Sex, Nuns, and Motherhood in Kamakura-Era Women’s Diaries

In a letter composed in 1264, the poet known as Nun Abutsu (1222-1283) advises her fourteen-year-old daughter on the vagaries of court life and what to do when all else fails: “If things do not proceed as you had hoped, distance yourself from this cycle of birth and death and dedicate yourself to the Buddhist realm. Calm your heart, take the tonsure, and enter the true path.” Abutsu embodied these teachings herself by oscillating between secular and religious life. This presentation will take up her writings to consider the intertwined issues of sexuality, motherhood, and nunhood and how tonsure could be both strategic and empowering in the literature of Kamakura-era (1185-1333) women.

Lecturer information: Christina Laffin is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia whose research focuses on medieval travel diaries and the contexts for their production. She is presently completing a manuscript tentatively entitled “Rewriting Medieval Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu.” Past contributions include The Noh Ominameshi: A Flower Viewed from Many Directions (Co-editor, 2003), and Gender and Japanese History (Managing Editor, 2 vols.). She is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow at the University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute through June 2011.

Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Supported by the Japan Foundation.

In translating Language X to Language Y we lose a lot, but translation has survived the centuries, primarily because not everybody can easily learn the Japanese language, and gain is larger than loss. The structures of Japanese and English are quite different on the surface, so we first lose sounds and orthography. Even so, crucially phonetic poetry like tanka, haiku, and modern poetry has been frequently translated into English. Surface morphological and syntactic structures are lost, too. There is no end to the long list of loss of forms due to translation. This lecture focuses on something cognitively lost in translation of written Japanese, and especially literary work, into English – loss of deep cognitive meaning expressed explicitly in the original Japanese language. There are many of layers to the phenomenon, but the present talk will focus narrowly on shift phenomena such as number shift, case marker shift, tense shift, formality shift, and voice shift, that which are almost permanently lost in translation even though they convey a significant cognitive shift on the part of the author.

Lecturer information: Seiichi Makino is a Professor of Japanese and Linguistics and serves as the Director of the Japanese Language Program at Princeton University, as well as the Director of the Japanese Language Program at Princeton University. He is also the Academic Director of the Summer M.A. Program in Japanese Language Pedagogy at Columbia University. Professor Makino is the author or co-author of numerous books, dictionaries, and articles, including Aspects of Linguistics: In Honor of Noriko Akatsuka (edited with S. Kuno and S. Strauss, 2007) and A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar (with M. Tsutsui, 2008). His current research interests include the cognitive linguistics inquiry intoof metaphors, and shift phenomena of tense, formality, numbers, and grammatical persons (i.e., the 1st person “I”, the 2nd person “you”, and the 3rd person “he”). He is the former President of the Association of Teachers of Japanese.

This lecture is offered as the Fifth Shirato Lecture on Japanese Language.
Supported by the Japan Foundation.