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.
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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
Mores and fashions were changing very,
very quickly from the beginning of the 1870s.
And we know from several newspaper articles that the man
who commissioned this portrait was concerned
mainly with preserving the image of traditional courtesan dress and fashion,
and their comportment, the spirit that they have with him.
We also know that Yuichi went to Yoshiwara and talked to a number of
different bravo owners proposing that
he draw a portrait of one of the famous women there.
He was rejected.
Most of the women looked at the work that he'd done already and refused.
They thought that this new form,
this new medium of art was rather vulgar and that it wouldn't capture them.
And often it was too realistic in a rather cruel way.
Only one courtesan, the 18-year-old, very,
very high-ranked oiran, or top-
ranked courtesan, came out and said "I'm not afraid of trying something new,
of pushing the envelope.
I'll sit for you and go ahead and do it".
So anyway, she allowed him to paint her portrait.
We also know from a couple of months after this was done by
journalistic reporting that she was extremely unsatisfied with her portrait.
She took one look at it and said "This is not me.
It doesn't look like me at all".
She got very, very angry and actually shed tears when
she encountered her visage here in this portrait.
Anyway, whether we think that she's attractive or not attractive,
whether it's a cruel version of her rendition or not,
is something that we can perhaps leave to the ages, to her contemporaries.
I think more important is the fact that this image was created to promote
oil painting portraiture itself by using as its sitter the object of the portrait,
a cultural hero in a sense,
one of the most popular,
very talented, and very beautiful courtesans in Yoshiwara.
The man who commissioned this portrait was less interested in producing
an accurate rendition of a young voluptuous, very talented courtesan than in
leaving a document of how Yoshiwara courtesans, who were very
unique in society this time - they looked
different than people walking around in the street - how they dressed,
how they set up their hair,
the way that they looked.
It was something that the men,
the patron of this portrait, the commissioner,
the man who commissioned this portrait was very,
very concerned that the traditions of
Yoshiwara were becoming weakened and westernized and so forth.
So he decided to have this done as a sort of memento,
as a memorial to a way of life,
a way of comporting oneself,
and probably the situation of courtesans themselves, which was fading away from society.
We can take a look. Koina here has an incredible hairdo.
Her hair itself is not really that ornate but she's got
about 20 tortoise shell-decorated hairpins
in her hair which was a very unusual style at this time,
very, very ornate, very, very heavy,
something that she would use for example,
when she was going to greet a guest,
an important guest, a well-paying guest, perhaps, and so forth.
So this is something, this is a style of dressing up with
fashion that one would see at that time only in a particular place,
in a particular situation in this small,
very intense and intensely fashionable world of Yoshiwara.
1872. This year corresponds with the emancipation of prostitutes.
Prostitutes, courtesans, up until this time throughout the Edo period were indentured.
They usually had 7-year or 10-year contracts, which they had to fulfill in
order to repay the money that they
would receive at the beginning of their contracts and so forth.
So they basically were really forced to
work and to live within the pleasure quarters for the amount,
for the duration, of their so-called contracts.
That became illegal.
The new Meiji government emancipated
and allowed the women to choose where to live and where to work and so forth.
So this was I believe another motivation
for creating a document in this sense.
Koina was not just a very popular, beautiful sort of icon of the age,
she was also very active in promoting Yoshiwara, the pleasure quarters,
as being a place that was politically
germane and active in the decades leading up to the Meiji Restoration.
For example, this was a little bit later.
She becomes the hero,
the protagonist of a novel in 1889.
This is after she's retired by Jōno Saigiku,
a gesaku, or light fiction, writer who became a newspaper journalist in the modern era.
Sparrow of the Pleasure Quarters: Koina's Rich Harvest.
We can see that she's pictured here again with a lot of these tortoise shell hairpins.
And she's looking at this sort of cartouche next to her in
which a young man is portrayed.
We know from historical documents that one of her clients,
one of her customers in the 1860s was a young man,
Nakano Goichi, who was being hunted down by the bakufu forces and she protected him
in Yoshiwara, she basically secluded him.
He then went on to being
a bureaucrat in the Meiji government and an entrepreneur as well.
This story is a sort of documentary fictionalized tale of her youth,
and the fact that she was a patriotic and a very,
very active and soulful courtesan.
And it turns her life into a novel as well.
Koina was not entirely satisfied with
her oil portrait but we can see it as one of the milestones in her life.
She was very, very well known to culture people and people
who had enough money to play in Yoshiwara in the 1870s, in the 1880s.
But representations, pictures, images of her
are used also or it can be read as documents,
attempts to document very important crucial events and
support the stories of important historical figures at the time.
So it's another way that we can see and bring the notion of image
into the mainline sort of history or
the cultural history of Japan in the early modern era.
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Robert Campbell(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
