Define Kanbun

Ross Bender

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Oct 17, 2022, 11:52:23 AM10/17/22

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To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, what is kanbun, and if you know what kanbun is, what is hentai kanbun. There is much muddle in this thread as to what precisely constitutes kanbun or other varieties.

The original query was about "hentai kanbun" which I took to mean the same as what we used to call wayō (Japanese-style) kanbun. Back at Columbia Paul Varley taught the course in "Wayō Kanbun" where we read primarily Azuma Kagami. Yoshito Hakeda taught the intro to kanbun in which we began with The Analects and Mencius using kaeriten, then moved into works of Kūkai.

Shoku Nihongi's narrative text is kanbun, which is pretty much straight classical Chinese of the early Tang variety. This was the assessment of Victor Mair, who assisted me with my translation. But the kanbun of the 9th century Rikkokushi seems to me to become a trifle hen, and even a bit baroque.

The Old Japanese senmyō are of course another kettle of fish and I would hesitate to classify them as some kind of kanbun. although an argument might be made. I have done two translations -- The Imperial Edicts in the Shoku Nihongi (2018) and Senmyō: Old Japanese Imperial Edicts in the National Histories 697 to 887 (2021). The ninth century edicts begin to change in style, shading into something very like the norito.

A baseline definition of kanbun would be Chinese written by Japanese authors. The next task would be to specify different genres, providing examples of each. I'm not sure of how much use the term "hentai" really is.

Ross Bender

Ross Bender | University of Pennsylvania - Academia.edu

Paula R. Curtis

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Oct 17, 2022, 12:10:17 PM10/17/22

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This is also a fascinating and important question, Ross.

Over a decade ago when I was working with James Unger at Ohio State for my MA I wrote a (now surely embarrassing, as I am not a linguist and this was so very long ago) paper trying to sort out the language people were using in Anglophone publications to differentiate between different writing forms while I myself was just learning about them and very confused. Since then I've had many students ready to tear out their hair trying to figure out what scholars mean when they say X or Y and why the terminology is not consistent. Among the many types of writing described in the scholarship I was looking at at the time, the terms being used that I listed included:

kanbun 漢文

Chinese writing

Sino-Japanese kanbun

hentai kanbun 変体漢文

variant Chinese

deviant Chinese

hybrid style

jun-kanbun 純漢文

pure Chinese

genuine Chinese

waka kanbun 和化漢文

"naturalized" style

man'yogana 万葉仮名

Azuma kagami-tai 吾妻鏡退
kiroku-tai 記録体
documentary form

sōrōbun 候文
epistolary form

kanji-kana majiri-bun 漢字かな交じり文
wakan konkōbun 和漢混淆文

There have certainly been many more studies since then with in-depth debates about the linguistic aspects, and my own early explorations were undoubtedly very incomplete at the time, too, but they included works by Aldridge, Backus, Frellesvig, Habein, Hannas, Hida, Rabinovitch, Seely, and Wixted. Now I am thinking I should crack open David Lurie's Realms of Literacy, which I teach with all the time, to revisit these early musings...! I am very curious about what the many scholars on this list, who are much better versed in this area, have to say about how and why they differentiate between certain translations/labels when writing and teaching.

Best,

Paula

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Paula R. Curtis

Yanai Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer

Department of Asian Languages & Cultures

University of California, Los Angeles

http://prcurtis.com/

Robert Borgen

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Oct 17, 2022, 12:42:45 PM10/17/22

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This is a message I was writing as my computer downloaded Paula’s message. Consider it a supplement to her more detailed comments.

Ross brings up an important point about the variety of languages that can be subsumed under the name of “kanbun” (“hentai” or otherwise). I would like to add to that the problem of English usage of the term. Ross notes that kanbun is Chinese written by Japanese authors, and I believe that is the way the term is commonly used, at least in the US and perhaps more widely in the anglophone academic community. But, many years ago, when I picked up a Japanese high school kanbun textbook, I discovered that virtually all it’s reading selections were taken from standard Chinese classics, supplemented with a very few examples by Japanese authors. Many years after that (but still a long time ago), I had a opportunity to observe a Japanese high school “kokugo” class. By chance, it was a kanbun lesson. The text being taught was a genuine Chinese poem and, after discussing it in Japanese, including, as I recall, a traditional yomikudashi, the teacher read it out in Mandarin. I assume her pronunciation was imperfect, but probably no worse that mine was when, as a grad student, I took a course in Chinese poetry. Note that this was, I repeat, a “kokugo” class. My point is that many of us may use the term “kanbun” to mean writings by Japanese authors in some sort of Chinese, but that’s not what it means in Japan. And, incidentally, that an authentic Chinese poem by a Chinese author is somehow part of Japan’s “national language,” a problem too modern to be discussed on this list.

Robert Borgen

Chris Kern

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Oct 17, 2022, 12:55:22 PM10/17/22

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It seems that there are parallels to the use of a broad term like "classical Japanese" that is supposed to include the Man'yoshu, Tale of Genji, and Higuchi Ichiyo.

-Chris Kern

Auburn University

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William Farris

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Oct 17, 2022, 1:25:58 PM10/17/22

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Greetings:

I have been following the discussions of documentary language and piracy/slavery with interest.

FIRST: Because, as has been correctly noted, the written languages of all those myriad texts from 木簡 to sixteenth-century diaries varies so greatly, my policy has always been to hire a senior Japanese grad student or other scholar to help me read whatever texts I wanted to read. This has several advantages:

1) It helps me to learn the texts I wanted to read;

2) It helps to support young Japanese scholars, often very able but pressed for cash;

3) It gives me an "in" to the Japanese history scholars of the University where I was working.

Because of the great variety of language of texts, I wonder if courses outside of Japan that focus tightly on one or another text are really the right way to go about this problem. Shouldn't this be left to the Japanese scholarly community?

To be sure, young Western scholars should have training in classical Chinese as Chinese, bungo, and various hentai kanbun texts (mine were almost all Tokugawa), but why not leave the detail work until one can work with Japanese scholars, assuming that one goes to Japan to do work, as I find is almost always necessary. If one cannot pay, then there are myriad kenkyukai where foreigners are usually welcome.

One last point, which I have made so many times it is nearly hectoring to repeat it: All this attention to "documents" can be viewed as one more example of the field's "primary documentary fetishism", as Connie Totman used to say. It will NOT grow the field.

Thus the brief discussion of piracy/slavery/human trafficking points the direction to growing the field. Documents are fine, and they flatter the egos of those who can read them, but only documents interpreted with IDEAS and in COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE will draw attention to a larger audience and find for pre-1600 Japanese history "a place in the sun."

My two ideas and my two cents worth.

Sincerely,

Wayne Farris

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Michael Pye

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Oct 17, 2022, 4:17:01 PM10/17/22

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Dear PMJS members,
I fear I'm just an also-ran in these matters, but I do think what
Robert Borgen wrote is very much to the point. I sat in on kanbun
classes at a Japanese high school where I taught for a while, long
ago, and kanbun was (and still is) presumed to be just that, (older)
Chinese literature, Chinese in the double sense of being written in
Chinese characters (kanji - surprise, surprise) and of hanging
together -also unsurprisingly- in terms of Chinese grammar. The
kakikudashi system is of course used to unlock the stuff for Japanese
readers, and at first I found the race to read it down in that way a
bit frustrating. There was not the slightest hint of reading it "in
Chinese". Parallel Korean textbooks I have examined are based on the
same assumption, and their textbooks are also headed 漢文. What are the
kokuyaku versions of Buddhist sutras if not extremely helpful
kakikudashi of the Chinese (i,e, kanbun) texts (a bit of an
oversimplification, but still), whereas gendaiyaku (e.g. from
Sanskrit) are different again.
Of course, learned Japanese in the past wrote some of their
works, or bits of them, in what they understood to be kanbun, the
process apparently leading to the mixed forms already remarked on.
This is the background to the earnest assertion one occasionally hears
that "we Japanese can read Chinese, though we cannot speak it": a fine
example of a half-truth.
What I'm driving at is that it's probably most helpful to think of
kanbun as (a) written-by-Chinese-and-received-by-Japanese, and (b)
written by Japanese using kanji only, using grammatical sequences that
look like Chinese but can be mentally transposed into (somewhat
stilted) Japanese. No doubt kanbun influenced classical Japanese, but
I can't judge that, and it seems to me to be a rather different
matter. In general I'd prefer it if the terminology could remain close
to Japanese high school usage,but perhaps that's just nostalgia.
Michael Pye

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Pinnington, Noel J - (noelp)

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Oct 17, 2022, 8:07:36 PM10/17/22

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I recently took the undergraduate course in classical Greek at my university, and was struck by the way professors felt it was necessary to impress on students the distinctions of various eras and degrees of “deadness” and also nativeness of authors were less important than realising that it (including today’s language) was all one “Greek” language.
At the other extreme, when I was reading the 15th century theorists Zeami and Zenchiku, their languages seemed quite different from one another even when not obviously non colloquial, indeed although they both included in their writings a range of styles of Chinese (strings of kanji) from citations of Chinese classics to their own constructions of portentous phrases etc., again their uses of those languages, and assumptions about what they signified, differed quite a bit from each other. In other words, it is not quite right to say that they, teacher and pupil, spoke or wrote the “same” languages. Hence determining exact definitions of types of language use is probably ultimately impossible.

However, putting aside these musings, I recall that there was a book in the library at the University of Arizona called Hentai Kanbun, by Akira Minegishi and I think it opened with a definition, that hentai kanbun was a Chinese written by Japanese that differed in some way from Chinese written by Chinese, (that is as far as I recall).

By the way, on Wayne Farris’s point about ideas, I see his point, but I hope that he can accept that there is room for a kind of study which roots its ideas in a careful reading of texts, using the authority of original texts to generate and argue about ideas. To me, translations can only tell you so much.

Sent from my iPhone

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Matt Treyvaud

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Oct 17, 2022, 8:56:35 PM10/17/22

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Hello all,

Minegishi Akira's 1986 book "Hentai Kanbun" (long out of print and hard
to get, but recently republished by Yoshikawa Kobunkan with an intro by
Tanaka Sota) offers a starting definition of "hentai kanbun" on p17:

漢文体の文章ではあるが、純漢文には存しない表記・語彙・文法を含むもの
1. 純漢文の作成をめざしつつも、そのような和習を含むもの（和化漢文）
i. 漢籍系の文体を基調とするもの
ii. 仏典系の文体を基調とするもの
2.
漢文様式によって国語文、即ち日本語の文章を表記したもので、文体上、純漢文とは異なる独自の特徴を有するもの
i. 漢籍系の文体の色彩の濃いもの
ii. 仏典系の文体の色彩の濃いもの
iii. 実用文体の色彩の濃いもの（記録体）
3.
漢字文ではあるが、一方に本来のものとしての仮名文・漢字仮名交じり文が想定され、若しくは現に存するもの（真名本）
i. 記録体に近いもの
ii. 真仮名文に近いもの

(There's more discussion and quotations from other people, but that's
Minegishi’s starting point)

Tanaka Sota's own more recent "Heain jidai ni okeru hentai kanbun no
kenku" (Bensei Shuppan, 2019) offers another definition. On p. 5, after
noting that different scholars define it in different ways and quoting
(not disapprovingly) the Daijisen dictionary's definition =
"日本語を漢文に倣って主に漢字だけでつづった文。正規の漢文にはない用字・語彙・誤報を含む",
Tanaka says:

つまり日本語史学上の変体漢文の要点は次の三つである。

（一）日本語分を表記したものであること
（二）多少なりとも中国語分の体勢を取っていること
（三）日本語的要素（和習）を含むこと

Incidentally, Gordian Schreiber is about to publish a very timely book
that, it appears, will be similarly focused on the idea of hentai kanbun
as a way of writing _Japanese_ (not "basically Chinese, but with some
Japanese elements"):

https://brill.com/view/title/61383

===

Japanese Morphography

Deconstructing/hentai kanbun/

Series:

* Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic
Cosmopolis <https://brill.com/view/serial/SINC>, Volume: 4

Author:
Gordian Schreiber
<https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Gordian+Schreiber>
How is it possible to write down the Japanese language exclusively in
Chinese characters? And how are we then able to determine the language
behind the veil of the Chinese script as Japanese? The history of
writing in Japan presents us with a fascinating variety of writing
styles ranging from phonography to morphography and all shades in between.
In/Japanese Morphography: Deconstructing/hentai kanbun, Gordian
Schreiber shows that texts traditionally labelled as “hentai kanbun” or
“variant Chinese” are, in fact, morphographically written Japanese texts
instead and not just the result of an underdeveloped skill in Chinese.
The study fosters our understanding of writing system typology beyond
phonographic writing.
===

(Please forgive any IME errors!)

Best regards,
--Matt

kktr...@me.com

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Oct 17, 2022, 11:40:21 PM10/17/22

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Apropos of Wayne’s comments and this comment, “> By the way, on Wayne Farris’s point about ideas, I see his point, but I hope that he can accept that there is room for a kind of study which roots its ideas in a careful reading of texts, using the authority of original texts to generate and argue about ideas. To me, translations can only tell you so much.” I think we need to read Wayne a bit more carefully. He starts out by saying that he does read documents, and studies them quite carefully. Years ago I remember his saying that he had read all the documents in the Nara ibun (my memory is that were a total of 800). His point is that if we want to talk with people other than our fellow students of Japanese premodern history, we need to also think comparatively and frame our argument with ideas. I believe that he would say that he roots his ideas in a careful reading of texts. I have been out of the field for too long to be able to quote precisely, but there was an Imabori document that Hitomi Tonomura and I interpret differently, with a significant impact on our arguments. It is one character that we differ on interpreting, but it contributed directly to my argument about common property and its regulation. This may be too elliptical for people to follow, and I have not published most of this, but hopefully you can understand my larger point.

Best regards,
Kris

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Kristina Troost, Ph.D.

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. What are the kokuyaku versions of Buddhist sutras if not extremely helpful kakikudashi of the Chinese (i,e, kanbun) texts (a bit of an oversimplification, but still), whereas gendaiyaku (e.g. from Sanskrit) are different again.

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Pinnington, Noel J - (noelp)

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Oct 18, 2022, 10:20:14 AM10/18/22

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I fear that my rather mild comment might have been be read as a critique of Wayne Farris himself. As it happens I have the greatest respect for him and his scholarship, as can be seen in my use of it in my last book.

I was actually thinking about how one would apply his call for engagement in wider ideas to my own fields, literature and art theory. On the surface this seems to be a good idea. However, it has been problematic in some cases. I also wished to defend fine scholars who have refrained from doing so.

Noel Pinnington

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William Farris

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Oct 18, 2022, 11:17:17 AM10/18/22

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Dear all:

I'm afraid that I am suffering from a bad case of jet-lag hangover after having spent 12 days touring Paris.

I have taken none of the discussion to be critical of me or my work.

Certainly there is written work that builds up from the sources, and that which engages comparative material and uses ecology, economics, sociology, anthropology, literary theory, and so on. Both are valid. The best work does both.

The point is NOT to stop with the sources or see them as an end in themselves.

The translated tomes of documents seem to be like a concrete wall to me, impenetrable and with no real meaning in themselves. They lack an interpretive framework.

I'm sure that good work is recognizable when it is done.

For the listserv, I guess I would prefer to see more discussion of historical issues, whether comparative or not, and less of documentary issues and "how to read XYZ."

Wayne

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William Farris

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Oct 18, 2022, 1:11:13 PM10/18/22

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Hello again:

I'm feeling a bit better now.

I thought that I would outline what I mean.

For instance, if one wants to take up the study of the demography of Japan, as I have tried, certainly one needs to know something about how demography is done.

With this knowledge, then one approaches source material, realizing that there may be source material that is not immediately apparent.

Then, with the sources, one puts together a sustained argument on the demography of Japan.

Comparative knowledge may also come in handy. For instance, to study the demographic impact of the Kangi Famine, it is, of course, necessary to search out and read all the sources, but I was tipped off to an article by William Atwell on "Volcanism and Climate Change". This article showed that the cold, snowy weather responsible for crop failures during Kangi was not just limited to Japan, but worldwide in scope. This then becomes a piece of the larger argument.

So, one uses a field (demography) and comparative material (Atwell) to put together a sustained argument on Japan's population for a given period of time. This argument is then susceptible to counter arguments,

It is also good to answer the question "So what?" in one's study. And to compare one's results with findings from other parts of the world.

To me, that's historical writing and it involves the close reading of myriad sources, both primary and secondary in many languages, but does not stop there.

In comparison, mere translation of documents or attention only to primary sources gets us only part way there. There may be some value in translation, but without an interpretive framework developed from many directions, it is lacking as history, in which the historian tells a story that is intended to be true.

IMHO, our field needs more history, as conceived above, and less mere translation, the easy part and only one step in the process of writing good history.

With kind regards,

Wayne

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Ross Bender

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Oct 18, 2022, 1:14:28 PM10/18/22

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Hope you get over jet-lag soon, Wayne. But I really have to take issue with you on this.

You say "The translated tomes of documents seem to be like a concrete wall to me, impenetrable and with no real meaning in themselves. They lack an interpretive framework."

I must defend myself here, having spent much of the past decade translating parts of Shoku Nihongi and the senmyō. While I largely agree with Snellen's ancient assessment that Shoku Nihongi is "dry as dust" and that translating it is "intellectual coolie labor," much of it is absolutely essential to an understanding of Nara Japan. Just recently on this list I pointed out that one can study the incidence of famines, epidemics, droughts, etc. by using the Kindle version of my translations. I flatter myself that my translations, which include the text, are useful for students learning to read. My introductory essays, while brief, address such topics as "gold, coins, silk, cloth, rice, coinage, inflation,natural disasters" and foreign relations with Tang, Silla, and Parhae. I also discuss issues of theology, political thought, and imperial legitimacy.

As to my two volumes of translations of senmyō, they have similar benefits. The Imperial Edicts in the Shoku Nihongi: A Translation with Text and Transliteration is the first complete English translation of these documents. Nowhere else in English, as far as I know, can students learn how to read Old Japanese prose. Senmyō: Old Japanese Imperial Edicts in the National Histories, 697-887 does not include the text and transliteration, but the brief introductions discuss political and religious ideas in the edicts. It also points out that the language of the edicts begins to shift, gradually shading into that of the norito.

My recent book The Last Female Emperor of Nara Japan, 749-770 is based on my work on Shoku Nihongi, and actually does contain a number of ideas. My next book, tentatively entitled Imperial Rule: Essays on Ancient Japan, which I hope to have out early next year, will be positively chock full of IDEAS, some of them big.

This whole translation vs. interpretation discussion is as old as the hills. I remember studying modern Japanese philosophy with David Dilworth back at Columbia. The tradition at Columbia, in which I was trained, was of course embodied in Sources of Japanese Tradition, which I believe is still an essential work in its new editions. The Columbia style was one of rigorous philological work, followed by interpretation. But Dr. Dilworth frequently raged against it, saying what we needed now most urgently was more big ideas. That was over 40 years ago, and the debate raves on. Incidentally, in spite of his views, Dilworth was one of the most important translators of the work of Nishida Kitarō.

"Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted facts."

--Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind

Ross Bender

Ross Bender | University of Pennsylvania - Academia.edu

.

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Christopher Hepburn

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Oct 18, 2022, 2:56:20 PM10/18/22

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Good morning,

Speaking as a musicologist, in addition to what has been stated previously by my distinguished colleagues, kanbun seems to me to be a form of communication that is embodied, formed in some way around the phenomenology of sound, and processed (and ultimately reprocessed) by silent and spoken speech. At the same time, I am also inclined to feel that, whatever kanbun is provisionally decided to be here, the definition should seek to incorporate elements that are also reflective of the increasing need for artistic expressiveness.

Best,

Christopher

--

Christopher Hepburn, PhD

Edward L. Doheny Jr Postdoctoral Scholar and

Teaching Fellow of East Asian Studies and Music

Department of History

University of Southern California

East Asian Library, 109B

Edward L. Doheny Jr Memorial Library

3550 Trousdale Pkwy,

Los Angeles, CA 90089

Tel: 213.628.4264

William Farris

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Oct 18, 2022, 9:19:10 PM10/18/22

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Hello again:

I'm not particularly speaking about Ross' post or his fine translations.

Still, if the discussion of various topics in Shoku Nihongi is not informed by knowledge of the fields that pertain to the topic (say, for epidemics, microbiology) then you don't and can't really present a complete interpretive framework, can you? All you can do is hint.

I have another point that goes along with the post done after the one Ross cites.

Good history begins with a question or problem. So, for example, in the case of Tokugawa Japan, Ron Toby asked: "Was sakoku true or a myth?" Was Japan really a "closed country" from 1639 to 1853? He very adroitly showed that it was not. And his book on STATE AND DIPLOMACY very quickly opened many new avenues for exploration. That is what the best history does.

IMHO, I would advise scholars NOT to simply find a cache of documents and then explain every nook and cranny of the documents.

Rather, begin with a question and then assemble your sources accordingly.

Wayne

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Amy Stanley

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Oct 18, 2022, 9:48:39 PM10/18/22

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Hello from Chicago, where it has been snowing (seriously)!

I think we can probably all agree that there is a difference between history and translation, and there is also a difference between reading documents and writing about them. It doesn't surprise me at all that on a listserv for people interested in premodern Japan, there's a lot of discussion of language and translation. Many of us are in situations where we can ask our colleagues about theories of and approaches to history, and if we want to know about, say, the seventeenth-century climate crisis or the marriage patterns of proto-Yoruba people (both of which I have had to look up this week - don't ask), we can read books. But if we want to figure out a tricky phrase, or understand who is teaching kanbun, we have to ask other specialists. So I don't see the attention to language here as indicating any kind of philological or antiquarian tendency among premodern Japan scholars.

I also don't think there is one way to make an argument! To take Professor Ferris's example, one could say many things about epidemics in Shoku Nihongi, and make many fascinating arguments, and no two would be alike. Some people might turn to microbiology; others would consider spiritual beliefs about contamination; comparativists might want to bring in other ancient records pertaining to disease. And it would also be perfectly fine to consider *how* disease is rendered in language, which would require very close attention to the text. There will never be any full context for history, and if there were we would all be bored.

I do agree that publishing tomes of dry documents, badly translated, would be a bad idea. But I also don't know who is doing that at the moment. And the presses would absolutely not go along with such a scheme unless someone bribed them.

So I suggest that we all read our documents and continue being philological, pedantic, and, yes, extremely nerdy about them on this list! If we can't do that here, where can we?

Best wishes,

Amy Stanley

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Sarah Thal

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Oct 18, 2022, 10:08:21 PM10/18/22

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Hello, everyone.

I would like to put my vote in for a combination of source- and question-based scholarship.

I very much appreciate source-focused work (especially translation with commentary!), both on its own for when I want to explore that source in search of my own answers, and in conjunction with question-focused analysis. And often our question-focused research will help us “discover” less-explored sources, helping further the virtuous cycle of sources and interpretation. And, while I get very excited by a deep dive into one particular argument or interpretive strand, there is also very much a place for scholarship that points to the many directions in which further interpretation might lead.

Let’s appreciate the value of scholarship across this spectrum!

I wonder, though, how we might explore Wayne’s call for more discussion on this list about question-focused interpretation or investigation. It feels relatively “easy” or “safe” to admit we’d like help with a translation or nuance, but I suspect many of us think of saving our interpretive ideas for possible future development or publication before broaching them to this large community. What might be the equivalent low-stakes interpretive conversation? Any thoughts on getting such started?

Best wishes,

Sarah Thal

University of Wisconsin-Madison

On Oct 18, 2022, at 8:19 PM, William Farris <wfa...@hawaii.edu> wrote:

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Federico Marcon

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Oct 19, 2022, 10:31:39 AM10/19/22

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Hello again.

Scholarly labor takes many forms: paleographical and philological analyses coexist with historiographical and theoretical interpretations, microhistories with deep histories, social histories with cultural histories, intellectual histories with religious histories, literary analyses with art histories, institutional histories with biographies, media studies with popular culture, etc. Taken all together and engaging as much as possible in a constant dialogue, the fruits of the collaborative labor of scholars constitute a field that is at once expanding and historically situated. All this is pretty much common sense. Like Sarah, I, too, give enthusiastically my vote for coexistence and combination.

Conflicts, polemics, critiques are indispensable ingredients of the discipline: they are necessary to keep the standards high, as it is a shared responsibility of the community of scholars to evaluate the legitimacy of the various cognitive claims (on syntactic structures, on semantic renditions, on justifiable translations, on narratological structures, on social dynamics, on cultural tendencies, on conceptual hybridizations, on geological and environmental processes, on the hypothetical causation of events, etc.). Philological analyses are as valuable and important as the tackling of big questions in comparative studies and the theoretical self-reflection of the heuristic categories we employ in our interpretations. Like professor Farris, I, too, tend to set up my own projects around big questions, grounded in documentary sources but always in an attempt to engage scholars in other fields to pay attention to what we do in East Asia studies. But that’s what I do, and I will never impose my style or concerns to anyone, not even my graduate students.

The pendulum of fads, fashions, tendencies, styles change over time—as history is historical, knowledge itself is historical: pace editorial marketing, there is no “ultimate study” nor “last word” on anything. Problems arises when, at an institutional and sociological level, hierarchies of disciplines are constructed, dogmatism is affirmed, orthodoxies (often presented in ideologically loaded and intellectually meaningless expressions like “good history”) are reproduced during hires, promotions, editorial steering committees, gossip, conferences, factionalisms, etc. These pernicious tendencies take the form of misrecognition of the scholarly value of different kinds labor. They may not present themselves explicitly: it is sufficient a smirk, a derision, a condescending comment, or simply avoidance. It would be hypocritical to deny that in the last couple of decades the main target of this sort of rejection in the name of orthodoxy has been theoretical reflection, and at times this spilled over to become a rejection of intellectual history tout court and the sort of comparative history professor Farris was defending.

The separation between fashion and orthodoxy is feeble, and it is easy to flip on the side of censorship and dogmatism to defend one’s work. That is the reason why I insisted on the notion of mediatedness of knowledge in my previous email, on the fact that no analytical technique grants unmediated access to an objective past, and that there is no cognitive practice that is not grounded on a theoretical premise, whether this is explicitly stated (or recognized) or not. No matter the paleographical accuracy or the political importance of our work, the interpretive labor must be visible in our publications and cognitively justified, in order that our procedures and theoretical premises can be subjected to falsification.

There, two emails in pmjs. I should return to be a silent reader for the next few years.

Yours,

Federico Marcon
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and History
215 Jones Hall
Princeton University
(609) 258-4274
fma...@princeton.edu

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walthall

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Oct 19, 2022, 2:39:50 PM10/19/22

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Let me roil the waters a little. Good history can begin with a question
or a problem, but it can also begin with a document or a set of
documents that shed unexpected light on some sort of historical
phenomena. I'm thinking primarily of Amy Stanley's wonderful Stranger in
the Shogun's City that illuminates how life on the margins in Edo
changed thanks to the Tenpo reforms in addition to tracing the life of a
woman from Echigo who ran off to the big city. Without knowledge of and
access to Tsuneno's letters, there would have been no book. On a much
more modest scale, I too have written articles when I came across
documents or objects that cried out for explanation--Ieyasu's hunting
rifles, for example.
So yes, one can start with big questions, but one can also start with
intriguing sources. It all depends on what you make of them, and for
that creativity and imagination are crucial. also decent writing skills.
Anne Walthall

>> translating parts of _Shoku Nihongi_ and the _senmyō. _While I
>> largely agree with Snellen's ancient assessment that _Shoku Nihongi_

>> is "dry as dust" and that translating it is "intellectual coolie
>> labor," much of it is absolutely essential to an understanding of
>> Nara Japan. Just recently on this list I pointed out that one can
>> study the incidence of famines, epidemics, droughts, etc. by using
>> the Kindle version of my translations. I flatter myself that my
>> translations, which include the text, are useful for students
>> learning to read. My introductory essays, while brief, address such
>> topics as "gold, coins, silk, cloth, rice, coinage,
>> inflation,natural disasters" and foreign relations with Tang, Silla,
>> and Parhae. I also discuss issues of theology, political thought,
>> and imperial legitimacy.
>>

>> As to my two volumes of translations of _senmy__ō_, they have
>> similar benefits. _The Imperial Edicts in the Shoku Nihongi: A
>> Translation with Text and Transliteration_ is the first complete

>> English translation of these documents. Nowhere else in English, as

>> far as I know, can students learn how to read Old Japanese prose._
>> Senmy__ō__: Old Japanese Imperial Edicts in the National Histories,
>> 697-887 _does not include the text and transliteration, but the

>> brief introductions discuss political and religious ideas in the
>> edicts. It also points out that the language of the edicts begins to

>> shift, gradually shading into that of the _norito_.
>>
>> My recent book _The Last Female Emperor of Nara Japan, 749-770 _is
>> based on my work on _Shoku Nihongi_, and actually does contain a
>> number of ideas. My next book, tentatively entitled _Imperial Rule:
>> Essays on Ancient Japan, _which I hope to have out early next year,

>> will be positively chock full of IDEAS, some of them big.
>>
>> This whole translation vs. interpretation discussion is as old as
>> the hills. I remember studying modern Japanese philosophy with David
>> Dilworth back at Columbia. The tradition at Columbia, in which I was

>> trained, was of course embodied in _Sources of Japanese Tradition,
>> _which I believe is still an essential work in its new editions. The

>> Columbia style was one of rigorous philological work, followed by
>> interpretation. But Dr. Dilworth frequently raged against it, saying
>> what we needed now most urgently was more big ideas. That was over
>> 40 years ago, and the debate raves on. Incidentally, in spite of his
>> views, Dilworth was one of the most important translators of the

>> work of Nishida Kitar_ō_.

>>
>> "Their minds are filled with big ideas, images, and distorted
>> facts."

>> --Bob Dylan, _Idiot Wind_
>>
>> Ross Bender
>> Ross Bender | University of Pennsylvania - Academia.edu [1]

>> https://brill.com/view/title/61383 [2]

>>
>> ===
>>
>> Japanese Morphography
>>
>> Deconstructing/hentai kanbun/
>>
>> Series:
>>
>> * Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the
>> Sinographic

>> Cosmopolis <https://brill.com/view/serial/SINC [3]>,

>> Volume: 4
>>
>> Author:
>> Gordian Schreiber

>> <https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Gordian+Schreiber [4]>

>> <https://upenn.academia.edu/RossBender [1]>

>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> PMJS is a forum dedicated to the study of premodern Japan.
>>>>>> To post to the list, email pm...@googlegroups.com
>>>>>> For the PMJS Terms of Use and more resources, please visit

>> www.pmjs.org [5].

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>>
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>> [6]
>>
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/CAMEQgpHKHiM3MUxc79HrJyiSSiE10aTdhd58pur-LCQSvJeQLQ%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer
>> [7]>.

>>>>> --
>>>>> PMJS is a forum dedicated to the study of premodern Japan.
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> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/02923061-05AB-4AED-A349-D7E7A519E988%40ucdavis.edu

>> [8].

>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
> .................................................................................................................
>>>> Professor of the Study of Religions (em.), University of Marburg,
>> Germany
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> PMJS is a forum dedicated to the study of premodern Japan.
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>>
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/20221017221529.Horde.8FnCvsy98er3AM8Wt1LwLS3%40home.staff.uni-marburg.de

>> [9].

>>
>> --
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> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/e1e1a560-a6b6-555b-4330-41e49cfa9902%40no-sword.jp
>> [10].

>>
>> --
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> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pmjs/AD56ADE7-709F-40B0-B25B-ED5A6169BC6E%40arizona.edu
>> [11].

>
> --
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> [12].

>
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Christopher Hepburn

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Oct 19, 2022, 6:06:20 PM10/19/22

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I, too, thought to say something along the lines of Amy and Federico, although I couldn't hope to say it as beautifully.

As a musicologist, I am an outsider to the traditional study of premodern Japan, which, if Harry Harootunian & Naoki Sakai are to be believed (!), has not taken kindly to outsiders like me in the past (see Ian Reader's review back in '98). I cannot begin to tell you how many sneers I have gotten at conferences when I say I treat waka as a musical artifact in addition to a literary one.

The fact of the matter is I did not grow up in the same tradition as many of my distinguished colleagues. I did not grow up in the tradition of literature qua literature where music and words are seen as non-mutually informative nor in the tradition of anthropology qua anthropology where non-western cultures have traditions rather than histories. The upbringing I received, which is likely what allows me to cross the field’s passport control with ease, was in the tradition of what we might call the new of new musicology, a reactionary movement that might be best understood as music plus context plus other disciplinary ideas (like applied linguistics in my case) equals new ways of understanding something in question.

This new musicology, which was undergoing reconstruction then as it continues to undergo reconstruction now, taught me to displace the literary through different modes of inquiry and constructions that help us to get closer to those highly sought after interdisciplinary objects of knowledge, which, in the past, have been sought after with a special kind of intradisciplinary rabidity. This statement might sound like I am positioning academics as something like medieval crusaders in search of a holy grail. But we are not knights galumphing about as a man clapping coconut halves accompanies us in tow as the old Monty Python sketch happens to go. After all, many of us can barely afford to feed ourselves let alone a horse. In reality, our disputation as specialists is given to curiosity, and our curiosity, it just so happens, is – and always has been – far-reaching, the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow including.

My curiosity has always been in what music and words, as a reflection of culture and society, can tell us about non-western cultures. And yet, my approach to understanding is no more right or wrong, as it were, than any other mediated approach for that matter. This is the whole point of interdisciplinarity. The danger, as my late mentor often said, is that truism easily hardens into dogma, and fictions, when they are left unawares, transform too easily into mystique. In may case, the study of waka ends up with claims such as waka is "sonically meaningless" or "waka has cast off its musicality." I don't think so!

We can't know everything. Though the tools (and I dislike this word) we use provide us access to the invaluable repository of human knowledge can be useful, this access will always be provisional. All tools have their limitations, e.g., you can't fix a pothole with a toothbrush. As such, certain areas within the repository of human knowledge will be obscured from view. In such cases, we have to use different tools, i.e., lenses, to view them.

In my estimation, what the western study of kanbun should be is far less important than what the western understanding of Japanese culture should be if the study of kanbun is to continue as its own brand of interpretation that, as the musicologist Gary Tomlinson would say, “silences, effaces, or absorbs the other in the act of understanding it.”

Now I fear I've overstayed my welcome, so I will do the very millennial thing of the tl;dr

tl;dr intradisciplinarity not so good; interdisciplinarity better.

Best,

Christopher

--

Christopher Hepburn, PhD
Edward L. Doheny Jr Postdoctoral Scholar and
Teaching Fellow of East Asian Studies and Music
Department of History

University of Southern California

East Asian Library, 109B

Edward L. Doheny Jr Memorial Library

3550 Trousdale Pkwy,

Los Angeles, CA 90089

Tel: 213.628.4264

Raji Steineck

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Oct 19, 2022, 6:06:29 PM10/19/22

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Dear colleagues,

this is just to alert you that the first translation of the Heike monogatari into German has just been published by Reclam Verlag, Ditzingen. The translator, Björn Adelmeier, studied Japanology at Hamburg University, one of the centers of Japanese philology in the German language area.

The daily "Frankfurter Allgemeine" last weekend published a one-page review by Andreas Platthaus:

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/belletristik/japans-epos-zur-deutschen-uebersetzung-des-heike-monogatari-18385530.html

Yours,

Raji

Prof. Dr. Raji C. Steineck

Japanologie, Asien-Orient-Institut

Universität Zürich

Zürichbergstrasse 4

8032 Zürich

Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera

Ross Bender

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Oct 19, 2022, 8:49:22 PM10/19/22

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Chrisotopher Hepburn says "I treat waka as a musical artifact in addition to a literary one." While I wouldn't know about waka, there has been much speculation about the orality of senmyō. And in fact there is some proof that they were performed as a musical art. This is a quotation from my book The Last Female Empress of Nara Japan. I am grateful to Ekaterina Komova for her translation of Yermakova:

L. M. Yermakova has suggested that “Like norito, senmyō was evidently performed in a particular musical key, as different authors mention the scores of individual senmyō that were preserved in some temples … It is quite possible that the performance of senmyō manifested itself as kind of a challenging musical-oratory art, which required both technique and experience.”[1] As evidence she cites the obituary of the Prince Nakano 仲野 in Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku 日本三代実録 which noted that the late Prince was skilled in yogoto 寿詞 and senmyō and in expounding the pronunciation of their recitation (ongishigo 音義詞語).Two high-ranking officials had been sent by imperial order to study recitation and melody (onshikyokusetsu 音詞曲折) with him at his home.[2]

[1] Yermakova 2006, unpublished translation by Ekaterina Komova, 2013, 2.

[2] NSJR Jōgan 貞観 9.1.17 (867).. See also Norinaga’s comment on this passage, MNZ 7, 192.

While this thread began on the theme "Define Kanbun," it has taken many interesting twists and turns.

Ross Bender

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