Sponsored by National Institute for Japanese Literature, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Department of Archaeology and Art History at Columbia University

Friday and Saturday, September 16-17, 2011

The symposium is an outgrowth of a multi-year research project by an international team of scholars, sponsored by the National Institute of Japanese Literature, of visual artifacts and texts in collections in the United States, notably at the Spencer Collection in the New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art, John C. Weber Collection, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The symposium focuses on a cluster of key issues foregrounded by these visual artifacts: 1) the place of other worlds, from animals and plants to the supernatural, and their intersection with orthodox religious views, 2) the reconstructions of court culture and their variegated functions in the medieval and Edo periods, 3) the role of famous places and cultural topography, and 4) the role of samurai narratives and their relationship to performance, painting, and gender. Through these four major themes, the symposium examines the larger issues of media, performance, and texts, with particular attention to the rich interrelationships among painting, literary culture, religion, and theater.

Major Themes:

Literature of Other Worlds, Animals, and Plants: From Folk Literature to Picture Scrolls

Famous Places and Cultural Topography

Reconstructing Court Culture: From Emaki to Edo Visual Culture

Performance and Painting: Women and Samurai Narratives