In Tao Yuanming’s story, the villagers explain to the fisherman that their ancestors had established their idyllic refuge after fleeing the chaos of warfare. As the references to battle in both of Ryūhoku’s poems show, it was this point of correspondence that made the analogy particularly fitting in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration. Ryūhoku’s use of the allusion in the later travelogues he published as a journalist, however, shows a subtle departure from the standard usage as a synonym for an isolated and idyllically tranquil village. Tao Yuanming’s narrative itself permits one to read the villagers’ remove from contending political forces in either spatial or temporal terms. The cave through which the fisherman passes to discover the isolated community signifies a physical separation, but the question he poses to the residents shows a form of disconnec­ tion that can also be chronologically configured: “He asked them what year it was, but they knew nothing of Han, let alone Wei or Jin.” In pairing the phrase “peach-­blossom spring” with the phrase “undeveloped country” in his later travelogue, Ryūhoku thus shifted the emphasis of the parable to the temporal. The town on the periphery of Atami was a “little peach-blossom spring” not so much because it was a distant and peaceful pas­ toral utopia, but rather because the residents of the community lacked contemporaneousness with the metropole. The paired alternatives that Ryūhoku proposed, one a richly allusive classical phrase synonymous with an elusive ideal and the other a neologism with a concrete and markedly negative connotation, indicate a new ambivalence in Ryūhoku’s reading of Tao Yuanming’s parable that emerged during the years he spent as a newspaper journalist in the final decade of his life. If the temporal remove were viewed positively, the villages on the outskirts of Atami might be thought of as little utopias, welcome refuges from the hectic pace of modern life. Yet such temporal remove also entailed privation so that the villages began to seem more like undeveloped countries. The paradigmatic recluse Tao Yuanming had longingly imagined a community living in chronological stasis and blithely unburdened by contem-

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porary cares, but this was a sentiment that seemed to be increasingly out of step with latenineteenth-century ideas of progress and modernization.43 Moreover, Ryūhoku’s published travelogues themselves had a role to play in promoting this agenda. For example, in “Laundering for the mind,” the travelogue that records his journey to Ikaho in 1881, Ryūhoku laments that a succession of rainy days has meant a delay in the postal service and records this poem: 斜陽收影澗橋西 栗葉撲衣秋氣凄 雲去雲來山出沒 峯前峰後日高低 縱然風景可娯目 其奈村醪難到臍 誰寄家書慰幽獨 斷鴻聲裏夢魂迷

The fading light of the setting sun glistens west of the bridge; Chestnut branches brush my robes, the autumn weather fierce. Clouds come and go, appearing and vanishing over the hills; Before the peaks, now behind them, the sun rises and falls. Even though the scenery has plenty to pleasure the eyes, Nothing can be done about the local ale—so hard to stomach! Who will send a letter from home to ease my solitude? The cry of a stray goose rings out, as I wander in my dreams.44

This poem serves as an expression of Ryūhoku’s feelings of travel-weariness, and, in its invocation of the well-known allusion connecting wild geese with letters from home, the last couplet highlights the poet’s anxious solitude, as he is only able to connect with friends back home through imagined wanderings. Given the references to the cessation of postal service to Ikaho that appear elsewhere in the travelogue, however, the poem raises this rather conventional emotion into a sense of pointed frustration and inconvenience at a forced disconnection that is now coded as aberrant. In “Diary of washing away melancholy,” a travelogue he wrote three years later, Ryūhoku made reference to this experience with the spotty postal service at Ikaho: I once spent time at Ikaho, and I published a comment in the newspaper that lamented the fact that it took three days for letters posted from there to reach Tokyo. And what do you know—the service improved. Now I know I can’t have had anything to do with it; surely it must have been because, when summer comes, all the officials come to spend time in these hot springs. But before long it got so that letters posted from Ikaho arrived in Tokyo the following day! Everyone was thrilled.45

Superficially, Ryūhoku adopts a self-effacing pose in this passage, drawing a clear distinction between his own meager position as a journalist and the powerful roles played by officialdom. However, behind this façade, Ryūhoku is suggesting that in fact his words did have their intended effect. In the other essays he wrote while journeying around Japan in the early 1880s, the instrumentality of the travelogue serialized in contemporary media becomes even clearer, with certain passages taking the form of advocacy. Ryūhoku began to include lengthy passages concerning some of the individuals whom he met in

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the course of his travels, praising them for their generous contributions to local communities. For example, in his 1882 travelogue “A half-smoked cigarette,” Ryūhoku wrote of his encounter with well-known entrepreneur Tanaka Heihachi 田中平八 (1834–84) at Atami. Narrating his unexpected meeting with this distinguished man, known familiarly as “Tenka no Itohei,” Ryūhoku described his philanthropic activities in detail, noting that, since Itohei had been frustrated with the lack of a telegraph office in Atami, he had requisitioned the money necessary to install a telegraph cable between Yokohama and Atami and donated it to the government. In addition, when Itohei found the water quality at Atami lacking, he amassed the money necessary to construct a new water main by himself and offered it to the government in the form of an interest-free loan. Itohei appears again just a week later in the same travelogue, the occasion being Ryūhoku’s narration of his “noble act” of donating the money necessary to reconstruct a stone stele at Onsenji temple.46 Furthermore, it was not just civilians who were singled out for praise in Ryūhoku’s late travelogues; occasionally civil servants became the objects of his praise. In another travelogue from the same year Ryūhoku introduces Genrōin chair Sano Tsunetami 佐野 常民 (1823–1902): I went out for a stroll and reached Kinomiya. The road around here was once overgrown with vegetation and vines, leaving no place to go for leisure and rest, but, this year, the brush and weeds have been removed and little benches installed here and there. They are very convenient for cooling off. I hear that, while the chairman of the Genrōin, Mr. Sano, was in Atami to convalesce, he contributed some money to this effort. Surveying the city, it seems that the telegraph office has already been completed, and the construction to put in the water line is advancing day by day. The repair of the roads has also begun. We can expect that the transformation of the area into one thriving region will take place in no time.47

In addition to this example, “Medicinal drippings” from 1881 records the efforts on behalf of road construction made by Ōsako Sadakiyo 大迫貞清 (1825–96), the first governor of Shizuoka, and also introduces the charitable activities of Kondō Kishirō 近藤軌四郎 on behalf of the impoverished.48 Though Ryūhoku rejected the offers of Meiji officials to serve in the new government and styled himself a useless man with no intention of participating in state affairs, he was nevertheless able to exploit the new potential of the medium of newspaper serialization to take an active and assertive role in shaping Japan’s present and future. Ryūhoku’s success on this score is most straightforwardly evident in the zatsuroku columns on a host of political, social, and cultural issues that we examined in chapters 6 and 7. Moreover, the capability that journalists such as himself had to shape national events and transform popular consciousness was itself something that he addressed from time to time in his columns, taking partial credit for limiting the spread of Saigō’s rebellion, for example, or highlighting the role of newspapers in cultivating understanding of popular rights.49 Yet, even within the seemingly detached, leisurely, and private world of Ryūhoku’s travelogues, his public role was never fully absent.

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Although he may not have been ready to follow in Tao Yuanming’s footsteps and write “The Return,” Ryūhoku nevertheless found a way to invoke the image of Tao Yuanming and his chrysanthemums in a way that coincided with his own role as a commentator actively taking part in public debate and committed to progressive reform. Just one year before he died, Ryūhoku wrote an account about his visit to the home of Soeda Tomoyoshi 添田知義 (d. 1912), a wealthy agriculturalist in the town of Ichiba who cultivated hybrid varieties of chrysanthemum: While we were drinking, the host said to me: “. . . This year, for example, I have produced thirty-five types of new flowers.” Hearing his words, I had an epiphany. Now then, these plants are not sentient. Nevertheless, in bringing them into being, the Creator made it so that, as they appeared, they became more and more marvelous. Endeavoring to reform their old ways, they display their new ways. They seem to understand the principle that a society needs to renew itself daily. How can it be in accord with the mind of heaven and earth for them to be mired in the old customs of thousands of years, loathing reform and taking no delight in invention? The only people who insist upon their inferior old-fashioned theories in order to restrain the trend toward daily renewal are fools and stubborn men. If there were any who looked upon the chrysanthemums of Mr. Soeda in Ichiba and said “These are not the same as the chrysanthemums of Tao Yuanming’s home in Lili, and moreover they are not as good,” then I would answer them, “If Tao Yuanming were alive today, he would be standing right alongside Mr. Soeda, cultivating many new varieties year after year.”50

Consistent with Ryūhoku’s own role as a committed agitator for reform, Tao Yuan­ming now came to stand not as a figure of aloof retirement, but as an active agent of innovation.

note s

Introduction 1 Lanman 1883, 146–60. Leading Men of Japan is also titled Japan, Its Leading Men. 2 Ibid., 147–48. 3 Kikuchi Sankei 1874; RZ, 293. 4 It is not to be found in any of the numerous anthologies of modern Japanese literature produced over the last century, for example, nor is it mentioned in any standard narrative of Japanese literary history. One of the only scholarly treatments I have come across concerning the work is a recent article by Ōmoto Tatsuya that addresses Ryūhoku’s preface to it. While Ōmoto correctly per­ceives the preface to be an argument for the significance of literary expression, his misreading of the grammar in the passage quoted above leads him to assert that Ryūhoku emphasizes a disconnect, rather than commonality, between Western and Japanese literary enterprise; see Ōmoto 2012, 58. The titular shashinkyō can mean either “camera” or “photograph”; see Ishiguro 2004, 368. 5 What is now called wenyan 文言 in Chinese is widely known in English as “literary Chinese” or “classical Chinese,” but I follow the use of “Literary Sinitic” proposed in Mair 1994a. The “Literary” reminds us that we are dealing with a fundamentally written form of discourse, for the evidence is overwhelming that Literary Sinitic has always been distinct from spoken varieties of Chinese. Likewise, “Sinitic” clearly affirms the ultimate linguistic origins of such writing but at the same time also inserts a slight distance between the form and the modern nation-state, thereby better accommodating the fact that such writing spread far beyond the borders of “China.” Significantly, these aspects are mirrored perfectly in the term by which Literary Sinitic is now known in Japan and Korea: 漢文 (J. kanbun; K. hanmun; lit., “Han writing”). The coinage of the term “Sinosphere” is often attributed to James Matisoff; see Matisoff 1990, 113 n. 17. My usage follows Fogel 2009, 1–6. 6 Significant surveys of Sinitic poetry from Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868) include Matsushita 1969, Nakamura Shin’ichirō 1985, Nakamura Yukihiko 1986, Ibi 1998, and Sugishita 2004. Edo period Sinitic verse is often divided into three periods: the seventeenth century, during which time poems were written mainly by Confucian scholars and literary expressiveness was often secondary to exe­ getical and didactic purposes; the first half of the eighteenth century, when a school venerating the close imitation of High Tang aesthetics emerged around Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) (though anticipated to some degree by Arai Hakuseki 新井白石 [1657–1725]); and finally the period from the late eighteenth century onward, when the theories of the Xingling (J. Seirei, “Innate Sensibility”) school became dominant. Rather than urging internalization of canonical texts from the High Tang and re-creation in their manner, in this final stage, adherents to Xingling aesthetics turned to their immediate environment and made their expression more individualistic. For English-language overviews of Edo period Sinitic poetry, see Rabinovitch and Bradstock 1997, esp. 16–39; and Fraleigh 2015a. Nagase 2014 explores Sinitic poetic theory of the late Edo period with special attention to the work of Ema Saikō 江馬細香 (1787–1861).

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7 Nagase 2007 focuses on the rise of Sinitic verse composition by Japanese women in the late Edo period and also discusses the practice in early Meiji. 8 Major treatments of Meiji Sinitic literature include Tsuji 1939, Kinoshita Hyō 1943, Iritani 1989, Miura 1998a, and Gōyama 2014. Miura 1998a divides the period into three phases: 1868–90, when Ōnuma Chinzan 大沼枕山 (1818–91) and Mori Shuntō 森春濤 (1819–89) were active; a peak of activity in 1891–97, when Shuntō’s son Kainan 槐南 (1863–1911) was the leading figure; and a decline from 1898 onward. For discussion of this literature in relation to the contemporaneous boom in Sinological studies, see Hisaki 1988 and Miura 1998b. For discussion of Japan’s Sinitic prose and poetry in a broader regional context and in connection with Sino-Japanese forms, see Saitō Mareshi 2005 and 2007. On the surge of Meiji production of Sinitic texts in connection with changing conceptions of the categories of “literature” and “poetry,” see Suzuki Sadami 1998, 169–76; Suzuki Sadami 2006, 128–35. In English, see Keene 1985; Watson 2003; Sakaki 2005, esp. 146–63; Rabinovitch and Bradstock 2009, 40–48; and Fraleigh 2015b. 9 For example, in the mid-1890s, Noguchi Neisai 野口寧斎 (1867–1905), a Japanese poet who worked in Sinitic forms and wrote numerous guides for aspiring Japanese poets, wrote an angry dismissal of the recent neologism kanshi arguing that the proper term should remain simply shi; the essay was later included in Noguchi 1905, 27–32. 10 The introductory notes to the popular 1882 anthology of vernacular “new style” verse, Shintaishishō, explicitly invest the term shi with a new meaning as “an equivalent of the Western word ‘poetry’ . . . not the so-called shi known since antiquity”; see Toyama et al. 1882. This midMeiji shift soon necessitated the addition of the prefix kan to the word shi in order to specifically designate Sinitic verse. While seeing the advent of the neologism as inevitable, Mori Ōgai pointedly acknowledged the discontent of Noguchi Neisai and other composers of Sinitic verse in an 1896 essay: “The term kanshi is still quite new and unfamiliar. As such, it is only natural that some are displeased with it, and, especially for those who have established themselves as composers of kanshi, there is little wonder that they are less than thrilled: they’ve already had the word shi plundered from their storehouse and now, to top it off, they have the unneeded word kan foisted upon them”; see Mezamashigusa 5 (January 1896): 38–39. 11 Karatani 1993, chap. 1. On the reconfiguration of Literary Sinitic literature from a corpus having a certain “universal” status within East Asia to a demoted position as one among many national literatures, see also Sakaki 2005, esp. pp. 79, 174. Although the term kanshi is arguably anachronistic to use in reference to works composed before this transformation in the 1890s, it is now the standard term, and I use it in this book. 12 Brownstein 1987, 441. 13 Ochiai 1890, 11. Ochiai celebrates here what he sees as the realization of the call issued in Shin­tai­ shishō almost a decade earlier: “Japanese poetry should be Japanese poetry and not kanshi”; see Toyama et al. 1882, 15b. 14 A few years later, for example, the editors of Teikoku bungaku made a similar argument in celebrating the apparent waning of kanshi composition among Japan’s youngest generation of writers: “In former times, Sinitic poetry was revered and emphasized to excess, but now it is being restored to its proper place. This is because our imperial island nation has awoken to self-awareness and requires national poems (kokushi) in the national language (kokubun)”; see Teikoku bungaku 2:6 (June 1896), 96. 15 Shirane and Suzuki 2001, 13–14. 16 Xu Shijia 2010, 108. 17 For a detailed consideration of the arguments presented during the debate, see Hisaki 1989. 18 This survey by Sugano Hiroyuki is discussed in Endō 1973, 81–82; see also the research of Ishige 2009, 226. In 2011, however, Japan’s Monbu Kagakushō approved new guidelines encouraging the inclusion of Japanese-authored works in the high school kanbun curriculum. 19 Nagai Kafū 1927b, 283. 20 Odagiri 1940, 141.



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21 When several of Ryūhoku’s works were collected as Ryūhoku zenshū in 1897, New Chronicles was reprinted in its original kanbun format. Later editions, however, such as Iwanami’s 1940 paperback, have tended to replace the original kanbun text with a derived kundokubun, or Sino-Japanese, rendition of it. Some postwar editions of the text further assist readers through detailed explanatory notes. For an introduction to and annotated English translation of New Chronicles, see NCY, xv–xli, 1–144. 22 Keene 1984, 42–45. 23 Sibley 1986, 125–26. The continued marginality of Ryūhoku and other such writers is evident from Erik Lofgren’s accurate assessment in 2002 that Ryūhoku remained a figure of “relative obscurity in the West”; Lofgren 2002, 138. 24 Haga Yaichi 1928, 1–2. The posthumous volume is based on notes from lectures Haga gave in 1908–9. Haga’s term Shina bungaku might also be translated as “China’s literature.” Notwithstanding Haga’s statement, some editors have included Japanese Sinitic poetry in “Chinese literature” anthologies; for example, Wu Kaisheng’s 1924 Wan-Qing sishijia shichao (Anthology of forty poets from the late Qing) includes compositions by three Japanese poets. Similarly, a few Japanese monographic treatments of Sinitic literature in Japan have also framed it as “Chinese literature” (Chūgoku bungaku); see Kanda 1965 and Mizuhara 1967. 25 The writer continues: “That a self-aware people, desiring the establishment of its own national literature (jikoku bungaku), is abandoning this [kanshibun] is rather something that calls for rejoicing and celebration”; see Teikoku bungaku 4.1 (Jan. 1898), 137. 26 Some poets proudly declared their indifference to being criticized for writing washū verse, but they are decidedly in the minority. To Ogyū Sorai, an outspoken opponent of nonstandard usages in Literary Sinitic composed by Japanese individuals, washū is, strictly speaking, a subcategory of such infelicities; his typology identifies the use of Japanese wording 和字 (J. waji; such as failing to distinguish between the different senses of 看, “to look at,” and 見, “to see”), the use of Japanese structure 和句 (J. waku; where lexical order reflects Japanese rather than Literary Sinitic syntax), and washū 和習, which he defines as any other instances where the diction and tone do not accord with Chinese practice; see Kanda 1977, 99–115. In spite of this more specific sense, it is common to use the term washū more broadly to encompass all three types of variation that Sorai identified. For further discussion of washū, see Kojima 1984 and Iritani 1989, 23–24, both of which argue that the phenomenon is all but unavoidable. 27 Iwabuchi 2002, 24–29, 89–96. In addition to discussing marketers’ attempts to suppress such “odors” of Japaneseness, Iwabuchi notes how associations with Japan may instead be regarded positively, as a “fragrance.” 28 The library’s categorization of kanshibun materials, even those about a single author, thus depends on when the library acquired and cataloged them. For example, Fujikawa Hideo’s 1990 study of Kan Chazan is classified under the first paradigm; Kurokawa Yōichi’s 1990 annotated edition of Kan Chazan’s poems is classified under the second paradigm; and a 1971 study by Fujikawa about Kan Chazan and Rai San’yō is categorized under the third. 29 To take one example, in Uncovering Heian Japan, Thomas Lamarre has shown the perils of assuming an easy homology between modern national identity and the subjectivities of individuals in the Heian court; in addition to Lamarre 2000, see also Kelley 2005. 30 Shirane and Suzuki 2001; Tomiko Yoda 2004. 31 For a detailed study of the development of the concept of “literature” (bungaku) in modern Japan, see Suzuki Sadami 1998, 2006. 32 Asahi shinbun, Dec. 6, 2005. Alongside the Taikei project, Iwanami has also published richly annotated editions of kanshi by Edo period poets in two series: Edo shijin senshū (10 vols., 1990–93) and Edo kanshisen (5 vols., 1995–96). Kenbun Shuppan is currently publishing a separate series focused on Japanese kanshi poets that offers extensive annotations of their poetry: Nihon kanshijin senshū (18 vols., 1998–).

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33 Wixted 1998, 23. 34 Wixted 2010, 2011, 2014; Rabinovitch and Bradstock 2009; Fraleigh 2009b and 2014; Tuck 2012, chaps. 1 and 2; Tuck 2014. The last fifteen years have seen a dramatic increase in Chinese scholarship on Japanese kanshibun as well, with numerous reproductions of primary texts, anthologies of Japanese kanshi, and monographic treatments of modern kanshibun such as Wang Sanqing 2003; Ma 2004; Wang Bao­ping 2004; Gao 2005. The journal Yuwai hanji yanjiu jikan 域外漢籍研究集刊, founded by Zhang Bowei in 2005, regularly includes scholarship on Japanese kanshibun. 35 The work states that, “by the Meiji period, kanshi was generally considered to have become obsolete”; Addiss and Chaves 2000, 73. In fact, as Atsuko Sakaki notes, “Chinese literature became more significant than ever in Japan’s reading experience in the early Meiji. . . . The tradition of kanshibun was hardly fading in the early Meiji”; see Sakaki 2005, 146. 36 Iritani 1989, 50. 37 Masaoka 1896, 18. 38 Sugishita 2004, 233. 39 Keene 1985, 75; see also Keene 1984, chap. 2. 40 The first lecture of Kornicki 2008 compares Literary Sinitic to Latin, pointing out two “crucial divergences”: “Latin was a spoken as well as a written language while Chinese was only a written language,” and Literary Sinitic belonged to China in a way that made it difficult to attain the neutrality of Latin; see also Lurie 2011, 342–52. The analogy between Literary Sinitic and Latin may have its origins in European missionary reports about the Chinese language, which inspired several eighteenth-century European thinkers to imagine that Literary Sinitic could replace Latin as a universal script among scholars; see discussion in DeFrancis 1984 and Unger 2004, chap. 1. In the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese commentators such as Maejima Hisoka 前島密 (1835–1919) and Baba Tatsui 馬場辰猪 (1850–88) drew parallels as well; see Lee 1996, 16, 30–31; Lee 2009, 15, 26. 41 Mair 1994a, 730. 42 Stray 1998, 71. 43 Saitō Mareshi 2007, 14–15. That aspiring poets had greatly diminished exposure to the canon of Literary Sinitic texts in their education was also a factor in the perceived decline of kanshi quality from the 1890s; see Xu Shijia 2010, 110. Wixted 2011 offers an insightful discussion of various forms of allusion in the kanshi of Mori Ōgai and uses them to show how allusive practices could create a sense of community and kinship among poets, their perceiving readers, and even earlier practitioners as fellow “enact[ors of] civilization”; see esp. pp. 106–7. 44 Quoted in Ashmore 2010, 11. 45 Tao 2002, 157–59; Hightower 1970, 130. 46 Nelson 2001, 437; see also Nelson 1998. 47 RZ, 285. Ryūhoku was not the first Japanese to pluck this particular chrysanthemum; a century earlier, Ryū Sōro 龍草廬 (1714–92) was styling himself Shōkiku shujin 松菊主人; see Nakano Mitsutoshi’s essay in Nakamura Yukihiko 1986. Even earlier, Japanese medieval monks such as Tetsuan Dōshō 鐵庵道生 (1262–1331) and Kōshi Ehō 翺之慧鳳 (1414–69) had named their studios with phrases drawn from Tao Yuanming’s poetry; see Ōyane 1967, 365–417. 48 Tao 2002, 91–92; Hightower 1970, 78–79. 49 In Hightower’s translation, the couplet reads: “Fallen leaves cover the empty courtyard / And with a pang I see that fall is come” 櫚庭多落葉 慨然知已秋. 50 Bitō 1847. 51 Tian 2005. In his recent study of Tao Yuanming, Kamatani Takeshi has likewise pointed out the ways in which certain idealizations and preconceptions concerning Tao Yuanming in the minds of his compilers and anthologizers have shaped the images of the poet that they have in turn produced; see Kamatani 2012, 16–17. 52 Swartz 2008, 5. 53 Ashmore 2010. 54 Katō and Noda, 2004. The authors in fact recommend Tokuzan’s poems to the book’s readers because they offer “pastoral therapy” (den’en serapii); ibid., 37. Nearly 1,500 years earlier, Xiao Tong



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adduced an equally therapeutic though more morally oriented transformative effect to Tao Yuanming’s poetry in the preface to his sixth-century anthology Tao Yuanming ji, which stresses its use in fengjiao, or “moral suasion.” 55 Quoted in Miura 1998a, 245, 289. 56 Natsume 1965, 20; see also Natsume 1993, 3:10. 57 See, for example, Shirane 2002, 912. 58 For a nuanced consideration of these issues in the context of Heian period Sinitic poetry and prose composition, see Steininger 2010. 59 The term “old poem” is something of a retrospective catchall for poetry that does not adhere to the rules of jintishi. 60 The term lüshi is sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to any verse form, regardless of length, provided that it adheres to the tonal rules of jintishi. In this book, I use it more narrowly to refer to octaves. 61 In this respect, the modern Chinese speaker has little advantage over the modern Japanese speaker; both must rely on tone manuals to determine whether a given character has a level or oblique tone in Middle Chinese. There are, however, rules of thumb that allow one to make a good guess. The Middle Chinese level tone generally corresponds to the first and second tones of modern Mandarin and the oblique tone to the modern third and fourth. However, Middle Chinese also had an “entering tone” (Ch. rusheng; J. nisshō) characterized by a short clipped articulation of a syllable ending in consonant p, t, or k, and this “entering tone” is classified as oblique. Although the particular consonant finals that mark the Middle Chinese “entering tone” disappeared from Mandarin during Yuan times, vestiges of them remain in Japanese Sinitic readings ending in fu, tsu, chi, ku, and ki. Therefore, one who knows both the Japanese Sinitic pronunciations and the modern Mandarin tones can conjecture about whether a character had a level or an oblique tone in Middle Chinese. For example, consider the characters 八 (Ch. bā; J. hachi) and 徳 (Ch. dé; J. toku). Given that these characters are, respectively, first and second tone in modern Mandarin, one would (incorrectly) guess that they both have a level tone in Middle Chinese. However, someone who knows these two characters’ Japanese Sinitic readings can discern from their terminal chi and ku sounds that in fact the characters have the “entering tone” in Middle Chinese and are therefore oblique. See Ōshima Eisuke 2009, 28–34. 62 See Smits 2012. 63 Some scholars prefer to retain the word kanshi. Paul Rouzer, for example, uses “Chinese poetry” to describe an intraregional poetic mode, including Japanese kanshi, that shares “continuity in linguistic form,” but he also uses the term kanshi for Japanese compositions, which show “certain shifts in emphasis”; see Rouzer 2004, 431. 64 Wixted 1998, 23. Denecke 2004 endorses this usage. 65 As Burton Watson observes, “the writing of poetry in Chinese was clearly looked on by many Japanese throughout all periods as a means of participating in some small way in the higher culture of the Sinitic world”; see Watson 1968, 15. 66 For example, consider the way in which Fujiwara no Kintō’s eleventh-century anthology of Sinitic and Japanese poems, Wakan rōeishū (Japanese and Chinese poems to sing), is sometimes discussed in English. According to the editors of the English translation, Wakan rōeishū consists of “three types of poetry . . . the poetry by Chinese authors, the poetry in Chinese by Japanese authors (kanshi), and the poetry in Japanese”; see Rimer and Chaves 1997, 5. This supposed threeway typological distinction is repeated by Paul Schalow, who speaks of the anthology’s “three general types of verses—shi, kanshi, and waka,” and also by Atsuko Sakaki, who likewise uses the terms shi and kanshi contrastively to mean, respectively, the Sinitic poems by Chinese and the Sinitic poems by Japanese contained in the anthology; see Schalow 2007, 7; and Sakaki 2005, 108. Yet the text of Wakan rōeishū itself makes no such three-way distinction; although Sinitic poems by Chinese poets often (though not always) are arranged to appear before Sinitic poems by Japanese poets, they are neither terminologically nor typologically distinguished. Far from a tripartite presentation of verse, the dominant organizational structure of the anthology is, as its title

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implies, binary, comprising Sinitic poems (by Chinese and Japanese alike) and Japanese poems; see Kawaguchi and Shida 1965. 67 The inclusiveness of the Japanese term kanshi is obvious and the usage in this sense ubiquitous. To offer but a few examples: The multivolume Kanshi dai kōza is a history of Sinitic verse composition that spans the full history of Chinese and Japanese kanshi; see Kitahara 1936–38. Innumerable anthologies of and reference works for appreciating Sinitic verse use the term kanshi in their titles and draw from both Japanese and Chinese Sinitic verse; see, for example, Arihara 1974. When Japanese authors seek to refer specifically to Japanese Sinitic verse, they do so not by setting kanshi against shi, but rather by using terms like Nihon kanshi or Nihonjin no kanshi. 68 Denecke 2004, 98. 69 See Smits’s chapter in Beerens and Teeuwen 2012, 93–107. 70 Denecke 2004, 101, 110. Denecke 2014 in fact discusses such Japanese appropriations in terms of active engagement with a “reference culture.” 71 Kornicki 2010, 33. In this piece, Kornicki offers an illuminating discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of the term “Sino-Japanese,” noting that it can be misleading given that many texts written in Literary Sinitic by Japanese could be read by others in East Asia with no knowledge of Japanese. He concludes: “I suggest that they [terms such as Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and so on] need to be used selectively and with caution, principally to denote texts that depart from Sinitic norms and were therefore not portable to other societies in East Asia”; p. 43. 72 Wixted 2010, 86 n. 46. 73 Mori Ōgai 2001, 13:47. For an earlier instance of this notation, see Seeley 1991, 127–28. 74 Iritani 1989, 186. In a later article, Wixted recognizes this poem’s exceptionality, noting that it “uses far more expressions influenced by colloquial Japanese than any of his other Sino-Japanese poems”; see Wixted 2014, 215. 75 Just as there is a distinction in poetry between kanshi proper and the comic kyōshi form, so too are there distinctions in prose; for a discussion of “pure kanbun” and “hentai, or variant kanbun,” see Rabinovitch 1996. Some scholars conceptualize so-called hentai kanbun as a form of “logographic Japanese” in contrast to kanbun by Japanese authors that closely adheres to literary Sinitic conventions; see Steininger 2010, 16; and Frellesvig 2010, 266–68. 76 As Xu Shijia has observed, orthodox Chinese forms remained the normative standard against which Japanese kanshi poets were compared through the late Meiji period; see Xu 2010, 113–15. Cai Yi has made a similar point through his analysis of how Ono Kozan 小野湖山 (1814–1910), a friend of Ryūhoku’s, responded to critiques of his poems offered by Qing readers Chen Manshou and Yu Yue. Cai finds that Ono chose to accept the corrections the Qing critics made almost across the board; see Cai 2003. That being said, Japanese Sinitic poets of this time period were far from uncritical in evaluating the literary skills of specific Qing individuals; see discussion in Fraleigh 2016. 77 Quoted in Nakai 1980, 171–72. By shibun, Arai means Sinitic “poetry and prose”; see Arai 1906, 5:430. 78 Seeley 1991, 25n33, 80. 79 Miller 1992, 176; emphasis in original. 80 For a useful illustration of the kundoku reading method, see the introduction to Watson 1990. 81 Wiebke Denecke, for example, argues, “Because the default mode of reading Chinese and Japanese kanbun texts was kundoku (with on’yomi, readings in Chinese-style pronunciation, reserved for special contexts), texts produced by Japanese in kanbun were naturally affected by Japanese grammar, semantics, and other interferences that made Japanese kanbun texts at best ‘Chinese-style,’ or better, ‘Sino-Japanese’ ”; see Denecke 2007, 366; see also Denecke 2014, 242 n. 14. 82 Kim Bunkyō 2010, chap. 2; Lurie 2011, 194–202; Whitman et al. 2010; Whitman 2011; see also Iwatsuki Jun’ichi’s chapter in Nakamura Shunsaku et al. 2008. 83 My proposal to use “Sino-Japanese” for kundokubun (the translationese produced as a result of kundoku: also known as kakikudashibun, if written down, or yomikudashi, if read out) is not a new one; see Backus 1974, 131. 84 The application of kanbun kundoku techniques to reading European languages reminds us that the Sinological tradition was not antithetical to Western learning in nineteenth-century Japan but



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rather one of its main conduits. On the use of kundoku to read and translate European texts, especially Dutch and English, see Morioka 1999. 85 Lurie 2011, 10. Emphasizing the dominance of kundoku as a reading practice, he concludes: “We cannot describe texts arranged in accordance with Chinese vocabulary and syntax as being written ‘in Chinese’ (no matter what their origins)”; see p. 5. The implication of Lurie’s statement here, especially in light of the parenthetical interjection, is that no text, not even the Chinese classics, can properly be described as being written “in Chinese.” 86 Lurie 2011, 180. 87 Ibid., 180. 88 Ibid., 303. 89 In discussing the sort of abbreviated memorandum-like inscriptions found on mokkan, the wooden fragments from the seventh and eighth centuries on which some of the earliest forms of writing in the archipelago are preserved, Konno Shinji makes this point about the primacy of the written word with a comparison to present-day advertising copy. A spatially constrained job listing, for example, might instruct potential applicants to 電後歴持 (give us a phone call and then bring your CV), but this does not mean that dengo rekiji is intelligible speech; nor, more important, is it clear that there is any single precisely recoverable bit of spoken discourse that exists anterior to this written message. Nevertheless, the meaning of the inscription is clear; see Konno 2013, 22. 90 The three readings come from, respectively, NROC, 109–12; SRS, 237; and Kinoshita 1937, 1:101. 91 See Suzuki Naoji 1975; the essay by Saitō Fumitoshi in Nakamura Shunsaku et al. 2008; Saitō Fumitoshi 2011; and Steininger 2010, esp. 65–75. 92 Each of the sixty points in the sexagenary cycle, used throughout the Sinosphere for recording days and years, is designated by a combination of two graphs: the first being one of the “ten heavenly stems” and the second being one of the “twelve earthly branches.” In the case of Kinemaro, the stem is 甲, or “wood senior/yang,” and the branch is 子, or “rat.” In this book I translate stem-andbranch dates in terms of their ordinal position in the cycle, following the approach of Lurie 2011. 93 As Ryūhoku observed about himself in the 1868 “Biography of the Sumida Recluse,” he employed “a great number of monikers,” beyond just “Ryūhoku” (or “the Sumida Recluse” for that matter). To some extent, he used these various names in discrete contexts and thus they often imply slightly different roles or personae, but it is also true that wholly extrinsic factors were sometimes responsible for his name changes. For example, Ryūhoku used the name On (or Atsushi) 温 as a young man but ceased using this name and started calling himself Korehiro 惟弘 after the death of the shogun Iesada (1824–58), since the graph 温 was part of the latter’s posthumous name, Onkyōin 温恭院; KN, 477. He often abbreviated Korehiro to the single character 弘, pronounced Hiro, Hiromu, or Hiroshi. Ryūhoku made use of a still wider array of appellations in his literary activities, beginning with the style Kakudō 確堂, but he is best known by the sobriquet Ryūhoku 柳北 (lit., “north of the willows”), which he chose because his Edo home was on the northern side of the Kanda River, across from the willows that grew along its southern bank at Yanagiwara (number 7 in figure 0.3; sometimes pronounced “Yanagihara”). Ryūhoku was unmistakably using “Ryūhoku” as a term of self-reference by Bunkyū 3 (1863); see the preface to Narushima 1863 and Ryūhoku’s quatrain celebrating the New Year of Bunkyū 3 in Katsuragawa 1864, 2b. From the titles of poems composed by Hirose Seison 廣瀬青村 (1819–84), it seems Ryūhoku became known as “Ryūhoku” in the summer of Bunkyū 2; see SI, vol. 4. Even farther back, a section in Ryūhoku’s manuscript Shunseirō shishō containing poems from around 1859 is titled 柳北集, “North of the Willows collec­tion”; SS, 16a. 94 The Narushima family had lived near the Sumida River in Asakusa from the mid-eighteenth century, but, at least from Bunsei 3 (1820), their official residence was in the area of Asakusa known as Onmaya-gashi, right on the banks of the Sumida. The home in which Ryūhoku spent his first years is indicated as number 10 in figure 0.3. In Tenpō 11 (1840), when he was four years old, the family’s official residence was transferred to Okachimachi in the Shitaya district (indicated as number 9 in figure 0.3); see Nagai Kafū 1927a, 279; Maeda 1976a, 37.

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95 A handwritten addendum to one family document by Ryūhoku’s adopted son Kenkichi states that Ryūhoku was adopted as an infant and was claimed to be Kadō’s offspring. The same document states that it was only after the Meiji Restoration that Ryūhoku had contact with his birth siblings (two elder brothers, Mori Seigo and Kusuyama Kōsaburō, as well as one elder sister), but other evidence indicates earlier interaction. The notice is quoted in Nagai Kafū 1927a, 279. 96 As the suffix bōzu suggests, these servants, who fulfilled a variety of tasks within Edo Castle, had their heads shaved. A Narushima family pedigree prepared for the shogunate in the late eighteenth century is the basis of the following discussion; the pedigree is reprinted in Hayashi Jussai 1996, 19:95–96. See also Kubota 2000, 88–89. 97 The earnestness with which Nobuyuki regarded himself as a servant to the shogun is evident in comments he made such as “My scholarship, my poems, and my writings too, were all created through the beneficence of my lord; they are all his, there is nothing that is mine”; see Kubota 2009, 8. Likewise, Nobuyuki’s contemporary Hattori Nankaku praised his learning, his “strong and resolute” character, and the fact that his “sole aspiration was to serve the shogunate”; quoted in Hara 1994, 363. 98 Since the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Hayashi family of scholars had been responsible for providing lectures and instruction to the shogun, but with the establishment of the okujusha position during the Kyōhō period, other scholars, including Narushima Nobuyuki as well as Muro Kyūsō, were given this responsibility. 99 The thirteen Confucian classics 十三経 refers to the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of Documents, the Classic of Changes, the Three Rites (the Rites of Zhou, the Book of Rites, and Ceremonies and Rites), the Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Zuo, Gongyang, and Guliang), the Analects, the Luxuriant and Refined Words (Er ya), the Classic of Filial Piety, and the Mencius. 100 The Reizei house in Kyoto is directly descended from the eminent early medieval court poet Fujiwara Teika and served for centuries as the custodians of a precious library of Japanese poetic texts. Nobuyuki had studied Japanese poetics under their tutelage since 1720. His dual pursuit of both Chinese and Japanese learning reflects the eclecticism of his thought; Kubota 1990a–c transcribes an important selection of Nobuyuki’s scholarship, and 1990d, 102–3, contains a quotation from Nobuyuki’s son, Kazusada, on how Nobuyuki emphasized the importance of Japanese scholars attaining mastery of both Japanese and Chinese learning. Kubota 2009 emphasizes the diversity of Nobuyuki’s scholarship and the broad scope of his artistic and literary pursuits. 101 The order charging Motonao with the task of compiling the Tokugawa jikki, or O-jikki as it was known at the time, is quoted in Yamamoto Takeo 1979, 319–20. Yamamoto notes that editing of the Tokugawa jikki was centered at the Narushima residence (indicated as no. 9 on figure 0.3) but that space in other sites was devoted to the task as well. He conjectures that, around 1843, the center of editing had moved from the Narushima household to the Shōheizaka Gakumonjo academy (indicated as no. 8 on figure 0.3). 102 “Bōzan isō jo” 茅山遺草序, KG, 99 (July 29, 1880); rpt. in RZ, 297. 103 Shinmi 1880, 12b–13a. 104 There are many names for this practice and various ways in which it can be enjoyed. The Song poetry treatise Zhongshan shihua distinguishes three main types: 次韻 (Ch. ciyun; J. jiin), in which the same rhyme characters are used in the same sequence; 用韻 (Ch. yongyun; J. yōin), in which the same rhyme characters are used though not in the same sequence; and 依韻 (Ch. yiyun; J. iin), in which the same rhyme group (Ch. yunmu; J. inmoku) is used but not the same characters. The general term 和韻 (Ch. heyun; J. wain) can be used in reference to any of these, but Japanese kanshi poets typically use it to designate the first type. Other terms for composing matched-rhyme poems include 賡和 (Ch. genghe; J. kyōwa) and 唱和 (Ch. changhe; J. shōwa); these also tend to refer to the first type. In pre-Tang (and some early Japanese) usage, the verb 和 “to harmonize” can mean simply to offer a poetic response but soon came to connote some form of rhyme matching; see Davis 1975, 93. 105 From the position of modern phonocentrism, the practice of the “brush talk” 筆談 (J. hitsudan; Ch. bitan), by which traditionally educated Sinospheric intellectuals used Literary Sinitic to com-



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municate in writing, may seem to be nothing but an awkward substitute for speech. Yet Saitō Mareshi challenges this assumption, arguing for the primacy of Literary Sinitic as written discourse. Commenting on interactions between Japanese scholar-officials 士 (J. shi; Ch. shi) and visiting Korean emissaries, he writes: “As East Asian intellectuals, they shared a common foundation. For them, the chance to engage in ‘brush talks’ with the emissaries and exchange poetry with them was a rare opportunity to confirm one’s belonging to the world of Chinese civilization’s shi. Moreover, it is important to realize that the ‘brush talk’ was their main and proper form of interaction and was not an auxiliary measure undertaken because they could not communicate with one another in speech. They were shi of written discourse, not practitioners of speech, and thus it was appropriate for them to wield the brush with a serene air of perfect composure”; see Saitō 2008, 84. Likewise, in her thorough examination of “brush talks” between Meiji and Qing literati, Chen Jie notes that some participants preferred direct written communication to mediation by a spokenlanguage translator; see Chen 2003, 88–89.

Chapter 1 1 RZ, 1. The phrase translated “He was fondest of” could also be understood as “He was most accomplished at.” 2 For example, Ryūhoku makes reference to Kadō’s encouragement of his kanshi composition in a set of two poems he wrote in the summer of 1856. Visiting the gardens located in the Fukui daimyo’s Reiganjima residence in Edo, Ryūhoku recalled leisure trips he had taken with his father to the site in the past and wrote in the poems’ heading: “In my childhood, whenever I would accompany my father there, I was able to spend the entire day enjoying the scenery, appreciating the flowers, fishing, and strolling around to my heart’s content. And what’s more Father would reward the childish Sinitic poems I composed by presenting me with stationery goods”; see KS, 3:15b–16b. 3 The vast majority of Ryūhoku’s extant kanshi have not yet been gathered together in printed editions, but instead remain scattered in manuscripts and on the pages of contemporary magazines and newspapers. In addition to the 1894 Ryūhoku shishō, the only other major printed selection of his Sinitic poetry is the 1897 Ryūhoku zenshū, but this volume’s “Poetry selection” (RZ, 299–320) is largely redundant. I have determined that only twelve of its two hundred poems do not appear in the earlier collection and furthermore that all twelve of these poems originally appeared in Ryūhoku’s literary magazine Kagetsu shinshi between 1877 and 1881. In other words, the editors of Ryūhoku zenshū relied on Ryūhoku shishō as their sole source of Ryūhoku’s poems prior to his formal entry into the world of print journalism in 1874. Recent years have seen a renewed scholarly interest in Ryūhoku in Japan, but thus far fewer than two hundred of Ryūhoku’s Sinitic poems have appeared in Japanese annotated scholarly editions, chiefly Kawaguchi 1984, NROC, and SRS. 4 One early usage of the term hanqing appears in “Rhapsody to a candle” 對燭賦 by Yu Xin 庾信 (512–80), which depicts a woman intently working beneath the light of a lampstand to prepare garments for her husband who serves along the frontier. It contains the couplet “Lotus curtains by the cold lamp, dawn breaks at the window / A fire in the bamboo censer, its fragrance fills the cotton garments” 蓮帳寒檠窗拂曙 筠籠熏火香盈絮; Yu Xin 1958, 97–99. In subsequent poetic usage, hanqing continued to suggest solitary work carried out under lamplight but came to be associated especially with reading and writing and to evoke a more austere, sometimes monastic setting. These resonances are perhaps why, two decades after Ryūhoku, Asano Baidō 浅野梅堂 (1816–80) used the term kankei as the title of a collection of miscellaneous jottings that he completed in the early Meiji period; the compilers of a reprinted edition of this work state that its title indicates a “cold and lonely desk”; see Asano 1979, 7. In the first volume of these poetry journals, Ryūhoku uses the similar word 殘檠 (J. zankei; Ch. canqing), meaning “fading lantern,” in a poem that depicts the “poet” 騷人 (J. sōjin; Ch. saoren) sleepless on an autumn night; see KS, 1:24a. 5 On rare occasion, the headings and titles of poems show minor departures from this general rule of chronological sequence. For example, a quatrain “On an image of Red Cliff” 赤壁圖 appears

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with the notation “Composed at the 08.16 gathering” (KS, 2:19b–20a), only to be followed by another quatrain, presumably composed earlier, titled “On 07.27, there was a great storm; I composed this extemporaneously” 七月念七日大風雨漫唫 (KS, 2:20a–b). 6 For example, the third volume contains a poem titled “An image of fighting cocks” 闘鷄圖 (KS, 3:10a), which opens with the following vivid couplets: “One cock flaps up, trying to dominate / The other cock lies low, trying to get up / Imposing helmets of crimson, blue tail-feathers erect / Fierce claws like blades, enough to cut iron” 一鷄翔上氣欲擠 一鷄伏下勢欲躋 紅冑作威翠尾立 怒距 若刃鐵可刲. The Kankei shōkō manuscript has a mistaken graph 封 (Ch. feng; J. hō; “to seal”) in the final position of the fourth line instead of the proper graph 刲 (Ch. kui; J. kei; “to slice”), an error that is obviously not the poet’s, for, in addition to being semantically opaque, the 封 graph clearly violates the end rhyme established in the first two lines (Ch. ji, ji; J. sei, sei). In the manuscript, 封 is changed to 刲 in a hand that seems to be Ryūhoku’s. As in this instance, some of the editing marks in the manuscript should be understood as corrections of scribal errors rather than revisions of poetic phrasing or content. 7 As I discuss in the next chapters, Ryūhoku returned from time to time to revise the Kankei shōkō manuscripts over subsequent years. In some cases, the revisions can be dated to as late as the Meiji period. This is evident if one compares versions of poems that appear in Ryūhoku’s Shunseirō shishō, a manuscript selection of 162 poems that Ryūhoku prepared in 1870, with the versions in Kankei shōkō. In some cases, the original version (still visible behind editing marks) in Kankei shōkō appears in the 1870 collection in its original, unrevised form, whereas a later collection like Ryūhoku shishō reflects the revisions to the Kankei shōkō manuscript. This suggests that some of the marks of authorial revision now present in Kankei shōkō were introduced after Ryūhoku created Shunseirō shishō. 8 The comments appear sporadically in the ample (about 4 cm) upper margins of the pages of the first volume of Kankei shōkō. Beyond obvious differences in handwriting, the two groups of comments can be readily distinguished because one set is explicitly signed by Funabashi Seitan 舟橋 晴潭 (1810–56). The other set of comments, though unsigned, can be deduced to be the work of the eminent Confucian scholar and poet Asaka Gonsai 安積艮斎 (1791–1860) because a note scribbled at the end of the first volume of Kankei shōkō (1:39b) reads: “Read and commented on by old Gon[sai].” Twelve poems from this first volume of Kankei shōkō, along with their marginal com­ mentaries, were reprinted in the posthumous collection Ryūhoku shishō, and, in this later type­set edition, both sets of comments are explicitly identified as being those of Seitan and Gonsai, respectively. Ryūhoku presumably solicited Funabashi Seitan’s commentary at some point between 1855, when he had finished the first volume, and 1856, when Seitan died. It took longer for Ryūhoku to work up the courage to submit the first volume of Kankei shōkō to Gonsai. On i05.29 of Ansei 4 (1857), Ryūhoku wrote in his diary: “I visited old Mr. Gonsai, entrusted him with the first volume of Kankei shōkō, and returned” (KN, 326). Later that year, on 10.18, he received the vol­ ume back from Gonsai (KN, 372). 9 There is a brief yet illuminating discussion of Kankei shōkō in Inui 1973 (and Inui 2003 draws upon the text as well), but Sugishita Motoaki’s 1999 article (subsequently reprinted in Sugishita 2004) is one of only two that I am aware of to devote focused attention to these manuscripts, the other being Ōtani Masao’s 2004 essay “Ryūhoku no seishun” (subsequently reprinted in 2008). In his article, Sugishita traces the correspondences between the poems contained in the first book of the published anthology Ryūhoku shishō and the four volumes of Kankei shōkō. He points out that the revisions written into the text of Kankei shōkō were incorporated into the versions of the poems published in Ryūhoku shishō but also notes that additional revisions were made to the poems beyond those appearing in Kankei shōkō. He therefore concludes that Ryūhoku shishō was compiled not directly from the volumes of Kankei shōkō that are in the National Diet Library, but from some intermediary manuscript that is now lost. Sugishita’s article provides a useful list of the poems in the first book of Ryūhoku shishō and the corresponding poems, where they exist, in Kankei shōkō (Sugishita 2004, 329–32). There are, however, two corrections that should be made to this list. Although they are identified on Sugishita’s list as absent from Kankei shōkō, the poems



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中秋風雨 (RS, 1:6) and 彈劍 (RS, 1:9) actually do appear in Kankei shōkō though under different titles: 九月十三夜風雨 (KS, 1:28a), and 偶成 (KS, 2:14a–b), respectively. This means that for the first fifty-two poems in Ryūhoku shishō, those up to and including 關原懐古 (RS, 1:20), all but one are taken from Kankei shōkō; the second poem in the collection, 敦盛吹笛圖 (RS, 1:1), is not to be found in Kankei shōkō. 10 Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 18. According to Ōshima, these two volumes of Ryūhoku’s waka compositions showed that Ryūhoku learned waka from his father Kadō, who assigned him topics for composition. 11 The poem is the second of the series; see KS, 1:1a. 12 The Book of Rites notes that Confucius arose one morning and intoned: “The great mountain must crumble; The strong beam must break; The wise man must wither away like a plant” 泰山其頽乎、 梁木其壞乎、哲人其萎乎. Telling a disciple “I apprehend I am about to die,” he took ill and died seven days later; see Legge 1885, 3:138–39. 13 See the entry for 02.11, for example, or the entry for 02.21, where he commemorates the one hundredth day after his father’s death; KN, 18–19. 14 See, for example, the second of two quatrains Ryūhoku composed during a Sumida River cherry blossom viewing excursion in the late spring of 1854: “Every year I have come in search of blossoms along the Sumida / Accompanying my father to judge the reds and praise the whites / This spring, I arrive alone at the place we once visited / And find streams of unbidden tears wetting the lovely petals” 毎歳來探墨水花 品紅評白伴嚴爺 今春獨過曾遊地 雙涙無端灑艷葩 (KS, 1:8a–b). In the winter of that year, Ryūhoku undertook a trip to Kōnodai, writing a sequence of poems that similarly references memories of his father stirred by the place; see KS, 1:29b–31b. 15 Zong Lin’s sixth-century Jing Chu suishiji (A record of the annual and seasonal customs in Jing and Chu) describes various customs surrounding the consumption of these wines on New Year’s Day, noting that the offering “usually proceeds from the youngest to oldest”; see the passage and discussion in Moriya 1978, 21–38. I have interpreted the last line of Ryūhoku’s poem to mean that the poet offers the pepper tray to his mother, reflecting practices described in Zong Lin’s text and a commentary on it by Du Gongzhan (fl. 581–618). Alternatively, this line could mean “In her northern quarters, she raises up the pepper tray as usual.” In any case, this poem provides a rare glimpse of Ryūhoku’s mother, who appears only a few times in his writings. 16 Kadō draws repeatedly upon language from the Book of Changes in this preface. The reference to a potential predator “working its jaws” 朶頥 and the phrase about “the advantages of boats and paddles” 舟楫之利 both bring the classic Confucian text to mind. The term 鞬櫜 (Ch. jian’gao; J. kenkō) indicates a quiver for arrows but can refer more broadly to weaponry; here I translate it as “military government,” referring to the beginning of shogunal rule. 17 RZ, 282. As the inclusion of this preface in RZ shows, Kaikeiroku is often misattributed to Ryū­ hoku rather than his father; see, for example, Yanagida 1965b, 298. Japan’s National Diet Library has a manuscript of the three-volume work; it is correctly attributed to Kadō by Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 17. 18 KS, 2:14b. Ryūhoku’s diary notes that, on the arrival of Takeuchi Hiroshi 竹内弘 from the northeast province of Mutsu, the two went to pay their respects at Kadō’s grave; see KN, 149. 19 Saitō Mareshi 2007, 26–29. Saitō argues that the high estimation of martial virtue should be understood in terms of the cultivation of loyalty rather than sheer technical skill. 20 Kusumi 2009, 34–35; Takahashi Akio 2012, 151; Inui 2003, 46. A parallel might be drawn to the limited role of domainal Confucian scholars, who “were on the whole not influential among daimyo except as their teachers when they were boys”; Backus 1979b, 290. Even before the formal institution of the office of okujusha, the first shogun Ieyasu (1543–1616) established a lasting precedent when he enlisted the services of Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657) with no expectation that the latter would contribute to policy decisions. Instead, Razan oversaw the education of the shogun, daimyo, and bannermen; prepared diplomatic documents including the exchange of Sinitic poetry with Sinospheric envoys; and compiled historical materials; see Suzuki Ken’ichi 2012, 44.

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21 Both Motonao and Kadō were punished in 1843 for their opposition to the agechirei, an edict promulgated by Mizuno Tadakuni 水野忠邦 (1794–1851) that aimed to consolidate lands in the immediate vicinity of Edo and Osaka under shogunal control. The plan met with such opposition from those holding lands in the affected areas, however, that it was not implemented; see Inui 2003, 32; and Nagai Kafū 1927a, 276–77. In later essays, Ryūhoku would recount childhood memories of hearing his father fault Tadakuni for his indifference to the concerns of common people; see “An argument about two men from Esshū” 両越州論, CS, June 21, 1878; and “In response to Mr. Ōe of the Hōchi” 答報知社大江君, CS, June 27, 1878. 22 Although it is impossible to state so unequivocally, it seems all but certain that Ryūhoku was responsible for the revision marks made to the main text of the poems in Kankei shōkō. The senior commentators Ryūhoku engaged to critique the manuscript, Seitan and Gonsai, occasionally indicated their enthusiasm for a line or couplet by dotting it with emphasis marks (J. hiten 批点 or kenten 圏点), but neither seems to have proposed any changes by writing them directly into the main text. Rather, they made such suggestions, even recommendations to change a single graph, in the pages’ upper margins, and then Ryūhoku decided which of these suggestions to heed when he edited the poetic text itself. Take, for example, the changes Seitan proposed in the margins of KS, 1:33a, a quatrain Ryūhoku wrote on visiting the Linked Bridge at Mama (in present-day Chiba prefecture). Ryūhoku’s poem ends “Poetic travelers occasionally come to take rubbings of the broken stele” 騷客時來打斷碑; and, in his marginal comments, Seitan asked, “Why does the person who takes a rubbing of the stele need to be a ‘poet’? It seems better to write ‘a person of taste.’ ” Ryūhoku followed this suggestion and replaced 騒客時 with 好事人 in the manuscript exactly as Seitan had proposed. There are numerous such examples in the manuscript but also many instances where Seitan made marginal suggestions that Ryūhoku ignored or followed only partially in his revisions to the main text. 23 As discussed in the introduction, the third line of an octave does not figure in the poem’s rhyme scheme, which involves only the final characters of the even-numbered lines and the first line. Likewise, cuidie and juzhang are identical in their tonal features: each is composed of a level-toned graph followed by an oblique-toned graph. 24 The “Questions about mourning rites” (Wen sang) chapter of the Book of Rites explains this distinction: “For a father they used the black staff of bamboo; and for a mother, the square-cut staff, an elaeococcus [i.e., paulownia] branch”; see Legge 1885, 4:378–79. 25 Ryūhoku’s diary does note that he wore mourning garments on the first day of the year, removing them on the following day; see the 01.02 entry in KN, 9. 26 Hino Tatsuo uses the term kanbunteki bunshoku 漢文的文飾, or “Literary Sinitic embellishment,” to refer to the kanbun author’s occasional use of resonant classical Chinese images and phrases to describe a contemporary Japanese scene even when such terms do not accord with the actual details of Japanese material culture. For example, in the “Calligraphy party” chapter of Account of the Prosperity of Edo, Terakado Seiken 寺門静軒 (1796–1868) describes the throng of guests coming to the event as though they were all arriving by horse-drawn carriage, a mode of transport that would not have been common in 1830s Edo; see EHRS, 36 n. 6. Another late Edo literatus, Kashiwagi Jotei, likewise describes his journeys in ways that echo the rhetoric of Chinese travel writing but depart from contemporary Japanese lived experience. In addition to mentioning travel by “horse-drawn carriage” 馬車, Jotei notes meals of “chicken and pork” 雞豬 (although pork was not a common food in early modern Japan), and, whereas Japanese villages were not enclosed like their Chinese counterparts, Jotei describes himself entering one rural area as passing through the “village gates” 里門; see Iritani 1999, 62–64, 190–91. 27 Ryūhoku used the term 梅墅 to mean Umeyashiki in his diary entry for 1855.01.12 (see KN, 103), where he notes visiting Kameido and two other plum gardens (presumably Hyakkaen and Komuraimura), and he used 柳塘 to mean the bank at Yanagiwara (“Yanagiwara no dote”) in a later essay (see RZ, 284). My interpretation of the usage of these terms in Ryūhoku’s New Year poem as toponyms differs from that of Ōtani Masao and Yamamoto Yoshiaki, who in their annotations to this poem interpret them as general terms for “a cottage where plums grow” and “a bank where



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willows grow”; see SRS, 213. I think it is unlikely that Ryūhoku would repeat the words “plum” and “willow” in lines 5 and 6 without any shift in meaning or twist. He used a similar technique of playing on toponyms and related flora names in the third couplet of an octave that appears in NCY, 129. 28 Umeyashiki is no. 30, and the willow bank of Yanagiwara is at the center of no. 9 in Smith 1986. Hiroshige’s depiction of Umeyashiki, a merchant’s residence in Kameido known for its splendid plum garden, in turn inspired Van Gogh to produce “Flowering Plum Tree (after Hiroshige)” thirty years later. 29 See Hagino 1779. A great many of the Sinified Japanese toponyms compiled in Tōsō kaii are from works by poets of the Ken’en school (centered on Ogyū Sorai and his disciples). Inasmuch as Ryūhoku’s ancestor Nobuyuki shared their “ancient phraseology” approach, it is not surprising that Ryūhoku used many of these Sinified toponyms in his own Sinitic poetry about Japanese sites. In “Two Sumida River poems” 墨水二首, for example, he uses 墨水 (lit., “river of ink”) in the title rather than the everyday 隅田川, and within the poems he refers to Umewakazuka 梅若 塚 using the term 梅兒塚 (lit., “burial mound of the plum child”); see KS, 1:16a. In both cases, the Sinified versions are more elegant and more intelligible as Literary Sinitic. Similarly, in a “Reminiscence on the past at Kōnodai” 鴻臺懷古, Ryūhoku uses in the title the concise yet evocative toponym 鴻臺 (wild goose platform) rather than the ordinary and longer 國府臺, and he likewise uses 刀川 (lit., “Knife river”) in the course of the poem rather than the conventional orthography for Tonegawa 利根川 (which is both wordy and strange as Literary Sinitic); see KS, 1:29a–31b. In all of these cases, the Sinified toponyms for these Japanese sites are attested in Hagino 1779, 24a–b, 26a, 27b. 30 Seven volumes of Ryūhoku’s diaries, all fortuitously acquired by Maeda Ai at a Tokyo book fair, are today part of Cornell University Library’s Maeda Bunko (see Maeda 1976a, 21–26; for a synopsis of Maeda’s speculations about how the diaries appeared on the market, see NCY, 312 n. 1). Six of the volumes are titled Kenhoku nichiroku, covering Ryūhoku’s life from 1854 to 1860: complete with the exception of the volume for Ansei 6 (1859), which is missing. The seventh volume is titled Tōkan nichiroku (Diary of one “thrown an idle empty post”) and covers the end of Bunkyū 3 (1863) through the beginning of Bunkyū 4/Genji 1 (1864), a period during which Ryūhoku was relieved of his official duties. All seven extant volumes are photographically reproduced in KN. A team of scholars led by Ibi Takashi has recently reprinted the first two volumes with some annotation; see Ibi et al. 2013, 2014. In addition, Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, Nagai Kafū 1927a, and Nagai Kafū 1927b contain fragments of the more than twenty other journal volumes that were destroyed in the fires of World War II. 31 When Ryūhoku’s grandson Ōshima Ryūichi discovered Ryūhoku’s diaries in the 1920s, several volumes were already missing. The earliest of the twenty-nine volumes of journals that came into his possession at the time contained Ryūhoku’s entries from 08.01 of Kaei 6 (1853) through the end of the year, but the volume bore no title. Finding such a midyear start unlikely, Ōshima conjectures that there were even earlier volumes that do not survive; see Ōshima 1943, 32–83. In any case, it seems that the first of Ryūhoku’s journals to bear a title was the one he began in Kaei 7, Kenhoku nichiroku; some dictionaries give the pronunciation kenboku or kenpoku instead of kenhoku. 32 Yuan 1996, 91–93. As Zhongdao explains in the essay, the term yanbei had been used in this sense by the Tang poet Duan Chengshi 段成式 (d. 863), who wrote: “After banquets of drink, I am often found north of the inkstone.” The fourteenth-century literatus Lu Youren 陸友仁 also alluded to this earlier usage when he chose to style himself Yanbei. 33 There may be a more specific referent here, for Ryūhoku was particularly fond of an inkstone his father had given him. The second of two poems he wrote in recollection of his father in 1856 contains the following couplet: “I pay special reverence to the inkstone that he entrusted to me / May the shine of its black ink long illuminate the walls of my poor study” 殊拜當時恩賜硯 墨光長照敝書幃 (KS, 3:15b–16b). 34 Even some of his less clearly self-referential Sinitic verses from the time focus on military valor that is thwarted or portrayed with distance; see “The old general” 老將 and “The old soldier” 老兵,

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two of four poems Ryūhoku composed in the manner of “Ten poems on the old” 十老詩 by Liu Kezhuang 劉克莊 (1187–1269); KS, 1:5b–6b. 35 The procedures for designating Ryūhoku as his father’s successor were not yet complete, and so his family did not formally announce Kadō’s death to the shogunate until 03.17 of Kaei 7 (1854). Following this announcement, Ryūhoku entered a period of mourning, observing various rituals, such as the “thirty-fifth day” services, that were calculated on the basis of the 03.17 date that had been reported to the officials rather than the actual date of Kadō’s demise in the previous year; see KN, 23–24, 27–28. Ryūhoku’s formal accession to headship came on 06.05. 36 It seems that, in the eyes of the shogunate at least, Ryūhoku was at this point simply filling in for his father, performing the latter’s duties and appearing in his place when the latter was summoned to receive awards or honors. That Ryūhoku was ostensibly just standing in may explain why he sometimes notes during these first months that he could not take his place among the assembled officials because his hierarchical position was still undetermined; see the 01.15 and 01.28 entries. Entries before the official announcement of Kadō’s death also record the speech and behavior of others who seem oblivious to Kadō’s death; in the entry for 03.10, for example, a messenger comes to summon Kadō to appear before the shogunate the following day, and Ryūhoku must go in his place. The record of shogunal appointments also reflects this apparent delay in the official reporting of Kadō’s demise; though Kadō unmistakably died in Kaei 6 (1853), it gives his year of death as Kaei 7/Ansei 1 (1854); RH, 5:165. 37 Whereas earlier generations of historians have tended to emphasize early modern Japanese isolation, more recent work has stressed instead the ways in which Japan actively sought information about and engaged in various forms of interaction with the outside world. Toby 1984 marks an early reassessment of the traditional view, and, more recently, Mitani 2008 and Hellyer 2009 both argue that the policies governing international relations that the shogunate adopted were less ideological than pragmatic. 38 Local authorities played an important role in mediating such interaction, the domains of Matsu­ mae, Satsuma, and Tsu taking charge of commerce and exchange with the Ainu, Ryukyus, and Korea, respectively. 39 Ryūhoku’s diary provides a good indication not only of Ryūhoku’s own reaction to the foreigners’ arrival, but of how his contemporaries responded; he notes, for example, how an official edict had been announced enjoining the people of Edo to remain calm even if the barbarians entered the port itself (01.16). In fact, some “barbarian launches” did precisely that the next day (01.17), and, in spite of the order to remain calm, “talk about the barbarians grows ever the more noisy” (01.18). Frustrated with the “confused clamor on the street” around this time, Ryūhoku vented his frustrations in a quatrain that ends: “And most hateful of late are the tongues of those on the street; Chattering on about the American and Russian barbarians” 近來尤厭途人舌 囂説 米夷兼魯蠻; KS, 1:6b–7a. 40 Maeda 1976a, 29–30. We can surmise how disturbing the thunderous cannon fire must have been to those near Edo Bay from a letter that American missionary James Hepburn wrote just over a decade later. Apparently the vibrations from “the frequent discharge of heavy cannon from the ships of war in the [Yokohama] harbor” were sufficient to damage his roof tiles; see Hepburn 1955, 83. 41 Mitani 2008, 187. The shogunate held “emergency consultations” on this day (February 25) to resolve a standoff between Ii Naosuke 井伊直弼 (1815–60) and other daimyo, who supported allowing trade, and Tokugawa Nariaki 徳川斉昭 (1800–60), who was resolute in his opposition. 42 KS, 1:2b–3a; see also SRS, 213–15. 43 To cite just one example, Ryūhoku’s friend the calligrapher Seki Sekkō’s collection Sekkōrō shishō contains a sequence of a dozen quatrains he composed in 1854 that is headed “On the eighteenth day of the first month, I heard of the naval threat and accompanied Yasuda Tōtei to Kanazawa on a three day journey; I wrote several quatrains”; see SSS, 7:7b–8b. Some of Sekkō’s poems merely describe the scenery he observed en route, but about half make some mention of Perry’s squadron.



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44 San’yō’s poem, “Oranda-sen kō” 荷蘭船行 (Ballad of a Dutch ship), is composed of twenty-eight lines all using the same rhyme; the translation here comes from Watson 1976, 129–30. For an annotated version, see Mizuta 1996, 189–91. 45 The events of the Opium Wars (1840–42) were well known and much discussed by Japanese intellectuals; the Ahen shimatsuki 阿片始末記 (A record of the opium events) of Saitō Chikudō 斎藤 竹堂 (1815–52), for example, was published in 1845. Individuals close to Ryūhoku had also written about the topic before Ryūhoku wrote this poem. For example, Ōtsuki Bankei 大槻磐渓 (1801–78) wrote a poem in 1850 to send off Asano Baidō to his new post at Uraga in which he referred to the Opium Wars and outlined his ideas about proper coastal defense policies (SNK, 17:199–200; see also Umezawa 1986, 36). In 1853, Ryūhoku’s neighbor in Shitaya Fujimori Kōan 藤森弘庵 (1799– 1862) wrote Kaibō biron 海防備論 (Argument for the preparation of naval defenses), which points out the cunning of the British in terms close to those Ryūhoku uses here; see SRS, 215 n. 13; Brook and Wakabayashi 2000, esp. pp. 55–75. 46 On 03.24, for example, he noted that his two students Aoki Ginzō and Izawa Heikurō had come to tell him that the American ships had not returned yet; see KN, 24. 47 KS, 1:3a–3b. 48 KN, 15. 49 Many earlier Japanese Sinitic poets had adopted this practice, known as shūsei 修姓, when writing Sinitic verse; the Wakan rōeishū, for example, identifies many Japanese Sinitic poets by singlecharacter abbreviations of their surnames. The practice became especially prevalent with the Edo period expansion of kanshibun, and sometimes the newly fashioned single-character surname had only an indirect connection to the individual’s Japanese surname. 50 An accomplished calligrapher, Yaguchi Kensai was also known as Naokai 直養 and Seizaburō 清 三郎. He had studied the Confucian classics for several years under Sone Tokusai 曾根得斎 before entering the Shōheikō, an academy run by the Hayashi family of scholars that enjoyed official patronage by the shogunate; see the kanbun biographies in Nakane 1886, 2:28a–b, and Uchida 1932. In 1849, Kensai had been appointed to assist Ryūhoku’s father Kadō in the compilation of the shogunate’s historical annals; see Fraleigh 2014. One of Kensai’s poems is translated in Watson 1976, 74. 51 Iwamatsu Tōsai, also known as Tōjūrō 董十郎, taught Confucian studies, poetry, and calligraphy in Edo’s Kohinata district. He is listed in the second edition of Edo genzai kōeki shoka jinmeiroku (published 1842), a directory designed for newcomers to Edo who wished to find instructors in various fields; see item 239 in KJS, 2:65. 52 Okano Kanae used the artistic name Teigyo 鼎魚; he appears as a “painter” in several contemporary directories of cultural practitioners from the 1850s and 1860s; see KJS, 3:229 (item 859) and 2:168 (item 607). His residence was not far from Ryūhoku’s; it is identified as no. 6 on figure 2.1. 53 Funabashi Seitan had studied the Confucian classics under Asaka Gonsai and poetic composition under Yanagawa Seigan 梁川星巌 (1789–1858). He published his first poetic anthology in 1835, when he was just twenty-five years old. In spite of its author’s youth, the volume contains a preface by Ōkubo Shibutsu 大窪詩仏 (1767–1837), one of the best-known poets of the Edo period, who in addition to his own composition was also a prolific publisher of numerous anthologies and treatises on poetic practice; see Funabashi 1835. Like Ryūhoku, Seitan lived in Shitaya; he is identified as a poet and calligrapher based there in an 1842 guide of cultural practitioners; see item 300 in KJS, 2:82. 54 Ryūhoku’s diary notes that Seitan attended his 06.21 shikai in Ansei 3 (1856), just two months before he died on 08.25; Seitan’s death is noted in Ryūhoku’s diary entry for the following day. Ryūhoku also taught Seitan’s son, Gyokkei, who occasionally attended Ryūhoku’s shikai; see KN, 210. Gyokkei accompanied Ryūhoku on poetic excursions in early Meiji and later came to work under Ryūhoku as a translator in the 1870s. 55 Seki Sekkō was born into a family of scholars who had served the Tsuchiura domain for four generations as calligraphers. From the Kyōhō period (1716–36), his family had operated an academy, the Sekkōrō, in the Shitaya area; see Shitaya-ku 1935, 810–12. Sekkō studied poetry under Kikuchi

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Gozan 菊池五山 (1769–1849) and later under Ōnuma Chinzan, but it was as a calligrapher that he became most famous; published guides to Edo’s cultural practitioners in fact began to list him as a professional calligrapher when he was just sixteen. Sekkō’s residence is indicated as no. 3 in figure 1.3. Sekkō’s extensive array of associations and activities in the overlapping poetic, artistic, and calligraphic worlds of the time are documented in the leaflets, advertisements, and other notices contained in his extensive scrapbook, Sekkō-sensei harimaze. In the photo-reproduced edition of this scrapbook published by Japan’s National Archives, SSH, Robert Campbell catalogs its contents and provides a concise essay on Sekkō’s career. See also Nakane 1886, 2:35b–36a. 56 An early draft of a series of twelve quatrains composed by twelve Edo poets, Seitan first among them, for an 1850 “poetic calendar” can be found in SSB, 1:22a–23a. A notation explains that the corrections and comments to the twelve poems were made by Seitan, but actually written out by Sekkō, for Seitan’s eyesight was poor. The revised poetic calendar, incorporating Seitan’s suggestions, was later circulated in Edo, and a copy of it can be seen pasted as item 61 into Sekkō’s scrapbook, SSH, 1:33. 57 In 1850, for example, Seitan contributed a preface to Bokusui zatsuei (Miscellaneous compositions on the Sumida River), a collection of thirty seasonally progressive octaves on the river’s scenery by his friend Tōyama Unjo 遠山雲如 (1810–63), a piece for which Seki Sekkō did the calligraphy. 58 Kaneko Sakō is listed in contemporary directories of cultural figures as a “poet and seal carver” and, like Ryūhoku, Seitan, and Teigyo, was based in the Shitaya district of Edo; see KJS, 2:169 (item 611) and KJS, 2:230 (item 787). His residence is identified as no. 11 in figure 2.1. 59 I have been able to discover little about Ono Goin, but clearly Ryūhoku regarded him as an important member of his literary circle. Ryūhoku mentions Goin’s death in his diary entry for 05.09 of Ansei 2 (1855), and then two years later, when another literary confrère, Takeuchi Ihin 竹内 渭濱, passed away, Ryūhoku wrote two poems in mourning, one of which makes a coded reference to Goin’s death; see KN, 137 and KS, 4:8b. The final couplet of Ryūhoku’s second elegy reads: “The paulownia and bamboo have already withered, the autumn moon has fallen; / Only a few dear friends remain in the literary world now” 梧竹已枯秋月落 文壇稍少幾親朋. From a note Ryū­ hoku appended to the poem, it is clear that “paulownia,” “bamboo,” and “autumn moon” refer to Ryūhoku’s three deceased literary associates whose names contain those characters: “I say this because my friends [Saitō] Chikudō, [Funabashi] Shūgetsu [i.e. Seitan], and [Ono] Goin have died one after another” 吾友竹堂秋月梧陰相繼而歿故云. 60 Ryūhoku used the style “Kakudō” 確堂 until just after 1855, when Matsudaira Naritami 松平斉 民 (1814–91), one of shogun Tokugawa Ienari’s sons, retired and began to style himself Kakudō as well. To avoid infringement, Ryūhoku abandoned his use of Kakudō; see SS, 1. Whereas the Kaei 7 (1854) and Ansei 2 (1855) volumes of Narushima’s diary are both signed Kakudō on their final pages (KN, 95, 192), this signature is absent from subsequent volumes. Still, some of Ryūhoku’s associates continued to refer to him as Kakudō for at least another decade. Maeda Ai mentions an instance wherein Katsuragawa Hoshū used the name “Kakudō” to refer to Ryūhoku in a diary entry he wrote in the mid-1860s; see Maeda 1976a, 153. 61 SSB, 2:45b. 62 SSS, 4:4a–b. Sekkō’s undated manuscripts were amended by multiple hands repeatedly over time, and thus it is impossible to state the relationship between them in terms of simple chronological sequence. For this poem, the corrections made to SSS seem to be reflected in the text as written in SSB, but there are also cases where the reverse is true. Although it may not always be a simple matter to establish a given manuscript’s primacy, we can say with certainty that the two discrepancies between the versions of the poem in these two manuscripts were clearly points of interest and attention for Sekkō and his contemporaries. 63 Two basic rules of regulated verse composition hold that the second and fourth characters of a heptasyllabic line should be opposite in tone, while the second and sixth should be the same. Using 陽 as the second character violates these rules since it is level, as is 紅, whereas 酒 is oblique; 照 has an oblique tone, however, and thus fulfills the rules. 64 Rabinovitch and Bradstock 2002 contains an analysis of the observation of rules of prosody in a small corpus of kanshi texts from the late Edo period. Although the kanshi in their sample are the



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compositions of townsmen rather than professional poets, almost all show end-rhyme; their study finds a much greater diversity in obedience to level and oblique tone distribution, with some basic principles being observed while finer points were ignored. They conclude that the tendency to observe such prosodic rules declined over time. For discussion of the degree to which Sinitic poems by earlier Japanese poets comply with Chinese prosody, see Rabinovitch and Bradstock 2005, 18–20. 65 Even before this meeting in the first month of Kaei 7, the Narushima residence was already the established site of a regular poetry gathering. Among the few surviving excerpts of Ryūhoku’s untitled diary from the previous year is an entry mentioning a poetry gathering held there that summer, but there is no clear indication about which Narushima presided over it; see Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 45–46. 66 It is possible to draw such a conclusion because, although Sekkō’s extant manuscripts show various forms of organization, a basic chronological ordering within individual sections is fairly consistent. His most extensive collection, Sekkōrō shishō, for example, comprises ten sections containing his poems from 1843 to 1868; these are first organized by formal attributes (pentasyllabic versus heptasyllabic, quatrain versus octave, and so on) and then arranged chronologically within each category. 67 For example, Sekkō’s manuscripts note his composition of a poem on the topic of “Rose balsam” 鳳仙花 as a “divided rhyme composition at Mr. Kakudō’s gathering” 確堂君席上分韵 in the summer of Kaei 7 (1854), but there is no poem in Ryūhoku’s poetry journals corresponding to this event; see SSS, 4:5a. 68 The scrapbooks of Ōtsuki Bankei and Seki Sekkō contain many such cards listing the topics assigned at the getsureikai convened by Ōnuma Chinzan, Washizu Kidō 鷲津毅堂 (1825–82), Funabashi Seitan, and other prominent Edo literary figures; see Kudō 1989 and SSH. 69 For an excellent survey of pastoral kanshi from the Edo period, see Ikezawa 2002. 70 Ōtani Masao 2008, esp. 384–85. 71 KS, 1:38a. The original sequence of ten poems by Li Shixiong is titled 寒夜十悽 and can be found in Li 1874, juan 2, pp. 16a–19a. Judging from the placement of these poems in Li’s collection, they are from late in the winter of 1655. Ryūhoku and his friends divided the sequence of ten poems on topics such as “Rain on a desolate night” or “The moon on a desolate night”; Ryūhoku was assigned “A flute on a desolate night.” The rhyme category that each participant was to use in writing his own composition was then assigned randomly. 72 KS, 1:36a–37a. The poem portrays Su Wu favorably not only in comparison to Li Ling, his former colleague who quickly submitted to the northern forces and tried to convince Su Wu to do the same, but also in comparison to a few other highly principled figures of Chinese antiquity whom Ryūhoku portrays as “narrow” and “self-righteous.” 73 It is worth noting that the Su Wu story remained inspiring to Japanese writers into the twentieth century, as the 1942 short story “Li Ling” by Nakajima Atsushi 中島敦 (1909–42) attests; for a translation, see Nakajima 2011, 103–49. 74 On 02.17 of Kaei 7, just one day after receiving the shogun’s dispatch order, Yaguchi visited Ryūhoku to inform him of it. On 02.28, the eve of his departure for Ezo, Yaguchi came to bid Ryūhoku farewell again. Perhaps this is when Ryūhoku presented him with the poem; KN, 19–20. 75 See Walker 2001, especially chap. 6. 76 Yaguchi accompanied Suzuki on a survey of Sakhalin (J. Karafuto) that took them as far north as the forty-eighth parallel. The 06.13 entry of Karafuto nikki states that both Suzuki and Yaguchi independently volunteered to undertake the expedition to Karafuto; Suzuki’s 06.21 entry goes on to extol Yaguchi’s selflessness and intrepid spirit; see Suzuki Shigehisa 1860. 77 The comment by Matsuura appears after Suzuki’s 06.21 entry; see Suzuki Shigehisa 1860, 1:14a–b. Karafuto nikki formed an important basis for comprehensive reports that officials dispatched to Ezo submitted to the shogunate and that in turn set the course of shogunal policy toward the northern territories; see Matsuyoshi 1970, 164–65. 78 One late-eighteenth-century Japanese source holds that the Ainu “are truly foolish and honest by temperament”; another states, “They are foolish by nature but good”; and the traveler Furukawa

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Koshōken 古川古松軒 (1726–1807) writes “The barbarians are honest, believing what people tell them; they are not deceitful”; see Matsuyoshi 1970, 29. 79 This appraisal heads Matsuura Takeshirō’s final comment on Suzuki’s travelogue; see Suzuki Shigehisa 1860, 2:32b. 80 The bestializing language makes this interpretation less likely, but if the “cunning” individuals of line 2 are the Matsumae clan, then perhaps the thrust of line 6 is that far from merely confronting the Matsumae clan’s presumption (like Zhao Tuo’s in that they infringe on Tokugawa authority by engaging in diplomacy with foreign powers), Kensai will also encounter real threats from the avaricious Russians themselves. 81 See the translation in Watson 1993, 3:207–10. 82 One of Yaguchi’s biographers also comments on his fondness for drink: “He was deliberate and serious, possessed of solemnity and gravitas. He was a poet as well as a skilled calligrapher and artist. And he also had a prodigious capacity for alcohol. Whenever he set about doing something, his spirit was indomitable, and he would never concern himself with trivial details”; see Uchida 1932, 1b. 83 Wuhou was the posthumous name of Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234), the famous Three Kingdoms era general. The second line of this couplet is virtually a direct quotation from his “Memorial on sending out the troops” (“Chushibiao” 出師表), in which he explains the reasons for the campaign of Shu against Wei in 227. 84 KS, 1:4a–5a. Ryūhoku uses the same rhyme, 豪 (Ch. hao; J. gō), in all twenty-two couplets. 85 Yaguchi presumably composed poetry while in Ezo, but I have been able to locate only poems he composed much later in life. Nevertheless, that Yaguchi did write kanshi while in Ezo is strongly suggested by the fact that his companion on the Karafuto expedition, Suzuki Shigehisa, composed several Sinitic poems that he included in his travelogue, including one quatrain addressed to Yaguchi himself. Written after Yaguchi had volunteered to venture ahead of the others to ensure that the necessary provisions were available for the group, the poem bewails Suzuki’s loneliness at having to pass the night alone: “Bitter pains we have tasted together: wind and rain / How can I bear to sleep alone in these mountain wilds? / Parting from you has been most heart-rending /  tonight, I share my bed with only insects in the bushes” 辛苦嘗來雨又風 寧堪獨臥亂山中 別君 最是傷心處 今夜同牀唯草蟲; Suzuki 1860, 1:19a. 86 Rai San’yō’s poem “The Mongols are coming” 蒙古來 is from the sequence titled Japanese Music Bureau poems (Nihon gafu) and can be found in Mizuta 1996, 362–63. The character I translate as “rank” in these poems is 羶 (J. sen; Ch. shan), which means “the stench of sheep” (and thus “rancid” or “gamey”); it is used metonymically as a pejorative reference to northern peoples. 87 In his study of the image of Japanese swords in Sinitic poetry (by both Japanese and Chinese poets), Horiguchi Ikuo identifies this popular poem by Rai San’yō as a point of inversion, for in it San’yō broke free of the “Sinocentric evocation of a marvelous material artifact of the barbarian regions” and instead used the Japanese sword as a symbol of national pride, a weapon wielded against foreign threats; see Horiguchi 1995, esp. 54–58. San’yō’s poem gave rise to a minor boom in such works, many of which end with the phrase 日本刀; Ryūhoku’s poem thus echoes San’yō and those he inspired in both thematic and formalistic terms. 88 KS, 1:13b. The version quoted reflects changes Ryūhoku made to the manuscript; in the original version, line 4, for example, reads, “My blue robes still retain the scent of the lord’s incense” 碧衫 猶帯御爐香. The image harks back to one of Sugawara no Michizane’s best-known Sinitic poems, where the exiled poet appreciates the fragrance lingering on a robe that the emperor once bestowed upon him; see Sugawara 1966, 484; Shirane 2007, 144. 89 Hayashi Fukusai 林復斎 (1800–59), the rector of the Shōheizaka shogunal academy and the head of the scholarly family that collaborated with the Narushimas to edit the Tokugawa jikki and other annalistic histories, was part of these negotiations; see Ryūhoku’s entries for 02.07 and 02.10. On 02.28, just a few days before the Treaty of Peace and Amity between the United States of America and the Empire of Japan was signed, Ryūhoku noted in his diary that an agreement was imminent. Yet the limitations of his grasp on these diplomatic developments is perhaps apparent in the fact that there is no subsequent comment in his diary reflecting the official signing of the treaty.



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90 On 05.18, for example, Ryūhoku boarded a ship with shogun Iesada and accompanied him on an inspection of the Shinagawa Daiba, a group of cannon fortifications that had just been constructed in the harbor to defend against foreign naval threats. Ryūhoku described these manmade islands in his diary, exclaiming: “Truly the construction is marvelous!” He also composed a poem on the occasion that begins: “Stone walls jut up amid the angry waves / The work of building done, a safeguard against a hundred barbarians” 石牆屹立怒濤間 新築竣功備百蠻; KS, 1:14b. 91 Perry 1968, 173–74; see also 175, 197. In a subsequent entry, Perry describes the size of the carriage as too small for even a child to ride inside, forcing would-be riders to sit atop the roof. A brief essay concerning Ryūhoku’s encounter with Perry’s ships and the railroad appears in Maeda 1976b, 184–87. See also the various Japanese representations of the locomotive and other American gifts gathered as part of the Visualizing Cultures unit on “Black Ships and Samurai” at http://ocw.mit .edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/black_ships_and_samurai/bss_essay07.html. 92 A few months before Ryūhoku’s observation of the scale model railroad in Edo, kanshi poet and scholar of Dutch subjects Ōtsuki Bankei made his own observations in Yokohama, producing sketches to present to his domain, but he does not seem to have written any poetry about the experience; see Kudō 1989, 172–74. Many of the Japanese travelers on shogunal missions to Europe and the United States from 1860 to 1867 wrote kanshi, and occasionally waka, about the trains they rode while abroad. Ryūhoku’s first experience riding a train came in France in 1872; the quatrain he wrote is translated in NCY, 188. 93 In the Kankei shōkō manuscript, Ryūhoku follows contemporary practice and accords special deference to terms referring to the shogun. In this heading, “great carriage” 大駕 is set off with a line break before the characters, which are further accentuated by reverse indenting them one space (a practice known as taitō 擡頭). 94 Egawa Tarōzaemon 江川太郎左衛門 (1801–55) was an important early student of Western military techniques. 95 The allusion is to a famous bit of oratory from the Zuo zhuan (Duke Cheng, 13), in which Lu Xiang, acting as emissary of the state of Jin, delivers a speech to the ruler of Qin, outlining Qin’s various violations of Jin’s and other states’ trust. Speaking on behalf of other wronged feudal lords, Lu reassures the Qin ruler that he is “hopeful always that we may establish friendly ties” 唯好是求 and presents an ultimatum: Qin can enter into an alliance with Jin and thereby restore peace, or it can refuse and face the consequences; see Watson 1989, 123–26. It may seem a bit surprising that Ryūhoku refers to this episode, since, if Perry and the United States are identified with Lu Xiang and Jin, then Japan becomes the duplicitous Qin. Yet, however ingenuous Jin’s claims to “establish friendly ties” may have been, they ultimately defeated Qin in battle; perhaps that is the cautionary note Ryūhoku is sounding. 96 KS, 1:18b–20a; an annotated version appears in SRS, 218–20. In this poem and elsewhere, I have used “Yankee” to suggest the pejorative tone of terms such as 米夷 (J. beii; “American barbarian”). In line 23, Ryūhoku originally wrote his given name On/Atsushi 温, later replacing it with 弘 to reflect his use of the latter name after 1858. 97 Sugishita 2004, 340–43. 98 On this point see Chou 1988, 80–81. 99 KN, 40. The original reads 實奇器雖然亦可稱玩物耳. 100 The episode is the focus of the text’s “Hounds of Lü” 旅獒 chapter; see also Legge 1960, 3:348–49. 101 The translation is taken from Watson 1974, 116. 102 KS, 1:11b–12a. In his remaining diary entries for the year as well, Ryūhoku often referred to reports of foreign ships (from Britain and Russia) in Japanese ports; see the entries for 06.18, 08.08, 09.28, and 11.13. 103 Okazaki 2009. Ryūhoku noted receiving “five skylarks” from the shogun’s hunt in his i07.28.1854 diary. In addition to its symbolic function, hunting gave the shogun a rare chance to get outside the castle; Kusumi 2009, 38. 104 The maxim “Do not forget chaos even in time of order” 治而不忘亂 appears in the “Appended Phrases,” an early commentary on the Book of Changes, and was paraphrased in many later texts.

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105 KS, 1:28b–29a; RS, 1:6–7; and RZ, 312; see also Inui 2003, 40; and Maeda 1976a, 49–50. The KS manuscript shows taitō reverse indenting for 殿下, “His Highness,” but it also shows that, when Ryūhoku returned to this text at some later point, presumably when preparing another edition of his poems, he directed the scribe to introduce even further expressions of deference to the shogun, recommending two additional reverse indents in lines 7 and 13. When the text was typeset in the posthumous poetic anthology Ryūhoku shishō, the editors largely dispensed with such reverential conventions toward the shogun. They did, however, maintain them in reference to the Meiji emperor, as in the poem “On sending off Shioda Saburō, who has received an imperial order to go to Europe” 送鹽田三郎奉 敕之歐羅巴 (RS, 3:1). Ryūhoku maintained such orthographic deference in his diary, too, inserting ketsuji 闕字, or blank spaces, before any term related to the shogun. 106 The point of the original quotation in the Greater Learning is not transparent and has been interpreted in many ways, but it seems to suggest the importance of knowing one’s proper station and having a dependable basis for one’s behavior: “The Classic of Poetry says, ‘The royal domain of a thousand li, is where the people rest.’ The Classic of Poetry also says, ‘There is that little yellow bird, resting on a corner of the mound.’ Confucius said: ‘When the bird rests, it knows where to rest. How can you be a man and yet less than a bird?’ ” 107 KS, 26b–27b. 108 She was the daughter of Kanō Tōsen 狩野董川 (also known as Nakanobu 中信, 1811–71), an artist who served in the employ of the shogunate. According to Yamada Kumiko, Tōsen’s wife, Utako 歌子, was the daughter of Ryūhoku’s grandfather Motonao and thus the sister of Ryūhoku’s father Kadō, who had been adopted into the Narushima family, meaning that Ryūhoku and Ryū were cousins; see Yamada 2000, 152–53. An alternative theory states that Ryū was Ryūhoku’s niece because Tōsen’s wife was Kadō’s second daughter; see Nagai Kafū 1927b, 285; Maeda 1975a, 116; Maeda 1976a, 40. Yamada’s account accords better with terms of reference to Kanō Tōsen as “uncle” (and the latter’s wife as “aunt”) in Ryūhoku’s diary, but, in any case, the families were rather closely related. 109 KN, 85; the penultimate sentence may also mean “There were numerous parts of the ceremony, but I will abbreviate them here.” 110 KN, 91–93. The entries for 12.17 and 12.24 indicate two trips to purchase “spring goods” at the Hinoya sundries shop in Asakusa, which Maeda Ai points out was the subject of a kyōshi in the 1836 Edo meibutsushi (Poems about Edo’s famous products); see Maeda 1976a, 41–42. The shop’s proprietor, Kangetsu, had designed a pillow for use in sexual intercourse to which he gave the name sekireitai (lit., “wagtail bird platform”), an allusion to the story from Japanese mythology of the male and female gods Izanagi and Izanami learning the mechanics of sex from a wagtail bird. The poem from the kyōshi collection reads: “The master Kangetsu is the patriarch of dawn; a variety of lovely devices are stacked up in his storefront. Lately he has devised a new marvelous item; high and low alike vie to buy his ‘wagtail bird platform’ ” 主人閑月曉連祖 諸色道具店頭堆 近來新製一奇品 貴賤爭買脊令臺. The poem along with an illustration of the shop, festooned with a banner advertising the sekireitai, and several customers making their purchases of the famed item can be seen in Kinoshita Baian 1983, 53–54. 111 KS, 1:38b; and RS, 1:7–8; annotated versions appear in NROC, 3–5; and SRS, 221.

Chapter 2 1 Murakami Tetsumi 1994, 32–52. 2 Marceau 2004, 4–9. The quotation that follows appears on p. 10. 3 As Ikezawa Ichirō has argued in his study of Ōta Nanpo 大田南畝 (1749–1823), a Japanese bunjin who never relinquished his government post, those Japanese bunjin who maintained a connection to officialdom were in fact closer to the Chinese model of the wenren, most of whom had civil service positions as shidafu; see Ikezawa 2000, 3–6. 4 Kubota Keiichi has spent several decades elucidating the scholarship and thought of the third Narushima patriarch, Nobuyuki, whom he calls a “multidimensional bunjin”; see Kubota 1990a,



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95. Even in reference to the scholarly and literary activities Nobuyuki undertook while in the shogun Yoshimune’s service, Kubota frames the discussion consistently in terms of Nobuyuki’s career “as a bunjin”; see Kubota 2009, 8. 5 Ryūhoku petitioned the shogunate for a transfer of residence in the winter of Ansei 1 (on 11.23), and this request was approved in the following month (on 12.15). Construction took an entire year, however, and it was not until late in Ansei 2 (on 12.15) that he relocated there, his family following shortly thereafter; see KN, 84–85, 90–91, 190. In figure 1.3, the Narushima’s former Neribei-kōji residence is indicated as no. 1 and the site of their future Izumibashi-dōri residence is indicated as no. 4. This site was formerly occupied by Honda Etchū-no-kami Tadanori, whom Ryūhoku mentions in connection with the approval of residence transfer in his entry for 12.15 of Ansei 1. 6 On the flourishing educational and literary life of Shitaya in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period, see Shitaya-ku 1935, 805–15; and Nagai Kafū 2000. In addition to being home to bunjin whose distinction was literary, Shitaya was also home to visual artists such as Tani Bunchō 谷文晁 (1763–1840), who was born and spent most of his life there. 7 One version of the map is reprinted in EKS, 6:43. On the basis of the dates when its creator, Nagayama Choen, was living in Shitaya, the editors of EKS estimate that it was created between 1850 and 1859; see EKS, 6:55–56. A substantially similar version of Choen’s map is held by Mukyūkai, and, on the basis of the death dates of some listed individuals, Ichikawa 1972 speculates that it is from the early 1860s (though the information Ichikawa presents actually suggests that it was completed before 1859). Considering these facts alongside the depicted location of Ryūhoku’s residence, I think a date between 1855 and 1859 is most likely. 8 Satō 2003 uses Nagayama Choen as a case study to show how low-ranking local administrators (the tedai and tetsuke who worked under daikan) in the late Edo period often became adept in arts such as Sinitic poetic composition. He argues that this cultural fluency helped them interact with local elites and also opened the possibility of future advancement. Indicating his own status as a bunjin, Choen inscribed his residence with a red circle on the map; I have indicated it as no. 12 in figure 2.1. Choen’s continued interest in political questions is evident in his authorship of treatises on coastal defense issues; see, for example, Nagayama 1932. 9 The Narushima residence is depicted on Izumibashi-dōri; I have indicated it as no. 2 in figure 2.1, and for reference I have also indicated the family’s former residence on Neribei-kōji as no. 7. 10 Saitō 2007, 128. 11 KS, 1:26b–27b. Line 36 draws heavily on diction from the Classic of Poetry (Mao no. 56); the term kaopan 考槃 is generally interpreted to mean “build a hermitage.” 12 One well-known story associating Tao Yuanming with the zither holds that Tao’s zither was unstrung, though this did not interfere with the pleasure he took in it. As Wendy Swartz points out, however, the “unstrung” nature of the zither is a later addition that serves to “magnify the untrammeledness” of Tao; see Swartz 2008, 40–41. 13 Tao 2002, 92–96; translation slightly modified from Hightower 1970, 79–82. Noting the material comforts and familial pleasures that mark his retired life, Tao goes on to write: “Here is truly something to rejoice in / It helps me to forget the badge of rank” 此事真複樂 聊用忘華簪. 14 Tao 2002, 21–27; translation slightly modified from Hightower 1970, 27–30. 15 Tao 2002, 328–37; translation slightly modified from Hightower 1970, 268–70. 16 Tao 2002, 115–18; translation slightly modified from Hightower 1970, 95–98. As part of her consideration of textual variants in Tao’s poetry, Xiaofei Tian notes that the “zither” may have been introduced here by later coherence-seeking editors cognizant of the association between Tao and the zither; see Tian 2005, 86–87. 17 The poem is part of a series of ten that Ryūhoku composed in the company of his student Watanabe, dividing a couplet by the Tang poet Liu Changqing (709–85) to determine the rhyme characters they would use; see KS, 1:9a–10a. Of the original ten, this poem was chosen for inclusion in later anthologies such as RS, 1:3–4, and RZ, 299. 18 Inui Teruo has helpfully distilled the information in Ryūhoku’s diary entries into several graphs and tables that make the patterns of his daily routine readily intelligible; see Inui 2003, 37–45.

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19 The couplet alludes to the Classic of Poetry (Mao no. 202, “Liao e” 蓼莪), which contains the couplet 哀哀父母、生我劬勞 “Alas for my father and mother, / Alas for all their trouble in bringing me up!”; see Waley 1987, 316. 20 Given the pairing with the Six Classics (which refers to the Five Classics and the no longer extant Classic of Music), the phrase “Han’s poems” could mean the Classic of Poetry textual line associated with Han Ying 韓嬰 or perhaps his commentary on the Classic of Poetry, the Han shi wai zhuan 韓詩外傳. A more likely possibility, however, is that it means “Han Yu’s poems” (Han Yu, 768–824), for, in the next couplet, Ryūhoku appears to be aware of a Du Mu (803–53) poem titled “Reading a collection of Han Yu and Du Fu” 讀韓杜集: “Poems of Du, Collections of Han, I read them when I am blue / Like getting Ma Gu to scratch me in an itchy place” 杜詩韓集愁來讀 似倩 麻姑癢處抓. The story of Ma Gu and her fabulously long fingernails appears in the Shen xian zhuan 神仙傳 of Ge Hong (284–364). 21 Recalling the poem’s opening image of adult animals feeding their young, Ryūhoku writes in line 15 that he has not “re-regurgitated” anything to his father; the term 反哺 (Ch. fanbu; J. hanpo) refers to filial children repaying the debt they owe to their parents for raising them. The second line of the couplet continues the ornithological theme, but, inasmuch as this idiom typically indicates infatuation, shikai senior member Funabashi Seitan wrote in the margins of Ryūhoku’s manuscript that it was a distracting turn of phrase to use here. 22 This couplet makes use of language from the Classic of Poetry (Mao no. 217, “Kui bian” 頍弁): 蔦 與女蘿、施于松上。未見君子、憂心怲怲 “Do not mistletoe and dodder / Twine about the top of the pine? / Before I saw my lord / My sad heart knew no peace”; Waley 1987, 206. 23 KS, 1:35a–36a. The first anniversary of a parent’s death was “auspicious” (line 31) because certain mourning practices could be discontinued that day; the term derives from the Book of Rites. 24 These canonical texts had an additional significance for Ryūhoku vis-à-vis the shogunate in that, as mentioned in the introduction, his ancestor Nobuyuki had been presented with editions of the thirteen Confucian classics and the twenty-one Chinese dynastic histories by the shogun Yoshimune in recognition for his scholarly service. 25 Inui notes that within Ryūhoku’s studies of the thirteen Confucian classics, there is a shift in emphasis observable from Ansei 1 to Man’en 1 (1854 to 1860) as Ryūhoku moved from a focus on the Six Classics to the Four Books (the Analects, Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Greater Learning); see Inui 2003, 44. Although it is true that Ryūhoku participated in a Mencius study session in Ansei 1 and was continuing to participate in the Classic of Poetry session in Ansei 5, Inui’s characterization is generally valid; the frequency of meetings for the other three of the Four Books became much greater as time went on. Inui attributes this to the central role the Four Books played in his teaching duties. 26 KS, 2:1a. Because they fly in formation, “flocking egrets” 鵷鷺 (Ch. yanlu; J. enro) is a term for officials arrayed at court. 27 KN, 99. 28 KS, 2:1a. Ryūhoku later revised the second line to read 囘思往事夢耶煙: “Reflecting on past events: are they dreams or mist?” 29 On the “nationalization” of the Shōheizaka Gakumonjo (also known as the Shōheikō), see Backus 1974, esp. 123–39; and Paramore 2012. A brief overview of the Hayashi academy before and after its incorporation as an official shogunal institution can be found in Mehl 2003, esp. 12–13. 30 Yamamoto Takeo 1979. The Shōheizaka Gakumonjo is identified as number 8 in figure 0.3. 31 See the brief note on Hayashi Fukusai in Nagai Kafū 2000, 263. 32 The kanshibun circle centered on the Shōheizaka Academy is sometimes called the Kangakuha 官学派 (Official Scholar Faction) or the Seidōha 聖堂派 (Sage’s Hall Faction), the latter name coming from the fact that the school and Confucian temple complex is also called Yushima Seidō; Inoguchi 1984, 391–410; Kikuta 2001, 33. 33 RZ, 1. 34 As mentioned in chapter 1, Gonsai’s comments appear, along with Funabashi Seitan’s, in the upper margins of the first volume of KS.



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35 For a detailed discussion of the academy’s curriculum and examination system, see Backus 1974, esp. 123–61; Makabe 2007, esp. 120–26. On the impact of the Kansei Reforms beyond the Hayashi school, see Backus 1979a. 36 As Robert Backus observes about the reforms’ ambivalence concerning literary competence, “for the samurai a little elegance went a long way”; Backus 1974, 101–2. 37 See discussion in Makabe 2007, 86–88. 38 Shibano 1915, 134–36. 39 See the preface to Narushima Kinkō 1736. Ogyū Sorai and others associated with the kobunjiha, or “ancient phraseology,” school argued that a keen grasp of the Chinese language was necessary in order to enter into the world of ancient China and truly internalize its classical texts. More than a polite accomplishment, Sinitic poetry composition was to Sorai an essential practice, not only as linguistic training but also in order to cultivate sensitivity and as an important expressive pursuit in its own right. In particular, he advocated the imitation of High Tang models, the emotional expressiveness of which he thought best captured the affective qualities of the Classic of Poetry; see Hino Tatsuo’s essay in Nakamura Yukihiko 1986, and Flueckiger 2011, esp. chaps. 2 and 3. 40 Matsudaira Sadanobu shared Ritsuzan’s disdain for the focus that Sorai’s adherents placed on the literary arts; in an early statement of his thinking, he wrote: “Sorai’s school makes too much of literary style, and so is both enervated and narrow”; see Backus 1979b, 282. 41 Backus 1974, 122. 42 Ritsuzan’s Sinitic poetry collection Ritsuzandō shishū is reprinted in SNK, 7:1–63. Asaka Gonsai praised Ritsuzan’s vigorous prose style to his students, calling him the “Su Dongpo of the Eastern Seas [i.e., Japan]”; see Nakamura and Murayama 2008, 181–82. 43 Shibano 1987 contains a selection of Ritsuzan’s kanbun essays, including several prefaces written for poetry collections, inscriptions for paintings, travel essays, and the like. 44 A typical student of gakumon (kanbun-based learning) in the Edo period, whether he entered the Shōheizaka Academy or enrolled in a private Sinological academy or domain school, worked his way through a sequence of discrete stages that employed distinct learning techniques. The most basic level was sodoku 素読 (internalizing the text, reading it out loud in Sino-Japanese without much regard for meaning), which involved the rote learning (or in Tsujimoto’s terms “corporealization”) of Confucian canonical texts. This would be followed by kōgi 講義 (assigning meaning to the text, whether from individual study of annotated editions and commentaries or from instruction by one’s teacher) and then finally kaigyō 会業 (meeting in small groups to read together, discuss, and debate the meaning of the text); see Tsujimoto 1999, 70–82. 45 Tsujimoto 1999, 80. 46 That poetry instruction survived at all at the Shōheizaka Academy was in spite of Ritsuzan’s efforts in the 1790s. Concerned that poetry was a distracting temptation to “frivolity,” Ritsuzan tried to exclude it from academy examinations and succeeded in diminishing its place in the curriculum; see Backus 1974, 128. 47 Sinological scholar Oka Rokumon’s reminiscences about his time as a Shōheizaka Academy student in the 1850s emphasize that being chosen as shibun-gakari was a “glorious honor” reserved for those students who were exceptionally talented; see Oka 1980, 1:25. 48 Takada 2007, 50–52. I offer these individual examples merely to suggest the place of poetic composition in the Shōheizaka Academy curriculum and do not mean to imply that the selection of a student as shibun-gakari determined his life course. Another student who served as shibun-gakari at the academy, Nanma Tsunanori 南摩綱紀 (Uhō 羽峰, 1823–1909), went on to become an educator, authoring several historical and geographical textbooks, but he also continued to write Sinitic poetry and even edited an early Meiji anthology of kanshi. 49 On the style of the Iwakura Mission report and its embeddedness within a broader Literary Sinitic context, see the essay by Saitō Mareshi in Bei-Ō-A Kairan no kai 2009, and the essay by Kotajima Yōsuke in Bei-Ō Kairan no kai 2003. For discussion of Kume’s expressivity in the report, see Mayo 1973; Campbell 2009; and Fraleigh 2011. 50 Tsujimoto 1999, 80.

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51 Ryūhoku’s first couplet quotes a didactic poem by Han Yu (who adopted the name Han Changli) on the virtues of diligent study titled “Fu studies south of the city” 符讀書城南; see Owen 1975, 271–75. The assigned title of Ryūhoku’s poem derives from the couplet in Han Yu’s poem, preceding the one Ryūhoku quotes, that Owen translates: “The season is autumn, the long rains are clearing up, / A fresh chill enters the hills and moors” 時秋積雨霽 新涼入郊墟. Ryūhoku followed Han Yu in formal terms by also making his poem a pentasyllabic “old poem.” 52 The phrasing in line 15 alludes to Mencius 4A.10: “Benevolence is man’s peaceful abode”; Lau 1970, 122. 53 KS, 3:12b–13b; RS, 1:16–17; RZ, 311; an annotated edition appears in NROC, 16–22. 54 KS, 3:31a. 55 Ryūhoku pokes fun here at excessive scholarly conservatism, and the shogunal academy’s official intolerance for variant doctrines was probably one target of his humor. Yet we would be wrong to equate Ryūhoku’s caricature of the “old Confucian scholar” simplistically with the Hayashi rectors or with other individual participants in their poetry gathering. In spite of the official prohibitions on heterodoxy, many scholars at the Shōheizaka Academy read quite broadly, and some, such as Asaka Gonsai, even wrote essays arguing for the importance of scholarly eclecticism. 56 The Liezi describes the Land of Huaxu: “In this country there are no teachers and leaders; all things follow their natural course”; see Graham 1990, 34. 57 Tao 2002, 53–61; translation from Hightower 1970, 50–56; the poem is second in the series. 58 Several assigned topics invited participants to comment on well-known episodes from the Chinese dynastic histories. For example, Ryūhoku’s poetry journal contains compositions on Hayashiassigned topics including “An image of three visits to the grass hut” 草盧三顧圖 (KS, 2:24a–b), referring to Liu Bei’s (161–223) recruiting of Zhuge Liang, and “An image of Fan Kuai fighting” 樊 噲排闘圖 (KS, 3:18b), presumably referring to the general’s display of strength and quick thinking during the “Feast at Hong gate” of 206 bce. 59 A parallel can be seen here with the curriculum of the Shōheizaka Academy as set forth in 1793, omitting “literature or any reading other than classical and historical”; Backus 1974, 127. 60 The legendary Chaofu 巣父 (sometimes translated “Nestdweller”) shunned contact with the world and lived in a tree. Chaofu and his contemporary Xu You 許由 are often framed together as urhermits, and some sources even assert that they were the same person. The particular story Ryūhoku alludes to comes from Xu You’s biography in the Gaoshi zhuan of Huangfu Mi 皇甫謐 (215–82); it recounts how Xu You felt defiled by hearing that he had been appointed to office by the sage ruler Yao, and so he went to wash his ears in a river. At that time, his friend Chaofu happened to be leading his ox to the river to drink. On learning the reason for Xu You’s behavior, Chaofu retorted that receiving the summons was Xu You’s own fault and likely his ulterior motive: if Xu You had truly wished to escape detection, he would have lived beyond the reach of human roads. Chaofu then led his ox upstream so as not to pollute its mouth; Ryūhoku’s allusion thus imagines how this must have made Chaofu’s ox thirsty. For further discussion of the episode, see Berkowitz 2000, 44–45. 61 The episode referred to here comes from the Han shu and records how, during the Spring and Autumn era, the powerful Duke Huan of Qi 齊桓公 overheard the ox groom Ning Qi 甯戚 singing an impassioned song while tapping out a tune on an ox horn as he fed his oxen. Duke Huan was impressed by the yearning young Ning Qi expressed in his song and offered him a position as a minister. Like many of the other allusions in this poem, this episode also appears in the Mengqiu, a popular primer of Literary Sinitic. 62 Anping refers to Tian Dan 田單, a minor official of Qi in the Warring States period; his biography appears in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. The particular episode referenced here, which also appears in the Mengqiu, narrates Tian Dan’s resourcefulness in overcoming seemingly imminent defeat at the hands of the Yan army that had surrounded the city walls of Qi. Tian Dan’s rather unusual stratagem was to round up over one thousand head of oxen, fit them with red silk cloth, paint them with a multicolored dragon pattern, and attach blades to the oxen’s horns and oil-soaked reeds to their tails. At night, he ignited the reeds and unleashed the oxen on the Yan



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troops. The oxen charged, and the Qi army followed in their wake. The Yan troops were caught off guard by the night attack and were moreover frightened by the dragon markings on the oxen. They were massacred by the onslaught, and the strategy ended in a total rout of the Yan forces. For a translation, see Watson 1979, 106. 63 Wencheng refers to Li Shaoweng 李少翁, a fangshi necromancer who enjoyed the favor of Emperor Wu of the Western Han. When Li’s powers faded later in life, however, he concocted a bizarre hoax: secretly feeding an ox with texts written on silk and then proclaiming that the ox’s stomach contained something miraculous. When the ox was killed and its innards examined, the writings were found, but unfortunately the emperor recognized Li’s handwriting. The episode appears in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (28.1387–88). 64 In the hot southern land of Wu, oxen were said to pant when they looked at the moon, mistaking it for the sun. This later became an idiom for extreme timidity; it is mentioned in the Shishuo xinyu; see Mather 2002, 20. 65 The reference here is to a satirical poem by Bo Juyi titled “Government Ox” 官牛 that is thought to date from roughly 808. One of his “New yuefu,” it tells of oxen being used to transport sand along the Chan River banks in modern-day Shaanxi to build a road that would allow a newly installed government official to keep his horse’s hooves clean: “Junior counselor-in-chief / Though your horse hoofs may be spotless as they trot along the sand / The neck of the ox that pulls the cart flows with blood” 右丞相、馬蹄蹋沙雖淨潔、牛領牽車欲流血; see Takagi 1958, 12:189. 66 The story of the wise old administrator Gong Sui, who rescued the people of the Bohai region from outlawry, occurs in the Han shu (and this episode is also included in the Mengqiu; see the translation in Watson 1979, 157–58). By dismissing the officials who had failed to apprehend the outlaws and furthermore declaring that those commoners who carried farming implements were good citizens, whereas those who held weapons were bandits, Gong Sui was able to end outlawry and promote peaceful cultivation. Ryūhoku is specifically referring to an extension of this policy: peasants were urged to engage in agriculture by allowing them to sell their weapons and buy cattle. 67 This is a reference to the story of Liu Xun 劉訓, a wealthy man during the Tang dynasty who invited guests to his home to view his peonies. At the time he had several hundred head of oxen tied up at the gate, and his guests pointed at them inquiring whether they were “the black peonies of the Liu house.” 68 In both RS, 1:3, and RZ, 311–12, the poem appears with the notation “composed at Mr. Hayashi’s” 林氏席上, which I have followed. In KS, 3:14b–15a, however, the poem appears with the notation “Divided rhymes at the gathering on 07.20” 七月廿日席上分韻, which suggests otherwise, for Ryūhoku’s diary (KN, 240–41) records that his own poetry gathering that month was on 07.20 and the Hayashi gathering on 07.25. It is difficult to be certain, but I think the two published inscriptions are more reliable because, whereas the version in the 1894 Ryūhoku shishō contains comments by Ōtsuki Bankei and Kikuchi Sankei, there are no marginal comments on the poem in the KS manuscript. This means that Bankei and Sankei must have commented on another, presumably no longer extant, manuscript that later served as the source used by the compilers of the 1894 anthology. Moreover, Bankei died in 1878, which means that this source text was prepared while Ryūhoku, who died in 1884, was still alive. It seems most likely, therefore, that Ryūhoku himself prepared this selection at some point before 1878, indicating in it that the poem was composed at the Hayashi gathering. 69 On the importance of the Mengqiu as a primer in Japan, see Guest 2013. The Mengqiu also includes another anecdote that Ryūhoku may be subtly referencing with the “I ask the ox” phrasing of line 3. The story tells of how Bing Ji, chancellor under Emperor Xuan of the Western Han, passes through the capital one spring day, ignoring the fights and other disturbances he sees en route but stopping to ask about an ox he sees panting. When asked why he looks into things so seemingly trivial, he explains that the panting of the ox in spite of the cool season may indicate climatic disruptions and disturbances in the balance of the elements—something more important than mere street fights, which the local authorities can handle.

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70 The rhyme group (inmoku) is 寒 (Ch. han; J. kan), and the rhyming characters are 竿 (gan; kan), 蟠 (pan; han), 安 (an; an), 桓 (huan; kan), 肝 (gan; kan), 酸 (suan; san), 丹 (dan; tan), 癉 (dan; tan), and 讙 (huan; kan). 71 Sankei’s phrase about “finding the source” alludes to a line in Mencius about immersing oneself in the dao and being able to find it all around (4B.14; see Lau 1970, 130). Bankei’s 一元大武 makes use of a term for sacrificial oxen in the Book of Rites. 72 See, for example, the poem titled “Cold cloud: at a gathering, I follow the rhymes of Rector Hayashi” 寒雲 席上次林祭酒韻 (KS, 3:33a) or the poem from 1857 titled “Leisurely chant: matching the rhymes of Hayashi Gakusai” 漫吟和林學齋韻 (KS, 4:2a); Hayashi Gakusai 林学斎 (1833–1906) succeeded to the post of rector in 1859. 73 Rhyme matching was a common practice among poetic contemporaries in the Tang, but transtemporal matching was a later development; in the preface to his “He Tao shi,” Su Dongpo is quoted as declaring, “I am the first to follow the rhymes of a poet of the past”; see Davis 1975, 106. For consideration of how nineteenth-century Japanese poets engaged in such matched-rhyme com­ position both with each other and transtemporally in response to Japanese and Chinese Sinitic poets of the past, see Fraleigh 2009b. Robert Tuck’s recent dissertation devotes a great deal of attention to rhyme matching as practiced among Meiji poets and also between Japanese and Qing literati; see Tuck 2012, esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 74 See, for example, the poems that Ryūhoku and the other participants in a Hayashi gathering composed matching the rhymes of a sequence by Fan Chengda 范成大 (1126–93) in KS, 2:8b–10a. 75 Seki Sekkō’s manuscripts refer to Ryūhoku consistently as “Kakudō-sensei,” and Uemura Roshū’s call him “Narushima gakushi.” 76 The yuefu or “music bureau” was established during Han times to collect song lyrics; Tang poets later composed their own folksy lyrics using the old yuefu titles (or creating new ones). In the case of “Bring on the wine,” Li He and Li Bo both composed well-known “folk songs” using this traditional title. 77 Hagura Kandō 羽倉簡堂 (Geki 外記, 1790–1862) had a long career as a daikan administrator in various locales before becoming a major figure behind the Tenpō Reforms of the 1840s. He was the architect of Mizuno Tadakuni’s agechirei policy (by which lands in the center of Edo were to be seized and consolidated under shogunal control). Fierce opposition led to the prompt retraction of the proposal, and both Mizuno and Hagura lost their posts; see Murakami Tadashi 1997, 164. Hagura was accomplished in Sinitic poetry and spent the remainder of his life engaged in writing and interacting with local intellectuals and literati. His home was adjacent to Ryūhoku’s (they appear as nos. 1 and 2 in figure 2.1), and moreover the two men shared numerous acquaintances, but I have come across virtually no indication of any interaction between them. Perhaps the fact that Narushima Motonao had been a principal opponent of the agechirei policy led to discord between their houses. 78 Oka Rokumon 1980, 1:32–33. The term 狂藥 (J. kyōyaku; Ch. kuangyao) emphasizes the wild and irrational behavior wine can incite; see Ryūhoku’s essay “Suikan no hanashi” (Story of a drunkard) in CS, May 20, 1883. 79 Judging from the age that Oka Rokumon gives for Ryūhoku, the year should be roughly Ansei 2 (1855), but the topic “Bring on the tea” does not appear in Ryūhoku’s poetry journals for this or any other year. It seems likely to me that Rokumon was slightly confused about the occasion, for the sekidai that he mentions, “Peach Blossom Spring,” does appear in Ryūhoku’s journals as a topic for 02.16 of Ansei 2; see KS, 2:5a. Moreover, the name Ōta Randō, whom Rokumon says attended Ryūhoku’s gathering with him, also appears in Ryūhoku’s diary as attending the gathering on that date along with “ten or more other students.” If this was indeed the occasion when Rokumon visited, then the shikai was not a New Year’s gathering but rather a celebration of Ryūhoku’s birthday; see KN, 114. 80 Both poems appear in KS, 2:1a–b, and as item 312 in SSH, 2:22. In the quatrain for the “small” months, “three beginnings” refers to New Year’s Day, since it marks a new “beginning” not only for the year but for the month and day as well. The “twelve balustrades” can mean a balustrade or



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railing that zig-zags; Ryūhoku may have had in mind a song lyric (ci) by Ouyang Xiu (1007–72) called “Youth wandering” 少年遊 that begins “In spring, he leans alone against the twelve zig-zag balustrades; clear azure skies extend to the distant clouds” 闌幹十二獨憑春 晴碧遠連雲. The final line of the quatrain for the “large” months is a bit forced, since the meaning of the poem necessitates reading 九十一 as “ninety” days of spring and “one” wine gourd, but, in order to represent the numerals of the large months, the graphs should instead be read as “nine” and “eleven.” Incidentally, Ryūhoku’s calendar poem for the following year did not contain any such technical faults; see KS, 3:1b, and item 352 in SSH, 2:43. 81 Sugishita 2004, 337. 82 Each volume of Sekkō’s scrapbooks contains several shireki produced by local bunjin in a dazzling variety of styles; they are clustered at the beginning of each yearly volume, suggesting their function as New Year’s greetings. An 1856 shireki produced by Iwamatsu Tōsai, a regular participant in Ryūhoku’s poetry gathering, appears as item 365 in SSH, 2:47. Several additional examples of poem calendars can be seen in Kudō 1989, 44–62. 83 Ryūhoku notes in his early Ansei era diaries the consistent participation of several others in his shikai including individuals named Hattori, Shimamura, and Miyamoto, but their identities are uncertain. Perhaps “Hattori” was Hattori Hazan 服部波山 (1827–94), a Shitaya-based literatus who was friendly with Ōnuma Chinzan and others. Another possibility is Hattori Rakuzan 服部 楽山, a scholar who was friendly with Uemura Roshū and who published Shin jikka zekku 清十 家絶句, an 1852 anthology of Qing poems. Inui Teruo has compiled a very helpful table of Ryūhoku’s poetry gatherings from Ansei 2 to 5, though some meetings and individuals are missing (e.g., 06.19 and 07.19 of Ansei 2, the second of which happens to coincide with Roshū’s first visit); see Inui 2003, 42. 84 Roshū was born into a family that had been employed by the shogunate for generations as yoriki (samurai who served as patrolmen or guards). The opening poems in his first poetry collection note how a New Year’s gathering at Seki Sekkō’s in 1848 provided Roshū with his first introduction to his future teacher Chinzan. In thanking Sekkō, Roshū observes that the Uemura and Seki families have been friendly with each other for “five generations”; see Uemura 1862, 1:1a–b. In addition to his own collections of poetry, Roshū edited several kanshi anthologies. The residences of Sekkō, Chinzan, Roshū, and Kaneko Sakō are identified as nos. 5, 9, 10, and 11 in figure 2.1. 85 KS, 2:23a. Four of the Du Fu poems from the “Qiu xing” 秋興 sequence of eight, including the one from which Ryūhoku drew the rhyme characters, were included in the sixteenth-century Tang shi xuan (J. Tōshisen) anthology, a collection of Tang poems (focused on the High Tang) that was particularly influential in Edo period Japan. 86 For a translation of Li Bo’s preface, see Minford and Lau 2000, 1:723. The preface is particularly well known in Japan because Bashō alludes to it in the opening of Narrow Road to the Deep North; see Matsuo 1966, 97. 87 Item 374 in Sekkō’s scrapbook (SSH, 2:51) is a memorandum for a poetry gathering to be held on 02.21 of Ansei 3 with the following assigned topics: “An image of the gathering at the peach and pear garden” 桃李園宴集圖, “A fallen plum” 落梅, and “Spring evening on a post station road” 驛路春夕. Though unidentified, the advertised gathering was surely Ryūhoku’s, for his poetry journals include not only the jizishi composition on Li Bo’s text (dated the same day), but poems on the other two topics as well; see KS, 3:4a; 5a–5b. 88 SSS, 3:4b–6b. Ryūhoku’s poetry journals from the same time period also contain poems on the topics of Su Dongpo’s “Poetic Exposition at Red Cliff ” and Zhou Dunyi’s “On the Love of the Lotus” (KS, 2:19b–20a). Though Ryūhoku’s compositions are not jizishi, they may well have some connection to the jizishi in Sekkō’s collection. 89 The sequence appears in KS, 3:25b–32b. The term 拈韻 (J. nen’in; Ch. nianyun) indicates that the poet could choose the rhyme group, or inmoku, as he wished; it is used contrastively with 限韻 (J. gen’in; Ch. xianyun), where the inmoku is determined by some other constraint. In his diary, Ryūhoku lists the seven students with whom he composed these poems, identifying each with a single-graph abbreviation; see KN, 261.

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90 Ryūhoku chose just six of them to include in Shunseirō shishō, and only two were included in Ryūhoku zenshū. 91 NSS, 1:15. For examination of the shifting ways in which one Japanese site, Mount Fuji, was depicted in Sinitic verse from the early modern period, see Ishikawa Tadahisa 2003, 13–25; and Horiguchi Ikuo 1996. 92 For an excellent and succinct discussion of the significance of the Kōko Shisha through the career of Ichikawa Kansai, see Ibi 2008. Niina 1991 focuses on Kōko Shisha poets’ compositions on the cherry blossom, showing how they stimulated contemporary poetic circles by turning their attention to such definitively Japanese topics. 93 Niina 1994 gives a detailed consideration of how Kansai, Jotei, and other members of the pioneering Kōko Shisha school fashioned the topic of katsuo as a viable theme of kanshi expression. 94 Uemura 1862, 2:11a–b. 95 KS, 3:9a–9b. 96 Niina 1994 notes that the fish had long been particularly popular among military houses because its name sounds like “fish of victory” (katsu-uo 勝つ魚). 97 In “A letter prohibiting haikai to my descendants,” Kinkō argues that those aspiring to write Sinitic verse and waka should “maintain a clear distinction between ga (elegant) and zoku (commonplace)” and that they should never “compose with lowly and everyday thoughts or words”; see Narushima Kinkō 1917. Ibi Takashi quotes this instruction to argue that it was virtually unthinkable in Kinkō’s time, when Sorai’s kakuchō aesthetics dominated, for the haikai style to influence composers of Sinitic verse; see his essay in Nakamura Yukihiko 1986, 143. 98 Ryūhoku’s poem appears in KS, 3:19b–20a. Roshū’s is in Uemura 1862, 2:20a–b. Ryūhoku’s diary indicates that Roshū was present at a poetry gathering he held on 09.21 of Ansei 3 (1856), which is very close to the time when these poems were composed; see KN, 253. Even if ushi no toki mairi was not an official topic at Ryūhoku’s shikai, it seems almost certain that the two poets’ nearly simultaneous compositions on the topic were connected. Ryūhoku and Roshū were not the first Japanese kanshi poets to write about this thoroughly domestic and undeniably eerie practice; Roshū’s poem in fact matches the rhymes of a work on the same topic by Kyushu-based Sinologue Hirose Kyokusō 広瀬旭荘 (1807–63). 99 Bankei’s comments appear in RS, 1:1–2. 100 Shin kokin wakashū no. 1615, in Tanaka and Akase 1992, 471. 101 Uemura 1862, 2:10a. 102 RS, 1:15; there are slight variants in KS, 3:6a. 103 The episode occurs in book 9 of Heike; see Ichiko 1975, 2:242–44. For a translation, see Watson 2006, 95–97. 104 SSS, 7:11a. Sekkō’s 扶桑 (Ch. Fusang; J. Fusō) is a conventional term for Japan based on a traditional association between the archipelago and an eastern island in Chinese mythology where a “great mulberry” grows. 105 Uemura 1862, 2:9a. The phrase about having affection for a “bare mulberry tree” in line 5 seems to allude to a saying from the earliest Buddhist sutra translated into Chinese to the effect that the Buddha did not stay for more than three nights beneath a mulberry tree lest feelings of attachment to it arise. The phrase is also reported in the Hou Han shu (juan 30b, 1082). 106 KS, 3:4b–5a. The second episode is in book 7 of Heike; see Ichiko 1975, 2:94–97; Watson 2006, 75–77. 107 Thomas Hare argues that Zeami “simply chose the name [Kitsunegawa] to fit into a chain of associations” (specifically with a Bo Juyi couplet) rather than for its location; Hare 1986, 204; Koyama Hiroshi et al. 1975, 1:165, n. 26. 108 Noh flowered under the patronage of the Ashikaga shoguns in the medieval period and continued to have a role in the Tokugawa shogunate’s celebratory occasions. Ryūhoku’s diary records his attendance at such performances staged for the shogun, such as the entry for 09.04 of Kaei 7 (1854); in a diary that tends to be somewhat laconic, the fact that Ryūhoku listed here all eight pieces performed that day suggests his keen early interest in Noh.



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109 Zeami’s Noh play reads, “Among them, this Tadanori was highly regarded as one who had mastered the ways of both military and literary arts”; see Koyama Hiroshi et al. 1975, 1:164. A similar statement occurs in the Heike narrative: “O, what a pity! He was a man skilled in both military arts and in the way of poetry!”; see Ichiko 1975, 2:244. 110 RS, 1:4–5. 111 Maohong 茂弘 was the sobriquet of Wang Dao 王導, who criticized Yuan Gui 元規 (i.e., Yu Liang 庾亮). According to the Shishuo xinyu, Wang Dao raised a fan whenever the western wind stirred up dust, saying that Yuan Gui’s dust would pollute him; for a translation, see Mather 2002, 463–64. 112 Shiyun indicates Fan Ran 范冉, an eccentric figure from the Later Han dynasty who avoided official service in favor of an itinerant and spare lifestyle. Shiyun’s Hou Han shu biography (also excerpted in the Mengqiu) quotes a contemporary popular verse that mocks his straitened circumstances, pointing out that his stove has gathered dust from disuse, and his pot contains only water, perfect for fish to swim in. While suggesting the success of his household’s cleaning efforts in rendering even the famously dusty stove immaculate, Ryūhoku also draws a connection between his own household and Shiyun’s impoverished circumstances. 113 KS, 1:37b–38a; SS, 4b; RS, 1:7; and RZ, 312. 114 Much is unclear about Ryūhoku’s family life, his wives, and his children. The most focused and thorough account is in KBKS, 1:244–51. In an interview conducted with Ryūhoku’s eleventh daughter, Kiku, the editors of this volume were told that he had sixteen children: four boys and twelve girls. The same number of progeny appears in the Narushima family pedigree in Miwa 1990, 6. If anything, however, this is an underestimate, for Ryūhoku actually fathered six sons, three of whom died in infancy (and only one of these three sons, Gorō 五郎, is listed on the pedigree). The children were born to four mothers: his first wife, Kanō Ryū; his second wife, Nagai; his third wife, Ochō; and a concubine named Raku. See also Shinoda 1936. 115 KS, 2:24b–25b; RS, 1:13–14; and RZ, 313–14; an annotated version appears in SRS, 223–25. 116 See, for example, Wu Qi and Cai Zhengsun 1804, 9:5a. 117 KS, 1:14b–15a; RS, 1:4; an annotated version appears in SRS, 216–17. Ryūhoku’s poem incorporates several phrases from other Li Bo poems. The couplet about “Jade Mountain” being about to crumble is a conventional reference to drunkenness that is particularly associated with Li Bo’s “Song of Xiangyang” (which in turn is inspired by a Shishuo xinyu episode; see Mather 2002, 406–7). Ryūhoku also draws on phrases other Tang poets used in reference to Li Bo; he calls Li Bo a “Banished Immortal,” echoing the famous story of He Zhizhang referring to Li Bo this way on first meeting him, and he alludes to Du Fu’s characterization of Li Bo sleeping in the bars of Chang’an after downing a gallon of wine and writing one hundred poems. 118 This excerpt is from the first of Li Bo’s two poems on the topic; for another translation, see Hinton 1996, 6–7. 119 Aoki 1942, 269–95; Aoki argues that the poetic genre of tihuashi was forged in the Tang dynasty as a fusion of yongwushi (poems on things) and huazan (inscriptions on paintings). 120 Yuyang was where An Lushan assembled his troops; Bo Juyi’s “Chang hen ge” 長恨歌 illustrates the emperor Xuanzong’s impervious absorption with his prize consort Yang (Guifei) by counterposing the beat of invading war drums to the sounds of courtly dancing and music: “Then kettledrums from Yu-yang came making the whole earth tremble  / and shook apart those melodies, ‘Coats of Feathers, Rainbow Skirts’ ” 漁陽鼙鼓動地來 驚破霓裳羽衣曲; see Owen 1996, 442–47. 121 These features of the Lin Bu narrative can be found in Shishuo xinyu bu, a Ming edition of Liu Yiqing’s Shishuo xinyu with He Liangjun’s supplementary accounts of thematically linked later figures. This expanded version of the text was reprinted in Japan, and the account of Lin Bu appears in the “Reclusion” section (corresponding to juan 17 of Liu Yiqing’s original): “Lin Bu went into reclusion on Solitary Hill. He always kept two cranes. When he released them they would soar up to the tops of the clouds, and, after they had flown around for a good while, they would return to enter the cage again. Bu would often float a little boat around the various temples at West Lake.

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When a visitor arrived at his residence, his acolyte would answer the door and bring the guest in to sit down. He would then open the cage and release the cranes. After a while, Bu would always paddle his small craft back. It must have been because the flying cranes were a sign that a guest had arrived”; He Liangjun 1779, juan 14, 23a–b. 122 For another translation, see Matsuo Bashō 1966, 61. Similar associations of Lin Bu with reclusion, plums, and cranes are evident in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s engagement with the Lin Bu story; see Sakaki 2005, 90. 123 KN, 3:2a–b. 124 On these events, see Yuan-Kang Wang 2011, 52–55; and Mote 1999, 115–17. 125 Ryūhoku was not the first Japanese poet to reference Lin Bu alongside the events leading to the Treaty of Shanyuan, for Rai San’yō’s 1810 poem “A painting of Lin Bu” 林逋圖 employs a similar frame; see SNS, 10:296. Nevertheless, Ryūhoku’s comparison was sufficiently unusual to prompt his contemporary Kikuchi Sankei to call Ryūhoku’s composition a good match to San’yō’s; see RS, 1:1. 126 KS, 2:12a–b; RS, 1:9. 127 The Song shu states that Tao “undid his seal ribbon and resigned his post” upon saying this, and the Jin shu account is similar; see Tian 2005, 74–80. 128 On the “dynastic loyalty” reading in particular, see Tian 2005, 60; Swartz 2008, esp. 81–85; and Kawai 2013, 196–98 129 As Ryūhoku’s couplet indicates, Xie An and Wang Dao both served the Jin as statesmen, and it is for their publicly minded integrity that they are paired with one another in the Mengqiu. The lengthy summary of their deeds in this popular eighth-century primer is headed “Xie An was noble and pure; Wang Dao was selfless and loyal.” Yet as even the Mengqiu account notes and as Ryūhoku would emphasize in later usages, Xie An did not serve in any official capacity for nearly half of his adult life; instead, he spent his days in leisurely abandon. Dwelling off in the eastern hills, Xie An earned quite a reputation for ignoring the court’s frequent requests that he serve, choosing instead to continue consorting with courtesans before he ventured out of his hedonistic hermitage at the age of forty; see Hayakawa 1973, 1:154–58. The absence of any reference to dissipation in Ryūhoku’s usage here is significant. 130 Originally the couplet read: “Yao and Yu are gone, Confucius and Mencius dead too / Under heaven, neither Zhu [Xi] nor the Cheng [brothers, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi] will come again” 堯禹 已殂孔孟没 天下無復朱與程. 131 Line 12 originally read: “Transcending it all, I vainly aspire to the name of Tao Yuanming” 高蹈 漫慕彭澤名. 132 KS, 2:22a–b; RS 1:12; and RZ, 313; an annotated version appears in NROC, 9–14. 133 Qu Yuan has been called the paragon of “the stalwart official whose mad ardour was his undoing”; Schneider 1980, 17. Schneider argues that this “flamboyantly self-righteous” quality is what distinguishes Qu Yuan from others who encounter unfavorable situations but escape them by seeking employment elsewhere, going into hiding, or otherwise biding their time. By contrast, Qu Yuan remains fiercely engaged and continues to remonstrate with the king of Chu even after being exiled. After Chu’s demise, he is said to have committed suicide at the Miluo River. Frustrated officials have been invoking Qu Yuan in their poetry since Jia Yi (201–169 bce). 134 KS, 2:14a–b; RS, 1:9. 135 His instructor was Yamaoka Sōzaemon, a minor shogunal attendant whose son Kintō was a friend of Ryūhoku’s; see Inui 2003, 306 n. 71. Ryūhoku had engaged in archery and equestrian practice a few times in the past; see his diary entries for 02.26 and 03.13 of Kaei 7 (1854), or 03.27 of Ansei 2 (1855). 136 See, for example, the hunt described on 02.11 of Ansei 3 (1856) in KN, 206–7. 137 Maeda 1976a, 48. 138 KS, 4:20a–21a. Ryūhoku uses the graph “superior” 上 to indicate the Tokugawa shogun and accords further deference to him by placing this graph atop a new column so that none appears higher than it, a practice known as heishutsu 平出. He also writes 弘, the graph representing his own name, in a markedly smaller hand.



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139 KN, 372–73. 140 The entry for 04.26 of Ansei 4 (1857) describes the ceremony at length. Ryūhoku’s grandfather Motonao had been censured during the Tenpō reforms for his opposition to the agechirei policy of Mizuno Tadakuni. His father Kadō also subsequently lost his position as an okujusha; for a discussion of these events, see Inui 2003, 32–33. 141 KN, 373. 142 Kusumi 2009, 89–94. 143 The poem is the ninth of ten in the sequence and appears in KS, 4:15b. My interpretation differs from that of Inui Teruo, who reads the “Anshi” of line 6 as referring to Wang Anshi; see Inui 2003, 46. 144 As part of the divorce proceedings, Ryūhoku returned the sum of twenty yen to the Kanō family on 03.25 of Ansei 4 (1857); his diary entry for 11.24 of Kaei 7 (1854) records receiving a dowry payment in the same amount from the family just a few days before the wedding ceremony; see KN, 295–96, and p. 85.

Chapter 3 1 On the history of Yanagibashi, its position within Edo’s demimonde, and the status of geisha, see NCY, xv–xxvi. 2 Poem text from Nakamura Yasuhiro and Murayama 2008, 193–94; see the variant version in Ishii 1916, 127–28. In framing his recollection of Gonsai’s admonition, Shishido concedes, “I don’t remember the poem precisely, and there may be some mistaken characters.” Indeed, the rhyme pattern does not make sense for an octave, but perhaps Gonsai intended these lines as a series of rhymed couplets. 3 That the text circulated in manuscript in the early 1860s is clear from the 1869 preface to the first volume; the preface writer makes reference to reading the text at some point “seven or eight years” in the past. The inclusion of this preface in the 1874 published version suggests that 1869 is when Ryūhoku first tried to publish it but was denied the right by the new Meiji government. Consistent with this hypothesis, the first volume of the text appears in a listing of censored books for 1869; see Saitō Shōzō 1932, 2. There are also pirate printed editions of the text’s first volume, but Shioda Ryōhei (1940, 1941) concludes that both of the known lines of pirate editions were produced after permission for publication was denied in 1869 and furthermore that the pirate versions may have been tacitly authorized by Ryūhoku. While recognizing that manuscripts of the text circulated to some degree in the late Tokugawa period, Shioda rejects the prevalent assumption that pirate versions of it were printed then. Shioda also compares the various printed versions of the first volume with a manuscript copy and argues that Ryūhoku toned down the vulgarity of the latter’s gikun (colloquial Japanese “playful glosses”) before having the text printed; for a different view see Aoyanagi 1985, 9–10. 4 To be sure, it was not unknown for Confucian scholars, even those affiliated with the Shōheizaka Academy, to visit Yanagibashi. Yet the fact that “private” behavior could nevertheless lead to public condemnation is clear from the examples of Confucian scholars such as Kamei Nanmei 亀井南 冥 (1743–1814) and Minagawa Kien 皆川淇園 (1734–1807); consorting with courtesans and other forms of “dissolution” had brought them censure a few decades earlier. As Robert Backus observes, “indifference to morality could be a damning charge at a time when many people believed that a direct relation existed between scholarship, education, and behavior”; Backus 1979a, 61–65. 5 KS, 1:21a–23b; the poem is headed 閏七月既望月色清瑩有感賦此七十韻. A comment in Ryū­ hoku’s diary entry for i07.22 suggests that he finished the composition on this date, six days after the date given in the poem’s title (i07.16); see Ibi et al. 2013, 237. 6 Lines 81–84 respond to American requests for Japan to allow the stationing of foreign legations on its territory and to provide provisions to foreign ships. The “ancestral law” of lines 85–86 refers to restrictions on foreign trade.

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7 With Wang Anshi’s “new policies,” mentioned in lines 91–94, the state took a more active role in regulating economic, military, and educational affairs, but the reforms earned Wang the contempt of his contemporaries. The episode discussed in lines 95–98 concerns Qin Hui’s 1142 decision to conclude a treaty between his Southern Song dynasty and the Jurchens (Jin) in spite of the unfavorable conditions offered. 8 In line 101, perhaps Ryūhoku had in mind the “Three Disquisitions on Heaven and Man,” traditionally attributed to Dong Zhongshu. In the next line, Ryūhoku refers to Liang Hong, who composed his “Wu yi ge” 五噫歌 upon traveling to the Luoyang capital in the first century and seeing the contrast between its splendid state buildings and the sufferings of the common people. The emperor Zhang learned of the poem and sought out its author, but Liang Hong had already retreated into reclusion. The anecdote is included in the Mengqiu, and detailed narrations of the story can be found in Berkowitz 2000, 106–12; and Vervoorn 1990, 196–201. 9 Bian Que and Cang Gong are frequently named together as pioneering figures of medicine in ancient China. 10 Although Gonsai was surely distressed, as the youthful Ryūhoku was, to see Confucian learning slighted, it would be wrong to assume that Gonsai was a narrow-minded xenophobe. Gonsai’s philosophical orientation was solidly grounded in Zhu Xi Confucianism, but he had a comparatively catholic interest in learning from other schools, including Legalism and Daoism; see Nakamura Yasuhiro and Murakami 2008, 136–42; and Ishii 1916, 91–96. The focus of his comments on Ryūhoku’s poem should thus be understood as condemning an excessively reverential attitude toward Western study that came at the expense of traditional learning. 11 RZ, 1. Though the subject of the biography is himself, Ryūhoku refers to himself in the third person. 12 For a succinct discussion of fūryū with a focus on the Edo period, see Harries 1984. Ogawa 1951 traces the evolution of fengliu from an early sense of capacity for moral suasion to its usage in Jin times to refer to individuals who act unconventionally or have a unique sensibility. As these senses evolved further, the term came to be used to mean attractive sensual beauty, a tolerant attitude, a lack of restraint, and sometimes even licentiousness. 13 Ryūhoku’s diary for Ansei 6 (1859) is no longer extant, but Nagai Kafū had access to it before it was lost. According to Kafū, the entry for 09.01 of that year read, “I began writing Shinshi.” Ryūhoku had finished most of the text by the winter of 1859, but he subsequently edited and supplemented it through 07.05 of the following year, on which day his diary reads, “I completed Ryūkyō shinshi”; see Nagai 1927b, 284, 288, 290; KN, 595. Internal evidence from New Chronicles bears this out; near the end of its first volume, a note states that the preceding text “was completed in this fifty-sixth year of the cycle [i.e., 1859]”; it is followed by some supplementary information from “this fifty-seventh year of the cycle [i.e., 1860]”; see NCY, 62; RKSS, 1:26a; EHRS, 373. 14 The Yanagibashi district and Ryūhoku’s Izumibashi-dōri residence are indicated as nos. 6 and 9 in figure 0.3. 15 Sugimoto Kōseki, whose given name was Chūtatsu 忠達, was the grandson of shogunal physician Sugimoto Chūon, the biological father of Ryūhoku’s father, Kadō (who had been adopted into the Narushima family in 1816). The Sugimoto residence is no. 6 in figure 3.3; the Narushimas’ residence on Izumibashi-dōri is indicated as no. 5 and their former residence on Neribei-kōji as no. 3 in the same figure. 16 KN, 284; there are a few scattered references to Sumida excursions at earlier points in Ryūhoku’s diary. 17 KN, 315–16. Izawa Heikurō 伊澤兵九郎 was a student of Ryūhoku’s; see Maeda 1976a, 43, 56. 18 Even penetrating reader Nagai Kafū notes being baffled by the identity of 月劵, in spite of the fact that he quotes the above passage mentioning Kokatsu in her un-encoded guise as 小勝 just two lines earlier; see Nagai 1927b, 285. 19 Maeda uses the list of geisha from the first volume of New Chronicles (see NCY, 61–62) to decipher several of the diary’s other coded names, such as 風鐸 (J. fūtaku, “wind bell”) used to indicate Osuzu お鈴, whose name means “bell”; 富岳 (J. Fugaku, “Mount Fu[ji]” or “Prosperity Peak”) for



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Ofuji お藤, whose name means wisteria but is homophonous with the toponym Mount Fuji; 微陽 (J. biyō, “faint sunlight”) for Oteru 小照, whose name suggests “shining”; and 巨眼 (J. kyogan, “large eye”) for Hitomi 瞳, whose name means “pupil”; see Maeda 1976a, 62–63. 20 Little is known about Ryūhoku’s second wife. In her 1999 short story “Narushima Ryūhoku no tsuma” (The wife of Narushima Ryūhoku), novelist Hayashi Eriko names her Yuki ゆき, but, as far as I can tell, this is Hayashi’s invention. Numerous scholars (e.g., Maeda 1976a, 120; SRS, 337 n. 11; Takahashi Akio 2012, 159) state that Ryūhoku’s second wife died in 1871, but actually she died in 1864; see Nagai Kafū 1927b, 291; Imamura 1977e, 18. Certainly by 1869 Ryūhoku was referring to her as “my late wife”; see RZ, 129. In any case, Ryūhoku’s marriage to Ms. Nagai, which took place on 04.24 of 1857, brought him into association with numerous individuals with whom he began to spend his leisure time. One such companion was Togawa Seisai 戸川成齋, the husband of his wife’s sister; one year after the Restoration, Ryūhoku visited Seisai in Okayama, a journey I discuss in chapter 5. The second volume of New Chronicles also quotes a poem composed by another member of the Nagai clan, Hōzan; see NCY, 125–26. 21 Nagai Kafū 1927b, 286. 22 Maeda 1975b, 54–57; Maeda 1976a, 70; see also the helpful table in Inui 2003, 50. 23 KN, 483. Maeda solves another mystery that eluded earlier readers of the diary by deciphering the cryptic name “Tripod Bay” 鼎浦 (J. teiho; Ch. dingpu). The ancient Chinese ceremonial vessel known as a ding 鼎 had three legs—and thus the graph is a cipher for “three”—and the name of the boathouse is Miuraya 三浦屋; see Maeda 1975b, 57. 24 There are various versions of the first two lines; Du Mu 2002, 7–8; for a different translation, see Burton 1990, 30. 25 According to Yamaguchi (1991): “Mitate is, in a sense, the art of citation. When an object is displayed on ceremonial occasions, for example, a classical reference—one familiar to anyone knowledgeable about history or the classics—is assigned to that object so that the immediate object merges with the object that is being referred to.” 26 For a discussion of the mitate technique in haikai, see Shirane 1998, 7–8, 73–76. 27 Du Mu’s poem “Red Cliff” 赤壁 reads: “A broken pike buried in the sand, its iron not yet rusted; / I pick it up and rub it clean, remembering an earlier dynasty. / If the eastern wind had not favored Zhou Yu that day, / The two Qiaos’ vernal charms might be locked in Bronze Sparrow Terrace” 折戟沈沙鐵未銷 自將磨洗認前朝 東風不與周郎便 銅雀春深鎖二喬. In the Battle at Red Cliff, the allied forces of Wu and Shu defeated the state of Wei. The Wu general Zhou Yu carried out a spectacular attack on the Wei ships, which were under the command of Cao Cao, succeeding in burning them all. Zhou Yu’s wife was the younger of the two Qiao sisters, and the elder Qiao was the bride of another eminent man from Wu, Sun Ce. Later fictional treatments have emphasized how Cao Cao’s desire for the Qiao sisters was a factor leading up to the conflict itself. In chapter 44 of Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for example, Zhuge Liang exploits the men’s rivalry for the sisters to goad Zhou Yu into attacking Cao Cao. Du Mu’s poem ponders an alternative outcome; had Cao Cao been victorious, he would have taken the two Qiao sisters and sequestered them in his Bronze Sparrow Terrace. See Du Mu 2002, 254–55; for other translations, see Burton 1990, 44; Luo 1994, 566. Some attribute the poem to Li Shang­ yin. Ryūhoku assigned “The Two Qiaos” as a topic to his poetry gathering on 04.21 of Ansei 4 (1857); see KS, 4:7a. 28 Maeda 1976a, 119–120; see also the essay Ryūhoku wrote to commemorate the completion of the residence for Ochō in RZ, 284–85. 29 RKSS, 1:22; an annotated version appears in NROC, 23–26, where Hino interprets line 3 to mean “It has grown late while I was visiting countless drinking houses, and now my tipsiness has worn off.” See also SRS, 225–26. 30 For Burton Watson’s translation of Bo Juyi’s “Pipa xing,” see Minford and Lau 2000, 890–93. 31 Niina 1998 is a detailed study of the hanjōkimono genre; for a discussion in English, see Fraleigh 2005, 186–200. Some portions of Seiken’s Edo hanjōki have been translated and insightfully introduced in Markus 1991 and 2000.

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32 The 1964 article comparing the texts of Yu Huai and Ryūhoku is reprinted in Maeda 1972, 215–35; this quotation is from p. 222. Pastreich 2000 makes a similar comparison and reaches the same conclusion. Yu Huai’s text was well known to writers of the Edo period, having been reprinted in Japan and even translated into Japanese. 33 Maeda Ai 1972, 120; a slightly different account by Takizawa Bakin is quoted in Nagai Hiroo 1966, 70–71. 34 On the impact of the Tenpō reforms on publishing, see Kornicki 2001, 344–45; and Bolitho 1989, 143–46. 35 Quoted in Maeda 1972, 122. 36 Pollack 1979 and Markus 1998 are two informative treatments of the kyōshi genre in English; both emphasize the genre’s significance as a medium of social critique and satire. 37 See Nakano’s chapter in Suwa and Hino 1977, 101–24; and the expanded version in Nakano 1981. Another concise account of kanbun gesaku is Ariga 1986, 32–46. On the efforts of Japanese scholars to learn vernacular Chinese and to produce original works in it, see Pastreich 2011 and Hedberg 2012. 38 Endō Shizuo states that Seiken was punished because his “evocation of conditions within the pleasure quarters in kanbun infuriated the Hayashi, who headed the academy and supported Con­ fucian study. From this it is self-evident how strict the world of kanbun was”; see Endō 1973, 101. 39 Nagai Kafū 1911, 122. 40 In a short essay titled “On reading New Account of the Prosperity of Tokyo,” Hong Kong–based Qing journalist Wang Tao (1828–97) compares Bushō’s work to Chinese urban writings and argues that, in documenting the city’s actual conditions, it provides valuable information to government officials; see Wang Tao 1883, juan 10, 19b–20a. Similarly, in the travelogue he wrote about the summer he spent in Japan, Wang refers to Ryūhoku’s New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and its “detailed account of Yanagibashi’s lovely charms”; see Wang Tao 1880, 1:18a–b. 41 McCullough 1988, 162. The nue beast appears in Tales of the Heike, where it is killed by Minamoto no Yorimasa. 42 For a detailed treatment of gikun, see Ariga 1989. On glosses in general, see Konno 2009. The term sakun (left gloss) is also used to identify these supplementary glosses on the basis of their placement to the left of the text. 43 EHJK, 1:5b; EHRS, 11. For this and other texts that use playful glosses, I translate them in smaller type above the words they gloss. For further discussion of this strategy, see NCY, xxxv–xli, lviii–lx. 44 On this idea of hanjōkimono filling in the gaps of gazetteers, see Niina 1998; Ishizaki 1939, 26; and Maeda 1976b. 45 Nakano 1981, 335–37. 46 Niina 1995, 61–62. 47 NCY, 4–5; RKSS, 1:[1]a; EHRS, 337. 48 Strassberg 1994, 27. 49 EHJK, 1:1a; EHRS, 4. 50 Niina sees a retrospective or nostalgic gaze as a distinguishing feature of Ryūhoku’s work (1998, 260). 51 NCY, 6; RS, 1:[ii]b; EHRS, 338. The argument is similar to Seiken’s in EHJK, 5:1a; EHRS, 268–69. 52 Ryūhoku’s pose of abject poverty and his claim that he must write for his livelihood echo the very real financial difficulties that Seiken faced and that he mentions in the passage quoted above. Moreover, Ryūhoku uses phrases such as “worn-down inkstone” and “bald brush” that appear in Seiken’s text; see EHJK, 3:1b–2a; EHRS, 139. 53 Ryūhoku repeats the word “supplement” 附益 (J. fueki; Ch. fuyi) here, which he used earlier in the preface to praise Seiken’s accomplishment, stating that even an expert could not “supplement” it. Placing his work on a historical continuum with Seiken’s, he argues that the passage of time has given him the chance to offer precisely such supplementation, and he looks forward to a day when some reader will do the same for his New Chronicles. 54 Horio 1994, 164, 171. Maeda also notes this disparity and argues: “Since he was emerging from the depths of the Willow Camp [i.e., the shogunate] to enter the Willow Bridge [i.e., Yanagibashi], Ryūhoku was a far cry from a civilian like Seiken, who could easily slip into the crowds that



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thronged the city’s poor lanes and hotspots. His upbringing was too genteel to allow him to acquire the mind of a commoner as his own”; see Maeda 1976a, 101. 55 There is a further transparent self-contradiction between the narrator’s claim that he is a student ignorant of the quarters and his claim that this text about the quarters is something that he alone can write; see Ariyama 1972, 300. 56 EHJK, 3:22b–23a; EHRS, 170. 57 Shioda 1939, 106. Shioda 1940 elaborates the point, positing a “covert” critical aim in the second volume. A contrary view that emphasizes instead the essential consistency of the two volumes appears in Mizuhara 1939, 42. 58 Some early critics were dismissive of the work as a whole; Kimura Ki, for example, saw only superficial sneers in it, calling it a combination “guidebook” (J. annaiki) and “report of hearsay” (J. fūbunki); see Kimura 1925, 126. 59 Wada 1950a, 16; see also Wada 1950b, which cites the satirical dimensions of the text to argue for its modernity. 60 Yu Huai 1999, 3a; Yu Huai 2000, 9. I have also made use of the helpful notes in Iwaki 1965 and Levy 1966. 61 Yu Huai 1999, 2b–3a; Yu Huai 2000, 8. 62 In Mencius (1B.2), Mencius faults King Xuan of Qi for imposing harsh penalties on hunting instead of sharing his spacious garden with his subjects. The idea here is that the prohibition on hunting within the garden would have led to an abundance of birds but that even this great number of birds could all be felled by Yanagibashi’s plentiful fruit. 63 NCY, 9; RKSS, 1:1b–2a; EHRS, 340. 64 NCY, 7–8; RKSS, 1:1a; EHRS, 339. 65 Edo meisho zue (An illustrated guide to the famous sites of Edo; published 1834–36) attributes the origin of the name Yanagibashi to the bridge’s proximity to Yanagiwara. 66 NCY, 9–10; RKSS, 1:2a; EHRS, 340. 67 Kitagawa 2002, 3:381–82. 68 NCY, 11; RKSS, 1:2b–3a; EHRS, 341. 69 See Mencius 6A.4; Lau 1970, 161. Ryūhoku also draws in this passage on phrasing from Mencius VA.3. 70 See Mencius 4B.18; translation slightly modified from Lau 1970, 130–31. The normally wholesome associations of this passage are evident from the fact that it inspired the name of the Suisaien 水哉園, a Kyushu academy founded in 1835 that stressed “cultivation of moral behaviour”; Mehl 2003, 107, 125. 71 Guo Jianxun 1996, 535. Translation slightly modified from Lynn 1994, 78. 72 NCY, 15–16; RKSS, 1:5a; EHRS, 344. 73 The narrator points out a different sort of gap between name and reality with his description of the practice by which boathouses falsely appropriate status symbols reserved for samurai use; see NCY, 13. 74 NCY, 16; RKSS, 1:5b; EHRS, 345. 75 NCY, 17; RKSS, 1:5b–6a; EHRS, 345. 76 Owen 1996, 65. 77 NCY, 23–24; RKSS, 1:8b; EHRS, 349. 78 NCY, 32–34; RKSS, 1:12b–13a; EHRS, 355. 79 NCY, 54; RKSS, 1:22a–b; EHRS, 368. 80 NCY, 46; RKSS, 1:18b–19a; EHRS, 363. 81 NCY, 39; RKSS, 1:15b–16a; EHRS, 359. 82 The acerbity of passages like this one has led Horio to conclude that Ryūhoku’s text lacks the “sense of sympathy” and the “warm gaze toward useless people” that she discerns in Seiken’s Account; see Horio 1994, 167. 83 For a different view, see the analysis of Chieko Ariga, who sees the portrayal of women in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi consistently in terms of their “ongoing suppression . . . under the patriarchal order”; Ariga 1992, 571.

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84 Ariyama 1972, 300. Compare the situation to Ryūhoku’s 1874 Keibyō ippan (A glimpse of the capital’s cats), in which the distance between the narrator and the historical Ryūhoku is effaced; see Fraleigh 2013. 85 NCY, 21; RKSS, 1:7b; EHRS, 347–48. 86 I interpret the subject of this sentence beginning “He pondered” to be the narrator’s friend, but its unstated subject could also be the narrator: “I pondered . . . struck my thigh and exclaimed.” 87 “Cultivation of the person” and “regulation of the family” are key terms in the Great Learning. 88 NCY, 35–36; RKSS, 1:14a–b; EHRS, 357. 89 Years later, Ryūhoku recounted an experience that took place when he was “twenty-two or twentythree,” the very time when he was writing this first volume of New Chronicles. While making his way through a dark hallway at Edo Castle one day, Ryūhoku mistook someone coming from the opposite direction for a daimyo and made a standing bow. In fact the person was the lord of a Tokugawa branch family, and Ryūhoku’s failure to offer full obeisance prompted the lord’s attendant to demand severe punishment. The situation was ultimately resolved, but Ryūhoku later recalled being “dumbfounded” at the harsh response; see “Konjaku betsutenchi,” CS, June 8, 1881. 90 Mizuhara Hitoshi argues that Seiken and Ryūhoku were implicitly arguing that “there was value in the description and documentation of urban customs and manners . . . and other actual facts, however trivial” of contemporary society, a position that amounted to an “attack” on hidebound scholars; see Mizuhara 1939, 42. 91 NCY, 64–65; RS, 1:27a–b; EHRS, 375. One additional sense of fengliu/fūryū that Ryūhoku seems to invoke here is a magnanimous tolerance and lack of fussiness; for Du Mu’s use of the term in this sense, see Ogawa 1951, 58–59. 92 Hayakawa 1973, 1:154–58. 93 The translation of Bo Juyi’s “Song on unforgettable passions” 不能忘情吟 is from Waley 1949, 196. 94 Hino 1994, 322–24. 95 NCY, 67; RKSS, 1:28b; EHRS, 376. 96 The passage appears in Analects 11.26; translation slightly modified from Lau 1979, 110–11. The responses of the first three disciples are closer to the shijin frame, and Dian’s response is more in line with the bunjin frame. 97 Tao 2002, 6–9; Hightower 1970, 16–19. 98 “Refuting the ‘Invitation to Hiding’ ” 反招隱詩 of Jin era poet Wang Kangju is one early articulation of this idea: “Little hiders hide in the hills and groves; big hiders hide in the city market” 小隱­ 隱陵藪 大隱隱朝市; see Watson 1984, 175. 99 The Liezi tells of master zither player Bo Ya, whose friend Zhong Ziqi was equally skilled at listening and able to discern from the notes Bo Ya played exactly what was in his mind; see Graham 1990, 109– 10. As noted in Lüshi chunqiu, when Ziqi died, his devastated friend broke the strings of his zither, vowing never to play again. The anecdote is also included in the Mengqiu; see Watson 1979, 88. 100 RS, 2:10; I have corrected an apparent error in line 6, substituting 姮 for 姐. 101 Dian’s response to Confucius’s query is preceded in the Analects (11.26) by “After a few dying notes came the final chord, and then he stood up from his lute” 鼓瑟希、鏗爾、舍瑟而作. 102 RS, 2:11; NROC, 30–33; RZ, 315b–16a; SS, 118; SRS, 227–28. 103 RS, 2:7–8; and RZ, 307. Ryūhoku’s diary notes that on 11.19 he was awarded with silk for this poem; see KN, 639. The shogunate had commissioned Ryūhoku to write such celebratory works as early as Ansei 2 (1855), rewarding him for the Literary Sinitic text he composed to commemorate the anniversary of the unification of Japan under the Tokugawa; see the entries for 04.22, 05.10, and 05.20 in Ryūhoku’s diary for that year. 104 Mao no. 237, “Mian” 綿; the translation is from Waley 1987, 247–49 (emphasis added). 105 The ode’s opening line is “The young gourds spread and spread” 綿綿瓜瓞. 106 Mao no. 189, “Si gan” 斯干; the translation is modified from Waley 1987, 282–84 (emphasis added). 107 Mao no. 252, “Juan a” 卷阿; the translation is from Waley 1987, 183–84. 108 The term 羽儀 (Ch. yuyi; J. ugi) means a model of behavior and derives from a passage in the Classic of Changes concerning hexagram 53, Jian 漸: “The wild goose gradually advances to the highland.



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Its feathers can be used as a model, for they mean good fortune” 鴻漸于陸、其羽可用為儀、吉; see Lynn 1994, 477. In the poem, the idea is that Kinkō was, like the wild goose, an exemplar for later generations through his writings. Classical Chinese literary theory describes patterns of language through analogy with patterns in the natural world, such as a bird’s plumage. 109 The first chapter of Zhuangzi begins with the story of the Peng, a giant and magical bird capable of flying across great distances. The possibility of flight on such a scale strikes more mundane creatures as patently ridiculous: “The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, ‘When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don’t make it and just fall down to the ground. Now how is anyone going to go ninety thousand li to the south!”; see Watson 1964, 24; Huang 1974, 3, 8 n. 15. 110 The allusion is to Mao no. 155 (“Chi xiao” 鴟鴞): “My wings have lost their gloss / My tail is all bedraggled / My house is all to pieces / Tossed and battered by wind and rain / My only song a cry of woe” 予羽譙譙、予尾翛翛、予室翹翹、風雨所漂搖。予維音嘵嘵; see Waley 1987, 235. 111 RS, 2:8–9, and RZ, 315; the closing couplet is also mentioned briefly in Inui 2003, 81. In the secondto-last couplet, I have corrected an apparent mistake, replacing 梧楓 with 梧桐. 112 See the useful table and discussion of this period in Inui 2003, 42–44, 51. 113 Ryūhoku’s diary for the relevant year, Ansei 6 (1859), is no longer extant, but Kafū quoted from it in another work; see Nagai Kafū 2000, 170. The poem on the topic “Skull” that Ryūhoku mentions writing in the entry is in RS, 2:1–2. Inui Teruo also points out that Chinzan’s name often appears first in the list of participants in Ryūhoku’s poetry sessions, ahead of those who had been attending the gatherings for years; see Inui 2003, 52. 114 The 1838 preface to Chinzan’s first poetry collection, which appeared when Chinzan was twenty years old, states: “There are just two great men who make their names as kanshi poets these days: Kikuchi Gozan and Yanagawa Seigan. Is their sole successor our Ōnuma? He is a truly rare talent in the world”; see Yasuda 1991, 18. 115 For a brief and informative look at Chinzan’s career focused on Tōkeishi, an 1870 collection of poems about Tokyo, see Keene 1978, 155–62. One may get the impression from reading it, however, that Chinzan’s Tōkeishi is “unknown” today and had long been presumed “lost” because it was of only ephemeral interest. In fact, the reason that the text became so hard to acquire is that it was banned soon after its publication; see NROC, 338. That the collection remained sought after in spite of the ban is evident from a letter written by a poet in Shizuoka to Chinzan some ten years later inquiring if he has any extra copies of the book; see Yasuda 1991, 19–20. 116 The portrayal of Chinzan as “the last kanshi poet” appears in, for example, Yasuda 1991, 24. 117 SNK, 17:482; an annotated version is in NROC, 203–6. See also Hino Tatsuo’s discussion in NROC, 335. 118 NROC, 336. Ultimately Chinzan’s poetry collection Chinzan shishō appeared later that year without Ryūhoku’s, or anyone else’s, preface. Hino suggests that Ryūhoku may have declined Chinzan’s request; see NROC, 336. Alternatively, perhaps Chinzan reconsidered and decided that the absence of a preface would itself be distinctive. In fact, Qing poet Yu Yue 兪樾 (1821–1906) drew attention to Chinzan shishō’s lack of a preface in Dongying shixuan, the massive anthology of Japanese kanshi that he edited and published in 1883 in China; see Yu Yue 1981, 418. 119 Fellow bunjin Seki Sekkō also wrote a poem in commemoration of the centennial; see SSS, 8:9a. 120 Kinkō sometimes used the Sinified single-graph surname Mei 鳴, which can be pronounced naru in Japanese and means “to sing.” The choice was especially appropriate given the graph for phoenix in his sobriquet Hōkei 鳳卿. 121 Bamboo seeds were apparently the phoenix’s staple food. See Watson 1964, 110. 122 SNK, 17:516. 123 The term 鳳毛 (Ch. fengmao; J. hōmō), literally “phoenix feather,” originally referred to a resemblance to a paternal ancestor that is perceptible in his descendants, but it came to mean rare literary talent from its use in the biography of the Xie Chaozong in the Nanqishu. Chaozong was the grandson of the famous Xie Lingyun (385–433) and served in an official position during the first half of the fifth century, distinguishing himself for his literary talents. When the emperor read a

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certain elegy he had composed, he said: “Chaozong has that rare phoenix feather; I suspect it is the reappearance of Lingyun.” The metaphor was particularly apposite since Xie Chaozong’s father happened to be named Feng, or “Phoenix” 鳳, too. 124 The poem, said to date from 758, is headed “Reverently written in harmony with Gu Zhi’s poem titled ‘Going to court at Daminggong’ ” 奉和賈至舍人早朝大明宮. 125 Ryūhoku had taken part in editing and supplementing Nochikagami for several years. Not long after submitting the completed text later that year (Man’en 1, 1860), Ryūhoku was rewarded on 11.29; he celebrated with his staff the next day; see KN, 643. Ryūhoku’s brief memorandum about the text’s compilation appears in RZ, 282–84. 126 Whereas practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine employed by the shogunate had blocked official recognition of Dutch medical techniques, the shogunate granted permission in 1858 to Itō Genboku, a physician trained in Dutch techniques, to establish a smallpox vaccination clinic in Edo. After a fire at its initial site, the clinic reopened in 1859 near Ryūhoku’s residence on Izumibashi-dōri; see Inui 2003, 57–60; Jannetta 2007, chap. 7. 127 Takenouchi Gendō was in fact so fond of drink that he was known as Suiken 醉軒 (The Tippler). See Ryūhoku’s Ansei 6 (1859) kanbun essay “Suikenki,” quoted in Imamura 1977a, 7. 128 Hata 機 had been born on the seventh day of the seventh month (Tanabata) of Ansei 5 (1858); see KN, 460. She was presumably named Hata, meaning “loom,” in connection with the Tanabata legend of the Weaver Girl. 129 In the 1850s, Terakado Seiken wrote the spirited “Kiransetsu” 毀蘭説 (On smashing Dutch [studies]), in which he argues that vaccination equates humans and beasts (a concern not unknown in Jenner’s England); see Nagai Hiroo 1966, 295; and Maeda Ai 1972, 127–28. 130 Inui Teruo 2003, 60–62. 131 Katsuragawa Hoshū, also known as Kunioki 国興, was the seventh in a line of shogunal physicians and scholars of Dutch. Both he and his famous ancestor Kuniakira 国瑞 (1751–1809) assumed the name Hoshū. 132 The elder Hoshū (i.e., Kuniakira) had worked with Sugita Genpaku 杉田玄白 (1733–1817) and Maeno Ryōtaku 前野良沢 (1723–1803) on Kaitai shinsho 解体新書, the 1774 Japanese translation of a Dutch anatomical text (which was, strictly speaking, itself a translation of a German text, the Anatomische Tabellen). 133 The dictionary that Hoshū published between 1855 and 1858 as Oranda jii (Lexicon of Holland), was a revised authoritative edition of the most comprehensive Dutch lexicon to be compiled during the Edo period, the so-called Doeff-Halma. The dictionary’s common name indicates its ultimate source in François Halma’s early-eighteenth-century French-Dutch dictionary, to which Nagasakibased Dutch diplomat Hendrik Doeff added Japanese glosses with the help of a team of interpreters in the early nineteenth century. Though the dictionary was much sought after by aspiring scholars of Dutch, the shogunate initially refused to allow its publication. Shortly after Perry’s arrival, Hoshū was the first to receive the right to publish an authoritative edition. For a discussion of the Doeff-Halma, see the essay by Rudolf Effert in Beerens and Teeuwen 2012, 197–220. 134 Katsuragawa worked in the paper’s news reports division; see, for example, CS, April 4 and Dec. 4, 1879. 135 Shunsan’s preface to the first volume is undated, but I suspect it was written when Ryūhoku attempted to publish the text in 1869; see NCY, 72. The 1862 “Evaluation of the Twenty-Four Flowers of Yanagibashi” that Ryūhoku and Shunsan prepared together is mentioned in NCY, 106. Ryūhoku’s poetry collection contains earlier works, dated to 1860, that he composed in response to Shunsan concerning Yanagibashi geisha; see RS, 2:6–7; SS, 18b; SRS, 226–27. 136 Ryūhoku’s narrator mentions Katsuragawa Hoshū and the latter’s favorite Yanagibashi geisha in a portion of the first volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi written in 1859; see NCY, 40. 137 The entry is for 06.16 of Ansei 7 (1860); see KN, 589. Accompanying Ryūhoku, Katsuragawa, and Bankei on this occasion were two shogunal physicians specializing in Chinese medicine: Tōda Chōan 遠田澄庵 (1819–89) and Motoyasu Sōtatsu 本康宗達. Maeda Ai also cites an earlier entry from that summer in which Ryūhoku attended a Noh performance in honor of the shogun’s



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birthday after which he met up with Bankei and his son Joden 如電 (1845–1931) at Tōda’s residence. With a geisha named Hana, they ventured to the home of calligrapher Nakazawa Setsujō 中澤雪 城 (1810–66), where other literati such as Washizu Kidō and Haruta Kyūkō 春田九皐 (1812–62) were waiting; see Maeda 1976a, 116–17. These entries show how the worlds of Western scholars, shogunal physicians, and traditional literati overlapped, with figures such as Bankei and now Ryūhoku moving between them. 138 Ryūhoku’s poems to commemorate the occasion can be found in RS, 2:13–15 and RZ, 316, with an annotated version in NROC, 37–48. Ōnuma Chinzan’s poems on the occasion appear in SNK, 17:524–25; Ōtsuki Bankei’s appear in SNK, 17:279; and Uemura Roshū’s appear in Uemura 1884, 1:17b–18a. 139 See Maeda 1976a, 134–35; and Inui 2003, 65. 140 Umezawa 1986, 23; Ōshima Eisuke 2004, 23–24; see also Jannetta 2007, 97. 141 Ōshima Eisuke 2004, 50–51. 142 Although Bankei was by no means the only Confucian scholar with an enthusiastic interest in Western subjects, he was in the minority. When Hayashi Fukusai’s student Fukuchi Gen’ichirō (Ōchi) began studying Western subjects, for example, Fukusai inverted a passage from the Classic of Poetry to express his disappointment that Ōchi was “going from the high branch to the dark cave”; the actual passage in the Classic of Poetry (Mao no. 165) celebrates a bird flying out of the dark cave to a high branch. When Ōchi was awarded a post in the office of the Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Fukusai turned away his former student at the door; see Yanagida 1965a, 59–60; and Koyama Fumio 1984, 34. 143 Umezawa 1986, 32; Shōji 1987. 144 As a former instructor at the Shōheizaka Academy, Bankei was close to the Hayashi family and often engaged in poetic exchanges with Gakusai and others. Ryūhoku may have first met Bankei through the Hayashi poetry circle. 145 In an 1875 piece, Ryūhoku describes Bankei as a shining human exemplar, distinguished in his learning, his poetry, and his sketching, not to mention his drinking and his consorting with geisha; see SNK, 17:335. 146 SNK, 17:225. Uemura Roshū also composed a poem to commemorate the occasion; see Uemura 1884, 1:16b. 147 Legge 1960, 3:251–52; emphasis added. 1 48 For the Mencius passage, see Lau 1970, 112. The last line of Bankei’s poem alludes to a famous poem by Du Fu, in which he expresses his political aspiration to guide the sovereign toward the sage rulers of the past. Written in 748, Du Fu’s poem is titled “Twenty-two rhymes reverentially sent to Left Aide Wei” 奉贈韋左丞丈二十二韻. It contains the couplet “To conduct the sovereign beyond the realm of Yao and Shun; and make the people’s customs pure again” 致君堯舜上、 再使風俗淳. 149 RZ, 284–85. According to the account, Ryūhoku had initially completed construction of a small leisure cottage “to the north of Willow Bank” in the third month of Bunkyū 1 (1861), but, before he could begin using it, the cottage succumbed to a fire. He had a new structure erected just south of the original foundation a few months later. The Zhuangzi quotation can be found in Watson 1964, 26. 150 Ochō gave birth to a son, the second Ryūhoku had fathered, on 12.19 of Bunkyū 3 (1863). Given that Ryūhoku was celebrating the “recent” birth of a son in the summer of 1865, receiving congratulations from friends and writing poetry about a “single” son that now joined his three daughters, it seems almost certain that the son born in 1863 died in its infancy and that Ochō gave birth to another son (Ryūhoku’s third) in the summer of 1865. A kanshi Ryūhoku wrote when his fifth son, Gorō, died in infancy refers to the premature deaths of his first and second sons; see KG, 32 (Dec. 22, 1877), 7a. 151 RS, 2:12–13, and RZ, 316; annotated versions appear in NROC, 33–36, and SRS, 228–29. 152 Shepherd Huang Chuping is said to have left his flock behind to follow a Daoist to Jinhua Mountain. Forty years later when his brother was able to track Chuping down, he asked about the

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sheep's whereabouts. At first, all that was visible were rocks laying scattered on a hillside, but, when Chuping commanded them to “rise,” they returned to sheep. The story appears in Ge Hong’s Shen xian zhuan and also in the Mengqiu. 153 RS, 2:17, and RZ, 310–11; annotated versions appear in NROC, 51–54, and SRS 230–31.

Chapter 4 1 Kusumi 2009, 23–26. Kusumi also notes how court delegates were forced to sign oaths of fealty to the shogun. 2 Kusumi 2009, 140–44; Totman 1980, 32–49. It was in the “watershed” year of 1862, Totman argues, that the Tokugawa “surrendered in both theory and practice its limited writ as the central government of Japan”; pp. xxii, 62. 3 The poem is printed and discussed in Imaizumi Genkichi 1969, 3:45–46; reprinted and discussed in Maeda 1976a, 38–40; and discussed also in Inui 2003, 55–56. All three frame the poem as evidence of Ryūhoku’s longstanding bonds of friendship with Western scholars Katsuragawa Hoshū and Bankei. 4 The outlines of the Soga vendetta are recorded in histories such as the Azuma kagami. Later military tales such as the fourteenth-century Soga monogatari embellished the story in various ways; for a translation, see Cogan 1987. Kominz 1995 examines the rich array of Soga theatrical adaptations that flourished from the Edo period onward. 5 In 1156, the emperor Go-Shirakawa commanded Director of the Left Horse Bureau Yoshitomo to kill his father, Tameyoshi. The medieval war chronicle Hōgen monogatari records how after much anguish and indecision, Yoshitomo does eventually comply and have his father killed; see Wilson 2001, 65–68. 6 The saying the poet mentions hearing in line 2 is a statement by Confucius that is quoted in the Book of the Later Han: “If you seek a loyal vassal, you must seek him in the gates of a filial child” 求忠臣必於孝子之門 (juan 26). For Ryūhoku’s poem, I have corrected two mistakes in the transcription that appears in Imaizumi Genkichi 1969; in line 6, I read 遶 for 遠; and, in line 11, I read 亂 for 飛. The transcription in Maeda 1976a has two additional mistakes, which I have also corrected here; in line 8, I read 茵 for 首; and in line 13, I read 殺 for 弑. 7 See Cogan 1987, 242–43, 248–49. In the course of the interrogation, Gorō informs Yoritomo that he considers the shogun his “enemy,” impressing Yoritomo with his honesty. 8 Kominz 1995, 12. 9 Imaizumi Genkichi 1969, 2:45–46; Maeda 1976a, 38–40. 10 Bankei’s poem is reprinted in SNK, 17:321. Judging from its sequence in Bankei’s collection (which is arranged chronologically), Bankei would have written the poem between 01.01 and 02.08 of Meiji 5 (1872). It seems almost certain that Ryūhoku wrote his response to Bankei shortly thereafter, on 03.12 of that year. Less than three years later, in January 1875, Ryūhoku published the work in the first issue of a lesser-known periodical printed by his newspaper company from 1875 to 1876, Bunmei yoin 1:6b–7a. Given the clarity of the “third month, twelfth day” inscription, this means that the only other possible date of composition for Ryūhoku’s poem is March 12, 1874; Ryūhoku could not have written the scroll to present to Hoshū on March 12, 1873, for he was in Paris at the time. 11 The earliest evidence of friendly ties between Ryūhoku and Katsuragawa salon members that I have seen comes from 1859, where Ryūhoku mentions Katsuragawa Hoshū by name in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi; see NCY, 40. The incorrect dating of the Soga vendetta poem leads Maeda to falsely posit friendship between Ryūhoku and Hoshū in 1852, but he also seems aware of the very long gap between this purported period of interaction and their manifest later intimacy, writing (emphasis added) “it was sometime after Ryūhoku began writing New Chronicles of Yanagibashi in 1859 that he revived his friendship with Katsuragawa Hoshū”; see Maeda 1976a, 133–34.



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12 Several early accounts clearly distinguish Ryūhoku’s “removal from office” from the punishment of “fifty days of domiciliary confinement”; see Sasaki 1880, 4. In later accounts, the fact that he lost his post and that he was ordered confined have tended to become blurred with the fact that he then largely withdrew to his home for more than two years. As can be seen in the autobiographical essay quoted above, Ryūhoku in some ways contributed to this confusion by narrating the sequence of losing his post, being confined, and emerging after “three years” in such a way as to insinuate that “three years” was the period of punishment. Whether imposed or self-selected, Ryūhoku’s withdrawal lasted just over two years, but these two years included parts of Bunkyū 3 (1863), Genji 1 (1864), and Keiō 1 (1865)—hence his phrase “three years.” 13 Kanda’s translation of both episodes and Ryūhoku’s condensed version of one, Yongeru no kigoku (The strange case of the esquire), are reprinted in Nishida 1997; Kanda’s original translation of the Yongeru story is reprinted, with extensive annotations and a contextualizing essay, in Nakamaru et al. 2002, 349–95, 539–53. 14 Ryūhoku’s preface appeared at the head of the first installment of Yongeru no kigoku, which Ryūhoku began serializing in KG, 22 (Sept. 4, 1877); see Nishida 1997, 173; and Inui 2003, 67. 15 The calligraphic frontispiece that Ryūhoku provided for Sugita Gentan’s Kenzengaku (The study of health) vividly attests to his expanding knowledge of and interest in Western subjects during this time. The undated inscription reads: “Life is short and art long, opportunity fleeting, experience perilous, and decision difficult. At right are the words of Hippocrates from the West” 生甚短 而術正長機會易失經驗多差考案蒙難 右泰西依卜氏之語. Although Sugita’s work was not published until 1867, the date of its explanatory front matter suggests that the manuscript was completed on 05.22 of Bunkyū 3 (1863), just a few months before Ryūhoku’s dismissal. Sugita’s work is a translation of Robert James Mann’s The Book of Health (London, 1850) that he prepared from the Dutch translation by Leonard de Bruyn Kops: Eenvoudige gezondheidsleer: een boekje voor allen (Amsterdam, 1856). 16 Nakamaru 2002, 541. The original Dutch text was Jan Bastiaan Christemeijer’s 1830 Belangrijke tafereelen uit de geschiedenis der lijfstraffelijke regtspleging en merkwaardige bijzonderheden uit de levens van geheime misdadigen (Important scenes from the history of penal justice and curious peculiarities of the lives of secret criminals). 17 For a discussion of Ryūhoku’s work as a translator, see Gujima 2012. Gujima argues that Ryūhoku endeavored in his translations to make conditions in the West readily intelligible to a broad audience. 18 For example, Ryūhoku makes this argument at the head of the translation of an extensive narrative concerning the sensational trial of French cabaret singer Marie Bière, a case newspaper readers all over the world tracked in 1880. Bière was ultimately found not guilty on charges of attempting to kill her former lover, a wealthy man named Robert Gentien, when he spurned her after she became pregnant and refused an abortion. Titled “Joyū Mari Bieru no shinpan” 女優馬利比越兒 ノ審判 (The judgment of the actress Marie Bière), the piece was serialized in ten parts in the CS between August 12 and August 26 of 1880; it was later anthologized in RI, 2:175–200. 19 Some accounts state that officials were dissatisfied with other texts Ryūhoku had chosen to lecture on and that they disdained his unrestrained commentary on the historical episodes contained in these texts; Maeda 1976a, 122–23. 20 RS, 2:18; RZ, 308; NROC, 57–59. Such references to money and the poet’s straitened financial circumstances are common in the works Ryūhoku wrote during his time out of office. 21 Ōkōchi Teruna quotes the couplet in NCY, 135–36; a slightly variant version appears in Kubota Tatsuhiko 1930, 90–91. 22 Kong cong zi, chap. 7; the anecdote also appears in the Zi zhi tong jian and various other texts. 23 This is the interpretation given in Kubota Tatsuhiko 1930, 90–91, and Imamura 1977b, 8. 24 YS, Dec. 7, 1884, p. 3. 25 Watanabe 1878, 1:19a; Sasaki 1880, 4; Narushima Ryūhoku 1885, 2. Ryūhoku is also said to have written another kyōshi at this time that insulted the feudal lords; see Yanagida 1965b, 299.

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26 Many shogunal officials in Edo opposed this unprecedented and expensive undertaking, and likewise those who supported the shogun’s declared exclusionist posture were in the minority. In arranging the logistics for Iemochi to perform his subservience, Edo vacillated on several points; see Totman 1980, 21, 51–54; Kusumi 2009, 182–83. 27 Maeda 1976a, 124; see also Gujima 2005, 26. I have been unable to verify Maeda’s claim that Ryūhoku went with Iemochi to Kyoto in 1863. I raise the question because in 1869, upon arriving in Kobe, Ryūhoku wrote that it was his “first time to the western provinces”; RZ, 123. A preface to his diary of the trip likewise calls it his “first travels to the capital area 上國 (J. jōkoku)”; KG, 82 (Sept. 28, 1879), 6a. 28 The purge targeted anticourt and antiexpulsion Tokugawa retainers; see Wert 2013, 18–22. 29 KN, 656. Recall that Gendō had been Ryūhoku’s guest at the “Cottage of Expectation” inaugural party in 06.1861. 30 CS, Nov. 1, 1876. 31 Hino Tatsuo makes a similar point; see NROC, 315. 32 Slightly modified from Mair 1994b, 580–88. The quoted phrase reads 投閑置散、乃分之宜 (emphasis added); Ryūhoku adopted the first two graphs for his title. 33 KN, 649–50. In his diary, Ryūhoku uses heishutsu rather than taitō (reverse indenting) or ketsuji (single-space insertion). Ryūhoku’s statement that his “learning is rotten” may reflect doubts about the relevance of traditional scholarship to Japan’s present circumstances. 34 See the 09.29 and 10.01 entries in KN, 657–58. The “fifty days” of mandatory confinement lasted from 08.09 to 09.29. 35 SS, 23b; RS, 2:17; an annotated version appears in NROC, 55–56. 36 SS, 23b; RS, 2:17–18; and RZ, 301; annotated versions appear in NROC, 56–57; and SRS, 231–32. 37 See KN, 650–51, 666. 38 Osatake 1940, 64–65. James Legge’s 1856 Zhihuan qimeng 智環啓蒙 (Graduated reading: comprising a circle of knowledge) was first imported to Japan in 1860, and it became widely used for English instruction. For a discussion of translation strategies in various Japanese editions of Legge’s text, see Howland 2002, chap. 3. 39 See KN, 655. Complete translations of Wei Yuan’s treatise appeared in Japan in the 1850s, and various sections of it were published independently as well. Masao Miyoshi notes its popularity among Japanese intellectuals who wished to learn about the West as well as those officials who were able to journey there; see Miyoshi 1979, 80. 40 Drake 1975, 4–5. Drake describes Xu as “an Oriental Galileo” who offered “a bold new perspective on the world, with shocking implications to conservative Chinese views,” for in the geography Xu espoused a “pluralism” that recognized the possibility of “civilization” outside of the Chinese cultural sphere; see Drake 1975, 191. 41 Japanese publishers of Xu’s text were not without their own agenda, however, which surfaces occasionally in changes to its contents, particularly in reference to Christianity. The original Chinese edition has a cautious tolerance toward the descendants of the patriarchs of Western religions: “There was no way for the transformative power of the Duke of Zhou and Confucius to be propagated there by translation. Intelligent and eminent men arose there, led the people, and urged them to do good. They harbored no intention to harm the world. Certainly it is not necessary to use the rules and standards of the Confucians to discuss their descendants”; Xu 1848, 3:40b–41a. But the Japanese edition replaces the last sentence with “However, their desire to propagate their religion in China cannot escape the charge of impudent ignorance of one’s proper place”; Xu Jiyu 1861, 3:36a. 42 Recall that Yasuda Unpeki (Jirōkichi) is the individual who in early Meiji provided Ryūhoku with a rare copy of A Record of Holland’s Beautiful Government. Yasuda was part of Katsuragawa’s circle, but little is known about him; see the scarce material gathered in Imaizumi Genkichi 1969, 479–80, and Ryūhoku’s brief mention in RZ, 78–79; RI, 2:45–47. In addition, Yasuda worked with Yanagawa Shunsan to publish Kakubutsu nyūmon wage 格物入門和解, a Japanese translation of Gewu rumen (Elements of natural philosophy and chemistry), a Chinese text by missionary



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William A. P. Martin (1827–1916). Yasuda died in 1873, according to a letter from his friend British diplomat and Japanologist Ernest Satow (1843–1929) to Mitsukuri Shūhei published in the January 7, 1874, Yūbin hōchi shinbun. 43 RS, 2:19; and RZ, 301–2. 44 The note reads: 彼理米國使臣始來本邦者. In his comments for the version of the poem in Ryūhoku shishō, Kikuchi Sankei compliments its structure and calls the reference to Perry “a new locus classicus.” 45 The text consisted of Perry’s journals supplemented with notes by his officers; it was titled Narrative of the expedition of an American squadron to the China Seas and Japan: performed in the years 1852, 1853, and 1854 under the command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, by order of the Government of United States. 46 See Ōshima Eisuke 2004, 235–42. The first three volumes of the translation of Perry’s journals that Bankei supervised are reprinted in Yokosuka Kaikokushi Kenkyūkai 2001. 47 Ryūhoku’s grandson lists Peruri Nihon kikō among “Ryūhoku’s translations”; see Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 126. 48 The phrase tazan no ishi 他山之石 is a metaphor for knowledge or insight that is borrowed from another person or discipline and put to an unexpectedly illuminating use in one’s own field. The source is the Classic of Poetry (Mao no. 184, 鶴鳴 “He ming”); see Waley 1987, 314. The implication of the term in modern Japanese tends to be that the borrowed “stone” is something pedestrian or undistinguished, but such a nuance is not emphasized here. 49 The quotation comes from the “Great Preface” to the Classic of Poetry in the section that describes the nature of feng 風 (airs), a category of poetry that often included criticism. In his discussion of feng poetry, Stephen Owen notes, “The clause, ‘the one who speaks has no culpability,’ became very important for later writers of social criticism”; see Owen 1992, 46. Though it was Perry who was the ultimate author of the discourse, Bankei was seeking to borrow the protection afforded by this classical sanction of protest. 50 SNK, 17:156–57. 51 Ryūhoku’s diary entry for 01.24 of Ansei 1 (1854) shows his early numismatic interests, which he probably acquired even earlier. In 1880, he referred to being “obsessed with old coins for thirty years”; CS, March 31, 1880. 52 Fukuzawa 1897, 318–19. 53 The Tōyō Bunko holds a related item: an exquisitely executed album of rubbings titled Kaigai hōkan ryaku (An abbreviated reference of foreign coins) that shows coins from Ryūhoku’s album and collection as well as one other source. The manuscript is attributed to Ryūhoku on the daisen label affixed to its outer case but seems to have been prepared by shogunal official Miura Ken’ya 三浦乾也 (1821–89), who wrote and signed its postface, dated Genji 2 (1865). 54 Sankei’s preface is not included in the Seikadō album, but two versions of it are preserved in his manuscripts at Kyoto University. My quotation comes from the earliest version, in TSS; the version in RKS is slightly later. A substantially similar version of it (replacing “Kakudō” with “Ryūhoku”) is in KG, 50 (July 28, 1878): 1a–2a. 55 RS, 2:16; SS, 23a–b; and RZ, 301; an annotated version appears in SRS, 230. 56 These descriptions of no longer extant volumes of Ryūhoku’s diary come from Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 60–61. 57 Ōtsuki Bankei was familiar with several participants on these earliest missions, as his send off poems show; see SNK, 17:221, 224–25. A few days before Tanabe Taichi 田辺太一 (1831–1915) departed on a diplomatic mission to Paris in Bunkyū 3 (1863), he visited Ryūhoku to bid him farewell; see the 12.29 entry in KN, 669. Although Katsuragawa Hoshū never traveled abroad, several members of his salon were experienced overseas travelers, including Fukuzawa Yukichi, Mitsukuri Shūhei, and Mizushina Rakutarō 水品楽太郎. 58 In the ninth month of 1862, Bankei was ordered back to Sendai, where he spent the next ten years. While in Sendai, Bankei continued to urge a dual course of opening the country and supporting the Tokugawa shogunate, a strategy that cost him his liberty when the regime collapsed and his

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domain was branded an enemy of the court. As soon as he was freed, he returned to Tokyo. See Ōshima Eisuke 2004; and Irokawa 1985, 78–80. 59 RZ, 220–41; Takahashi Akio 2013 provides the first extensive annotation of the text. 60 RZ, 220. The “Hall of Spring Voices,” or Shunseirō, was the name of a building at Ryūhoku’s residence that he used as a study. “Whose Garden” 誰園 (Suien or Tagasono) was another of his sobriquets. 61 Totman 1980, 108–32. 62 RZ, 222. 63 “That is why Heaven, when it is about to place a great burden on a man, always first tests his resolution, exhausts his frame, and makes him suffer starvation and hardship, frustrates his efforts so as to shake him from his mental lassitude, toughen his nature and make good his deficiencies” 故天將降大任於是人也、必先苦其心志、勞其筋骨、餓其體膚、空乏其身、行拂亂其所為、所以 動心忍性、曾益其所不能; Mencius 6B.16; Lau 1970, 181. 64 RZ, 16–17. 65 RZ, 226; emphasis in original. The collaborative nature of Endless Ivy is clear from the comments that follow the couplet: one proposes to replace 時 in line 2 with 須, changing “occasionally” to “must,” and another suggests it would be even better to use 未, which would change “occasionally embrace” to “have not yet embraced.” 66 See NCY, 40, where Hoshū appears as Aikōshi 愛篁子, “The Bamboo Lover.” The graphs 早樹 (lit. “early tree”) were part of a longer title, “Nezame hayaki ushi” 寝覚早樹大人 (The master who rises early); see Imaizumi Genkichi 1969, 3:452. For a list of pseudonyms often used in Endless Ivy and their conjectured referents, see Aoyanagi 1985, 8. 67 RS, 2:20; RZ, 229; NROC, 63–66. The main text of Endless Ivy identifies the woman simply as “a beauty,” but RS identifies her as “the geisha called Jeweled Simurgh” 玉鸞. As Hino Tatsuo points out, the ornithological appellation is surely an elegant way of referring to Otori, a woman with whom Ryūhoku was involved for several years. The term 校書 (Ch. jiaoshu; J. kōsho) is a conventional term for geisha; see NCY, 32 n. 51. 68 RZ, 3. 69 RZ, 227–28. As discussed in the next chapter, Ryūhoku later used these three terms in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, vol. 2; see NCY, 92. Since Endless Ivy was not published during his lifetime, it was an “inside joke” of the salon. Chaple is apparently a misspelling of chapel, thought to derive from the Dutch word for butterfly kapel. 70 Ryūhoku alludes here to Tao Yuanming’s ode on reclusive life, “The Return,” in which the poet exclaims: “The world and I shall have nothing more to do with one another”; see Hightower 1970, 268–70; and Hinton 1993, 32–35. 71 In addition to the occasional use of English words in Endless Ivy entries such as the one cited here, there are a few full sentences in English buried amid the rest of the text’s cryptic banter; one example reads: “P Says: ‘I love all men, but love no tomas’ on the contrary, Mr. N. Says: ‘I refuse all Women but love Cant’ ”; see RZ, 238. Perhaps “P” refers to the geisha Oume (i.e., “Plum”), and the “N” of “Mr. N” refers to Narushima. As for “Cant,” Tasaka suggests Immanuel Kant (1970, 41), but I suspect that since “thomas” was contemporary English slang for “penis,” perhaps the second letter of “cant” should be a “u.” 72 Maeda 1976a, 135–40. 73 RZ, 226; emphasis in original. 74 The sound tori is not vocalized in a typical kundoku gloss of this line, such as chōgo o kikazu, asei o kiku 鳥語を聽かず 蛙聲を聽く. The humor does not depend on pronunciation alone but on the polysemy of the written text. 75 RZ, 226. 76 RZ, 226; emphasis in original. 77 Imaizumi Mine, Hoshū’s daughter, also recalled Fukuzawa’s studiousness: “Mr. Fukuzawa sticks out in my mind as somehow different from his companions. He always had his pockets stuffed with books, and he always had books on his mind. He would borrow Western books from the



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Katsuragawa house, but, whereas others would require one or two months to copy them, Fukuzawa would copy and return them in four or five days”; see Maeda 1976a, 139–40. 78 RZ, 226. 79 Fukuzawa 1899, 14. 80 On his second trip abroad in 1862, Fukuzawa went with the shogunal mission to Europe; as the mission was about to return, they were detained for ten days off the coast of Lisbon. At the time, Fukuzawa composed something vaguely like a pentasyllabic quatrain, which if nothing else suggests the monotonous days the group spent waiting for the stormy weather to clear: 朝漂斯把洋 暮漂斯把洋 十日又十夜 漂盪斯把洋 (In the morning, the Spanish sea / In the evening, the Spanish sea / Ten days and ten nights / Floating in the Spanish sea); see Haga Tōru 1968, 199–200. 81 Fukuzawa 1966, 235–36; the original text is Fukuzawa 1899, 182. 82 To offer a few examples: on September 9, 1875, Ryūhoku’s zatsuroku column in the Chōya published a reader’s Sinitic quatrain singling out Fukuzawa’s Outline of a Theory of Civilization for praise among a flood of recent books; on September 30, 1876, the paper carried Ryūhoku’s account of the memorial held on the fiftieth anniversary of Ōtsuki Bansui’s death in which Fukuzawa and Ryūhoku appear in the list of “famous scholars of Western subjects” who gathered to pay their respects to the pioneering efforts of Bansui; and on July 22, 1879, Ryūhoku wrote an editorial calling for the preservation of ancient architecture for public benefit in which he refers to his “good friend Fukuzawa Yukichi.” A few days after this last editorial appeared, Fukuzawa was apparently a guest at Ryūhoku’s home; see Yoda Gakkai 1993, 4:199. 83 Shunsan was accomplished in many fields, but it was his foundational work in Japanese newspapers that Ryūhoku regularly emphasized. In CS, Dec. 13, 1874, for example, Ryūhoku singles out Shunsan as a pioneering newspaperman and lavishes praise on journalist Fukuchi Ōchi by calling him a “rare talent not seen since Shunsan.” In 1881, Ryūhoku organized a memorial for Shunsan (see the ad in CS, March 2) and wrote several columns imagining how prominent Shunsan would be in the journalism world had he lived; see CS, March 6, 15, 17, 1881. 84 See the send-off poems in RZ, 227, and the quotation from Mizushina’s letter and poems to Ryūhoku in RZ, 234. 85 NROC, 317–18. 86 Inui 2003, 74–75. 87 Oguri Tadamasa 小栗忠順 (1827–68) was active in 1860s diplomatic negotiations. A staunch shogunal loyalist and an advocate of cooperation with France, he was one of the few key officials executed in the Restoration. 88 Kubota Tatsuhiko 1930, 92, and Maeda Ai 1976a, 149, both name Kurimoto Joun, but this assertion is challenged in Imamura 1977b, 8; 1977g. Imamura notes that the preface to the second volume of New Chronicles singles out Matsudaira Norikata, who later changed his name to Ogyū Kigai 大給亀崖, as the one who discerned Ryūhoku’s talents and recommended him for the position; see NCY, 77. In 1869, Ryūhoku wrote a colophon for Kigai’s poetry collection; see RZ, 285–86. 89 Enomoto 1912, 56; see also Tanabe Taichi’s statement that Matsudaira discerned Ryūhoku’s talents at a time when he “had been removed from his post owing to unrestrained behavior” in ibid., 223. 90 Kurimoto 1969, 321. 91 Mermet de Cachon had initially traveled to Japan in 1855 as a Catholic missionary but had subsequently become a teacher in Hakodate, where he befriended Kurimoto Joun and began with him a program of language exchange. Appointed consul Léon Roches’s personal interpreter, Cachon eventually left Hakodate, but he soon found himself again participating in negotiations with Joun on the Ōta barracks project, and later the two both taught at Yokohama’s Collège Franco-Japonais. For a biography, see Tomita 1980. It was with Mermet de Cachon that Ryūhoku studied French while in Yokohama; see Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 116–17. 92 On the Collège Franco-Japonais (Yokohama Furansugo Denshūjo 横浜仏蘭西語伝習所), see Tomita 1991, 39–48. It enrolled about fifty students (aged fourteen to twenty), most of whom were sons of daimyo and hatamoto, but there were also a few samurai children from various domains among their number. Some of the most gifted of them went to study in France in 1867.

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The academy closed with the Restoration, but many of its students went on to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 93 The position translated “lieutenant colonel in the infantry” is hoheigashira nami 歩兵頭並; RH, 5: 230. 94 The literal translation of Zuishin kanzu 随身巻子 is “A book to carry on my person”; it is dated Keiō 1 (1865) and inscribed in Dutch “In dis Boek is mijne hersen beslōten / Hosúw” (In this book are my private thoughts contained / Hoshū); see Imaizumi Genkichi 1969, 3:325. The book contains a note dated 09.28 that records Ryūhoku’s promotion and another entry for 10.02 that records the party Hoshū organized to celebrate it. 95 Ryūhoku’s third wife, Ochō, may have been absent from the festivities because she had given birth to a son recently. Endless Ivy contains a poem Ryūhoku wrote on 09.09 that uses diction from the Classic of Poetry to describe “the addition of one piece of jade to three tiles”: the birth of a son to join three daughters; RZ, 232. 96 RZ, 236. A “cinnabar phoenix” refers to an imperial missive. 97 Imaizumi Genkichi 1969, 3:347. 98 RZ, 241. 99 Ryūhoku was made kiheigashira nami 騎兵頭並 (lieutenant colonel of the cavalry) on 12.19 of Keiō 1 (1865) and was promoted to kiheigashira (colonel of the cavalry) on 05.06 of Keiō 3; RH, 5:221–22. 100 Ōshima 1943, 62. The date corresponds to February 23, 1866. Charles Buland was Cachon’s assistant at the French academy. He taught French in Japan until late 1870, when he returned to France escorting several Japanese students; Nishibori 1988, 565. I think 河栄 refers to Kawano Eijirō 河野­栄 次郎, who served in the Kanagawa infantry. Ryūhoku seems to have been traveling back and forth between Yokohama and Edo during these months. Endless Ivy contains a series of parting poems exchanged by Ryūhoku and Mizushina Rakutarō on 01.08 of Keiō 2 (1866), the day before the entry Ōshima quotes; see RZ, 238–39; and Imaizumi Genkichi 1969, 3:359–60. Although the whereabouts of Ryūhoku’s original diaries from this period are unknown, Inui 2013 quotes extensively from copies of Ryūhoku’s Ōta diaries corresponding to portions of Keiō 2 and 3. 101 Maeda Ai has described the history of the Ōta barracks and the various early efforts to train shogunal troops under Western advisors; see Maeda 1976a, 151–54. The maps he discusses are reproduced in Iwakabe 1989, 10–11, 26–27. 102 Polak 2001, 56–57. 103 The article appeared in Le monde illustré on December 1, 1866 (357–58); I would like to express my thanks to Vernica Downey for tracking down a copy of it. See also Nishibori 1988, 230–31; and Polak 2001, 58, 63. 104 Polak 2001, 63–64. 105 On Brunet’s efforts to challenge imperial troops by helping Tokugawa forces seize Ezo, see Sims 1998, 78–82. 106 Descharmes seems to have misunderstood the names of the two officers he mentions here; the original reads: “Le chef de la cavalerie se nomme Norori-Shina-Kiritaru et le premier lieutenant Narushima Shintaro”; Polak 2001, 64–65. 107 See Masuda 1989, 60. Masuda notes how Descharmes and the other French officers instructed their cavalry trainees in detail about equine anatomy, giving commands and conducting lectures in French. 108 RI, 2:62. 109 SS, 24b–25a; RS, 2:21; and RZ, 302; an annotated version appears in NROC, 68–69. 110 “Yūji no enkaku” (A history of diversion), RZ, 71; the parenthetical note appears in the original. 111 RS, 2:21–22; and SS, 25a. This is the third of the three octaves Ryūhoku wrote on the occasion. 112 In addition to eighteen students from the Yokohama Academy who were sent to study in France, several of Ryūhoku’s acquaintances, including Shibusawa Eiichi, Tanabe Taichi, Mukōyama Kōson 向山黄村 (1826–97), and Shimizu Usaburō 清水卯三郎 (1829–1910), were in Paris accompanying the shogun’s teenage brother, Tokugawa Akitake 昭武 (1853–1910); see Miyanaga 2000 and Sumi 1984.



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113 The Yokohama training operation comprised “60 infantry officers, 20 artillery officers, a squadron of cavalry officers and the cadre of a battalion of sub-lieutenants and corporals, altogether 230 men”; see Medzini 1971, 131. 114 Quoted in Medzini 1971, 131. 115 RS, 2:22–23; SS, 25a–b; RZ, 316–17; annotated versions appear in NROC, 72–77; and SRS, 234–35. 116 Totman 1980, 342–45. 117 Ibid., 375–86. 118 After resigning the office of shogun on 12.09, Yoshinobu retreated to Osaka; ibid., 399–402 and 408–15. 119 Ibid., 409. 120 RZ, 1–2. 121 The quotation is from the essay “Yūji no enkaku”; see RZ, 71. 122 Polak 2001, 72–75. 123 Maeda 1976a, 161–62. 124 RZ, 1–2. Ryūhoku was appointed commissioner of foreign affairs on 01.11 of Keiō 4 (February 4, 1868), and, less than two weeks later, he was made the vice-treasurer. 125 The letter is quoted in Kubota Tatsuhiko 1930, 89. Kubota gives the addressee’s name as Kobayashi Seigo 小林省吾, but this is clearly a mistake for shogunal official Mori Seigo 森省吾, Ryūhoku’s biological brother. Seigo’s son Suganuma Tatsukichi 菅沼達吉 (1861–1915) studied kanbun and English under his uncle Ryūhoku for many years and was a devoted fan of Kagetsu shinshi as a teenager before becoming a successful banker and businessman; see Akita 1916, 1–2, 8, 174–77. Among Suganuma’s children is the actor Morishige Hisaya 森繁久弥 (1913–2009), whose autobiography discusses Ryūhoku’s relations with the Mori family; see Morishige 1984, 95–107. 126 Imamura 1977b, 9. 127 Inui 2003, 89–91. 128 Yoda Gakkai 1900, 11. In his November 30, 1884, diary entry, Gakkai recorded that Ryūhoku once had told him that “it is one of the greatest deeds of my life” to have forestalled a proposal for the shogunate to seek foreign military assistance; see Yoda Gakkai 1993, 6:92–94. Yet, in his entry from October 7 of the following year, Gakkai records that, according to Yamaguchi Naoki 山口直毅 (1830–95), who had served as treasurer in the shogunate’s final days, the proposal in question had been for a loan and not for military forces per se; see Yoda Gakkai 1993, 6:251. 129 Maeda 1976a, 166–67. 130 Sasaki 1880, 6. 131 Sasaki 1880, 7. 132 Inui 2003, 92. 133 RZ, 1–2. 134 Nobukane was born Kawakami Taigorō 川上泰五郎 (1847–68) and was given the name Nobukane as well as Ryūhoku’s childhood name Kinetarō at the time of his adoption in the second month of 1868. His succession to household head came on 04.10 of that year. See RI, 1:129; Inui 2003, 185–90, 315 n. 36; Kataoka 1974, 107. 135 See the poem Ryūhoku composed to mourn Nobukane in RS, 2:25; RZ, 302. On visiting Shizuoka a decade later, Ryūhoku paid a tearful visit to Nobukane’s grave; see RZ, 173–74. 136 RS, 3:7–8; RZ, 311; NROC, 100–106. Presumably Bin was another of Kenkichi’s names. Line 14’s “carving insect miniatures” is a stock expression for elaborate literary artistry; the individuals in line 16 are pre-Qin figures both of whom were celebrated for their accomplishments as statesmen and military commanders. Line 18 refers to Guo Ziyi and Li Guangbi, two generals who served in the suppression of the An Lushan Rebellion. Line 31 refers to Tao Yuanming’s poem faulting his sons for making slow progress in their studies; see Tao 2002, 199–200; Hightower 1970, 163–64. 137 Kenkichi was sought out at the 1889 Paris International Exhibition by participants curious about Asian agriculture and was inducted into the Légion d’honneur by the French government the following year; see YS, Aug. 8, 1889; Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 32–36; and Inui 2014. 138 RZ, 285.

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139 NROC, 322–23. 140 Tao 2002, 361–64. 141 Tian 2005, 13. She also observes that, “during the Southern Dynasties, it was in fact extremely common for a person to serve more than one dynasty, sometimes even up to three”; see ibid., 60. On this point, see also Murakami Tetsumi 1994, 78–94. 142 The chinbun 珍聞 of the paper’s title was a pun on shinbun 新聞 (which meant “news” in early Meiji; shinbunshi 新聞紙 was the word for “newspaper”). Two issues of Tōkyō chinbun, dating from the sixth and ninth months of Meiji 2, were reprinted in YS, Dec. 23, 1895, and Jan. 6, 1896. 143 Ryūhoku included a notice in the second edition that, “when I hear more strange news, I will record it in no. 3,” but a hastily conceived trip to western Japan, discussed in the next chapter, interrupted these plans. 144 Quoted in Inui 2003, 192–93. Inui argues that this passage shows that, “although Ryūhoku sympathized with the rice merchants, he also was trying to conform with the policies of the new government.” 145 Inui 2003, 183–208. Sumiya 1958 stresses a similar point and suggests “roughly 1867” as the time when Ryūhoku became interested in newspapers through his acquaintance with Yanagawa Shunsan and others. 146 On this period of Ryūhoku’s life, see chapter 7 of Inui 2003, esp. 190–92; and Imamura 1978. 147 Imaizumi Mine 1963, 217–19. 148 Cited in Inui 2004; see also Mori Senzō 1971, 109–10. 149 RS, 2:33–34; SS, 27a; RZ, 303; an annotated version is in NROC, 83–84; see also SKNK, 8:456. 150 Han Xin was a man who was “big and tall and loved to carry a sword,” but he was publicly humiliated by being made to crawl between the legs of one of the “butchers of Huaiyin”; see Watson 1993, 2:163–64. 151 RS, 3:19–20; and RZ, 319; an annotated version appears in NROC, 130–34.

Chapter 5 1 Yamashita 1995, 37–39. In 1869 Mukōyama Kōson proposed the change of Fuchū (Sunpu) to Shizuoka. Kōson was an official whom Ryūhoku respected greatly; see the poems he sent to Kōson in 1863 and the preface he contributed to Kōson’s poetry collection in RS, 2:18–19; RZ, 297–98. 2 See Fraleigh 2014, 97–100. 3 See Steele 2003, 88–109. 4 For a discussion of how the Byakkotai became “the poster boys of Aizu,” see Shimoda 2014, 113–26. 5 RS, 3:4–5; and RZ, 317; an annotated version appears in NROC, 93–100; Ryūhoku also published the poem in CS, Dec. 17, 1875. The “Northern prince” of line 23 is Liu Chen 劉諶, son of Emperor Liu Chan 劉禅 of Three Kingdoms era Shu. When Liu Chan was about to surrender to Wei, Liu Chen argued that they should instead fight, and, when his advice was not heeded, he killed his wife and children before committing suicide. Line 24 offers the contrastive example of Zhang Xun 張巡, who resisted the An Lushan rebels at Suiyang; when taken prisoner, he ground his teeth perpetually, cursing the enemy. 6 NROC, 95. 7 RS, 3:10; and RZ, 304. On Oda Fusanosuke, see Imaizumi Genkichi 1969, 3:313–15. 8 On the Shōgitai and the Battle of Ueno, see Kikuchi Akira 2010. 9 See Fraleigh 2009b, 132–33. These poems both recall a line from a poem Su Dongpo sent to his brother from prison, “You can bury my bones anywhere there are green mountains” 是處青山可 埋骨; see Fuller 1990, 247. 10 RS, 2:23–24; RZ, 302; the second of these two quatrains appears in NROC, 79–80. 11 Tao 2002, 70–72; modified from Hightower 1970, 63–64. Perhaps the reference to the grave in the previous poem prompted this reference, for Tao’s poem is set in a graveyard.



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12 RS, 3:17–18; and RZ, 318; an annotated version appears in NROC, 124–30. Line 18’s “bear rice” is an expression indicating a child’s filial service to support and nourish his parents. 13 Inui’s table of Ryūhoku’s Ansei 5 (1858) outings in the Edo area is representative of these years; Inui 2003, 50. 14 RZ, 148. 15 For a study of the richly intertextual tradition of utamakura, see Kamens 1997. 16 For further consideration of Ryūhoku’s domestic travelogues, see Fraleigh 2008, 2009a. 17 Kōbi nikki was first published serially in KG from issue 82 (Sept. 28, 1879) to 117 (Oct. 28, 1881), ten years after the journey itself; see also RZ, 121–58. Oka Chōhei 2011 reprints the text and provides some annotation. Inui 2007 provides a close reading of Ryūhoku’s journey. 18 RZ, 122–23. 19 RZ, 122. 20 RZ, 123, 302; RS, 2:27. Ryūhoku had acquired some familiarity with steamships while posted in Yokohama, as demonstrated in his diary entry for 09.29 of Keiō 2 (1866); Inui 2013, 7. 21 Ten years later, when he published this early travelogue in the literary magazine Kagetsu shinshi, Ryūhoku added a somewhat self-conscious note asking readers to bear in mind that “this diary was written soon after the steamship service to Kobe had started, and so I thought it a rare occasion and even composed poetry about it”; see RZ, 123. A few quotations from what is presumably the original text of the diary appear in Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 64–72. Comparing these with the published version shows that, although the basic content is the same, Ryūhoku made some structural changes and also revised phrasing; even within the selections Ōshima quotes there are variations in style. Ozawa 1892 preserves the transcription that Ozawa Suien 小沢酔園 (1842–1932) made of the original travelogue, which Ryūhoku showed to him in 1870. 22 RZ, 130–31. 23 RZ, 136. 24 RZ, 125. 25 RZ, 150. 26 For a translation and discussion of the poem by Minamoto no Kanemasa, see Mostow 1996, 372–73. 27 RZ, 127–28. 28 Itasaka Yōko argues that the travelogues of Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714) heralded this new approach, contrasting them to the more famous, though less representative, works of Matsuo Bashō; see Itasaka 1993, 93–95, 110–14; and Itasaka 2011, 3–18. Plutschow 2006 argues for a similar shift in Edo travel writing but situates it slightly later. 29 RZ, 123–24. The crest of an Edo period fireman appeared prominently and in several places on his garments. 30 RZ, 125. 31 RZ, 139–40. 32 RZ, 124. 33 RZ, 152. 34 RZ, 141. 35 RZ, 134. Matasaburō is the son born to Ochō in 1865 whose birth is mentioned in Endless Ivy. 36 Inui 2007, 196–200. 37 RZ, 126. 38 RZ, 146. In the poems he composed at the summit as well, Ryūhoku compared Kankakeyama to Penglai and Yingzhou, islands of immortals that Chinese mythology locates in the eastern seas (and which are often associated with Japan in Sinitic poetry). One of his quatrains concludes: “The groves and springs do not seem to be those of our world; for the first time I realize that the realm of the immortals is this mountain” 林泉不似人寰物 始悟蓬瀛是此山; the poem is anthologized in RS, 2:32. 39 Inui 2007, 212–15. 40 RZ, 148.

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41 RZ, 158. 42 RZ, 156. 43 KG, 26 (Oct. 14, 1877), 1a–b. Ryūhoku notes that he presented his poetry volume to Egawa Kunpei, an interpreter based in Nagasaki, who presumably entrusted it to Gong Shenfu, the man who brought the volume to preface author Xu Qianshen in Hangzhou. 44 Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 277–84. Ōshima quotes an account by Ryūhoku’s son Kenkichi stating that a Shanghai man named Xie Pengfei (Yinzhuang) 謝鵬飛 (隱莊) wrote a preface in Tongzhi 12 (1873), but it did not reach Japan until after Ryūhoku’s death. 45 As mentioned in chap. 2, Gyokkei and his father, Seitan, were both occasional participants in Ryūhoku’s poetry gatherings; see also RS, 2:26–27. 46 RZ, 287; entry for 03.22. The term translated “Japanese poetry” is kokushi 國詩, or “the poems of our land.” 47 RZ, 291; entry for 12.08. 48 RZ, 286. 49 RZ, 288. Sankei was okujusha for less than one year and soon resigned from service entirely, apparently disgruntled at senior officials’ lack of support for scholarship; see RH, 5:167; Fukui 2008. He later served in the Meiji Police Agency before moving to Kyoto, but he remained an active participant in Ryūhoku’s literary circles. 50 RZ, 288; RS, 2:35. 51 RZ, 287. 52 Analects 13.4; translation from Lau 1979, 119. The phrase reads 則四方之民、襁負其子而至矣. 53 RZ, 292. The first graph of the second line is 汔, but I have interpreted it to be a typographical error for 汽. 54 This is the last of the seven poems (from an original series of ten) in RS, 3:10–12; RZ, 310; NROC, 114–16. 55 Ryūhoku’s diary for 1871, which is no longer extant, notes the second volume’s completion on 03.23; Nagai Kafū 1927b, 291. Imamura Eitarō concurs but argues that most of it was written the previous year; Imamura 1977b, 9. 56 Nagai 1927b, 291. 57 Ishikawa Iwao 1928, 15–16. 58 Maeda Ai 1972, 232; emphasis in original. 59 Campbell 2007, 217–19. 60 “Bamboo branch” (竹枝; J. chikushi; Ch. zhuzhi) ballads are a genre of yuefu (music bureau) poetry focused on local customs that was developed by Tang poet Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫 (772–842). In Japan, the genre became especially popular in the late Edo period, when poets used the form to address romantic subjects or depict life in the pleasure quarters. 61 Painted-Boat Records refers to Wumen huafanglu 呉門畫舫録, a mid-Qing record of famous Suzhou courtesans written by Xixi Shanren 西溪山人. Like Yu Huai’s Miscellaneous Records, it was widely read in Japan. 62 Ryūhoku enlisted his former neighbor Sakata Ōkaku 坂田鷗客 to create this lively illustration, and another Shitaya bunjin, his good friend Seki Sekkō, to produce the calligraphy. The illustration and calligraphy appear in NCY, xv, 74. Ōkaku’s residence is indicated as no. 4 in figure 2.1. 63 NCY, 76–77; EHRS, 383. Imamura 1977b, 8, identifies the preface writer as Tanabe Taichi. 64 NCY, 78; EHRS, 384. The phrase “became an urban recluse” is 隱于市; as discussed in chapter 3, the shiin 市隱 (Ch. shiyin) model became important to Ryūhoku in the late 1850s as he sought elements of reclusive existence within Yanagibashi. In describing his early Meiji withdrawal to the Shōkikusō, he more fully embraced the mode. 65 NCY, 79; RS, 2:1a; EHRS, 385. The last phrase reads 朱門粉壁、變為桑茶之園者不鮮. 66 It was Tokyo metropolitan governor Ōki Takatō who proposed this plan to transform some of the vast lands in abandoned daimyo compounds into fields for the cultivation of tea and mulberry; see Ogi 1980, 3. 67 The common metaphor for transience is 滄海桑田 (Ch. cang hai sang tian; J. sōkai sōden).



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68 Yu 1999, preface 3a–4a; Yu 2000, 3–6; emphasis added. Yu Huai’s phrase is 時移物換; Ryūhoku’s is 世移物換. 69 This passage refers to the “Banquet at Hongmen,” a famous meeting that took place in 206 bce between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, two generals of Chu and Han respectively, who had just toppled the Qin. Xiang Yu’s councilor Fan Zeng hoped to have Liu Bang killed by using the subterfuge of urging Xiang Zhuang to perform a sword dance with him; contrary to his expectations, however, Xiang Bo interceded to protect Liu Bang. Liu Bang then excused himself to use the toilet, summoning his carriage attendant Fan Kuai to go with him. Liu Bang ordered Zhang Liang to stay behind and make excuses to delay the others from discovering that he had escaped; he gave Zhang Liang the pair of jade discs and the pair of jade wine dippers originally intended as gifts for Xiang Yu and Fan Zeng respectively. When presented with the jade dippers, Fan Zeng smashed them with his sword; see Watson 1993, 3:30–33. 70 See Minford and Lau 2000, 723. 71 NCY, 96–97; RS, 2:8b–9a; EHRS, 395–96. 72 NCY, 92; RS, 2:6b–7a; EHRS, 392–93. 73 See RZ, 227–28. 74 Okada 1984, 39. The 1861 Eigosen gives chapel as the equivalent of butterfly, which Ryūhoku’s Endless Ivy spells chaple. In any case, the word is thought to derive from the Dutch word for butterfly, kapel. 75 Mizumoto 1993, 85. There may be another level of humor here, with Ryūhoku self-mockingly recreating his own youthful misapprehension of the term. 76 NCY, 104–5; RS, 2:12b–13a; EHRS, 401–2. 77 In 1845 Ōtsuki Bankei proposed kyōwa (Ch. gonghe) as a gloss for “republic” to Mitsukuri Gyokkai; Umezawa 1986, 24–25. Fukuzawa Yukichi’s use of it in his 1866 Conditions in the West (Seiyō jijō) made the term standard. 78 Pastreich 2000, 218. Though the Western calendar was introduced after Ryūhoku had completed the text, perhaps Pastreich is thinking of a passage concerning the institution of regular days off for civil servants; see NCY, 90–91; RKSS, 2:6a; EHRS, 391. The passage seems not so much to target the Meiji government for imposing a new calendar than to satirize officials who spend their new leisure time in banquets and to show how geisha exploit the system. 79 See NCY, 118–19; RS, 2:20a; EHRS, 410–11. 80 The narrator ridicules those who prefer ostentatious yakata to the simpler yanebune; NCY, 14. See also NCY, 54. 81 Wada 1950a, 12; Aoyanagi 1985, 7. For this reason, one bibliography of Meiji books lists New Chronicles of Yanagibashi not in the “geography” section, but rather in the “novel” (shōsetsu) section; see Niina 1998, 29–30. 82 Some sources state that Ryūhoku was offered a post in the Chamber of the Left in 1870 (see RZ, 331), but the date on this memorandum is 1871. The 1871 date matches the autobiographical profile quoted in Takayasu 1929, 90. 83 Kanbe 1960, 67. Shinshū Tōha Gakujuku was founded on 08.06, and Ryūhoku became the school’s principal in the tenth month; see Kataoka 1962, 1963, and 1974. The curriculum featured introductions to Western history and geography, classic works of Chinese learning, as well as natural science works prepared by Western missionaries in China, including those Ryūhoku had read during his period of confinement. 84 Ryūhoku’s central role in the academy is also apparent from the fact that it was shut down shortly after Ryūhoku severed his connection to Higashi Honganji and joined the Chōya shinbun in 1874; see Kanbe 1960, 68. 85 Around this time, interactions with Buddhist clergy (including his future traveling companion Matsumoto Hakka) begin to appear in Ryūhoku’s poetry; RS, 3:15–16, 18–19. Ōtsuki Bankei’s poetry collections also record an 1871 summer outing with Hakka, Ryūhoku, and others; SNK, 17:320. See also Matsumoto 1916, 9b–10b. 86 NCY, 190.

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87 For a general overview of Ryūhoku’s Diary, see Keene 1995, 119–32; and NCY, xlii–lvii; for comparison of the Diary with its predecessors, see Fraleigh 2002a. Ryūhoku’s original diary is not extant, but a partial copy of it is; see Matsumoto 1873a. For further discussion of the original text, see Maeda 1983, 69–83; Ueda 1989a–b; Fraleigh 2002b, 15–21. Ryūhoku’s Diary ends with his arrival in New York; on the last six weeks of his journey, see my afterword in NCY, 311–36; and Gujima 2011. 88 NCY, 132–34; RS, 2:26a–27a; EHRS, 420–21. 89 Ōno 1935, 35. 90 RZ, 2. 91 Ōno 1935, 41–42. 92 Maeda 1976a, 191; Maeda 2004, 288; the corresponding section of Ryūhoku’s Diary is NCY, 216–19. 93 Tanaka Akira 1994, 124–29. For a complete English translation of the Iwakura Mission report see Kume 2002; the compact paperback edition edited by Tanaka is Kume 1878. 94 Izumi 1993, 2:42. 95 This interpretation of Ryūhoku vis-à-vis the Iwakura Mission has acquired a life of its own. It is so axiomatic that it is routinely recapitulated without any particular attribution; see Tomita 1997, 88. 96 One of many articles to describe Ryūhoku as the first Japanese “tourist” to visit Paris is Shima­ mura 1997, 111. 97 Maeda did concede that “it is ironic, however, that Ryūhoku, having gone into reclusion professing himself to be a ‘useless man,’ then went on to live another life in which he did a lot of ‘useful things’ ”; see Maeda 1976a, 171. 98 See NCY, 219–22. 99 Inui 2003, 105–21. 100 Miyaoka 1978, 163–71. 101 For concise discussions of the threat to Buddhism, see Collcutt 1986 and Grapard 1984. 102 On the mutual benefits that the government and the temple sought in the Hokkaido development program, see Ketelaar 1990, 68–69, 133; Nakanishi 2013, 90–95. 103 Thelle 1987, 21–22. On the Meiji state’s attempt to incorporate Buddhist advisors into the new office as part of its “amalgamation of Shinto and Buddhist teachings into a state doctrine” and the complex trade-offs this presented for Honganji, see Ketelaar 1990, 91–122. 104 Thelle 1987, 28. 105 On Ishikawa Shuntai’s career, see Taya 1961, 156–61; and Kano 1951 (which describes his more imaginative plans for missionary projects in China on pp. 117, 133–34). On the influence of Takakura Academy faculty on his thinking about Christianity, see Kano 1951, 84; on his intellectual development, see Takahata 2000, 27. 106 See Kuniyoshi 2005; see also Oda 1972 and Mochizuki 1987, 197–99. On Seki’s role simultaneously gathering intelligence on Christian groups for both Higashi Honganji and the Meiji government, see Kuniyoshi 2011, 63. 107 Naramoto and Momose 1987, 240. Gonnyo was the temple’s twenty-first abbot, Ōtani Kōshō 大谷 光勝 (1817–94). 108 The three letters to Gonnyo are reprinted in Ōtani Daigaku Shinshū Sōgō Kenkyūjo 1994, 2:115–18. 109 Ryūhoku paid the group’s travel costs in the company of Namura Taizō, an official from the Ministry of Justice; see Narushima Ryūhoku 1872, 445. The eight men from the Ministry of Justice are listed in NCY, 150 n. 10. 110 Kawabe and Machi 2007, 273; Kawabe 2013, 60–71. It seems that Ryūhoku was invited to join the four priests around the eight month, about one month before departure. Sanjō’s support of the Higashi Honganji tour is also mentioned in Fukushima 1978, 57 n. 10. On Ishikawa Shuntai’s role in making the plans for the group’s departure, see Kano 1951, 99–112.



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111 Nakanishi 2013, esp. 99–106; Kawabe 2013, 93–97. 112 The Nishi Honganji group was led by Umegami Takuyū 梅上沢融 (1835–1907), who represented Abbot Meinyo, and Shimaji Mokurai 島地黙雷 (1838–1911), who served as Takuyū’s assistant. The group departed Japan in the first month of 1872 and also included three students, who pursued their studies independently upon arrival: Akamatsu Renjō 赤松連城 (1841–1919) and Horikawa Kyōa 堀川教阿 (d. 1880) in England, and Mitsuda Tamenari 光田為然 (1848–75) in Germany; for a detailed article concerning this mission, see Fukushima 1978; see also Shimaji 1872a, 1872b. Nishi Honganji enjoyed closer ties to the Meiji government than Higashi Honganji, which had supported the shogunate until its demise; see Kawabe 2013, 35–36. 113 See the entries for 09.05, 10.12, and 10.20 in Kido 1933; see also Kido 1986, 2:110; but note that it is Kido who has been encouraging the abbot and not the abbot who has been encouraging Kido. 114 Kido 1933, entry for 07.19 of 1872. On Mokurai and Kido’s interactions, see Tomita 1997, esp. 122–33. 115 On the Chamber of the Left’s investigation of European legal systems, see Matsuo Masahito 1986. For a detailed summary of both it and the Ministry of Justice tour, see Mōri 1997, esp. 138–42, 159– 61. The “later departure groups” (kōhatsudan 後発団) term is in Izumi 1996, 266; and in Kasumi Kaikan Shiryō Tenji Iinkai 1993, 187–88, 203–4. 116 NCY, 158, 160. 117 NCY, 210. Harada Kazumichi 原田吾一 (1830–1910), a former shogunal official who was part of the Iwakura Mission, and Irie Fumio 入江文郎 (1834–78), who had studied French in Yokohama, seem to have assisted Ryūhoku in contacting Rosny. 118 Kurimoto 1969, 307. 119 Matsubara 1986 provides an excellent summary of Rosny’s career; see also Ōhashi Atsuo 1994. On Rosny’s interactions with the first shogunal mission to Europe in 1862, see Haga Tōru 1968, 88–100, which calls Rosny “an eccentric japonophile” and a “Japan maniac”; and Miyanaga 1989, which reproduces much of the correspondence between Rosny and the mission members. Taniguchi 1994 translates the report Rosny presented on the Japanese to his ethnographic society in 1862. Kornicki 1994 catalogs Rosny’s Japanese library. 120 For a discussion of Rosny’s role as Edo gaikokukyoku tsūshin’in for the shogunate, see Ericson 1979, 399–400. 121 Ebihara 1980, 31–32. Rosny published Yo no uwasa with the linguistic help of Shimizu Usaburō, a businessman who traveled to Paris in 1867 for the International Exhibition and who was also a friend of Ryūhoku’s; Sawa 1981, 502–4; Matsumoto 1873a, 373. In the Meiji era, Shimizu contributed to improving printing technology, reforming the Japanese language (Braisted 1976, 96–101), and facilitating access to Western scholarship. 122 “Yo no susumi” (The progress of the world), YS, Dec. 6, 1882; YZ, 158–59; emphasis added. 123 Frank 1973, 256. 124 Many of Rosny’s fellow scholars accorded him high respect, and Sinologist Stanislas Julien (1797– 1873) praised Rosny in 1871 as “the most accomplished Japanologist in Europe”; see Horiguchi Ryōichi 1994, part 2, 20–21. 125 Matsumoto 1873b, 397. The entry also notes reaction to Darwin’s text and mentions its French translator. 126 See the entries for 04.02, 06.19, and 06.25 in Shimaji 1872a. 127 Shimaji 1872a, 41. See also Fukushima 1978, 51–52. 128 See Horiguchi Ryōichi 1995, 131–36; and Horiguchi Ryōichi 1994, part 1, 61–69. 129 Thelle 1987, 79–82. 130 Ishikawa Shuntai 1875, i–ii. 131 Matsumoto Hakka 1873a, 400–401. 132 NCY, 235. 133 Ryūhoku was not the first Japanese to join Rosny’s Société d’ethnographie. Fukuzawa Yukichi became quite friendly with Rosny in 1862 and seems to have joined the society then; see Fukuzawa 1862, 103; Matsubara 1986, 28.

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134 NCY, 244–45. The two Japanese men Ryūhoku mentioned in his earlier entries about beginning to learn Sanskrit, Irie Fumio and Imamura Warō, were also associates of Rosny’s; on Irie Fumio, see Tomita 1976, 128–35. 135 NCY, 216, 236; Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 125–26. It was probably H. H. Wilson’s 1841 An Introduction to the Grammar of the Sanskrit Language: for the Use of Early Students that Ryūhoku began to translate. 136 See International Congress of Orientalists 1873, 3:cxlvi. Though concerning an 1873 meeting, this report was printed in 1876, which may indicate that Rosny somehow learned Ryūhoku had become a newspaper publisher in 1874. 137 NCY, 252. Gujima Misako notes that Il secolo had been established in 1865; see Gujima 2010, 67. 138 NCY, 294. Ryūhoku mentions what is surely the Tai Sei Shinbun, a Japanese-language newspaper published by James Summers, but identifies its publisher as [Samuel] Beal. Summers and Beal were friends, and both were members of Rosny’s Société d’ethnographie; this connection may have facilitated Ryūhoku’s meeting with either or both. The Tai Sei Shinbun was published just once, on January 30, 1873; an article in The Times of London dated February 20, 1873 (p. 10), quotes the paper’s aim: “to serve as a means of communicating further knowledge of Western arts and policy among the millions of Japanese who are now desirous of learning all they can of foreign nations.” It seems that Minami Teisuke 南貞介 (1847–1915) was the paper’s editor; Ebihara 1980, 43–52. 139 Kataoka 1962, 16. 140 Ryūhoku notes corresponding with three of his students who later worked at the Translation Office; NCY, 234. 141 Under the leadership of Ishikawa Shuntai, Higashi Honganji promoted overseas missionary activity, Sanskrit study, and various translation projects. But internal conflicts led to Ishikawa’s removal in 1878, when the temple curtailed its missionary activities and shut down the Translation Office; Taya 1961, 161–62. 142 Kataoka 1962, 11. 143 The reminiscences of Nanjō Bun’yū, one of the students Higashi Honganji sent to study Sanskrit in England, explain how Gennyo and Shuntai became convinced of the importance of Sanskrit study during their time in France. Nanjō also mentions getting advice from Ryūhoku on the eve of his departure; Nanjō 1979, 83, 88–89. 144 Matsumoto 1873b, 394. NCY, 222–23. 145 Quoted in Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 122–23; emphasis added. 146 In later reminiscences as well, Ryūhoku emphasized the academic dimensions of his work with the temple. About his year at the Translation Office he recalled that he “made a recommendation that the temple priests be strongly encouraged to pursue scholarship” but that this proposal fell on deaf ears; see CS, Dec. 23, 1875. 147 Yūbin hōchi shinbun, Feb. 6, 1874, p. 2. 148 Yūbin hōchi shinbun, Feb. 18, 1874, p. 2.

Chapter 6 1 Ryūhoku’s good friend Yanagawa Shunsan was a pioneer in these developments; he had translated European newspapers into Japanese for the shogunate during the 1860s and went on to create original Japanese periodical media until his death in 1870; see Osatake 1940. On early modern Japanese predecessors of the daily newspaper, see Yamamoto Taketoshi 1990, 47–63; and Huffman 1997, 13–24. On Japan’s Western-language newspapers and Japanese prototypes based on them, see Huffman 1997, 24–35; and Akiyama 2002, 8–75. For a discussion of Restoration era newspapers with a focus on Fukuchi Ōchi’s Kōko shinbun, see Huffman 1980, 45–63. 2 Information about Ryūhoku’s eldest brother, Kusuyama Kōsaburō 楠山孝三郎, is contradictory. Nagai Kafū and Maeda Ai identify him as the “grandfather of Kusuyama Masao” 楠山正雄 (1884–1950), the prolific author and translator of children’s literature. Yet Masao’s grandfather was



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actually named Hidetarō 秀太郎 (d. 1886), and his great-grandfather was Kōichirō 孝一郎. The confusion may have originated with a 1918 article that wrongly identifies Kōichirō as Masao’s grandfather; see KBKS, 68:295. Still other sources state that Ryūhoku’s elder brother was named Kōshichirō 孝七郎; see Akita 1916 and Morishige 1984. 3 Yūbin hōchi shinbun 54 (May 1873), 2a–3a; rpt. Yoshino 1927, 586. The story of “Camellia” was later translated into Japanese as Tsubakihime, ironically enough by Osada Shūtō 長田秋涛 (1871–1915), the nephew of Ryūhoku’s adopted son Kenkichi. Osada published a partial translation of Dumas’s play in 1896 and later translated the novel. 4 On the tensions in Ryūhoku’s views of the newspaper’s role—both to convey information and to function in a didactic or admonitory capacity as an agent of bunmei kaika—see the discussion in Yamamoto Yoshiaki 1994. 5 Ryūhoku’s best-known assertion of the universality of human feeling was in the preface he contributed in 1878 to the Japanese translation of Ernest Maltravers, which I discuss in the next chapter. The theme is one that recurred again and again in Ryūhoku’s Chōya shinbun miscellany columns. 6 Only one year had passed since the term “letter to the editor” (tōsho 投書) is thought to have been coined; it appeared in the Nichi nichi in the summer of 1872. Over time, the distinction between news reports written by regular staffers and letters contributed by readers gradually became clearer, but the papers’ traditional reliance for their news on correspondence from readers remained; see Yamamoto Taketoshi 1990, 108–9. 7 Yūbin hōchi shinbun, March 26, 1874, p. 2; this series of three quatrains is reprinted in Okabe 1875, 8a–b. 8 See Fraleigh 2013. In March 1875, Ryūhoku wrote a letter urging Minister of Education Tanaka Fujimaro to reconsider, but permission to publish Keibyō ippan was not forthcoming. Two years later, Ryūhoku managed to elude the prohibition by changing the work’s title and serializing it in his literary magazine, Kagetsu shinshi. 9 See CS, July 4, 1877. In an article from the 1930s, Miyatake Gaikotsu lists several of Ryūhoku’s Hōchi pieces; see Kōshi geppō 33, p. 4. Yet, aside from the 1873 dispatch from Paris, Ryūhoku’s publications in the Hōchi have been largely overlooked by postwar scholars; one of the few articles to mention them is Imamura 1978. 10 See the Yūbin hōchi shinbun, Aug. 22, 1874. The Sinitic poems that Ryūhoku composed during his Hokuriku travels are preserved as the Hokuyū ginsō section of RS. In a later poem, Ryūhoku would recall this 1874 journey as a time when “I once traveled north to sell my writings,” which probably indicates both the interactions he had with local literati and also his intent to publish his poems and travelogue for a wider audience; see CS, Sept. 1, 1878; and Narushima 1874. 11 The column name was changed from zatsuwa to zatsuroku on September 5, 1875; Ukai 1985, 114. In a later column, Ryūhoku explained the meaning of the zatsu (miscellaneous) graph as being like the same graph in zōni 雑煮, a porridge with a variety of ingredients thrown in; see “A Statement” 口上, CS, Dec. 29, 1877. 12 As detailed in CS, Nov. 19, 1875, the character 嘶 is, in fact, an acceptable description of a goose’s cry. 13 Maeda 1976a, 227. 14 The historian Gokyū Sessō 五弓雪窓 (1823–86) took part in making these arrangements; see Ukai 1985, 4. According to Sessō’s diary, Bankōkan nisshi 晩香館日誌, Ukai Nagisa reached a preliminary agreement with Ryūhoku when he visited the latter’s home in the company of Ōtsuki Bankei on August 26. On September 5, Sessō visited Ryūhoku’s home to negotiate his salary. I am grateful to Gōyama Rintarō for providing me with copies of the relevant portions of Sessō’s diary, a study of which he is currently preparing for publication. 15 On the Kōbun tsūshi and the immediate changes Ryūhoku instituted when he relaunched the paper as the Chōya shinbun, see Ukai 1985, 3–7. On the role of Bankei, see Ōshima Eisuke 2004, 330. 16 In 1874, the Tōkyō nichi nichi circulation was 7,430, and the Yūbin hōchi circulation was 6,881; Huffman 1997, 64.

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17 Yamamoto Taketoshi 1990, 87–93. Before the 1874 shift, notes Yamamoto, publishers “took pride” in helping disseminate government information, and “officials had not in their wildest dreams imagined that newspapers might play a role in constructing antigovernment consciousness.” 18 Kim 2007, 90–92. 19 The piece appeared in the inaugural edition of the Chōya shinbun; rpt. Ukai 1985, 106. In keeping with Bankei’s scholarly eminence, Takahashi and Sawada use a lofty phrase from the Classic of Poetry to describe their appeals to him: 將伯助予 means to ask one’s senior for assistance and comes from “Zheng yue” 正月 (Mao no. 192). 20 See Nozaki 1927; Tsuchiya 2002, 11. Inui 2003, 255 gives fuller discussion of Nozaki’s recollections. Similar comparisons of the ōshinbun and koshinbun can be found in Yamamoto Taketoshi 1990, 99–103; Rubin 1984, 37–39; and Huffman 1997, 93–94. Huffman uses “prestige paper” and “vulgar paper” to translate the two terms. 21 Tsuchiya 2002, 9–40. 22 “Lament of the Loincloth” 犢鼻褌の愁嘆, CS, Oct. 18, 1874. The louse’s suggestion that the loincloth seek the aid of the washerwomen would surely have brought the story of Han Xin to the mind of many contemporary readers. 23 Slightly adapted from Hawkes 1985, 206–7. 24 Kanda 1983, 23. 25 “Lament of the Newspaperman” 新聞子ノ嘆, CS, Nov. 15, 1874. 26 Lau 1970, 114. The passage is Mencius 3B.9. 27 Given its provocative content, Ryūhoku published the text as a “letter to the editor” under the pseudonym Ukiyo Mosuke in CS, May 19, 1875; Ukai 1985, 9. The September 16, 1893, CS identifies Ryūhoku as the piece’s author and argues that it led the Meiji authorities to issue a set of restrictive press laws one month after its appearance. 28 CS, June 22, 1875; RI, 2:7–10; RID, 11–14; SRS, 254–56. Some contemporary pieces in Ryūhoku’s newspaper give “civilization” as a phonetic gloss beside the characters bunmei kaika; see CS, April 18, 1875. For a brief note on the neologism bunmei kaika with reference to scholarship that considers the origins of the phrase, see Fraleigh 2012, 180 n. 10. 29 CS, Oct. 8, 1878. 30 Guo Feiying observes that Kagetsu shinshi, the literary journal Ryūhoku went on to found in 1877, was an outgrowth of these early literary columns in the Chōya shinbun; see Guo Feiying 1992, 29. 31 Ryūhoku also staged occasional public gatherings, similar to the shogakai of late Edo, to which he invited interested poets, painters, and calligraphers. He announced these gatherings not only in the Chōya but in other newspapers (even koshinbun such as the Yomiuri); see the advertisement in YS, Feb. 19, 1875. 32 Ibi 2001. 33 Similarly, when Mori Shuntō’s Tōkyō saijin zekku appeared, Ryūhoku advertised a party to celebrate this anthology’s publication, printed a poem composed for the occasion, and quoted a kanbun preface to the work by Kawada Ōkō 川田甕江 (1830–96) that compares the anthology to François Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe, an influential text in Japan at the time; see CS, Oct. 2 and Oct. 25, 1875. In future years, the Chōya would continue to feature and advertise regularly the activities and publications of Mori’s school. 34 CS, Nov. 9, 1874. 35 CS, Dec. 9 and 10, 1875. 36 To give one example, CS, Nov. 25, 1876, contains several kanshi Nanjō Bun’yū composed about various overseas sites that he saw on his way to begin his studies at Oxford. CS, April 20, 1882, contains Sinitic poetry exchanges taking place among him, other Japanese students and officials, and Qing visitors then touring London. 37 Chinpunkan (written 陳紛漢, 珍糞漢, and numerous other ways) is used even in present-day Japanese to mean unintelligible discourse. The expression is thought to derive from imitation of the sounds of Chinese or Dutch. 38 See the second, third, and sixth installments of Chinpu kango in CS, Nov. 12 and 18, Dec. 5, 1874.



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39 The allusion is to a very well known quatrain by Zhang Ji 張繼 titled “Maple Bridge Night Mooring” 楓橋夜泊, the first couplet of which is “As the moon goes down, a crow caws in the frosty night / Facing the fishing lanterns through the riverside maples, I am unable to sleep” 月落烏啼霜 滿天 江楓漁火對愁眠. It is anthologized in the Tang shi xuan and other collections of Tang poetry. For a translation, see Mair 1994b, 219. 40 CS, March 18, 1875; rpt. SRS, 249–53. In emphasizing the importance of poetry in the “civilized” West, Ryūhoku’s essay echoes the preface, discussed in the introduction, that he had written for Tōkyō shashinkyō the previous year. 41 Kikuchi Dairoku was a child prodigy who had spent many years studying in London. He was the son of Mitsukuri Shūhei 箕作秋坪 (1826–86), a Western scholar and a close friend of Ryūhoku’s. Ryūhoku’s visit to London in May 1873 came during the second of Kikuchi’s stays there, for he had been the youngest of the students whom the shogunate sent to England in 1866. Ryūhoku had even gone to the Yokohama dock to send Kikuchi off on this first visit; Miyanaga 1994, 45. In the wake of the Restoration, Kikuchi and the other students were summoned back to Japan, but just two years later he was able to resume his studies. Kikuchi went on to pursue mathematics at King’s College Cambridge and later taught it at the University of Tokyo; for a detailed treatment of Kikuchi and other Japanese students at Cambridge, see Koyama Noboru 1999, 5–131, esp. 37–39 for Ryūhoku’s visit. 42 “On dregs” 糟粕論, CS, April 5, 1875; rpt. RI, 2:5–7. 43 Ōtsuki Bankei sent these two quatrains to Ryūhoku, who published them in CS, March 18, 1875. They are reprinted along with the prefatory essay in SRS, 249–53. 44 Maeda 1976a, 228. 45 In a column from the paper dated January 11, 1877, Ōtsuki Bankei wrote, “It is after all needless to say that the success this company enjoys at present can be attributed to Ryūhoku’s accomplishments. . . . It has reached the point that, if the Chōya shinbun were to be renamed the Ryūhoku shinbun, there would be no one who would raise an objection”; quoted in Imamura 1977d, 5. Many have attributed the success of the paper to Ryūhoku’s humorous and often satirical essays; see, for example, Nozaki 1926, 22; Ishikawa Iwao 1928, 15; Ono 1963, 192–93; and Akiyama 2002, 223–24. 46 CS, Oct. 12, 1874; rpt. RZ, 44–46; RI, 2:1–5. 47 Fukurokuju 福禄壽 (Ch. Fulushou) and Jurōjin 壽老人 are better known in Chinese as Shou­ xinglaor 壽星老兒 or Nanji laoren 南極老人. The other “foreign” deities are Hotei 布袋 (Ch. Budai), Bishamonten (Skt. Vaiśravaņa), and Benzaiten (Skt. Sarasvatī). But, as Ryūhoku noted in his explanation, even the “Japanese” gods of fortune were manifestations of foreign deities. 48 CS, Nov. 9, 1874; rpt. SRS, 245–48. 49 Rubin 1984, 21. For a thorough survey of these laws and Ryūhoku’s response to them, see Ono 1963, esp. 193–212; on the Press Law and the Defamation Law in general, see Kim 2007, 260–66; and Huffman 1997, chap. 4. 50 This quotation and those that follow are from an untitled editorial in CS, June 30, 1875. 51 Ono 1963, 197–98. On Fukuchi’s actions at the time, see Huffman 1980, 104–6. On Ginkō, see Fraleigh 2010. 52 CS, July 28, 1875. 53 CS, Aug. 5, 1875; RZ, 87; RI, 1:232–33; see Ono 1963, 195–96; Ōshima Ryūichi 1943, 221; and Sumiya 1958, 30–31. 54 The translation of “Preface to the ‘Orchid Pavilion Poems’ ” 蘭亭集序 by Wang Xizhi 王羲之 that appears here is derived from Owen 1996, 283–84. In order to make the correspondences between the parody and the original more evident, I have adapted Owen’s translation considerably. 55 See Yamamoto Taketoshi 1990, 152; and Ukai 1985, 9. 56 “A record of cooling off” 納凉記, CS, July 22, 1875; rpt. RI, 1:1–3. 57 Tetchō’s boast appears in Ono 1963, 198. 58 Yamamoto Yoshiaki 1992, 5. 59 Ryūhoku quotes Analects 14.3; Lau 1979, 124. In the same editorial, he refers to his earlier essay (CS, July 28, 1875) and its allusion to a Records of the Grand Historian passage, facetiously writing,

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“Of course, in promulgating the new laws, the government was not imitating a tyranny where ‘On the streets, people [were afraid to speak and so] could only exchange glances with each other.’ ” On August 20, he wrote an earthier riff on the same passage, obliquely comparing Meiji journalists to the students of a strict teacher who imposes an elaborate schedule of fines to curb their flatulence. The stifled students submit a memorial stating, “Once the river’s flow is stopped up, then, when the dam breaks, the damage people suffer is even more severe.” 60 Just that morning, he had published a piece that ostensibly sought to discover why even apparently intelligent reporters should be so foolish as to trouble the nation’s august judiciary: “Could it be that they were compelled to do so by circumstance? Could it be because of the stolidity of their aspirations? Could it be that they were hoping the government would have an epiphany? I do not know the answer.” Ryūhoku went on to suggest the difficulty in evaluating offending speech to determine a proper penalty in any consistent way. Of course, there was no reason to doubt the flawless judgment of the eminent men serving Japan’s legal system at the present time, “But just suppose: given a long range of time and a large number of officials, if there were some who were perhaps slightly deficient in intelligence, and, supposing further that, when they attempted to find a crime in language and weigh it carefully, they made a mistake in assigning the length of the term of punishment, then reporters would inevitably be the most unfortunate people in all of Japan.” See CS, Aug. 15, 1875. 61 Adapted from Owen 1996, 292–94; for a side-by-side comparison of the two texts, see Fraleigh 2005, 391–94. 62 Even rival newspapers praised the work; the August 18, 1875, Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun, for example, called it and Ryūhoku’s May 19 piece on the foundering ship of state “prose masterpieces” (meibun). 63 “Poetic exposition on shrinking in fear” 辟易賦, CS, Aug. 17, 1875; rpt. RZ, 79–80; RI, 1:235–37; an annotated version appears in SRS, 257–61. 64 See Yamamoto Yoshiaki 1992, 3–4. For this reason, Yamamoto argues that “Hekiekifu” is not only a parody of Su Dongpo, but a parody of Ryūhoku’s persona as a fūryūjin. 65 Ryūhoku’s “diary” appeared in CS from August 30 to September 3, 1875; rpt. RID, 22–34. A description of the mock trial, which combined elements of a celebrity roast with language befitting the very topical issue of parliamentary government, appears in the “Zatsuwa” column, CS, Sept. 3, 1875. 66 These remarks by publishers Akagi Sanao and Otobe Kanae appeared in CS, Sept. 25, 1875. The success of the Chōya shinbun stood out even more prominently when compared to the failure of its predecessor. Befitting the occasion of the “name-changing ceremony,” Akagi and Otobe observed that the Kōbun tsūshi 公文通誌 in fact belied its name, for, in its public 公 role, it was yet “unable to contribute to the public benefit 公益” and its prose 文 was likewise “insufficient to aid national culture 文化”; it was “an emaciated and moribund state that was known to all.” A letter from a reader quoted in the paper that day praised Ryūhoku, by contrast, as “Ryū bungaku” 柳文学 (Ryūhoku the literary scholar), “with the brush strength of a thousand men.” For a discussion of the kaishōsetsu 改称節 celebration, see Ukai 1985, 72–75. 67 “Later poetic exposition on shrinking in fear” 後辟易賦, CS, Oct. 15, 1875; rpt. RZ, 80; RI, 1:237–38. 68 CS, Oct. 7, 1875. 69 A week later, Ryūhoku poked further fun at the seikan position with a pun-filled essay portraying a group of doctors gathered to discuss how to treat a strange new communicable disease wreaking havoc in Japan: seikan-netsu, or “blue liver fever” 青肝熱. According to one eminent physician’s report, the illness manifests itself first in violence, causing those afflicted to act thoughtlessly and in total self-contradiction; see CS, Oct. 24, 1875. 70 Watson 1994, 97–98. 71 In one later essay, Ryūhoku drew an analogy between present-day Korea and the situation in Japan during the bakumatsu era; see “What nation lacks stubborn men?” 何レノ國カ頑人無カラン, CS, May 5, 1881.



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72 It was the conclusion of the judges who decided the defamation case that the offending piece was written as the cooperative effort of both men, with Tetchō at the center. 73 CS, Dec. 20, 1875; rpt. SRS, 259–61. 74 As an example of a marginally more sincere statement offered before his sentence, see Ryūhoku’s “New Year’s Greeting” 新年賦, CS, Jan. 4, 1876; rpt. RI, 1:238–40; RZ, 80–81. Amid a catalogue of myriad auspicious beginnings to the ninth year of Meiji, Ryūhoku lamented the fate of newspaper journalists, whose “earnest patriotic hearts have not yet exhausted their words and already the marks of the censor’s red brush fill the paper.” 75 CS, Jan. 29, 1876. Presumably Ryūhoku has in mind “Blizzard song” 大雪歌 by Lu You, which begins “Within the city walls of Chang’an three days of snow; on the road to Dong pass, no sign of travelers” 長安城中三日雪、潼關道上行人絶. 76 CS, Feb. 3 and Feb. 5, 1876. 77 CS, Feb. 15, 1876. 78 CS, Feb. 19, 1876. 79 CS, Feb. 17, 1876. 80 CS, March 28, 1876. For other examples of Ryūhoku’s prison poems, see CS, April 13 and May 10, 1876. 81 CS, June 13, 1876; reprinted with additional reading marks in the Yomiuri on June 14, 1876. 82 In the essay, a student argues for eliminating the troublesome newspapers only to be admonished by his teacher: “The newspaper was brought in from the civilized countries of Europe and America. . . . It is a vehicle for guiding the people from their uncivilized ways. . . . Think what it says in the Analects: if it weren’t for the newspaper, we’d still be wearing our hair down and folding our robes to the left.” The last line paraphrases Analects 14.17. 83 Ryūhoku commented on the phenomenon in a column he wrote just before he was imprisoned: a dialogue between two newspaper staff writers, one of whom suggested that writing with as many fuseji as possible would be a great boon to the paper since it would cut down on typesetting expenses; see CS, Jan. 31, 1876. 84 For a discussion of modern Japanese engagement with Wen Tianxiang’s poem, see Fraleigh 2009b. 85 CS, Feb. 29, 1876. 86 See James Legge’s translation “The Game of Pitch Pot” in Legge 1885. 87 CS, April 5, 1876. 88 See the untitled editorial in CS, Feb. 17, 1876. 89 Gokunaibanashi, which puns on two words pronounced gokunai 獄内 “inside prison” and 極内 “confidential,” was serialized in the CS between June 14 and June 24, 1876; RI, 2:217; Narushima 2012, 15. On the popularity of Gokunaibanashi, James Huffman writes: “Only a few major papers ever reached a daily circulation of more than 10,000 until the 1880s. Chōya exceeded that briefly, with nearly 18,000 subscribers in 1876, apparently because of the popularity of Narushima’s prison writings”; see Huffman 1997, 87. 90 The prisoners’ reading options were limited to Literary Sinitic historical texts; see Narushima 2012, 11. 91 Suehiro Tetchō wrote that Ryūhoku’s jailhouse newspaper was called Gokuchū shinbun; the few extant editions bear various titles, including Kingoku eiri shinbun and Kingoku eiri dodoitsu shinbun; see Ono 1963, 212. 92 The deeds of Nie Zheng, Jing Ke, and other famed retainers of Chinese antiquity who undertook missions of assassination are recounted in the “Cikezhuan” 刺客傳 (Biographies of the assassinretainers) section of Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian; see Burton Watson’s translation in Minford and Lau 2000, 1:337–51. 93 Narushima 2012, 19; RI, 2:221–23. That the target of Ryūhoku’s critique is the superficiality of Westernization efforts is further clarified by comparing these remarks with his impressions of the Prison de la Santé, which he visited in 1873. Following a detailed account of the layout and policies of this Parisian prison, he exclaimed in his travelogue: “it is the pinnacle of strictness where strictness is called for and the height of mercy when mercy is in order”; see NCY, 220–22.

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94 In the Chōya shinbun’s coverage, Ryūhoku pointed out the diverse aims of event participants: some journalists took part to purge their own sins; some were coming to pray for better business; some wished to lament the souls of those who died because of the newspaper; and some wished to bring comfort to imprisoned reporters. 95 “Prose memorial for the newspaper” 祭新聞紙文, CS, July 1, 1876; rpt. RZ, 48–49; RI, 2:131–33; an annotated version appears in SRS, 262–63. The sermon is partially translated and the event described in Rubin 1984, 36; see also Maeda 1976a, 244. 96 Moreover, Ryūhoku mourned not just the “spirit of the newspaper,” but human victims as well. A few weeks after this ritual, for example, he published an open letter to Nakajima Katsuyoshi 中島 勝義 (1858–1932), who had recently been appointed editor of the Akebono shinbun. Ryūhoku lamented that Nakajima would now be subject to all kinds of new scrutiny, especially from the newspaper censors; see CS, July 25, 1876; rpt. RI, 2:133–35. 97 In his 1821 “Anchored off the coast of Amakusa” 泊天草洋, Rai San’yō glimpses the coast of Kyushu faintly but imagines that he can see the Chinese mainland; for a translation, see Shirane 2002, 919–20. 98 Ōhashi and Kita 1878, 110. 99 The contemporary pronunciation rei for the “cipher” (zero) is documented in, for example, Hepburn 1867. 100 Kim 2007, 65. 101 Ibid., 95.

Chapter 7 1 Maeda 1976a, 247. 2 “Celebratory remarks in honor of the move of our offices” 遷社祝辭, CS, Nov. 5, 1876; rpt. RI, 2:121–24. 3 Satsuma was famous for its sweet potatoes. The phrase I translate as “samurai hothead” is sesshi yakuwan ryū 切齒扼腕流, which more literally is “those types who grit their teeth and clutch their arms.” Whereas his earliest poems praise this figure of earnest indignant intensity, Ryūhoku had come to use the term dismissively toward belligerent samurai stalwarts. “Rambling notes from a journey” 客中漫録, CS, March 18 to April 24, 1877; rpt. RI, 1:98–117. 4 On the coverage of the Satsuma Rebellion in the Chōya shinbun and other papers, see Ukai 1985, 17–19; Huffman 1980, 115–20; Huffman 1997, 95–97; Katō Yūji 1998. From the first, Ryūhoku seems to have planned to return to Tokyo within a month or two; see “A statement to the readers” 看官 諸君 ニ申ス, CS, March 11, 1877. 5 “New Zhuangzi” 新莊子, CS, Sept. 4, 1877; rpt. RI, 2:78–79. 6 Watson 1964, 23. 7 The text ends with a final bit of rhyming word play: having heard Ryūhoku’s narrator read out the text, a visitor remarks, “It sounds like the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi (莊子ノ内篇; Sōji no naihen),” to which the narrator responds, “That’s no surprise; it is the Internal Conflict of the present (當時ノ内變; tōji no naihen).” 8 Quoted in Maeda 1976a, 245–46. However much he may have failed in his own attempts at frontline news gathering, Ryūhoku was not unaware of the importance of such efforts to the newspaper’s success, as his own comments on the occasion of the Chōya’s move to Ginza indicate; see RI, 2:121–24. 9 Maeda 1976a, 260. 10 Hino 2001. 11 See especially Imamura 1977d, 1977e. 12 See, respectively, the untitled editorial in CS, Aug. 27, 1876, rpt. “One great strategy for national benefit” 一大國益策, RB, 49–54; “A recommendation about addresses” 番地ノ建言, CS, May 10, 1878; and “Annoying vehicles” 厄介車, CS, March 27, 1879.



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13 CS, Feb. 28, 1877. 14 “A great nuisance” 大迷惑, CS, March 1, 1877. 15 One essay Ryūhoku published at the time imagined the samurai as rapacious “crows and sparrows” plundering the fields of diligent farmers: “Unless we purge ourselves of these mutinous samurai and transform them all into good citizens, our nation cannot be independent”; see “Our obstruction” 我々の妨害, CS, March 3, 1877. 16 “The empty name should be abandoned” 虚名去ル可シ, CS, June 19, 1877. Ryūhoku called again for eliminating shizoku status and eventually kazoku (nobility) status in an editorial he published in CS, Oct. 16, 1877, arguing that ending these formal class distinctions should even take priority over the founding of parliamentary government. 17 Ryūhoku compared Saigō to other antagonists of the imperial court, remarking in one essay that the decapitated head of Taira no Masakado, a samurai who mounted an insurrection against the Japanese emperor in the tenth century, was on display at a Kyoto exhibition and musing, “Perhaps the head of Saigō will also be on display at an exhibition hundreds of years from now”; see “Unparalleled surprise” 無類ノ驚, CS, May 1, 1877; rpt. RID, 130–31. 18 “Old customs are hard to break” 舊習ハ止ミ難シ, CS, Nov. 22, 1878. 19 Signed editorial, CS, Oct. 25, 1877. 20 “Strong and weak the same” 強弱同轍, CS, July 1, 1877. 21 “The brush can kill a man” 筆能ク人ヲ生殺ス, CS, Oct. 9, 1877. 22 The paper occasionally printed Sinitic verses by Saigō, some of which were accompanied by others’ compositions that matched Saigō’s rhymes. These matching quatrains often contrast Saigō’s early heroism in the Restoration with his final tragic mistakes; see, for example, the “Zatsuroku” column of CS, Oct. 7, 1877. 23 “Pond-fish society” 池魚社會, CS, Oct. 13, 1877. 24 For example, Ryūhoku used this idiom to describe his own application of a quotation from the Zen classic The Gateless Gate to Japan’s present dilemma: “Buddhists say: ‘Advance and get lost in principle; retreat and violate the teaching; but if one neither advances nor retreats, he is just a breathing corpse.’ Ah, ‘the stones of other hills may be made into grindstones and used to polish our jade.’ ” He goes on to argue that the bunmei kaika project must base its “advances” and “retreats” on due consideration of public interest, not “superficial decoration”; CS, July 5, 1877. 25 “On conditions in the realm” 論天下形勢, CS, April 20, 1879. For discussion of this and other pieces critical of Ōkubo Toshimichi’s policies, see Inui 2003, 126–27. 26 On the assassination of Ōkubo, see Brown 1971; see also Ukai 1985, 145–46. 27 “An advertisement for a change in position” 轉職ノ廣告, CS, May 31, 1878; rpt. RZ, 110–11; RI, 2:83–85. 28 Often Ryūhoku’s exaggerated frustrations with the hectic pace and busy schedule of a newspaperman were the very fodder for his columns. One of his columns later that year, for example, consisted solely of Ryūhoku’s amusing arguments in prose and poetry for why he deserved a vacation; in the midst of a hot summer, he reasoned, there was little chance his services as Fire Guard would be required. See “Song of speechlessness” 閉口歌, CS, July 20, 1878; rpt. RI, 2:87–88. 29 “A treatise on the Fire Guard” 火之番ノ解, CS, June 1, 1878; rpt. RZ, 111–12; RI, 2:85–87. 30 Beyond the sheer number of essays that he published in the zatsuroku column during these years (well over a hundred each year through 1883), the simple fact that Ryūhoku remained integral to the Chōya is often clear from the content of the essays themselves. In one column from 1880, for example, Ryūhoku laments that the owner of the Chōya has denied his proposal to travel alongside the emperor on the latter’s tour of Kyoto, arguing that Ryūhoku is vital to the paper’s operations in Tokyo; see “Afflicted with discontentment” 不平病, CS, May 14, 1880; rpt. RZ, 99–100; RI, 2:32–34. In a column the following year, Ryūhoku notes how he is at last able to travel to Kyoto in spite of the objections of his coworkers; see “Declaration of escape” 脱走ノ口供, CS, March 31, 1881. Or consider Ryūhoku’s travelogue about his 1882 journey to Hakone, in which he notes how the paper repeatedly sends telegrams summoning him back to Tokyo to handle a publishing crisis there; see “As the brush travels” 筆のまにまに, CS, Aug. 16 to Sept. 6, 1882.

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31 Suzuki Mitsujirō 1903, 76–77. 32 For a discussion of the translations that appeared in Kagetsu shinshi, see Gujima 2012. 33 “An epigraph to New Journal of Blossoms and the Moon”; KG, 1 (Jan. 4, 1877): 1b–2b; rpt. RZ, 8–9. 34 “Internal affairs at Journal of Blossoms and the Moon” 花月ノ内情, CS, Feb. 17, 1877. 35 These two quotations from Wita sekusuarisu are based on Mori Ōgai 1971, 5:127, 163; for a different translation, see Mori 1972, 80, 130. Ōgai’s fondness for Kagetsu shinshi is also evident from the magazine’s appearance in his novella Gan (The wild goose), where two young intellectuals who come of age in Meiji identify it among their favorite reading materials and mention specifically Ryūhoku’s travelogue Diary of a Journey to the West, serialized in its pages; see Mori Ōgai 1971, 5:597; and Mori 1974, 114. On the youthful Ōgai’s reading of kanshibun, see Gōyama 2014, 39–51. 36 On the overlap of readership between Chōya shinbun and Kagetsu shinshi, see Yamamoto Taketoshi 1990, 137. Beyond the overlap in contributing poets, the continuity between the poetry section of the Chōya and Kagetsu shinshi is particularly clear in cases where a single series of poems is divided between the two. See, for example, the ten poems by Sugi Chōu 杉聴雨 (1835–1920) called “The joys of drinking tea,” five of which appear in CS, Nov. 1, 1877, and the other five in KG 28 (Nov. 9, 1877); subsequent responses from readers appeared in both periodicals. This instance also merits attention because Chōu was a prominent Meiji official (and a Chōshū man at that); in his comments on the poem, Ryūhoku notes his surprise that a taikaku poet should so savor rustic ambiance in his tea appreciation. 37 Ukai 1985, 26. 38 DS, 1 (Dec. 5, 1878): 1a–2a. Ryūhoku’s epigraph is dated November 1878. 39 See DS, 19 (May 30, 1880); DS, 21 (Aug. 26, 1880); and DS, 23 (Oct. 27, 1880). 40 “Sleep-talk early in the New Year” 新年早々ノ寐言, CS, Jan. 4, 1879. 41 Ryūhoku made frequent reference to his work facilitating Grant’s tour in his zatsuroku columns, focusing in particular on Grant’s visits to educational, recreational, and theatrical sites. Though Ryūhoku sometimes made exaggerated protests of regret that he had accepted yet another responsibility, he also asserted that serving on the committee was his “civic duty”; see CY, July 8 and 9, 1879. At a celebratory gathering for the planning committee following Grant’s return, Ryūhoku gave a speech and was publicly thanked for his efforts; see YS, Nov. 14, 1879. 42 “Bokujō gyoshi is dead” 濹上漁史死ス, CS, March 3, 1880; rpt. RZ, 98–99; RI, 2:29–31; SRS, 284–86. In an earlier column, Ryūhoku had enthusiastically praised his friend the contemporary poet Suzuki Shōtō for publishing a schedule of his fees and recommended that others adopt the practice; see “Schedule of writing fees” 潤筆條例, CS, Jan. 15, 1880; rpt. RZ, 97–98; RI, 2:26–28. 43 In one early essay, Ryūhoku argues that kana-based newspapers (as well as touts who trumpeted their contents) had an important role to play in offering moral instruction to “the commoners and women of the city” who were unable to read “the Nippō or the Chōya”; see “Marvelous medicine for the ears” 耳ノ妙樂, CS, Sept. 14, 1876. 44 See, for example, “The harms of newspapers” 新聞ノ弊害, DS, 18 (May 30, 1880): 9a–10b. 45 “A message to the general public” 江湖ノ諸君ニ告グ, CS, Jan. 8, 1882. 46 CS, March 29, 1883. 47 This statement recalls the foreword Ryūhoku contributed to the 1878 Karyū shunwa, a translation of Ernest Maltravers; in it Ryūhoku asserts what he saw as the universality of human feeling, framing it as something he discovered during his travels abroad in 1872–73: “Some narrow-minded scholars maintain that Western people are only interested in profit and utility, and that they never dare to show any interest in pleasant diversions and amorous foolishness. This is just nonsense. I once made a yearlong journey [abroad], and, after close observation, I realized that our emotions and feelings correspond to theirs without the slightest difference whatsoever”; RZ, 10–11. 48 “The gods of fortune” 福の神, YS, Jan. 4, 1881; rpt. YZ, 16–17. 49 Sakaki 1999, 191. 50 Ryūhoku and most other commentators at the time were certain that “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika, often abbreviated kaimei) was desirable, but they disagreed on what exactly



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these terms meant. Ryūhoku saw bunmei kaika as a universal process of progress and improvement that included intangible spiritual dimensions and should not be confused with mere technological advances. Although he critiqued the bunmei kaika that others propounded as superficial, he did not question that bunmei kaika was a shared goal. In his usage, it was thus a stinging criticism to accuse someone or something of being an “obstacle to kaimei” (as he called fuseji in “Theory of – –” ○○論, CS, Nov. 5, 1875). Or consider an essay that recounts Ryūhoku’s household being thrown into turmoil one night by a belligerent drunk’s sudden visit and then suggests an allegorical reading of his efforts to expel this intruder: “Maybe he’s intoxicated not with alcohol but with hidebound backwardness that runs counter to the true principle of kaimei?”; see “Recording a drunkard’s visit” 記醉客事, CS, Dec. 27, 1883; rpt. RI, 2:93–95. 51 “A land of no learning” 無學國, DS, 7 (April 17, 1879): 1a–3b; emphasis in original. 52 “The vitality of thought” 思想ノ死活, DS, 8 (May 20, 1879): 10a–11b. 53 “The common fault of scholars” 學者ノ通癖, CS, Dec. 22, 1877. 54 “In all areas, select what is good” 百事其善ヲ選ブ可シ, CS, April 6, 1881. The first two quotations come from the Book of Rites, Legge 1885, 3:170–72; the third is Analects 15.11; Lau 1979, 133. 55 “How biased is the Preserve the Nation Society!” 偏ナル哉保國社, CS, June 3, 1881. For an excellent study of Sada Kaiseki’s career, see Tanigawa 2002; see also Steele 2007 and 2010; Rambelli 2011. 56 “A madman doesn’t think he’s mad” 狂夫自カラ以テ狂トセズ, CS, Aug. 9, 1881. 57 “Agile advance, quick retreat” 鋭進速退, CS, Dec. 12, 1880. The quotations are Analects 12.11 and 8.9. 58 “Refutation of a misguided argument” 迂論ノ一駁, CS, Oct. 8, 1881. 59 “A sermon in the Bokujō [i.e., Ryūhoku] sect” 濹上宗の説教, YS, Feb. 9, 1881; rpt. YZ, 26–27. 60 See Yamamoto Yoshiaki 1992, which takes Ryūhoku’s “principleless principle” as its theme, and Ryūhoku’s “Yojirōbei” 与次郎兵衛, CS, Nov. 6, 1877. 61 “The secrets of plastic arts” 工藝技術ノ臆議, CS, Feb. 25, 1881; rpt. RI, 2:37–39. 62 “A record of Western confections” 洋菓ノ記, CS, Feb. 7, 1878; rpt. RI, 1:4–6. 63 “A record of touring the Shinsuisha Factory” 觀新燧社製造場記, CS, Dec. 7, 1879; rpt. RI, 1:14–16. See also the piece by Sawada Chokuon concerning this factory in DS, 12 (Sept. 30, 1879): 4a–6b. 64 “The pros and cons of new and old commerce” 舊新商賣ノ一得一失, DS, 12 (Sept. 30, 1879): 9a–11b. 65 “A record of the opening of the Second Industrial Exposition” 第二回勸業博覧會開場之記, CS, March 2, 1881; rpt. RI, 1:84–87. Four years earlier, Ryūhoku offered similar praise of the Meiji Emperor’s visit to an industrial exhibition held in Tokyo, noting how it signaled a shift from past practice: “Though they are intimately tied to the wealth and strength of the nation, agriculture, commerce, and industry were once spurned, and gentlemen were all ashamed to discuss these matters. But, after the Meiji Restoration, we have greatly purged ourselves of these old ways of thinking”; see “Essay in celebration of the exhibition grounds” 祝博覧會場文, CS, Aug. 22, 1877; rpt. RI, 2:109–12. 66 “A little statement on fondness for antiquities” 好古小言, KG, 29–30 (Nov. 18 and 29, 1877); rpt. RZ, 58–61. 67 “The inattentiveness of the Japanese” 日本人ノ不注意, CS, April 6, 1879. 68 See Inui 2003, 137; and 105–13 for further discussion; see also Kobayashi 1985. 69 “An argument for the preservation of Nikkō Shrine” 晃山廟ノ保存ヲ論ズ, CS, July 22–23, 1879. 70 As discussed in chapter 5, Ryūhoku had a memorable experience scaling Mount Kankakeyama in 1869; nearly ten years later he described the efforts of local citizens to develop and promote the site; see “Memorial on Kankakeyama” 鍵懸山移文, CS, Oct. 17, 1878. Ryūhoku’s own efforts in the early 1880s to raise awareness about the village of Komukai on the outskirts of Tokyo led to its fame as a destination for plum blossom viewing. 71 “A record of listening to a Heike lutenist” 聽平家琵琶記, CS, Oct. 7–8, 1880; rpt. RZ, 36–38; RI, 1:40–43. 72 “A record of seeing Noh” 觀散樂記, CS, April 20, 1880; rpt. RI, 1:24–26; emphasis in original. Perhaps Ryūhoku had seen a particularly egregious example, for, at least according to Ryūhoku’s

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column, even Fukuchi Ōchi, who was also attending the performance and is traditionally thought of as an advocate for theatrical reform, disapproved. 73 “Tea ceremony” 茶の湯, YS, May 17, 1883; rpt. YZ, 184–85. Ryūhoku’s fondness for traditional arts had limits, however, and he called the tea ceremony a “prison”-like restriction on “what should be freest”: food and drink. 74 “The popularity of preservation” 保存の流行, YS, March 30, 1882; rpt. YZ, 114–15. 75 A zatsuroku essay Ryūhoku published the following year reiterated the point by praising various contemporary preservation efforts before arguing, “We must make every effort to preserve old things and items, but the nation and the citizenry alike should aspire to a spirit of daily reform. We cannot retreat but must charge boldly forward”; see “Old things ought to be chosen selectively” 古物モ取捨有レカシ, CS, May 2, 1883. 76 See Takahashi Kiichi 1879; I have determined that the source text is Chambers’s Encyclopædia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People (London: W. and R. Chambers, 1876), rev. ed., 7: 280–92. 77 On Fukuchi’s gradualism, see Huffman 1980, 95–113. Fukuchi supported eventual popular sovereignty, calling it “the kingly way” 王道, but Ryūhoku turned these words against him. Those agitating for the rapid founding of a Diet must surely then be “loyalists” 勤王家, reasoned a sarcastic Ryūhoku, and a divine land like Japan could never have too many such men; see “Loyalist petition” 勤王請願, CS, March 28, 1880. 78 “A record of an excursion to Ryōgoku on July 10” 七月十日遊二州記, CS, July 11 and 13, 1880; rpt. RI, 1:29–33. 79 “Recording an auspicious dream of the new year” 記新年吉夢, CS, Jan. 4, 1881; rpt. RZ, 27–28; RI, 1:96–98; emphasis in original. Ryūhoku makes use here of an anonymous Tang era phrase, “a hundred thousand cash tied to my waist, I mount a crane and go to Yangzhou” 腰纏十萬貫、騎 鶴上揚州. 80 “New Year’s Eve draws near” 大晦日近し, YS, Nov. 27, 1881; rpt. in YZ, 90–91. 81 “Sumida scenery” 隅田のけしき, YS, May 17, 1882; rpt. in YZ, 124–25. The “person of old” 古人 is Wang Anshi, in whose “Poem composed spontaneously on the things of early summer” 初夏即事詩 the line appears. 82 See “Diet pill” 國會開設丸, CS, July 2, 1880; “Neutrality” 局外中立, CS, Sep. 22, 1880; and “The curious statement of Bismarck” ビスマーク公ノ奇言, CS, Nov. 28, 1882. 83 “The sea bream nets of Atami” 熱海の鯛網, YS, Jan. 25, 1882; rpt. YZ, 100–101. Ryūhoku had expressed related concerns about excessive scandalous content in furigana newspapers a few years earlier; see, for example, “Dekinei complaints” 溺濘小言, DS, 13 (Oct. 26, 1879). In the early 1880s, however, his comments focus less on critiquing the papers’ inclusion of salacious content and more on lamenting their exclusion of political fare. 84 “Be independent!” 独立し給へ, YS, Feb. 26, 1882; rpt. YZ, 108–9. 85 Ryūhoku occasionally adopted such a snooty tone in his column, dismissing certain groups or customs as crass or lacking in panache; one unusually strident example is “There are distinctions among people” 人ニ品格有リ, CS, March 12, 1881. Yet a healthy dose of self-mockery sometimes undercuts any snobbery. In one essay, Ryūhoku describes a disappointing visit to an iris-viewing festival overrun with “uncouth” sorts. Yet, because he made the journey in spite of his wife having reminded him that morning that he didn’t even like irises, Ryūhoku finds himself in the ridiculous position of being unable to complain to her upon his return; rather than face his wife’s scolding, he claims he went elsewhere. See “An account of Horikirimura” 堀切村ノ記, CS, June 19, 1880; rpt. RI, 1:28–29. 86 “Winter scenery on the Sumida” 隅田の冬げしき, YS, Nov. 22, 1881; rpt. YZ, 88–89. 87 “The principle of fūryū” 風流の主義, YS, June 15, 1882; rpt. YZ, 130–31. 88 “The jade of Oyabegawa” 小矢部川ノ玉, CS, April 6, 1882; rpt. RI, 2:97–99. 89 Ryūhoku had expressed his support for popular sovereignty more directly in essays published in Dekinei sōdan and other forums; see, for example, “Autocracy depends on keeping the people foolish” 人民愚ナラザレバ専制行ハレズ, DS, 18 (April 21, 1880): 11a–12b. 90 “Appealing unjust charges on the dolls’ behalf” 雛ノ為メニ冤ヲ訴フ, CS, March 5, 1882.



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91 “What is the principle of the Loyalist Party?” 勤王黨ノ主義如何, CS, Nov. 25, 1881. Ryūhoku alludes to Analects 7.11, in which Confucius esteems circumspection over impulsiveness. Shishi activists from Ryūhoku’s time often saw Gamō Kunpei 蒲生君平 (1768–1813) and Takayama Hiko­ kurō 高山彦九郎 (1747–1793) as their heroic antecedents; see Fraleigh 2009b, 112–13. 92 “Empty infeasible arguments” 無手段ノ空論, CS, Nov. 27, 1881. 93 Inui Teruo argues that the place of the Rikken Teiseitō is best understood in terms of its opposition to the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement; see Inui 2003, 233–38. 94 In one piece, Ryūhoku mocked the very name of the Rikken Teiseitō, arguing that instead of the teisei 帝政 that meant “imperial government,” other teiseis might better fit the party’s nature: perhaps 抵勢, “resisting the trend of the times,” because the party wished to slow the pace of progress, 偵省, “scrutinizing the ministries,” because they were always toadying to the officials, or 低聲, “low voices,” since the party had forgotten its mission and consisted only of a few likeminded people talking in isolation with one another; see Inui 2003, 245.

Conclusion 1 See YS, Dec. 4 and 6, 1884; and Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun, Dec. 4, 1884. A photograph of the lengthy procession is reproduced in Nozaki 1927, 261. Those who paid their respects at Ryūhoku’s funeral included such prominent public figures as Fukuzawa Yukichi, Enomoto Takeaki, Ōkuma Shigenobu, Fukuchi Ōchi, Shibusawa Eiichi, Masuda Takashi, Ōkura Kihachirō, and Kanda Takahira; see Ōshima 1943, 394. 2 “Grave inscription for Narushima Ryūhoku” 成島柳北墓誌, RZ, 298. The text appeared in CS, Dec. 2, 1884, and was reprinted in YS, Dec. 3, 1884. 3 The only other post-mortem arrangements Ryūhoku made were for a simple funeral, a ceramic rather than a wooden coffin, and a Buddhist service if a funeral service were to be held, because “Ryūhoku detests Shintō funerals”; see YS, Dec. 7, 1884, p. 3. Although the Yomiuri reporter does not link the name Bunseiin to Xie An, another national newspaper made the connection: “What is the locus classicus of Bunsei, I wondered, and tried to look it up. At first I couldn’t discover the answer, but then I learned that it is the posthumous name of Xie An. It seems that Ryūhoku must have seen himself in terms of Xie An. It is said that ultimately his posthumous name was decided to be Bunseiin Nichiei Ryūhoku Koji 文靖院日詠柳北居士”; see Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun, Dec. 4, 1884, p. 3. The elements nichiei and koji might be translated “Japanese poet” and “retired scholar.” 4 “Eel or clam” 鱣カ蛤カ, CS, April 25, 1882. 5 According to calligrapher Kusakabe Meikaku 日下部鳴鶴 (1838–1922), Ryūhoku’s widow complained to Ōtsuki Joden that the phrase made Ryūhoku seem nonhuman and asked him to convey her dismay to Shinobu Joken. Joken initially refused to change his proposed text, citing the use of exactly the same phrase in a Xunzi passage. Another Sinologue, Mishima Chūshū 三島中洲 (1831–1919), was eventually able to bring an end to the standoff by proposing that Joken substitute “His face was long and thin” 面頎而癯 for the problematic “His face was three feet long.” See Kusakabe 1925, 123–24. 6 In 1880, Gakkai and Ryūhoku were among the founding members of Hakuōsha 白鷗社 (White gull society), a Sinitic poetry group whose members mainly dwelt along the Sumida River. The river had been associated with white gulls since the ninth-century Tales of Ise; see Yoda Gakkai 1993, 4:306. 7 The revised stele text is reprinted in Yokose 1893, 453–57. 8 What is claimed to be Joken’s original stele text appears, with comments by Gakkai and several others, in Shinobu 1889, 3:1a–6b. See Miyazaki 2004 for a detailed discussion of Joden’s critique of Joken’s text. 9 The poem appears with a photograph of Seigai and other participants in the memorial service for Ryūhoku as the frontispiece to Ibungaku 10:1 (Jan. 1934); see also Nagao 1934. Xie Anshi is another name for Xie An.

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10 “Yesterday a cat, today a tiger” 昨猫今虎, CS, Feb. 3, 1880. 11 See the entry for August 24, 1885, in Yoda Gakkai 1993, 6:242–43. 12 Yoda Gakkai 1993, 6:92–94. 13 Yoda Gakkai 1900, 10. 14 See “Short biographies of Japan’s great men” 日本名家小傳, CS, March 25, 1883. Lanman’s book contains translations of two sample essays from the Chōya shinbun that it attributes to Ryūhoku. One is an editorial presumably by him from CS, Aug. 13, 1876; the other is an editorial by Komatsu­ bara Eitarō 小松原英太郎 (1852–1919) from CS, July 2, 1878. 15 The letter is cited in Takayasu 1929, 91. Takayasu says only: “I obtained an abbreviated [auto]biography in Ryūhoku’s own hand . . . attached to it was a letter”; he gives no details on whether or not the original is dated, how he came into possession of it, or where it is now. Ryūhoku’s 1876 incarceration is the last entry in the autobiography; presumably the letter was written around that time. 16 Tokutomi 1932, 34. 17 “Theory of the comic” 滑稽論, CS, May 17, 1881. 18 “The laments of various books” 群書ノ嘆, CS, Nov. 7, 1875. 19 “Excremental logic” 屎理窟, CS, Nov. 19, 1876. 20 “A word for vulgar writers” 俚俗ノ操觚者ニ告グ, CS, March 10, 1881. 21 “Scholarly foibles” 學者ノ通癖, CS, Dec. 22, 1877. 22 In the newspaper’s first year of operation, Ryūhoku’s old friend Seki Sekkō wrote a quatrain to Ryūhoku that ends “Your garden plum is planted beside the willow at your gate; You are fit to join the ranks of old Tao [Yuanming] and Lin [Bu]” 園梅種得傍門柳 匹似陶翁林叟倫; see the letters section of CS, Feb. 27, 1875. 23 In keeping with Ryūhoku’s ominous declaration, his colleagues at the paper composed a mock funeral memorial for him on the occasion; see CS, Aug. 31, 1875. 24 CS, Dec. 22, 1875. 25 Ryūhoku’s first two sickbed poems appeared in CS, Aug. 26, 1880, and three more followed in CS, Sept. 5, 1880. The paper published the matched-rhyme compositions of several other poets in subsequent issues. 26 CS, Sept. 29, 1880. 27 “A record of chrysanthemum viewing” 看菊記, CS, Nov. 30, 1876; rpt. RI, 1:3–4. 28 As discussed in chapter 6, from the beginning of his career as a journalist Ryūhoku had emphasized the “public” status of the newspaper. He reiterated the point in several subsequent essays, such as one that urged letter writers to refrain from airing their private disputes; see “The newspaper is not an arena for private grudges” 新聞紙ハ私怨ノ闘場ニ非ズ, CS, Feb. 12, 1880. The follow­ing year, he wrote another piece distinguishing legitimate “public debate” from personal grievances; see “Is the newspaper a vehicle for expressing personal indignation?” 新聞ハ私憤ヲ洩スノ器械 カ, CS, Jan. 15, 1881. 29 One essay features Ryūhoku’s dialogue with a rural man who still operates under old assumptions about the meaning of “public” 公 and thus erroneously believes the cherry blossoms at Ueno Park (kōen 公園) are now in a “government garden” that is off limits to him; see “Mistake about a public garden” 公園ノ間違, CS, April 10, 1878. 30 “A theory of discontent” 不滿論, CS, May 10, 1881. 31 “A boat at midstream” 中流ノ舟, CS, July 6, 1882. 32 On Ryūhoku’s eye difficulties, see “Eyesight is an unwelcome blessing” 難有迷惑ノ眼玉, CS, July 13, 1883. In 1880, Ryūhoku worked with entrepreneur Yasuda Zenjirō 安田善次郎 (1838–1921) and others to establish a nonprofit life insurance association; see Ryūhoku’s “In celebration of the founding of Five Hundred Member Mutual Aid Pact” 共濟五百名社集會記, CS, Feb. 17, 1880. In 1885, the company erected a stele on the grounds of Chōmeiji temple to commemorate Ryūhoku and his efforts on the company’s behalf; see Katō Osamu 2006. 33 “Superfluous words from a superfluous man” 贅人ノ贅語, CS, Jan. 12, 1882. 34 RI, 1:100–101. 35 RZ, 160. “A record of spa bathing” 澡泉紀遊, KG, 54–62 (Sept. 22–Dec. 26, 1878); RZ, 158–69.



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36 RI, 1:130. “The winds of Hamamatsu” 濱松風, CS, Oct. 2–12, 1879; RZ, 169–75; RI, 1:121–32. 37 Narushima 1884, 98. “A sedge hat” すげのを笠, CS, Aug. 30–Sept. 14, 1883. 38 Narushima 1884, 53. “Would that it were not” なくもがな, CS, Jan. 18–Feb. 4, 1882. 39 Tao 2002, 339–45; Hightower 1970, 254–58; on peach-blossom spring and other figures of utopia in Chinese literature, see Kawai 2013. 40 RS, 1:8. 41 RS, 2:26. 42 RZ, 289; RS, 2:35. 43 The increasing emphasis on temporality in Ryūhoku’s later travelogues parallels the shift that Tessa Morris-Suzuki identifies away from a spatially defined worldview toward a more progressbased narrative of civilization; see Morris-Suzuki 1998. 44 RZ, 204. “Laundering for the mind” あたまの洗濯, CS, Sept. 11–25, 1881; RZ, 199–208. 45 RI, 1:220. “Diary of washing away melancholy” 洗愁日乘, CS, Aug. 26–Sept.26, 1884; RI, 1:208–32. 46 Narushima 1884, 84. “A half-smoked cigarette” 烟草の吸さし, CS, Jan. 26–Feb. 15, 1883. One of Ryū­ hoku’s daughters married Tanaka’s second son but was ultimately divorced; see Shinoda 1936, 5. 47 Narushima 1884, 108. 48 Narushima 1884, 136–39, 157–58. “Medicinal drippings” 藥槽餘滴, CS, Jan. 8–Feb. 23, 1884. 49 See “True colors” 真面目, CS, Sept. 18, 1879. 50 “Some words on seeing chrysanthemums” 看菊餘言, CS, Nov. 9, 1883; rpt. RI, 2:55–57; emphasis in original.

Bi bl iogr a ph y

Several of the texts I reference under Frequently Cited Sources, such as KS and SS, are unpaginated manuscripts. I nevertheless cite passages in these texts as though their pages were numbered; I refer to indications of internal partition when present but ­otherwise simply count from the first page.

Frequently Cited Sources CS

DS EHJK EHRS

EKS KBKS

KG KJS KN KS NCY

Chōya shinbun 朝野新聞. Originally published 1874–93. Rpt. ed. Tōkyō Daigaku Hōga­kubu Meiji shinbun zasshi bunko 東京大学法学部明治新聞雑誌文庫. 38 vols. Tokyo: Perikansha, 1981–84. Dekinei sōdan 溺濘叢談. Tokyo: Chōya shinbunsha. 29 issues published 1878–81. Terakado Seiken 寺門静軒. Edo hanjōki 江戸繁昌記. 5 vols. Edo: Kokkijuku, 1832–35. Terakado Seiken and Narushima Ryūhoku 成島柳北. Edo hanjōki, Ryūkyō shinshi 江戸繁 昌記・柳橋新誌. Ed. Hino Tatsuo 日野龍夫. Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 新日本古典 文学大系, vol. 100. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1989. Edo kiriezu shūsei 江戸切絵図集成. Ed. Saitō Naoshige 斎藤直成. 6 vols. Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1981–84. Shōwa Joshi Daigaku Kindai Bungaku Kenkyūshitsu 昭和女子大学近代文学研究室, ed. Kindai bungaku kenkyū sōsho 近代文学研究叢書. 76 vols. Tokyo: Shōwa Joshi Daigaku kenkyūjo, 1956–2001. Kagetsu shinshi 花月新誌. 8 vols. Originally published 1877–84. Rpt. ed. Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 1984. Kinsei jinmeiroku shūsei 近世人名録集成. Ed. Mori Senzō 森銑三 and Nakajima Masatoshi 中島理寿. 5 vols. Tokyo: Benseisha, 1976–78. Narushima Ryūhoku. Kenhoku nichiroku: Narushima Ryūhoku nikki 硯北日録：成島柳北 日記. Tokyo: Taihei shooku, 1997. Narushima Ryūhoku. Kankei shōkō 寒檠小稿. 4 vols. Manuscript held by Japan’s National Diet Library. Narushima Ryūhoku. New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ryūhoku Reports from Home and Abroad. Trans. Matthew Fraleigh. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Program, 2010.

438 B i b l i o g r a p h y

NROC NSS

RB RH RI RID

RKS RKSS RS RZ SI SKNK SNK SRS

SS SSB SSH SSS TSS YS YZ

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shipuru” メディアと成島柳北－プリンシプルなきプリンシプル. Nihon kindai bungaku 日本近代 文学 47:1–12. ———. 1994. “Narushima Ryūhoku no jānarizumu kan: kangaku to kindai medeia no aida de” 成島 柳北のジャーナリズム観－漢学と近代メディアの間で. Gakushūin Daigaku Bungakubu kenkyū nenpō 学習院大学文学部研究年報 40:149–98. Yamashita Tarō 山下太郎. 1995. Meiji no bunmei kaika no sakigake: Shizuoka Gakumonjo to Numazu Heigakkō no kyōjutachi 明治の文明開化のさきがけ：静岡学問所と沼津兵学校の教授たち. Tokyo: Hokuju shuppan. Yanagida Izumi 柳田泉. 1965a. Fukuchi Ōchi 福地桜痴. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan. ———. 1965b. Meiji shoki no bungaku shisō 明治初期の文学思想. 2 vols. Tokyo: Shunjūsha. Yasuda Yoshihito 安田吉人. 1991. “Meijiki no Ōnuma Chinzan” 明治期の大沼枕山. Chihōshi kenkyū 地方史研究 41 (6): 17–26. Yoda Gakkai 依田學海. 1900. “Dansō” 談藪. Reprinted as Dansō 談叢. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Hanshichi. ———. 1993. Gakkai nichiroku 學海日録. Ed. Gakkai Nichiroku Kenkyūkai 学海日録研究会. 11 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Yoda, Tomiko. 2004. Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Construction of Japanese Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Yokose Tei 横瀬貞, ed. 1893. Kinsei meika hibunshū 近世名家碑文集. Tokyo: Keizai zasshisha. Yokosuka Kaikokushi Kenkyūkai 横須賀開国史研究会, ed. 2001. Peruri Nihon kikō: Perī to Uraga 彼理日本紀行：ペリーと浦賀. Yokosuka: Yokosuka-shi. Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎. 1955. “Chinese Poetry in Japan: Influence and Reaction.” Journal of World History 2 (4): 883–94. Yoshino Sakuzō 吉野作造, ed. 1927. Hon’yaku bungei hen 飜譯文藝篇. Meiji bunka zenshū 明治文 化全集, vol. 14. Tokyo: Hyōronsha. Yu Huai 余懐. 1999. Banqiao zaji fulu yijuan 板橋雜記附録一巻. Rpt. in Xuxiu siku quanshu, vol. 733, 321–60. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. ———. 2000. Banqiao zaji (wai yi zhong) 板桥杂记(外一种). Ed. Li Jintang 李金堂. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Yu Qi 于済 and Cai Zhengsun 蔡正孫, comps. 1804. Renju shikaku 聯珠詩格. Ed. Ōkubo Shibutsu 大窪詩仏. 20 juan. Edo: Yamazakiya Seishichi. Yu Yue 兪樾. 1981. Dongying shixuan 東瀛詩選. Ed. Sano Masami 佐野正巳. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin. Yu Xin 庾信. 1958. Yu Xin shifu xuan 庾信詩賦選. Ed. Tan Zhengbi 譚正璧 and Ji Fuhua 紀馥華. Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe. Yuan Zhongdao 袁中道. 1996. Yuan Xiaoxiu xiaopin 袁小修小品. Ed. Li Shouhe 李寿和. Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe.

I n de x

Page numbers for figures and tables are in italics; poem and essay titles without an author’s name are works by Ryūhoku. Abe Masahiro, 49 Account of the Prosperity of Edo (Edo hanjōki; Terakado Seiken): compared with New Chronicles, 135–37, 138, 147, 402nn52–53, 402–3n54, 403n82, 404n90; as model for New Chronicles, 132, 135–36, 141, 147, 286; in preface to New Chronicles, 135, 136–37, 138, 240; reaction to, 132–33, 248; use of Literary Sinitic, 133–35, 380n26 Addiss, Stephen, Old Taoist, 10, 372n35 agechirei, 380n21, 394n77, 399n140 Ainu, 50, 64, 66, 382n38, 385–86n78 Aizu domain, 218–20 Akagi Sanao, 426n66 Akamatsu Renjō, 421n112 Akebono shinbun, 293–94, 428n96 allusion, in Sinitic poetry, 12–15, 92, 372n43 Analects: and democratic principles, 337; in New Chronicles, 149–50, 151, 404n101; used in commenting on public affairs, 235, 427n8, 433n91; used in criticism of the press laws, 294–95, 297 An Lushan Rebellion, 109, 397n120, 415n136, 416n5 antiquities, 341, 343 Aoki Ginzō, 75, 383n46 Aoki Masaru, 110, 397n119 Arai Hakuseki, 23, 369n6 archery, 116–18, 398n135 Ariga, Chieko, 403n83 Ariyama Taigo, 146 Asaka Gonsai: argued for scholarly eclecticism, 392n55, 400n10; comments on “On the day after the full moon,” 126, 127, 400n10; on con-

sorting with geisha, 123–24; gave Ryūhoku sobriquet Kakudō, 85–86; marginal comments in Kankei shōkō, 56, 86, 378n8, 390n22, 390n34; praised Shibano Ritsuzan’s prose style, 391n42; students of, 123, 383n53; “To show my various students,” 124, 399n2 Asakusa Onmaya-gashi, 375n94; depicted on map, 29 Asano Baidō, 377n4, 383n45 Asano Nagayoshi, 197, 218 Ashikaga shogunate, 31, 396n108 Ashmore, Robert, 16 “At the first of the year, I congratulate the tutor scholar” (Ōtsuki Bankei), 163–64, 185, 407n148 Autumn feelings; ten poems, six recorded [2], 12–15, 18–20, 27 “Autumn fields,” 61 Awajishima, 226–27 Awashima Kangetsu, 214 Azuma (Eastern) Bridge, depicted on map, 29 Baba Tatsui, 372n40 Backus, Robert, 391n36, 399n4 Ballad of the Two Soga (calligraphy scroll), 171, 173, 174 “Ballad of the two Soga,” 170–73, 171, 174, 408nn10–11 “bamboo branch” ballads, 239, 418n60 “bamboo wife,” 190; “Parting from a ‘bamboo wife’ pillow,” 59, 60, 61 banquets, 33, 117, 298; with geisha, 123, 227, 242, 419n78; at Hongmen, 419n69 Bashō, Nozarashi kikō, 110

464 i n d e x

Battle of Fei River, 113 Battle of Hakodate, 200, 214, 225 Battle of Toba-Fushimi, 208, 226 Battle of Ueno, 220 Beal, Samuel, 422n138 Beimang Cemetery, 106 Benfey, Theodor, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 260 Bian Que, 127, 159, 400n9 Bière, Marie, 409n18 “bilingual fallacy” (Lurie), 25 Bing Ji, 393n69 “Biography of the Sumida Recluse,” 37, 205–6, 209–10, 212, 220, 375n93 Bismarck, Otto von, 321–22, 347 Bitō Jishū, Seiki yohitsu (Superfluous jottings at the Hall of Tranquil Lodging), 15 “Blizzard has continued for days, A,” 302 Bo Juyi: “Government Ox,” 392n65; invoked by Ryūhoku, 17, 148–49, 356; referred to in poem by Kikuchi Sankei, 238; “Song of Lasting Pain” (Chang hen ge), 70, 110, 397n120; “Song of the Lute,” 131; “Song on unforgettable passions,” 148–49 Bo Ya, 181, 404n99 Bo Yi, 276 boathouses, 123, 130, 143–46, 241, 403n73. See also pleasure boats book: contrasted with the sword, 33, 38, 42, 66, 74, 82, 121, 166–67, 215, 320; representing scholarly realm, 77, 80–81; and the zither, 81–82, 180–81, 212, 213 Book of Changes, 142–43, 379n16, 387n104, 404–5n108 Book of Documents, 71, 188 Book of Rites: in critique of contemporary affairs, 152, 334; mentioned, 376n99, 379n12, 394n71; mourning references, 44, 380n24, 390n23; “Pitchpot” chapter, 305, 306 Book of the Later Han, 408n6 Boshin War, 218, 220, 242 Bradstock, Timothy, 20 “Bring on the tea,” 93–94 “Bring on the wine,” 93–94, 394n76 Brownstein, Michael, 5 Brunet, Jules, 199 “brush talk” (hitsudan), 376–77n105 Buddhism: crisis of, 251; defense of, 258–59, 262; and Indian studies, 259, 262–63; shinbutsu bunri policy, 251, 284–85. See also Higashi Honganji Buland, Charles, 199, 414n100

Bungaku zasshi, 325 bunjin (literati): contrasted with shijin (scholarofficials), 34, 77, 80, 86–87, 90, 108–10, 112–15, 115–16, 121, 148, 222, 361; ethos of, 77–78, 221; and withdrawal, 108, 175, 180–81 bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment): analysis of the phrase, 278, 350, 424n28, 430– 31n50; critique of, in New Chronicles, 242–45, 273, 277–78; literature and, 278–79, 281–83; newspapers and, 423n4; Ryūhoku’s critique of, 196, 317, 331–33, 341, 343, 349–50, 429n24, 430–31n50. See also modernization Bunmei shinshi, 325 Bunmei yoin, 408n10 bunshi (gentlemen of letters), 80. See also bunjin (literati) Byakkotai (White Tiger Brigade), 218 Cachon, Mermet de, 197 Cai Yi, 374n76 calligraphy: Ballad of the Two Soga (scroll), 171, 173, 174; frontispiece for Sugita Gentan’s Ken­ zengaku, 409n15; of Seki Sekkō, 56, 95, 96, 385n55, 418n62 Campbell, Robert, 238, 385n55 Cang Gong, 127, 159, 400n9 cavalry service, 117, 196–205, 201, 205–6, 414n99 Cayla, J. M., Jésuites hors la loi, 262 censorship: of New Chronicles, 399n3; of playful writings, 133, 402n38; of Terakado Seiken’s Account of the Prosperity of Edo, 132–33. See also Defamation Law; press laws Chambers’s Encyclopœdia, 432n76 Chanoine, Charles, 199–200, 203, 206–7, 209, 215; letter from Ryūhoku, 206, 207 Chaofu (“Nestdweller”), 91, 392n60 Chaves, Jonathan, Old Taoist, 10, 372n35 Chen Jie, 377n105 Chen Manshou, 274n76 Chen Sheng (aka Chen She), 100 Cheng brothers, 398n130 cherry blossoms, 104–5, 123, 161, 202, 379n14, 396n92, 434n29 Chinese dynastic histories, 30, 289–90 Chinese literati, 232, 418nn43–44 Chinpu kango column, 281, 283 Chōmeiji, 434n32; depicted on map, 29 Chōshū, samurai from, 236, 237, 318 Chōya shinbun: audience of, 271–72; Chinpu kango columns, 281, 283; and competing demands on Ryūhoku’s time, 328–29; con­ tributions by Chinese poets, 280, 424n36;

i n d e x 465

c­ overage of Satsuma Rebellion, 312–14, 428nn3–4; and the creation of a public of ­kanshibun readers, 311, 358; criticism of Meiji policies, 268, 277–78, 426n60; decline of, 312, 314; diary of press law interrogations, 297; employed Katsuragawa Hoshū, 161, 406n134; founding of, 268, 269–70, 354, 423n14; Ginza location of, 312, 316, 428n8; inaugural edition, 271, 424n19; literary orientation of, 283–84; name-changing commemoration, 298, 426n66; name of, 270, 271; as ōshinbun, 272– 73; as poetry forum, 4, 35, 269, 278–81, 283, 302–4, 360, 429n22, 434n25; and the press laws, 269, 288–91, 289–95, 300–301, 315, 322; reader contributions, 303–4, 305–7, 360; in Ryūhoku’s career, 2, 247; Ryūhoku’s columns and essays for, 266, 282–83, 423n5; and Ryū­ hoku’s legacy, 356–57; Ryūhoku’s positions at, 262, 268, 270, 271, 322–23, 328, 423n14; success of, 283–84, 295, 298, 312, 314–15, 425n45, 426n62, 426n66, 427n89; Suehiro Tetchō and, 300–301; and “uselessness,” 249, 281–82; zatsu­ roku columns, 35, 269, 279–80, 284, 315, 326, 423n11, 429n30, 432n85. See also zatsuroku columns Christemeijer, Jan Bastiaan, 409n16 Christianity, 251, 252, 253–55, 258, 262, 263, 410n41 chrysanthemums, 13, 16–17, 151, 360, 367; “A record of chrysanthemum viewing” (column), 361. See also Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage Chu ci (Qu Yuan), 275–76, 286. See also Qu Yuan Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals), 277, 359 Chunyu Kun, 358–59 “civilization and enlightenment.” See bunmei kaika Clarke, James Freeman, Ten Great Religions, 260–62 classical Chinese. See Literary Sinitic Classic of Changes, 142–43, 379n16, 387n104, 404–5n108 Classic of Documents, 71, 188 Classic of Poetry: “black and brown bear” portents, 153, 165; “Great Preface,” 145, 411n48; on knowing one’s station, 388n106; phoenix references, 154, 158; phrase used in appeal to Bankei, 424n19; and the press laws, 359; referenced in poems, 84, 101, 124, 153–54, 389n11, 390nn19,20,22, 414n95; and the Sorai school, 391n39; “stones from other hills,” 185, 321, 351, 360, 411n48, 429n24; study group, 82; used by Hayashi Fukusai to criticize student, 407n142

coastal defenses, 41, 67, 116–17 coin collecting, 185–88, 187, 231, 411nn51,53–54 “Cold cloud,” 394n72 Collège Franco-Japonais (Yokohama Furansugo Denshūjo), 197, 413–14n92 commerce and industry, 339–40, 431n65. See also foreign trade “Composed on behalf of the geisha Ofuji to ­dispel the scorn,” 193 Confucian classics: allusions to, 92; appropriate use of, 101; bestowed upon Nobuyuki, 30; central to Ryūhoku’s world, 82–84; and democratic principles, 337; enumeration of, 376n99; irreverent use of, 124, 142–43, 149–50, 151; and the press laws, 359; study of, 5, 82, 86, 162, 390n25; used to critique contemporary affairs, 152, 333–34. See also Analects; Book of Rites; Classic of Changes; Classic of Documents; Classic of Poetry; Doctrine of the Mean; Mencius; Spring and Autumn Annals Confucianism, 89, 185–86, 263, 321, 400n10 Confucian scholars, 42, 90, 114–15, 124, 167, 392n55, 399n4. See also Confucianism; Haya­ shi family scholars; shijin (scholar-officials); Shōheizaka Academy Confucius: death of, 40–41, 379nn12–13; on editing the Spring and Autumn Annals, 277; on knowing one’s station, 388n106; on loyalty and filiality, 408n6; reference to, in New Chronicles, 142 Constitutional Imperial Party (Rikken Teiseitō), 351, 433nn93–94 Constitutional Progressive Reform Party (Rikken Kaishintō), 351 Cornell University Library, Maeda Bunko, 381n30 courtesans: in Dumas’s La dame aux camélias, 266; Nanjing, 132; Suzhou, 418n61. See also geisha court poetry, 152–54, 325–26, 404n103 cranes, 110–11, 198, 299, 346, 397–98n121, 398n122, 432n79 criminal cases: case of Marie Bière, 409n18; Western texts on, 176–77 cultural heritage, 341–43. See also preservation “Curse in the Hour of the Ox,” 101 daigashi (Ch. tihuashi; poem on the topic of a painting), 108–9, 110, 112–13, 114, 397n119 La dame aux camélias (Dumas), 266, 423n3 Daoism, 46, 297, 299, 320, 346, 400n10 Darwin, Charles, 258

466 i n d e x

“Dawn view at a lakeside mansion,” 61 Defamation Law, 288, 289, 300–301, 312, 348, 427n72. See also press laws Dejima, 50 Dekinei sōdan, 315, 326–28, 328–29, 331–34, 432n89 democracy. See popular rights Denecke, Wiebke, 21–22, 374n70,374n81 “Departing Tenpōzan,” 229–30 Descharmes, Augustin, 199, 200, 414nn106–7 diaries: coding used in, 55–56, 129, 383n49, 400– 401n19; content of, 48–49; at Cornell Univer­ sity’s Maeda Bunko, 381n30; entries on excursions to Yanagibashi, 130; entries on Perry’s mission, 49, 50–51, 53, 70–71, 382n39, 383n46, 386n89; entries on poetry gatherings, 55, 59; entries on Ryūhoku’s marriage, 74–75; entry on Funabashi Seitan’s death, 383n54; format of, 48; on instruction of Iemochi, 121–23; Kenhoku nichiroku, 47–49, 49, 381nn30–31; listing of Noh performances, 396n108; from the Ōta barracks, 414n100; postdismissal, 180–82, 381n30; on Ryūhoku’s daily routine, 389n18; on Townsend Harris visit, 118–19; use of En­glish and alternate calendars, 188; use of ketsuji in, 388n105. See also Diary of a Journey to Bitchū; Diary of a Journey to the West; travelogues Diary. See Diary of a Journey to the West Diary of a Journey to Bitchū (Kōbi nikki): focus on the act of inscription, 231; on local geisha districts, 228–29; and Ryūhoku’s knowledge of the West, 225; satirical comments about fashions and practices, 237–38; scenic beauty in, 229–31; serialization in Kagetsu shinshi, 323–24, 417n17; travel for, 224–31; writing style of, 232, 233 Diary of a Journey to the West (Kōsei nichijō): accounts of public performances, 266; on acquaintance with Rosny, 256, 259; appeared in Kagetsu shinshi, 323–24; on covertness of journey, 253; kanshi in, 37, 246–47; mentioned in Mori Ōgai novella, 430n35; overview of, 246–47, 420n87; on publishing activities, 256, 262; “useless man” in, 250. See also Higashi Honganji, world tour “Diary of one ‘thrown an idle empty post’” (Tōkan nichiroku), 180–82, 381n30 Doctrine of the Mean, 76, 102, 347 Doeff, Hendrik, 406n133 Doeff-Halma lexicon, 406n133 Dong Hu, 305

Dong Zhongshu, “Three Disquisitions on Heaven and Man,” 400n8 Dongfang Shuo, 358–59 Drake, Charles, 182, 410n40 drinking, 13, 123, 129, 159, 163, 401n29, 407n145 Drouyn de Lhuys, Edouard, 199 Du Fu (Shaoling): aspiration for official position, 119; “Autumn Feelings” (Qiu xing), 97, 395n85; characterization of Li Bo, 397n117; invoked by Ryūhoku, 17; octave in praise of Gu Zhi, 158– 59; “Song of the Eight Immortals of Drunkenness,” 70; “Twenty-two rhymes reverentially sent to Left Aide Wei,” 407n148 Du Mu (Fanchuan): invoked by Ryūhoku, 17, 130–31, 229; invoked by Yu Huai, 240–41; “Reading a collection of Han Yu and Du Fu,” 390n20; “Red Cliff,” 130, 401n27; use of the term fengliu, 404n91; verse inspired by, 279; Yangzhou dream, 130, 241 Dubousquet, M., 199–200 Dutch, relations with, 50, 52–53, 118 Dutch studies, 159–61, 162–63, 406nn129,131,133 “Early summer,” 61 earthquakes, 107–8; “Earthquake song,” 107 Edo (Tokyo): as center versus periphery, 228; after collapse of the Tokugawa, 217–18; French military training program, 203–5; renamed Tokyo, 217; skirmishes of 1868, 218 Edo Castle, 42, 49, 53, 84, 147; depicted on map, 29; poems about, 67, 153, 154, 165. See also Tokugawa shogunate Edo genzai kōeki shoka jinmeiroku, 383n51 Edo hanjōki. See Account of the Prosperity of Edo Edo meibutsushi (Poems about Edo’s famous products), 388n110 education and scholarship, essays on, 331–34 Egawa Kunpei, 418n43 Egawa Tarōzaemon, 68, 70, 387n94 Eigosen (English vocabulary notes), 243–44, 419n74 Eiri chōya shinbun (Illustrated national news­ paper), 272, 329–30 Eitai (Eternal) Bridge, depicted on map, 29 Endless Ivy (Itsumadegusa): account of Ryū­ hoku’s promotion, 197–98; as collaborative work, 188–89, 190, 192, 412n65; as diversion for scholars, 175, 189–90, 195–96; discussed by Maeda Ai, 192–93; poems in, 190, 198, 414n95, 414n100; punning in, 190–92, 243, 412n74; Ryūhoku’s description of, 190; title of, 189; use of English terms in, 192, 412n71

i n d e x 467

end-rhyme, 18–19 English language study, 182, 195, 256, 410n38; episode in New Chronicles, 243–44, 419n75; by Yasuda Unpeki, 182–83 Enomoto Takeaki, 1, 218, 225, 226, 433n1 Ernest Maltravers (Edward Bulwer-Lytton), 423n5, 430n47 Etō Shinpei, 253–55 “Evaluation of the Twenty-Four Flowers of Yanagibashi” (with Yanagawa Shunsan), 161, 162, 406n135 “Evening cool by the waterside,” 61 Ezo, 62–63, 218, 385n74,385n77. See also Yaguchi Kensai (Seizaburō) falconry, 72–73, 117 Fan Chengda, 394n74 Fan Ran (Shiyun), 106, 397n112 Fan Su, 148 Fan Zeng, 242, 419n69 “Feeling my emotions,” 181 feng poetry, 411n48 filial piety, 117, 172, 390n21, 408nn5–6, 417n12 Fillmore, Millard, 40, 50 “Fine spring day at a pondside pavilion, A,” 53–55, 61; Ryūhoku’s poem, 55; Seki Sekkō’s poem, 57 “Flowering grain in a vase,” 61 “Flute on a desolate night, A,” 385n71 foreign ships, 50–53, 382n43, 387n102, 399n6. See also Perry, Matthew foreign threat, 40–43, 53, 63, 67, 111–12, 117–18, 125, 157 foreign trade, 40, 50–53, 118, 382n41, 399n6 freedom, 349, 350; of the press, 293, 328; of religion, 337–38. See also popular rights Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, 349, 351, 433n93 French military advisory programs, 196–97, 199–200, 203–5, 415n113 “Frosty dawn,” 61 Fuchū, 217, 416n1. See also Shizuoka Fūgetsudō company, 339 fuhei shizoku uprisings, 313, 318–19. See also ­Satsuma Rebellion Fujimori Kōan: Kaibō biron (Argument for the preparation of naval defenses), 383n45; residence of, 79 Fujisawa Shima-no-Kami, 194, 202 Fujiwara no Kintō, Wakan rōeishū (Japanese and Chinese poems to sing), 373–74n66 Fujiwara Shunzei, 104, 105

Fujiwara Teika, 376n100 Fukuchi Ōchi (Gen’ichirō): advocated gradual reform, 344, 351, 432n77; attended Ryūhoku’s funeral, 433n1; listed in Leading Men of Japan, 1; and the Nichi nichi, 289, 313; on Noh performance, 431–32n72; studied Western subjects, 407n142 Fukuda Kodōjin, 10 Fukuzawa Yukichi: attended Ryūhoku’s funeral, 433n1; composed Sinitic doggerel, 194, 413n80; Conditions in the West, 419n77; contrasted with Ryūhoku, 195; and the Katsuragawa salon, 194; and Léon de Rosny, 258, 261, 421n133; listed in Leading Men of Japan, 1; Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 413n82; promoted bunmei kaika, 196; relationship with Ryūhoku, 192– 93, 413n82; on Ryūhoku’s interest in coin collecting, 185–86; studiousness of, 193–94, 412– 13n77; travel abroad, 411n57 Funabashi Gyokkei, 97, 232, 246, 260, 383n54, 418n45 Funabashi Seitan: attended poetry gatherings, 55–56, 97, 383n54, 385n68, 418n45; collaboration with Seki Sekkō, 56, 384nn56–57; comments in Kankei shōkō, 56, 378n8, 390nn21–22; comments on “An image of Su Wu eating snow,” 62; comments on “On the day after the full moon,” 126; death of, 383n54, 384n59; as poet and calligrapher, 383n53, 384n56 Furukawa Koshōken, 385–86n78 fūryū (Ch. fengliu): aesthetics of, 324; aspect of Ryūhoku, 316; as freedom, 349, 351; quatrain celebrating, 221; Ryūhoku’s role as, 128, 131, 297, 312, 426n64; world of, in New Chronicles, 147–49, 324, 404n91 fuseji, 304–7, 311, 427n83, 431n50 Futakida Nozomu, Kihei renpei no gazu (Image of cavalry training), 201 Gakken Bunko, 56, 57 Gamō Kunpei, 350, 433n91 Ganghwa-do Incident (1875), 298, 300 Gaozi, 141–42 Gateless Gate, The, 429n24 Ge Hong, Shen xian zhuan, 390n20, 408n152 geisha: Asaka Gonsai’s admonition on, 124; assigned representative flowers, 161, 406n135; Confucian scholars and, 124, 399n4; puns on the names of, 129, 130, 190–93, 412n67; Ryūhoku’s encounters with, 34, 123, 129–30; and Ryūhoku’s legacy, 355; in Tokyo compared with Kansai, 227, 228–29; voice of, in essays,

468 i n d e x

geisha (continued) 242–44, 294, 298, 345; of Yoshiwara and Yana­ gibashi, 141, 145–47. See also Endless Ivy; New Chronicles of Yanagibashi; Ochō; Yanagibashi pleasure quarters genbun-itchi movement, 5 Gennyo, Abbot, 251–52, 253, 254, 259, 422n143. See also Higashi Honganji Genrōin, 366 geography, 182, 188, 195, 410n40 Gesshō, 221 “Getting out my feelings,” 130 gikun (playful glosses), 134, 144, 399n3, 402n42 Gion Nankai, 99, 100 Girls’ Day (hina-matsuri), 350 glosses. See gikun (playful glosses) “Gods of fortune, The” (Yomiuri column), 330–31 Gokunaibanashi (Super secret tales from the slammer), 307–8, 427n89 Gokyū Sessō, 423n14 Gong Shenfu, 232, 418n43 Gong Sui, 92, 393n66 Gonnyo (abbot), 253, 420n107 Go-Shirakawa, 408n5 Gou Bian, 177, 178 governmental reform, 344–47, 432n77 Grant, Ulysses S., 329, 430n41 Greater Learning, 73, 147, 388n106, 404n86, 404n89 Gu Zhi, 158–59, 406n124 Guizot, François, History of Civilization in Europe, 424n33 Guo Ziyi, 415n136 gushi (old-style poems), 18, 104, 373n59 Haga Yaichi, 6–7, 371n24 Hagi Rebellion, 313, 318 Hagura Kandō, 94, 160, 394n77; residence of, 79, 394n77 haibutsu kishaku (expel the Buddha and crush Shakyamuni), 251, 284 haikai style, 101, 396n97 hairstyles, 227, 236, 243, 274 Hakodate, 67, 413n91; Battle of, 200, 214, 225 Hakone, 215, 267, 363, 429n30 Hakuōsha (White Gull Society), 433n6 Halma, François, 406n133 Han Xin, 216, 416n150, 424n22 Han Yu: “An Explication of ‘Progress in Learning,’” 180, 181; “Fu studies south of the city,” 392n51; poetry of, 390n20

hanjōkimono (chronicles of urban life), 132–37, 237, 239, 245, 248 Han shu, 392n61, 393n66; biography of Zhu Yun, 71–72 Harada Kazumichi, 421n117 Haraguchi Nanson, 303 Hare, Thomas, 396n107 Harris, Townsend, 118–19 Haruta Kyūkō, 407n137 Hata (daughter of Ryūhoku), 159–61, 210, 406n128 Hattori Bushō, New Account of the Prosperity of Tokyo, 134, 402n40 Hattori Hazan, 395n83 Hattori Nankaku, 376n97 Hattori Rakuzan, 395n83 hawks, 66, 72–73 Hayashi Eriko, “Narushima Ryūhoku no tsuma” (The wife of Narushima Ryūhoku), 401n20 Hayashi Fukusai, 119, 386n89, 407n142. See also Hayashi family scholars Hayashi Gakusai, 394n72 Hayashi Jussai, 133 Hayashi Kinpō, 87 Hayashi Razan, 85, 379n20 Hayashi Teiu, 133 Hayashi family scholars: and censorship of playful writings, 133, 402n38; and editing of Toku­ gawa jikki, 85, 376n101, 386n89; interactions with foreign visitors, 119; poetry gathering of, 34, 85–86, 88–93, 155, 392n58, 393n68, 394n74; provided lectures to the shogun, 376n98; served as rectors of academy, 87, 88, 392n55. See also Shōheizaka Academy He Liangjun, Shishuo xinyu bu, 397n121 He Zhizhang, 397n117 Heian emperor, 33 heishutsu, 398n138, 410n33. See also ketsuji, taitō “Hekiekifu” (Poetic exposition on shrinking in fear), 295–97, 298–300, 426n64 hentai kanbun (variant kanbun), 274n75 Hepburn, James, 253, 382n40 heyun. See rhyme matching Hideyoshi, 226, 299 Higashi Honganji: activities to defend Buddhism, 252; Asakusa branch temple, 246, 247, 252; branches in China and Korea, 252; missionary work in Hokkaido, 252, 420n102; Shinshū Tōha Gakujuku, 246, 266, 419nn83– 84; Translation Office, 35, 247, 252, 256, 259– 62, 265, 266, 422n141, 422n146; world tour, 35, 246, 251–55, 256–60, 420nn109–10. See also Gennyo, Abbot

i n d e x 469

hina-matsuri (Girls’ Day), 350 Hino Tatsuo: on Bo Juyi poem, 148–49; kanbunteki bunshoku (Literary Sinitic embellishment), 380n26; kundoku readings by, 27; on the last years of Ryūhoku’s career, 315; mentioned, 412n67; on Ōnuma Chinzan, 156, 157, 405n118; on Ryūhoku’s Aizu poem, 219; on Ryūhoku’s circle of Western scholars, 195 Hinoya sundries shop, 388n110 Hirose Kyokusō, 252, 396n98 Hirose Seison, 375n93 Hitomi (geisha), 401n19 Hōgen monogatari, 408n5 Hokkaido, 347; Higashi Honganji mission, 252, 420n102. See also Ezo Hokokusha (Preserve the Nation Society), 334–35 Hokuriku, 268, 423n10 Hong Xiao, 238 Hongmen, banquet at, 419n69 Honpōji temple, 353 Horiguchi Ikuo, 386n87 Horikawa Kyōa, 421n112 Horio Junko, 137, 146, 403n82 Huan, Duke of Qi, 92, 392n61 Huang Chuping, 167, 407–8n152 Huang Zunxian, 13 Huangfu Mi, Gaoshi zhuan, 92 huazan (inscriptions on paintings), 397n119 Huffman, James, 311, 427n89 “hundred schools,” 89, 90 hunting expeditions, 72–73, 116–17 Hyakunin isshu (One hundred poems by one hundred poets), 227 Ibi Takashi, 279–80, 381n30 Ichikawa Kansai, 99, 396nn92–93 Ieharu (tenth shogun), 30 Iemitsu (third shogun), 179 Iemochi (fourteenth shogun): heir to, 154; instructed by Ryūhoku, 121–23, 176–77, 185, 409n19; marriage to the emperor’s sister, 169; visit to the imperial house, 410nn26–27 Ienari (eleventh shogun), 30 Iesada (thirteenth shogun): death of, 121; falconry expedition with, 72–73; inspection tours of, 68, 387n90; lack of male heir, 154; ­lectured by Kobayashi, 82; received Consul Townsend Harris, 118–19; tutored by Ryū­ hoku, 37, 119 Iesato (Tokugawa successor), 217 Ieshige (ninth shogun), 30

Ieyasu (first shogun), 217, 379n20 “I hear that women of the city have been prohibited,” 152 Ii Naosuke, 382n41 Ikaho, 365 illness, poems on, 73–74 “Image of fighting cocks, An,” 378n6 “Image of Li Bo gazing at the waterfall, An,” 108–10, 397n117 “Image of Lin Bu looking at his plum blossoms, An,” 110–11 “Image of playing a zither under the moon, An,” 150–51 “Image of Saigyō gazing at the peak, An,” 102–3, 108 “Image of Su Wu eating snow, An,” 59, 61–62, 61, 385n72 “Image of Tadanori lodging under a cherry tree, An,” 103–5 “Image of tending oxen, An,” 91–92, 393n68 “Image of the phoenix singing on a high ridge, An,” 154–55 Imaizumi Genkichi, 161, 198 Imaizumi Mine, 412n77 Imamura Eitarō, 316 Imamura Warō, 257, 422n134 imin (leftover vassals), 114, 357–58, 361 Imperial Loyalist Party (Kin’ōtō), 350–51 Indian studies, 259, 262–63. See also Sanskrit industry. See commerce and industry “In mid-autumn of the fourth year of the cycle,” 202–3 inmoku. See rhyme groups Inoue Kowashi, 301 intellectuals. See bunjin (literati); Confucian scholars; shijin (scholar-officials) “In the fifth month . . . Oda Fusano[suke] died in battle,” 220 introspection, 222–23 Inui Teruo: analysis of Ryūhoku’s diary, 129, 159, 398n18; on Diary of a Journey to Bitchū, 229, 231; mentioned, 399n143; on Ryūhoku and cultural heritage, 341–42; on Ryūhoku’s circle of Western scholars, 195; on Ryūhoku’s defense of Yoshinobu, 209; and Ryūhoku’s late essays, 315–16; on Ryūhoku’s study of Confucian classics, 390n25; table of Ryūhoku’s poetry gatherings, 395n83; on “uselessness,” 251 Inukai Tsuyoshi, 313 Irie Fumio, 421n117, 422n134 Iritani Sensuke, 10 Ise Shrine, 267

470 i n d e x

Ishikawa Fusakane, 232 Ishikawa Iwao, 236–37 Ishikawa Shuntai: career of, 252, 420n105; encounters with Rosny, 258–59; participated in world tour, 251, 253, 254, 255; removal of, 422n141; and Sanskrit study, 422n143; and the Translation Office, 260, 422n141 Itō Genboku, 160, 406n126 Itō Hirobumi, 1, 347 Itō Jakuchū, 13 Itokuri River, 234 Itsumadegusa. See Endless Ivy Iwabuchi, Koichi, 8, 371n27 Iwakura Tomomi, 1. See also Iwakura Mission Iwakura Mission: account by Kume Kunitake, 88, 391n49; contrasted with Higashi Honganji tour, 35, 249–50, 250, 251, 255, 256, 420n95; mentioned, 421n117 Iwamatsu Tōsai (Tōjūrō), 55–56, 97, 383n51, 395n82 Iwamura Warō, 257 Iwanami Shoten, 9–10, 27, 315, 371n32 Izawa Heikurō, 129, 383n46, 400n17 Izekawa Ichirō, 388n3 Izumi Saburō, 250 Japanese literary canon, 9–10 “Japanese odor,” 8, 371n27 Japan Weekly Mail shipping report, 254 Jia Yi, 127, 398n133 Jin dynasty, fall of, 113–14 Jingikan (Department of Shinto), 252 Jin shu (History of the Jin), 148, 216, 398n127 jintishi (poems in the modern form), 18, 19–20, 373n59 Jiyūtō (Liberal Party), 351 jizishi (poems of gathered graphs), 97–98, 395n88 Jōsō yūki (Record of a journey to Hitachi and Shimōsa), 232–35 journalism: as alternative role for Ryūhoku, 213, 357–58, 366; and hanjōkimono, 248; role in society, 257, 320, 356, 359, 366; Ryūhoku’s career in, 2, 214, 247–48, 354, 356–57, 263. See also “newspaperman,” identity of; newspapers Judgment of the Actress Marie Bière, The (Joyū Mari Bieru no shinpan), 409n18 jueju (broken verse), 18 Julien, Stanislas, 421n124 “Just for fun, I make a poem calendar,” 95, 394–95n80

ka (Japanese-language poetry), 4 kabuki, 227, 228 Kagetsu shinshi (New journal of blossoms and the moon): contrasted with other literary journals, 325–26; in conversation with other periodicals, 325, 328; essay on antiquities, 341; inaugural issue, 324; as outgrowth of Chōya shinbun literary columns, 279, 323–25, 424n30, 430n36; place in Ryūhoku’s career, 247, 312, 315; poems from, 377n3; readers of, 4, 326, 415n125, 430n35; serializations, 176, 423n8; title of, 324; travelogues in, 417n21 Kagoshima. See Satsuma domain Kaibara Ekiken, 417n28 Kaifūsō, 23 Kaigai hōkan ryaku (Abbreviated reference of foreign coins), 411n53 Kaigai kahei shōfu (An album of overseas coins), 187. See also coin collecting Kaikeiroku (Coastal defense records; Narushima Kadō), 41, 42–43, 379nn16–17 Kaitai shinsho, 161, 162, 406n132 kakikudashibun, 374n83. See also kundoku reading method Kamatani Takeshi, 372n51 Kamei Nanmei, 399n4 Kameido, 46, 380n27, 381n28 Kamigata, 228 kan (prefix meaning Sinitic), 4 Kanagawa, 182–83. See also Treaty of Kanagawa Kanbe Yoshimitsu, 246 kanbun (“Sinitic prose”): censorship of texts in, 133; instruction and textbooks, 5–6, 370n18; pure and variant, 274n75; use of the term, 4, 9. See also kanshibun kanbungaku (“Sinitic literature”), 6–7, 8–9. See also kanshibun kanbun gesaku (playful writings in Literary ­Sinitic), 133–35, 291, 402n37 kanbun sharebon (books of mode written in ­Literary Sinitic), 133 kanbunteki bunshoku (Literary Sinitic embellishment), 380n26 Kanda Takahira: attended Ryūhoku’s funeral, 433n1; contributions to Endless Ivy, 189, 193– 94; helped Ryūhoku with English study, 182; member of Ryūhoku’s social circle, 161, 188; translation of Record of Holland’s Beautiful Government, 176, 409n13 Kanda River, 122 Kan’eiji Temple, 209, 220; depicted on map, 29

i n d e x 471

Kaneko Sakō, 56, 97, 384n58; residence of, 79, 395n84 Kangakuha (Official Scholar Faction), 390n32. See also Shōheizaka Academy Kankei shōkō (Little manuscript composed by cold lamplight): manuscript of, 38–39, 121, 378n6; marginal comments in, 39, 378n8; martial imagery in, 41–42; meaning of the title, 38, 48, 377n4; New Year poems, 39–41, 43–46, 45; poems from poetry gatherings, 59, 61; poems on foreign ships, 51–52; poems selected for Ryūhoku shishō, 96; revisions to, 43–44, 45, 125–27, 126, 378n7, 378–79n9, 380n22, 390n22; as rich source for studying kanshi, 39; terms referring to the shogun in, 387n93 Kanō Ryū: children with, 120, 397n114; divorce of, 120, 399n144; marriage to, 74, 105, 388n108; reference to, in poem, 106 Kanō Tōsen (Nakanobu), 388n108 Kansei Reforms, 3, 86–87, 391n36 kanshi (“Sinitic poems”): adaptability of, 10; allusion in, 12–15, 92, 372n43; decline in quality of, 372n43; domestication of, 44–46; in Edo period, 369n6; English equivalent of, 20–22, 23, 373n63; formal features of, 17–20, 26, 58, 384–85n64, 390n23; guides to composing, 99, 100, 101; by Japanese women, 3, 369n7; Library of Congress subject heading for, 8–9; as means of self-expression, 11–12; publications, 6, 35, 38–39, 112, 280, 371n32, 377n3; shift away from, 5, 281, 370nn13–14; use of the term, 4, 9, 20–21, 370nn9–11, 374n67. See also Kankei shōkō; kanshibun; kyōshi; Literary Sinitic; poetry journals; regulated verse; rhyme groups; Ryūhoku shishō kanshibun: Chinese scholarship on, 372n34; as Chinese versus Japanese, 7–8, 21–23, 25–26; English equivalent of, 20, 21–22; and national literature, 4–7, 9–10, 371n25; use of the term, 4; viewed as obsolete, 10–11, 372n35; Western studies of, 10. See also kanshi; kanbun; Literary Sinitic Kant, Immanuel, 412n71 Karafuto, 63, 385n76. See also Suzuki Shigehisa Karatani Kōjin, 4 Karyū shunwa (Ernest Maltravers), 423n5, 430n47 Kasahara Kenju, 259 Kashiwagi Jotei, 99, 380n26, 396n92 Kataoka Takaaki, 260 Katei sōdan, 325

Katō Kiyomasa, 299 “Katsuo” (Uemura Roshū), 99–100, 396n93, 396n96 Katsuragawa Hoshū: and Endless Ivy, 190, 412n66; friendship with, 170, 173, 408n11; held party to celebrate Ryūhoku’s promotion, 197–98, 414n94; invited to house-warming party for Ōcho, 164; mentioned, 384n60, 406n136, 411n57; Oranda jii (Lexicon of Holland), 406n133; pharmacy business with, 214; physician and scholar of Dutch, 161, 406n131; poem inscribed to, 170, 171, 173, 408n3; time spent with during confinement, 35, 173, 188, 193; Zuishin kanzu (Vade mecum), 197, 414n94. See also Katsuragawa salon Katsuragawa salon, 161, 163, 170, 175, 183, 194, 408n11. See also Katsuragawa Hoshū; Yasuda Jirōkichi (Unpeki) Kawada Ōkō, 324, 424n33 Kawakami Taigorō, 415n134. See also Narushima Nobukane Kawano Eijirō, 414n100 Kawazu Sukeyasu, 170 Kazunomiya (emperor’s sister), 169 Keene, Donald, 10–11, 12, 20, 156 Keibyō ippan (A glimpse of the capital’s cats), 268, 404n84, 423n8 keigi (classical exegesis), 87. See also Confucian classics Keiō University, 331 Kenbu Shuppan, 371n32 Ken’en school, 381n29. See also Ogyū Sorai Kenhoku nichiroku, 47–48, 381nn30–31; first page of, 49 ketsuji (blank spaces), 388n105. See also heishutsu, taitō Khitan, 111 Kido Takayoshi, 1, 255, 421n112 Kikuchi Dairoku, 282, 425n41 Kikuchi Gozan, 384–85n55, 405n114; Gozandō shiwa (Gozandō’s talks on poetry), 279–80 Kikuchi Sankei: collaborated on Kagetsu shinshi, 323, 324, 326; comments on “An image of Lin Bu looking at his plum blossoms,” 398n125; comments on “An image of Taira Tadanori,” 105; comments on “An image of tending oxen,” 92, 393n68, 394n71; comments on “Ninth day of the fifth month, excursion to Kanagawadai,” 411n44; exchange of poems with, 233–34; poems for New Chronicles, 238–39; praise of court poem, 154; preface to Ryūhoku’s coin

472 i n d e x

Kikuchi Sankei (continued) collecting album, 186, 411n54; as tutor to ­shogun Iemochi, 233, 418n49. See also Tōkyō shashinkyō (Photographs of Tokyo) Kim, Kyu Hyun, 311 Kimura Ki, 403n58 Kimura Yoshitake, 184 Kingoku eiri shinbun (Illustrated jailhouse newspaper), 308, 427n91 Kinji hyōron, 325 Kin’ōtō (Imperial Loyalist Party), 350–51 Kirino Toshiaki, 320 Kishida Ginkō, 289 Kishida Kandō, 230 Kishigami Shikken, 191 Kobayashi Bunshi, 363 Kobayashi Eitarō, 82 Kobayashi Inosuke, 118 Kobayashi Seichi, 117 Kobayashi Seigo, 415n125 Kobayashi Shigeru, 250 Kobe, 225, 227 Kōbi nikki. See Diary of a Journey to Bitchū Kōbun tsūshi (Bulletin of official writings), 35, 269–70, 272, 298, 354, 423n15, 426n66. See also Chōya shinbun Koga domain (Ibaraki), 232–35 Koga Ferry, 233 Kokatsu (geisha), 129, 130, 162, 400n17 Kōkosha, 99, 280, 396nn92–93 Kōko shinpō, 325 Kōko Shisha poetry circle. See Kōkosha Kokubu Seigai, 355, 356, 433n9 kokubungaku (national literature), 5, 7 kokushi (poetry in the national language), 5, 370n14 kokutai (national essence), 5 Komatsubara Eitarō, 434n14 Komukai village, 431n70 Kondō Kishirō, 366 Kondō Tokuzan, 16, 372n54 Kong cong zi (Kong family masters’ anthology), 177 Konno Shinji, 375n89 Kōnodai, 379n14 Korea, relations with, 50, 298–300, 313, 382n38 Kornicki, Peter, 22, 374n71 Kōsei nichijō. See Diary of a Journey to the West Kōshi Ehō, 372n47 Kou Zhun, 111–12 Koyasu Takashi, 330 Kubota Keiichi, 388n4

Kudō Suketsune, 170–72 Kume Kunitake, 88, 391n49 kundoku reading method: applied to English and European languages, 24, 374–75n84; approach to reading Literary Sinitic, 23–24, 374n81; Lurie on, 25, 26, 375n85; variations in, 27–28; and zatsuroku columns, 269 Kurimoto Joun, 196–97, 199, 256, 257, 276, 286, 413n88 Kurimoto Teijirō, 257, 261 Kuroda Kiyotaka, 1 Kusakabe Meikaku, 433n5 Kusunoki Masahige, 351 Kusuyama Kōsaburō, 197, 265–66, 376n95, 422–23n2 Kusuyama Masao, 422–23n2 Kyōbushō (Ministry of Religious Affairs), 252, 253, 420n103 kyōshi (“crazy poems”), 22, 133, 179, 193, 228, 274n75, 402n36, 409n25 Kyoto, 47, 268, 313, 317, 363, 429n30; shogunate and, 179, 205, 208, 209, 410n27 Kyoto University, 27 kyūshinshugi (rapid-progressivism), 344 Lamarre, Thomas, Uncovering Heian Japan, 371n29 “Lament of the Loincloth,” 273–76, 284, 286, 424n22 “Lament of the Newspaperman,” 276–77, 284, 286 “Lament while facing the mirror,” 222–23 Land of Huaxu, 90, 392n56 Lanman, Charles, Leading Men of Japan, 1–2, 4, 6, 356–57, 434n14 “Late in autumn, the winds and rain continue for days without end,” 74 “Late spring,” 82 Leading Men of Japan (Charles Lanman), 1–2, 4, 6, 356–57, 434n14 “Leaving Edo Castle in the evening,” 67, 386n88 Legge, James, 256; Zhihuan qimeng (Graduated reading), 410n38 “Leisurely chant,” 394n72 letters to the editor, 266, 287–88, 288–89, 294, 295, 423n6, 424n27 Li Bo: associated with Lu Mountain, 108–9; “Banquet in the Peach and Pear Garden,” 98; “Bring on the wine,” 394n76; invoked by Ryūhoku, 17; preface to “Peach and Apricot Garden,” 242; reclusion of, 109, 114; “Song of Xiangyang,” 397n117. See also “An image of Li Bo gazing at the waterfall”

i n d e x 473

Li Guang, 204 Li Guangbi, 415n136 Li He, “Bring on the wine,” 394n76 Li Ling, 385n72, 385n73 Li Shangyin, 401n27 Li Shaoweng, 393n63 Li Shixiong, “Ten kinds of desolation on a cold night,” 62, 385n71 Liang Hong, “Wu yi ge,” 127, 400n8 Liang Kai, Dongli gaoshi tu, 14 Liberal Party (Jiyūtō), 351 Library of Congress (United States), 7–9, 371n28 Liezi, 90, 392n56, 404n99 life insurance, 362, 434n32 Lin Bu, 110–12, 114, 397–98n121, 398n122, 398n125 “Listening to hail fall,” 61 literary gatherings, 291, 424n31. See also poetry gatherings literary journals, 279, 325–26. See also Kagetsu shinshi Literary Sinitic: and “brush talks,” 376–77n105; comparison to Latin, 11, 22, 23, 372n40; criticism of washū, 8, 371n26; demotion of, 370n11; embellishment of, 380n26; instruction in, 5–6, 82, 87–88, 92, 391n44; journalism and, 35, 358; and the Kansei Reforms, 3, 86; kundoku reading method for, 23–28, 374n81; linguistic play in, 22–23, 133–34; in New Chronicles of Yanagibashi, 123, 132–34; used for travelogues, 232– 33; use of the term, 369n5; use of the term “Sino-Japanese” for, 20, 21, 22, 374n71; as a written language, 26–27, 369n5. See also kundoku reading method; Sinitic literature literature in the bunmei kaika era, 278–79, 281– 83, 339 Liu Bang, 419n69 Liu Bei, 392n58 Liu Chan, 416n5 Liu Changqing, 389n17 Liu Chen, 416n5 Liu Kezhuang, “Ten poems on the old,” 382n34 Liu Xun, 92, 393n67 Liu Yu (Emperor Wu of the Liu-Song), 114, 361 Liu Yuxi, 418n60 “Locomotive song,” 68–72, 73, 125 Lofgren, Erik, 371n23 logographic writing, 25–26 loyalty: of Aizu men, 218–20; and filial piety, 172, 408nn5–6; of Li Shixiong, 61; “Loyalist petition,” 432n77; mentioned, 173, 217, 238, 433n91; of Oda Fusanosuke, 220; of Ryūhoku, 115, 273, 275, 286–87, 319, 342, 257; of Su Wu, 62, 65–66,

84; of Tao Yuanming, 15, 16, 17, 113, 114, 212– 13; of Xie An, 148. See also Imperial Loyalist Party Lu Jia, 64 Lu Xiang, 387n95 Lu You, “Blizzard Song,” 327n75 lunzan (J. ronsan), 242 Luo Xuegu, 280 Lurie, David, 25–26, 375n85 lüshi (regulated verse), 18–20, 46, 58, 373n60 Lüshi chunqiu, 404n99 Ma Gu, 83, 390n20 Maebara Issei, 318 Maeda Ai: on Chōya shinbun, 284; compared Ryūhoku to Seiken, 137, 402–3n54; contrasted Ryūhoku’s journey with Iwakura Mission, 249–50; on decoding of names in Ryūhoku’s diaries, 129, 400n19, 401n23; discussion of Endless Ivy and Fukuzawa Yukichi, 192–93, 194–95; on the end of Ryūhoku’s career, 312, 315; on history of the Ōta barracks, 414n101; on Kusuyama Kōsaburō, 422–23n2; mentioned, 116, 132, 161, 179, 270, 337; and Ryū­ hoku’s diary, 129–30, 381n30; on Ryūhoku’s resignation from the cavalry, 206; on Ryū­ hoku’s use of Yu Huai’s Miscellaneous Records, 237 Maeda Bunko, 381n30 Maejima Hisoka, 372n40 Maeno Ryōtaku, 162, 406n132 Manchu conquest, 62, 132, 139, 237 Mann, Robert James, The Book of Health, 409n15 Man’yōshū, 17 Marceau, Lawrence, 78 Marsden, J. B., 262 martial imagery, 41–42, 43, 72, 316, 381n34. See also sword imagery Martin, William A. P., 411n42 Marvelous Anecdotes about One Hundred Great Figures of Our Times, 323 Masaoka Shiki, 10, 16 Masuda Takashi, 433n1 Matsudaira Naritami, 384n60 Matsudaira Norikata, 197, 413nn88–89 Matsudaira Sadanobu, 86, 391n40 Matsumae domain, 63, 64, 72, 382n38, 386n80 Matsumoto Hakka, 251, 252, 254, 258, 259, 262, 419n85 Matsumoto Jiemon, 28 Matsumoto Keidō, 94 Matsuo Bashō, 417n28

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Matsuri Ginsha, 280, 424n33 Matsuura Takeshirō, 63, 386n79 May, Erskine, The Constitutional History of ­England, 328 “Meeting Takeuchi again,” 42 Meiji army, 319–20 Meiji emperor, 1, 388n105, 431n65 Meiji government: announcement of National Diet, 347; attempt to recruit Ryūhoku, 218, 246, 247, 249, 357, 419n82; nation-building by, 3; opposition to, in Chōya shinbun, 268, 277– 78, 426n60; policy on Korea, 298–300; press restrictions, 35–36; recruitment of former Tokugawa officials, 218; relations with newspapers, 270–71, 424n17; reported on in Tōkyō chinbun (Strange news of Tokyo), 213; service to, 211, 213; shinbutsu bunri policy, 251, 284–85; sponsored Higashi Honganji tour, 35, 253–55; ties with Nishi Honganji, 255, 421n112; vaccination policies, 235. See also bunmei kaika; Defamation Law; Iwakura Mission; press laws Meiji Nippō, 335–36 Meiji Restoration: and changes to Yanagibashi, 236–37, 241–42; in exchange of poems with Sankei, 234–35; executions during, 413n87; immediate aftermath of, 35, 364. See also ­bunmei kaika; Meiji government Meiji shibun, 279, 325 Meinyo, Abbot, 421n112 Memorial Service for the Spirit of the News­ paper, 309–11, 312, 428nn94–96 Mencius: allusions to, 277, 392n52, 394n71, 403n62; on benevolence and righteousness, 142; and popular rights, 337; and the press laws, 359; on the role of the sovereign’s advisors, 164; study of, 390n25; teaching on “great task,” 190 Mengqiu: account of Wang Dao and Xie An, 398n129; episodes from, in Ryūhoku’s poems, 92, 392n61, 393n69, 400n8, 404n99, 408n152; mentioned, 392n62, 393n66 Messelot, M., 199–200 military reforms, 41. See also coastal defenses military service, 35, 174, 196–205, 208–9, 215–16, 319–20. See also cavalry service Miller, Roy, 23 Minagawa Kien, 399n4 Minami Teisuke, 422n138 Minamoto no Yoritomo, 172, 408n7 Minamoto no Yoshitomo, 172, 408n5 Ming loyalists, 62. See also Yu Huai Ministry of Education, 5

Ministry of Religious Affairs (Meiji period), 252, 253, 420n103 miscellaneous essays. See zatsuroku columns “Miscellaneous poems from the fifth month of the fifth year of the cycle,” 221 Mishima Chūshū, 433n5 mitate (double vision), 130, 229, 238, 401n25 Mito domain, 179 Mitsuda Tamenari, 421n112 Mitsukuri Shūhei, 161, 188, 261, 411n42,411n57, 425n41 Miyanoshita, 363 Mizuhara Hitoshi, 404n90 Mizumoto Seiichirō, 243–44 Mizuno Tadakuni, 133, 380n21, 394n77, 399n140 Mizushina Rakutarō, 195, 411n57, 414n100 modernization: Ōkubo Toshimichi’s policies, 321; Ryūhoku’s eclectic approach to, 36, 269, 281, 315, 317, 330–35, 360 mokkan, 375n89 Le monde illustré, 199 Monier-Williams, Monier, Sanskrit Manual, 260 Mori Arinori, 1 Mori Kainan, 370n8 Mori Ōgai: “crazy poems” (kyōshi), 22–23; fondness for Kagetsu shinshi, 326, 430n35; Gan (The wild goose), 430n35; on the term kanshi, 370n10; Vita sexualis, 326; Wixted on, 10, 372n43 Mori Seigo, 376n95, 415n125 Mori Shuntō, 279, 280, 302, 370n8; Tōkyō saijin zekku, 424n33 Morishige Hisaya, 415n125 Mormonism, 262 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 435n43 Motoyasu Sōtatsu, 406n137 Mount Fuji, 102, 108, 277, 396n91, 400–401n19 Mount Kankakeyama, 230–31, 417n38, 431n70 Mount Lu. See “An image of Li Bo gazing at the waterfall” Mount Matsuchi, depicted on map, 29 Mount Nogeyama, 199 Mukōyama Kōson, 279, 414n112, 416n1 mulberry: bare, 104, 396n105; fields, 240, 267, 274, 418n66; and hemp, 234, 364 Murakami Tetsumi, 77–78, 80 Muro Kyūsō, 376n98 museums, 251, 341 Nagai (second wife), 129, 397n114, 401n20 Nagai Kafū: analysis of Ryūhoku’s diary, 400n13, 400n18; on hanjōkimono, 134; on Kusuyama

i n d e x 475

Kōsaburō, 422–23n2; on New Chronicles, 6, 236–37; and Ōnuma Chinzan, 156; on Ryū­ hoku’s attempts at business, 214 Nagai Shuzen, 213 Nagai family, 129 Nagasaki, 50, 52–53, 163, 252 Nagayama Choen: case study by Satō, 389n8; map of Shitaya literati, 78, 79, 389n7, 389n8; residence of, 79, 389n8 Nagoya, 345 Nakajima Atsushi, “Li Ling,” 385n73 Nakajima Katsuyoshi, 428n96 Nakamura Keiu, 279 Nakamura Yukihiko, 78 Nakano Mitsutoshi, 9–10, 11, 133 Nakazawa Setsujō, 407n137 Namura Taizō, 420n109 Nanjing. See Yu Huai Nanjō Bun’yū, 259, 280, 422n143 Nanma Tsunanori, 391n48 Napoléon III, 208 Narushima Gorō, 397n114, 407n150 Narushima Kadō (Yoshimatsu): adoption of Ryūhoku, 28, 376n95; biological father of, 400n15; death of, 33, 37, 38, 40, 44, 47, 61, 77, 382nn35–36; editing of shogunal histories, 31, 65; encouraged Ryūhoku’s poetry com­ position, 377n2, 379n10; as family head, 31; Kaikeiroku (Coastal defense records), 41, 42–43, 379nn16–17; mentioned, 388n108; position of okujusha, 28; punished for opposition to agechirei, 380n21, 399n140; Ryūhoku’s poems for, 40, 83–84, 88, 379n14, 381n33 Narushima Katsuo, 30, 31 Narushima Kazusada, 30, 31, 376n100 Narushima Kenkichi (Osada Kenkichi): adoption of, 210–11, 415nn136–37; government career of, 211, 213; mentioned, 376n95, 418n44, 423n3; relocated to Shizuoka, 217 Narushima Kinemaro. See Ryūhoku Narushima Korehiro. See Ryūhoku Narushima Matasaburō, 210, 229 Narushima Motonao: death and mourning of, 176; mentioned, 388n108; opposed agechirei policy, 380n21, 394n77, 399n140; oversaw editing of Tokugawa jikki, 30, 85, 118, 376n101; and Ryūhoku’s dismissal, 176 Narushima Nobukane (Kawakami Taigorō), 209, 217, 267, 415nn134–35 Narushima Nobusato, 30 Narushima Nobutsugu, 30, 31 Narushima Nobuyoshi, 31

Narushima Nobuyuki (Kinkō): as bunjin, 87, 388–89n4; Daien (A garden of poetic themes), 101; as family head, 31; “A letter prohibiting haikai to my descendants,” 396n97; names of, 405n120; poems to commemorate, 154– 55, 157–58, 164, 404–5n108, 405n119; poetry composition, 101; scholarship of, 30, 376n100; service to the Tokugawa shogunate, 30, 376nn97–98 Narushima Ryūhoku. See Ryūhoku Narushima Tomoichi, 211 Narushima Yoshimatsu. See Narushima Kadō Narushima family: family home, 31, 375n94, 376n101, 385n65; family pedigree, 397n114; graves, 31; heads, 31, 33, 38; honor, 118; origins, 30; residences, 53, 54, 78, 79, 108, 160, 375n94, 389n5, 389n7, 389n9, 400n15; Ryūhoku’s adopted successors, 210, 415n134; service to the Toku­ gawa shogunate, 30–31, 33, 37, 118, 357, 376n95 National Diet, 344–47, 350, 352 National Diet Library, 34, 38–39, 378n9, 379n17; Gakken Bunko, 56, 57 national language, 5, 370n14 national literature, 4–7, 9, 370n11, 371n25 Natsume Sōseki, Kusamakura (The ThreeCornered World), 16–17 Nelson, Susan, 13 New Chronicles of Yanagibashi (Ryūkyō shinshi), 34; afterword by Yanagawa Shunsan, 161; allusion to Xie An, 148–49, 175, 178, 354; censorship of, 399n3; commented on by Qing journalist, 402n40; compared to a newspaper, 214, 248, 325; compared with Terakado Sei­ ken’s Account, 135–37, 138, 147, 402nn52–53, 402–3n54, 403n82, 404n90; compared with Yu Huai’s Miscellaneous Records, 132, 136, 138– 40, 240–41, 245; critical spirit in, 242, 245, 249, 286; criticism of, 138, 403n57, 403n58; descriptions of boathouses, 130, 143–45; editions of, 6, 371n21; first and second volumes contrasted, 138, 236–38, 241–42, 245, 403n57; first volume of, 123–24, 128, 138–51, 399n3, 400n13; geisha in, 129, 144–46, 241–42, 244, 294, 419n78; and the hanjōkimono genre, 132, 237, 239, 245; indebted to Terakado Seiken’s Account, 132, 135–36, 141, 147, 286; jabs at the social elite, 146–47; mentioned, 37, 97, 403n83; narration of, 136–37, 138, 139–47, 149, 240; passage for spring, 149; popularity of, 6; preface to, 135– 37, 146; prefatory material in second volume, 238–41, 275; and Ryūhoku’s career as a journalist, 137, 247–48, 256, 273; satire in, 34, 132,

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New Chronicles of Yanagibashi (Ryūkyō shinshi) (continued) 138, 147, 237, 239; second volume of, 35, 222, 236–37, 239, 242–46, 401n20, 418n55; “uselessness” of, 239, 248, 325; use of Confucian canon, 124, 141–43, 149, 151; use of Literary Sinitic, 123, 132–34; woodcut of “Willow Bridge,” 239 New Journal of Blossoms and the Moon. See Kage­tsu shinshi “newspaperman,” identity of, 35, 268, 273–77, 285, 317, 318. See also journalism; newspapers Newspaper Ordinance, 288–90, 311, 312. See also press laws newspapers: attention to, in travelogues, 265, 363; categories of, 272, 272, 329–30, 424n20, 430n43; furigana, 347–48, 432n83; as index of civilization, 267–68, 427n82; introduction of, 265, 325; journalists, 413n83, 429n28; and late-breaking news, 312–13; and the Meiji government, 270–71, 424n17; New Chronicles compared to, 214, 248, 325; and the “public,” 311, 434n28; reliance on readers for contributions, 266, 423n6; role of, 257, 287–88, 423n4. See also Akebono shinbun; Chōya shinbun; journalism; letters to the editor; Memorial Service for the Spirit of the Newspaper; “news­ paperman,” identity of; press laws; Tōkyō chinbun; Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun; Yūbin hōchi shinbun Newton, Isaac, 214 New Year: customs, 40–41, 46, 105–6, 379n15; poems to mark, 32–33, 32, 40, 84, 214–15; rites for, 84 “New Year’s Day. I compose two quatrains and two octaves,” 40 “New Year’s Day in the forty-third year of the cycle,” 32–33, 32 “New Year’s Day in the seventh year of the cycle,” 214–15 “New Zhuangzi,” 313–14, 328n7 Nihon (Japan) Bridge, depicted on map, 29 Nihon bungaku zensho, 5 Nihon koten bungaku taikei, 9–10 Niijima Jō, 1 Niina Noriko, 135 Ning Qi, 92, 392n61 “Ninth day of the fifth month, excursion to Kanagawa-dai,” 183, 184, 411n44 Nishi Honganji, 251, 255, 258, 421n112 Nishio Shōkei, 187 Nochikagami (A later mirror), 31, 159, 406n125 Noguchi Neisai, 370nn9–10

Noh, 105, 342–43, 396n108, 397n109, 406n137, 431–32n72 nue beast, 134, 402n41 Ochiai Naobumi, 5, 370n13 Ochō: children with, 165, 397n114, 407n150, 414n95, 417n35; cottage of, 164–65, 407n149; in Endless Ivy, 192; essay on house-warming party for, 164–65; marriage to Ryūhoku, 130, 229; name of, 129–30, 243; and Ryūhoku’s stele, 355, 433n5 Oda Fusanosuke, 220 Oda Nobunaga, 193 Odagiri Hideo, 6 “Ode to katsuo, An,” 100 “Offering my celebratory words,” 153 Ofuji (geisha), 193, 400–401n19 Oguri Tadamasa, 196, 206, 209, 413n87 Ogurusu Kōchō, 252 Ogyū Kigai (Matsudaira Norikata), 197, 413nn88–89 Ogyū Sorai: advocated High Tang aesthetics, 101, 369n6, 391n39, 396n97; Ken’en school, 381n29; school of, 87, 391nn39–40; on washū in Literary Sinitic, 23, 371n26 Oka Rokumon, 93–94, 391n47 Okada Kesao, 243 Okano Kanae (Teigyo), 55–56, 383n52; residence of, 79, 383n52 Okayama, 224, 225 Okazaki Hironori, 72 Ōkubo Shibutsu, 383n53 Ōkubo Toshimichi, 1, 321–22, 429n25 okujusha: behind-the-scenes role of, 42; establishment and formalization of, 30, 376n98; Kikuchi Sankei as, 418n49; Narushima family position, 28, 43, 47; oath of, 49; Ryūhoku’s apprenticeship as, 49, 74, 75–76, 82, 116, 119, 382n36; Ryūhoku’s official appointment as, 119, 121; Ryūhoku’s role as, 119, 121–23, 163– 64, 166; stipend of, 49. See also Tokugawa ­shogunate, Ryūhoku’s service to Ōkuma Shigenobu, 351, 433n1 Ōkura Kihachirō, 433n1 “Old Confucian scholar, An,” 90 Ōmoto Tatsuya, 369n4 “On 07.27, there was a great storm,” 378n5 “On an album of coins from various Western countries,” 186–88 “On an image of Hideyoshi,” 59, 61 “On an image of Red Cliff,” 377–78n5 “On dregs” (essay), 282–83

i n d e x 477

“On fireflies,” 61 Ono Goin, 56, 384n59 Ono Kozan, 274n76, 279, 323 Ōno Mitsutsugi, 248–49 “On sending off Shioda Saburō,” 388n105 “On sending Yasuda Unpeki off to Kanagawa to study English books,” 182–83 “On the day after the full moon,” 125–27, 126, 399n5 “On the eleventh day . . . it is the anniversary of my father’s passing,” 83–84 “On the harm of the sajō argument,” 179 “On the opening of the Translation Office and the ancient languages of India,” 262–63 “On the seventeenth day . . . I board an American steamship,” 225 “On the twentieth day of the ninth month, I led soldiers and horses,” 204 “On the twenty-seventh day . . . His Highness conducted military exercises,” 72–73, 388n105 Ōnuma Chinzan: contrasted with Ryūhoku, 156–59; contributed to Kagetsu shinshi, 323; excursion to Yanagibashi, 161; joined Ryū­ hoku’s poetry gatherings, 156, 405n113; leader of Shitaya circle, 56, 156, 163, 280; in Meiji ­Sinitic literature, 370n8; “Poem of spring feelings,” 157; poem to commemorate Narushima Kinkō, 157–58, 164; poetry collections of, 156, 157, 405nn114–15, 405n118; poetry gatherings of, 56, 385n68; praise for Ryūhoku, 154, 157–58; residence of, 79, 395n84; Ryūhoku’s ties with, 97, 156; teacher of poetry, 97, 384–85n55 Opium Wars, 53, 383n45 Oranda biseiroku (Record of Holland’s beautiful government), 176, 409nn13–14, 409n16, 410n42 Osada Kenkichi. See Narushima Kenkichi Osada Shūtō, 423n3 Osaka, 208, 224, 227–29, 319, 335, 380n21, 415n118 Osaka Castle, 226 Ōsako Sadakiyo, 366 Ōshima Ryūichi, 198, 379n10, 379n17, 381n31 ōsōji (great sweeping), 105–6 Osuzu (geisha), 400n19 Ōta Nanpo, 388n3 Ōta Randō, 94, 394n79 Ōta barracks, 199, 202, 203, 204, 414n101 Otake (geisha), 190 Ōtani Kōei, 252. See also Gennyo, Abbot Ōtani Masao, 27, 59, 380–81n27; “Ryūhoku no seishun,” 378n9 Oteru (geisha), 401n19 Otobe Kanae, 269, 426n66

Otori (geisha), 192, 193, 197, 229, 412n67 Ōtsuki Bankei: acquaintance with Ryūhoku, 170, 184, 407n144, 408n3, 419n85; “At the first of the year, I congratulate the tutor scholar,” 163–64, 185, 407n148; as bridge between Shitaya literati and Western scholars, 161–63, 407n137; and Chōya shinbun, 270, 271, 279, 283, 302, 423n14, 424n19; comments on “An image of tending oxen,” 92, 393n68, 394n71; comments on “Curse in the Hour of the Ox,” 101, 124; contributed to Kagetsu shinshi, 323, 324; education of, 162–63; joined Ryūhoku’s poetry gatherings, 156; knowledge on West­ ern subjects, 163, 183–84, 411n57; memorial for, 413n82; as model for Ryūhoku, 163, 167, 407n145; political views of, 167, 383n45, 411– 12n58; project to translate Perry’s travelogue, 183–85; proposed kyōwa as gloss for “republic,” 245, 419n77; reassigned to Sendai, 188, 411n58; scrapbook of, 97, 385n68; Soga vendetta poem, 171, 173, 408n10 Ōtsuki Bansui (Genpaku), 162 Ōtsuki Joden, 355, 356, 407n137, 433n8 Ōtsuki Shunsai, 160 Oume (geisha), 192, 197–98, 412n71 Outer Kanda, map of, 54 Ouyang Xiu, “Youth wandering,” 395n80 Owen, Stephen, 411n48 Oyabegawa, 349 Ozaki Saburō, 301 Ozawa Suien, 417n21 pailü (J. hairitsu), 18 “Painting of Tao Yuanming’s ‘The Return,’ A,” 112–14 Paris, 246, 249–50, 256, 262. See also Paris International Exhibition Paris International Exhibition, 415n137, 421n121 Parkes, Harry, 203 parliamentary government, 344–47, 352. See also National Diet “Parting from a ‘bamboo wife’ pillow,” 59, 60, 61 “Passing Yanagibashi at night,” 131, 132, 401n29 Pastreich, Emanuel, 245, 419n78 peach-blossom spring, 363–64 Peng bird, 225 Perry, Matthew: gifts presented by, 67–68, 387n91; Japanese travelogue, 184–85, 411n45, 411n47; in “Locomotive song,” 68–69, 71, 73, 387n95; mission of, 40, 41, 50–51, 67–68; negotiations with, 119; in “Ninth day of the fifth month, excursion to Kanagawa-dai,” 183,

478 i n d e x

Perry, Matthew (continued) 411n44; return visit of, 33, 50–51, 55, 116, 156– 57, 382nn39–40, 382n43; and Ryūhoku’s antipa­ thy toward the West, 124; in Ryūhoku’s diaries, 49, 50–51, 382n39; in “Writing my feelings at year’s end,” 75–76 philanthropists, 366 phoenix, 154–55, 158–59, 198, 405n123 Photographs of Tokyo. See Tōkyō shashinkyō Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage (Shōkikusō), 13, 211–12, 213, 220, 223, 353, 360, 418n64; significance of the name, 211–12, 213, 361 pingze (level and oblique), 19–20, 58, 373n61, 384n63, 385n64, 390n23 playful glosses (gikun), 134, 144, 399n3, 402n42 playful Sinitic writings (kanbun gesaku), 133–35, 291, 402n37 pleasure boats, 129, 141, 161, 347. See also boathouses plum gardens, 380–81n27, 381n28. See also “An image of Lin Bu looking at his plum blossoms” poem calendars, 95–97, 96, 394–95n80, 395n82 “Poem of spring feelings” (Ōnuma Chinzan), 157 “Poem on an old sword,” 215–16 “poems of gathered graphs” (jizishi), 97–98, 395n88 poems of mourning, 384n59. See also Narushima Kadō “Poems of one night,” 98, 395n89 “Poetic exposition on shrinking in fear” (Heki­ ekifu), 295–97, 298–300, 426n64 poetry gatherings: assigned topics for, 57, 58, 59–62, 60, 61, 93–94, 98–99, 101–2, 130, 385n67, 394n79, 396n98, 401n27; formal considerations, 103–4; getsureikai, 58, 385n68; marathon session at, 98; Ōnuma Chinzan’s, 56, 385n68; recommendations for improvement, 57; Ryūhoku’s, 34, 53–55, 57–59, 93–94, 97, 156, 385n65, 385n67, 394n79, 395n83; Ryūhoku’s compared with Hayashi, 91, 97, 101; sekidai topics, 58, 61–62, 94, 394n79; topics on Japanese themes, 98–102. See also Hayashi family scholars poetry journals, 34, 377n4, 377–78n5, 378n6; completeness of, 58, 385n67; poems composed for the Hayashi gatherings, 91, 392n58; and sequence of poetry gatherings, 59. See also Kankei shōkō poetry schools, 87, 280, 381n29, 391nn39–40 political commentary, 314, 327, 344–47, 352 political parties, 350–51 popular rights, 337, 348–49, 350, 366, 432n89

postal service, 365 “Presented to Master Suien to congratulate him” (Yanagawa Shunsan), 197–98 preservation, 341–43, 343–44, 432n75 Preserve the Nation Society (Hokokusha), 334–35 press laws: Chōya shinbun and, 268–69, 288–97, 300–301, 304–5, 322, 359, 424n27; and figurehead positions, 328; newspapers’ response to, 288–89, 293; outlawed pseudonyms, 288–89; violation of, 294–95, 297, 300–301, 315, 360. See also freedom of the press; Memorial Service for the Spirit of the Newspaper; Ryūhoku, imprisonment of Prison de la Santé, 427n93 prostitution, 152, 167. See also geisha public and private spheres, 361, 434nn28–29 publishing, 256, 259–60, 262, 264, 265. See also journalism Qiao sisters, 130, 401n27 Qin, first emperor of, 115 Qin Hui, 125, 400n7 Qinhuai pleasure quarters (Nanjing). See Yu Huai Qu Yuan, 114, 115, 275–76, 286, 398n133 Rabinovitch, Judith, 20 railroad, 67–68, 387n91. See also “Locomotive song” Rai San’yō: “Anchored off the coast of Ama­ kusa,” 311, 428n97; “The Mongols are coming,” 66, 386n86, 386n87; “Oranda-sen kō” (Ballad of a Dutch ship), 52–53, 383n44; “A painting of Lin Bu,” 398n125 Raku (concubine), 397n114 Randon, Marshal, 199 “Reading books in the fresh chill of autumn,” 88–90, 116 reclusion: dismissal and, 175, 181; and the fall of the Tokugawa, 35, 209; rejection of, 360–62; in Ryūhoku’s poems, 82, 110–11, 181, 215, 304; Tao Yuanming and, 13–15, 34, 112–13; urban, 150–51, 181, 215, 220, 234, 240, 404n98, 418n64. See also “An image of Li Bo gazing at the water­ fall”; “Biography of the Sumida Recluse”; Tao Yuanming Record of a Journey to Hitachi and Shimōsa (Jōsō yuki), 232, 233, 364 Record of Holland’s Beautiful Government (Oranda biseiroku), 176, 409nn13,14,16, 410n42 Records of the Grand Historian (Sima Qian):

i n d e x 479

“Biographies of the Assassin-Retainers,” 308– 9, 427n92; biographies of Li Guang and Wu Qi, 204; lunzan, 242; mentioned, 82, 392n62, 393n63, 425–26n59; story of Zhao Tuo, 64; “Treatise on Rivers and Canals,” 235 recumbent traveling, 135–36 Red Cliff, 130, 312, 377–78n5, 401n27. See also Su Dongpo, “Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff ” regulated verse (lüshi), 18–20, 46, 58, 373n60 Reiganjima, 377n2 Reizei house, 30, 376n100 religion: essays on, 263–64, 337–38; freedom of, 287 “Reminiscence on the past at Kōnodai,” 381n29 Renan, Ernest, Vie de Jésus, 258, 262 Renjinglu (Hut in the Human Realm), 13 rhyme groups, 18–19, 51–52, 385n71, 394n70, 395n89. See also kanshi, formal features of rhyme matching: with Du Fu’s “Autumn Feelings,” 97–98; at the Hayashi gatherings, 93, 394n72; social function of, 33; transtemporal, 93, 394nn73–74; types of, 376n104 Rikken Kaishintō (Constitutional Progressive Reform Party), 351 Rikken Teiseitō (Constitutional Imperial Party), 351, 433nn93–94 Roches, Léon, 197, 199, 203 Rodriguez, João, 257 Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong), 401n27 “Rose balsam,” 385n67 Rosny, Léon de, 256–58, 421n117, 421n119, 421n124; Introduction à l’étude de la langue japonaise, 421n119 Rouzer, Paul, 373n63 Russia, southward advance of, 63–64 Ryōgoku: depicted on map, 29; in illustration of Yanagibashi, 122; river-opening festival, 344–45 Ryū Sōro, 372n47 Ryūhoku (Narushima Kinetarō): adopted sons of, 210–11, 415nn136–37; biography, 1–2; birth siblings of, 376n95; children of, 106, 120, 165, 397n114, 407n150, 414n95, 435n46; confinement of, 35, 173–74, 175, 180–81, 191, 409n12, 410n34; death of, 352, 353; dismissal from shogunal post, 34–35, 169, 173–75, 175–81, 191, 212– 13, 409n12; eclecticism of, 36, 281, 315, 321, 330– 33, 337–38, 360; education of, 31; eyesight of, 362, 434n32; as family head, 31; funeral of, 353, 354, 433n1, 433n3; grave inscription of, 353–54, 356; imprisonment of, 36, 269, 297, 302–5, 307–

9, 427n91; legacy of, 353–56; marriages of, 74–75, 105, 120, 129, 130, 397n114, 399n144, 401n20; names of, 28, 57, 71, 85, 123, 178, 191, 353, 375n93, 384n60, 387n96, 412n60; parentage of, 28, 376n95; political activities, 343–52; posthumous name of, 354, 355, 433n3; residences of, 13, 28, 29, 163, 211–12, 246, 375n94, 412n60. See also Narushima family Ryūhoku shishō: Chinese readers of, 232; comments and revisions in, 378nn7–8, 378–79n9; poems from Hayashi gathering, 92, 393n68; selection of poems for, 38, 39, 95–97, 112; typesetting of references to the shogun, 388n105 Ryūhoku zenshū, 371n21, 377n3, 396n90 Ryūkyō shinshi. See New Chronicles of Yanagibashi Ryukyus, 50, 382n38 Sada Hakubō, 279 Sada Kaiseki, 334–35 Saigō Takamori, 298, 313, 317–18, 320, 360, 366, 429n17; compared to fish in a pond, 320–21; Sinitic verses by, 429n22. See also Satsuma Rebellion Saigyō, “Composed about Mount Fuji when he traveled to the east,” 102 Saitō Chikudō: Ahen shimatsuki (A record of the opium events), 383n45; death of, 384n59 Saitō Gesshin, Edo meisho zue, 140, 403n65 Saitō Mareshi, 42, 80, 87, 377n105, 379n19 sajō (closing the ports and expelling the barbarians), 169–70, 179, 189, 299–300 Sakaki, Atsuko, 372n35, 373n66 Sakata Kan’ichirō, 259 Sakata Ōkaku, 418n62; residence of, 79 Sakhalin. See Karafuto sakō (closing the ports). See sajō samurai: and assassination of Ōkubo Toshimichi, 321; challenge to Meiji state, 316, 317– 18, 429n15, 429n17; contrasted with Chinese scholar-officials, 42; displaced Tokugawa, 236–37, 242; essays on, 317–18, 429nn15–17; fuhei shizoku uprisings, 313, 318–19; loyalty of, 287; Satsuma and Chōshū, 236–37; status, 35, 210, 218, 267, 316, 318–19, 320, 429n16. See also Saigō Takamori; Satsuma Rebellion Sanjō Sanetomi, 253–55 “Sankei invited me to Itokuri River,” 234 Sano Tsunetami, 366 Sanskrit, 251, 259–62, 422n135, 422n143 Sasaki Hidejirō, 209 Satō Issai, 85

480 i n d e x

Satow, Ernest, 411n42 Satsuma domain, 236–37, 287, 382n38; 1868 rebellion, 205, 206 Satsuma Rebellion (1877), 312–14, 317, 319–20, 428nn3–4. See also Saigō Takamori Sawada Chokuon, 270–71, 283, 328 Schalow, Paul, 373n66 Schneider, Laurence, 398n133 scholar-officials. See shidafu; shijin Il secolo, 260 Second Industrial Exhibition (1881), 340 Seeley, Christopher, A History of Writing in Japan, 23 Seidōha (Sage’s Hall Faction), 390n32. See also Shōheizaka Academy Seikadō Bunko, 186, 411n54 seikanron (argument to punish Korea), 298–300, 426n69 Seiki yohitsu (Superfluous jottings at the Hall of Tranquil Lodging; Bitō Jishū), 15 Seinan conflict. See Satsuma Rebellion Seirei (Ch. Xingling) school, 369n6 sekidai, 58, 61–62, 94, 394n79 Seki Sekkō (Tetsuzō): attended poetry gatherings, 55–58, 97–98; biography of, 383–84n55; as calligrapher, 56, 95, 96, 385n55, 418n62; collaboration with Funabashi Seitan, 384nn56–57; contributed poetry to Chōya shinbun, 280; “An image of Tadanori lodging under a cherry tree,” 103; interactions with Ryūhoku, 56–57; jizishi, 98; manuscripts of, 56, 57, 384n62, 385n66, 394n75; mentioned, 24, 80; poem calendars, 97, 395n82; poems on Perry’s return, 382n43; quatrain comparing Ryūhoku to Tao Yuanming, 434n22; residence of, 54, 79, 385n55, 395n84; scrapbook of, 59, 60, 61, 95, 96, 97, 385nn55–56, 385n68, 395n82; Sekkōrō shishō poetry collection, 56–57, 382n43, 385n66 Seki Senzō, 160 Seki Shinzō (Kira Yūryū), 251, 252–53, 254 Seki Tetsuzō. See Seki Sekkō Seki Tokudō, Eiri Eigaku mōgyū (Illustrated primer of English study), 24, 25 Seki Tsunezō, 97 Sekine Chidō, 345 Sekkōrō academy, 383n55 “Sending off Yaguchi Naokai, who has received an official order to go to Ezo,” 63–66, 74, 182–83 Sensōji temple, 309; depicted on map, 29. See also Memorial Service for the Spirit of the Newspaper

Senzaishū (Collection for a thousand years), 104–5 Seven Gods of Fortune (Shichifukujin), 284–85, 330–31, 425n47 shi (Sinitic poetry), 4, 20–21, 370nn9–10. See also kanshi Shibano Ritsuzan, 86–87, 391nn42–43, 391n46 shibun-gakari (person in charge of prose and poetry), 88, 391nn47–48 Shibusawa Eiichi, 1, 414n112, 433n1 Shichifukujin (Seven Gods of Fortune), 284–85, 330–31, 425n47 Shichikyoku Ginsha, 280 shidafu (scholar-officials), 42, 77–78, 80, 388n3 shifu (shi and fu), 4 Shigeno Yasutsugu (Seisai), 88 shijin (scholar-officials): contrasted with bunjin (literati), 34, 77, 80, 86–87, 90, 108–10, 112–15, 115–16, 121, 148, 222, 361; limited role of, 119, 151–52, 166, 379n20; in quatrain by Gesshō, 221. See also Confucian scholars shikai. See poetry gatherings Shikama, 227 Shikoku, 228, 230 Shimaji Mokurai, 255, 258–59, 421n112 Shimaya (Western articles store), 247 Shimizu Makoto, 340 Shimizu Usaburō, 414n112, 421n121 Shimoda, 67 Shimodate yūki (Record of a journey to ­Shimodate), 232–33, 235 Shimooka Renjō, 225 Shinagawa Daiba, 387n90 Shin Buddhism. See Higashi Honganji; Nishi Honganji Shinbunshi (literary journal), 279, 325 Shinbunshi (Newspaperman), 273, 276, 318. See also “newspaperman,” identity of shinbutsu bunri policy, 251, 284–85 Shin’enkan (Hall of the Detached Mind), 13 Shinjū ten no Amijima (Love suicides at Amijima; Chikamatsu), 228 Shin kokinshū, 102 Shinmi Masamichi (Bōzan), 31, 32–33, 32, 93 Shinobazu Pond, depicted on map, 29 Shin’ō (New Great) Bridge, depicted on map, 29 Shinobu Joken, 355, 433n5, 433n8 Shinshū Tōha Gakujuku, 246, 266, 419nn83–84 Shinsuisha, 340 Shintaishishō, 370n10, 370n13 Shinto, 251, 252, 263. See also shinbutsu bunri policy Shioda Ryōhei, 138, 399n3

i n d e x 481

shipping report, 254 Shirakawa domain, 86 Shiramine Shunme, 339 Shirane, Haruo, 5, 9 shireki. See poem calendars Shishido Tamaki, 123–24, 399n2 Shishuo xinyu (Liu Yiqing), 393n64, 397n111, 397n117, 397n121 Shitaya district: map of, 29, 54, 160; Narushima residence, 53, 56, 128; residents of, 56, 78, 79, 128–29, 163, 383n53, 384n58, 389n6–8 Shitaya Ginsha (Shitaya Poetry Society), 56, 156, 280 shizoku privilege, 318–19, 320, 429n16 Shizuoka, 210, 217, 220, 240–41, 247, 267, 416n1 Shōdoshima, 230. See also Mount Kankakeyama Shōgitai, 220 shogunal histories, 31, 37, 65. See also Nochi­ kagami, Tokugawa jikki shogunate. See Tokugawa shogunate Shōheizaka Academy (Shōheikō): brought under shogunal control, 85, 390n29; center of editing of Tokugawa jikki, 85, 376n101, 386n89; cur­ riculum of, 86, 87–88, 391n46, 391n48, 392n55, 392n59; depicted on map, 29; and Hayashi poetry gatherings, 85, 390n32; Ōtsuki Bankei’s study at, 162; rectors of, 87, 88, 133; students of, 383n50. See also Hayashi family Shōji Sōichi, 163 Shōkikusō. See Pine and Chrysanthemum Cottage Shu Qi, 276 shukudai. See poetry gatherings, assigned topics for Shunseirō shishō, 39, 375n93, 378n7, 396n90 shūsei, 383n49 Shūzenji hot springs, 363 Sibley, William, review of Keene’s Dawn to the West, 6, 10 Siebold (German physician), 159 signature seals, 192 Sima Qian. See Records of the Grand Historian Sinitic literature, 3, 7–9, 370n8, 371n24, 371n28. See also kanshibun Sinitic poetry. See kanshi Sino-Japanese, 20, 21, 22, 24, 374n71, 374n81, 374n83 “Sinosphere,” 369n5 “Skull,” 405n113 “Sleep-talk early in the New Year,” 328–29 smallpox vaccination, 159–61, 160, 234–35, 268, 406n126, 406n129

Smits, Ivo, 21 snobbery, 432n85 Société d’ethnographie, 259–60, 262, 421n133, 422n138; membership roster, 261 Soeda Tomoyoshi, 367 Soejima Taneomi, 255 Soga brothers vendetta, 170–73, 174, 408n4 Sone Tokusai, 383n50 “Song of Kawaisō, The,” 191 “Song of speechlessness,” 429n28 “Song of weariness,” 114–15, 398nn130–31 “Song on seeing a picture of the suicide of the sixteen men from Aizu, A,” 218–20, 416n5 “Song on selling my books to buy a sword,” 166–67 “Song on sweeping dust,” 106 Sonzogno, Edoardo, 260 Sorai school, 87, 381n29, 391nn39–40. See also Ogyū Sorai “Spontaneous composition,” 177 Spring and Autumn Annals, 277, 359 “spring goods,” 75, 388n110 “Spring moon on Willowbank,” 61 “Spring rain in an apricot village,” 61 “Steamship song,” 51–52, 68, 70, 125, 156 Stenhouse, Thomas B. H., Rocky Mountain Saints, 262 Strange News of Tokyo (Tōkyō chinbun), 213–14, 218, 256, 308, 416nn142–43 Strassberg, Richard, 135 Stray, Christopher, 11 study groups, 82, 390n25 Su Dongpo (Su Shi): line sent to his brother from prison, 416n9; “Poetic Exposition on Red Cliff,” 98, 295, 296–97, 298–99, 314, 346, 395n88, 426n64; preface to “He Tao shi,” 93 Su Jun, uprising of, 113 Su Shi. See Su Dongpo Su Wu, 61–62, 65, 80, 84–85, 385nn72–73. See also “An image of Su Wu eating snow” Su Xiaoxiao, 131–32 Suehiro Tetchō: and the Meiji press laws, 293– 94, 300, 302, 344, 427n72; memoirs of, 314, 427n91; mentioned, 328, 361 Sugano Hiroyuki, 370n18 Suganuma Tatsukichi, 415n125 Sugawara no Michizane, 33, 386n88 Sugi Chōu, “The joys of drinking tea,” 430n36 Sugimoto Chūon, 400n15 Sugimoto Kōseki (Chūtatsu), 51, 128–29, 160, 400n15 Sugishita Motoaki, 10, 39, 70, 71, 97, 378n9

482 i n d e x

Sugita Genpaku, 162, 406n132 Sugita Gentan, Kenzengaku (The study of health), 409n15 “Suikenki,” 406n127 Suisaien academy, 403n70 Sumida River: cherry blossom viewing, 379n14; home of the White Gull Society, 433n6; in illustration of Yanagibashi, 122; map of, 29; pleasure boats on, 129, 161, 347; scenery, 348, 384n57. See also boathouses; Yanagibashi pleasure quarters Summers, James, 260, 422n138 Super Secret Tales from the Slammer (Gokunai­ banashi), 307–9, 427n89 Suzaku-mura, depicted on map, 29 Suzuki Shigehisa: Karafuto nikki (Diary of Karafuto), 63, 64, 385nn76–77, 386n85; poem addressed to Yaguchi, 386n85 Suzuki Shōtō, 280, 323, 430n41 Suzuki, Tomi, 9 Swartz, Wendy, 15–16, 389n12 sword imagery, 38, 42, 66, 69, 74, 76, 77, 115, 116, 215–16, 316, 351, 386n87. See also book, contrasted with sword; martial imagery; “Song on selling my books to buy a sword” sword merchants, 317 taikaku (court) poetry, 152–54, 325–26, 404n103, 430n36 tainin (great task), 189–90 Taira no Masakado, 429n17 Taira no Tadanori, 103–5, 397n109 Tai Sei shinbun, 260, 422n138 taitō, 387n93, 388n105. See also heishutsu, ketsuji Takahashi Aritsune, 94 Takahashi Kiichi, 270–71, 328 Takakura Academy, 252 Takasago, 227 Takayama Hikokurō, 350, 433n91 Takeda Shingen, 30 Takehashi estate railroad demonstration, 68, 71 Takenouchi Gendō (Seiha), 159, 164, 179, 406n127, 410n29 Takeuchi Hiroshi, 42, 379n18 Takeuchi Ihin, 384n59 Takizawa Bakin, 402n33 Tales of the Heike, 103, 105, 226, 342, 397n109, 402n41 Tamenaga Shunsui, 133 Tamura Sōtatsu, 129 Tanabe Taichi, 239, 411n57, 414n112

Tanaka Akira, 250 Tanaka Fujimaro, 423n8 Tanaka Heihachi (aka Tenka no Itohei), 366, 435n46 Tang shi xuan (Tōshisen), 395n85 Tani Bunchō, 389n6 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 398n122 Tao Yuanming, 13–17; “An Account of PeachBlossom Spring,” 363–64; association with zither, 81, 151, 389n12, 389n16; “Biography of Master Five Willows,” 113–14, 212–13; and chrysanthemums, 16–17, 151, 360, 367; invoked in new ways, 36, 358, 360–61, 367; as loyal vassal, 213; poems of, 81, 389n13; “Progression of the Seasons,” 150; readings of, 15–16, 372n51; reclusion of, 13–15, 16, 81, 90, 112–14, 212, 223, 360, 361, 362; references to, in Ryūhoku’s poems, 12–13, 17, 114, 115, 150, 221–22, 303, 360– 61, 398n131, 416n11; “The Return,” 81, 112–13, 148, 211–12, 220, 362, 367, 412n70; “Returning to the Farm to Dwell,” 90–91; Ryūhoku’s identification with, 15–16, 360–61, 434n22; sons of, 211, 415n136; “Twenty Poems on Drinking Wine,” 13; use of words from his poems, 13, 15, 372n47; visual representations of, 13, 14 “Tapping my sword,” 116 tea ceremony, 432n73 Teikoku bungaku, 7, 370n14, 371n25 “Ten kinds of desolation on a cold night,” 62, 385n71 “Ten poems on autumn feelings,” 236 “Ten poems to express my feelings on an autumn night,” 119, 399n143 Tenpō reforms, 133, 394n77. See also Mizuno Tadakuni Terakado Seiken, “Kiransetsu” (On smashing Dutch studies), 406n129. See also Account of the Prosperity of Edo Tetsuan Dōshō, 372n47 theater, 266, 342–43, 431–32n72. See also kabuki; Noh Thelle, Notto, 258 “Theory of the Seven Gods of Fortune, A” (Shichifukujin setsu), 284–85 Tian Dan, 392–93n62 Tian, Xiaofei, 15, 81, 213, 416n141 tihuashi (J. daigashi; poem on the topic of a painting), 108–9, 110, 112–13, 114, 397n119 Toba-Fushimi, Battle of, 208, 226 Tōda Chōan, 406–7n137 Togawa Seisai, 224, 401n20 Tōkaidō highway, 267

i n d e x 483

Tōkan nichiroku (Diary of one “thrown an idle empty post”), 180, 381n30 Tōkei shinshi, 310–11; poem “Shinbun segaki” (Feeding the hungry ghosts of the news­ paper), 310 Tokugawa Akitake, 208, 414n112 Tokugawa Nariaki, 382n41 Tokugawa jikki: edited by Narushima family, 30, 53, 85, 118, 376n101, 386n89; and the Hayashi family, 85, 376n101, 386n89 Tokugawa shogunate: authority over northern region, 63–64; Bankei’s position on, 411–12n58; discontent with, 163, 166–68, 169, 178; dismissal of Ryūhoku, 34–35, 169, 173–75, 175–80, 191, 212– 13, 409n12; fall of, 35, 174, 205, 208, 217–18, 226, 236, 408n2; foreign threat to, 40–43, 53, 63, 67, 111–12, 117–18, 125, 157; graphical indications of deference to, 180, 387n93, 388n105, 398n138, 410n33; isolationist policies of, 50, 382n37; and Léon de Rosny, 257; Naru­shima family service to, 30–31, 33, 37, 118, 357, 376n95; negotiations with Western powers, 189; position vis-à-vis the emperor, 169; Ryū­hoku’s final months of service, 205–10, 415n124; Ryūhoku’s military post for, 35, 174, 196–205, 208–9, 215–16, 414n99; Ryūhoku’s position on, 208–9, 286–87, 357–58, 415n128; Ryūhoku’s service to, 33, 34–35, 38, 53, 67, 128, 155, 174–75; and trade with the United States, 51, 382n41. See also court poetry; okujusha; sajō (clos­ing the ports and expelling the barbarians); samurai; Tokugawa jikki Tokugawa shoguns. See also individual shogun and successor names Tokutomi Sohō, 358 Tokyo, 217, 228. See also Edo; Yanagibashi pleasure quarters Tōkyō chinbun (Strange news of Tokyo), 213–14, 218, 256, 308, 416nn142–43 Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun, 270, 273, 289, 313, 353, 423n6, 423n16, 426n62 Tōkyō shashinkyō (Photographs of Tokyo; Ki­kuchi Sankei), 2–3, 369n4; preface by Ryūhoku, 2–3, 4, 369n4, 425n40 toponyms, 46–47, 380–81n27, 381n29 Tōshōgū (Nikkō), 342 Tōsō kaii, 47, 381n29 Tōyama Unjo, Bokusui zatsuei (Miscellaneous compositions on the Sumida River), 384n57 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 193 “Training cavalry in the Ōta encampment,” 202 travel: within Japan, 224–35; in the Kansai region, 226–28; to Koga and Shimodate, 232–35; by

Ryū­hoku’s associates, 188, 411n57; and Ryūho­ ku’s career as a journalist, 224; Shikoku and Shōdoshima, 230–31; world tour with Higashi Honganji, 246–47; Yokohama, 224–25. See also Higashi Honganji temple; travelogues travelogues: advocacy in, 365–66; attention to newspapers, 363–64; “As the brush travels,” 429n30; Chinese rhetoric in, 380n26; descriptions of scenery, 229–31, 233; domestic, 362–65; format and writing style of, 232–35; as ground­ work for career in journalism, 35, 231, 235; in Kagetsu shinshi, 417n21; Jōsō yūki (Record of a journey to Hitachi and Shimōsa), 232–35; late Edo approach to, 227, 417n28; opposition between center and periphery in, 228; Shimo­ date yūki (Record of a journey to Shimodate), 232–33, 235; temporality in, 364, 435n43. See also Diary of a Journey to Bitchū; Diary of a Journey to the West treasure ship, 46 Treaty of Kanagawa, 67–68, 118, 386n89 Treaty of Shanyuan, 111, 398n125 treaty ports, 169–70, 179, 183, 185, 265 Tsuchiya Reiko, 272 Tsu domain, 382n38 Tsujimoto Masashi, 87, 88 Tsutsui Masanori, 133 Tuqiu, 220–21 “Twenty rhymes to give my son Bin,” 210–11 “Two Sumida River poems,” 381n29 Uchida Kyūichi, 225 Uemura Roshū: attended poetry gatherings, 97, 98, 101; “An image of Saigyō gazing at the peak,” 102–3; “An image of Taira [Lord of] Satsuma lodging under a cherry tree,” 104; jizishi, 98; “Katsuo,” 99–100; mentioned, 161, 394n75, 395n83, 407n146; residence of, 79, 395n84; and Seki Sekkō, 395n84 Ueno: Battle of, 220; map of, 54 Ueno Park, 434n29 ugachi (digging or piercing), 135, 140 Ukai Nagisa, 269–70, 423n14 Umegami Takuyū, 421n112 Umeyashiki, 46, 380n27, 381n28 Umezawa Hideo, 163 United States: Civil War soldiers in Yokohama, 208; demand for trade agreement, 50–51; gifts from, 67–68; requests to station foreign legation, 399n6; and the Treaty of Kanagawa, 67; viewed as threat, 53. See also Perry, Matthew; Treaty of Kanagawa

484 i n d e x

“uselessness” (muyō): addressed in Chōya shinbun, 281–82; in “Biography of a Sumida River Recluse,” 209–10; in Diary of a Journey to the West, 250; in Endless Ivy, 175, 195; and the Higashi Honganji world tour, 250, 256; Inui on, 251; key to framework for viewing Ryū­ hoku, 249–50; Kobayashi Shigeru on, 250; Maeda on, 249–50, 420n97; in New Chronicles, 239–40, 248 Ushimado, 227 ushi no toki mairi, 101, 396n98 uta (Japanese-language poetry), 4 Utagawa Hiroshige: depiction of Umeyashiki, 381n28; One Hundred Famous Scenes in Edo, 46 Utagawa Hiroshige III, The Chōya Newspaper Company Building on the Ginza, 316 Utagawa Kuniteru, illustration of Yanagibashi, 122 utamakura, 224, 233 “Valley of petrification,” 167–68, 178, 181 Van Gogh, Vincent, “Flowering Plum Tree (after Hiroshige),” 381n28 Voltaire, 258 wabun, 5, 18, 232 Wada Shigejirō, 138, 249 waka, 39, 101, 103, 104–5, 233, 379n10 wakan binary, 18 Wakan rōeishū (Japanese and Chinese poems to sing), 383n49 Wang Anshi, 432n81; “new policies,” 125, 400n7 Wang Dao (Maohong), 113, 397n111, 398n129 Wang Dun, uprising of, 113 Wang Kangju, “Refuting the ‘Invitation to Hiding,’ ” 404n98 Wang Qinruo, 111–12 Wang Tao, 402n40 Wang Xizhi, “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Poems,” 98, 290–93, 295, 314 Wang Zhiben, 360 Washizu Kidō, 156, 161, 385n68, 407n137; residence of, 79 washū (in the Japanese custom), 8, 23, 371n26 Watanabe (student), 389n17 Watson, Burton, 20, 373n65 Wei Yuan, Haiguo tuzhi, 182, 410n39 Wen Tianxiang, “Song of the Righteous Spirit,” 304–5 wenren (literati). See bunjin West, the: as “barbarians,” 41, 42–43, 49, 50–51,

52, 68–69, 118, 125, 157, 183, 296, 299, 336, 351; Ryūhoku’s transformation regarding, 34, 124– 25, 127–28, 170, 182, 185–86; Western medicine, 159, 170, 235, 406n126, 406n129, 406n132, 409n15; Western military techniques, 196–97; Western technology, 70. See also foreign ships; foreign threat; foreign trade; railroad; sajō (closing the ports and expelling the barbarians); small­ pox vaccination; Westernization; Western studies Western (Gregorian) calendar, xi, 245, 419n78 Westernization, 309, 331, 334–37, 350, 427n93. See also bunmei kaika; modernization Western studies: coin collecting and, 185–86; confinement and, 181–82, 192; Meiji backlash, 331–32; referred to in poems, 182–83; and the shogun’s curriculum, 176–77, 185; and Sinology, 281–82, 331–33; and Western languages, 175, 181–82; Western scholars, 159–62, 170, 225 Wheeler, James T., A History of India from the Earliest Ages, 262 White Gull Society (Hakuōsha), 433n6 White Tiger Brigade (Byakkotai), 218 Wilson, H. H., 262 Wixted, Timothy: contrasted with Lurie, 25; on poetry of Mori Ōgai, 10, 274n74; translation of the term kanshibun, 20, 21, 22, 24 “Writing my feelings at year’s end,” 75–76 Wu Ding, King, 164 Wu, Emperor (of the Liu-Song), 114 Wu Kaisheng, Wan-Qing sishijia shichao (Anthology of forty poets from late Qing), 371n24 Wu Qi, 204 Wumen huafanglu (Xixi Shanren), 418n61 Xiang Bo, 242, 419n69 Xiang Yu, 419n69 Xiang Zhuang, 242, 419n69 Xiao Tong, Tao Yuanming ji, 372–73n54 Xie An (Anshi): invoked by Ryūhoku, 17, 113, 119, 148–49, 175, 178, 236, 354; in Mengqiu, 398n129; posthumous name of, 178, 354, 433n3; Ryūho­ ku’s affiliation with, 178, 355 Xie Chaozong, 158, 405–6n123 Xie Lingyun, 405–6n123 Xie Pengfei (Yinzhuang), 418n44 Xingling (J. Seirei) school, 369n6 Xu Jiyu, Yinghuan zhilüe, 182, 186, 187, 410nn40–41 Xu Qianshen, 232, 418n43 Xu Shijia, 274n76

i n d e x 485

Xu You, 92, 392n60 Xuan, King of Qi, 403n62 Xue Juzhou, 164 Xunzi, 433n5 Yaguchi Kensai (Seizaburō): attended poetry gathering, 55–56; biography of, 383n50; dispatched to Ezo, 62–66, 74, 80, 85, 182–83, 385n74, 386n85; expedition to Karafuto, 63, 385n76; fondness for drink, 386n82; poem by Suzuki addressed to, 386n85; relationship with Ryūhoku, 65, 66; residence of, 54, 160; in shijin and bunjin realms, 80; taken prisoner by Meiji, 218 Yamaguchi Naoki, 415n128 Yamamoto Taketoshi, 270–71, 424n17 Yamamoto Yoshiaki, 294, 315, 338, 380–81n27 Yamaoka Kintō, 398n135 Yamaoka Sōzaemon, 398n135 Yanagawa Seigan, 383n53, 405n114 Yanagawa Shunsan: member of Ryūhoku’s social circle, 161, 188; memorial for, 195; as newspaper­ man, 195, 214, 413n83, 422n1; “Presented to Master Suien to congratulate him on his glorious advancement,” 197–98; publications of, 182, 410n42; sequence with Ryūhoku in Endless Ivy, 192; spent time with Ryūhoku during confinement, 35, 193 Yanagibashi pleasure quarters: changes brought by Meiji Restoration, 236–37, 241–42; compared with Yangzhou, 229, 238; comparison with “eastern hills,” 148, 175, 178, 236, 354; encounters with Western scholars in, 128; excursions to, 129, 129–30, 161, 170, 188–89, 206; female entertainers of, 141, 145–46; illustration by Utagawa Kuniteru, 122; name of, 140–41, 403n65; poems connected with, 123, 131; Ryūhoku’s introduction to, 34, 123. See also boathouses; geisha; New Chronicles of Yanagibashi; Yanagi (Willow) Bridge: depicted on map, 29; in illustration of Yanagibashi, 122 Yanagi (Willow) Bridge: depicted on map, 29; in illustration of Yanagibashi, 122 Yanagiwara: depicted on map, 29; mentioned in New Year’s poem, 46, 380n27 Yang Guifei, 397n120 Yangzhou, 229, 238, 432n79 Yao (sage ruler), 220 Yasuda Jirōkichi (Unpeki), 176, 224–25, 410– 11n42; “On sending Yasuda Unpeki off to Kanagawa to study English books,” 182–83 Yasuda Zenjirō, 434n32

Yates, William, A Bengali Grammar, 262 Yellow Emperor, 90 Yin, Lord of, 220 Ying Wa College (Hong Kong), 256 Yoda, Tomiko, 9 Yoda Gakkai, 208–9, 279, 355–56, 415n128, 433n6, 433n8 Yokohama, 67–68, 179, 203, 225. See also French military advisory programs Yokohama Furansugo Denshūjo (Collège FrancoJaponais), 197, 203, 413–14n92, 414n112 Yokohama mainichi shinbun, 265 Yomiuri shinbun: Ryūhoku’s contributions to, 36, 247, 304, 315–16, 330, 347–48; on Ryūhoku’s funeral, 353 Yongeru no kigoku (The strange case of the esquire), 176, 409nn13–14 yongwushi (poems on things), 397n119 Yo no uwasa (News of the world), 257, 421n121 Yoshida Sakuzō, 176 Yoshikawa Kōjirō, 78 Yoshimune (eighth shogun), 30, 389n4 Yoshinobu (shogun), 205, 208–9, 217, 226, 415n118 Yoshiwara: depicted on map, 29; geisha of, 141, 145–47 Yu Huai, Miscellaneous Records of the Wooden Bridge (Banqiao zaji), 132, 136, 138–40, 237, 238–39, 240–41, 245, 402n32 Yu, King, 188 Yu Xin, “Rhapsody to a candle,” 377n4 Yu Yue: critique of Ono Kozan, 274n76; Dong­ ying shixuan, 405n118 Yuan Gui (Yu Liang), 397n111 Yuan Hongdao, 70; residence of, 48 Yuan Mei, clutching a chrysanthemum, 13 Yuan Zhongdao, 48 Yūbin hōchi shinbun: competitor of Chōya shinbun, 270, 273, 315, 423n16; essays submitted to, 263–64, 266–68, 423n9; Kurimoto Joun’s editorship, 286; letter from Ryūhoku to his brother, 265–66; reporting on Satsuma Rebellion, 313 yuefu (music bureau) poetry, 93, 94, 394n76, 418n60 “Yūji no enkaku” (A history of diversion), 206, 415n121 Yushima Seidō, 390n32 Yuwai hanji yanjiu jikan, 372n34 zatsuroku columns: “An account of Horiki­ rimura,” 432n85; “An advertisement for a change in position,” 322–23; “Afflicted with

486 i n d e x

zatsuroku columns (continued) discontentment,” 429n30; “Agile advance, quick retreat,” 336–37; “Appealing unjust charges on the dolls’ behalf,” 350; “A boat at midstream,” 362; “The brush can kill a man,” 319–20; “As the brush travels,” 429n30; “Declaration of escape,” 429n30; “Diary of washing away melancholy,” 365; “A half-smoked cigarette,” 366; “How biased is the Preserve the Nation Society!” 335; “In all areas, select what is good,” 334; “Internal affairs at Journal of Blossoms and the Moon,” 325; “The jade of Oyabegawa,” 349; “Lament of the Loincloth,” 273–76, 284, 286, 424n22; “Lament of the Newspaperman,” 276–77, 284, 286; “Laundering for the mind,” 365; “A madman doesn’t think he’s mad,” 335–36; “Medicinal drippings,” 366; “New Year’s Greeting,” 427n74; “New Zhuangzi,” 313–14, 328n7; “Poetic exposition on shrinking in fear,” 295–97, 298–300, 426n64; “Pond-Fish Society,” 320–21; “Rambling notes from a journey,” 313, 428n3; “A record of cooling off,” 293–94; “A sedge hat,” 363; “Theory of the comic,” 358; “A theory of the Seven Gods of Fortune,” 284–85; “A treatise on the Fire Guard,” 322–23; “What is the principle of the Loyalist Party?” 350–51; “The winds of Hamamatsu,” 363

Zeami, Tadanori, 105, 396n107, 397n109 Zeng Dian, 358 Zhang Bowei, 372n34 Zhang Ji, “Maple Bridge Night Mooring,” 425n39 Zhang Liang, 419n69 Zhang Xun, 416n5 Zhao Tuo, 64, 386n80 Zhenzong (Song emperor), 111 Zhong Rong, Shipin (Poetry gradings), 13 Zhong Ziqi, 151, 181, 404n99 Zhongshan shihua, 376n104 Zhou Dunyi, “On the Love of the Lotus,” 98, 395n88 Zhu Xi, 86, 163, 398n131, 400n10 Zhu Yun, 71–72 Zhuangzi, 155, 165, 225, 320, 405n109; “New Zhuangzi,” 313–14, 328n7; parody of, 314; and the press laws, 359 Zhuge Liang, 392n58, 401n27; “Memorial on sending out the troops,” 386n83 Zisi (Confucius’s grandson), 177 zither: associated with Tao Yuanming, 81, 151, 213, 389n12; of Bo Ya, 181, 404n99 Zong Lin, Jing Chu suishiji (A record of the annual and seasonal customs in Jing and Chu), 379n15 Zuo zhuan (Zuo commentary), 387n95, 82

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339. Michael Schiltz, The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895–1937 340. Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon, eds., Toward a History beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations 341. Sonia Ryang, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry 342. Shih-shan Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China 343. Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture 344. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912 345. Satoru Saito, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930 346. Jung-Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzō and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937 347. Atsuko Hirai, Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912 348. Darryl E. Flaherty, Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan 349. Jeffrey Paul Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan 350. Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Kwanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy 351. Michel Mohr, Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality 352. J. Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction 354. Chong-Bum An and Barry Bosworth, Income Inequality in Korea: An Analysis of Trends, Causes, and Answers 355. Jamie L. Newhard, Knowing the Amorous Man: A History of Scholarship on Tales of Ise 356. Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan 357. Christopher P. Hanscom, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea 358. Michael Wert, Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan 359. Garret P. S. Olberding, ed., Facing the Monarch: Modes of Advice in the Early Chinese Court 360. Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across the 1949 Divide 361. David Spafford, A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan 362. Jongryn Mo and Barry Weingast, Korean Political and Economic Development: Crisis, Security, and Economic Rebalancing 363. Melek Ortabasi, The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio 364. Hiraku Shimoda, Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan 365. Trent E. Maxey, The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan 366. Gina Cogan, The Princess Nun: Bunchi, Buddhist Reform, and Gender in Early Edo Japan 367. Eric C. Han, Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972 368. Natasha Heller, Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben

369. Paize Keulemans, Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination 370. Simon James Bytheway, Investing Japan: Foreign Capital, Monetary Standards, and Economic Development, 1859–2011 371. Sukhee Lee, Negotiated Power: The State, Elites, and Local Governance in TwelfthFourteenth China 372. Foong Ping, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court 373. Catherine L. Phipps, Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899 374. Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 375. Barry Eichengreen, Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park, and Dwight H. Perkins, The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future 376. Heather Blair, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan 377. Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria 378. Martina Deuchler, Under the Ancestors’ Eyes: Kinship, Status, and Locality in Premodern Korea 379. Joseph R. Dennis, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700 380. Catherine Vance Yeh, The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre 381. Noell Wilson, Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan 382. Miri Nakamura, Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan 383. Nara Dillon, Radical Inequalities: China’s Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective 384. Ma Zhao, Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 19371949 385. Mingwei Song, Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 386. Christopher Bondy, Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of Buraku Identity in Contemporary Japan 387. Seth Jacobowitz, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture 388. Hilde De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China 389. Elizabeth Kindall, Geo-Narratives of a Filial Son: The Paintings and Travel Diaries of Huang Xiangjian (1609–1673) 390. Matthew Fraleigh, Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan 391. Hu Ying, Burying Autumn: Poetry, Friendship, and Loss 392. Mark E. Byington, The Ancient State of Puyŏ in Northeast Asia: Archaeology and Historical Memory 393. Timothy J. Van Compernolle, Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel 394. Heekyoung Cho, Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature 395. Terry Kawashima, Itineraries of Power: Texts and Traversals in Heian and Medieval Japan 396. Anna Andreeva, Assembling Shinto: Buddhist Approaches to Kami Worship in Medieval Japan