Our last lesson in this module, is going to bring us into the Twentieth Century. A photograph here, of a woman, a very famous woman and educator, and promoter of women's rights in Japan, Niijima Yae. The photograph was taken later in her life, we don't know precisely what the the date was. It was perhaps in the 1910s, or in the 1920s, I would imagine. We can notice from the photograph, which was taken formally in a photographer's studio, that she's dressed in the hakama style of a samurai. She's actually wearing a sword which a male samurai would have worn, perhaps 30 or 40 years before. The carrying of swords was forbidden in the early Meiji period, so this is later on in her life. We can see that she's pulled her hair back, it's almost as if she's sort of crossing gender in a sense. Portraying herself in a way that a male warrior, samurai warrior would have looked in the 1850s or the 1860s. In the studio itself, there's a sort of boulders and trees behind her, it looks like an evening scene. And standing next to her there's a tree, perhaps a pine tree, with a hanging scroll on it which has writing, a Japanese style writing, on it. I've transcribed what was written here, right here to the left here, so that we can read it. I'll read it in Japanese just so that you can hear what it sounds like. [FOREIGN] Translated it goes as, "Tomorrow night who, from which land, will gaze out on moonlight left shining upon this dear old castle?" And the signature is of Yae, the woman who is portrayed in the portrait. In other words, this is a picture of a woman, Niijima Yae, an important educator, who was known very, very broadly in Japan at the time, dressed in an sort of antiquated style across genders, she's dressed as a man. And the poem, which she wrote, and we know also that this writing is in her own hand, sort looks back, it's an evening sign just like, an evening scene, just as the scene that she's portrayed in the photograph is, and she's standing on the ramparts of a castle, she's about to leave it. Tomorrow night who will be looking out from the ramparts of this castle that she says. Contemporaries in Japan, her contemporaries, looking at this photograph, anyone would be able to read the characters, the writing on the wall so to speak here, would immediately see what she is referring to. This sort of mock-up, this sort of historical sort of recreation of a scene from the 1860s. Niijima Yae in 1868, fled from her castle town in the north east of Japan, Aizu, which was the last domain to remain loyal to the Tokugawa bakufu and battled with what would be, which had already become the new government army. It was a very, very famous battle to overtake the castle at Aizu in 1868. Niijima Yae, as a very young woman, was there, and she escaped during the battle to safety outside of her domain. After that she married a very famous young Christian intellectual, Niijima Jō, who founded a very important private university in Kyoto after that, and she developed in the Meiji period her own career, as I said, as an educator. Here in this picture she's looking back and recreating the scene of her escape. And also, this would of seen of her emancipation in a way from feudal Japan. Looking back on it with nostalgia, but also with a certain amount of tension, I would say. The people who would have been standing on the ramparts, looking out on the moon the next day with the conquerors of Aizu domain, her enemies at the time. At the point in history where this photograph is being taken, and she's obviously complicit with it and happy to be photographed in this way. Or at least agreeing to be photographed in this way. The conquerers were the base, the people, the men and the women, who formed the new Niijima society, which she was so much part of. A fascinating reinterpretation of her own history, but also placing herself within the history, the political history of the nation itself. This poem, by the way, was already known to have been written by Yae, by a lot of different people. For example, in 1885, a so-called political novel, seiji shōsetsu, Chance Encounter with a Beauty, was published. And within it, it's fictionalized, but her poem and what she did that evening in her compatriots at Aizu Castle was part of a very, very important scene in the novel itself. Let me just read you part of an excerpt from what I've translated. "Enraged to hear the realm had surrendered, one of the noble young ladies bit her finger and wrote upon the castle wall in her own blood: Over my lord's castle flies the flag of surrender- Deep within its walls, how was I to know?" Here is represented one of the very, very noble young daughters of the leaders of the vanquished domain in Aizu. "She proceeded then to hang herself from a pine tree in front of the buildings." This is a very popular novel, a lot of young people would have read it. And remembered, perhaps, this scene well into the 20th century when Yae's photograph had been taken. Another woman appeared. By the light of the moon, she carved with her hairpin a waka poem into the white mortar wall of the castle: "From tomorrow on who, from which land, will gaze on moonlight left shining upon this great old castle?" The words of the poem, the waka 31-syllable traditional Japanese poem, have changed a little bit. The version is a little bit different but we can see basically its the same poem, which Yae uses to re-enact this scene, which has already been fictionalized and become very, very popular within the Japanese literary imagination from the 1880s. Again, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century we see images of women. The image itself portraying femininity, womanhood, being attractive in different ways to the male-gaze but also pointing to changes in society. Innovations in the medium of representation, often having this sort of allegorical content, or context, which describes or leads the viewer, or the reader into a deeper understanding. Or it gives them the ability to question the sort of historical course of the previous decades. And Japan's position, perhaps, often in the world. I wanted to end this lesson and our module on pictures of beauties with an illustration of a woman later in her life, a photograph of Niijima Yae, who was a very successful educator and important role-model for young women in Japan from the late 19th to the early 20th century, and also a very, very conscious user, very, very conscious of the way that her image, her words but also of her physical presence also, the meaning that it held, as an image itself. I'd like to all of us to think about the different ways, the trajectory of images, their connections with words, and especially in the context of our module here, how the image of women changed over the course of so many decades within the 19th century itself.
