Taira Conference
Loveable Losers: The Taira in Action and Memory
An Interdisciplinary Academic Conference
Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada
August 13-15, 2011
Description
Participants
Conference Sponsors
Description
This conference was held in order to promote a better international understanding of one of the most important families in Japanese culture, the Taira. As is well known, the Taira lost the war of 1180-85 to the Minamoto, ending a five-year conflict that had divided much of Japan. Whereas the Minamoto thus were victorious, and went on to establish the first shogunate, an institution that would endure and play a central role in Japanese history until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it was the Taira, the losing side, who came to be celebrated in literary and otherartistic works for centuries to come. The best known of these works is undoubtedly the war tale Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike, c. 14th century), which takes a sympathetic view of the Taira and which has had considerable influence on a number of later texts and genres, most notably Noh theatre. In short, the Taira have been seen as tragic losers, a popular theme in Japanese culture, who were at once too uninformed, and even pacified by their preoccupation with courtly matters and lifestyles, to realize that real power now rested with their own class of warriors in the provinces, not with courtiers in Kyoto.
This contradictory narrative of the Taira as successful imitators of court culture but unsuccessful innovators in the political, social and economic spheres has been sustained by a scholarly tendency to confine inquiries to traditional academic divisions, while overarching treatments have been woefully lacking. This conference significantly increased our cultural understanding of Japan through a careful and markedly interdisciplinary approach to the Taira. The conference presentations examined and analyzed not only cultural images of the Taira, and considered how tragic, but loyal and refined losers can become heroes in Japanese culture, but also showed that the Taira were instrumental in promoting trade with China and in importing copper coins. Both of these developments were crucial steps in Japan’s development into a medieval economy. Not only would this trade continue and develop over the centuries, it would also provide the foundation for the proto-capitalist economy of the Tokugawa age. This conference did, in other words, yield a far more nuanced and richer understanding than we had previously of the Taira as agents in their own time and cultural heroes in later ages, and of Japan’s early economic developments.
The conference featured scholars from the disciplines of history, literary studies, art history and religious studies, in addition to younger scholars and students who are just beginning their careers. The participation of these junior scholars ensures that further research on this important topic will be done outside the confines of the conference. The senior presenters came from institutions all over the world.
This conference was a collective effort organized by Mikael Adolphson, Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Anne Commons, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Alberta, and Joshua Mostow, Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia.
PARTICIPANTS
Keynote Speaker
Takahashi Masaaki, Professor Emeritus, Kobe University
"Facts and Fictions of the Heike Monogatari.”
Presenters
Mikael Adolphson, University of Alberta
"Fukuhara: Kiyomori's Lost Capital"
Heather Blair, Indiana University
"Ritual Regimes: Kiyomori, Itsukushima and Fukuhara"
Anne Commons, University of Alberta
"Taira no Tadanori as Poet and Warrior"
Monika Dix, Saginaw Valley State University
"Heike Nōkyō: Taira no Kiyomori and kechien-gyō Practice in Kamakura-Period Japan"
Naoko Gunji, Augustana College
"The Revival of Amidaji as a Mortuary Site for Antoku and the Taira"
Sachiko Kawai, University of Southern California
"Nyoin Power, Estates, and the Taira Influence: Trading Networks Within and Beyond The Archipelago"
Adam Kern, University of Wisconsin
"Picturing the Classics: The Tale of the Heike in Early Modern Comicbooks"
Keller Kimbrough, University of Colorado, Boulder
"Villains of the Stage? Taira no Kagekiyo in the Seventeenth-Century Puppet Theater"
Lori Meeks, University of Southern California
"Changing Views of Buddhist Nunhood in Kamakura-Period Japan: The Case of Kenreimon'in"
Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia
"Heike Bunka: Taira Literary Culture and Its Influence"
Elizabeth Oyler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Haunted Places: The Heike in the Noh Drama - The Shura Noh Tadanori and Shigehira -"
Paul Rouzer, University of Minnesota
"Sinicizing the Heike: Rai San'yō's Historical Ballads".
Hitomi Tonomura, University of Michigan
"Kiyomori and His Family in Postwar Japan: Mizoguchi's Shin Heike Monogatari (The New Tale of the Heike)"
Michael Watson, Meiji Gakuin, Tokyo
"The Possible Worlds of the Taira: Vignettes of Three Generations in Heike Variants"
Charlotte von Verschuer, L’École des Hautes Études, Paris, France
"Demystifying the Taira Trade Network"
X. Jie Yang, University of Calgary
"A Miracle at Morihisa's Execution: On Legends about the Origin of Kiyomizu-dera Temple (Sec. 5, Scroll 3)"
Respondents
Kondo Shigekazu, Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo
David Bialock, University of Southern California
Hank Glassman, Haverford College
Thomas Keirstead, University of Toronto
Haruo Shirane, Columbia University
CONFERENCE SPONSORS
The organisers wish to express their gratitude to the following sponsors:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Japan Foundation
Toshiba International Foundation
China Institute, University of Alberta
Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
Department of East Asian Studies, University of Alberta
Prince Takamado Japan Centre for Research and Teaching, University of Alberta
Faculty of Arts Conference Fund, University of Alberta
