China as Self, China as Other: On Ki no Tsurayuki's Use of the wa-kan Dichotomy

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Abstract

The article discusses Ki no Tsurayuki's strategic othering of "China" (Kara, Morokoshi) in order to theorize an independent "Yamato" cultural identity. It opens with an overview of the debate on the wa-kan issue in Japanese and Anglo-American scholarship and then moves on to explore Tsurayuki's use of the wa-kan dychotomy in such texts as the Kokinshū prefaces (905) and the Tosa nikki (935). Although Tsurayuki often appears to adopt a regionalist stance in his writings, I stress the strategic nature of these claims (his priority was to exalt his genre of choice, not to lambast Chinese forms), and argue against seeing the making of the Kokinshū as the beginning of a cultural move away from China. Rather, cases like Tsurayuki's point to the multiplicity of functions that Kara played within Heian culture. With remarkable pliability, Heian Japan's "China" was both unquestionably part of the Heian self and a convenient inner Other in opposition to which new personal, political, ethnic, and cultural identities could be fashioned.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number2
Pages (from-to)31-58
Number of pages29
JournalSino-Japanese Studies
Volume23
StatePublished - 2016

Keywords

  • wakan
  • Kokinshū
  • Ki no Tsurayuki
  • self-fashioning
  • ethnicity
  • Heian period
  • East Asia
  • Sino-Japanese interaction

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