Abstract: This article examines the Satsuma stupas ( satsumatō ), a group of distinctive stone monuments produced in coastal Kyushu during the Kamakura period, as evidence of localized Buddhist material practice shaped through transregional contact. Rather than treating these monuments as anomalous derivatives of continental prototypes or as passive by-products of maritime trade, this study approaches them as material responses to changing religious and social conditions in thirteenth-century Japan. Through a comparative analysis of stone stupa forms from Southern Song coastal China and their selective reception in Kyushu, the article traces how Song-style visual idioms were transmitted, transformed, and redeployed without the wholesale transfer of their original doctrinal frameworks. Attention is given to the roles of Zen expansion, funerary practice, imported materials, and artisanal networks in shaping these monuments. Situating the Satsuma stupas within overlapping spheres of maritime exchange and local religious need, this study argues that they represent community-based, non-elite forms of Buddhist expression that illuminate how "ordinary" monuments mediated death, memory, and salvation at the margins of institutional orthodoxy in medieval Japan.
Abstract: This article examines the integration of discourses on respiration into kōan exegesis within the Genjū lineage of Rinzai Zen in medieval Japan. Drawing on missan (records of private face-to-face exchanges between masters and students on various kōan ) preserved at the Matsugaoka Bunko and presenting a selection of these as annotated translations, it argues that Genjū monks developed a distinctive interpretive framework within kōan discourse in which breath occupied a central role. This framework, however, can only be fully understood when situated within broader medieval Japanese Buddhist discourses on respiration, particularly those articulated within Shingon Buddhism (including the Tachikawa sublineage), Tendai's Genshi kimyōdan initiations, and Jōdo Shinshū's secret insights. Through a comparative analysis of these parallel traditions, the study demonstrates that Genjū monks understood respiration as both a physical practice and a conceptual manifestation of nonduality. Breath thus emerges as the locus where cosmology, embodiment, and realization converge in unity, forming the essential foundation of kōan practice. Ultimately, this study proposes that respiration offers a vital lens for rethinking the relationship between embodiment and exegesis in kōan practice and Buddhism more broadly.
Reconstructing the lives of Shibukawa Sachiko and Ki no Yoshiko, the two official wives of Ashikaga Yoshiakira, is difficult, for their histories can only be glimpsed partially through diaries kept by the chroniclers of their time that address their natal families, husband, and male children and through other sources such as death records, land documents, and archaeological reports. By painstakingly searching out pieces of evidence about how these women lived, where they gave birth and how they dealt with their children's deaths, the types of activities in which they engaged, their relationships with other women, and how they were remembered after death, we can begin to build an outline of their lives. This article brings together small but significant pieces of information that paint a vivid portrait of two women who have been marginalized in Japanese history.
With a focus on Jippensha Ikku's Hara no uchi yojo shuron (The Essentials of Healthy Living Inside the Abdomen; z799), this article explores the role of metaphors in the portrayal of the medical body, health, and disease in late Edo-period "yellow-cover" (kibyoshi) fiction and popular prints and how the use of metaphor in these works fit within the broader intellectual currents of the times. The study shows how such graphic narratives built on the rich tradition of metaphorical ways of thinking about the body that had been inherent in Sino-Japanese medicine virtually since its inception. I examine how the influx of medical themes and their metaphorical heritage in late-Edo fiction took place against the backdrop of a marked increase in the circulation of medical knowledge for lay audiences in the Edo period-a process in which fiction itself played a part. In this context, I discuss two distinct yet interlinked lines of metaphorical thinking that enjoyed popularity in late-Edo fiction and popular prints, as well as in contemporary educational and health-related texts-namely, the tropes of health in relation to societal harmony on the one hand and moral education on the other. Ultimately, my contention is that when writers of fiction came to use images of the medical body, health, and disease for the purposes of entertainment, they often rendered absurd the medical, political, and moral orthodoxies of their day, presenting visions of "ailing" social and moral bodies quite at odds with the views that educators, scholars, and the authorities had been seeking to promote.
The compiler of the poetry collection Hyakunin isshu, among the most famous works of Japanese literature, was long believed to be Fujiwara no Teika. Today, however, scholars broadly doubt this attribution, given substantial indications that Hyakunin isshu was itself a reworking of the earlier anthology Hyakunin shuka (in contrast, quite likely Teika's compilation). The present article revisits these origins, starting with the evidence tying Teika to Hyakunin shuka but examining primarily that prior collection's impetus in a certain commission undertaken by Teika for Utsunomiya Rensho: a request to personally produce ornamental poem cards (shikishigata) for the shoji (sliding screens) of Rensho's own villa. As destined recipient for such a gift of waka art, this Rensho-head of the Utsunomiya clan, prestigious political and religious figure, father-in-law to Teika's son-represents a critical context for the creation of Hyakunin shuka/Hyakunin isshu, one often under-appreciated in previous research. Focusing on Rensho to address this neglect, the article investigates in detail parallel examples of screen poetry gifted to Rensho, specifically two further sets from Teika and his son, respectively.
This article presents a fully annotated English translation of Jippensha Ikku's "yellow-cover book" (kibyoshi) Hara no uchi yojo shuron, one of a number of late-Edo works of popular fiction and prints that used the inner workings of the human body as their subject matter. A close reading of the work shows how it relies heavily on Sino-Japanese medical concepts-particularly those propounded in Kaibara Ekiken's Confucian-inflected health cultivation text Yojokun-and how it draws on the moral teachings of Shingaku ("Mind-Learning"); thus the present article reveals the flow of knowledge between medical, moral, and literary discourses. It demonstrates, moreover, the interest that Hara no uchi yojo shuron holds not only for literary scholars as an example of popular fiction's turn toward more serious subject matter in the wake of the Kansei Reforms but also for scholars of medical history as a text that incorporates notions of health cultivation and the medical body that were current in Ikku's day.
Scholars have long noted the essential role of nyobo, or ladies-inwaiting, in The Tale of Genji. Although rarely taking center stage, these seemingly peripheral characters have been understood to constitute networks through which information could flow, often "offstage," thus setting in motion much of the tale's drama and propelling the narrative forward. This article examines the prominence of ladies-in-waiting in the tale's earliest extant adaptation, the mid-twelfth-century Genji Scrolls. My study, employing both art historical and literary textual analyses, demonstrates that the nyobo's function informs their treatment and placement in the scrolls' images as well as several aspects of the work's visual structure. It also adds to scholarship on voyeurism in Genji by noting the ways in which information gathering is shown to be multisensory rather than limited to the use of vision and to be the purview of female as well as male characters. Finally, paralleling the role of nyobo as points of connection in the tale's narrative structure, I show how images of the ladies-in-waiting in the Genji Scrolls tie together disparate elements of the tale and also reveal hidden meanings to astute readers and viewers.
The role of music and dance in the creation of the modern Japanese nation-state has yet to be fully appreciated. Dance was among the many areas of social activity in which the Japanese encountered different attitudes and practices after the forced opening of the country to Western powers. Concern about Western contempt for the allegedly immoral ways of the Japanese people, as well as the elite's contempt for the practices of the common people, led to regulation and prohibition of customs deemed offensive-including, in the z87os, the dances associated with the Bon festival. Meanwhile, Western-style ballroom dancing was introduced as part of a "Western civilization" (seiyo bunmei) package, but it, too, acquired a dubious reputation. Borrowing heavily from bon odori, the reform- oriented musicologists Tanaka Shohei and Tanabe Hisao devised so odori (communal dancing), which they intended as a more appropriate social and leisure activity for middle- and upper-class families. The form, later renamed katei odori (home dance), attracted significant media attention in the z9aos, although its actual dissemination is hard to gauge. The current article examines these attempts to regulate bon odori and its reinvention as katei odori, arguing that both of these efforts were part of a broader agenda for reforming social life and, moreover, exemplified the process of creating a democratic national culture that could be shared by all members of the nation. The article also discusses the dances as examples of how elements of common culture, despised and condemned by the social elite in the early Meiji period, were rehabilitated and transformed into cultural assets.
