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Visual vernacular: rebus, reading, and urban culture in early modern Japan

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666286.2012.655467

1943-2178

Charlotte Eubanks,

Translation Studies and Practices

Abstract In Japan, the image has long been a primary locale for linguistic experimentation and a crucially important site for the localization of language. This article explores the ways in which the rebus, as a distinct form of verbal/visual play, became a platform in early modern Japan for radical language experimentation contiguous with, and a precursor of, the more well-known political reform movements of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries (such as genbun itchi "unification of the spoken and written" and hōgen bokumetsu "eradication of the dialects"). As I show here, the rebus was a key instrument through which the inflection, syntax, terminology, and visual language of the capital circulated in early modern Japan, reaching both hypo- and hyper-literate circles, and inculcating a sense that the witty language of the Edo urbanite was Japanese language par excellence. To understand this movement of knowledge, we need to consider closely the full material range of early modern popular texts, and particularly we need to plumb the depths and terms of linguistic experimentation taking place along the fertile seam between the spoken sound and the written sign. To this end, I provide a brief genealogy of visual play with homophones in classical Japan before moving to the early modern period where I focus on several deep readings of both hypo-literate ("illiterate map") and hyper-literate (rebus narrative) forms to examine the creation of what I call a "visual vernacular." Keywords: rebusvernacularEdo Japanlanguage modernization mitate Notes 1 – Hayashi Yoshikazu, ed., Zashikigei Chūshingura (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1985), 119–20. Hereafter, Hayashi, Zashikigei. This article follows Asian format for names, with family name followed by given name. 2 – Timothy T. Clark, "Mitate-e: Some Thoughts, and a Summary of Recent Writings," Impressions 19 (1997): 7–27. 3 – For an excellent discussion of censorship's effects on literary culture in late eighteenth-century Edo, see Suzuki Toshiyhuki, Tsutaya Jūzaburō (Tokyo: Wakakusa Shobō, 1998), 159–204. A concise overview in English can be found in Timothy Clark, "Utamaro and Yoshiwara: The 'Painter of the Green Houses' Reconsidered," in The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, 2 vols, ed. Asano Shugo and Timothy Clark (London: British Museum Press, 1995), Vol. 1, 35–46. 4 – Throughout this article I will be using "rebus" as an umbrella term, encompassing the entire variety of more-or-less interchangeable Japanese words for picture puzzles that hinge on the illustration of homophones. Japanese terms include nazonazoe (謎々絵), ekangae (絵考 ), monotsukushi (もの尽くし), hanjimono (判じ物), and hanjie (判じ絵). 5 – J.Scott Miller, "The Hybrid Narrative of Kyoden's Sharebon," Monumenta Nipponica 43, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 133–52, p. 133. 6 – Fumiko T. Togasaki, "The Assertion of Heterodoxy in Kyoden's Verbal–Visual Texts," in The Pictured Word: Word & Image Interactions 2, ed. Martin Heusser, Claus Clüver, Leo Hoek, and Lauren Weingarden (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 286–97, p. 287. 7 – Maeda Ai, Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. James A. Fujii (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), xi–xv. 8 – Ibid., xv. 9 – As Komatsu Hisao has pointed out, many early modern authors of popular fiction (genres like ninjōbon, kokkeibon, sharebon, and so forth) were highly aware of their role as language instructors, at times seeming to see this almost as one of the moral duties of their work. Of Tamenaga Shunsui's (1790–1843) work, Komatsu notes, "we can see an almost moralistic attitude toward language instruction" in some of the interlinear notes glossing specific words and phrases particular to Edo speech as uttered by his characters and, he continues, this does not seem to be a case of Tamenaga flattering himself. In fact, "from a readerly point of view, Shunsui's rural readers did expect that the stories would serve as a guidebook to Edo language" (Komatsu Hisao, Edo jidai no kokugo: Edogo (Tokyo: Tokyodō Shuppan, 1985), 60–61. These authors were in the vanguard of a notable cultural shift, in which Edo speech was gradually to overtake the classical language of Heian/Kyoto as the cultural lingua franca of Japan. As another other register of this change, we may note that 1775 saw the publication of the first major dictionary of dialects, Butsurui shoko (edited by the poet Koshiya Gozan), to use Edo speech as its standard. For more on the significance of this dictionary, see Shimoda Hiraku, "Tongues-Tied: The Making of a 'National Language' and the Discovery of Dialects in Meiji Japan," American Historical Review 115, no. 3 (June 2010): 714–31, p. 718. 10 – Indeed, in the context of ukiyoe, the rebus owed much of its popularity to the Kansei reforms which prohibited, among other things, the inclusion of courtesans' names on woodblock prints, one response to which was to encode the names as rebuses, a technique that artists playfully applied to other subgenres. The rebus as a response to censorship, however, is but one aspect of its currency in Edo Japan, where rebuses performed an array of other functions. Visual riddle games which encoded the names of common household goods, tools, animals, provinces, insects, and an array of other topics into rebuses were a standard operation. For a catalog of this, and other more populist uses of the rebus in Edo print culture, see Iwasaki Hitoshi, Edo no hanjie: Kore o hanjite gorōjiro (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 2004). 11 – Hida Yoshifumi, "Genbun itchi kenkyū no shiten," in Genbun itchi undō, ed. Hida Yoshifumi (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 2004), 1–20, p. 2–3. See also Lee Yeounsuk, The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing Language in Modern Japan, trans. Maki Hirano Hubbard (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1996), 45–46. 12 – For further discussion of this point, see Iwasaki Hitoshi. "Gesaku to hanjie," Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kanshō 74, no. 5 (May 2009): 60–68. 13 – Iwasaki Hitoshi, "Hanjie jōron: Bakumatsuki kankō 'Hanjie' no shikō (Monozukushi hanjimono ni tsuite)," in Ukiyoe no Genzai, ed. Yamaguchi Keizaburō (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, Heisei 11), 423–33, p. 426. 14 – Carolyn Wheelwright, Word in Flower: The Visualization of Classical Literature in Seventeenth-Century Japan (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1989), 13. See also Shimizu Yoshiko's discussion of the interplay of word and image, calligraphy and illustration, in Genji monogatari no buntai to hōhō (Tokyo: Daigaku shuppankai, 1980). Pages 203–222 comprise a close consideration of one particular version of the Genji. I thank an anonymous reader for encouraging me to include this point, and for alerting me to these sources, especially Wheelwright's excellent discussion of the visual rhetoric of calligraphy in "Past and Present, Text and Image," Word in Flower, 84–108. 15 – Lotus Sutra, in Taishō shinshū daizōkyō, ed. Takakusu Junjirō, Watanabe Kaigyoku, and Ono Gemmyō, 100 vols (Tokyo: Taishō Issaikyō Kankōkai, 1924–1934), T. 9.262.47c1–11, http://www.cbeta.org (accessed July 20, 2011). Electronic resource. 16 – Kameda Tsutomu, "Heike nōkyō no e to imayō no uta," Bukkyō Geijutsu 100 (February 1975): 105–19. 17 – To wit: Sanrin [ni] (five syllables by Japanese count, in which "n" receives a full beat)/ shizukani hitori (seven syllables)/ ite shudō (five syllables by Japanese count, in which long vowels receive a second beat)/ hōshi no mae ni (seven syllables)/* Fugen bōsatsu wa (seven syllables)/ mietamae (five syllables). *Assuming this ballad existed, and that I have parsed it correctly, there would have been a five syllable line missing here. 18 – Wheelwright, Word in Flower, 7. 19 – Joshua S. Mostow, "Painted Poems, Forgotten Words: Poem-Pictures and Classical Japanese Literature," Monumenta Nipponica 47, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 323–46, p. 328. For further discussion see also Ono Mitsuyasu, Kotoba asobi no bungakushi (Tokyo: Shintensha, 1999), 48–49. 20 – Kotoba 117. 21 – Wheelwright, Word in Flower, 12. 22 – See, for instance, Peter Kornicki, "Nishiki no Ura: An Instance of Censorship and the Structure of a Sharebon," Monumenta Nipponica 32, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 153–88. For a specific discussion of the edicts' influence on the depiction of courtesans, see Julie Nelson Davis, Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), 115–68. 23 – Ono Mitsuyasu, "Hanjimono to kayō: 'Ryūtatsubushi kayō' wo chūshin ni," Osaka Kyōiku Daigaku kiyō 43, no. 1 (September 1994): 45–56, p. 45. 24 – Charlotte Eubanks, "Reading by Heart: Translated Buddhism and the Pictorial Heart Sutras of Early Modern Japan," International Journal of the Sociology of Language Summer 2012, forthcoming. 25 – Ono, Kotoba, 29, 67. 26 – Cited in Iwasaki, "Hanjie jōron," 429. 27 – Moriya Katsuhisa, "Urban Networks and Information Networks," in Tokugawa Japan: The Social and Economic Antecedents of Modern Japan, ed. Chie Nakane and Shinzaburō Ōishi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1991), 97–123, p. 97. 28 – Nishiyama Matsunosuke argues that the term "Edokko" first appeared in the 1760s, rapidly gaining currency as a "self-professed" identity whose broad contours — including habits of speech (kotoba) and qualities of temperament (katagi) — were well established by the 1780s. Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Edokko (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2006), 10–12. 29 – Komatsu, Edo, 83–84. 30 – Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7. Yonemoto's study encompasses literary, historical, and cartographical materials, parsing these for evidence of the ways in which early modern Japanese conceptualized (indeed, visualized) "Japan" as a notion concerned with both spatial geography and personal identity. Her later chapters, focusing on the place of the map in late Edo fiction, and the early section on "Print Culture, Map Culture, and the 'Vernacularization' of Space" (pages 14–17) have been particularly useful to me in formulating this discussion. 31 – For a discussion of the legal context of publishing in early modern Japan, see Peter Kornicki, "The Enmei'in Affair of 1803: The Spread of Information in the Tokugawa Period," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42, no. 2 (1982): 503–33. See also the section on mapping in his The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001). 32 – Yonemoto, Mapping, 166–72. By comparison, one might consider the rebuses of the Tayama region, a mountainous, very rural district which is perhaps the cultural antithesis of the heavily networked urban culture I discuss above. Tayama rebuses were created largely for the purpose of allowing non-literate farmers to enunciate the sounds of sutras, hymns (wasan 和讃), and incantations (darani 陀羅尼). While some of the images appear in both the Tayama and the urbanite rebuses and seem to have composed a sort of common visual vocabulary — rice fields for the sound ta, for instance, or a hand for the sound te — we can also discern distinct differences. The Tayama rebuses certainly do not include erect penises, or the sounds of farts, or piss; rather, the majority of the images are of basic foodstuffs and farming tools. For a discussion of the Tayama material, see Eubanks "Reading by Heart." 33 – Clark, "Mitate-e," 22. 34 – While this example is, perhaps, a relatively oblique sort of endorsement, explicit product placements were not an unknown phenomenon in the Edo arts. Ellis Tinios provides an intriguing discussion of an array of woodblock prints, each of which associates a prominent kabuki actor with a particular brand of face-whitening powder. Tinios's article, while not conclusive, raises some very interesting questions about "advertising, celebrity endorsement and the sponsorship of color-print production in the first half of the nineteenth century", "The Fragrance of Female Immortals: Celebrity Endorsement from the Afterlife," Impressions 27 (2005–2006): 43–53, p. 43). Such product endorsements — often for toothpaste, face powder, and other cosmetics — were delivered from the stage as well as the page. For one discussion, see Andrew Gerstle. "Flowers of Edo: Eighteenth-Century Kabuki and Its Patrons," Asian Theatre Journal 4, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 52–75. see also Adam Kern, Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 89–94. 35 – Tsunose Corporation, Osaka Meibutsu nara Awaokoshi: Rekishi to Dentō no Aji. "Tsunose to Futatsuido no Ayumi," http://www.tsunose.co.jp/singlefolder/ayumi.html (accessed July 17, 2011). Electronic resource. 36 – Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 65–66. Berry provides a very useful overview of "cartographic communication," that is, levels of meaning and the layering of word and image in maps (60–69). In that, as Berry notes, map-making involves the "linking of classification to convention" (67), we can see at work the sort of "double exposure" that Timothy Clark ("Mitate-e," 22) identifies as a core principle of mitate, or artistic "likening." Playing off the category of "map" (as a genre of publication dominated by official, licensed publishing houses) with the categorically common, and even vulgar, register of the images produces the sort of comic frisson characteristic of Edo apprehensions of the classical literary technique of likening. 37 – Yonemoto, Mapping, 4. 38 – Kyokutei Bakin, "Onagusami chūshingura no kangae," in Zashikigei Chūshingura, ed. Hayashi Yoshikazu (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1985), 91–118. For commentary in English see Kyokutei Bakin, A Diverting View of Loyal Retainers: "Onagusami Chūshingura no kangae" (1797), intro and trans. Charles Shirō Inouye (Hollywood, CA: Highmoonoon Press, 2003). For a full English translation of the play on which Bakin's rebus is based, see Donald Keene, trans., Chūshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). 39 – Koike Masatane, "Kibyōshi to wa," in Edo no gesaku ehon, 4 vols, Koike Masatane, Uda Toshihiko, Nakayama Yūshō, and Tanahashi Masahiro, eds (Tokyo: Shisōsha, 1980), Vol. 1, 3–6, p. 3. For an in-depth exploration of the genre in English, see Kern, Manga. 40 – Though unnamed, critics concur that the artist is almost certainly Kitao Shigemasa. For discussion see Hayashi, Zashikigei. 41 – Hayashi, Zashikigei, 102. 42 – For more on publishing practices in early modern Japan, see Matthi Forrer, Eirakuya Tōshirō, Publisher at Nagoya: A Contribution to the History of Publishing in 19th Century Japan (Amsterdam: JC Gieben, 1985). The section on the development of commercial publishing is particularly useful (pages 63–81). Also Kornicki, Book in Japan. As for the popularity of the rebus in 1790s ukiyoe culture, one may note that, aside from the experiments of Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin discussed in this article, Kitagawa Utamaro used the rebuses in cartouches to suggest the names of famous courtesans in a well-known series produced in the mid-1790s, and that Utagawa Kunisada employed the same method to represent the names of actors in an equally popular series. To these more acclaimed works, one may add the array of less sophisticated guessing-game rebuses discussed in Iwasaki, Edo no hanjie. 43 – Nakamura, Gesaku ron, cited in Clark, "Mitate-e," 9. 44 – Lee, Ideology, 46. 45 – Kornicki, Book in Japan, 32–33.