Tools of Culture: Japan's Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000s–1500s (review)

The editors suggest that Tools of Culture is distinctive in two ways. First, it aims to "depart from the overall thrust of much English-language scholarship, which has tended to look at overseas contacts and relations as extensions of the state and thus principally as diplomatic history," and, instead, to "look foremost at factors and interactions that occurred beyond the state" (p. 1). Second, it aims to move beyond "a land-focused approach to Japanese history [that] has tended to marginalize those aspects of Japanese history that involved interaction between Japan and overseas regions" and to "embrace activities not readily incorporated in 'nation-based' history" (p. 2).

The strategies the editors adopt in order to highlight these distinctive features are nothing new: they disapprove of existing works on the same, or related, subjects and then basically claim to offer unprecedented, innovative, and pioneering achievements. The task should then be to clarify what other scholars have so badly missed in Japanese history and to indicate how well Tools of Culture succeeds in overcoming this. As far as the editors of this volume are concerned, the shortcomings of existing English-language scholarship on Japanese history are fundamental because its research is based on "assumptions that have [too narrowly] defined the understanding of what constitutes Japanese history" (p. 2). In contrast, as the editors imply, Tools of Culture promises to "decenter some of the assumptions" that have produced "a 'sedentary mapping' of history that elides the fluid dynamics of movement, both physical and cultural, in the premodern era" (p. 2).

What is so wrong with past scholarship? In attempting to shed light on the "wider horizons for Japanese history" (p. 2), Tools of Culture presents nine chapters, which are grouped into three parts. Part 1 is entitled "Inscriptions and Interactions," and chapter 1, written by Robert Borgen, examines the diary of a Heian monk named Jōjin (1011–81) who traveled to Song China for 16 months in 1072–73 and attentively observed Chinese canals, architecture, medical practices, and the like. According to Borgen, Jōjin seemed quite impressed by Chinese technology and scientific knowledge. In chapter 2, Murai Shōsuke pays attention to Chinese poetry, which served as a vehicle of diplomatic communication and intellectual exchange in premodern East Asia. Kenneth R. Robinson, in chapter 3, focuses on a 1539 trade mission to Chosŏn Korea led by a monk named Sonkai. Based on the monk's account of his journey, Robinson describes how the Korean government managed Japanese visits in terms of reception, transportation, accommodation, and ceremonies.

Part 2 is entitled "Arts and Aesthetics," and in chapter 4 Haruko Wakabayashi offers a detailed examination of a fourteenth-century painting from Shikanoshima. This painting is known as Shikaumi Jinja engi, and it depicts the legendary conquest of the three Korean kingdoms of Silla, Paekche, and Koguryŏ by Empress Jingū in the third century. Based on her finding that the Korean enemies depicted in the Shikaumi Jinja engi are similar to the Mongol enemies who invaded Japan in the late thirteenth century, Wakabayashi suggests that the Japanese came to create timeless images of alien enemies against a backdrop featuring the power of the military god Hachiman (who was, as the myth tells, in Empress Jingū's womb at the time of the Korean conquest). In chapter 5, as a case of intellectual and cultural exchange between Japan and China, Martin Collcutt discusses the Chinese monk Lanxi Daolong (1213–78), who introduced Chinese-style Zen meditation and culture to Japan and established Kenchōji in Kamakura under the patronage of the Hōjō and other warrior elites. In chapter 6, Saeki Kōji discusses Chinese ceramics (karamono). In Muromachi Japan, karamono shone brightly amid the growing popularity of tea, which constituted the core of medieval...