Please think back, remember among the images that we saw in the second module of images of beauties portrayed in the 19th century. Towards the end of that we saw the same photograph that I've put up here for us at the beginning of our lesson here. It's a photograph, later in the life, of Niijima Yae who is a prominent educator, a woman from a warrior family in the province or the domain of Aizu. The Aizu Domain is known in Japan throughout modern history as being the sort of loser in the troubles and the conflicts leading up to the Meiji Restoration and many of the samurai families, after the establishment of the new government in the 1870s, were sort of left out in the cold and to their own devices and so forth to survive and to educate themselves and so forth. So anyway, Niijima Yae was a daughter of a samurai family there who was actually in Aizu when the government, the Meiji government forces came and overtook the castle and drove out all of the residents and so forth. It was a very very violent, very very, for a young woman at the time probably very very unsettling, terrifying incident. She wrote some poems shortly after that in commemoration, to document her feelings and her thoughts toward her lost patrimony. And these became well-known later on in her life. And anyway, this photograph here that I have, shows Niijima Yae, later in her life, dressed as a samurai. She has her hair sort of swept back. She's wearing a men's hakama and is actually holding a sword which a man would be wearing, as well. We remember also from the second module that the writings that she has here, there's a tree in the photograph studio with this sort of banner. This white banner on it on which she is inscribed with brush in Japanese ink, the poem that she wrote, as a young woman, after she was driven from the Aizu castle. I've written it here in Japanese but I want to take a look at the English translation once again. To look at the connection here in this age, towards the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century when this photograph was taken. "Tomorrow night who, from which land, will gaze out upon moonlight left shining upon this dear old castle?" She's, as a young woman, right after 1868-1869 when this event actually occurred, she's looking out, she's remembering that tomorrow, today I leave the castle, tomorrow the invaders will have occupied the castle and she's imagining these enemies looking out over the same ramparts at the moon from the same position that she stood at for so many so many times, so many days and nights during her girlhood, anyway during her childhood. This poem, she's basically resurrected, together with a sort of dramatic recreation of herself or what she imagined herself to be as a young adult at this time when these events occurred. A very, very unusual, very, very peculiar sort of historical mock up, not by an actor or an actress, but by herself, dressed up as something that she wasn't to begin with, in other words, she's crossing genders here pretending to be a male samurai and introducing her readers, reintroducing her very, very famous poem towards her lost patrimony at this time. During the 1880s, this poem itself, the capturing of the Aizu castle captured the imagination of many, many people in Japan. It was turned into a number of different novels and plays and so forth, obviously being you know safely vanquished. The second generation of Meiji era intellectuals and readers and so forth could sort of enjoy the adventure of this sort of historical romance occurring very shortly before in the 1860s. Any way, we have one novel here, Chance Encounter with a Beauty, which is a so-called political novel written in 1885, in which the scene of the fall of Aizu Castle is depicted. "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?' She proceeded then to hang herself from a pine tree in front of the buildings." Please remember the image of Yae in the photographic studio has her looking like a samurai and then there's a pine tree next to her with her with her poem sort of hanging from it or stuck to it in a sense. So, all this sort of historical already popular sort of scenes and images surrounding the battles leading up to the fall of Aizu. The passage continues. "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?'" As we saw in module two, the words have changed a little bit but we can see they're using, they're quoting Yae's poem itself. And again note, that the poem is represented here in the novel as having been carved with her hairpin into the white mortar wall of the castle, graffiti in other words, for the vanquishers to see after she'd left. A sort of sort of, you know, a sort of daring sort of you know sort of challenge by this young woman for the vanquishers, for the government forces, who would have come and seen the poem there as well. In this novel, this very popular novel from the 1880s, Niijima Yae is carving her poem into the mortar of the castle wall itself, but in the sort of historical photographic mockup that she makes probably in the in the early 20th century, we see that it's all written by hand and she's standing next to it in the same photograph, as well. The sort of self-production or self reproduction representation of her historical self, and the situation that she was in as a child but also, its dramatization all of the layers of discourse and drama and so forth that this particular historical event had passed through in the decades between are reflected in a way in the in the image that is very very closely, carefully crafted here in front of us.
