The Kingless Generation

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In part one of this second installment of our series on China as a silk road great power in pre-modern Japanese literature, we read Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet play “The Battles of Coxinga,” about the half-Japanese, half-Chinese hero Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong) who fought the Manchu Qing dynasty in an attempt to restore the Ming dynasty. Chikamatsu’s most successful play in his lifetime, it is striking today for its geopolitical perspective: although ambitions of Japanese conquest and aggrandizement are present, China is looked up to as the indisputably superior center of civilization where we plucky Japanese are happy to be of service, and even if we lack intelligence and refinement, we have a grit and gristle and spirit (and the protection of the Japanese gods) that makes us uniquely able to save the day against the savage and treacherous Manchus of the Qing dynasty, who are depicted in a proto-racist way that we do sometimes see in Early Modern Eurasia, even in the East. Notice how this is the precise opposite worldview of imperial Japan, where the old nothern “barbarian” Altaic peoples were seen as Japan’s natural allies according to modern genetic theories, and everything Han Chinese became primitive or degenerate, and Anglo-American whiteness became the new object of an increasingly violent inferiority complex. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next in our ongoing series ReOrient-ing early modern literature across Eurasia, we discuss the most widely visually represented of the sixteenth-century Japanese short-form ballads known as kōwaka, which arguably surpassed the noh theatre for patronage among the warrior elite of Japan’s age of civil war. First appearing in performance records at the height of the Tally Trade (勘合貿易) with China—whereby the military ruler of Japan (like the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu or the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi) accepted investiture as King of Japan from the Emperor of China in return for various samurai-bourgeois clans like the Hosokawa and the Ōuchi receiving trading rights in their designated port of Ningbo—this story legendarily depicts the founder of the Fujiwara courtier family (representative here simply of the Japanese elite) proudly marrying his daughter to the Emperor of China at the latter’s request. He is “overwhelmed at the honor of having the Emperor of the Great Country of the world for a son-in-law, despite being a mere subject of the Emperor of a small country.” This reflects the standard medieval Japanese worldview in which there are three main countries in the world: Japan which is a “small country on the margins” (辺土の小国), the Great Country of China, and India, which as the source of Buddhism may or may not be even greater than China. An adventure ensues involving a precious relic stolen by demonic forces, among whom are supposedly degenerate, northern nomad races according to a new, early-modern, quasi-racist logic, but one that is precisely opposite to that of the Japanese empire, in which everything Chinese was discredited and the Mongoloid, nomadic, and Altaic was elevated as the ideal. Here, by contrast, Chinese heroes are the most noble and orderly (even though they make mistakes), and they possess advanced technology that Japanese can only dream of. Many striking things to see in this glimpse of a different worldview from another time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A chatty hangout episode on recent events, the class politics of fashion in our post-cultural moment, and an American (...?) Broadway musical from the End of History as performed in Japanese in air-conditioned chambers surrounded by hordes of shrink-wrapped Teslas on reclaimed land developed Tel Aviv–style in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this final episode of our first series on the 1,001 Nights, we take up Frenchman Antoine Galland’s adaptation, where we see a Europe that has only begun to see its nearest Afro-Asiatic merchant-capitalist great power as a different , “eastern” civilization whose cultural products must be held at arm’s length and ethnographically explained—rather than adopted wholesale without comment, as stories from the very same 1,001 Nights had been in medieval European literature like the Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) or Orlando Furioso (1516–1532). Galland introduces critical details and disparaging attitudes, writes new scenes not found in the Arabic, and sometimes misreads the Arabic quite dramatically. The things he needs to explain to his readers—that druggists can be respectable members of society, that poetry can express emotions vicariously—reinforce for us the low level of development of “Europe” as it begins to step onto the stage of history for the first time (it was not meaningfully continuous with Greco-Roman antiquity but rather borrowed most from the Arab-Islamicate Mediterranean world from whose side it sprang) and as an awkward newcomer rather than an overwhelmingly powerful main character (it would not even begin to dominate the Eurasian economy until after 1800). Finally, here too Galland’s central interest is evident in the bureaucrat-connected merchant rogues and organized criminals who are able to slip through the cracks of this highly developed and regimented society and accumulate capital—the Sons of the Silk Road who were already the main model for the Crusader bourgeoisie. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.