Search Results

Epilogue

in Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike

This chapter discusses the hidden histories in The Tale of the Heike and questions its haecceity as a canonical work. It highlights the problem concerning the relationship between space and narrative ... More

This chapter discusses the hidden histories in The Tale of the Heike and questions its haecceity as a canonical work. It highlights the problem concerning the relationship between space and narrative in their cultural, ritual and political manifestations and the failure of English-language scholarship on Japan to consider body of knowledge and ritual praxis related to Daoist and yin-yang ideas. This chapter suggests that these problems are connected to the problem of cultural memory.Less

Introduction

in Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about The Tale of the Heike and its medieval world. This volume explores the yin-yang and Daoist ideas in the Nara and early ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about The Tale of the Heike and its medieval world. This volume explores the yin-yang and Daoist ideas in the Nara and early Heian periods and analyzes the different aspects of ritual, space and narrative from Kojiki to the late Heian historical narrative Ōkagami. It examines the relation of The Tale of the Heike to the canon of Japanese literature, competing spatialities and narrative assemblages and attempts to reposition it in relation to this Sino-Japanese tradition.Less

China in the Medieval Imaginary

in Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike

This chapter examines the role of China in medieval Japanese spatial imaginary. It analyzes several episodes from the The Tale of the Heike variants including those centered on Taira no Kiyomori and ... More

This chapter examines the role of China in medieval Japanese spatial imaginary. It analyzes several episodes from the The Tale of the Heike variants including those centered on Taira no Kiyomori and Taira no Shigemori that relate to the Taira's commerce with China. It suggests that exposure to or awareness of China influenced the development of the Yamato court. This chapter also considers how the Nihon shoki redirected the Japanese geographical imaginary to its own “barbarian” others and enforced the authority of its own text.Less

The Apocryphal History of Kiyomori

in Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike

This chapter examines the The Tale of the Heike as an apocryphal history of Taira no Kiyomori. It focuses on the episodes about Kiyomori's kaburo who served as his spies, the identification of ... More

This chapter examines the The Tale of the Heike as an apocryphal history of Taira no Kiyomori. It focuses on the episodes about Kiyomori's kaburo who served as his spies, the identification of Kiyomori as the reincarnation of the demon-subjugating general Jie Taishi and legends of Kiyomori's heterodox royal parentage in the “Gion Lady.” This chapter discusses Kiyomori's achievement of symbolic authority over the demonic and defiled realms and suggests that this royal authority and practices are similar to those of Emperor Go-Shirakawa and Go-Daigo.Less

Introduction: Trance Mediums and New Media

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

in Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction

Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance ... More

Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication. In order to invoke the transcendental, to make otherworldly beings and powers appear, trance mediums need to make dispositions and take great care in preparing a setting conducive to their work of mediation. Their equipment includes technical media, apparition and apparatus are linked through ritual techniques. Likewise, the discourses and the imaginary of trance mediumship powerfully anticipated and shaped technical media such as photography, cinema, the telephone, and television. Spirits and their mediums served as the media a priori for the ‘‘invention’’ of these technical media: spirits were able to ‘‘telesee’’ and ‘‘telehear’’ long before television and the telephone existed. Inquiry into trance mediumship, therefore, forms an interpretative key to understanding technical media, and vice versa.Less

Spaces of Refusal: Photophobic Spirits and the Technical Medium of Photography

Heike Behrend

in Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction

In the West, photography and spirit, far from being opposites, have been seen as peculiarly analogous and adapted to one another. Since the beginning of spirit photography in the 1860s, the camera, ... More

In the West, photography and spirit, far from being opposites, have been seen as peculiarly analogous and adapted to one another. Since the beginning of spirit photography in the 1860s, the camera, photographers, spirits and their mediums have built up various alliances. In contrast, spirit mediums in Africa and other parts of the world have shunned photography and refused the presence of the camera during their séances. In my contribution, I will explore the negative relationship between spirits, spirit mediums and photography in Africa, in particular on the East African Coast. This negative relation is connected not only with the political and historical specificity of spirit mediums’ ambiguous position in relation to Islam and the postcolonial state but also with characteristics of the photographic medium itself - freezing, fixation, and serialization - that seem to endanger the auratic power of spirits. While photography has been refused, video technologies have appeared to be more suitable to mediate spiritual power. In fact, in locally produced videos photography and the reasons for its refusal themselves become part of the ways in which the work of spirits and their mediums is represented.Whereas they built up alliances with various technical medias as extensions and intensifications of the capabilities of their bodies and worked out new media “utopias”, they interdicted the doubling of their bodies in photographs. This refusal raises important theoretical questions about the often assumed “innocence” or “neutrality” of Western technical media and the epistemologies they carry within them. Obviously, the “visual programm” of photography (Flusser) that always gives something “more” to see and centers on transparency may clash with other visual regimes that attempt to mediate much more secrecy and concealment.Less

Pornographic Adaptations of the Classics: The Safflower (1948–1950) and The Record of the Night Battles at Dannoura (1970–1976)

Kirsten Cather

in The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan

This chapter focuses on two censored Japanese classic texts: The Safflower and The Record of the Night Battles at Dannoura. The Safflower is a late eighteenth-century collection of senryu, a genre of ... More

This chapter focuses on two censored Japanese classic texts: The Safflower and The Record of the Night Battles at Dannoura. The Safflower is a late eighteenth-century collection of senryu, a genre of comic verse that was essentially a more vulgar and witty offshoot of Bashō’s haikai. As an exclusive collection of indecent senryu, or “last choice” verses (suebanku), the work is composed of the bawdiest of the bawdy. Meanwhile, Dannoura focuses on the “night battles” between the captured Heike women and the Genji warriors after the final major sea battle in 1185 in which the Heike are brutally defeated and commit suicide en masse when that defeat becomes apparent. It is rife with clichés that might appear in pornography today.Less

Blurring the Lines: Repositioning the Heike

Mikael S. Adolphson and Anne Commons

in Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory

This essay, by the editors, draws from the various chapters to address the larger goals of the volume of contextualizing and deconstructing images of the Heike (or Ise Taira) from the time of their ... More

This essay, by the editors, draws from the various chapters to address the larger goals of the volume of contextualizing and deconstructing images of the Heike (or Ise Taira) from the time of their historical emergence in the twelfth century to the modern age. It identifies common distinctions made in discussions of the Heike (between warriors and aristocrats, and between the Heike’s actions and their later commemoration) and elucidates the aim of the volume in breaking down these binary categories to give a more holistic and accurate view of the Heike’s activities and the ways in which they have been remembered and reconstructed.Less

Kiyomori, Itsukushima, and Fukuhara

Heather Blair

in Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory

The author examines the Heike’s religious practices, situating the Heike nōkyō (Sūtras Dedicated by the Heike, 1164) within a larger ritual context established by Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181), which ... More

The author examines the Heike’s religious practices, situating the Heike nōkyō (Sūtras Dedicated by the Heike, 1164) within a larger ritual context established by Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181), which also involved the Heike’s development and sponsorship of Itsukushima Shrine in western Japan as a site of religious and political significance. Through the construction of his “ritual regime,” involving displays of piety through signature sites, rites, and texts, Kiyomori not only emulated existing aristocratic practices, particularly those of the regent Fujiwara no Michinaga (966-1027), but also built on existing court customs to lay the foundation of a new tradition for his envisioned Heike imperial line.Less

Heike Nōkyō as Repertoire: Contextualizing Kiyomori’s Devotional Practice of Copying Sutras

Monika Dix

in Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory

In this essay the author concentrates on the exquisitely decorated Heike nōkyō (Sūtras Dedicated by the Heike, 1164), prepared and dedicated by the Heike as they adopted aristocratic sūtra-copying ... More

In this essay the author concentrates on the exquisitely decorated Heike nōkyō (Sūtras Dedicated by the Heike, 1164), prepared and dedicated by the Heike as they adopted aristocratic sūtra-copying practices with the aim of enhancing their own social standing as well as displaying their piety. The copying and donation of the Heike nōkyō are situated within Heian and medieval elite and popular discourse about sūtras as objects and sūtra-copying as a religious practice, in order to gain a sense of what the copying and dedication of a sūtra could have meant to Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) and his family in personal as well as political terms.Less

Fact and Fiction in the Heike monogatari

Takahashi Masaaki

in Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory

This essay is primarily concerned with a comparison between historical accounts of members of the Heike with their depictions in the Heike monogatari, in which the author clearly shows the extent to ... More

This essay is primarily concerned with a comparison between historical accounts of members of the Heike with their depictions in the Heike monogatari, in which the author clearly shows the extent to which the Heike monogatari manipulates the images of Heike figures and demonizes Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) in particular. The author discusses the Heike monogatari’s initial composition, which may well have involved Heike survivors and supporters at the early-thirteenth-century court. He also examines the Heike’s dual identity as both warriors and aristocrats, arguing that Kiyomori, while working within the Heian court hierarchy, paved the way for Japan’s first warrior government (bakufu) through strategies that the first Kamakura shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), later employed.Less

Envisioning the Classics: The Tale of the Heike in Edo-Period Comic Books

Adam L. Kern

in Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory

This essay deals with representations of the Heike in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), focusing particularly on images and descriptions of the Heike in comicbooks intended for a broad audience. The ... More

This essay deals with representations of the Heike in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), focusing particularly on images and descriptions of the Heike in comicbooks intended for a broad audience. The author shows that the “Heike world” was an essential element of popular culture in the mid-Tokugawa period, and generally involved sympathetic portrayals of the Heike while casting the Seiwa Genji as villains, a dynamic that can be understood as an implicit criticism of the Tokugawa regime. The author also argues that sound played as crucial a role as vision in Tokugawa narratives, demonstrating this through an analysis of the figure of the blinded Taira no Kagekiyo (?-1184).Less

Kiyomori and His Family in Postwar Japan: Mizoguchi’s Shin Heike monogatari (The New Tale of the Heike)

Hitomi Tonomura

in Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory

This essay examines the changing depiction of Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) in the postwar era. Consistently depicted as an embodiment of greed and excessive ambition in accounts of the Heike from ... More

This essay examines the changing depiction of Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) in the postwar era. Consistently depicted as an embodiment of greed and excessive ambition in accounts of the Heike from the medieval to the Meiji period, Kiyomori is depicted far more positively in Yoshikawa Eiji’s novel Shin Heike monogatari (The New Tale of the Heike, 1950-57), a work that was adapted to film by Mizoguchi Kenji in 1955. The film became enormously popular in a postwar world where many Japanese came to identify Kiyomori with democracy and anti-authoritarianism. The author analyzes Kiyomori and his on-screen family, particularly the roles of his mother and wife, in relation to social conditions in 1950s Japan.Less

Professorship and family life

A. J. Kox and H. F. Schatz

in A Living Work of Art: The Life and Science of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz

Chapter 2 describes Lorentz’s appointment as university professor, his move from Arnhem to Leiden, the methodology and views on physics in his inaugural lecture on molecular theories in physics, and ... More

Chapter 2 describes Lorentz’s appointment as university professor, his move from Arnhem to Leiden, the methodology and views on physics in his inaugural lecture on molecular theories in physics, and his use of mathematics for the development of his theoretical work on optics and molecular theory, among other topics. Lorentz’s induction and involvement in the Royal Academy of Sciences is discussed in this chapter. Other sections are devoted to Lorentz’s experimental work in physics together with Pieter Zeeman, and to his work with various friends and colleagues, like Kamerlingh Onnes and Van de Sande Bakhuyzen. Lorentz’s first foreign contacts are explored, in particular those with Woldemar Voigt, Ludwig Boltzmann, Felix Klein, and Walther Nernst. Lorentz’s teaching and his first public activities are discussed here, as well as his marriage and his family life.Less