In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant.
Learners will walk away with a clear understanding of how society and the individual were conceived of and represented in early modern Japan. Unlike contemporary western art forms, which acknowledge their common debt as “sister arts” but remain divided by genre and discourse, Japanese visual and literary culture tended to combine, producing literary texts inspired by visual images, and visual images which would then be inscribed with poems and prose. Noticing and being able to interpret this indivisibility of visual/literary cultures is essential in understanding the social and psychological values embedded within the beauty of Japanese art.
De la lección
Painted Beauties
Visual images of women produced in Japan before the introduction of photography can be divided into two types: portraits of women who actually existed in society, and painted or printed images of idealized “beauties,” whose resemblance to physical reality was subsumed often to an intense interest in mode and situational aspect. Like samurai portraits, images of women, both real and imagined, would often be inscribed with texts which instruct viewers how to understand and appreciate them. In this module, we will overview several painted and printed images, and learn how contemporary viewers used these images and their texts as a tool to understand the world.
(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo (Current Affiliation) Director-General, National Institute of Japanese Literature
The next image we're going to take a look at is, again,
one of a courtesan or a prostitute who worked in the Yoshiwara
pleasure district in Tokyo.
These women, obviously, were often forced to work where they were sex workers, certainly.
At the same time, they were expected to be and trained
to be very very talent musicians or dancers,
calligraphers, painters, poets often.
So, these women who faced
very, very severe physical restraints and danger often of illness and so forth,
and had very very little freedom of movement were, at the same time,
viewed by the general public as being extremely cultivated and often,
were the object of envy by general Edo merchant population.
And the women there,
who worked at Yoshiwara,
were fashion leaders in a lot of ways.
The way that they spoke,
the way that they conducted themselves,
their relationships with their clients,
and especially the way that they dressed themselves were often, well,
throughout the 18th and 19th century,
viewed as the sort of the starting point for new trends in Edo.
Beginning of the Meiji period,
we still have the pleasure quarters just as they were.
In 1872, there's a edict
emancipating these women allowing them to work wherever they want.
But a lot of them remained there and the culture of
the pleasure quarter remained in Japan throughout the decades of the Meiji era.
What we're looking at right here is the courtesan Usugumo,
who actually existed in Edo at a place called the Miura House,
which was a brothel,
and it's a portrait of her dressed up as a working, high-ranked courtesan,
but at the age of 89.
What does this tell us?
Were there 89 octogenarian courtesans actually working in Yoshiwara?
No. What we can read from this portrait is that at this point in 1875,
a lot of people were looking at the pleasure quarters in an antiquarian sort of way,
interested in preserving the traditions,
the culture and basically what actually occurred over
the last 200 years or so within the brothel.
1875 was a very important year in the history of the Yoshiwara brothel district.
Several of the brothel owners got together and decided to
hold an exhibition of the brothel district;
world exhibitions were very popular at this time in Europe.
And then again in Japan,
there had already been several exhibitions undertaken in Tokyo and in the provinces;
and it was a sort of fashionable thing.
A way of getting people together introducing them to Western culture.
The idea of a public exhibition itself is something which was
European and new and fascinating to Japanese people at the time.
So these very astute merchants in
the Yoshiwara district decided that they would
have a public exhibition of the brothel district,
which sounds like a contradiction in terms in a sense.
Anyone could come, you didn't have to pay any money.
You could walk around and look at all sorts of
different documents and artifacts about Yoshiwara,
not just at that time but 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
They actually displayed, just like in a museum,
all of the old artifacts.
Old clothes that courtesans from years and years ago had used,
different sort of forms.
They recreated dance in different styles of
music that were made popular in Yoshiwara and so forth.
We could think of it as a sort of
educational sort of amusement park in a way, or sort of active
learning museum about sexual culture in Japan in the 1870s.
Anyway, here in this portrait that we have of an 89-year-old courtesan, Usugumo,
suggests that the woman who used to be Usugumo,
they all have their own sort of trade names, Usugumo wouldn't have been her real name,
that she had retired and stayed healthy to the ripe age of 89.
And they called her back, perhaps,
to dress up in the way that she did 70 years ago during the Edo period,
to show people what what it was like,
what the district was like a long time ago.
We don't really know much about this woman herself,
but we do know that the title Usugumo,
for high-ranked courtesans,
it is one that's very old,
extends back to the 17th century and that people already in the 1820s, the 1830s,
were interested in researching the history,
the lineage of this courtesan herself.
So we have this fascinating portrait of very, very beautiful clothes.
Here, she is wearing these kimono and she's being assisted by
an adolescent young woman who's in training to be either a geisha or a courtesan.
But she's stooped over,
shows all the signs of aging and so forth,
and there is a lot of things written around her.
A Chinese quatrain by Kanagaki Robun,
a very, very popular journalist and fiction writer at that time,
praising her and looking back and imagining what her life might have
been decades and decades ago.
This picture is part of a long hanging scroll,
I'm going to show you what the whole thing looks like here.
On top of the portrait,
we see six panels of,
pasted in woodblock, print monochrome pages,
which when we look at closer we can see our pages from
the manuals or the town information directories of Yoshiwara from the 18th century.
This one here is from 1745 and it shows us right here,
I'm going to point to it,
it says,"Miuraya", this is the title of the brothel house.
And then next to it, we can see in Japanese, "Usugumo",
the title of the current, contemporary Usugumo in 1745.
So, I assume that this hanging scroll was made in
order to demonstrate or to display at the public exhibition in 1875,
for which Kawanabe Kyōsai,
the brilliant painter, created this portrait of Usugumo.
Again, portraits of women,
of real existing women,
who have a name and a social existence themselves in the modern period as well,
are being used to convey a certain historicity or to
recreate or reconstruct the history itself of popular culture.
This culture itself, of course,
is being lost very, very rapidly in the 1870s.
Just like the oil painting of Koina,
this picture here of Usugumo at the age of 89,
can be seen as one way to fix in time the image of something which had already passed,
the brilliant, very, very vivacious and very,
very elegant Yoshiwara pre-modern courtesan.
Again, this approach to the image,
the image of beauty,
is portrayed in the 19th century in Japan.
It gives us one more,
a new vector into how contemporary Japanese men and women
viewed and conceived of - conceptualize - their own culture in historical terms.
Robert Campbell(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
