Counting Dreams: The Life and Writings of the Loyalist Nun Nomura Bōtō

By Roger K. Thomas

Counting Dreams tells the story of Nomura Bōtō, a Buddhist nun, writer, poet, and activist who joined the movement to oppose the Tokugawa Shogunate and restore imperial rule. Banished for her political activities, Bōtō was imprisoned on a remote island until her comrades rescued her in a dramatic jailbreak, spiriting her away under gunfire. Roger K. Thomas examines Bōtō's life, writing, and legacy, and provides annotated translations of two of her literary diaries, shedding light on life and society in Japan's tumultuous bakumatsu period and challenging preconceptions about women's roles in the era.

Thomas interweaves analysis of Bōtō's poetry and diaries with the history of her life and activism, examining their interrelationship and revealing how she brought two worlds—the poetic and the political—together. Counting Dreams illustrates Bōtō's significant role in the loyalist movement, depicting the adventurous life of a complex woman in Japan on the cusp of the Meiji Restoration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501760006

Book preview

COUNTING DREAMS

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THE LOYALIST NUN NOMURA BŌTŌ

ROGER K. THOMAS

CORNELL EAST ASIA SERIES

AN IMPRINT OF

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Girlhood to Widowhood

2. Loyalist

3. Imprisonment and Exile

4. In Chōshū

5. Poetry

6. Diaries

7. Legacy

Conclusion

Sources I. Diary of My Journey to the Capital

Sources II. Counting Dreams

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An exhaustive list of everyone who has contributed in some way to the appearance of this volume would necessarily include numerous librarians and archivists whose names I do not know but who certainly deserve acknowledgment. Special thanks must go to Sumie Jones, who introduced me to early modern literature—including waka—many years ago when I was a graduate student; to the two anonymous readers who offered much constructive criticism; and to my wife, Michiko, who not only suggested possible interpretations of difficult passages but who supported me through this effort in countless ways. I am also grateful for institutional support, including financial assistance from Illinois State University, and permission from the National Diet Library to use the illustration appearing on the cover.

NOTE ON TRANSLATION

Romanized Japanese words appearing in brackets in translated texts are taken from the original, and are included for the benefit of readers familiar with the language.

ABBREVIATIONS

NBZ Nomura Bōtō. Nomura Bōtō-ni zenshū. Ed. Sasaki Nobutsuna. Atami: Nomura Bōtō-ni Zenshū Kankōkai, 1958.

YSZ Yoshida Shōin. Yoshida Shōin zenshū. Ed. Yamaguchi-ken Kyōikukai. 12 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1938–1940.

NKT Nihon kagaku taikei. Ed. Sasaki Nobutsuna. 10 vols. Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 1956–1965.

SKS Ōkuma Kotomichi. Sōkeishū. Ed. Anayama Takeshi and Sasanoyakai. Fukuoka: Kaichōsha, 2002.

Introduction

Migake kashi kiyoki kokoro no masukagami utsurou kage wa oimasaru to mo

Polish it (I tell myself): this heart till it is pure—

even if, as in a bright mirror, what is reflected betrays my advancing age.

—NBZ 235, Nomura Bōtō

It is a commonplace to note that the lives and works of most figures since antiquity are of interest mainly to historians or to littérateurs, but seldom in equal measure to both. Japan of the Bakumatsu period—roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the Imperial Restoration in 1868—produced a number of individuals who attempted, most of them unsuccessfully, to straddle the worlds of political affairs and poetry. One figure from this period who deserves equal attention from scholars of literature and historians alike is Nomura Bōtō (1806–1867), a loyalist nun from Fukuoka who left a substantial corpus of poetry and prose writings, and who played an important—if ancillary—role in happenings that shaped the course of events of the northern Kyushu and western Honshu areas, counting among her close acquaintances some who would become leaders in the new Meiji government.¹ Her poetry and her social vision of the age are so closely intertwined that one cannot hope to properly understand either independently of the other, though a study that attempts to do justice to both runs the risk of shortchanging one or the other. For Bōtō, one important link between the introversive tendency of her poetic vision and the extroversive inclination of her social ideals was arguably the great importance she attached to her dreams, as illustrated in the pages that follow and especially in her diary, Counting Dreams.²

Boasting a history longer than any other genre of verse in Japan, waka—literally, Japanese song/poetry—is also the legacy of an age that pre-dates foreign influences, and as such it had long enjoyed pride of place among those of a nativist bent. With the rise of kokugaku as a separate intellectual endeavor over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, composition of waka was elevated almost to the level of a sacrament in certain schools. By tradition eschewing all diction of foreign derivation, it came to be seen as a quintessentially pure expression of Japaneseness, and the idea even obtained among some that, by adhering to correct forms and styles, a poet could succeed in re-creating a state of mind approximating the unsullied view of the ancients. Among nativist scholars and their spiritual heirs, the loyalists (kinnōka) of Bakumatsu Japan, composition of waka thus became obligatory, as much a political act as an aesthetic or literary one, with the result that many with no particular belletristic interests or aptitudes would spout verses whose quality would be judged more on the basis of their fervency than on their adherence to any conventional norms. Sugiura Minpei notes that since waka was employed to pledge one’s loyalty in antiquity demonstrating faith in the divinity of the emperor, loyalists [of the Bakumatsu] deemed it most suitable for expressing their feelings, but seldom to felicitous effect, failing to achieve the tone of the ancients and simply regurgitating the same phrases and diction in imitation of one another.³

Bōtō approached the enterprise from the opposite direction, devoting her life to poetry and gaining a considerable local reputation for it before being swept into the events of the age. Her literary inclinations, already evident in her early years, occupied her attention through marriage, stepmotherhood, and on into retirement with her poet-husband. Though she sometimes expressed views that appear consonant with a growing spirit of radicalism among certain factions in the Fukuoka domain, nothing suggested she might someday pursue the same course. Possible sources of influence that turned her into a risk-taking activist are explored in the following pages, but here it is sufficient to note the multifaceted patterns of her life and thought, which draw both from Japan’s rich literary tradition and from the political views of such firebrands as Hirano Kuniomi (1828–1864) and Baba Bun’ei (1821–1892). Areas of Japanese cultural and social thought of the age that are aptly illustrated by her career could be subsumed under four general categories.

Deserving first mention are the case studies Bōtō provides that illustrate the expanded possibilities for a traditional genre of poetry like waka, as well as its limitations. By the time Bōtō was active, both teaching and practice of waka had long since moved beyond their previous confinement to the aristocracy and had become the property of all classes; only in her generation, however, does one see many examples of a poetry master of a lower class instructing students from a higher class (Bōtō’s second and lifelong teacher, Ōkuma Kotomichi [1798–1868], was from the townsman class, while she was from the middle ranks of samurai society, a few rungs higher). Expanded participation also affected women. Although women had always been active in composition of waka poetry, their voices became more public with increased publication of their collections and with many women becoming teachers (Bōtō included a number of men among her own students).⁴ Acceptable diction and imagery in waka composition had become more varied, expanding expressive possibilities in the genre and producing compositions that would have been unthinkable even a generation earlier.⁵ The sheer volume of waka poetry written during the two and a half centuries of the early modern period far exceeds the amount produced over the millennium that preceded it. And yet, for all of its expanded possibilities, waka continued to be bound by numerous limitations, some inherent—its limitation to thirty-one syllables, for example—and others imposed by convention, such as its continuing rejection of diction of nonnative origin. As Momokawa Takahito has argued, however, there was an unmistakable trend toward vernacularization of waka, beginning most noticeably with Ozawa Roan (1723–1801) and his ideal of tadagoto (ordinary language) as an apt vehicle for poetic expression.⁶ Roan could hardly be called a spiritual forebear to loyalists of the Bakumatsu, but they were in a very real sense beneficiaries of the loosening of acceptable themes and diction that his style came to exemplify.

Among loyalists of the period, a subgenre of waka appeared known as patriot verse (shishigin), which included many of the works of the aforementioned political poetasters. Aoyama Hidemasa, who has undertaken a scholarly analysis of their literary endeavors, has described it thus: "The style of their poetry—which from the standpoint of traditional waka expression is clearly heterodox—employs conventional diction of such things as elegiac verse with a diverse admixture of terms in vogue among contemporary thinkers as well as words of Man’yōshū vintage." To explain the appearance of such a seemingly aberrant style, he cites of course the inadequate training and literary acumen of many of its practitioners, but also mentions the fact that there was little precedent in traditional waka for the expression of such sentiments.⁷ Moreover, although sonnō (revering the emperor) was certainly a driving force for the loyalists, their incipient nationalism was qualitatively different from that which would later obtain during the Meiji period, for as Momokawa has cogently argued, kō (filial piety) had not yet been conflated with chū (loyalty to one’s lord), with the result that the conflict loyalists sometimes felt between these two values is reflected in their verse.⁸

To this one might add that, for reasons cited above, it is perhaps unsurprising that composition in a verse form whose very origins were couched in the myths of Japan’s beginnings should be elevated to the level of a sacrament for those steeped in such lore, or that their forays into the literary realm should value a valiant tone (what the Japanese would call kakuchō) more than technique. A brilliant political theoretician like Yoshida Shōin (1830–1859) could thus in genuine sincerity dash off such unremarkable compositions as

Abokuto ga Yōra o yakushi kitaru to mo sonae no araba nani ka osoren

Though Yankee villains in league with Europe appear on our coasts,

if we are but prepared what need have we to fear?

Sonae to wa kan to hō to no iinarazu waga Shikishima no yamatodamashii

By prepared I do not speak of warships and cannons,

but of the Yamato spirit unique to our blessed land.⁹

And yet Shōin also claims the distinction of having composed one of the most frequently cited verses in this subgenre, a poem he wrote when imprisoned in Kantō in 1859, which could be said to have served as a template for many other versifiers in the loyalist movement:

Mi wa tatoi Musashi no nobe ni kuchinu to mo todomeokamashi yamatodamashii

Even if this body should rot on the plain of Musashi,

what shall ever remain is my Japanese spirit.¹⁰

This—and the afore-cited verse—introduce Japanese spirit (yamatodamashii), a term that appears ubiquitously in shishigin, where it takes on a peculiar semantic burden. Its application in patriot verse is analyzed in detail by Aoyama, who traces meanings attached to the word beginning with its first appearance in the Otome (The Maidens) chapter of The Tale of Genji and continuing down to its use among Bakumatsu loyalists, who united its earlier connotation of Japanese distinctiveness—usually in contrast to Chinese—with a sense of martial courage.¹¹

Concurrent with its new martial tone, another admixture to the semantic makeup of yamatodamashii during this period was associated with masculinity.¹² When Bōtō and other women in the loyalist movement such as Matsuo Taseko (1811–1894) or Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791–1875) were moved to express patriotic sentiment in their verse, they felt constrained to strike a balance between acceptable feminine imagery and fervent avowal of devotion to the cause, sometimes resulting in what seem like pleas. Consider these lines by Masu, the mother of Kojima Kyōsuke (1837–1862), one of the assailants in the Sakuradamon Incident (1860) in which Chief Minister Ii Naosuke (1815–1860) was assassinated:

Shikishima no michi wa hitotsu o me nari tote nani otoru beki yamatodamashii

The Way of Japan is but one—

what, then, lacks in a woman’s native spirit?

Me ni koso are ware mo yuku beki michi o yukite yamatogokoro wa otoranu mono o

Precisely because I am a woman there is a path I must tread,

for I am not lacking in Japanese spirit.¹³

Here she affirms her yamatodamashii, but appears at the same time to protest the masculine co-opting of the word. Later—perhaps after Kyōsuke’s death in prison—she registers her despair:

Isotose o ada ni kurashite namayomino kainaki mono wa omina narikeri

These fifty years I have lived in vain—

what a useless thing a woman is.¹⁴

Bōtō’s attempts to achieve a fitting tone in her patriotic verse in spite of these odds are discussed in the chapters that follow.

In the second general category, Bōtō’s experiences aptly illustrate many of the dynamics of the class structure of late Tokugawa Japan, as well as the stresses to which it was subjected and the various shifts that may be observed. Though the samurai of the period are described as a discrete class, within that class existed a rigid hierarchy, from the daimyo and chief retainers (karō) at the top down to the foot soldiers (ashigaru) at the bottom, and all were acutely aware of their respective positions in this order. As a member of the middle ranks of samurai society, Bōtō experienced the advantages of a family stipend well above subsistence level, as well as connections that facilitated her pursuit of cultural activities. Throughout her writings, while she refers with obvious pride to her family’s history and position, at the same time she demonstrates an almost instinctive deference to those above her in the domain leadership, even when they bring charges against her.¹⁵ And yet she often appears remarkably egalitarian in her empathy for the lower classes. As mentioned before, she accepted a townsman as her poetry master, and a scion of the lowly ashigaru class, Kuniomi, as her mentor in political theory. Her egalitarianism was not without limits; she remained convinced that only those of high rank should be allowed to serve the aristocracy.¹⁶

Anyone versed in the history of early modern Japan is sure to have encountered in older textbooks descriptions of the class structure of its society—samurai, peasant, artisan, merchant (shi-nō-kō-shō), an ancient concept originally appearing in Confucian classics but adapted to Tokugawa social composition—which describe these divisions as rigidly enforced, restricting social mobility and even intermarriage among them. Such textbook descriptions are not without some basis, but the actual situations were often very nuanced.

This class structure is said to have had its genesis in the practice of soldier-peasant separation (heinō bunri) that developed during the century of civil wars out of the need to keep peasants on the land producing food and soldiers in the ranks without gravitating to other occupations.¹⁷ Specific mention is made in all treatments of this topic to a Tenshō 19 (1591) edict signed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598), forbidding among other things peasants from abandoning their land or seeking any kind of wage labor.¹⁸ An earlier edict had limited to the samurai class the possession of armaments, and the famous sword hunt (katanagari) of 1588 had ruthlessly enforced this.

It has been noted that Hideyoshi’s edict did not have the legal force often attributed to it—that not only was his reference to samurai limited to young retainers (wakatō) rather than to samurai generally, but that the edict was intended only as a temporary measure.¹⁹ But, however status may have been defined legally—and whatever minor variations might have existed from one domain to another—the customary divisions through much of the early modern period appear to have been as rigid as any legal code could have mandated, and the structure was created and maintained to keep power exclusively in the grasp of the warrior class, especially its higher ranks. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that the common people, that is, the peasants, the artisans, and the merchants, were permitted to exist only to serve the samurai and to feed the samurai.²⁰ Though in theory the peasantry ranked second after the samurai because of their indispensable productive role, in practice they suffered the greatest hardships and were the most adversely affected by heavy taxation. Also in theory the merchants were ranked the lowest among all the subject classes because they were seen as living outside the ethical realm, supposedly devoid of all sense of public responsibility, pursuing only their personal economic interests.²¹ In practice, however, many were able to accumulate great wealth, often becoming creditors to samurai. They also made many significant contributions to the arts and culture of the age.

The role of education for each class was also fixed in theory, though not always in practice. "The principles of government were based on ‘making them dependent, not informed [yorashimu beshi, shirashimu bekarazu],’ and education was to be limited to the warrior class." This was in keeping with Confucius’ saying (Analects 8:9): The common people can be made to follow it [the Way]; they cannot be made to understand it. The practical value of basic literacy and numeracy for commoners was recognized, but anything beyond that was officially discouraged. A cynical verse of senryū summarized the samurai’s role:

Bu de odoshi jin de wa sukashi chi de oshie

Threaten with armaments, coax with benevolence, teach with knowledge.²²

Such class-bound principles of education may have been of some force at the beginning of the early modern period, but they soon lost potency with the growing numbers of merchants, artisans, and even peasants who excelled in learning and the arts. Indeed, as Eiko Ikegami has cogently illustrated, it was often in the area of learning and the arts that the greatest porousness in early modern class boundaries may be observed. She demonstrates that by recurrently joining the sites of what she calls aesthetic publics—social spaces officially regarded as belonging to the private sphere but historically based on a compromise between vertical political organization and horizontal entities such as guilds, village structure, and so forth—people temporarily decoupled from their existing ties and switched their identities from those of a dutiful samurai or wealthy merchant to those of poets or artists. This compromise is of critical importance in the present discussion because unlike political alliances, authorities did not bother to meticulously control the numerous networks of cultural circles and associations.²³

The Bakumatsu period was a time when this class structure was being subjected to various strains and pressures, and many transformations had already taken place well before the system collapsed. A relaxation of the rigor with which class boundaries had been maintained could be observed on various fronts. This has been described above in the area of waka teaching and practice, but the same trends held for other areas of the arts and scholarship, which had important implications for the development of discrete political alliances. As Ikegami notes, Although the members of the Tokugawa aesthetic publics were tolerated by the authorities as long as their private activities were conducted under their enclave identities, it was difficult to confine the relationships that were formed within these private enclaves.²⁴ This is certainly observable in circles of waka poets, social spaces dealing with a medium that had strong ties to kokugaku and that gave expression to the aspirations of many loyalists, as seen above. In some instances, waka instruction appeared even to be a cover for political activity.

The burgeoning enrollment of commoners in private academies, where they studied side by side with samurai, was another important development, as was increasingly numerous cases of commoners studying in official domain schools.²⁵ Finally, there was also an increase in commoners who were rewarded with the privilege of having surnames and carrying swords (myōji taitō gomen). Recipients of this privilege were often skilled physicians, village headmen (shōya), or commoners who had aided military endeavors, rendered unusual service to domain government, or given significant financial support. Studies quantifying this practice are few, but in one domain—the Toyotsu han in Buzen—at the time of the Restoration, 2 percent of commoners had been accorded this privilege.²⁶ A related phenomenon is seen in the trend that grew in the Bakumatsu period to recruit non-samurai for service in militias. The most noteworthy example of this is the Irregular Militia (Kiheitai), founded in 1863 by the Chōshū loyalist firebrand Takasugi Shinsaku (1839–1867)—with whom, incidentally, Bōtō had close personal association. The approximately half of the militia consisting of commoners—of which peasants were most numerous but which included even declassed outcaste (burakumin)—were of course permitted to bear arms but were also allowed public surnames. (It should be noted, however, that class distinctions were maintained not only in the hierarchy but also in the attire of militia members.) To a lesser extent this trend was also apparent in the shogunate’s special police force, the Newly Selected Squad (Shinsengumi), which, though drawn primarily from the rōnin, whose numbers were increasing in fencing schools in Edo, also included members from peasant, merchant, and other backgrounds, something that would have been unthinkable in an earlier generation.

The third of the aforementioned four categories of cultural and social thought that are illustrated by Bōtō’s life experiences is the changing role of women in late Tokugawa society: how they were treated differently in the penal system and how this treatment changed over time; how possibilities and limitations resulted from family demands (her own successful remarriage as a so-called demodori would likely have been more difficult even a generation earlier); changes in travel restrictions, which had eased generally, but especially for nuns and clergy, and; renegotiation of boundaries of public and private spheres in the chiliastic atmosphere of Bakumatsu Japan, a recalibration that arguably affected women more than men.

This aspect of gender roles in Bakumatsu society and culture illustrated by Bōtō’s life and career will no doubt beg further attention in the minds of many readers, which is only reasonable give the paucity of treatments of women from the early modern period.²⁷ Rather than devote a separate chapter to these questions, however, I suggest some basic considerations here in the introduction and attempt to pay due attention to these considerations throughout.

At least as early as the Meiji era, serious attempts have been made to describe the lives and roles of women during the preceding Tokugawa period. The phrase the land of Japan is woman’s hell (Nihonkoku wa josei no jigoku nari) has been attributed to the influential scholar and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), but whether or not this attribution is correct, the sentiment projected in these words and in Fukuzawa’s many writings on the topic set the tone for many subsequent academic treatments of gender in the early modern period.²⁸ Fukuzawa and many of the following generation, inspired by the ideals of newly imported European liberalism, tended to paint an unrelievedly bleak picture of the lives of women under what they called the feudal order of early modern Japan. Fukuzawa’s descriptions of the period are typified by his claim that the relationship between men and women naturally followed the general trend [of the social hierarchy], with the man as liege and the woman as subject; even as one takes into account their social rank, the man as liege—whether noble or base, wealthy or poor—… taking his cue from shoguns and daimyos, could treat her with arrogance or indifference …²⁹ Few such treatments failed to devote ample space to reviling the notorious Great Learning for Women (Onna daigaku), a work on proper education and deportment of women that has been (probably erroneously) attributed to the Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714), a fellow native of Fukuoka, though Bōtō never once mentions the work nor does her life exemplify its precepts.³⁰ Neither does she betray any familiarity with Yoshida Shōin’s Confucian-inspired instructions for women (jokun), in spite of her later personal connection with Shōin’s younger sister.³¹ Although it would be misguided to minimize the hardships that women—or anyone—faced in this unusually oppressive social order, women’s roles in it and the relationships between men and women were more nuanced than the broad strokes of such depictions suggest. Following Fukuzawa and the somewhat self-conscious liberalism-catchup of many of his contemporaries, in the next generation written treatments of early modern women were sometimes influenced by the rising spirit of militarism to portray certain women as nationalist heroines while at the same time managing to adhere to traditional norms of femininity. Bōtō was sometimes cast in that role (as discussed in a later chapter).

Across class lines, female literacy had risen, along with the burgeoning of the readership generally, and an increasing number of parents sought education for their daughters as well as their sons. By the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for women to teach in neighborhood schools (terakoya) and even private academies, and it came to be seen as a suitable occupation for women from both the samurai and the merchant classes.³² Nor did women’s curriculum consist exclusively or even largely of unrelieved Neo-Confucian moral education, with tracts like Great Learning for Women, as some have characterized the period; an analysis of texts used in women’s education during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals that the majority of them provided instruction on academic and practical subjects rather than on moral exhortation. Many women of the Bakumatsu were intellectually well prepared to grapple with the issues confronting their contemporary society.

The 1980s saw a renewed interest in historical treatment of early modern women, but much of it has focused on the peasant class.³³ Discussions of women of the samurai class have not been as numerous. In some respects, this evolving history of the treatment of women of the period highlights some complications inherent in the topic, difficulties that bedevil an examination of Bōtō as well. On the one hand, it would be both absurd and patronizing—to Bōtō and to women generally—to imply that the mere fact of her birth sex enhances the value of her poetry or elevates the significance of her contributions as a loyalist. Her accomplishment as a poet stands on its own merit, and the ramifications of her political activity were far-reaching, as the following chapters demonstrate. Yet, on the other hand, one cannot deny that questions of gender cast her attainments in a peculiar light, one that invites much further discussion. A perennial pitfall of such discussions is the temptation to indulge presentist biases that fail to account for social dynamics obtaining in a very different age and culture. This book attempts to provide special focus on those fluctuating aspects of gender roles that appear to be peculiar to a liminal age.

The problems inherent in writing about a female historical person are mentioned by Carolyn Heilbrun, who argues,

There are four ways to write a woman’s life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman’s life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.³⁴

She continues by claiming that the various genres available for women to write themselves in are dominated by masculine conventions that burden the process with various complications. Significantly, she omits diaries, a genre with a literary status far more limited in the West than in Japan, where from early times its foremost representative authors have been predominantly female. Nor does she devote much discussion to how a woman might write herself through her poetry. Significantly, literary diaries and waka poetry were Bōtō’s primary vehicles for writing herself. Letters are not usually regarded as a literary genre even in Japan, where men’s and women’s epistolary conventions differed significantly in the period considered here. And yet letters (also not mentioned by Heilbrun) are a way women may write themselves, one that Bōtō often employed with felicitous aesthetic effect. In the chapters that follow, the extent to which these three types of writing—diaries, poetry, and letters—overlap in Bōtō’s oeuvre becomes obvious, but the one area where she was perhaps indeed hobbled by male conventions was in achieving the desired tone for her patriot’s verse (shishigin), a subgenre unquestionably dominated by ideals generally thought to be masculine. Bōtō left many compositions that could be called shishigin, their numbers increasing toward the end of her life. One example that addresses the role of women as loyalists is

When asked for a verse in admonition of young women

Hitosuji no michi o mamoraba taoyame mo masuraonoko ni otori ya wa suru

If she but stays her course on the one path,

then is a feminine woman at all inferior to a manly man?³⁵

That women composing shishigin in Chinese faced similar challenges in finding the right tone is illustrated by a verse composed in 1845 in response to the Opium Wars by the loyalist Yanagawa Kōran (1804–1879), who would later go to prison in her deceased husband’s stead. Here, she responds to the same kind of skepticism about women’s abilities that Bōtō’s verse addresses:

The sentiments of these verses—both Bōtō’s and Kōran’s—are of one piece with the folk song If I Were a Man, which was first sung by the women of Hagi as they built the earthen defenses at Kikugahama against anticipated attacks from foreign powers in 1863. This song—still often sung in Yamaguchi Prefecture—aptly illustrates the depth of sincerity of female devotion to the loyalist cause, as well as suggesting some of the limitations imposed on that devotion:

Maeda Toshiko has argued that three generalizations may be made about female loyalists of the Bakumatsu: (1) most were either from the wealthy segment of the peasant class or from the middle- to low-ranking samurai class; (2) most hailed from the provinces; and (3) poetry and ideas about poetry played an important role in shaping their political thought.³⁸ Bōtō’s career illustrates all three generalizations, and in this sense is perhaps representative. But her poetic career arguably outshines the literary achievements of most of her sisters in the movement, and a study of her life is potentially illustrative of the symbiotic relationship that appears to have obtained between poetry and politics in Bakumatsu Japan.

In this context, perhaps the tendency to slight the poetic accomplishments of Bōtō—and of other women of the Bakumatsu—reflects a holdover from the aforementioned Meiji-period penchant for overcompensation for the alleged backwardness of every aspect of the ancien régime. In his A New Great Learning for Women (Shin Onna daigaku), in advocating a modern curriculum for women, Fukuzawa Yukichi castigated persisting ideas from the past that limited "women’s education … strictly to studying old native writings [furuki wabun] and to composing verses in thirty-one syllables."³⁹ This overemphasis on the alleged evils of women’s education in the early modern period has had the unfortunate effect of obscuring many accomplishments of the women of the time, and Fukuzawa’s trivialization of their considerable cultural literacy perhaps colors the thinking of some researchers more than a century later.

The fourth category, which is important for understanding Bōtō and her intellectual milieu, is the chiliastic atmosphere that increasingly predominated some sectors of Bakumatsu society, a phenomenon that has not been adequately addressed by historians and that has received little attention from scholars of literature of the age. One noteworthy exception to this neglect is George Wilson’s excellent study, though it focuses on manifestations of millenarianism among commoners—the craze for pilgrimages and the ee ja nai ka (Why not?) dance frenzies—and minimizes its influence on loyalists.⁴⁰ Here I argue that the chiliastic tendency of the age did in fact shape the perspectives of loyalists in general—and of Bōtō in particular—in various ways, though its manifestations differed qualitatively from those seen among commoners.

The mention of millenarianism in a Japanese context sometimes meets with the objection that its user is attempting to incongruously impose a linear Western concept on the cyclical view of time that has been predominant in the Far East. But such an objection rests on two misunderstandings. The first is what is implied by the word millenarian. Although its etymology is indeed Occidental—deriving from the thousand-year reign of Christ prophesied in the Apocalypse of St. John—it is currently used typologically to characterize religious movements that expect imminent, total, ultimate, this-worldly, collective salvation.⁴¹ Certainly the history of East Asia provides no dearth of examples of movements that display such tendencies.⁴² The second fundamental misunderstanding of this objection lies in its assumptions about conceptions of time. To begin with, cyclical paradigms in no way preclude the possibility of social or religious movements that can properly be called millenarian, but in any case it can be argued that the native conception of time in Japan is more linear than cyclical, as evinced, for one thing, by the unbroken—and theoretically unbreakable—line of imperial rule. It must be conceded, however, that the native Japanese model of time as history differs from that of the West in not including a tradition of eschatological thought, which had important implications for how chiliastic tendencies played themselves out in the Bakumatsu period.⁴³

It has quite correctly been pointed out that the terms nativism, "kokugaku, and even loyalism" have often been employed carelessly and, on occasion, as if they were unproblematically fungible, but there can be no doubt that strands of kokugaku were combined with nativism (which, as Mark McNally argues, is not quite the same thing as kokugaku), and these in turn meshed with what became restorationist Shinto, a politico-religious ideology that underwrote millenarian tendencies among the loyalists.⁴⁴ To reinforce the claim that loyalism and sonnō-jōi (revere the emperor, expel the barbarian) not only included chiliastic elements but in many instances were also dominated by the same, we should consult the authoritative definition provided by Talmon, who writes that millenarianism is a merger between a historical and a nonhistorical conception of time, of which a denouement is due in the near future, that its view of the divine is transcendent and imminent at the same time, that it involves both inclusion and exclusion, and that many millenarian movements deliberately break accepted taboos and overthrow hallowed norms.⁴⁵ The chapters that follow provide corroborating examples. In the case of Bōtō, these tendencies reached a high pitch toward the end of her life, during her sojourn in Chōshū, and are particularly evident in her poetry from that period.

It is hoped that this treatment of Bōtō will illustrate both the richness of her interior life and her political activism, driven by uncompromising beliefs. One could easily get the impression that two very different people are being described. How, then, are these various aspects of her life—in particular the outer (loyalist) and the inner (visionary)—to be reconciled? Bōtō’s reputation as a loyalist, though well deserved, has unfortunately tended to eclipse interest in her poetry; many have attempted to analyze her contributions strictly in terms of her political activities and views. But to do so is to misunderstand her worldview. I argue here that an important link between her political activity and her interior life was her poetry. Through its lens she made sense of and reconciled both worlds. Before embarking on an analysis of this link, it is essential to examine the events and people who made up her life, for neither her literary work nor her social activity can be fully understood apart from the other.

---

1. There are those who insist that the characters Bōtō (望東) are correctly read in Man’yō-gana fashion as Moto, the same as her secular name. Citing various sources, Tanigawa Kaeko cogently argues that Bōtō was, in fact, the reading she and her contemporaries used. See Nomura Bōtō-ni: Hitosuji no michi o mamoraba (Fukuoka: Karansha), 83–84. Yasukawa Jōsei, Kokoro tazunuru sumizome no eikai, Nihon oyobi Nihonjin 1537 (September): 137, also presents evidence for the reading Bōtō. Ogawa Sumako, Nomura Bōtō-ni (Fukuoka: Nishi Nihon Shinbunsha), 16, argues that, although the name Bōtō took at the time of her tonsure was indeed Shōgetsu Bōtō Zenni, she was known informally among acquaintances as Moto-ni. Ogawa cites no documentation to support this claim. In any case, Bōtō will be used in this study.

2. The significance of dreams in Bōtō’s thought is treated in my Approaches to Oneiric Texts and Imagery in Early Modern Japan, Journal of Japanese Studies 45 (1): 85–87, and by Laura Nenzi in Portents and Politics: Two Women Activists on the Verge of the Meiji Restoration, Journal of Japanese Studies 38 (1): 19–20.

3. Sugiura Minpei, Ishin zen’ya no bungaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), 184–185.

4. I treat many of these changes in The Way of Shikishima: Waka Theory and Practice in Early Modern Japan (Lanham, MD: University Press of America), xvi–xxi.

5. Many of these tendencies are especially pronounced in Kotomichi’s poetry. See my A Voice of the Tenpō Era: The Poetics of Ōkuma Kotomichi, Monumenta Nipponica 59:321–358.

6. Momokawa Takahito, Kinnō shishi waka no shiteki isō, in Teikoku no waka, ed. Asada Tōru, Waka o hiraku, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), 25–26.

7. Aoyama Hidemasa, Bakumatsu shishi no uta ni okeru chūsei no hyōgen to koten waka: kotoba kara no apurōchi, in Gengo to bungaku, ed. Saitō Yoshifumi (Tokyo: Asakura Shoten), 85–86.

8. Momokawa, Kinnō shishi waka no shiteki isō, 29–33.

9. In a letter to his brother Sugi Umetarō [Minji] (1828–1910), dated the third day of the twelfth month, Kaei 6 (1853). YSZ 5:189. These same verses also appear—along with several other patriotic compositions by Shōin—in Tanaka Takashi, ed., Ishin no uta: Bakumatsu sonnōshishi no zesshō (Tokyo: Nihon Kyōbunsha), 14–15. The word shishi—translated in this study as loyalist—has its origin in the Confucian classics, particularly Analects 15:9: "The Master said: ‘The resolute knight (C. zhishi, J. shishi) who is humane does not seek life if it compromises humaneness; there may be times when he will sacrifice his life in order to complete humaneness’ " [子曰：「志士仁人，無求生以害仁，有殺身以成仁」].

10. YSZ 7:319.

11. See Aoyama, Bakumatsu shishi no uta ni okeru chūsei no hyōgen to koten waka, 68–78.

12. Aoyama, Bakumatsu shishi no uta ni okeru chūsei no hyōgen to koten waka, 72.

13. Nishimura Kanefumi, comp., Junnan zokusō ([Tokyo]: Tanaka Jibee), 19r. Shikishima no michi in the first example is typically used to refer to the Way of waka, but the context here implies a more general meaning.

14. Kanefumi, Junnan zokusō, 21r.

15. Bōtō’s unwavering adulation of the Kuroda family is evident throughout her diaries, and appears as early as 1852 in the following verse:

On the night of the tenth of the eleventh month the lord [of the domain] appeared to me in a dream

Hitsuki yori tōtoku omou mi-sugata o neshi ma no yume ni mitatematsurishi

His form, more resplendently noble than sun or moon—

appearing in a dream, even as I slept. (NBZ 119)

16. When her kinsman was called to guard noblemen who were detained in Dazaifu, she lamented that for such lowly yokels to serve them personally truly inspires a sense of dread. NBZ 314.

17. See Minegishi Kentarō, Kinsei mibunron (Tokyo: Azekura Shobō), and Takagi Shōsaku, Nihon kinsei kokkashi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten).

18. Takagi (Nihon kinsei kokkashi no kenkyū, 155–156) cites and comments on this edict.

19. Takagi, Nihon kinsei kokkashi no kenkyū, 279.

20. Masao Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, trans. Mikiso Hane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 328.

21. Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History, 329.

22. Kitajima Masamoto, Bakuhansei no kumon (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha), 381–382. I have used Arthur Waley’s translation of Confucius: 民可使由之，不可使知之.

23. Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press), 8, 12, 33.

24. Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 202. On the transfer of elite learning to commoner groups, see also the eleven excellent essays in Matthias Hayak and Annick Horiuchi, eds., Listen, Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan (Leiden: Brill).

25. Richard Rubinger documents and quantifies this development in his Private Academies of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), noting for example that samurai constituted only 6.4 percent of the enrollment in Hirose Tansō’s (1782–1856) prestigious Kangien, while Ogata Kōan’s (1810–1863) academy of Dutch studies in Osaka had roughly 20 percent samurai, and Motoori Norinaga’s (1730–1801) Suzunoya had only 13.8 percent (142). R. P. Dore, in his Education in Tokugawa Japan (London: Athlone Press), 219–221, documents commoner enrollment in domain schools, but emphasizes that, even where admitted, commoners were segregated.

26. Fukuchi Shigetaka, Bakumatsuki ni okeru myōji taitō gomensha no seikaku, Nihon rekishi 38 (July): 22–24. Fukuchi notes that this practice