Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan ed. by Karen M. Gerhart (review)

It is the twenty-first century, and we are reminded time and again that women's voices continue to be silenced, erased, and ignored (as I write this in late 2018, Christine Blasey Ford and her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation as a US Supreme Court justice come immediately to mind). In the notably thoughtful preface of the volume under review, Barbara Ruch, citing Mary Beard, relates that in the ancient Western World rapists cut out the tongues of their victims to silence them, while in today's world "we have … 'more civilized' non-disclosure clauses and bank checks to achieve the muting effect" (p. x). Ruch sees here a parallel with the Japanese case, where today as much as in the premodern period covered by this book, women are not always taken seriously.

Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan, edited by Karen M. Gerhart, is a welcome contribution of ten scholarly essays that fill a deep lacuna in Japanese studies by restoring some of the ignored, forgotten, or deliberately suppressed voices and lives of women in premodern Japan. The book's three themes—women, rites, and ritual objects—have always been of great interest to Gerhart. In editing the volume, she took care to ensure that it addressed larger cultural concerns "such as gender politics, the female body, class, and materiality" (p. 1). As a multidisciplinary examination of rituals and their objects—in this case featuring women and female deities—the current book follows a trajectory established with the publication of Gerhart's two earlier monographs, which interwove material culture studies, ritual studies, and art history.¹

The book covers a historical span of roughly a millennium, from the eighth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Its ten essays, organized into four parts—"Rituals Related to Household and Childbirth" (with essays by Gerhart, Anna Andreeva, and Naoko Gunji); "Women and Buddhist Rituals and Icons" (Chari Pradel, Hank Glassman, and Sherry Fowler); "Buddhist Women and Death Memorials" (Patricia Fister and Monica Bethe); and "Female Patronage, Portraits, and Rituals" (Elizabeth Morrissey and Elizabeth Self)—all touch upon the issue of gender and female agency in Japanese art and ritual practice from one perspective or another.

One of the difficulties in uncovering what women were actually doing when it came to ritual activities is that most of the extant primary sources documenting rituals, such as court diaries, official histories, medical treatises, and Buddhist handbooks, were initiated and written by men. As explained in the book's introduction, even when women regularly documented their daily lives, the specifics were often left out. The essays demonstrate how the contributors overcame the challenge presented by a scarcity of written sources to illuminate the lives of women in premodern Japan, both as subjects and as objects of ritual activity.

Two of the essays are notable for illuminating the role of elite women in the performance of ritual. First, in chapter 1, Gerhart examines the active participation of aristocratic Heian women in a complex set of yin-yang rituals known as shintaku ishi that were prescribed by yin-yang masters (onmyōji) when a household moved to a new residence. Meanwhile chapter 9, by Elizabeth Morrissey, analyzes two extant sources, the fourteenth-century illustrated handscroll Ishiyamadera engi e (Illustrated Legends of Ishiyamadera) and the eleventh-century text Eiga monogatari (A Tale of Flowering Fortunes), and proposes that Higashisanjō-in (962–1002), the tenth-century consort of Emperor En'yū (959–991; r. 969–984) and mother of Emperor Ichijō (980–1011; r. 986–1011), was one of the key female patrons of Ishiyamadera and an avid devotee of its main object of worship, a "secret icon" (hibutsu; a Buddhist image hidden from view) of Nyoirin Kannon (Sk. Cintamāṇicakra). By Higashisanjō-in's time, this important temple already had a well-established reputation among elite women as a miraculous site. Ishiyamadera's Nyoirin Kannon image was particularly...