fraleigh

"Blood Into Ink: the Poetry of the Shishi in Nineteenth Century Japan"
Tuesday, October 9 at 3:30 p.m. Golding 101
 * Matthew Fraleigh** (Brandeis University)

The shishi, or “men of high purpose,” a group of mostly young samurai who banded together in the mid-nineteenth century behind various pro-imperial causes, also produced an extensive body of shi poetry. Whether they used Chinese poetry to vent their displeasure with the status quo or to stridently call for the overthrow of the shogunate, whether their poems attested to the purity of their own intentions or gave voice to ethnocentric or xenophobic ideas, the shishi shared a nationalistic identification with Japan, an intense concern for its fate and a stated willingness to become martyrs. Considering its requirement of familiarity with an extensive corpus of Chinese texts, poetic rules, and rhetorical techniques, not to mention its privileged status as an “insiders’” literature, the kanshi form may at first seem an unlikely choice for Japanese nationalists, who claimed to value direct action and unadorned expression, and who saw themselves principally as opponents of the establishment. This paper examines how Chinese poetry could become the dominant expressive form for the shishi of the bakumatsu period, one that forged bonds between various disenfranchised figures – often in times of greatest duress. After identifying some of the institutional, linguistic, and cultural factors that created a compositional context for Chinese poetry among the shishi, I examine works by Fujita Tōko (1806-1855), Yoshida Shōin (1830-1859), Hashimoto Sanai (1834-1859), Takasugi Shinsaku (1839-1867), Saigō Takamori (1828-1877), and others, looking at how the specific Chinese allusions and texts they chose could be re-worked, and how these in turn circulated as an intertextual currency among the shishi.

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