Browsing by Subject "Japan"

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1. At the Conflux

At the Conflux is a three part musically driven time-lapse film that tours Japan by road and rail. It is an exploration of its sprawling nocturnal cityscapes crisscrossed by thruways, its urban grid illuminated by fiery-hued highways pulsing through the city like arteries circulating blood, its towering skyscrapers watching over all, unmoved—soaring sentinels of steel and glass, its patterns of people rhythmically engaging with the machinery of modern life. A spacious Japanese flavored soundscape contrasts with the frenetic energy of the imagery. Piano, violin, trumpet, trombone and upright bass lines are decorated with snippets of field recordings captured in Tokyo and Osaka.

2. Craft and Expression Entwined in the Music of Martin Bresnick

The music of Martin Bresnick is filled with allusions to literature, history, politics, and music of the past. These extramusical references are often combined with complex musical structures. Symmetries and serial operations are staples of his craft. These two aspects of his work often exist in different conceptual realms. However, from the early 1990s onwards, there is a trend in Bresnick’s music in which technical elements entwine with expressive aims. This short article explores the relationship between compositional technique and referentiality through two exemplary works, the String Quartet No. 2, Bucephalus (1984) and The Bucket Rider (1995) with a brief exploration of the aesthetic of Arte Povera, an avant-garde art movement of the 1960s and 1970s Bresnick used as the title of the set of pieces to which The Bucket Rider belongs.

This dissertation examines the social and financial activities of Buddhist nuns to demonstrate how and why they deployed Buddhist doctrines, rituals, legends, and material culture to interact with society outside the convent. By examining the activities of the nuns of the Daihongan convent (one of the two administrative heads of the popular pilgrimage temple, Zenkōji) in Japan’s early modern period (roughly 1550 to 1868) as documented in the convent’s rich archival sources, I shed further light on the oft-overlooked political and financial activities of nuns, illustrate how Buddhist institutions interacted with the laity, provide further nuance to the discussion of how Buddhist women navigated patriarchal sectarian and secular hierarchies, and, within the field of Japanese history, give voice to women who were active outside of the household unit around which early modern Japanese society was organized.

Zenkōji temple, surrounded by the mountains of Nagano, has been one of Japan’s most popular pilgrimage sites since the medieval period. The abbesses of Daihongan, one Zenkōji’s main sub-temples, traveled widely to maintain connections with elite and common laypeople, participated in frequent country-wide displays of Zenkōji’s icon, and oversaw the creation of branch temples in Edo (now Tokyo), Osaka, Echigo (now Niigata), and Shinano (now Nagano). The abbesses of Daihongan were one of only a few women to hold the imperially sanctioned title of eminent person (shōnin 上人) and to wear purple robes. While this means that this Pure Land convent was in some ways not representative of all convents in early modern Japan, Daihongan’s position is particularly instructive because the existence of nuns and monks in a single temple complex allows us to see in detail how monastics of both genders interacted in close quarters.

This work draws heavily from the convent’s archival materials, which I used as a guide in framing my dissertation chapters. In the Introduction I discuss previous works on women in Buddhism. In Chapter 1, I briefly discuss the convent’s history and its place within the Zenkōji temple complex. In Chapter 2, I examine the convent’s regular economic bases and its expenditures. In Chapter 3, I highlight Daihongan’s branch temples and discuss the ways that they acted as nodes in a network connecting people in various areas to Daihongan and Zenkōji, thus demonstrating how a rural religious center extended its sphere of influence in urban settings. In Chapter 4, I discuss the nuns’ travels throughout the country to generate new and maintain old connections with the imperial court in Kyoto, confraternities in Osaka, influential women in the shogun’s castle, and commoners in Edo. In Chapter 5, I examine the convent’s reliance upon irregular means of income such as patronage, temple lotteries, loans, and displays of treasures, and how these were needed to balance irregular expenditures such as travel and the maintenance or reconstruction of temple buildings. Throughout the dissertation I describe Daihongan’s inner social structure comprised of abbesses, nuns, and administrators, and its local emplacement within Zenkōji and Zenkōji’s temple lands.

Exploring these themes sheds light on the lives of Japanese Buddhist nuns in this period. While the tensions between freedom and agency on the one hand and obligations to patrons, subordination to monks, or gender- and status-based restrictions on the other are important, and I discuss them in my work, my primary focus is on the nuns’ activities and lives. Doing so demonstrates that nuns were central figures in ever-changing economic and social networks as they made and maintained connections with the outside world through Buddhist practices and through precedents set centuries before. This research contributes to our understanding of nuns in Japan’s early modern period and will participate in and shape debates on the roles of women in patriarchal religious hierarchies.

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Young people in Japan contend with shifting understandings of family and friends, insecure jobs, and changing frames around global and national identities. The category of youth itself is unsettled amid a long period of social and economic change and perceived widely as crisis. Within contested social categories of youth, how do young Japanese people use the city, media, and body practices to create flexible, meaningful sociality across spaces of work, education, and play? What do youthful sociality and practices reveal about globally oriented connections and how do they inform conceptions of the future, kinship, gender, and pluralized identities? In short, what is the embodied and affective experience of being young as the category itself is increasingly unstable and full of risks? These questions shape the contours of this project.

This dissertation considers youth through its becoming, that is, the lived enactment of youth as energy, emotion, and sensibility always in motion and within range of cultural, spatial, bodily, and technological forces. Three groups of young people in this layered latitudinal study demonstrate various relations to the city street, visual media, globalized identities, contingent work within affect and cultural production, and education. The three groups are distinctly different but share surprising points of connection.

I lived alongside these three groups to understand the ways young people are innovating within the shifting form of youth. I skated with male skateboarders in their teens to early 30s who created Japan's most influential skate company; I taught kids attending a specialized cram school for kikokushijo (children who have lived abroad due to a parent's job assignment); I observed and hung out with young creative workers, the photographers, web designers, and graphic artists who produce the visual and textual content and relationships composing commercial "youth culture."

My project examines how these young people redefine youth through bodily practices, identities, and economic de/attachments. The skaters' embodied actions distribute/dissipate their energies in risky ways outside formal structures of labor. The kikokushijo children, with their bi-cultural fluency produced in circuits of capitalist labor, offer a desirable image of a flexible Japanese future while their heterogeneous identities appear threatening in the present. The creative workers are precariously positioned as "affective labor" within transglobal (youth) cultural production, working to generate visual and textual content constant stressful uncertainties. All three groups share uneasy ground with capitalist practices, risky social identities, and crucially, intimate relations with city space. In attending to their practices through ethnographic participation and video, this dissertation explores questions concerning youthful relations to space produced in material contacts, remembered geographies of other places and imaginary urban sites.

The dissertation itself is electronic and non-linear; a formal enactment of the drifting contact between forms of youth. It opens up to lines of connection between questions, sites, events, and bodies and attempts an unfolding of affect, imagination, and experience to tell stories about histories of gender and labor, city life, and global dreams. It asks if the globalized forms of Japanese youth avoid the risks of the impossible secure for the open possibilities of becoming and thus refuse containment by crisis?

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In this dissertation, I examine the development of lay Rinzai Zen in modern Japan, a transformation that entailed a large-scale opening of Zen practices to non-clerics and eventually contributed to Zen’s worldwide spread. I detail the historical shift between 1868 and 1945, which saw the emergence of hundreds of lay Zen groups throughout Japan, the proliferation of literature targeting a popular audience, and a new paradigm of practice amidst imperial Japan’s changing zeitgeist. Although Rinzai Zen was only one of thirteen Buddhist schools in Japan at the time, lay Rinzai Zen became disproportionately significant through its dissemination among educated, relatively elite young men, and through the success of its popularizers in associating modern lay Rinzai Zen with “traditional” Buddhism and Japanese culture itself.

In order to investigate this phenomenon, I conducted archival research, focusing on the following genres: contemporaneous periodicals and books aimed at a popular Zen audience, and the publications of lay Zen groups, such as their commemorative histories that included detailed activity logs, personal testimonials, and institutional histories. In my analysis, I integrate the dimensions of intellectual and social history (e.g., situating modern lay Rinzai Zen practitioners in imperial Japan) with religious and doctrinal concerns (e.g., situating modern Rinzai Zen in traditional Zen narratives). Although I consider teachers’ prescriptions for ideal Zen practice, I emphasize the perspective of ordinary practitioners from a variety of practice contexts in order to examine the nature of Rinzai Zen’s popularization in modern Japan: the emergence of lay groups, the religious practices in which practitioners engaged, the ways in which lay practitioners articulated their motivations, and how such motivations reflected the historical context.

My conclusions include the following: First, the scale of the lay Rinzai movement in modern Japan was far larger than research until this point suggests, in terms of numbers of groups and practitioners and the amount of popular literature. Given the diversity among the emerging Rinzai lay groups, I propose a typology to highlight the groups’ qualitative differences, ranging from more “traditional” to more radically divergent from normative Rinzai. Second, I found that even while the lay Zen audience expanded to an unprecedented level in Japan, the average lay Rinzai practitioner was educated and relatively elite; therefore, Rinzai Zen’s popularization did not amount to full democratization. Moreover, students and other youth played a sizable and significant role in modern lay Rinzai. Third, I show that despite divergent ideology and rhetoric among modern lay Rinzai Zen groups and figures, a specific pattern of activities became standard among nearly all such groups. This pattern centered on sitting meditation, kōan practice, encountering the master one-on-one, dharma discourses, and practice intensives, with far less emphasis on aspects that have been historically important in Rinzai monastic training, such as ritual, liturgy, manual labor, and literary study in advanced kōan practice. This new lay Rinzai pattern functioned to increase an emphasis on personal experience and kōan practice. Finally, in contrast to idealized notions about pursuing Zen primarily for the sake of enlightenment, most modern lay Rinzai practitioners examined here pursued Zen for this-worldly benefits, such as improved health, improved swordsmanship abilities, or as a means of strengthening the Japanese nation. Such goals were particularly expressed following 1905, amidst the nationalism and interest in personal cultivation movements that surged after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Moreover, for many practitioners, there was a convergence among lay Rinzai practice, nation-protecting self-cultivation movements, “way of the warrior” rhetoric, and modern Japanese ideals of masculinity: a convergence that likely attracted many practitioners but was inherently at odds with Zen’s rhetoric of equality.

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