Meeting Minutes for Feb. 21st, Notice for meetings on Feb. 28th and following

Last Wed. Jan. 21st, we met at the Peace Park's Conference Center on the 3rd floor overlooking the fountain, Seminar Room #3 . We'll meet there again this Wed. the 28th and subsequent Wednesdays from 6 to 8 PM. Meetings are free and you're welcome to attend. For those who can't make it in the evening, we also meet in the afternoons on Wednesdays and Saturdays, at the Port Cloud on the 9th floor of the |Chamber of Commerce Building from 3 to 5 PM.

We finished Chapter Six of our reading concerning Shukkeien Garden, The Rise of West Lake: A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty, "Ten Views of West Lake: A Naming Convention." and have but the ten page Epilogue to read before we can call the book finished. (You can download the book from the link to the Facebook group site there.) Three words that kept coming up in this chapter were, "formulaic," "stereotyped," and "cliched," which all arose in the context of "trope." The poetic and painting conventions of the Lake and the aesthetic culture surrounding it were responsible for these adjectives; originally innovative, they were copied and done to death at scenic sights throughout China . . . and Japan as well.

For those looking for more substantive narratives for the new wave of tourists, the design of Shukkeien as a miniature of 西湖 Xi Hu, the lake outside the Southern Song Dynasty Capital of Hangzhou, provides a wellspring. Our discussion using Xiaolin Duan's Ph.D thesis and book has been very fruitful. We'll most likely next turn our gaze toward the ancient pilgrimage site that inspired the Mori Clan to establish a city in the adjacent tidal estuary. Although now a mere shell of itself, the iconic dock on Miyajima was once built to house an important artifact, illuminated scrolls of Buddhist Suttras. Here's the text, which you can download from this Google Docs link:

Women and the Heike Nokyo.The Dragon Princess, the Jewel and

While the Japanese language scholarship on the 平家納経 Heike Nokyo is quite voluminous -- and referenced heavily the author of this article, Ryuchi Abe, a Professor of Japanese Religions at Harvard -- there's considerably less available in English. During the Imperial Era, when Itskushima's primary infrastructure was changed to a State Shinto edifice, the site's connections to Buddhism were downplayed or abandoned. Tourists confronting the structure would have no clue as to its original purpose unless they visited the Treasure Hall behind it, where a facsimile of the scrolls is available for viewing.

If you're new to this list, Hiroshima's Historiographers is a non-profit volunteer group of amateur and professional historians, tour guides, museum curators and history enthusiasts. We started as an outreach project of the 頼 山陽 San'yō Rai (1780 - 1832) Historical Site Museum six years ago, and have been meeting weekly since to read together in a round robin fashion academic journal articles related to the Rai legacy. Our membership is both Japanese and foreign. For Japanese, the opportunity to be immersed in an Anglophone narrative about their native geography proves attractive, while astute foreigners realize that Japan's history provides useful keys to contemporary situation management. If you'd like to be removed from this list, let me know; likewise, if you know of someone who may be interested, pass it on. You can find a partial catalog of the articles we've read at the Files Tab of our Facebook Group Site, and several more at our naescent webpage.