The Centre for Japanese Research (CJR) at the University of British Columbia presents a series of online book launches to celebrate recent publications about premodern Japan. For our November event, author Takashi Miura will be discussing Agents of World Renewal: The Rise of Yonaoshi Gods in Japan in conversation with Gideon Fujiwara and Gennifer Weisenfeld.

• Takashi Miura (University of Arizona)
• (Interlocutor) Gideon Fujiwara (University of Lethbridge)
• (Interlocutor) Gennifer Weisenfeld (Duke University)

This talk focuses on envoy poetry from early modern East Asia, in particular on Collections of Magnificent Flowers (Hwanghwajip), a large corpus of officially compiled poetry anthologies from the missions the Ming court sent to Chosŏn Korea between 1450 and 1633; and several 18th-century poetry collections from Korea's t'ongsinsa missions to Japan. In cross-cultural perspective East Asia's envoy poetry is a highly distinctive phenomenon: during their encounters envoys communicated in the scripta (rather than lingua) franca of Literary Sinitic through "brush talk" on paper; they were Confucian literati eager to display their talent in collective poetry composition on set topics and shared rhyme schemes; and they learnt how to play with a common set of themes and tropes to convey courtesy and conviviality. How do the literary repertoires differ in Ming-Chosŏn and Chosŏn-Tokugawa envoy poetry collections and why? How did current events and evolving political constellations affect this rather formulaic  poetry? Ultimately this lecture aims to understand the role of envoy poetry in the history of early modern East Asia and develop a comparative framework for understanding the phenomenon of envoy poetry in cross-cultural perspective.

Dr. Wiebke Denecke - Visiting Professor of East Asian Literature & Comparative Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Centre for Japanese Research (CJR) at the University of British Columbia presents a series of online book launches to celebrate recent publications in the field of premodern Japan.

For our October event, author Erin L. Brightwell discussed Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre in conversation with Michael McCarty and Roberta Strippoli. 

• Erin L. Brightwell, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Culture, University of Michigan.
• (Interlocutor) Michael McCarty, Assistant Professor of East Asian History, Salisbury University, Maryland.
• (Interlocutor) Roberta Strippoli, Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies, Binghamton University, New York.