Japan in East Asia: Culture and Identity in the Historical Narratives of the 18th Century

Dr. Nobuko Toyosawa from the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences will give a lecture as a part of the Humanities Week. The lecture will be held in English, on the following topic:

This presentation, “Japan in East Asia: Culture and Identity in the Historical Narratives of the 18^th Century,” explores the contested space of civilization center in early modern East Asia with special emphasis on the changing geopolitical dynamics. The shift was most profoundly exemplified in the crushing setback of the Manchu takeover of the Ming dynasty in 1644. Reflecting the shogunate’s refusal to acknowledge the Qing dynasty as the legitimate successor to Ming China, Japanese scholars enthusiastically produced local historiography, while writers and artists, in a similar vigor, published various prints and stories and performed kabuki, noh drama, and puppet theatres.

Through my analysis of several texts written in the eighteenth century, this presentation demonstrates that there was a common narrative thread in different genres of texts. While the nature of these texts is distinctly different—a guidebook, a bunraku puppet play, and others, they unanimously projected the ideal country of Japan as the country of the deities. Scholars and artists were encouraged to recognize that they were living in a new epoch of great peace under the Tokugawa shogunate. At the same time, we can also see that there emerged a desire to attribute Japan’s cultural identity that was different from China, which took the form of Japan as the “country of the deities” (shinkoku) vs. China as the Confucian sagely country (seijinkoku).