The making of tojin: construction of the other in early modern Japan.(Report)

THIS article examines the kinds of worldviews and images of foreign Others the nonelite people of premodern Japan constructed, and how folk belief and knowledge contributed to this construction. (1) Recent scholarship on Japanese history has shown how open Japan was under the Tokugawa government's foreign policy of "national seclusion" (sakoku), which was in effect from 1639 to 1854. (2) While Japan's international relations were certainly limited, this does not mean that the government stopped using the world outside, especially East Asia, for ideological purposes. That is, by treating the foreign countries of Korea, Ryukyu, Holland, and Ezo (Ainu) as tributaries, the Tokugawa government tried to establish, or rather fabricate, Japanese centrality--a practice that produced a Japan-centered world order that scholars have examined from the perspectives of state diplomacy and state policy toward foreign Others. (3)

What has been overlooked in scholarly examinations of these elite attitudes toward foreign Others are the popular narratives of the world and its people. It seems taken for granted that the nonelite followed the lead of the elite, that there was either a hegemony controlling the experiences and conceptions of nonelite Japanese, or that the nonelite were completely disconnected from state affairs. Although there is no question that the seclusion policy severely limited the nonelite from firsthand information about foreign countries and peoples for more than two hundred years, this does not justify scholars treating them as if they stopped imaging and imagining the outside. Instead, we need to examine how nonelite Japanese understood the foreigners who were absent from their everyday lives, and consider what the imagining and imaging, including visualization and visual experiences, tell us about the Japanese of this period.

These are some of the questions I will pursue through an investigation of the visual representations of foreigners in the popular art of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) in the Edo Period (1603-1868). By focusing on specific imagery, I will argue that foreigners found their niche in the Japanese cosmology even during the period of national seclusion, typically through the stereotype of tojin ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "Tang Chinese"). The popular imagery of tojin, with its distinctive and extensive characteristics, formed a general category of foreigner that included both Westerners and non-Westerners, and served as travesties of human beings. In other words, while distinguishing various foreigners, people who bought ukiyo-e, most of whom were commoners living in urban environments, understood foreigners by means of the general category of the foreign Other, and represented that category through the homogenized identity of tojin.

Tojin in this sense is part of the popular imaginary, a discursive invention. Ronald Toby has already drawn attention to the importance of the concept of tojin for the Japanese cosmological and epistemological order. He extensively investigates premodern visual representations of foreigners, examining how Japan's Other(s) changed historically and discussing what this tells us about the construction of Japanese identity (cf. TOBY 1986, 1994, 2001). While I share a great deal of research interest with him, my focus here is more specific: popular discourse on foreign subjects in the Edo Period, for which I concentrate on ukiyo-e. By so doing, I will demonstrate how extensive and complex were the tojin-related representations and tropes that Japanese commoners created. An extensive study of the characters that the townspeople imagined and constructed for the foreign Other as well as for themselves tells us how thorough the townspeople's cultural production of the Other could become even without opportunities to establish contact with actual foreigners.

FROM "KARA" TO "TO" BUT NOT TO "SHIN"

Tojin is a rather colloquial, and sometimes a pejorative, term that literally means "Tang Chinese" but also refers to foreigners in general, including Westerners in the Edo Period. Not originally contained in the term, the latter meaning was attached centuries after the term was first introduced into Japan. It is worth considering why foreigners of any kind were called tojin (using the Sino-Japanese reading of the Chinese characters), rather than karabito (the Japanese reading of the same Chinese characters). (4) While both kara and to were used interchangeably to some extent until the end of the Edo Period, a gradual shift occurred from the former to the latter; for example, import shops (karamono-ya) came to be called tobutsu-ya in the late Edo Period (IWASAKI 1996a, 35). This shift carries important implications for the ways in which the Japanese categorized the foreign. Since ancient Japan had its first foreign contacts with Kara ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Kor: Kaya), a small country on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula that had been absorbed by the kingdom of Shiragi ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Kor: Silla) by the sixth century CE, the Japanese had used kara to refer to whatever foreign country they had the most frequent contacts with at the time. Thus kara, a Japanese reading, was applied to Han [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Korea) in ancient times, and Tang [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Tang dynasty China, 618-907) in the Heian Period (794-1192), when the Imperial Court sent envoys to China to acquire advanced Chinese civilization. Since then, kara (Tang) or karakuni (Tang country) came to mean foreign countries with advanced civilizations, especially China (NAKAMURA, OKAMI, and SAKAKURA 1982, 889 and 893). Used as a prefix for clothing and other material culture, kara suggested sophistication, value, and the highest quality, followed by Korean goods of lower quality and copied domestic Japanese products at the bottom of the ranking (TANI 1983). In fact, there is a passage in Uji shui monogatari [A collection of tales from Uji], an anthology of short fiction edited in the early thirteenth century, saying that Chinese silk textiles with a twill weave (kara-aya) cost five times as much as the best domestic silk from the region of Mino (MORI 1948, 194).

Unlike kara, tojin was used as a derogatory term applied to anyone, including a Japanese, who was impervious to reason and common sense, and who talked nonsense--a meaning never implied by karabito. The derogatory meaning is most obvious in the term tojin baka (stupid or foolish tojin), whereas there was no equivalent karabito baka. Likewise, the Edo-Period term ke-tojin (hairy tojin), used to denigrate foreigners--first the Chinese and later Westerners--was formed because Edo-Period Japanese represented them with mustaches and beards while representing themselves as clean-shaven, unlike during the Nanban era (from the mid-sixteenth century to the early seventeenth century), when facial hair was fashionable in Japan. (5)