Gerald Groemer

In a tradition extending from the medieval era up through the middle of the 19th century, visually disabled Japanese women known as Goze would tour the Japanese countryside as professional singers, contributing to the vitality of rural musical culture. Gerald Groemer shows that the solidarity these singers achieved through narrative and music was based on the convergence of their desire to achieve social autonomy and the wish of lower-class to mitigate the cultural deprivation to which they were subject.

Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan

Goze

Before the twentieth century, Japanese religious and cultural life was shaped by a variety of yearly ceremonies, festivals, and customs. These annual events (nenju gyoji) included Shinto festivals in which participants danced through the night to boisterous music and Buddhist temple practices that honored deities, great priests, or temple founders with solemn rituals and prayers—and sometimes, when the Buddha was invoked, raucous dancing. Temples also hosted popular fairs, where holy objects and artwork were displayed to the faithful and curious. Countless other celebrations were held annually at the residences of the nobility and military elite and at commoner domiciles. Kyoto, the imperial—and cultural—capital since the eighth century, was the center of many of these events. From Kyoto festivals, rituals, and celebrations diffused to other parts of the land, ultimately shaping religious, artistic, and everyday life as a whole. By the seventeenth century the Kyoto public wished to inform itself more accurately about nenju gyoji and their dates and meanings. As a result, a growing number of guidebooks and almanacs were written and published for the urban populace. This volume is the first to present translations of two such publications. Introductory chapters explain Japanese conceptions of time and space within which annual celebrations took place and outline how ceremonies and festivals in and about Kyoto were chronicled, described, and interpreted from the earliest times to the seventeenth century. The final two chapters offer annotated translations of writings from the seventeenth century that catalogue and describe the dates, sites, meanings, and histories of many Kyoto annual events. The two works, one largely historical, the other more ethnographic in nature, indicate not only when and where observances and commemorations took place, but also how their authors understood the significance of each. Both translations feature a large number of illustrations depicting events as they appeared in Kyoto at the time.

Edo-Period Writings on Annual Ceremonies, Festivals, and Customs

A Year in Seventeenth-Century Kyoto

Japanese zuihitsu (essays) offer a treasure trove of information and insights rarely found in any other genre of Japanese writing. Especially during their golden age, the Edo period (1600–1868), zuihitsu treated a great variety of subjects. In the pages of a typical zuihitsu the reader encountered facts and opinions on everything from martial arts to music, food to fashions, dragons to drama—much of it written casually and seemingly without concern for form or order. The seven zuihitsu translated and annotated in this volume date from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Some of the essays are famous while others are less well known, but none have been published in their entirety in any Western language. Following a substantial introduction outlining the development of the genre, “Tales That Come to Mind” is an early seventeenth-century account of Edo kabuki theater and the Yoshiwara “pleasure quarters” penned by a Buddhist monk. “A Record of Seven Offered Treasures,” composed by a retired samurai-monk near the end of the seventeenth century, starts as a treatise on the proper education of youth but ends as a critique of the author’s own life and moral failings. Perhaps the most famous piece in the volume, “Monologue,” was drafted by the renowned Confucianist Dazai Shundai, a keen and insightful observer of life during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Dazai treats, in turn, poetry, the tea ceremony, comic verse, music, theater, and fashion. “Idle Talk of Nagasaki” is an entertaining record of a journey to Nagasaki by a group of Confucianists in the early eighteenth century. In “Kyoto Observed,” a mid-eighteenth-century Edo resident compares the shogun’s and the emperor’s capital in a series of brief vignettes. An 1814 zuihitsu classic written by a physician, “A Dustheap of Discourses” presents another colorful mosaic of topics related to life in Edo. The book closes with “The Breezes of Osaka,” a lively essay by a highly cultured Edo administrator contrasting the food, life, and culture of his hometown with that of Osaka, where he briefly served as mayor in the 1850s.

An Anthology of Zuihitsu Writing from Early Modern Japan

The Land We Saw, the Times We Knew

Stephen Addiss

J. Thomas Rimer

Compiled in this volume is original material on Japanese arts and culture from the prehistoric era to the Meiji Restoration (1867). These sources, including many translated here for the first time, are placed in their historical context and outfitted with brief commentaries, allowing the reader to make connections to larger concepts and values found in Japanese culture. This book contains material on the visual and literary arts, as well as primary texts on topics not easily classified in Western categories, such as the martial and culinary arts, the art of tea, and flower arranging. More than sixty color and black-and-white illustrations enrich the collection and provide further insights into Japanese artistic and cultural values. Also included are a bibliography of English-language and Japanese sources and an extensive list of suggested further readings.

An Illustrated Sourcebook

Traditional Japanese Arts and Culture

Chikuzan Takahashi

Blind Musicians, Tsugaru-jamisen, and the Folk Music of Northern Japan, with the Autobiography of Takahashi Chikuzan

The Spirit of Tsugaru

In a tradition extending from the medieval era to the early twentieth century, visually disabled Japanese women known as goze toured the countryside as professional singers. An integral part of rural musical culture, the goze sang unique narratives of their own making and a significant repertory of popular ballads and short songs. Goze activities peaked in the nineteenth century, and some women continued to tour well into the middle of the twentieth. The last active goze lived until 2005. In Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan, Gerald Groemer examines the way of life, institutions, and songs of these itinerant performers. Groemer shows that the solidarity and success goze achieved with the rural public through narrative and music was based on the convergence of the goze's desire for a degree of social and economic autonomy with the audience's wish to mitigate the cultural deprivation it so often experienced. Goze recognized audiences as a stimulus for developing repertories and careers; the public in turn recognized goze as masterful artisans who acted as powerful agents of widespread cultural development. As the first full-length scholarly work on goze in English, this book is an invaluable resource to scholars and students of Japanese culture, Japanese music, ethnomusicology, and disability studies worldwide.

This book presents a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study of the emergence, development, and demise of music, theatre, recitation, and dance witnessed by the populace on thoroughfares, plazas, and makeshift outdoor performance spaces in Edo/Tokyo. For some three hundred years this city was the centre of such arts, both sacred and secular. This study outlines the nature of the performances, explores the social relations which lay behind them, and reveals vast complexity: an obligation of gift-giving on the part of observers; performers who were often economic migrants fallen on hard times; relations of performance to social class; a class system much more finely gradated than the official four caste system; and institutions of professional organization and registration, enforced by government, with penalties for unregistered performers. The book discusses how performing, witnessing, and rewarding performance were closely bound up with economy, society and government, how the interaction between various groups related to socio-economic advancement, how the system of street performance reinforced social control, and how the balance between different groups shifted over time.

The Beggar's Gift

Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600-1900

In a tradition extending from the medieval era to the early twentieth century, visually disabled Japanese women known as goze toured the Japanese countryside as professional singers and contributed to the vitality of rural musical culture. The goze sang unique narratives (many requiring several hours to perform) as well as a huge repertory of popular ballads and short songs, typically accompanied by a three-stringed lute known as the shamisen. During the Edo period (1600-1868) goze formed guild-like occupational associations and created an iconic musical repertory. They were remarkably successful in fighting discrimination accorded to women, people with physical disabilities, the poor, and itinerants, using their specialized art to connect directly to the commoner public. The best documented goze lived in Echigo province in the Japanese northwest. Although their activities peaked in the nineteenth century, some women continued to tour until the middle of the twentieth. The last active goze survived until 2005. In Goze: Blind Women and Musical Performance in Traditional Japan, author Gerald Groemer argues that goze activism was primarily a matter of the agency of performance itself. Groemer shows that the solidarity goze achieved with the rural public through narrative and music was based on the convergence of the goze's desire to achieve social autonomy and the wish of lower-class to mitigate the cultural deprivation to which they were otherwise so often subject. It was this correlation of emancipatory interests that allowed goze to flourish and attain a degree of social autonomy. Far from being pitied as helpless victims, goze were recognized as masterful artisans who had succeeded in transforming their disability into a powerful social tool and who could act as agents of widespread cultural development. As the first full-length scholarly work on goze in English, this book is sure to prove an invaluable resource to scholars and students of Japanese culture, Japanese music, ethnomusicology, and disability studies worldwide.

This admirable and necessary volume allows the original writers to speak to us directly. Though all this is carefully documented, we are at the same time spared any layers of scholarly interpretation. Rather, the richness of the original reaches us complete. —Donald Richie, Japan Times, May 14, 2006 Japanese artists, musicians, actors, and authors have written much over the centuries about the creation, meaning, and appreciation of various arts. Most of these works, however, are scattered among countless hard-to-find sources or make only a fleeting appearance in books devoted to other subjects. Compiled in this volume is a wealth of original material on Japanese arts and culture from the prehistoric era to the Meiji Restoration (1867). These carefully selected sources, including many translated here for the first time, are placed in their historical context and outfitted with brief commentaries, allowing the reader to make connections to larger concepts and values found in Japanese culture. The book is a treasure trove of material on the visual and literary arts, but it contains as well primary texts on topics not easily classified in Western categories, such as the martial and culinary arts, the art of tea, and flower arranging. More than 60 color and black and white illustrations enrich the collection and provide further insights into Japanese artistic and cultural values.

This volume presents a series of five portraits of Edo, the central region of urban space today known as Tokyo, from the great fire of 1657 to the devastating earthquake of 1855. This book endeavors to allow Edo, or at least some of the voices that constituted Edo, to do most of the speaking. These voices become audible in the work of five Japanese eye-witness observers, who notated what they saw, heard, felt, tasted, experienced, and remembered. “An Eastern Stirrup,” presents a vivid portrait of the great conflagration of 1657 that nearly wiped out the city. “Tales of Long Long Ago,” details seventeenth-century warrior-class ways as depicted by a particularly conservative samurai. “The River of Time,” describes the city and its flourishing cultural and economic development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “The Spider’s Reel” looks back at both the attainments and calamities of Edo in the 1780s. Finally, “Disaster Days,” offers a meticulous account of Edo life among the ruins of the catastrophic 1855 tremor. Read in sequence, these five pieces offer a unique “insider’s perspective” on the city of Edo and early modern Japan.

Gerald Groemer

Books

Your next favorite book is out there