International Online Symposium - February 2021

This international symposium explores Japan’s role in the “First Global Age” through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary investigation of its cultural, material, and intellectual production from about 1500 to 1700. The thematic focus lies on transcultural exchange and its related processes, such as shifting taxonomies and iconographies; translation, interpretation, and appropriation; re-evaluation and re-interpretation; and the construction of social biographies of moving objects.

A key goal is to advance the discussion beyond prevalent yet limiting models such as, for instance, a narrowly conceived, bilateral exchange between Iberia and Japan. Instead, this symposium aims to complicate and deepen our understanding of the complex amalgam of actors and trajectories of exchange by exploring the pre-existing cultural, political, and economic spaces of an “East Asian Mediterranean;” transfer routes via South and South-East Asia as well as the Americas; diasporas and hybrid communities; continuities, ruptures, and innovations in the conceptualization of self and other; and processes of mapping, labeling, and appropriation.

Researchers from top institutions around the world and from a wide disciplinary range will convene to bridge the classical humanities (history, art history, literature, religious studies, intellectual history) and history of science (astronomy, cartography). The aim is to find a balance between established and emerging scholars as well as between the academic cultures of Japan, Europe, and the Americas.

This symposium is co-organized and co-funded by Kyushu University’s Faculty of Humanities and Yale University’s Council of East Asian Studies.

• For all registration and general program inquiries, please contact: imapidoc@gmail.com

List of Contributors

Bébio Vieira AMARO (Tianjin University)

Assistant Professor - School of Architecture

A Brief History of the Jesuit Facilities in Azuchi: New Insights on their Architectural and Urban Features

ARIMURA Rie 有村 理恵 (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Asociate Professor - Department of Art History
Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores Unidad Morelia

ロザリオと数珠―近世日本における宗教間体験 [The Rosary and the Juzu: An Interreligious Experience in Early Modern Japan]

ロザリオ、数珠といった念珠は、古代インド宗教に起源をもち、東西に伝播したというW.C.スミスの定説を近年、疑問視する向きもある。シルク・ロードを通って展開した東西の影響は皆無であるとは断言できないが、諸宗教が独自の発展を遂げてきたという見方もある。いずれにせよ、１６〜１７世期の日本宣教において、ロザリオに類似した仏教の数珠を宣教師たちはどう理解し、日本人はロザリオをどう受け止め、自らのキリシタン信仰の中に取り入れていったのか。

近世日本布教におけるロザリオ信仰の重要性は、文献のみならず、キリシタン関係遺品においても垣間見ることができる。元来、ロザリオ信仰はドミニコ会を中心に発展した信仰であるが、同会の許可を得て、別の修道会がロザリオを広めることは許されていた。事実、日本で初めてロザリオ信仰を伝えたのは、宣教を開始したイエズス会であり、同会画学舎で聖画を学んだ日本人により制作された「マリア十五玄義図」が二点残されている。また、1599年、江戸に建立されたフランシスコ会教会では、マニラのドミニコ会管区長の承諾のもと、ロザリオ聖母が守護聖人として祀られた。当報告では、キリシタン信者らの間でロザリオと仏教の祈りが共存していた事実を明らかにし、「マリア十五玄義図」と「当麻曼荼羅」との類似点を検証する。

Liam Matthew BROCKEY (Michigan State University)

Professor - College of Social Science, Department of History

Getting News from Japan in Early Modern Europe

Angelo CATTANEO (National Research Council CNR, Rome)

Researcher - CHAM - Centro de Humanidades
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - C.N.R.

Toward a Cultural Geography of Japan Through the Japanese ‘World Map’ Folding Screens (c. 1590-1650)

The topic of cartography, in particular world cartography, was one of many nanban or foreign topics treated by Japanese painters on the broad surfaces of byōbu. There are circa 30 known and extant so-called cartographic byōbu. Most of the screens include a planisphere depiction on one side and some form of cultural intelligence on the other. At this respect, cartographic byōbu are a contact zone in which multi-languages and multi-cultures converge, overlaps and were mutually transformed in early modernity. They were part of the global circulation of material culture and knowledge that resulted from the combined agencies of the Iberian and Dutch expansions in Asia, Jesuit missionary strategies, as well as circulation of material culture between Japan, China and Korea, in the contexts of Hideyoshi’s unsuccessful attempts at Japanese expansion in Korea and subsequent diplomatic relationships developed by the Tokugawas.

Japanese painters addressed the geography of the world by re-elaborating works from three main cartographic genres that reached Japan since the end of the sixteenth century. These genres included Western maps of the world (in particular, Portuguese manuscript planispheres and Dutch printed planispheres like those of Plancius, Blaeu and van der Keere); the planispheres written in Chinese and printed in numerous editions in the context of the mission in China by Matteo Ricci, in collaboration with the scholar and mathematician Li Zhizao and the printer Zhang Wentao, in particular the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu 坤輿萬國全圖 (1602); finally, Sino-Korean cartography, in particular the Korean transformation of Yang Ziqui’s 楊子器 Integrated Map of the Historic Boundaries of Nations and Capitals, also known as Map of the Great Ming Nation 大明国地理図.

Rather than reflecting specific scientific or technical features as previous scholars have highlighted, the heterogeneous maps and composite iconography of the cartographic byōbu enable one to draw a cultural geography of ideas and material culture reaching Japan during the nanban century. Once observed from this perspective, the cartographic, graphic, textual and iconographic features of the byōbu become fundamental elements to trace, on the one hand, the circulation of knowledge, people, ideas and material culture at the global scale in early modernity and, on the other hand the specific place of Japan within these long-disance cultural flows.

There are two major implications that emerge from this perspective: the first is the breaking of linear Eurocentric models of circulation of knowledge, people, and ideas – such as West-East relationships – still very popular, but ill-adapted to articulate the complex system of maritime and terrestrial routes that linked port cities in Europe with port cities in Asia and the New World. The second, highlights that instead of a linear model based on the simplistic West-East circulation, the analyses of the corpus of cartographic byōbu highlights a more complex radial system of vectors that departed from and arrived to a major fulcrum: the port city of Macao. This system of vectors is paired by independent linear vectors linking Japan, Korea and China as well as Amsterdam (directly or via Batavia) with Hirado and Nagasaki.

Edward S. COOKE (Yale University)

Professor - Department of the History of Art

Alexandra CURVELO (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Assistant Professor - Department of History of Art, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas

Weaving Relations: The Use of Exotic Textiles in Early Modern Japan

Textiles were the basis of long-distance trade relations across Asia, perhaps being the most global of the various commodities that entered into this type of trade in the period 1500-1800. With the presence of European powers in this geography, not only did Asian textiles played a significant role as profitable merchandise, as they promoted transcultural exchanges, including the introduction of new codes of dressing for the Europeans themselves. Clothing has always occupied a position closely linked to identity building, and dress in general, largely anticipate other types of interaction and communication. In these foreign lands, and even more so in the territories where there wasn’t a direct European political presence and means of control, as it happened in Japan, there was space for experiment, and for one to express himself in more unrestricted and eclectic ways. With the presence of the Southern-Europeans in its shores, not only the Japanese were in contact with European agents already sensitive to the new material cultures of Asia, as this territory became part of a structured and composite network of merchants operating in vast spaces in an almost global dimension.

The impact of the arrival and reception of exotic textiles in Japan, especially towards the end of the Edo and during the Meiji era, has been studied by scholars of different fields. The aim of this paper is to extend the chronology backward and to analyze the introduction of Persian, Indian, Southeast Asian and Chinese textiles in 16th Japan via the “Nau do Trato” (kurofune). Through this approach, I will examine the reaction in Japan to the dresses and textiles used by the nanban-jin, and the reception and direct impact of these foreign textiles in Japanese cultural and social norms from those early years of interaction.

Anne DUNLOP (University of Melbourne)

Professor - Centre of Visual Art

Zipangu Before the Jesuits: Medieval European Missions to East Asia - presentation cancelled

This paper examines images and ideas about Japan and East Asia before the sixteenth century. It concentrates on the years between about 1250 and 1400, when renewed contact in the wake of the Mongol conquests brought European missionaries and merchants into Central and Eastern Asia in search of diplomatic allies, religious converts, and commodities and trading partners. For the first time, in the accounts of Marco Polo and his contemporaries, Japan appears to the Latinate West- a shadowy and far-distant island of idolaters, rich in gold and pearls.

If a goal of this conference is to deepen our understanding of the complex agents and exchange in the early-modern global period, an analysis of this first and earliest moment of contact and representation can help to establish the concepts, information, and misunderstandings that Europeans brought with them into direct contact and encounter. The paper will therefore offer a brief overview of classical ideas before turning to the Mongol moment. It argues for the preeminent role of the thirteenth and fourteenth-century Franciscan missions in bringing new information and images into the European sphere, and seeks to determine how much these early missions set patterns and models for the sixteenth-century Christian missionary orders.

Fabian DRIXLER (Yale University)

Professor of History

Mark ERDMANN (University of Melbourne)

Lecturer - School of Culture and Communication

Nebuchadnezzar’s Draw: Revisiting Philips van Winghe’s Sketches of Azuchi Castle

In 1585, four Japanese youths presented to Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585) a remarkable set of paintings known as the Azuchi screens. Executed by Kanō Eitoku (1543-1590), commissioned by Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), and brought around the world by Jesuit missionaries, these works depicted Nobunaga’s Azuchi Castle and its surrounding town on the shores of Lake Biwa. The screens are lost and their fate remains a tantalizing mystery. Nevertheless, as the only visual record of the prototype of the iconic Japanese castle, a rare example of Eitoku’s brushwork, and a central prop in the first diplomatic exchange between Japan and the West, they remain uniquely significant international treasures.

This paper will consider the only known illustrated vestiges of the Azuchi screens: a set of prints for a treatise on “Indian” gods by Lorenzo Pignoria (1571-1631) based on sketches by the Louvain antiquarian Philips van Winghe (1560-1592). These clunkily composed images of a “tower” and a “gate” have long been dismissed as orientalist curiosities. However, through comparison with analogous paintings and examples of Japanese architecture, as well as an appreciation of Azuchi’s layout, their value as primary sources is newly revealed. In their details and the scattered clues left by the authors of these copies of copied images, a tentative, but significant re-identification of one of the prints’ subjects as the main hall of Sōkenji, the famed site of Nobunaga’s alleged apotheosis, is possible.

FUJIKAWA Mayu 藤川 真由 (Meiji University)

Senior Assistant Professor

The Tenshō Embassy’s European Clothes: Court and Missionary Functions in Italy and Japan

Fujikawa’s presentation is part of a project to complete a manuscript, which will be the first book-length investigation into the European visual images of both the Tenshō and Keichō embassies from Japan (1582-90 and 1613-20, respectively). Based on archival documents, the book analyzes why and how Europeans depicted these embassies from the perspectives of papal politics, court diplomacy, information network, and historicizing effort, both institutionally and individually. Discussions also include costumes, gifts, and the images of other non-Europeans to situate those of the Japanese within the larger diplomatic, artistic, and cross-cultural contexts.

Reinier HESSELINK (University of Northern Iowa)

Professor, Department of History

Plotting Power on a Map

Starting from the life of one samurai, Takenaka Shigeyoshi (aka Takenaka Uneme, 1588-1634), I will show how the location of his kamiyashiki exemplifies his position in the hierarchy of the Tokugawa Bakufu. At the hand of the first reliable map of Edo, printed in 1632, I will analyze how this map provides us with a clear view of Tokugawa power relations at the very moment that the ex-shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (1579-1632) lay on his deathbed. This will lead me to examine two cherished myths of Japanese historiography: 1. the idea that after Ieyasu’s assumption of the shogunate, in 1603, his samurai band quickly developed into a well-organized bureaucracy ruled by law; and 2. the idea that after Iemitsu’s accession to the shogunate in 1624 there existed, until Hidetada’s death in 1632, a system of dual rule equally divided between the Honmaru and the Nishinomaru of Edo Castle.

Elizabeth LILLEHOJ (DePaul University)

Professor - Department of the Fine Arts

The 1596 Ming Investiture of a King of Japan and Hideyoshi’s Attempt to Reshape an East Asian Diplomatic Order

Envoys of Emperor Wanli traveled to Osaka in 1596 and presented Ming investiture paraphernalia to Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The surviving paraphernalia—including garments (Myōhōin, Kyoto), a Patent of Investiture (Osaka City Museum), and an Edict with Instructions from Emperor Wanli (Kunai-chō)—provide fresh insight into Japan’s engagement in the East Asian War.

The Edict lists investiture gifts for Hideyoshi, including Ming court costumes. First on the list is “a deep crimson, round collared robe with woven-gold qilin badges,” thought to refer to a robe kept at Myōhōin. The mystical qilin was one of the highest Ming rank insignia, and Emperors presented qilin robes to imperial sons-in-law and other lofty nobles.

Traditional accounts say the investiture documents surprised Hideyoshi. When he heard that Wanli was naming him “king of Japan” (i.e., a vassal of the Ming empire), he tore up the document(s) in a rage. But the Patent and Edict survive, requiring us to re-assess. We find that Hideyoshi’s reaction was likely a ruse. He had launched the war in hopes of enlarging territorial claims and restoring trade with China. Financial interests personally motivated some of Hideyoshi’s generals, who were merchants and/or Christians. Even when the war reached a stalemate, Hideyoshi continued efforts to reshape the East Asian diplomatic order. Awareness of European activities in Asia, including Spanish colonization of the Philippines, encouraged Japanese expansionist aspirations. The Ming tribute-trade system had allowed for long stretches of stability in East Asia, but when faced with new global realities, it failed to avert war.

Yukio LIPPIT

Professor of History of Art and Architecture

Keynote Lecture - The Pictorial Cultures of Nanban

Samuel LUTERBACHER (Yale University)

Alumni Fellow - Department of the History of Art

Andrew MASKE (University of Kentucky)

Associate Professor - School of Art & Visual Studies

Tea Caddies, Trade, and Territory: Hakata Merchants and Hideyoshi’s Expansion of Power

Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s courtship of the merchants of Hakata appears to have begun around 1586. In that year, Kamiya Sōtan (1551-1635) was invited to Kyoto, where he was welcomed along with the most powerful warlords and merchants engaged in the practice of suki (tea ceremony). On the same trip, he took religious orders at the Zen temple Daitoku-ji, and met Hideyoshi for the first time. Hideyoshi’s invitation of Sōtan and other Hakata merchants was a clever way to garner their support for his planned military excursions into Kyushu. Later, in the 1590s, the relationship proved invaluable in providing supplies for the Japanese troops invading Korea.

It is intriguing that Hideyoshi did not use primarily financial incentives to draw the merchants of Hakata to his side. Neither did he use orders or threats. Instead, Hideyoshi used what has come to be called “soft power” – an attraction based on mutual respect and shared love of culture. This paper will explore possible reasons why Hideyoshi, who certainly did not hesitate to use military force, threats, and orders when he deemed them necessary, used such a conciliatory approach in dealing with the Hakata merchants and examine in particular the role that suki events and utensils played in facilitating their relationships.

Matthew McKELWAY (Columbia University)

Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History

D. Max MOERMAN (Barnard College / Columbia University)

Professor - Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures

Sonia OCAÑA (Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, Mexico)

Professor - History Department

From Nanban Lacquer to New Spaniard Mother-of-pearl Inlaid Paintings (enconchados)

Between 1573 and 1815, Asian objects arrived regularly in New Spain via the Manila Galleon. Albeit Japanese artworks have hardly been preserved in Mexico, proof of their circulation in New Spain is found both in documentary information and domestic works inspired by Japanese originals, such as mother-of-pearl inlaid paintings, currently known as enconchados. The scenes depicted on enconchados are very similar to those found on other paintings, except for the use of mother-of-pearl, which is inlaid and painted, showing its underneath shine under the layer of pigment. Frames are a very important part of enconchados; they have black backgrounds covered by flowers, leaves, birds, and, occasionally, grape clusters. Figures are usually outlined in black, painted in gold and shell encrusted. Their designs recall namban lacquer, but the figures are simpler and non-naturalistic.

Enconchados were made in Mexico City from the 1660s through the 1740s; that is, decades after the production of namban lacquer had come to an end. Enconchados were made by painters, with techniques and materials of Western origin. Some authors have believed that enconchados were made by Japanese immigrants. However, seventeenth century New Spain was the scenario of other artistic experimentations based on the circulation of Japanese originals, such as biombos (folding screens). This suggests that New Spain was itself an important market for Japanese art objects, which were in turn an important source for artistic inventiveness in the Americas in the seventeenth century.

Morgan PITELKA (University of Northern Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Professor of History and Asian Studies; Chair of the Department of Asian Studies (Joint appointment with Asian Studies)

Stephanie PORRAS (Tulane University)

Chair, Newcomb Art Department; Associate Professor

Ivory as a Littoral Material: Devotional Carving and Trade Across the Indian, Pacific and South China Seas

The art historical appellations given to seventeenth-century Catholic devotional ivory sculptures made in Asia (Hispano-Philippine or Singhalo-Portuguese, for instance) reinforce a conceptual binary often associated with colonial or export art objects, between European models and anonymous non-European makers. Yet closer consideration of these objects reveals a more complicated series of transcultural trajectories, as these figures were carved from African ivory, using European as well as Asian stylistic and iconographic models, and were largely produced for Latin American markets. This paper reorients the analysis of these artworks towards the material of ivory itself, its value and export, as well as artistic and technical innovations in its carving by artists operating across multiple oceans. Shifting focus from the European printed and sculpted models often provided to or procured by these carvers, to the early modern trade in both raw and carved ivory, highlights the role played by trading and artistic networks composed of primarily non-European actors.

In the absence of any surviving contracts or artist names, and with a paucity of archival references to the manufacture of these objects, the ivory sculptures themselves are the only record of a dizzying series of early modern migrations. Prized by merchants and consumers across the globe, both raw tusks and finished sculptures traversed the same Indian Ocean routes as the enslaved peoples brought from Africa and Asia to the Americas in the seventeenth century. Considering ivory’s relative fungibility as commodity, diplomatic gift and luxury material for devotional artworks, exposes still understudied links between the littoral zones of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Eliane ROUX (University of Genoa / Azuchi Castle Screens Network)

An ‘Antiquity’ from Japan: The Azuchi Castle Screens and Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century European Antiquary Networks

Harrison SCHLEY (Independent Scholar)

They Also Came to Japan: Depictions of the European Slave Trade in Japanese Art

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese merchants enslaved and traded people from Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and Korea through their trade port of Macau. Lúcio de Sousa’s pioneering research on the movement of enslaved Japanese across the Portuguese empire and the sale of Chinese and Korean captives in Japan has helped open the exploration of international slavery and forced migration within studies of East Asia.

The experiences of enslaved Africans and South Asians who came to Japan during this period have been less explored. Japanese paintings of Portuguese ships, envoys, and settlements from that era frequently depict laborers and crew from Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, many of whom would have been enslaved. These workers are typically portrayed as subordinate to European merchants and clergy with set tropes indicating servitude repeated across many works of art. Examining these paintings in the context of contemporary records such as such as Historia de Japam by the Jesuit Luís Fróis (1532–1597) and the diary of the English merchant Richard Cocks ((1566–1624), offers insight into lives and condition of enslaved people who came to Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This broader context aims to reposition these Japanese depictions of Portuguese traders in the context of the European slave trade and colonial project.

Anton SCHWEIZER (Kyushu University)

Professor - Faculty of Humanities

Construing a New Deity: Nanban Fūryū Dancers in Kanō Naizen’s Toyokuni Festival Screens

Patrick SCHWEMMER (Musashi University)

Faculty Member, Department of Humanities

A Transgender Saint in Translation: Marina the Monk in the Secret Books of the Hidden Christians

Marina the Monk was born a woman but chose to live as a man (changing her name to Marino) for the immediate purpose of joining her father in the Christian monastic life, perhaps originally in the caves of the Qadisha Valley in Lebanon, although her legend has been localized all across the Christian world. In Japan, too, her legend appears in the Barreto Manuscript in the Vatican Library, though not in the printed collection Sanctos no gosagueo of 1591, and it is one of only four saints’ lives extant in Japanese-script hand copies confiscated from hidden Christians during the Edo period. In the story, Marino is accused of having fathered an illegitimate child in the surrounding community, and rather than reveal his secret he accepts the blame, is expelled from the monastery, and dies alone in poverty, and when his estranged colleagues go to wash his body they realize he was innocent and bury him with great honors. I do a close reading of the two extant Japanese versions together with the Portuguese source, highlighting the process of stylistic localization and the theme of unjust condemnation and the burden of a secret, which the hidden Christians evidently found so compelling.

Timon SCREECH (SOAS, University of London)

Professor - Department of History of Art and Archaeology, School of Arts

Nanban Elements in the Cult of Ieyasu as Tōshō Daigongen

Birgit TREMML-WERNER (University of Växjö)

Researcher - Department of Cultural Sciences,
Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Nanban, the Christian Century and Other Co-produced Tropes: Murakami Naojirō’s Legacy for the Historiography of Cultural Exchange

Few other historians have shaped global views of the encounter between Japan and Europe in a period that is commonly referred to as namban bōeki 南蛮貿易or the Christian Century as the Kyushu born historian and translator Murakami Naojirō 村上直次郎 (1868-1966). How did that happen and what did Murakami do to establish such strong images and narratives? While it is a commonplace that academic history in Japan developed under the influence of Western history writing from the 1880s onwards, the reverse effects of historiographical exchange, however, have hardly been addressed. The study of Japan’s official early modern encounters with the outside world and its simultaneous engagement in Southeast Asia are one example how scholarship became entangled with implicit comparisons.

This paper discusses both the empirical and methodological impact of Western language sources and the institutionalisation of komonjogaku 古文書学 on the extensive Japanese scholarship on the namban. It moreover seeks to understand how, why and when the work by Japanese historians in return entered global discourses. Empirically, it looks at how Murakami and his students applied important tropes from the history of European maritime expansion such as merchant capitalism, individual agency and sovereign foreign relations when describing Japan’s engagement with the outside world from the late sixteenth century onwards. Combining approaches from global intellectual history with the methodology known as sites of citation, the paper discusses how narrative tropes were always co-produced across time and space.

TAKISAWA Osami 滝澤 修身 (Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University)

Professor - Faculty of Humanities, Department of Culture and Communication

Spain and the Azuchi Castle Screens

WANG Ching-Ling (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam)

Curator of Chinese Art

Japanese Objects in the Chinese Imperial Collection and their Transcultural Context

Japanese objects found their way to China around the sixteenth century. Objects such as folding fans and lacquerware soon became desirable, fashionable and valuable commodities. Scholars like Gao Lian (1573-1620) and Wen Zhenheng (1585-1645) both favored and appreciated Japanese objects, especially lacquerware, and put them in use in their studios.

Not only scholars, but also Chinese emperors valued and appreciated Japanese objects, they were included in the imperial collection. This article examines the Japanese objects in the collection, including porcelain and lacquerware and discusses them in a transcultural context. Firstly, the essay provides an overview of the Japanese objects in the Chinese court. Secondly, through some case studies, it discusses the context in which those objects were used. Worth noticing is, some of these objects were altered by the imperial workshop to be more suited to their new function in the court. Thirdly, the imperial workshop also imitated the Japanese work. The last part of this essay addresses the impact the objects had on Chinese art and its aesthetic practices.

WASHIZU Katsura 鷲頭 桂 (Tokyo National Museum)

学芸研究部調査研究課絵画・彫刻室 主任研究員

Global Circulation and Transformation of Japanese Folding Screens

Andrew M. WATSKY (Princeton University)

Professor - Department of Art & Archaeology

Withered, Shrivelled, and Cold, Etcetera: Translating Tenshō Tea Aesthetics in a Global Age

When the Southern Barbarians resided in Japan, wabi was the governing principle of chanoyu, the tea practice that was arguably the leading art form of the archipelago’s military and merchant elites. For “Japan’s Global Baroque” (Yale University, 2018), the precursor of the present symposium at Kyushu University, I probed wabi and the Europeans’ encounter with it. Now, in this paper, I will take the next step in this study and examine the language tea men adopted to invest wabi, and its objects, with distinctive aesthetic content. Among the central terms were karekashike samukare (“枯かしけ寒かれ,” “withered, shrivelled, and cold”) and sosō (“そさう,” “malformed, rough, and coarse”).

My time frame centers in and around the Tenshō era (1573-1592), from which survives an abundance of evidence, including the Records of Yamanoue no Sōji, a 1588 chanoyu treatise eponymously authored by a disciple of Sen no Rikyū, and as well, diaries kept by tea practitioners of the gatherings they attended and objects encountered. Such sources reveal much about the knotty aesthetic terms, but much also remains abstract and unexplained. The visiting Europeans were alert to these words and ideas, and their writings help fill the lexical gaps; especially valuable is the Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam, a Portuguese dictionary of the Japanese language the Jesuits compiled around this time (and published in 1603-1604).

The problems these terms pose concern translation—not simply of Japanese to Portuguese, but also of standard Japanese to tea-Japanese, as well as the translation from literary text to visual effect; and the incomplete and asymmetric ways that both in- and outsiders tended to the layers of interpretation.

YASUNORI Hata (Kyushu National Museum)

Senior Researcher, Cultural Properties Division

Mimi Hall YIENGPRUKSAWAN (Yale University)

Professor - Department of the History of Art