more booknotes

[wombat1138]

Random cultural snippets from two different diaries kept by women in Meiji-era Japan: Clara's Diary: An American Girl in Meiji Japan by Clara A.N. Whitney, edited by M. William Steele and Tamiko Ichimata, and Makiko's Diary: A Merchant Wife in 1910 Kyoto by Nakano Makiko, translated/annotated by Kazuko Smith.

Clara was an American whose family came to Tokyo as missionaries in 1875, when she was 15; she eventually married a Japanese man and lived out the rest of her life there. A generation later, in 1910, Makiko was a 20-year-old bride who'd just married into a long-established family of pharmacists; although her husband's family store had been selling herbal medicines for at least 200 years, he himself (and other family members of his generation) had attended and graduated from local pharmacy schools that were based on Western medicine, and their store's inventory reflected both of these aspects.

From Clara's diary: she records the assassination of Okubo[*] Toshimichi on May 16th, 1878, noting the details as they really happened instead of the fictionalized version presented near the start of RK's Kyoto Arc. On June 8th, she and some other (unidentified) people visited the grave of a family friend in Aoyama Cemetery, where Okubo was also buried. A nearby gardener sold them some flowers to leave at their friend's grave, as well as a rosebush to plant there.

[*: technically, the first vowel of his family name should be marked as elongated; the book is printed with macrons there instead of the different method I've used below.]

Their friend's grave was marked by "a single shaft of unpainted wood" with the woman's name, age, sex, and date of death (Jan/Feb of that year) written on it; there were already two plain bamboo vases sitting there with an incense burner between them. Okubo's grave was slightly more elaborate:

[...] raised in a little mound and covered with a wooden pavilion. All around were white banners with inscriptions, while the sides of the pavilion were hung with black and white muslin. Near Oukubo's tomb in a little enclosure is buried Nakamura Tarou, his murdered coachman, and behind him his horse, each with a head shaft of wood. [emphasis added]

On August 24th, Clara mentions an event which might be interesting to check against RK's chronology:

Last night was one of terror. About eleven o'clock a battalion of soldiers made an insurrection at their headquarters at Takebashi, near the Kaisai Gakkou. [....] The extent of the killed and wounded is not known yet, although three officers and two coolies are reported as having been slain by guns and swords. Report says that from two to three hundred were killed.

The editors' summary of events:

Killing an officer, arming themselves and deserting their regiments, about 200 officers of the Imperial Guards tried to set fire to the palace and assassinate high government officials, but were suppressed before achieving their objectives. The insurrectionists' main grievance was the unequal distribution of honors for their role in help deal with the Satsuma Rebellion.

On May 2nd, 1879, she described the O-Inari festival at Nagasaka, as experienced at the house of some friends whom they'd gone to visit, and whom the festival came to visit, so to speak. (The first bracketed note below is mine; the ones in the following paragraph are as printed in the book.)

Six men in blue uniform with blue cloths on their heads came striding up to our party before the gate [of their friends' household], and giving a grand salaam, thanked us for calling the dancers. Then a rumbling was heard and a great chariot appeared upon which knelt four young girls in costume with their dancing teacher and her scholars,. This was followed by another conveyance of similar construction filled with musicians who piped and drummed and blew and sang the accompaniment of the dancers.

[....]At matsuri [festivals], which take place very often, the girls who dance before Inari are said to have a sure prospect of a happy life. These girls are selected, not from the upper, but from the lower classes. For instance, the jorou [female entertainer] we saw today is the daughter of the kanzashiya, or "seller of hairpins," and the fierce prince was only a poor soba (macaroni) seller's daughter. The daughters of nobles and samurai will not be seen even looking at the dancing. Perhaps from their curtained balconies, surrounded by maids, they might deign to look half-scornfully on the public exhibition that their less fortunate sisters make of themselves, but to mingle with such a crowd would be disreputable.

On Jan. 2nd, 1880, she notes of women's hairstyles, "[w]hen we first came to Tokyo, the marumage was in high disfavor, every lady wearing the mitsuwa, or the curious round of hair through which a single hairpin is inserted. [....] Just now long and slender golden hairpins are all the rage."

On April 1, 1884, she describes a wedding which she and her friend Addie attended "at Ueno [Park] in a picturesque teahouse by the lake"; it seems to've been a semi-Christianized version of whatever popular customs were prevalent before the invention of the Shinto ceremonies for the Crown Prince's wedding in 1900:

[A] long line of ladies facing the gentlemen on the other side of the room. We all sat on the floor in two lines facing each other. There were fewer on the ladies' side than on the gentlemen's. We were the only foreigners besides Mr. Harris [the missionary performing the service] and Dr. Cutter from Sapporo [a former teacher of the groom's]. [....]We waited over an hour during which some of the ladies whiled away the time by making paper flowers and birds.

Finally there was a slight stir and everyone stood up as a side door opened and [the groom] Mr. Uchimura appeared, leaning on the arm of the go-between's husband. Behind him came his family-- father, mother, a little sister, and a brother. Then the bride came led by a finely dressed lady, but the bride quite eclipsed her. [...] She wore lovely robes of white and red crepe, and over all a beautifully embroidered robe which might have belonged to some princess. Her hair was done up in marumage, or round coil style, and she wore a square headdress across her forehead, called ageboushi. Her family followed her, and the whole party seated themselves at the upper end of the room facing the company. Mr. Harris then offered prayer while all knelt. Then all stood again while Mr. Harris read the Methodist-Episcopal service in Japanese. [...]I fancy this beautiful Christian ceremony must have been very strange to the Japanese who witnessed it for the first time.

From Makiko's diary: according to the supplementary material in the introduction, even in 1910, middle-school boys alternated between a Western-based school uniform and kimono/hakama, and primary-school boys wore kimono without hakama [p. 26]. There's also a fair amount of info about the wedding customs that were prevalent in Kyoto at that time:

Weddings were held either in the home of the groom (or in that of the bride if, like Makiko's mother-in-law, her household was taking an adopted husband), without the services of a priest of any kind, or at a shrine, at which a Shinto priest officiated, followed by a banquet in a restaurant. There are two weddings in Makiko's diary, one of each kind. [...]Today [the shrine wedding] is considered to be the most "traditional" form, but in fact at that time, the most common ty[e of wedding ceremony among Kyoto's merchant households was that held in the home. Indeed, such purely domestic rituals were common in rural Japan until well after World War II.[...]

[T]he domestic ceremony Makiko wrote about was held in the evening, and the party following it went on all night, which is never the case today. I found it even stranger that the bride's trousseau was carried to the house of the groom after dark, presumably by lantern-light. [Makiko's son] Professor Nakano's explanation is that merchant households held the wedding ceremony at night because they were reluctant to lose a whole day's business. It seems that Makiko's and Chuuhachi's wedding was held at night, for she told her son how the bride and groom sat in front of a gold folding screen, with a large candle stand on either side, and took their wedding vows by the ritual exchange of cups of sake. [p.34]

Makiko's entry for "October 13" (corrected by the editor to Friday, October 14) describes the run-up to the more traditional wedding, though for some reason she didn't get to attend the actual ceremony.

For the past few days, she'd been helping to collect the wedding gifts that'd been arriving, "filling the chests with the bride's trousseau" (and sewing some of the kimono that went into it) for delivery to the groom's house, and buying little wedding favors to give to the servants, deliverymen, and kids. On the afternoon of the wedding day, a hairdresser came to the house to work on Makiko and other members of the family, although this was a fairly routine event not limited to wedding prep. Near sunset, another woman came to specifically manage the bride's makeup and wardrobe; this was a junior geisha belonging to the same house as the geisha who was regularly contracted with Makiko's family business to entertain business clients at a teahouse or restaurant, or to assist with family events like this one. The hairdresser did the bride's hair last. In the meantime, other people were milling in and out of the house: the go-between, immediate family members, and more distant relatives, but they all headed off to the groom's house before ~8pm. Makiko and some of the store clerks and servants stayed behind. Her husband and mother-in-law didn't come back from ther wedding until five in the morning.

On November 2nd and 3rd [p. 198], she mentions the Shinnou festival in the Nijou district of Kyoto. The editor explains in a note that the festival was held in honor of "the deity of medicine, Yakusoshin, protector of pharmacists":

[...At that time, the festival] was scheduled to coincide with the Meiji Emperor's birthday, November 3. Originally it was celebrated privately in every household of pharmacists. The stores competed in displays of famous historical figures or scenes, created with medicine bottles or cans and Chinese herbal medicines, by the store owners and their employees. Vendors, who were invited to set up stalls among these displays, sold cotton candy, sweets, and children's toys. It was a very popular event that drew big crowds.

Makiko herself notes, "The themes of the decorations in our neighborhood this year are a sacred palanquin and a sacred sword."

On December 23rd, the winter solstice, there was a smaller celebration of Yakusoshin within the household; the children gathered around an iron brazier holding small slats of wood, and stuck them into the burning coals while chanting "Ta-a-ke, ta-a-ke, o-hi-ta-a-ki, nou-nou. Mi-i-kan, manjuu, hooshi-i-ya, nou-nou" (translated in the footnotes as "Burn, burn, god of spring! We want tangerines and steamed buns!"). Naturally, "trays of tangerines, steamed buns, and candied popped rice were passed around. Later on, trays of the same food were sent to the store, and all the members of the staff enjoyed them."

This last one has me pondering the (admittedly very faint) possibility that Kenshin and Tomoe might've engaged in a similar ritual during their very last days together in Otsu, but I don't really think they would've known much about it. The only connection I can think of might've been via the general Yukishiro familiarity with distilled liquid perfume (Tomoe, Enishi, *and* Oibore all have their own stashes of it somehow, despite the historical rarity of such things at the time) and Oibore's practically-unknown wife. OTOH, it's not as if RK is completely historically accurate anyway, frex the preposterousness of Tomoe having adopted Kenshin's "family" name-- not only did she outrank him, but afaik it wasn't until much later that wives started to change their names after marriage.

Comments

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Given the amount of research you've been doing about it, have you considered writing a book about RK-era Japan? I'm quite serious.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Also, stupid question: How do you set up block quotes on LJ? I'm thinking of throwing an old paper up later, for the hell of it.

[redswordheart.livejournal.com]

Based on that, I think KxK's wedding would have to be at the Kamiya Dojo since Kenshin's previous "homes" would have been under various bridges. *points at kenshin and laughs* Oro...

KenshinxTomoe

[redswordheart.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but she didn't know she outranked him. She, like most of the others, probably thought Kenshin was a real samurai.