Aesthetics of Space: Representations of Travel in Medieval Japan.

Abstract

The fourteenth century in Japan saw the failure of the Kamakura shogunate, a rupture in the centuries-old system of imperial succession, and a series of shifting allegiances among the rising Ashikaga warriors of the Northern Court and their rivals in the Southern Court. Against this backdrop, pausing to take in a landscape view and to compose a poem about it strikes one as a relatively benign endeavor. However, in travel journals by elite members of the Northern Court, this was in fact a project of vital importance—establishing an authoritative link to the land and past rulers to legitimize potential claims to political and military power.

In a selection of travel journals that I translate and analyze in my dissertation, Aesthetics of Space: Representations of Travel in Medieval Japan, famous place names were a means of accessing past literary and historical figures by recalling canonical poems and other texts. The notion of the famous place is central to travel writing at this time: the more often a place name appeared in the literary canon, the more important a destination for travel and topic of poetry it became. The famous place is not a stable or homogeneous site that exists continuously through history, although its name appears to do just that. Rather it is the traveler that constitutes both place and name in the body’s presence at each site, examining the names associated with the site, and using repetition and formula for representing those sites.

Close literary analysis firmly rooted in the historical context of the journals’ production shows how, for these political elites, traveling and producing a record of the journey is a performance and a political act, regardless of the traveler’s motivations. The literary structure of the medieval poetic travel journal works to promote an idealized sociopolitical geography, an imagined future so to speak, by selectively drawing from a constructed past. In this way, travel was an act of inscribing new maps on the landscape, and the resulting textual representations of those landscapes promoted an explicit historical ideology to establish alternate lineages for imperial succession in a new age.