I recently moved this blog from Bluehost.com to WordPress.com. In the previous iteration, I was responsible for updating the blogging software quite regularly, and lots of maintenance was required. Now those changes occur automatically. WordPress only does blogging, whereas Bluehost is a fully configurable web hosting service, with marketplace and email options that I didn’t need. Anyway, I unfortunately have also given up on the “Displaying Japan” blog and the “Ravi and Luca Files” blog, both of which were just too much trouble to maintain. I will probably continue to tweak the design of this site, and some of the old posts need to be reformatted to remove incorrectly coded quotation marks, but overall the transition was very smooth.
April 14, 2009
Essay in Impressions 30
I have an essay in the recently published issue of Impressions. This special issue came out of a Festschrift conference held in honor of Henry D. Smith II.
The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America
Number 30 (2009)
PICTURES AND THINGS: BRIDGING VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN JAPAN
Essays in honor of Henry DeWitt Smith II
Keep reading →
January 30, 2009
The Early Modern Warrior Experience
An essay that I originally wrote for an anthology (that was not meant to be, alas) has now appeared, in a completely new version, in the new issue of the wonderful online journal Early Modern Japan. It provides a general introduction, probably best for undergraduates, to the history of daily life of the samurai during the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868). It also introduces three wonderful essays on warrior food, shopping, and travel:
The Early Modern Warrior: Three Explorations of Samurai Life
Pitelka, Morgan pp. 33-42
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (977.23 kB)
Banquets Against Boredom: Towards Understanding (Samurai) Cuisine in Early Modern Japan
Rath, Eric C. pp. 43-55
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (537.34 kB)
Samurai and the World of Goods: the Diaries of the Toyama Family of Hachinohe
Vaporis, Constantine N. pp. 56-67
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (476.05 kB)
Encountering the World: Kawai Tsugunosuke’s 1859 Journey to Yokohama and Nagasaki
Nenzi, Laura pp. 68-83
Article description | Article Full Text PDF (631.69 kB)
I began this project when I was doing the early research for my current research into the life and career of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. I was surprised to discover that the scholarship on warriors seemed to focus mostly on institutions and war, rather than issues such as social networks, cultural practices, class, gender, and daily life. That scholarship is invaluable, but I feel that we need to build on it by shifting our focus away from questions of periodization and political power.
March 4, 2008
Review of What’s the Use of Art? in Japan Times
Thanks to Donald Richie for reviewing What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context in The Japan Times on February 24, 2008.
February 28, 2008
Acquiring and Possessing Korean Things: Material Culture and National Identity in Japan
I’m giving a public talk at UCLA’s Center for Korean Studies (243 Royce Hall) on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, which will consider how the survival of old things (especially objects from the 16th century) informs modern national identity in Japan. In particular, I’ll examine the genealogy of “acquiring and possessing Korean things” as an elite cultural practice in late medieval and early modern Japan. Buddhist monks, merchant tea practitioners, and feudal lords actively sought ceramics and other forms of material culture from Korea, and cherished and labeled these pieces as products of Korai (Koryo). I will survey some of these objects, and then theorize the legacy of their existence in Japan.
Examination of Korean art in Japanese collections has tended to focus on style and aesthetics with little attention to the biographies or socio-political influence of such objects. Perhaps we assume that in the relationaship between art and society, pictures and things are mere contrivances or tools. However, some anthropoligists have challenged us to revise this view, arguing that artistic products have a non-linguistic agency through which they influence people. How, we need to ask, do material things shape (literally and figuratively) the world we live in? What role have old things played in the making (and unmaking) of modern identity in Northeast Asia?
January 19, 2008
New book review
My review of Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck and Arthur E. Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2: 1600 to 2000 (Columbia University Press, New York, 2005) appears in the recently published Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal v. 15 (2007), p. 20-21. EMJ has gone completely online, making it the most accessible journal in our field.
January 9, 2008
What’s the Use of Art? now available
- The anthology that I edited with Jan Mrazek is now available.
December 20, 2007
The Early Modern in East Asia: The Challenges of Periodization
East Asia Seminar: A Symposium
The Early Modern in East Asia: The Challenges of Periodization
February 1, 2008
SOS 250, USC
9:00 – 9:10 a.m. Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:00 – 10:50 a.m. East Asia and the Early Modern World
John Wills Jr., USC
Some Earlier Divergences: China-Europe Differences that Mattered,
Han to Ming
Robert Marks, Whittier College
Early Modern or Late Imperial: An Environmental Perspective
Richard von Glahn, UCLA
An East Asian Early Modernity? Kinsei in Japanese Scholarship on
Japanese and Chinese History
11:00 a.m. – 12:10 p.m. Consciousness and Culture
Samuel Yamashita, Pomona
Reimagining the Intellectual Landscape of ‘Early Modern Japan
Jahyun Kim Haboush, Columbia University
Discourse of ‘Nation’ in Choson Korea: Early Modern?
1:30 – 2:40 p.m. Interactions
John Duncan, UCLA
From External Stimulus to Internal Integration in Late Koryo and
Early Choson Korea
Kenneth Pomeranz, UC Irvine
Early Modern Networks Without an Early Modern Period-or is it the
Other Way Around?
3:00 – 4:40 p.m. Authority Structures
R. Bin Wong, UCLA
The Eighteenth-century Qing State: Fantasies and Fallacies of the
‘Early Modern’
Kyung Moon Hwang, USC
Constructions of State and Society in the Late Chosôn
Morgan Pitelka, Occidental College
Afterlives of the Shogun: Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Material Legacy in
Early Modern Japan
4:40 – 5:00 p.m. Closing Discussion
Sponsored by the East Asia Seminar of the USC-Huntington Early Modern
Studies Institute, and the Department of History, East Asian Studies
Center, and Korean Studies Institute at USC
October 16, 2007
More People Will Read This . . .
A short essay (just 500 words!) of mine has just been published in a new book, which will probably sell more copies than anything else I will contribute to in my entire life: the 10th edition of the Lonely Planet Japan Guide.
The essay, “Japanese Tea Culture,” is easy to find: it’s on page 100! The book looks great and is already helping me to plan my next research trip.
September 15, 2007
The Culture of Copying now available
I have an essay in the new anthology The Culture of Copying in Japan: Critical and Historical Perspectives (Routledge, 2007), edited by Rupert Cox.
The contents include:
Series Editor’s Preface Joy Hendry
Introduction Rupert Cox
Section 1: Original Encounters
1. Body to Body Transmission: The Copying Tradition of Kagura Performance Irit Averbuch 2. A Spectrum of Copies: Ritual Puppetry in Japan Jane Marie Law 3. Copying in Japanese Magazines: Unashamed Copiers Keiko Tanaka
Section 2: Arts of Citation
4. The Originality of the ‘Copy’: Mimesis and Subversion in Hanegawa Toei’s Chosenjin Ukie Ronald Toby 5. Copy to Convert: Jesuits’ Missionary Practice in Japan Alexandra Curvelo 6. Back to the Fundamentals: “Reproducing” Rikyu and Chojiro in Japanese Tea Culture Morgan Pitelka 7. An Investigation of the Conditions of Literary Borrowings in Late Heian and Early Kamakura Japan Rein Raud 8. Chinese Calligraphic Models in Heian Japan: Copying Practices and Stylistic Transmission John Carpenter
Section 3: Modern Exchanges
9. Beyond Mimesis: Japanese Architectural Models at the Vienna Exhibition and 1910 Japan British Exhibition William Coaldrake 10. Copying Kyoto: The Legitimacy of Imitation in Kyoto’s Townscape Debates Christoph Brumann 11. Copying Cars: Forgotten Licensing Agreements Chris Madeley 12. ‘Hungry Visions’: The Material Life of Japanese Food Samples Rupert Cox
The volume originated with an interesting conference held in 2001 at Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK. It has been rather a long time gestating, and as far as I can tell the contributors never got a chance to check proofs or submit images, but I hope it will be an interesting volume nonetheless.
