2010 Gyokuyō Kambun Workshop
Professor Masao Kawashima, Ritsumeikan University
Professor Ikuyo Matsumoto, Yokohama City University
Professor Joan Piggott, University of Southern California
Professor Lori Meeks, University of Southern California
This August USC’s annual Kambun Workshop welcomed graduate and doctoral students from many Ivy League universities and other prestigious schools to study Sino-Japanese texts with prominent Japanese scholars. Attendees included graduate and doctoral students from Princeton, Berkeley, UCLA, USC, Yale, Cornell and Cambridge, as well as an assistant professor from the University of Chicago.
The theme of this year’s workshop, conducted in Japanese, was “Buddhist Thought and Practice in a Time of War.” Participants studied the Gyokuyō, the journal of Kujō Kanezane (1149-1207). Kanezane, a high-ranking courtier who served as prime minister and regent, recorded his daily activities and concerns from 1164 to 1200, an era that saw the Gempei War (1180-1185) erupt.
Kambun, which means “Chinese writing,” refers to written forms of Chinese developed in Japan. The two-week-long workshop focused on passages of the Gyokuyō text that engage religious themes. Japanese historians Masao Kawashima (Ritsumeikan University) and Ikuyo Matsumoto (Yokohama City University) led the workshop, and USC Associate Professor Lori Meeks of Religion and East Asian Studies Languages and Cultures organized the event, which was funded by the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Project for Premodern Japan, and the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture Interdisciplinary Research Group. In recent summers the Kambun Workshop has focused on courtier journals because they are an abundant but underutilized source. This year, they were read in an effort to understand how religious ideas were incorporated into the rituals and protocols of the Japanese court in the early medieval age. Says Meeks, “Courtier journals are useful for scholars of Japanese religion because they offer perspectives on religious life that more traditional, doctrinal or scripture-focused studies tend to miss. In these journals, which courtiers wrote largely as a way of recording events and protocols for the benefit of later generations, we learn how and when the court utilized religious professionals, how and when it staged religious rituals, and how its officials drew upon religious ideas and language to explain birth, death, war, and natural disasters. “Our students are learning to read courtier journals with commendable accuracy, and they are learning, at the same time, how twelfth-century Japanese courtiers thought about religious rites and the spiritual world,” Meeks said. “Moreover, they have had numerous opportunities to network with peers from other institutions, and with our teachers. We have also been posting our readings on a wiki created for the workshop. The wiki will serve as a long-term resource for our participants as they move forward in their research.”
During the two-week workshop, students and faculty read passages from the Gyokuyō under the direction of Professors Kawashima and Matsumoto, who also provided short lectures on a wide range of issues, including bibliographic methods, religious rites of the court, and Heian-period visual culture. In the week before the main workshop began, Kristina Buhrman, a Ph.D. candidate in History, also taught a “pre-workshop” for students who needed to brush-up their Sino-Japanese reading skills.
The Kambun Workshop was first established by Professor Joan Piggott in 1997 when she taught at Cornell. She moved the workshop to the West Coast in 2004, after her arrival at USC.
News
“USC College Kambun Workshop Draws Grad Students Nationwide”
Participants
Special Editorial Meeting for Chuyuki Publication: Dr. Aileen Gatten, Professor Christina Laffin, Dr. Takeshi Watanade, Professor Yoshida Sanae