Interview with Two Ladies of the Ōoku: A Translation from Kyūji Shimonroku

The collection of interviews with former bakufu officials known as Kyūji shimonroku or Furukikoto tazuneshi kiroku (Record of Inquiries into Bygone Days) was the indirect result of an article that appeared in Shigakkai zasshi (Journal of the Historical Association of Japan) in November 1890.¹ In the article the association’s secretary, Ogawa Ginjirō , called on historians not to ridicule the feudal era but to make an effort to understand its spirit. To that end, he said, researchers should utilize the knowledge of people with firsthand experience of bakufu institutions and practices, before such knowledge was lost forever. The response was prompt, and within a few months a research group devoted to interviewing former bakufu officials had been formed. The group came to be known as the Kyūji Shimonkai (Society for Inquiring into Bygone Days). The first interview (with two gentlemen who had served among the shogun’s personal attendants) took place on 31 January 1891. The fourteenth and last interview was held in November 1892.

Transcripts of the interviews were published as a supplement to Shigakkai zasshi. Modern editions of these transcripts, however, contain only the first to eleventh interviews. What happened to the other three is uncertain. Shinji Yoshimoto , who wrote the introduction to the 1986 Iwanami bunkobon edition, believes that fourteen interviews took place, but states that it is unclear whether or not the last three were actually published.² Miyoshi Ikkō , editor of the 1964 Seiabō edition, simply mentions the sudden cessation of the project, which he ascribes to a lack of funds.³ The project was not subsidized; the members of the Kyūji Shimonkai paid for the whole enterprise—including printing costs and the fees of two shorthand transcribers—out of their own pockets. Lack of funds seems therefore plausible enough as the reason for the project’s abrupt termination, but, as will be seen below, something more sinister may have been afoot.

Kyūji shimonroku is an example of what is known today as “oral history”—that is, a method of investigation based on interviews of people with direct experience of the events discussed. Although the term “oral history” was reputedly coined by the American historian Allan Nevins in 1948, its practice is, of course, much older. Western exemplars of the genre include works by the nineteenth-century folklorists and such classics as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England by Friedrich Engels (1845) and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851).⁴ Japan had something of an oral history tradition of its own. The interrogations of repatriated castaways by bakufu scholars and officials in 1792 and 1804, for instance, are quite well known.⁵ The historians participating in the Kyūji Shimonkai may have heard about European examples of oral history from Ludwig Riess (1861–1928), who had been appointed professor of history at the Imperial University in 1887. As a student of the German historian Leopold von Ranke, however, Riess was not an advocate of oral history; he represented, rather, the documentary tradition that had emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century.⁶ This latter approach, with its focus on archival research, caught on well in Japan, as respect for evidence and facts was part of the Confucian scholarly tradition.

Although the documentary approach that many Japanese historians had so enthusiastically embraced put little trust in the subjective eyewitness, Ogawa’s urgent appeal to preserve the knowledge of former officials also had much to commend it. Once the decision to embark on the interviews had been taken, it would appear that the society did its utmost to preserve a Ranke-school-like objectivity and factuality by consciously trying to produce a record comparable to the raw data provided by documents in an archive. The questions asked for the most part concerned practical matters such as terminology, rules and regulations, customs and etiquette, hierarchy, and the nature of the various functions performed. Where possible, objectivity was enhanced by interviewing different officials from the same department. The Kyūji Shimonkai also completely eschewed editing, let alone analysis...