The third module and the fourth module as well is centered on what I call the literary photograph. Photographs which are of the human form but which have either on the front or the back or on some sort of documentation, which usually travels together with the photograph, a lot of writing, a lot of words about the photograph but more specifically more often words which were sparked by, or inspired by, the photograph and the occasion on which that photograph might be given or exchanged to someone else. The photograph as a social occasion or a social opportunity to place oneself, usually the person who's photographed in the portrait, into society and work, and act and move within the social milieu of the time and place that he or she is in. We took a look at some photos from the 1860s before the Meiji Restoration of samurai here, a western Japan domainal high-ranking samurai who at the age of 60 was looking back over the 59 years of his life and being satisfied with some aspects but also regretting that he hasn't been able to repay the debt of honor which he was granted by his Lord and by the domain in the environment in which he lived in a very very tense period of time. He also proclaims that he's willing to, even at his advanced age, to go into battle to defend the honor of his Lord. So we have these words in here to the right, in Chinese, and on the photograph itself, in classical Japanese. Sort of declarations of the spirit, the resolution of the men who are portrayed in this, at the time, extremely modern new medium. We also took a look at right at the crux between the 19th and 20th century Masaoka Shiki, one of the great innovators of modern Japanese literature in the year- two years before he passed away and in his mid-thirties. A photograph which he had taken to distribute to his literary colleagues at the end of the year. We also saw at the back of the photograph what I believe are his one of his last sort of commitments, one of his last comments on his own image in his own hand here using one of the common season words, the first calendar of the New Year's to describe his situation, his degrading, his degenerative disease and his anxiety about his own mortality. The last module which was also about the literary photograph took us further into the 20th century. Here we have a group portrait from Hokkaido of a young man who looks like the parent of these three children. but in fact he isn't. And he gives us his very loving second-person discourse aimed at the children in the portrait, imagining them growing up and reading his words when he's no longer present. We also saw some picture postcards from the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, 1905, women dressed up in all sorts of different costumes and in different situations and which were sent in great quantity from domestic areas within Japan to the Korean peninsula, Manchuria and other areas, other fronts in the war. Our last lesson then brought us well into the 20th century, the warring years on the continent during the Second World War. While Nagai Kofu in Tokyo was writing a novel about a very small brothel district on the other side of the river. His photographs and the way that he juxtaposes haiku poems on them is very modernistic sort of way, similar to what was going on in Europe or the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, and we can see here a rupture or a turning away from the very synergistic, very very personal reflective relationship or dynamic between the image of the human being, the environment that the human is in and the words that that image spark or spin out so to speak which we see throughout the 19th century. This leads us, I think, past the war years into our own environment, our own sort of sense of what a photograph is, how words and text relate to them. We can view then Nagai Kafū's novel, the illustrations and the words that he used in this 1930s text, to show the distance between the relationship, the so-called traditional, 19th-century sort of relationship between the text and the image in Japan. I hope you've learned something from the course, the four modules that we've put together. I'm afraid I can't recommend further reading or immediate ways to investigate further the relationship between the image and the written word in the 19th century Japan because a lot of research hasn't been done in this field, but I would like to point you to all of the very, very high quality, varied translations of Japanese literature from the 19th century into the 20th century that have already been published. And also the work of art historians and curators all over the world displaying and describing and analyzing Japanese art. A great deal of scholarship and criticism has been dedicated to Japanese portraiture. And I think by looking at each aspect of the sorts of media that we were looking through in this course together you have an idea and you'll be able to perhaps hone your skills and your sensibilities and in order to approach or to come a little bit closer to the reality, the historical reality and the various interpretations that are possible within them in the 19th century in Japan. Good luck.
