Lecture: Leviathans of the Floating World: Sumo Wrestlers and the Japanese Print

January 27, 2005

Lecture: Leviathans of the Floating World: Sumo Wrestlers and the Japanese Print
Harold Bolitho (Professor of Japanese History, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. and Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

During the Tokugawa period, Japanese popular culture produced its share of celebrities. Many of them, particularly the actors and the courtesans, are known to us from the woodblock prints of the time, the ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world.” But another group, no less well-known in their generation than their counterparts from the stage or the pleasure quarter, have been virtually ignored. They are the popular sporting heroes of the day, the sumo wrestlers. In studies of the Japanese print, these figures have been marginalized, consigned to the category of the curious and the eccentric. It is not difficult to see why. In the West we have always tended to privilege the delicate, the diminutive, and the understated in Japanese culture, an aesthetic that leaves little room for representations of big, fat, strong, sweaty men. This neglect is undeserved. Sumo wrestling is just as typical of traditional Japan as the more elegant pastimes of the tea ceremony, haiku, and flower arrangement. If anything, it enjoyed greater popularity. Each of the great print designers responded to the sport, producing a variety of pictures to satisfy public demand. These prints are well worth our attention, for despite wrestling’s thematic limitations, the artists’ desire to emphasize the bulk and might of their subjects prompted the development of new techniques. The resulting icons of power are unique in the otherwise sedate and tasteful world of the woodblock print.

Co-sponsored by the Ukiyo-e Society of America, Inc.