The papers in this number of Modern Asian Studies were originally prepared for a symposium that took place in London in December 1981. It was sponsored jointly by the Japan Foundation and the School of Oriental and African Studies in order to provide an opportunity for discussion of the cultural background to an important exhibition of Japanese art mounted by the Royal Academy during the winter of 1981–82.

As Peter Gay has observed in his stimulating and standard work on the European Enlightenment: ‘Even the most genial Christian had to regard his religion as absolutely true (and therefore all others as radically false), and heathens as unwitting precursors, or unregenerate enemies, or miserable souls in need of light.’ This conviction was held by the great majority of Europeans for centuries, and not least by the Roman Catholic Portuguese and the Calvinist Dutch who were successively the main intermediaries between Japan and the Western World. Of course, there were always some exceptions, such as the Portuguese fidalgo in the Moluccas, c. 1544, who commented that in spite of racial and cultural gaps, differences, and prejudices, ‘still, as the proverb says, the whole earth is one, and all its peoples are basically alike.’ However, as a general rule, many, perhaps most, Europeans were either hostile or else indifferent to Asian cultures. The Italian Jesuit Visitor Valignano stated that this applied especially to the Portuguese ‘who often termed even the Chinese and the Japanese “Niggers”.’ He also noted on one occasion that the Portuguese merchants from Macao seldom or never ventured further inland than Nagasaki and the Kyushu ports. ‘And because of the great difference in language, manners, and customs, the Japanese think very little of them, and they still less of the Japanese.’ This was written in 1583, and was probably an exaggeration even then. By the end of the century, it was quite inapplicable.

The continuities between the study of the West through Dutch in Tokugawa Japan and the program of modernization in the Meiji period seem self evident. The influence of Holland through Deshima became the focus of the life work of Itazawa Takeo and others well before the war, and it received detailed discussion from Charles Boxer in 1936. Nevertheless issues of the importance and influence of Tokugawa rangaku continue to be debated, and that debate greatly enriches our feel for Japanese society then and now.

It is generally accepted that nationalism has two frames of reference. One is external: the pursuit of national independence, asserting the nation's freedom from domination by other states or groups. The second is internal: a commitment to national unity, requiring political and social cohesion. Both are associated with awareness of cultural identity, which is the nation's image of itself in terms of those characteristics that are held to be common to its members.

Little did it occur to me when I began to translate Ogyū Sorai's Kyōchūkikō (‘Report from Journey to Kai’) some years ago that this endeavour would lead me to the first work that was written by this philosopher. Even after I had shown that the Kyōchūkikō was only a new and shorter edition (1710) of the earlier travelogue Fūryūshishaki (‘Report of the Elegant Emissaries’), written in 1706, it still took time before I realized that this must be the very first work to come from Sorai's brush. The Fūryūshishaki must be his first work and this means that he was 40 before he wrote anything that was literary, and of any length. What we have from before that time are short pieces, letters, poems, and memoranda; also the lexical work Yakubun sentei, which was probably written, at least partially, before 1706.

Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) stands at the forefront of those thinkers in Japanese history who are attracting the greatest attention today. When the work entitled Motoori Norinaga, a study of Norinaga's thought and method of scholarship written by the eminent literary critic, Kobayashi Hideo, was published in 1977, its sales triggered substantial journalistic comment, especially because the book was widely read even among those outside the academic community, such as mid-level business executives. At roughly the same time, there also appeared academic studies by several other scholars. Furthermore, while collections of Norinaga's works appeared three times prior to the end of the second world war (1901–03, 1924–27, and 1943–44, the last incomplete), a new large-scale collection totaling 23 volumes and including diaries, letters, and other related materials, as well as his published works, has been in publication since 1968, and is now nearing completion.

A curious and as yet little discussed phenomenon of the Edo period is the immense increase among ordinary lay people in journeys of pilgrimage. From the middle of the seventeenth century people of all classes, alone and in groups, began to make their way in ever larger throngs to the Ise Shrines, to Kōyasan, to Zenkōji, to Fujisan, and to the various circuits of thirty-three places dedicated to Kannon and the eighty-eight places dedicated to Kōbō Daishi.

Long ago in my early reading on Japanese literature and thought—I think I was studying G. W. Knox and A. Lloyd in their essays in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan—the name of Fujiwara Seika was mentioned as that of the founder of a movement of great historical importance. But until very recently the history of Japanese culture has not aroused much interest, and the local neo-Confucianism tended to be seen as a pretty poor reproduction of the Chinese models. This assessment of Japanese culture in such modest terms was accompanied by the standardized conception that saw in Shushigaku nothing more meaningful than an instrument of power in the hands of the Tokugawa family, a kind of intellectual build-up stimulated and protected merely because it served to prop up the régime that Ieyasu had founded, and to organize support for it.

As an aspect of the Kansei Reforms at the end of the eighteenth century initiated by the Councilor of the Elders, Matsudaira Sadanobu, the Tokugawa bakufu officially took over the administration of the Shōheikō (The Confucian University in Edo). The Shōheikō had been operated as a private school by the Hayashi family, who held the hereditary position of education councilors to the bakufu. With the expansion of the faculty and facilities under the new administration, ways were opened even for the children of any domain retainer and for those of peasants and merchants.

The formal, authoritarian organization of people with similar occupations or interests has been a feature of Japanese society throughout its history. As such, it must be of interest for its own sake and, no less perhaps, for the indications it can provide of the nature of Japanese society as a whole.

In 1568, Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) entered Kyoto. The warring daimyō of a small domain of Owari was about to begin the occupation of the capital with a great army rumored to be fifty or sixty thousand strong.

As compared with earlier times the emergence of period style in any sense of a unified concept during the Edo period is obscured for the historian by unprecedented factors: the new multiplication of figural and narrative subjects in painting, the predominance of new class interests and patronage, the dissemination of printed pattern books, the suddenly expanded commerce and industry of decorative art in its many branches. Viewed from outside ofjapan the scene has not been clarified by the recent Japanese official emphasis on the art of the Momoyama period as the proper historical perspective for restored imperial rule, nor by an obsession in the west with the special qualified and genre interest of the prints and paintings of the Ukiyo-e school. The work of the latter, in a well-established conventional wording, was ‘patronised by comparatively uncultured people, aimed at a simple and unsophisticated expression, mostly beautiful and sometimes even sensuous rather than deeply spiritual and scholarly’. This approach to the so richly varied art of Edo, and to the original dimension within it created by the new relation of decorative to expressive art, reinforced by the fragmentation of schools, has militated against the definition of pervasive structures in composition which endow the whole art of the period with its distinctive character. The present paper looks to textile decoration as epitomizing a universal trend in design and as an index to stylistic change with some claim to general validity.

These are two very different assessments of Japanese art and artists both published in London during the 1860s. We may argue that both comments are ill-conceived and prejudiced; yet both in their own way are characteristic Western reactions of the time. In this paper I should like to explore the Western image of Japanese art during the period from 1853 to 1867.

The opening up of Japan to the west and the consequent influences of the west and of Japan upon each other are remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is the interchange of styles and techniques of the arts and crafts one to the other. The export of Japanese works of art, and the influence upon European artistic production during the Meiji period (though often of works produced during the Edo period) have all but obscured the remarkable effects Japanese export art had upon the west during the period of self-imposed semi-isolation. Of course Japan was also greatly influenced by western art; that is not the subject of this paper, but it is a subject of great interest, worthy of considerable attention.

Hiiki is the word commonly used for support given to a Kabuki actor, or for the supporter or fan himself. It can be applied to other sorts of ‘fan’, such as one who follows a particular sumō wrestler. The derivation of the word is not certain, but it is generally taken as a lengthened form of hiki, with a meaning of ‘pulling’ or ‘pulling together’. The clubs themselves were known as hiiki renchū, the last element having the alternative pronunciation renjū. Throughout this paper, ‘hiiki’, ‘supporter’ and ‘fan’ have been used indiscriminately with the same meaning.

The more spectacular incidents in the career of Utaemon III (1778–1838) took place in Osaka. They include a fierce rivalry with the Arashi family, especially Rikan I (1769–1821), and a later career characterized by a marked reluctance to retire. In this account of his life, much use will be made of the documentary evidence of Osaka actor prints, and also of banzuke, which are the programmes of performances at a particular theatre. Banzuke come in various forms, including the illustrated ones called e-banzuke, more or less abbreviated ones such as those used apparently rather like fly-posters for circuses in England (tsuji-banzuke, put up at street-corners), and the standard form which lists the roles and those who performed them, names of musicians, name of zamoto or manager, theatre, date, and so on. Many libraries have collections of these available for inspection, but I should like to mention here another source. In the Waseda University Theatre Museum there survives a sort of theatrical scrap-book, consisting of boxes of made-up books with materials from the 1620s to 1827, but in fuller detail for the period of the life of Utaemon III, which was of great interest to the compiler, who is thought to have been a wealthy Osaka ginseng merchant and kabuki fan called Yoshida Goun, who employed Hamamatsu Utakuni, a well-known theatrical critic, to collect the material, order illustrations from artists, write explanatory pieces, arrange and catalogue it.

Mayama Seika was born in Sendai in 1878 and came to Tokyo, after an unsuccessful start to a medical career, to try his hand at writing in 1903. A young writer needed a patron and literary mentor, if he was to have any hope of rising in the bundan, and Mayama set about finding one. He was rebuffed by Tokutomi Kenjirō, attached himself to Satō Kōroku for about one year and finally became a monkasei of Oguri Fūyō in 1905. Under Fūyō's tutelage, although the small difference in their ages and Mayama's strong character precluded a normal sensei/deshi relationship, Mayama Seika became a Naturalist writer of some note at the time. In six years, between 1905 and 1911, he published nearly one hundred short stories, most in prestigious literary magazines. Frank description of life in the raw was a requirement of Naturalist authors and many of Mayama's works were strong in this quality. In particular his accounts of life in poverty-stricken agricultural communities of the Tōhoku area, observed with a doctor's eye, and his accurate reproduction of the dialects of that region have been singled out as distinctive contributions to this genre of literature.

Edo culture, in spite of its continuing presence, was not highly valued in the Meiji period. In the Taishō period, when Westernization was again at a high tide, the cult of Edo developed among minorities. In the war years of Shōwa, 1931–1945, when the cult of Japan was widely subscribed to, the cult of Edo was at its lowest ebb. The same unpopularity continued during the Occupating period, 1945–1952. After 1952, in parallel to economic recovery and accelerated industrialization, the cult of Edo emerged in the field of young people's fashion as an expression of their yearning for simple living.

Individuals and societies are as much influenced and motivated by perceptions of reality as by reality itself, indeed possibly more so. It is in that sense that the images which one society holds in relation to another are highly significant in terms of an understanding of the relationship between the two. Japanese officials tend to stress that problems which exist between Japan and Europe are due to ‘misunderstandings’—and indeed the fact that Endymion Wilkinson's book on Europe and Japan (‘Misunderstanding’) has proved such a best-seller in its Japanese version, GOKAI, indicates that it struck a sensitive chord among the Japanese public. In other words, the image, it is alleged, is out of focus with reality. Presumably an aspiration, and an entirely legitimate one, in the mounting of the Great Japan exhibition was to redress and improve Japan's image in the West, namely by stressing the cultural legacy with the intention of diverting attention from the more powerful industrial dimension.