We know, it's a fact of history that the side that Yoshida Shōin

was supporting and was active in actually won the battles,

was successful in toppling the Edo regime,

which lasted and ruled Japan,

formed the basis of Japanese society for over 260 years.

Shortly after the Meiji Restoration,

almost immediately at the same time, parallel with it,

people began to collect and to commemorate the words and the images of all of the men,

especially the men who fell as

so-called political martyrs during the troubled decades before the Meiji Restoration,

Yoshida Shōin of course being one of them.

I have a copy here in hand of a book,

which was published a year after the Meiji Restoration.

I will give you a closer look at it here.

It's called in Japanese Ryūkonroku, or A Record of My Abiding Soul.

Yoshida Shōin wrote this almost as a diary in his last days,

of the words, the important sort of messages that he had,

and the things that he had been through,

and all the things that he had gone through in

the years and months before being executed.

This of course was was not publishable during the Edo era, because obviously he was

a very incendiary figure and he couldn't freely publish the work that he wanted to.

But after his demise,

his execution, and right after the Meiji Restoration,

we see dozens and dozens of different books by

different booksellers in different parts of the country publishing his words as

manuals or reader books for especially young men who were really

interested and motivated by this fallen activist intellectual poet who was beyond them.

I also have a pile of books right here.

There are about may be 15 titles here, which I am holding,

which were published almost at the same time within a year of each other in Kyoto,

and in Tokyo or in Osaka right after the Meiji Restoration.

Each of the titles that I have is an anthology of the last poetry,

the last poems and prose,

which were composed and left behind by people all over the country

of different positions and policies and so forth,

but who were fighting against the bakufu government.

So, we can just see the volume and the variety of texts,

which were compiled, read and sort of transmitted right after the Restoration.

And as I have said earlier in one of the lessons, the anthologizing,

this collection of all of these words gave young people

at the beginning of the first decades of the modern era, after the Meiji Restoration,

a sense, a way of dividing up and categorizing and understanding

the political motivations and the difficulties and

the challenges that the men and women who fought for the Meiji Restoration had.

So in other words, there was a history already prepared right after the event,

which is a fascinating aspect of Japanese history at this period.

The historization of the event, in other words,

was almost parallel or occurred right after the event itself, the Meiji Restoration.

Why did it happen?

What were the purposes? Who was behind it?

That can all be had or understood by reading the final poems and prose

of men and women who were most deeply engaged with the movement itself.

In our first module,

I tried to convey the sense of what it was like to be

active in Japan as an illustrator, a painter,

a poet or a writer,

someone who expresses oneself,

especially samurai-class men who tried to represent themselves

and their own acts and what they were trying to accomplish through the painted image,

but also at the same time through words and by docking them or coupling them themselves.

We began by looking at works of art and literature,

which described or tried to encourage the viewer to look at what is immediate,

what is real around them and then we see later on as the period,

the 19th century progresses,

that art itself, literary or visual art,

becomes very, very much involved.

And in so many ways becomes a tool of political activity,

of the troubles facing young samurai who were

adamant in fighting against the entrenched forces of the Tokugawa bakufu.

There are many differences between what these men were trying to accomplish,

what they were challenged by,

from the beginning of the 19th century up until

the years right before and right after the Meiji Restoration.

One way, one vista that we can

have on the cultural history of this period is by looking at

portraits of individuals themselves and what has been

inscribed by them or by others onto the portraits themselves,

the connection between the word and the image looked at and appreciated as

one integral facsimile or one integral document from history.

1-12 Yoshida Shōin and His writings II

Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan

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