GUEST EDITORS
IVO SMITS & MARGARITA WINKEL
Ivo Smits originally set out to study literature and it was only accidentally that he ended up reading the literature of Japan, a country he knew only from the movies. He has now travelled extensively throughout the country, but he still remembers the first time he set foot in Japan. He just sat on the train and watched and watched. The abstraction he had been studying suddenly took shape before his eyes. Ivo Smits wrote a thesis on the court poetry of the early Middle Ages: The Pursuit of Loneliness: Chinese and Japanese nature poetry in medieval Japan, ca 1050-1150 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995) and has since worked on medieval poetry from a socio-historical perspective. Together with Leonard Blussé and Willem Remmelink he spent the last two years co-editing the book Bridging the Divide: Four hundred years the Netherlands-Japan (Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2000). That period has been a crash course in the breadth of Dutch-Japanese relations, he maintains.
Margarita Winkel started out in Cultural Anthropology of the Caribbean, the region from where she originally came. After her graduation in the 1980s it proved difficult to find a job in Anthropology that she could combine with bringing up her children. Because her husband is a dealer in Japanese prints, she decided to go back to university to study Japanese for a just a year. Soon she was spellbound by the language and history of Japan and decided to complete her studies. In many ways, she sees Japan as the reverse of the Caribbean: the former is a large but relatively homogeneous society that has absorbed foreign influence, but retained its identity, the latter is a small yet complex multi-cultural community. Margarita Winkel is now completing her thesis entitled Exploring Culture and History: Japanese ethnographical studies around 1800. She aims to obtain an understanding of early modern Japanese ethnographers and their interest in culture and history. These scholars devoted their attention to the use and meaning of rare (antique or foreign) objects, as well as to less tangible subjects, such as life in the cities and the history and customs of the remote areas of Japan, and even of other countries. Winkel is the Japan editor for the IIAS Newsletter. *
What strategy did you follow in compiling this thematic issue?
Our first goal was to give young researchers especially the chance to present their work. Secondly, we strove to include current research only, and thirdly, we realized that the Dutch-Japanese relations are, of course, unique but cannot be viewed independently from the international context. The Chinese, the colonial elite of Batavia, and other Europeans also interacted with Japan. This wider context of East-West relations is touched upon in the articles by Ishii, Viallé, Fujita, and Raben.
What do you hope to achieve with this issue?
Firstly, we would like to point out that there is a wealth of historical materials available on interactions between East and West and on Japanese international relations in particular. More and more these materials are being translated and made accessible. For instance, the existence of commercial sources, such as reports of Japanese and Chinese trading posts and accounts of trading espionage, was relatively unknown and, until now, nothing much was done with them.
Secondly, we hope to generate new contacts with scholars that share common ground, but also with an audience that is involved in Asia in a wider context.
What are your plans for the near future?
Ivo Smits: My first priority will stay as it was for now, that is, I will continue my work on medieval poetry and continue to teach at Leiden University. In addition, I plan to delve deeper into emblems (or symbols, allegories), imported into Japan through Dutch seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books, and study the extent to which the Japanese understood and copied them. I developed this interest in the process of co-editing the book Bridging the Divide. Also new is that, in the autumn of this year, I will teach Classical Japanese Literature at Yale.
Margarita Winkel: I have been working as a part-time teacher at the Department of Japanese and Korean Studies, and would like to continue this, if the opportunity arises. In the field of research, there are several aspects of my current study that I would like to pursue if possible. One example would be the ethnographies of Russia written up by two Japanese scholars on the basis of castaway reports in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Another idea is to further explore the exchange of information between Japan and the Netherlands, particularly in the fields of ethnography and geography. When the children come of age I would also like to focus on Modern Anthropology and conduct research in Japan. *
Ivo Smits and Margarita Winkel both teach at Leiden University. They can be reached at: i.b.smits@let.leidenuniv.nl and m.winkel@let.leidenuniv.nl respectively.