• Corpus ID: 191222136

A Shared Heritage of Sensibility?: The Reception of Bai Juyi's Poetry in Japan

@inproceedings{Arntzen2008ASH,
  title={A Shared Heritage of Sensibility?: The Reception of Bai Juyi's Poetry in Japan},
  author={Sonja Arntzen},
  year={2008}
}

• Sonja Arntzen
• Published 2008
• Art

This paper will focus on one particular aspect of the Japanese reception of Chinese classical culture that can be traced from the Heian period (794-1185) up into the modern period. This is the millennium long absorption of the poetry of Bai Juyi (772-846.) So much has the sensibility expressed in Bai Juyi’s poetry become an integral part of Japanese literary and artistic culture that a noted art historian, Yashiro Yukio (1890-1975) could even at the height of the Pacific War cite a line from a Bai Juyi poem as a touchstone for one of the “special qualities of Japanese art”, Nihon Bijutsu no Tokushitsu (1943). The reception of Bai Juyi’s poetry will be used as an example to explore the larger phenomenon of the China of the imagination in Japanese culture, a “China” that could be said to have in large part been invented in Japan and is therefore significantly different from any China the Chinese themselves might recognize now or have recognized at various points in their history. Nonetheless, it is a construct that, of course, shares much with traditional Chinese cultural values and has at least in some measure survived the political hostilities and tensions of the modern era. This paper will first give a general overview of the reception history of Bai Juyi’s poetry in Japan and will then focus on a few instances of the incorporation of Bai Juyi’s poetry into modern Japanese texts to trace that reception into the modern period. With reference to a recent work by Katō Shūichi and Ikkai Tomoyoshi entitled ''Kanji, Kango and Kanshi'' (2005), the paper will finally muse on the possibility for this kind of cultural heritage in its broadest sense being able yet to provide a ground of rapprochement for contemporary Chinese and Japanese people