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EALL Scholars Wrap Up Collaborative Project with Japan and the Honolulu Museum of Art

A three-year collaboration between faculty and students in UH’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (EALL), a group of scholars in Japan, and the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) has borne fruit: a bilingual cross-platform publication that brings scholarly attention to bear on an 18th century treasure from the Honolulu Museum of Art’s Lane Collection. 

The project’s seeds were planted in 2020, when a group of grad students and faculty from EALL (see names below) and a researcher from Japan independently but simultaneously began to explore a unique two-scroll set held in HoMA’s Lane Collection known as the Jūban Mushi-awase (A Match of Crickets in Ten Rounds of Verse and Image) scrolls.  These scrolls depict in text and painting a literary event in 1782 Edo (Tokyo) that brought together poets and painters to explore the relative virtues of two humble insects – the bell cricket and the pine cricket – that have played an outsized role in East Asian literature for centuries as representatives of the sadness of autumn and the pain of separation felt by lovers kept apart.

The UH team saw the scrolls as an opportunity to learn how to read the difficult cursive script in which the scrolls (and countless other pre-modern Japanese works) were written, while the Japanese scholars saw the scrolls as exemplary of a classical revival that was sweeping Japan in the late 18th century.  The two teams were introduced to each other by Kiyoe Minami, Research Associate at HoMA in charge of the Lane Collection, and thanks to a generous grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), they began their collaborative research in 2021.  The pandemic was actually a boon, because it brought the teams together on Zoom monthly – far more frequently than e-mail or travel did before.  

The results were published in March 2024 in a bilingual book entitled The Heian Cultural Revival in Edo: Reading the Jūban Mushi-awase scrolls in the Honolulu Museum’s Lane Collection (Tokyo: Bungaku Tsushin, 2024).  The book includes a transcription of the original text, a modern Japanese translation with extensive annotations, along with a full English translation with its own annotations.  Though the two teams worked together and learned from each other, the commentary and annotations were prepared independently.  In addition, all the team members wrote essays or research papers related to some aspect of the work, and these were translated into both languages.  These elements together fulfilled one of the goals of the project, which was to showcase distinct approaches taken to the same material by Japanese and American scholars.  Moreover, HoMA provided full color digital reproductions of all elements of the scroll so that the reader can experience the work on many levels.

But perhaps the project’s most interesting feature is the open-access online version of the text, which reproduces all the elements of the print book except for the essays and scholarly papers.  The online version is also bilingual, and elaborately constructed so that viewers can access various aspects of the text and paintings through links.  This level of free access to Japanese and American scholarship was something the funding agency, JSPS, particularly wanted. 

https://juban-mushi-awase.dhii.jp

The Honolulu Museum are featuring the scrolls as part of an exhibit called “Miyabi: Renaissance of Court Culture,” running from April 18, 2024 and through July 28, 2024, admission free to UH students with ID:

https://honolulumuseum.org/exhibitions/miyabi

The team members / authors involved in the book and online project are:

From UHM’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures: Robert Huey (Professor Emeritus), Andre Haag (Associate Professor), Francesca Pizarro (UHM PhD, 2023, Assistant Professor at Colorado College), and PhD candidates Tanya Barnett and Hilson Reidpath. 

From Japan: Morita Teiko (Professor, Kyoto Sangyo University); Iikura Yōichi (Professor Emeritus, Osaka University), Matsumoto Ōki (Associate Professor, Kansai University), along with contributors Kadowaki Mutsumi, Katō Yumie, Arisawa Tomoyo, Kawarai Yūko, and Yamamoto Yoshitaka. The digitization part of the project was directed by Nagasaki Kiyonori.

From the Honolulu Museum of Art: Kiyoe Minami

A link to the UH News story on this topic: