Good afternoon and welcome to today’s Harvard Yenching Research Meeting – Culture of Classicism: On a Core Knowledge of East Asian Literature. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Karen Thornber – I’m an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Literature and Comparative Literature here at Harvard. I’ll be kicking off today’s session with a welcome to our speakers and our moderator, followed by some brief introductory remarks.

I am particularly excited to welcome to Harvard today two distinguished professors from Japan: Professor Kōnoshi Takamitsu, Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Tokyo, and Professor Saitō Mareshi, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Tokyo and also an affiliate at the Harvard Yenching Institute.

Professor Kōnoshi is one of Japan’s leading scholars of ancient Japanese literature. He has written prolifically on the Kojiki, the Nihon shoki, and the Man’yōshū. One of his more recent books is Kanji tekisuto to shite no Kojiki (Kojiki as a Kanji Text), which provides an insightful model for examining ancient Japanese literature as part of the East Asian classical tradition. Welcome, Professor Kōnoshi, it’s a pleasure to meet you, and thank you so much for coming today.

Professor Saitō Mareshi, our second distinguished visitor from Japan, is also a very prolific and accomplished scholar of Japanese and Comparative Literature. One of his recent books is Kanbunmyaku no kindai: Shinmatsu – Meiji no bungakuken (Modern Times and Literary Chinese: The Literary Circumference of Late Qing and Meiji). This study looks closely at the interactions of the literatures of Late Qing China and Meiji Japan, and urges us to rethink the history of East Asian modern literatures from a broader comparative perspective.

Professors Kōnoshi and Saitō also have collaborated on research efforts, producing most recently an edited volume titled Koten nihongo no sekai: kanji ga tsukuru Nihon (The World of Classical Japanese: The Japan that Kanji Built). This monograph covers impressive ground. Its nine chapters examine the importance of kanji and kanshi/kanbun in Japanese literature and culture from the eighth to the twentieth centuries.

So thank you once again, Professors Kōnoshi and Saitō for making the long journey to Cambridge, Massachusetts. We welcome your presence here today and are really looking forward to your presentations.

I also would like to welcome Professor Edward Kamens, Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies and interim Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Professor Kamens will moderate the discussion that follows the presentations by Professors Kōnoshi and Saitō. Professor Kamens is well known as a leading scholar of classical Japanese literature, particularly for his monographs Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries which he co-edited with Mikhail Adolphson and Stacie Matsumoto; Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry; The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess: Daisaiin Senshi and Hosshin Wakashū; and The Three Jewels: A Study and Translation of Minamoto Tamenori’s Sanbōe. Thank you so much Professor Kamens for coming today.

And finally, thank you Professor Tokumori Makoto of the University of Tokyo and the Harvard Yenching Institute for organizing this afternoon’s events.

Before turning the floor over to our speakers, I would just like to say a few words about the larger project on which this workshop is based, “Jōdai Bungaku in East Asian Classics”, based at the University of Tokyo. According to their website, this project “aims to reorient paradigms of East Asian classical studies and place ancient Japanese literature among East Asian Classics by reexamining it from a script and text level.”

The project organizers argue that “before the tenth century, East Asia was one world modeled around the advanced culture of China [China, Japan, and Korea shared] a common ‘world-view’ based on Chinese characters and classical Chinese.” Ultimately, by stressing the importance of philology and hermeneutics when examining early Japanese literature, participants in the project would like “to reconstruct the field of East Asian classical studies.”

As much as we’d like to, I don’t think we will be able to reconstruct East Asian classical studies in one afternoon. But there are several points that might be helpful to keep in mind as we listen to Professor Kōnoshi’s and Professors Saitō’s presentations and as we move into the discussion that follows.

Professors Kōnoshi and Saitō and the other participants in the Jōdai Bungaku project emphasize the importance of Chinese characters in East Asian cultural history into the twentieth century, that is to say, their central role not only in China, but also in Japan, Korea, the Ryūkyū Islands, and Vietnam. More specifically, scholars of Japanese literature in both Japan and the United States have for some time now been criticizing the relative neglect of kanshi and kanbun (Chinese-language writing by Japanese) and have pushed for a more integrated understanding of classical Japanese literature. The same is true of scholars of Korean literature, who have had to deal not so much with the marginalizing of literature written in classical Chinese (although Chinese-language literature by Chinese long was valued over Chinese-language literature by Koreans), but with the marginalizing of Korean vernacular literature, which was “stigmatized as the literature of the lower class and women.”

I have some doubts that before the tenth century East Asia was, as the Jōdai Bungaku project participants claim, “one world modeled around the advanced culture of China” and that “[China, Japan, and Korea shared] a common ‘world-view’ based on Chinese characters and classical Chinese.” In fact, although most Japanese and Korean elites greatly admired China, they seldom passively soaked up its culture. Instead, they adapted and reconstructed art forms, religions, and philosophies from China, and their favorite Chinese writers and texts were not necessarily those most esteemed in China. Japanese divergence from Chinese models often was more overt since Korean elites frequently strove to become more “Chinese” than the Chinese themselves.

However, Koreans also radically transformed Chinese cultural products, including Buddhism. Moreover, the proliferation of native beliefs, religious practices, and artistic forms in Japan and Korea and the assimilation of elements of Chinese culture into these more local structures also are evidence of significant cultural negotiation with China.

Creative reconfiguring of Chinese culture is particularly apparent in premodern Japanese and Korean literature: although relying heavily on Chinese diction, forms, conventions, and texts, both early Korean and early Japanese literatures reveal real ambivalence toward China and/or Chinese culture. Japanese and Korean writers selectively referred to Chinese literature in their own creations, often transforming the meaning of whole sections of Chinese source texts. They also used literature to assert the validity, and sometimes superiority, of their own cultures.

This is not to deny the benefits of organizing the study of East Asian cultural history around Chinese characters. After all, notwithstanding Japanese and Korean ambivalence toward China, until the late nineteenth century an overpoweringly sinocentric substrate supported East Asian cultural relations.

Most obviously, focusing on philological concerns allows us to understand better the long, complex, and fascinating history of Chinese characters themselves beginning at least with the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty and the bronze inscriptions of the Shang and early Zhou dynasties. It also allows us to appreciate better the important role Chinese characters (and classical Chinese) have played in East Asian cultures from earliest times to the present. More important, examining the transculturation of Chinese characters within East Asia allows us to understand better the integration – and it is important to separate “integration” from “equivalence” – of East Asian cultures from earliest times to the present. It also forces us to reconceptualize what we mean when we talk about “East Asian,” or “Chinese,” “Japanese,” or “Korean” literatures, cultures, and peoples. These all are important enterprises for the first decades of the twenty-first century.

But I would argue that rather than think of Chinese characters as the be all and end all or even the sole foundation of East Asian cultures, whether classical or modern, we explore Chinese characters as one part, albeit a crucial one, of the story. Chinese characters are but one cultural product of many and we run the risk of selling ourselves short if – in attempting to understand intra-East Asian cultural dynamics through the ages – we focus solely on the role they have played. This is not to deny that most East Asian cultural products have ties, direct or indirect, with Chinese characters. Of course they do. But it is to suggest that we think of Chinese characters as a place to begin, rather than as a place to conclude.

To give just one example, as Professor Saitō reminds us in his article, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese transplanted into their languages hundreds of newly coined Japanese kanji compounds, many of which were Japanese translations of newly introduced Western terminology; some of these Japanese compounds paradoxically had their origins in Chinese. But it is important to recognize that this transplanting was only one part of language reform, a pressing concern of colonial and semicolonial intellectuals. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese also were inspired by Japan’s recent genbun itchi (unity of speech and writing) movement. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the many versions of baihua (the new written vernacular) that proliferated in China in the 1920s were hybrids not only of classical Chinese, the premodern vernacular, and contemporary colloquial speech, but also of Japanese and Western vernacular writing.

Even more important, language reform was only one of the many ways colonial and semicolonial peoples actively followed Japanese blueprints in the hopes of building up, if not liberating, their homelands. Hundreds of thousands of colonial and semicolonial elites chose to study in Japan. They did so because they believed educational opportunities at home insufficient, whether because of Japanese-imposed quotas in Korea, Taiwan, and occupied Manchuria (where the Japanese reserved most seats at the best schools for Japanese) or an outdated system in China proper. Many colonial and semicolonial elites became deeply engrossed in the social and political currents swirling in Japan, including socialism, anarchism, communism, and feminism, which they believed could bolster their societies. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese became deeply involved with national self-strengthening as Japan tightened its grip on East Asia. They hoped to stem the increasing tide of Japanese (and, in the case of China, Western) imperialism, establish independent legitimacy, and be recognized regionally and globally. And so they actively sought out and enthusiastically incorporated what they considered more advanced knowledge from Japan.

These self-strengthening initiatives in turn must be understood within the greater context of early twentieth-century intra-East Asian cultural interactions. For instance, at the same time that Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese were seeking out from imperial Japan what they regarded as superior ideas and institutions, imperial Japan was imposing policies, often with the support of local collaborators, that enabled them to increase political, economic, and cultural penetration of East Asia; these policies generally exploited colonial and semicolonial resources and attempted to assimilate colonial and semicolonial peoples, denying the validity of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese cultures. Both these modalities of foreign system integration posit a hierarchy, whether of oppressor/oppressed or benefactor/supplicant. To make matters more complicated, as I explore in my forthcoming book Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (which will be published by Harvard next year), more fluid forms of transculturation also proliferated in early twentieth-century East Asia, particularly in what I have termed artistic contact nebulae. In these ambiguous social spaces, which include both physical sites and creative products, people from societies in unequal power relationships grapple with one another’s cultural output in atmospheres of considerable reciprocity and diminished hierarchies of authority.

Among the most vibrant subsets of artistic contact nebulae are literary contact nebulae, active sites both physical and creative of readerly contact, writerly contact, and textual contact, intertwined modes of transculturation that depend to some degree on linguistic contact and often involve travel. “Readerly contact” refers to reading creative texts (texts with aesthetic ambitions, imaginative writing) from cultures/nations in asymmetrical power relationships with one’s own, “writerly contact” to creative writers from conflicting societies interacting with one another, “textual contact” to transculturating creative texts in this environment (appropriating genres, styles, and themes, as well as transculturating individual literary works via the related and at times concomitant strategies of interpreting, adapting, translating, and intertextualizing), and “linguistic contact” to engaging with the language of the society oppressing or oppressed by one’s own. Language (including Chinese characters) obviously is a central if not in some cases the central element of these contacts – but it is only part of the story. As such, it is best approached as a starting block, not as a finishing tape.

And finally, we need to examine cultural products and phenomena not only in their regional but also their global contexts. That is to say, one of our remaining challenges is to probe the dynamics of classical Chinese language/Chinese characters in East Asia in relation to the dynamics of other multi-ethnic classical languages, including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic in other parts of the world. This ultimately will not be an exercise in pointing out similarities and differences – although so doing is admittedly no easy task – but rather will be an attempt to try to understand better the particularities of vernacular and classical cultural production and identity formation and the commonalities of human cultural expression across time.

Thank you very much for your time and attention. I’d now like to turn the floor over to our first speaker, Professor Kōnoshi from the University of Tokyo.