Idly Scribbling Rhymers

Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Robert Tuck

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547222
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How can literary forms fashion a nation? Though genres such as the novel and newspaper have been credited with shaping a national imagination and a sense of community, during the rapid modernization of the Meiji period, Japanese intellectuals took a striking—but often overlooked—interest in poetry's ties to national character. In Idly Scribbling Rhymers, Robert Tuck offers a groundbreaking study of the connections among traditional poetic genres, print media, and visions of national community in late nineteenth-century Japan that reveals the fissures within the process of imagining the nation.

Structured around the work of the poet and critic Masaoka Shiki, Idly Scribbling Rhymers considers how poetic genres were read, written, and discussed within the emergent worlds of the newspaper and literary periodical in Meiji Japan. Tuck details attempts to cast each of the three traditional poetic genres of haiku, kanshi, and waka as Japan's national poetry. He analyzes the nature and boundaries of the concepts of national poetic community that were meant to accompany literary production, showing that Japan's visions of community were defined by processes of hierarchy and exclusion and deeply divided along lines of social class, gender, and political affiliation. A comprehensive study of nineteenth-century Japanese poetics and print culture, Idly Scribbling Rhymers reveals poetry's surprising yet fundamental role in emerging forms of media and national consciousness.

CHAPTER ONE

Climbing the Stairs of Poetry

Kanshi, Print, and Writership in Nineteenth-Century Japan

This chapter is structured around one relatively simple question: how did one learn to write kanshi in nineteenth-century Japan? Suppose that you are a young man in a provincial part of Japan during the middle years of the nineteenth century—rather like, say, Masaoka Shiki—and you decide, for any of a variety of reasons, that you want to learn to write Sinitic verse. You have little previous background in literary Sinitic, maybe a basic grounding in reading certain canonical texts aloud (sodoku), but this is not enough to allow you to dive straight into reading anthologies of kanshi verse, and certainly not enough to start writing kanshi by yourself. What should you do?

One option might be to enroll in a private academy of Chinese studies (kangaku juku), an institution that proliferated from the middle years of the nineteenth century onward. Though one would certainly thereby improve one’s knowledge of the classical Chinese canon, a kangaku juku was not always the best option for a budding poet; depending on the institution, poetic composition as a specific subject was often peripheral to the curriculum at such academies.1 If kanshi composition and appreciation were the aims, rather than a broad grounding in the Chinese classics as a whole, in many cases the best option would be to find and join a local poetic group, if one existed. There, one could work with more experienced poets and have one’s poetry readings and verse composition supervised by a recognized, professional kanshi master, assuming one was available locally. An oversupply of professional teachers in the main urban areas of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka during the mid-nineteenth century meant that a number of famous kanshi poets made a living traveling around Japan as itinerant instructors, and so the availability of such teachers would vary depending on the area. For his part, however, Shiki had no need to enroll in a private academy or seek a local master since he had a highly qualified teacher in his very family. His maternal grandfather, Ōhara Kanzan 大原観山 (1817–1875), an adviser to the fourteenth daimyo of the Iyo domain, was a scholar of some renown and had taught at the Meikyōkan, the official Matsuyama domain Confucian academy. Although Kanzan resigned his official duties in Meiji 4 (1871), he taught privately thereafter and, as Shiki recalls, took a keen interest in his grandson’s education in the Chinese textual canon:2

I think it was around the time when I was about eight or nine years old and going to my maternal grandfather Kanzan’s home for sodoku instruction. One morning I went into his entrance hall, and off to one side were two or three of his students with their desks side by side, and I saw that one of them had a pocketbook in which there was some writing in black ink with writing in red ink in among it. I asked what it was, and they said it was a Sinitic poem [shi]. Obviously I knew nothing about writing in red ink [to correct and comment on poems] or what sort of thing a Sinitic poem might be.… I probably just thought that the red and black mixed together looked very attractive. I thought, “I want to grow up as soon as I can and write Sinitic poetry.”3

Though Kanzan normally delegated the teaching of sodoku to the senior students at his private academy, he elected to personally supervise the instruction of his first grandson, giving lessons to both Shiki and the latter’s first cousin Minami Hajime 三並良 (1864–1940) early in the morning, sometimes before it was fully light.4 Unfortunately, Kanzan did not live to see either boy finish his studies, since he passed away in 1875. After this, Shiki continued his studies with another local teacher: “Kanzan died shortly after that, but we continued by going to Tsuchiya Hisaaki’s home for sodoku, and so finally it was the summer of Meiji 10 [1877] when I learned how to compose Sinitic poetry from him—that is to say, I went off carrying my Handbook for Beginning Learners and learned how to arrange tonal prosody. After that I composed one pentasyllabic quatrain [Ch. wuyan jueju, J. gogon zekku] each day and had him look at it.”5

Although we know almost nothing about Tsuchiya Hisaaki, the details in this short passage show that his kanshi pedagogy conformed largely to the standard practice of the time. First, like most other novice poets of the period, Shiki started by composing quatrains (Ch. jueju, J. zekku), a four-line form of Sinitic verse. Over the course of the nineteenth century in Japan, the quatrain had come to be viewed as the first form that novice learners should attempt, and its prominent place in entry-level kanshi pedagogy meant that it was also well represented in contemporary print media. Second, Shiki mentions making use of what he calls a Handbook for Beginning Learners (Yōgaku benran). By 1877, the year of which Shiki was writing, “handbook for beginning learners” had come to be used as a generic term for a wide range of entry-level instructional manuals aimed at helping novice poets learn kanshi’s structures and vocabulary. While they varied slightly in form and content, virtually all such manuals featured a lexicon of preprepared poetic vocabulary, divided by topic, on which the novice poet could draw while learning composition. Later manuals also provided more explicit, step-by-step instruction in how to write kanshi, usually beginning from the quatrain form. In Shiki’s specific case, it seems that he also made use of such a manual in learning tonal prosody (Ch. pingze, J. hyōsoku), probably under Tsuchiya’s close supervision; tonal prosody was an important formal feature of kanshi writing and one that entry-level materials consistently emphasized as very important.6

Shiki’s recollections therefore point us in the direction of a number of answers to the basic question of how one might take one’s first steps in learning to write kanshi in nineteenth-century Japan. His mention of using an instructional manual highlights the important relationship throughout the nineteenth century between kanshi learning and print capitalism; as I show later, the broad expansion of kanshi producers and consumers in nineteenth-century Japan owes much to the development of what I term a textual infrastructure for kanshi. By “textual infrastructure,” I mean primarily instructional materials such as poetic lexicons, composition guides, rhyming dictionaries, and the like, by means of which the reader could acquire a basic functional knowledge of how to read and compose kanshi, without necessarily needing a background in the Chinese classics or to receive instruction from a teacher. Kanshi publishing as a whole, including anthologies of verse by both Japanese and Chinese poets and “poetic talks” (shiwa), flourished during the nineteenth century, but seemingly one of the most widely published—and therefore lucrative—categories was guides for beginning learners with little or no previous background in Sinitic poetry. Producing entry-level materials was, of course, in a publisher’s long-term interest, since it broadened the potential readership for other such materials, and as a poet progressed he (or occasionally she) would presumably need to lay hands on more advanced materials such as poetic collections and treatises.

It should be emphasized that materials such as the poetic lexicons were very much entry-level materials, particularly helpful to those who did not have access to (or were not interested in) a more traditional course of study in the Chinese classics. In practice, all indications are that their use dropped away rapidly as the poet progressed; Shiki himself seems to have discarded the lexicon-based “cut-and-paste” approach within a couple of years of the time of the previously quoted passage. Albeit probably intended for novice poets almost exclusively, these materials are nevertheless important, for several reasons. One is that entry-level kanshi materials over the course of the nineteenth century not only show a remarkable degree of standardization but also seem to have been used almost universally among beginning poets, making it easier to draw some broader conclusions about the mechanisms through which kanshi literacy was initially acquired. Furthermore, as I subsequently argue, because the poetic manual was often a novice learner’s first point of contact with the genre, a given manual’s content and cultural assumptions shaped ideas of what kanshi was for and who should compose it.

One of the main reasons why printed kanshi manuals (particularly the specific genre of the poetic lexicon, which I discuss extensively later in this chapter) were so important was that they made possible a major expansion of kanshi practice in Japan during the latter half of the Edo period, both in terms of practitioner demographics and thematic scope. They did this by helping aspiring learners to manage the linguistic and technical challenges that kanshi presented. One obvious challenge was that literary Sinitic was a nonvernacular language for Japanese poets and so required concentrated study to master.7 Likewise, the composition of kanshi required understanding certain formal and technical structures, particularly tonal prosody and rhyme (Ch. ya yun, J. ōin), which were not found in either vernacular or classical Japanese, both of which are nontonal.8

On the basis of these factors, it seems fair to conclude that, for most novice Japanese poets, kanshi was relatively challenging, certainly more so than the other two main poetic genres of haikai and waka, and it was in response to this need that the kanshi manual arose. Whether in tandem with in-person instruction or used on its own, the kanshi manual usually provided clear and accessible explanations of kanshi’s technical and formal requirements. Many manuals, poetic lexicons in particular, also provided either classical or vernacular Japanese glosses (sometimes both...