Prince Genji, the protagonist of Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji, who came to represent the ideal of the sensitive, gifted, handsome male, and was also known as "the Shining Prince."
*LADY MURASAKI
Murasaki Shikibu, (c. 978, Kyoto - d. c. 1014, Kyoto), author of the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), one of the great works of Japanese literature and the world's first complete novel. A lady of the Heian court, her real name is unknown, the date of her death is uncertain, and little else is known of her aside from her authorship of this masterpiece.
*TALE OF GENJI
Japanese Genji Monogatari, early 11th century classic of Japanese literature by the Lady Murasaki Shikibu.
Considered the world's oldest novel and a masterpiece of world literature, it deals with Prince Genji and his many love affairs. Set in the exquisite Heian court, it examines the subtleties of human emotions and the beauty, as well as the transitory quality, of the natural world.
The Tale of Genji, translated by Arthur Waley and published in 1935, has become a classic of English literature. A translation by Edward G. Seidensticker was published in 1976.
The following is the full quote of the shorter passage which appears in the Field Notes - from The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, New York, 1976, Alfred A. Knopf,
p.406-407:
"With the approach of the New Year he turned his attention to festive dress and appurtenances, determined that nothing suggest less than the highest rank. Though the girl had been a pleasant surprise thus far, he made allowances for rustic tastes. He himself reviewed all the colors and cuts upon which the finest craftsmen had concentrated their skills.
" 'Vast numbers of things,' he said to Murasaki. 'We must see that they are divided so that no one has a right to feel slighted.'
"He had everything spread before him, the products of the offices and of Murasaki's personal endeavors as well. Such sheens and hues as she had wrought, displaying yet another of her talents! He would compare what the fullers had done to this purple and that red, and distribute them among chests and wardrobes, with women of experience to help him reach his decisions.
"Murasaki too was with him. 'A very hard choice indeed. You must always have the wearer in mind. The worst thing is when the clothes do not suit the lady.'
"Genji smiled. 'So it is a matter of cool calculation? And what might my lady's choices be for herself?'
" 'My lady is not confident,' she replied, shyly after all, 'that the mirror can give her an answer.'
"For Murasaki he selected a lavender robe with a clear, clean pattern of rose-plum blossoms and a singlet of a fashionable lavender. For his little daughter there was a white robe lined with red and a singlet beaten to a fine glow. For the lady of the orange blossoms, a robe of azure with a pattern of seashells beautifully woven in quiet colors, and a crimson singlet, also fulled to a high sheen. For the new lady, a cloak of bright red and a robe of russet lined with yellow. Though pretending not to be much interested, Murasaki was wondering what sort of lady would go with these last garments. She must resemble her father, a man of fine and striking looks somewhat lacking in the gentler qualities. It was clear to Genji that despite her composure she was uneasy.
" 'But it is not fair to compare them by their clothes,' he said. 'There is a limit to what clothes can do, and the plainest lady has something of her own.'
"He chose for the safflower princess a white robe lined with green and decorated profusely with Chinese vignettes. He could not help smiling at its vivacity. And there were garments too for the Akashi lady: a cloak of Chinese white with birds and butterflies flitting among plum branches and a robe of a rich, deep, glossy purple. Its proud elegance immediately caught the eye--and seemed to Murasaki somewhat overdone. For the lady of the locust shell, now a nun, he selected a most dignified habit of a deep blue-gray, a yellow singlet of his own, and a lavender jacket. He sent around messages that everyone was to be in full dress. He wanted to see how well, following Murasaki's principle, he had matched apparel and wearer."
*COURT
During the Heian Period (794 to 1185) a distinctly Japanese culture emerged from its Chinese origins. The aristocratic Fujiwara family controlled the government, centered in the capital city of Heian Kyo (Kyoto).
The privileged classes had amassed great wealth and ruined the farming peasants by purchasing large tracts of public land. The peasants were forced to work as tenant farmers on these vast new estates, which prospered accordingly. Materially secure, these court aristocrats spent their days pursuing aesthetic pleasure in art, poetry and nature, engaging in romantic intrigues with court ladies, and enhancing their status at court.
It was a time of national isolation. Relations with other countries were severed, and economic and social realities were not addressed. But Japan was developing a genuine native culture.
The refined grace and sensuality that are hallmarks of the arts in Japan began to flower by the tenth century. New forms of Buddhism profoundly influenced this aristocratic culture: first, Esoteric Buddhism, and later, the Jodo sect of Buddhism.
Literature was the first to blossom. The invention of kana syllabary made it possible for the Japanese to express their thoughts and emotions more fully. Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, considered the world's first significant novel, captures the exquisite refinement of the Heian court, and the transitory quality of life.
Throughout this period, in waka poetry, the architecture of Kyoto, Buddhist painting and sculpture, and yamato-e (secular Japanese-style painting), the Japanese gave form to a unique aesthetic ideal.
*BORROWED AND ASSIMILATED
*WESTERN TECHNOLOGY, EASTERN SPIRIT
*BORROWING
*'MODERN, BUT NOT WESTERN'
Corky White writes:
"Japanese spirit and western technology, wakon yosai, these are Meiji period ideas, when the struggle to create a modern society meant also guarding the essence of Japan.
"The Japanese are characterized as imitative, as copiers, and they are said to borrow instead of creating. Instead, as Joseph Tobin says, we may see the Japanese "as engaged in an ongoing creative synthesis of the exotic with the familiar, the foreign with the domestic, the modern with the traditional, the Western with the Japanese" (p. 4, Joseph J. Tobin, editor, Remade in Japan, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
"I'll go out on a limb here and say that nothing in Japan is just borrowed: everything is remade. You can tell, clothes bought overseas are noticeably different (to a Japanese) from Western clothes bought in Japan. Yes, research and development were slow to take off in Japan. People had great creative energy in the postwar years, but the first stage was to adapt, then create. This is also how old time apprenticeships in the crafts work too--a novice potter spends years imitating and adapting the master's style before busting out to create his own.
"In fact as Tobin and others point out, what happens is the domestication of the foreign, not the borrowing. Everything is made Japanese, in its ultimate meanings. Borrowing is an active, not a passive act, and creative, not an inferior or subordinate act.
"A friend of mine is importing Kentucky bourbon to Japan, and instead of a southern motif, he uses cowboy imagery--he himself is a Japanese cowboy singer, and so made up an audiotape for selling with the bourbon, of Elvis songs! Whatever works.
"One sort of curious item: you know Benihana of Japan, in the states? The teppanyaki style eating with the chef doing tricks with the knives? Well, that is pure American, Rocky Aoki created it for the American audience. But it became popular in Japan as an American invention, and his restaurant there is called Benihana of New York!"
*JOHN DOWER: Author/Scholar
John Dower writes in Japan in War and Peace, pg.27:
"And over the course of the last century, the Japanese had felt the sting of Western condescension. Even when applauded by Europeans and Americans for their accomplishments in industrializing and "Westernizing," The Japanese were painfully aware that they still were regarded as immature and unimaginative and unstable-good in the small things, as the saying went among the old Japan hands, and small in the great things."
John W. Dower received his BA in American Studies from Amherst College in 1959 and his Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University in 1972. From 1971 to 1986, he was a member of the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and from 1986 to 1991 he was the Joseph Naiman Professor of History and Japanese Studies at the University of California, San Diego. In 1991, he joined the History faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is currently the Elting E. Morison Professor of History.
Professor Dower is the author of many books and articles on modern Japanese history and US-Japan relations. His 1986 book War Without Mercy: Race and Power in Pacific War was a pathbreaking comparative study of the racial and psychological aspects of the war from both Anglo-American and Japanese perspectives. War Without Mercy was honored with several prizes in United States, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. In Japan, it won the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize for distinguished scholarship on Asia and the Pacific.
Another thematic concern in Professor Dower's scholarship has been the linkages and discontinuities between prewar and postwar Japan. He examined political and international aspects of this in great depth in Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954. First Published in 1979, this study of Japan's most famous postwar political leader became a best-seller in Japanese translation and recently has been issued in both English and Japanese paperback editions. Professor Dower's most recent book, titled Japan in War and Peace, was published in 1994 and contains twelve essays on a great range of prewar and postwar topics pertaining to Japan and US-Japan relations.
Professor Dower also has broken new ground through his scholarly use of visual materials and other expressions of popular culture in reexamining Japanese history, including World War II and the ambiguous nature of Japan's unfolding relationship with the United States and Europe. He has published books on Japanese design and Japanese photography, as well as on the collaborative "Hiroshima Murals" of the painters Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi. In 1986, he was executive producer of a documentary film on the collaborative political art of the Marukis titled Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Currently, Professor Dower is completing a book dealing with Japan in the period immediately following World War II. Here again, he is concerned with a number of large issues. These include the complex interplay of Japanese and Western influences, the uses and abuses of power and authority, and the dynamism of mass culture and popular aspirations. Tentatively titled Coming Out of War, this new study devotes as much attention to ordinary lives as it does to top-level policymaking. It will include lengthy sections on such topics as despair, guilt and atonement, dreams of a new society, the construction of multiple "democracies,' and the emergence of a "visible hand" in economic planning. Coming Out of War is a logical extension of Professor Dower's long scholarly engagement with issues of war, peace, and democracy in modern Japanese history and US-Japan relations.
*JAPAN IN WAR AND PEACE
Dower, John W., Japan in War and Peace - Selected essays, New York: New Press, 1993
*MRS. NOBU YAGI
Owner of the Hiratsuka kimono shop and long-time friend of the Miyagawa family; interviewed by Shigeru in the video.
*HAIKU
Haiku is a uniquely Japanese poetic form consisting of seventeen syllables arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables each. It was perfected in the late seventeenth century during the Edo period by Basho (1644-94).
A highly austere form, haiku suggests much more than it says, distilling the essence of some aspect of nature or life to present a passing glimpse of the what the author has felt or observed. By mentioning an appropriate creature, plant, or custom, each haiku refers to a particular season.
*ISSA
Issa (1763-1827) was the author of over 20,000 verses as well as prose works. His haiku was the among the first to incorporate slang and vernacular language. Many of his poems were about insects and other small creatures, and many others expressed sympathy for the poor and anger at injustice.
*YUKATA
A yukata is a light-weight cotton kimono worn in summer, especially by young women attending festivals. Most are navy and white, but girls and young women sometimes wear brightly colored yukata with flower patterns. Some people also wear them around the house. Hotels provide yukata for guests to wear in their rooms.
*OMIYA MAIRI
A visit to Hachiman Shinto shrine to receive the priest's blessing for health, happiness, and a long life (omiya=shrine, mairi=going for a blessing).
*FAMILY CREST
Every family has their own crest, or mon, which may have a flower, trees, plants, bird, other animals and abstract patterns and designs represented, usually as a white figure against a dark background.
*DAKIMYOGA
This is the name of the Miyagawa family crest. Daki means to hold or embrace, and myoga is a kind of plant. This round crest shows two myoga plants embracing
*WEARING KIMONO
*FINE KIMONOS
The kimono is the national costume of Japan. Adapted from a Chinese undergarment in the seventh century, by the twelfth century it had become an outer garment of fine materials, elaborate and decorative.
Types of kimono:
Furisode
A furisode is colorful kimono with flowing sleeves that hang almost to the ankles and is appropriate for an unmarried woman to wear on formal and ceremonial occasions, such as Seijin Shiki and weddings.
Yukata
A yukata is a light-weight cotton kimono worn in summer, especially by young women attending festivals. Most are navy and white, but girls and young women sometimes wear brightly colored yukata with flower patterns. Some people also wear them around the house. Hotels provide yukata for guests to wear in their rooms and around the hotel and grounds.
Kimono-Fabric
Most kimonos are made of silk, although an inexpensive kimono may be made of cotton or other cheaper fabrics. Yukatas are generally made of cotton. The price of kimono fabric is dependent on the material (silk or cotton), the weave (plain, or a fancy weave such as Chirimen), and the method and type of decoration such as Yuuzen. What fabric the kimono is made of depends on what is suitable on the wearer and the occasion.
Chirimen
Chirimen (crepe) is a silk weave with a nubbly texture that can be used for making kimonos. In Japan, kimonos made from chirimen, which is a very luxurious fabric, are among the most expensive.
Yuuzen
Yuuzen is a method of decorating fabrics that involves several labor-intensive steps. The dyes for the design are hand-brushed onto tightly stretched rolls of fabric as if the artist were painting a canvas. A Yuuzen design on a woman's or young girl's kimono indicates that the garment is quite expensive.
Kimono: How to wear
First, a thin under-kimono is put on. Then an outer kimono is put on and fastened. No buttons, snaps, or zippers are used. Instead, the kimono is carefully aligned, draped, and held in place with cords, thin scarves, and sometimes short elastic belts with clips on each end. Both women and men wrap the right side across the chest first, and then bring the left side over to be fastened by the right hip. After the kimono is firmly in place, the obi, or sash, is tied at the waist.
Obi
An obi is the sash tied around a kimono. Men wear narrow, simple obi. An elaborate woman's obi may be a foot wide before it is folded in half at the waist, and 13 feet long. It may take half an hour or more for someone to tie an obi in one of the complicated styles appropriate for a young, unmarried woman on a formal occasion. The young woman would not and could not wrap and tie it herself.
Kimono: Care
Traditionally, to clean a kimono, you unsew the kimono, clean and press the pieces of kimono fabric separately, and then resew the kimono. This method is called araihari, from arau ('wash') and haru ('spread'). Since all of the seams in a kimono are straight, it is easy to take a kimono apart and remake it. Cleaning a kimono in the traditional way works very well, and doesn't damage the fabric of the kimono, so that a kimono can last for decades. Cloth is also cleaned by araihari before being made into kimonos.
Seijin Shiki (Coming-of-Age Day)
On January 15, celebrates the coming into adulthood of all young people who turned 20 years old during the previous year. From this point, they are expected to take on more adult responsibilities. On Coming-of-Age Day, a young woman who chooses to wear traditional clothing would put on a long-sleeved kimono, called furisode, covered with a colorful design and an expensive obi tied in a complicated and elegant bow.
*WEDDING KIMONO
From Hakubi Kyoto Kimono School brochure:
"Nowadays in Japan, it's very common to see gorgeous kimonos at wedding ceremonies. Among the many wedding kimonos, the Uchikake is the most popular. The Uchikake is a colorful, long robe-like kimono; a formal gown worn over a bridal kimono like a coat. Shiromuku as well, is a traditional and a formal wedding kimono. It is believed that this Shiromuku was originated in the 16th century. As for the name Shiromuku, the word 'shiro' means white and 'muku' means pure. So, this white wedding kimono shows the bride's resolution to accept the family traditions, and customs of her husband.
"When the bride wears an Uchikake or a Shiromuku, she wears her hair in a Bunkin-takashimada, a variation of the Shimada hairstyle which has been a Japanese traditional chignon."
