Author: pranavkjain

By Guest Contributor John D’Amico

On April 1, 2019, the government of Japan announced the name of the new era. With the abdication of Emperor Akihito and the accession of Crown Prince Naruhito, the curtain  falls on the Heisei period (1989 – 2019), and on May 1st, the new era, dubbed Reiwa (literally: “Ordering Harmony,” but the government suggested “Beautiful Harmony” as the official translation), begins.

The practice of changing era names upon the succession of a new emperor — one only established with the post-1868 emergence of a modern Japanese nation-state — might seem like an empty ritual. But the two character phrases that make up the era names are meant to “bear a meaning appropriate to serve as an ideal for the [Japanese] people,” and so serve an important ideological function (1979 Cabinet Report).

In contrast to earlier reign names, all based on phrases from Chinese classics, Reiwa comes from the Man’yoshū, the earliest extant vernacular poetry collection in Japan. It is the first reign name sourced from a Japanese work.

Critics quickly latched onto the authoritarian ring of “Ordering Harmony.” The right-wing bona fides of current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo are well known. He has called for the return of Japan to the status of a “normal” country through remilitarization and the rewriting of the postwar constitution. But what does his evocation of the Man’yoshū mean politically?

To help answer this question, it is worth quoting the prime minister’s remarks at the announcement of the new era at length.

Today, we have decided as a cabinet on the change in era name. The new era name is Reiwa. This is from the Man’yoshū passage, “An auspicious month (reigetsu), the beginning of spring. In the fine weather a fair breeze blows gently (kaze yawaragi[wa]). Plum blossoms bloom, scattering like powder before a mirror, and orchids give off the fragrance of perfume.”

Thus, “Reiwa” means that when people beautifully bring their hearts together, culture is born.

The Man’yoshū, though compiled over 1,200 years ago as Japan’s oldest poetry collection, featured poems from a broad spectrum of society: not only from the emperor, the imperial family, and nobility, but also from people like border guards and farmers. It’s a national work that represents the rich national culture and long tradition of our nation.

An eternal history and an elegant [literally: “aromatic”] culture, beautiful nature changing with the seasons. This Japanese national character should firmly be passed on to the next generations. Like the proudly blooming plum blossoms that herald the coming of spring after a long winter, each and every Japanese person, along with their hopes for tomorrow, can make their flowers bloom. That’s the kind of Japan I want to see. With that hope, we decided on the name “Reiwa.” Bearing heartfelt thanks for peaceful days where we can cultivate culture and appreciate the beauty of nature, I want to open up a path to a new era full of hope along with the people of Japan.

In spite of their classical trappings, the links drawn by Abe between poetry, social harmony, and cultural unity are of a more recent vintage. They hearken back to a pre-World War II discourse that idealized Japanese antiquity and the idea of a classless polity united under the divine authority of the emperor.

Readings of the Man’yoshū played an important role in the construction of this discourse, one that Abe drew on in his speech. The text was seen to represent an overcoming of the barriers of class and status and a repository of the raw, unfiltered emotions of the Japanese people. Abe’s appeals to culture, similarly, mirror the turn of many thinkers in the politically charged 1930s and 40s to see aesthetics as a solution to the mounting contradictions and conflicts inherent in modern life.

Writing in 1942, literary critic and leader of the Japanese Romantic school Yasuda Yojūrō argued in his The Spirit of the Man’yoshū (Man’yoshū no seishin) that, “In the Man’yoshū is the faith to establish the nation, expressed in a confidence in the nation itself…I felt deeply, painfully the idea behind the Man’yoshū: to protect the spirit of the nation’s history in an era of incommensurable darkness, shining forth an unextinguishable light” (426).

Yasuda saw in this ideal a transcendent spirit passed down from the Man’yoshū poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi (718 – 785) via the “national learning” scholars of the Tokugawa period. Yakamochi is an important figure in his own right. But in the 1930s and 40s, he was most well known among the general public for his verse Umi yukaba [If we go on the sea], set to music in a popular military song emblematic of the war years:

If we go on the sea, our dead are sodden in the water

If we go on the mountains, our dead are grown over with grass

We shall die, by the side of our lord [i.e. the emperor]

We shall never look back (trans. Cranston, The Gem-Glistening Cup, 458)

In 1942, the associations between the Man’yoshū, emperor worship, and militarism were impossible to ignore. That same year a conference on “overcoming modernity” was held by the Bungakkai (The Organization for Literary Studies), with members of the Japanese Romantics and the Kyoto School of philosophers also in attendance. Many of the participants saw their enemy as the relentless process of history itself. The Man’yoshū’s status as a repository of tradition and source of authenticity made it a potent tool in the hands of those searching to turn away from the contradictions of contemporary life and embrace a transhistorical “Japanese spirit.”

Yasuda did not participate in the conference, however. Philosopher Karatani Kojin contends that Yasuda sought instead to “overcome” the modern through an active rejection of “interest” through aesthetics, cultivating a detached “romantic irony” that spurned explicit ideological motivations. (Senzen no shikō 110-1) To participate in any kind of coherent, practical project would stink too much of “interest” for Yasuda. In Karatani’s words, Yasuda saw the war as “nothing more than an occasion for poetry” (111). This reading makes Yasuda, a former Marxist, more an amoral aesthete than a full-throated militarist.

What he shared with the conference participants, in the historian Harry Harootunian’s words, was “…a dangerous kinship with fascism in its desire to bracket history and hence the development that had propelled the country to its present in order to represent Japan as fixed and eternal. In all of those discussions about an ineluctable ‘spirit,’ the symposium shared with the prevailing discourse on cultural authenticity the fantasy that neither history nor techno-economic development had managed to change what was essentially and eternally Japanese” (Overcome by Modernity, 40).

Abe also wants to share in this fantasy. Cloaked in the language of valuing a rich “cultural life,” his remarks seem almost innocuous. But they speak to the enduring desire to transcend the modern through a retreat into the classical past, an impulse that should give us pause in light of its dark history.

John D’Amico is a second-year PhD student in history at Yale University. His research focuses on merchants and commercial networks in early modern Japan.

 

By Guest Contributor Elizabeth Buckheit

One of my favorite hypothetical games is to categorize all humanity in the vein of the adage “there are two types of people in the world.” To give a very silly example, I can say there are responsible people who read the assembly instructions of IKEA furniture before beginning and there are exciting people who consult them only when they have already erred, if at all. However, I read an excerpt from the sixteenth-century theologian Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594) for a doctoral course which led me to think about more serious uses for my bifurcations. Perhaps subconsciously cribbing Daniel Kahenman, I began to think about fast and slow writers. I had previously written my undergraduate and masters dissertations on aspects of Hooker’s thought and had been struck by how deliberately and reflectively he crafted his argument over almost a thousand pages. I enjoyed reading him because he thought slowly. Though well aware of the limitations of reading for a seminar, I still found reading from an abridged edition of the Laws jarring. There are many fast writers: pithy polemicists, lively narrators, or fervent debaters. It is rarer to find writers who follow the roads of their arguments to the very end, exploring byways and reflecting on alternate modes of transit along the way. Upon returning to Hooker in what felt like a flavorless, low-calorie format, I began to reflect on how Hooker is valuable because he is a good slow thinker and he cannot be made to think fast.

The abridged copy of Hooker’s Laws I returned to is a small book dressed in an aggressive shade of blue only found on “Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought” and mid-2000s PC error screens. Edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade, the Cambridge edition was my first introduction to Hooker as an undergraduate; I had quickly discarded it for the Folger edition of Hooker’s works and had not thought of the Cambridge edition since. The petite figure of McGrade’s blue book is striking to me now as the Polity consists of eight zaftig volumes defending the crown-established English Church as it stood in the 1590s. After outlining an abstract theory of law and human reason against the history of the Reformed Church in England (Preface and Volume I), Hooker discusses to what extent humans can use their own intellect rather than divine decree in establishing polities (Vols. II-III), what forms ecclesiastical polity should take (IV-VII), and how ecclesiastical and civil polity should relate to each other (VIII). However, McGrade’s edition contains only Hooker’s preface and Books I and VIII.

There are clear reasons why McGrade abridges Hooker – the most obvious being that he is publishing in the “Cambridge History of Political Thought” series and thus Hooker’s books on law and the authority of secular states are the more purely ‘political’ parts of the Polity. McGrade, as he tells us in his introduction (p. xiv), also has a larger historiographical project to further situate Hooker in the world of Elizabethan religious polemic. Hooker was born in 1554, four years before the Act of Supremacy would install Elizabeth as head of the English Church and five years before the Acts of Uniformity would require subscription to the Book of Common Prayer. Hooker was an academic theologian all his life: he attained his Doctor of Divinity from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he remained as a fellow and a Professor of Hebrew until 1580; he then served as Master of the Temple at the Inns of Court before retiring to the countryside in 1591 to work on the Polity until his death in 1600. During his lifespan, the fledgling Church of England began working to conform the religious landscape to its Articles of Religion. This project met with considerable resistance from nonconformists, particularly those ‘Puritans’ who believed that the established Church was not Reformed to the Genevan standard. Hooker’s early biographers and editors, Izaak Walton in the seventeenth century and John Keble’s explicit upholding of Walton in the nineteenth, painted him as an irenic theologian and legal scholar who refused to engage in petty polemic and instead came to a perfect Anglican conclusion by reason alone. Though Walton’s core narrative has held surprisingly stable, there has been a trend to include Hooker as an active participant in Elizabethan crises of conformism (beginning and most notably with the work of Peter Lake). As a chief concern of nonconformists was that the Crown was overstepping its authority by making laws to order the Church which went against the dictates of Scripture, McGrade’s paring down of Hooker to Books I and VIII allows him to highlight Hooker’s role as an Anglican apologist against Reformed rebels.

I am by no means suggesting that Hooker is not polemically engaged in the crisis of the Elizabethan Church. In the Preface, Hooker explicitly claims his aim is to “rip up to the verie bottom” the views of his nonconformist opponents in pursuit of truth. Yet how he engages with them is remarkable. The Polity is not Marprelatean satire, a sermon or admonition, an enraged academic disputation, a legal document, catechism, or systematic theology. It is certainly not the polemical tract with ecclesiastical filler that McGrade’s editing suggests. Instead, Hooker produces a complete theory of how man should act according to divine will: as a rational and faithful individual, as a believer in common with others, and as a member of civil society.

However, the structure of Hooker’s theory is not evident from the outset and subtle contours are missed through speedy reading. A good example of this is Hooker’s view of human reason. If we look only at Books I and VIII, reason provides a simple mechanism to allow humans to order themselves. ‘Rational law’ first appears as that aspect of natural law which mankind uses to achieve their ends of survival and salvation. After the Fall, human reason is no longer soteriologically sufficient without the supernatural donative of Scripture. Humans can, however, use their reason to survive and flourish on earth by creating their own civil laws and politic societies. The Church, while holding an additional supernatural end of salvation, exists as an outwardly visible, human-ordered polity. Thus, a civil sovereign can order a national church so long as he and his subjects share the same religious ends (see 1.3.2-4, 1.5.2, 1.10.1-4, 1.11.4-5, 1.12,3, 1.15.2, 8.3.3-5, 8.6.4-7).

If we include Books II and III, human interpretive faculties gain more weight in ordering earthly action. Unlike his more Reformed peers, Hooker does not believe that all ecclesiastical or civil law must be rooted in Scripture. God made man with reason and, despite its corruption though original sin, He still delights in man’s use of his natural faculties. As long as we are not directly contradicting God’s express soteriological dictates as found in Scripture, we are free to act. In matters adiaphora, those affairs indifferent to salvation, Hooker recommends that we use our faculties to find what is most beneficial and expedient for human society. It is not against faith to do so because natural law requires that we act rationally in order to survive. We can also use our reason to aid in our supernatural ends, helping us to interpret Scripture appropriately and persuade others to do so as well. Just as imperfect “reason hath need of grace,” Hooker hopes that grace also has some need of reason. How we think is crucial; it is therefore critical that we work to hone our faculties and avoid vain, speedy, or heretical philosophy (see 2.1.4, 2.2.2, 2.5.4-7, 3.8.6-11). From this we learn about the intellectual responsibility of an individual which has significant consequences for Hooker’s account of sovereign power in Book VIII. Given the fragmentary and heavily edited nature of the eighth book, Hooker’s argument in Books II and III also helps us clarify doubts provided by the publication history. To add another layer, Hooker’s concern for correctly used reason and his concerns about misinterpretation also give us some insight into the intellectual standards of an academic divine in a period when institutional culture and curricula of education were dramatically changing.

It should be said that just because a book is large and slow does not mean it is good. Hooker’s contemporary John Bridges produced the fourteen-hundred-page Defence of the Government Establish’d which Patrick Collinson has called “smothering” and which I call “the literary equivalent of a humpback whale trying to run a marathon.” In the same vein, some fast thought is cleverly crafted, exceptionally illuminating, and worth slow scholarship. Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly is an excellent example of this. In a 1968 article which holds true to this day, McGrade himself notes that Hooker is ‘largely unread’ due to his heft.  We may find slower thinkers to be bad or fast thinkers to be good, but we have to read them at all to make that judgement and do so with an awareness of their identities as writers. For me, Hooker’s layered argument provides a unique and interesting way to consider thinking in the Elizabethan church and the society around it precisely because of the way which it unfolds. I worry – whether through oversimplification, hurriedness, cavalier editing, or plain laziness – we risk making Hooker and other slow thinkers do intellectual work they did not do.

Elizabeth Buckheit is a first-year PhD student in history at Yale University.

By guest contributor Lidia Plaza

On my way to Covent Garden this summer, I spotted a Muji store and popped inside.  A few months earlier I had picked up a pair of Muji socks in Terminal 5 of JFK, which had since become my favorite pair.  Determined to acquire more, equally lovely socks, I studied the sock selection until I found some in the same style, size, and color as my beloved pair.  I grabbed them and headed to the till.  I didn’t bother to inspect the socks; I assumed the knit tensions were all perfectly even, the densities were consistent, the colors were identical.  I also assumed that they were exactly like the socks I had purchased a few months earlier in New York.  I didn’t compare the socks because I take consistency for granted.  I expect it.  I insist upon it. My expectation that socks I purchase from a Japanese retailer in New York will be identical to socks I find in London months later is a testament to the success of the Industrial Revolution.

In the history of the Industrial Revolution, the mechanization of cleaning, processing, spinning, and weaving textiles has become Chapter One of the gospel, but in this telling there has been undue emphasis put on the mechanization of manufacturing.  The triumph of the Industrial Revolution was not the machines themselves, but the processes that could produce consistent products at a mass scale; machines were just one tool of those processes.  This point is well illustrated in an often-overlooked verse of the gospel: dyeing.

Dyeing’s neglect is partially understandable, as dyeing is almost as difficult for the historian to study as it was for the eighteenth-century apprentice to learn.  Unlike paints, dyes must chemically bond with the textile fibers, and variations in the fibers, the pH of the water, the quality of added mordants and dye-assistants, or even the composition of the containers used can affect the results.  Only in the nineteenth century did chemists begin to understand dye chemistry, and when histories of industrialization include dyes, this, for instance, is often what they highlight. But early modern dyers spent their careers learning to achieve consistent, even dyes, and, more recently, scholars like Giorgio Riello have included dyeing innovations in their examinations of early textile industrialization.  It is now becoming clear that dyers and clothiers like William Butt were making critical strides in early textile industrialization.

William Butt began his dye book on November 24, 1768.  As a clothier, Butt oversaw the entire process of producing a woolen textile from cleaning the raw fibers to weaving the fabric.  Yet his book, the product of almost daily work, is just about dyeing.  Why then did Butt devote so much effort to just one step in the manufacturing process?  The answer is simple: half the price of a finished textile could come just from the quality of its dyeing.  It was not uncommon for clothiers to set up their own dye houses, unwilling to trust someone else’s work with such a critical step.  William Butt was such a clothier.

Between 1768 and 1785, he recorded 794 recipes, filling over 88 pages with rows and columns of cryptic numbers, strange symbols, bizarre ingredients, and round little pieces of colored felt, stuffing little scraps of paper between its pages.  After weeks and months of pouring over the book in the reading room of the Beinecke Library, I made some sense of the book; each row documents a new recipe, and each column contains a separate piece of information about the recipe.  In this way, Butt recorded the amounts of wool he worked with, the merchant marks of his wool suppliers, and the dyestuffs used in each recipe, always providing samples of the results and assigning a unique recipe number.

The book shows that Butt was able to dye more wool with better results by systematically experimenting with his dyes.  Starting around 1777, about page 35 of his book, Butt began to treat his book less like a cookbook of collected recipes, and more like a lab notebook to record his experiments.  He started dating his recipes, and the dates suggest that Butt began to intensify his production.  Butt filled 35 pages between 1768 and 1777.  Assuming this was his only dye book, this means he only filled 3 or 4 pages a year during this period.  However, after 1777 he usually filled at least 6 pages each year.

Number of Pages Filled by Each Year in William Butt’s Dye Book Between May 1777-May 1785
Year	Approximate Number of pages filled
1777 (May-December)	6
1778	6.5
1779	8
1780	6
1781	7
1782	6
1783	6.5
1784	5
1785 (February-May)	3

Not only was Butt working with more recipes but he also became more meticulous in his work.  He got pickier about how he classified a new dye recipe by assigning a new dye number to recipes that varied only slightly from other recipes in the book.  He began experimenting with his recipes, recreating previous recipes using wool from different suppliers, for example.  In another instance, he experimented with technique, noting that recipe 20129 was the same as 19917, “differing from 19917 in method only.”  His book gets more cluttered as he began recording the merchant marks of the merchants who supplied the wool in each recipe, and as he makes more notes and comments.

Part of Butt’s success may have come from the fact that he seems to have been a specialist.  He was clearly skilled at using many dyestuffs, but he relied on other dyers to provide him with indigo-dyed wool.  Indigo is a vat dye, which has an entirely separate chemical process for bonding to fibers than the other dyestuffs Butt worked with, which were almost exclusively mordant-dyes.  Not all dyers specialized, but there is evidence that indigo specialists were common, and so it is not surprising that Butt would also specialize in one type of dye.  By focusing on dyes that all required similar methods, Butt was able to refine those methods and increase his efficiency.  By the end of his book, Butt had more than doubled the amount of wool he dyed in each recipe.

Technology was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, but, as Butt’s dye book illustrates, if all we imagine when we think of technology is machines, we are missing a large part of the picture.  Technology is simply the practical application of scientific knowledge, and in this sense William Butt’s dye book is as much a piece of technological advancement as the spinning jenny and the power loom.  He could not have known the chemistry underpinning his work, but he knew he could maximize his output by systematically experimenting with dyestuffs and applying what he learned to his processes.  All the spinning jennies and power looms in the world would have been useless if all those threads and fabrics could not be consistently and reliably dyed, but dyeing at larger scales required a better understanding of the dyes, not new machines.  Butt and the many others like him understood this.  Hiding in record offices and archives, there are other dye books, all written by clothiers and dyers trying to master dye processes.  It was their mastery of process that achieved the consistency that I take for granted every time I browse a wall of socks.

Lidia Plaza is a PhD student in British history at Yale University. Her research focuses on industrialization and British foreign policy in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries.