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CLASS
OF 71
A
Princesss Diary
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Dr.
Cecilia Segawa Seigle Gr71 returned
to her native Japan to research one book topic and came across an unexpected
treasure a 36-volume diary written by a 17th-century Japanese imperial
princess. Though the document had been hand-copied from the original in
1902, and stored in the Historiographical Institute at the University
of Tokyo, scholars had all but ignored it until now.
I was excited
and wanted to introduce this woman to the Japanese public because this
was a very rare diary, says Seigle, who is professor emerita of Japanese
studies in the Asian and Middle Eastern studies department at Penn. Though
there was a golden age for Japanese women writers around the 11th century,
as time went on, womens positions declined and they became more oppressed.
So it is rare that such a socially prominent woman [in the 17th century]
left a diary.
v Seigles new
book, Kojo Shinanomiya no nichijo seikatsu: Mujohoin-dono gonikki wo
yomu (The Everyday Life of Imperial Princess Shinanomiya: Reading
the Mujohoin-dono Diary) has been published this year by one of the
most distinguished publishers in Japan, Iwanami Shoten, under her Japanese
name, Yoshiko Segawa.
Seigle previously
had written a book about Japanese courtesans, who, though companions of
socially prominent people, were considered the lowest as far as society
was concerned. After finishing that project, she says, she got bored
and began thinking about the opposite of these women and decided to research
the Ooku, the walled-in area in Edo Castle where thousands of ladies-in-waiting
lived, serving the wife of the shogun, the shoguns concubines, and also
the shogun when he visited his ladies. The Ooku, which also referred to
the institutionalized body of women who occupied this space, had its own
administration, customs, politics, and regulations. Its inhabitants did
not go out. The higher the position, the more secretive their lives were.
Those who left the service of Ooku were forbidden to talk about what went
on behind those walls, leading to rampant rumors and the exaggerated material
of kabuki plays and other fictionalized accounts.
Seigle went to
the Historiographical Institute with a research grant to look for authentic
documents, but found very little about Ooku. She did come across the diary
of a 17th-century nobleman, Konoe Motohiro, who was invited to visit his
daughter, wife of the sixth shogun, Tokugawa Ienobu.
Later
she found out that the noblemans wife, Princess Shinanomiya Tsuneko,
also wrote her own diary. The following summer Seigle began reading the
document. (The original is in the Konoe family archives.)
It was difficult
to understand at first, she says, because the princess used many codes,
referring to family and friends by their positions in society. As people
were promoted, their ranks kept changing, adding to the confusion.
Princess Shinanomiya
is not an analytical writershe just describes what happenedbut when
you read the [diary], you find out so much about the people around her
and the transition of her life and her thinking.
While she comes
across as a happy person, Seigle says, The interesting thing is that
she was in denial all the time. She would write only about happy events.
One of her favorite mantras was Medetashi. Medetashi. (How auspicious,
how happy). Even after something bad happened, she would repeat these
words. But over the course of her diary, in the face of a number of unhappy
events, she gradually changed from a very spoiled princess to an extremely
good wife, good mother [to three children] and someone who was very pious
in a secular way.
Her daughter,
Hiroko, left home with many servants at age 13 to marry the shoguns nephew,
who would unexpectedly be named the next shogun when he was 41. Unfortunately,
Princess Shinanomiyas diary divulges no secrets about Ooku. While Hiroko
sent many letters to her mother, the princess reveals little of their
content. But we know that the letters came with presents after presents:
money, clothing, incense burners and beautiful folding screens.
According to
Seigle, documents like this one havent found their way to the public
in the past because of chauvinism among scholars typically obsessed
with affairs of state rather than womens matters. But this, she believes,
is gradually changing. As Princess Shinanomiya would have said, Medetashi.
Medetashi.
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