Over the last twenty years, institutional and academic definitions of “cultural heritage” have gradually abandoned the assumption that “cultural properties” should be identified with their material components (Aikawa 2004). As a consequence of this shift, the concept of “intangible heritage” has been mobilized to indicate «a set of practices around specific cultural performances such as storytelling, music, craft, workplace knowledge, food and other phenomena» (Smith, Wetherell and Campbell 2018, 9). Japan has had a significant role in the creation of this new category: for example, the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage has adopted specific formulations originally introduced in the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity (Hassard 2009; Akagawa 2014). Yet, Japan has also tended to emphasize the authoritative character of textual sources and canons –as opposed to immaterial or intangible practices– as physical proof of the “authenticity” of modern cultural manifestations like music and poetry.

This panel investigates the centrality of texts and their interpretations in the effort by cultural elites and other social stakeholders to reconstruct, actualize, re-enact and reuse Japanese cultural heritage. Bringing together scholars working across different fields, including literary studies, theatre, intellectual history and historical musicology, the panel will feature both modern and premodern case studies, with the aim of designing a new, interdisciplinary approach to the study of Japanese “textual heritage”.

If Koten Means Heritage. Practices of “Heritagization” of Chinese and Japanese Past in the Poetic Discourse of the Early Heian Period

Edoardo Gerlini (Ca' Foscari University of Venice/Waseda University)

The term koten (classic), often intended as opposite to “contemporary”, or as a synonym of “premodern”, contributed partially to the idea that the study of the past, being unrelated to the present, is unsuitable to solve issues of modern society, leading to the progressive marginalization of classical studies in academic and school curricula. But recent theorizations of cultural heritage, intended «not so much as a ‘thing’, but as a cultural and social process, which engages with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage with the present» (Laurajane Smith 2006:2), as something that «has always been with us and has always been produced by people according to their contemporary concerns and experiences» (David Harvey 2001:320), suggest new possibilities for the “reuse” of literary heritage and the role of classical studies today.

Reflecting interdisciplinarily on well-known terms like “heritagisation” and “canonization”, this paper aims to demonstrate that an “heritage discourse”, namely a conscious reception and reuse of the past by the posterity to fulfill new needs and scopes, did exist in literary and historical texts in premodern Japan. Starting from the definition proposed by Wiebke Denecke (2004) of “creative appropriation” and “textual reenactment” of Chinese antiquity in early Japanese poetry, this paper will show textual evidence by analyzing prefaces of poems and of poetic anthologies – from Kaifūsō to the Imperial kanshi collections, from Michizane to the Kokinshū – focusing on the rhetorical strategies adopted in the literary metadiscourse by cultural elites of Nara-Heian Japan to legitimize themselves.

What if the Silk Road Sounded Japanese? Musical Manuscripts from Dunhuang and their Japanese Reconstructions

Andrea Giolai (International Research Center for Japanese Studies)

As an emblem of early transnational flows and «a model of idealized exchange» (Chin 2013), the Silk Road continues to capture the Japanese imagination, fueling new forms of cultural mediation and public representation. Every year, the success of temporary exhibitions that showcase Central and East Asian treasures from the Shōsōin repository in Nara confirms the lasting centrality of the Silk Road imaginary in the overall discourse of Japanese cultural heritage. Among these objects are precious musical instruments once used for the entertainment of the court of Chang’an.

This presentation examines recent attempts promoted by the National Theater of Japan to “reconstruct” both the Shōsōin musical instruments and their earliest surviving musical notations from Dunhuang (see Terauchi 2008). Analyzing different approaches to the interpretation of textual sources, I will highlight a tension between philological strategies that strive to «follow the same principles demanded of reconstruction and conservation in archaeology, architecture, and visual art» (Wolpert 2010) and performance-oriented reconstructions that problematize widespread claims to “authenticity”. While theaters and concert halls are often regarded as «sonic museums» (Kivy 1995) in which embodied practices become institutionalized and commodified, the examples I explore complicate conventional understandings of the relationship between musical texts and their sonic realization across time and space. Ambiguously located at the intersection of “transnotation”, “reconstruction”, “reworking” and “re-enactment”, Japanese re-appropriations of Silk Road music bring into view the cultural politics at work in the safeguarding of intangible heritage, raising the important question of who gets to (re)claim the sonic past.

The Creation and Reconstruction of Saibara in the Edo Period: Uragami Gyokudō’s Attempts to Reproduce the Musical Culture of Heian Japan

Emiko Takenouchi (Kyoto City University of Arts)

The term Saibara refers to the music produced by the aristocratic society of the Heian period. This repertoire consisted of popular songs with poetic texts sung in Japanese and accompanied by Tōgaku instruments. In the Heian period, contrary to current practice, it was common to play gagaku instruments as solo instruments, or to rearrange musical compositions for different instruments.

Although by the early Edo period Saibara had completely disappeared, in 1626 some Saibara songs were reconstructed from surviving ancient notations. This was only the first of several attempts carried out throughout the Edo period. In this context, the famous bunjin literati and master of the Chinese 7-string zither qin (guqin) Urakami Gyokudō (1745-1820) arranged various Saibara for qin. The qin was used in Japan during the Heian period, but subsequently fell into disuse. In the Edo period, however, it was rediscovered by the bunjin intellectuals. The production of qin versions of the Saibara repertoire was an homage to the qin of the Heian period, and functioned as a tool to better understand the musical culture of Heian Japan. Urakami Gyokudō’s qin Saibara were published, but they did not give rise to a performance tradition. In this presentation, I argue that by studying Edo- period reconstructions of Saibara it might be possible to rebuild the qin music of the Heian period as re-imagined by the literati of the Edo.

The Rhetoric of Cultural Revival in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Confucianism

Yoshitaka Yamamoto (National Institute of Japanese Literature)

At first glance, the flowering of Confucian scholarship and Sinitic literature during the Edo (1603- 1868) and Meiji (1868-1912) periods may seem completely unprecedented in the intellectual and literary history of Japan. Yet some Confucian scholars in the first decades of Edo viewed the rising interest in Confucianism as constituting a return to the golden age of early Japan, envisioning themselves as participating in the restoration of the long-diminished cultural heritage of the Heian (794-1185) court. For example, as Miyazaki Shūta has pointed out, seventeenth-century Rinke Confucian scholars in service of the Tokugawa shogun often idolized Heian-period court literati.

In this presentation, I will examine the rhetoric of cultural revival in the Sinitic texts composed by Japanese Confucian scholars on the occasion of the opening of Matsunaga Sekigo’s Confucian lecture hall in Kyoto in 1648. In particular, I will consider the ways in which claiming to be heir to the heritage of Heian court culture could have benefited the various parties involved in the establishment of the lecture hall: namely, members of the Tokugawa shogunate, members of the court including the emperor, and independent Confucian scholars. I will argue that the rubric of cultural revival and restoration proved useful for asserting the legitimacy of relatively new and volatile institutions and practices, such as the Tokugawa shogunate and its reunification of Japan, the alliance between the shogunate and the court, and the espousal of recent Korean and Chinese texts, scholarship, and literary trends.