Our next lesson, let's return to the first image that I showed at the start of our module. This is a long, hanging painted scroll from 1817. It documents a gathering of poetry and calligraphy, a sort of performance, which was undertaken by five literata, men and women who had traveled all the way from Edo up to northern Kanto which is in present day Saitama Prefecture, a small post town called Satte. This is along the highway which leads up to the northeast of Japan. Among the prominent men in this post town was one doctor who probably had spent some time in Edo got to know the prominent, the most famous literati and cultural figures, of the time and invited five of them to visit his, his small town and to create art, to distribute to people in the area who had some disposable income in order to purchase it or just to gather and look at these these men and women actually creating paintings and calligraphy. The, the event itself we don't really know much about from diaries and other documents of the time. This painting itself really sort of captures what was going on at the time in the picture and the words that that we see in front of us. As I mentioned at the beginning of the module I want to take a look at this particular, particular sample of work to remind us how before the introduction of realistic, immediate modes of representation like photography or movies came into Japan or invented how people actually captured the moment in visual image and how they supported it by by describing it in words and text and turned it into one sort of integral work of art like the one that we're looking at right now. Let's take a close up at the the way that it's sort of proportioned with the text and the words at the bottom. I mentioned that the painter here. His name is is down here is Yoda Chikkoku, a well-known literatus, painter, actor from the 1810s until the 1830s in Edo. And the inscription which is written all on here which is read in this direction, to the right, in kanbun and dated right here, is written by the in the hand of Kameda Bōsai, who is a prominent calligrapher, poet, and painter at this time as well. Let's zoom in a little closer to take a look at what's going on actually going on in this scene. There's a whole crowd of people and if you look very closely you can see that there are men, there are women, the observers, the participants in this scene. There, they cross class boundaries, there are some samurai men drawn into this illustration who have swords. You can see some of them look more like farmer types and so forth. There's a monk sitting up here in his black robes on, and then in the center of the scene there are five men and women who have rolled out paper in front of him, right here, and are busy. There's one person, there's one person up here. They're all busy writing on fans or in large pieces of paper perhaps silk. Each of them has a small crowd of people around them and they're creating art for for everyone who's there. There's some interesting details below this, also. You can see that there's a stove here which people are, are putting probably firewood in to heat and they're heating up saké wine and perhaps some simple dishes to entertain the people who have come together for that for this event. Anyway, it's a very, very vibrant scene. Fascinating document in itself but just as a visual image we, we don't know whether it was actually occurred in time, who the people are, what the occasion was, and so forth. So, in order to pin that down, we need to look at the text itself. I'm not going to translate the whole the whole text. Here we have, Kameda Bōsai, right here, who's given his signature. We also know from the text itself the date, 1817, and he describes the passage that they made from Edo up to this small town and how the group of men and women, locals there, basically greeted them very, very warmly. They intended to go back to Edo after one night, but so many people came from the surrounding areas, entirely rural situation here, that they needed to stay an extra day. In other words, extend their tour to, to satisfy everyone who who had come there. There's nothing extremely sort of emotional or lyrical sort of written; it's a very very sort of simple document but at the end there's a Chinese quatrain, which sort of expresses the participants', the artists', respect and gratitude for the hospital-, hospitality that was shown to them by the people in this town. Stepping back to look at the whole scroll in its entirety, we can see that the five men and women who were painted into this painting themselves painting, in other words, a sort of meta-document about the act of painting and writing calligraphy for these for these countryfolk. Are describing themselves and that leads us to the question of why this document? Why this image with these words which have sort of sprung out? It was actually commissioned why it was made whether it was something that was spontaneous, how is it transmitted and so forth. In other words, the, the, the sort of patronage aspect or the transmission of, of the text itself sort of comes into question. There are no documents sort of clearly defining or delineating what actually, how this, this work of art occurred. But reading the text and the poem, as I mentioned, he sort of offers his respect and his gra- his gratitude for the hospitality that they receive. We could imagine, we could we could surmise that this was left as a gift as a sort of parting gift. We often say okimiyage in Japanese, a gift that you leave to your hosts- when you for your host, when you leave after you've been taken care of somewhere. Not sure of this. But, it's certainly a communication. It's a it's it's a document of of a very very special time and place, an occurrence, an event which happened. We can assume that the people who called, who actually sponsored this event were were gratified and satisfied by it and in return for this. Again, I imagine that the artists created this document of the day and left it behind for them. This is before the invention and of course the introduction of photography to Japan. We can see, already at this early point, at the very beginning of the 19th century that many Japanese artists, people who were interested in art, art lovers, people who were culturally acclimated were concerned with, interested in, placed value on the document documents of the immediate event itself. In illustrations together with writing as we've seen in all of the other lessons so far. Let's move straight into the the end of the Edo period. One of the first, during the first generation the first decades of the introduction of Japanese people themselves to photography abroad, but then also photography which was made, taken, distributed, consumed here in Japan. And let's take a look at how these threads that we've seen so far between the illustrated image, especially the image of the human figure, and literary words, combined, melded together.
