Japanese Art, Aesthetics, and a European Discourse: Unraveling Sharawadgi

door: Prof. dr. ir. Wybe Kuitert op: 4 februari 2016

At the origin of a voluminous discourse on picturesque taste in eighteenth century England stands an essay by Sir William Temple (1628–99) that contains the word sharawadgi,  which he claims is Chinese. As a result of his introducing this concept, Temple is considered the originator of the English landscape garden movement. In extended academic debates on urban planning or contemporary art, the term has played an ever-increasing role since the mid twentieth century. Several attempts have been made to decipher the word and grasp its meaning. Nonetheless, sharawadgi  cannot be apprehended in terms of sound and meaning only. It needs to be understood from a functional and historic context in the lands of its origin—Japan as we will see— as well as a practice of landscape design in Europe where it inspired new creative ideas. Imported art works, strikingly with their Japanese aesthetics, were re-interpreted to fit a European understanding. This reconstruction in turn was framed within the complex world of European tastes for landscape and other applied arts. Men of letters, widely learned and erudite like Temple, maintained their networks by writing letters and exchanging books and other gifts, eager for the most recent news on developments in the world of learning. In northern Europe these savants communicated in French, English, Dutch, German, or Latin; conceptual ideas were sometimes expressed in Greek. Temple’s world was this cosmopolitan Europe, receptive to the beauty of Asian art and concepts like his enigmatic sharawadgi. This paper intends to unravel the meaning and context of the word in Japan; to show the context in which it traveled to Europe and entered the circles of Temple; and to make clear how he placed it in a slightly different setting to serve his purpose. It concludes that “literary picturesque taste” is a proper translation for sharawadgi.

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De Japanse watten van Constantijn Huygens

door: Prof. dr. ir. Wybe Kuitert op: 4 februari 2016

The versatile and complex works of poet and state adviser Constantijn Huygens show a few instances of perceptions of Japan. Intriguing is his epigram ‘Iaponsche Trijn’ [Japanese Kitty] that at a closer look indicates how well-informed he actually was about this far away country on the other side of the globe. The poem is also one of the first sources that contain a new Dutch word watten for cotton wool and leads, within a wider context of the Dutch and Paris’ circles around Huygens, to clear evidence of the Japanese origin of the word watten itself.

Article is in Dutch.

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I. Jinja ko bengi Text in kanbun (annotated)

door: W.J. Boot en M.M.E. Buijnsters op: 14 januari 2016

Today, the results of the ‘Jinja kō bengi’ research project by W.J. Boot and M.M.E. Buijnsters have been made public on our website under the section “Specialist; Scholarly Publications”. All together, these results amount to seven pdf’s which consist of an annotated rendering of the original text of Jinja kō bengi 神社考辨疑(1686), and of an annotated transliteration in Japanese and translation in English of this Early Modern Buddhist-Confucian polemic. Jinja kō bengi by the Shingon priest Jakuhon 寂本 (1631-1701) should be considered as an early Buddhist reply to one of, if not the most influential Confucian criticisms of Buddhism in the early seventeenth century: Honchō jinja kō 本朝神社考 by Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583-1657). In addition to these documents, the authors have added an annotated translation of the preface of Razan’s Honchō jinja kō, a biographical portrait of both Jakuhon and Hayashi Razan, and, finally, an extensive bibliography of all sources used.

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