Introduction: The Visual Culture of the Edo Period

I. Contents and organization. The Edô period (1615-1867) was a diverse, indeed an explosive, stage in the development of visual representation in Japan. In this unit, we will concentrate especially on the development of popular culture and the "floating world," and alternate realm of fantasy and play which revolved around the twin poles of the Yoshiwara licensed quarter and the kabuki theater. While would barely be able to scratch the surface of Edo visual culture even with a whole semester devoted to the topic, we will be taking a brief look at three aspects of Edo visuality:

1. The floating world: image and text (gallery one)

2. Kabuki visuality (gallery two)

3. Vision, technology, and the West (gallery three)

II. Historical background

During this period the Tokugawa shoguns, beginning with Tokugawa Ieyasu, ruled the country from their military seat in Edo, present-day Tokyo. Contact with the West was restricted to trade with the Dutch, whose outpost was on the island of Dejima in Nagasaki. (Click here to review the periods of Japanese history and the subdivisions of the Edo period).

Edo society was autocratic and hierarchical. The Tokugawa shoguns divided the country into han, or domains, each ruled by a daimyô, or regional lord. Each of the daimyô was supported by an army of samurai, who, during the long Tokugawa peace, came to serve as bureaucrats or administrators more than soldiers (although they maintained their military paraphernalia and their warrior's code of ethics). To monitor the daimyô and keep them from becoming too powerful, the shoguns instituted a system of alternate attendance, where the daimyô and their samurai retinues (but not their wives) had to spend one out of every two years in the capital of Edo. This contributed both to the growth of Edo into a major metropolis, and to the development of a network of roads and post stations connecting the metropole and the provinces.

Regional trade flourished, thanks in part to this network of roads and the long pax tokugawa. A new money economy also fueled the growth of commerce. At the left are some examples of coins in circulation in the Edo period.

Many regional centers specialized in handicraft production, and new manufacturing techniques for various products were developed.

At right is a signplate and a perspective woodblock print showing the Etsugoya dry goods store. Lively, cavernous stores such as the Etsugoya symbolized the new money economy, and were the ancestors of today's Japanese department stores. The merchant class prospered in the Edo period, as did townsmen (chônin) in various service occupations who supported them. Although ranked below the samurai in the social order, the merchant class exercised much influence on Edo-period culture, supporting the Kabuki theater and patronizing the licensed quarters. As we will discuss in class, the licensed quarters and the kabuki theater were the primary subjects of ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world. Merchants and other chônin were also the primary consumers of mass-produced woodblock prints on ukiyo-e subjects.

III. Key terms.

1. Ukiyo (the floating world).

2. Mitate (comparison; parody)

 Kitao Masanobu "Tsuburi no Hikaru" ("Shiny head") from the illustrated book Temmei shinsen gojûnin isshu: Azumaburi kyôka bunko, 1786. Reproduced in Donald Jenkins, ed., The Floating World Revisited (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press and Portland Art Museum, 1993) 180.

 Kitagawa Fujimaro, "Kyôka Poets Mimicking the Six Immortals of Poetry," ca. 1800. Hanging scroll; inc and colors on silk; 40.7 x 51.5. From The Floating World Revisited 195.

Iki, sometimes translated as "chic," was a term which came to the fore in the Edo (Kantô) region. It is often associated with a sophisticated form of understatement. Such sophistication-within-understatement was to some extent a cultural response to the pressures of sumptuary reforms which outlawed showy dress and lavish cultural display.It is related to an earlier term for cultural panache, sui (literally, essence), which was used in the Kyoto-Osaka (Kamigata) region.

 Kitagawa Utamaro, "Flowers of Edo: Young Woman's Narrative Chanting to the Samisen." Woodblock print; 35.8 x 25.2 cm; ca. 1800.

This print shows a geisha-- an professional entertainer, not a courtesan. Her kimono shows her sense of style within a limited palate, while her pose suggests a certain coquetishness-- two qualities associated with the ideal of iki. In his study The Structure of Iki (see below) Kuki Shûzô argues that a kimono pattern of vertical stripes, such as that worn by the geisha in this picture, is a typical visual expression of iki.

From The Women of the Pleasure Quarter, ed. Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton (New York: Hudson Hills Press and the Worcester Art Museum, 1995) 42.

 Kitagawa Utamaro, "Courtesan in Deshabille" from the series Ten Feminine Facial Types. Woodblock print; 37.8 x 24.9 cm; early 1790's.

Another important aspect of iki was ikiji, or "pluck."

From The Women of the Pleasure Quarter, 132.

Both iki and sui referred to cultural forms of the floating world; a male customer who truly understood these forms was said to possess the quality of tsû-- connoisseurship or expert knowledge.

In her essay "The language of the pleasure quarter," Kazue Edamatsu Campbell writes as follows:

Each of these terms [sui, tsû, and iki] is an expression of the same general principle-- what the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga discussed as the single-minded and passionate obsession toward the acquisition of relevant knowledge by partcipants in a game to become superior players. But in the pleasure-quarters of Edo-period Japan, the acquisition of thorough knowledge alone did not qualify the player to be an expert or connoisseur. The knowledge had to be accompanied by a sensitivity to the human heart, an awareness of the fiction on which this particular play world was built, and the self-discipline to play one's role in a way that sustained the magic of the play.

     --In The Women of the Pleasure Quarter, ed. Elizabeth de Sabato Swinton (New York: Hudson Hills Press and the Worcester Art Museum, 1995) 76.

In his unique study Iki no kôzo (The Structure of Iki), originally published in 1930, Kuki Shûzô interrogates iki as a "mode of being" which is fundamentally a "phenomenon of conciousness," although it does have "objective expression" in various cultural forms such as kimono design, architecture, etc. Kuki Shûzô, Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki, trans. John Clark (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997) 34-35.

Kuki suggests that iki is composed of three primary elements: "coquetry" (bitai), "brave composure" (ikiji-- an ideal which he ties to the warrior ethic of Bushidô), and "resignation" (akirame-- an ideal tied to Buddhism). (Kuki 37-46)

Kuki then relates iki, and its opposite, yabo (borishness), to other pairs of opposing culture terms, such as shibumi (astringent) and amami (sweet), jôhin (refined) and gehin (unrefined), and hade (showy) and jimi (subdued), concluding with a complex three-dimentional mapping of these concepts (Kuki 64):