By Ivo Smits
Most literary historians are aware of the fact that the role of Japanese court poets began
to change in the course of the twelfth century, although this awareness has usually not
influenced their research methods in any essential way. Until the twelfth century, poets
had been courtiers to whom poetry was only one of an array of social assets. About this
time a gradually increasing number of courtiers, generally from the lesser nobility, began
to devote themselves exclusively to poetry. Since the division of government offices was
generally assigned according to rank and status, they saw a poetic career as an alternative
to one in the civil service. The term proposed in the project for these poets is 'expert' or
'professional poets', partly because these poets directly or indirectly tried to make a living
from poetry, and partly because the differences between experts or professionals and
'amateurs' was widening visibly as the result of the former groups' intensive training in
the literary arts. Many of these newly emerging 'professional' poets depended on a form
of patronage.
The texts written by these poets, both poetry and literary treatises, are analysed against
the background of the court. Such an approach is useful only when the texts are
interpreted unequivocally against this background. To mention just one example, poetic
treatises will have to be correlated to the status of the readers for whom they were
written. It is vital to reconstruct the literary field, the social, cultural, and economic
relations between the poets and their environment. How could medieval poets maintain
themselves economically and make a literary contribution as poets? How did they function
within the framework of the court as both poet and courtier? What role did the patrons
play and what was their relationship to the poets? These are the kind of questions the
research project plans to ask.
Interdisciplinary research
This project implies a combination of cultural and social history as well as literary
history, a method which has recently proved fruitful for the study of medieval European
literature. These studies of European medieval literature also provide the starting point for
an appropriate working definition of the forms of literary patronage with which this
project is concerned. At a more theoretical level, the work of scholars like Pierre
Bourdieu provides a model for a sociology of literature that is useful for examining the
situation in pre-modern Japan.
Interestingly, things are changing both in Japan and in the West. The fairly strict division
of the different fields of expertise and research areas in Japan prevents most scholars
from what they regard as trespassing into the field of others. Nevertheless,
interdisciplinary research does take place. A (re-)inventory of existing sources as well as
the occasional discovery of new source material, often front-page news in Japan, provide
more data with which to work (see illustration 1). Some Western scholars, too, have
recently been shifting their attention to more socio-historical studies of literature in pre-
modern Japan.
It is, of course, impossible to cover three centuries completely in the three years initially
allotted to the project. However, the Japanese Middle Ages, roughly the period covered,
form a historiographic continuum and it is advisable to treat it as such. I have therefore
selected a few 'moments' in history: the project consists of a number of case studies
which will provide the foundations for a reconstruction of the development of the
relationships between poets and their patrons. This will lead, I believe, to the recognition
that the court poets' activities increasingly were overtly given over to seeking a
livelihood, the change from expert to professional in the strict sense of the word.
It is hoped that this project will eventually contribute to our understanding of the mechanics of literary patronage in Japan, as well as adding an extra insight into a socio- literary history of Northeast Asia.
For more information about the project, please contact:
Dr I.B. Smits
Centre for Japanese and Korean Studies
Leiden University
P.O. Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
E-mail: ibsmits@let.leidenuniv.nl
Dr I.B. Smits is a Research Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences [KNAW] and attached to the Centre for Japanese and Korean Studies of Leiden University.
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