Japanese Ink Paintings from American Collections: The Muromachi Period, An Exhibition inHonor of Shūjirō Shimada by Yoshiaki Shimizu; Carolyn WheelwrightReview by: Donald F. McCallumJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1979), pp. 334-336Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602678 .

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334 Journal of the American Oriental Society 99.2 (1979)

In the last dozen years conditions have changed markedly. Each of the component periods and subperiods of that earlier era is now drawing attention, and the studies that have appeared have made full use of the oldest documents and the newest scholarship. Moreover, because of the prior neglect, the field has been able to center its energies on the "most important" subjects; the topics being dealt with are anything but obscure. It was in this context that Prof. Hurst undertook to study one of the key developments of the late Heian age-the emergence to prominence of "retired emperors." It has long been known that the "rule of taste" was part and parcel of the achievement of the Heian court. What we have never been able to reconcile, however, was the tastemakers' concurrent "rule of Japan." Hurst has focused on this important question, and given us our most authoritative and illuminating account of Japan's aristocratic age.

I mentioned a moment ago the retired emperors' emergence to "prominence." This is the key to Hurst's thesis: previous surveys have asserted or assumed instead an emergence to "dominance." The difference is signifi- cant. For Hurst sees no new form of government established by ex-sovereigns, nor even a marked shift from an "age of Fujiwara regents" to an "age of retired emperors." Rather, politics at court continued to operate within the framework of the imperial state, with shifts among individuals near the top providing the appearance of a transfer of hegemony. What has always seemed to us as the victory of retired emperors over the Fujiwara was no more than a fragile realignment within the highest court circles. The changes, then, were political, not institutional: the way of conducting governance hardly altered.

To strengthen his thesis, Hurst shows how emperors had been abdicating for generations and how many of the organizational elements of the so-called ex-sovereign's government were likewise of earlier vintage. This allows him to destroy the common view that the emperor Go-Sanjo (r. 1068-1072) devised his retirement scheme as part of a deliberate plot to create an era of "retired emperor rule." In fact, as he shows, even Go-Sanjo's successor, Shirakawa, did not immediately press hard to create some new power configuration. His only design at first was to regain control from the Fujiwara of the right to designate the next emperor. Hurst's conclusion is that the real construction of a new pyramid of wealth and power came only after 1 100, but that even then the edicts of ex-sovereigns did not become sovereign. Policy initiation remained a collegial possession, and the highest decisions of state continued to be filtered through the traditional formal apparatus.

To tell his story the author makes very ample use of the diaries and documents of the Heian age, as well as the best of recent Japanese scholarship. Beyond that, he introduces

useful conceptual schema (e.g., a characterization of Heian politics as a competition among rival patron-client organizations). Moreover, he approaches his main sub- ject-the phenomenon of retired emperors-from two basic perspectives. After examining the condition of the imperial house chronologically (including separate chapters for each of the four ex-sovereigns after 1072), he moves to a structural analysis of the retired emperors' administrative system. We learn here of the network of offices and their respective activities, of the families and individuals who controlled this vast private organization, and of the growing bloc of estate holdings that financed it all. The imperial family may not have ruled Japan by 150; but it is clear that its share of the country's wealth and power was greater than anyone else's. For Hurst, therefore, the golden age of Japan's imperial house was the twelfth century.

This is an extremely important book, containing insights that are richly provocative. But most significantly, it is a comfort to know that the "world of the shining prince" was not all glitter. If it had been we should be forced once again to attempt to square an old circle: how could those effete courtiers have managed to perpetuate four full centuries of rule? Now with this first in-depth examination of Heian politics, we have our initial glimpse into their secret.

JEFFREY P. MASS

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Japanese Ink Paintings from American Collections: The Muromachi Period, An Exhibition in Honor of Shfijiro Shimada. Edited by YOSHIAKI SHIMIzu and CAROLYN WHEELWRIGHT. Pp. 300. Princeton: THE ART MUSEUM,

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. 1976. $40.00 cloth; $18.00 paper.

Although Western students of Japanese art have long been interested in Muromachi ink painting, especially the work of Sesshu, it has only been in the last few years that strong foundations for this field of research have been established in the United States. The recent publication of Hall and Toyoda'sJapan in the the MuromachiAge (1977) provides stimulating interpretations of the political, eco- nomic, cultural, and religious history of the period, while two books translated from Japanese, Tanaka's Japanese Ink Painting: Shubun to Sesshu (1972) and Matsushita's Ink Painting (1974), offer basic information as to important developments in the art of the period. The major figure in encouraging the study of Muromachi painting in the U.S. has been Professor Shuijiro Shimada of Princeton,

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Reviews of Books 335

and the book under review is a catalogue of an ambitious exhibition of ink paintings organized on the occasion of Professor Shimada's retirement.

For some years now I have felt that the study of the later periods of Japanese painting in America has been too much dominated by the exhibition catalogue. Despite my admiration for the work of the Princeton group, I still feel the need for fewer catalogues and more monographic studies, be they articles or books. One hopes that the numerous younger scholars who have contributed so impressively to this catalogue will now find it possible to produce substantial pieces of original synthetic research, rather than bringing out more catalogues, which, by their very nature, tend to be somewhat less focussed than the monograph.

The editors of Japanese Ink Painting, Yoshiaki Shimizu and Carolyn Wheelwright, begin the catalogue with an extremely interesting "Introduction" (pp. 17-40). In view of the bias that I admitted to in the preceding paragraph, the reader will perhaps not be surprised if I concentrate my discussion on this more synthetic part of the catalogue, although I must point out that much of the "meat" of the work will be found in the 37 individual entries. The introduction begins with a useful contrast, placed in the early 14th century, between Japanese style painting- Yamato-e-and the beginnings of Chinese style landscape painting. Such a contrast is especially valuable when one thinks of our normal tendency to shift gears rather rapidly in the study of Japanese art, under the assumption that a new and vital artistic mode somehow totally overwhelms those traditions which were dominant in earlier periods. Clearly the Yamato-e style, as seen in the "Ishiyama-dera Engi" continued to flourish long after the monochrome ink style had become the dominant mode of certain elites. (Parenthetically, I might point out that no account of Muromachi art can be fully satisfactory if it does not take into account the enormous amount of Buddhist sculpture produced during the period.) The early phases of ink painting in Japan saw a large number of figural works with specific Zen iconographies, and the first pages of the introduction concentrate on this mode. The material treated here might be usefully compared with that in Fontein and Hickman's Zen Painting & Calligraphy (1970).

I felt that the essay reached its peak when it moved into the realm of landscape painting proper. There is an especially good discussion of the ambience of "Cottage by a Mountain Stream," attributed to the Mincho circle, with emphasis placed on its character as a shosaizu ("painting of a study"). However, I would have liked to have seen more effort made to place this, and similar works, into a stylistic framework, since it seems to me that its charming naivete can only be associated with a period of apprenticeship.

Perhaps the best part of the introduction is that devoted to the Shubun tradition; here the emphasis is placed on two works, Chikusai Dokusho ("Reading in the Bamboo Study") and Suishoku Ranko ("Color of Stream and Hue of Mountain") as the central paintings in the artist's oeuvre. Richard Stanley-Baker's discussion of the beautiful Seattle "Landscape" rounds out the treatment of the Shfibun style. It is perhaps not unreasonable to say that the most important advances in post-war research devoted to Muromachi painting have been in the area of the Shubun school, and this progress is amply reflected in the work under review.

On the other hand, I felt that the assessment of Sesshu was surprisingly uncritical. While all of us are familiar with the hagiolatry directed toward Sesshi in Japan, it is appalling to see it replicated in Western publications, especially of a post-Covell vintage. I was particularly amazed by the positive characterization of the Ohara "Landscape": "The landscape vibrates with the electric energy of diagonal thrusts and counterthrusts, held in check by the vertical axis of the central pines and the crossing horizontal of distant mountains" (p. 33. Where the authors see "electric energy" and "thrust and counter- thrust" I see only awkwardness and incoherence-a matter of taste, perhaps, but I wonder if a less conventionally admiring approach to Sesshu might not lead to a more fruitful assessment of his contribution to Far Eastern landscape painting. Certainly the time for cliches con- cerning Sesshi is long past.

The closing pages of the introduction emphasize the contributions of the Ami and Kano schools, with some discussion of KenkO Shokei, the Soga school, and Sesson. While all of this material is presented in a balanced manner, a fuller treatment of Sesson would have been both possible and desirable.

The 37 paintings in the exhibition are grouped into three categories: figural (1-9), landscape ( 10-26), and flora/fauna. (27-37); the entries, which are fully annotated and are models of their kind, were written by Helmut Brinker, Sarah Handler, John Rosenfield, David Sensabaugh, Yoshiaki Shimizu, Richard Stanley-Baker, Carolyn Wheelwright, and Ann Yonemura. There is a useful compilation of artist's signatures and seals, extensive bibliographies, a complete index, a map, and chronological charts. The latter (pp. 278- 79) struck this reviewer as bizarre, although this reaction may reflect a different order of priorities than those of the person responsible for the charts; for example, Jomon most certainly did not begin in 2000 B.C., but many millenia earlier, Yayoi ended ca. A.D. 300, not A.D. 200, and the date of 552 for the end of Kofun is a totally arbitrary and probably incorrect date, especially since the tumulus period continued on much longer in the Kanto region. Similar

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336 Journal of the American Oriental Society 99.2 (1979)

objections could be directed at the periodization of the historical eras, but enough of such quibbles. This is a first- rate book which should be in all libraries, and if it is superceded I would imagine that the work will be done by those scholars who participated in the work at hand.

DONALD F. MCCALLUM

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Mon-Khmer Studies IV. Edited by DAVID D. THOMAS and NGUYEN DINH-HOA. Pp. xiii + 184. Carbondale, Illinois: CENTER FOR VIETNAMESE STUDIES and SUM- MER INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTICS, SOUTHERN IILLINOIS UNIVERSITY. 1973.

Mon-Khmer Studies V. Edited by KENNETH GREGERSON and DAVID THOMAS. Pp.ix + 267. Manila: SUMMER INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTICS. 1976.

It is difficult to foresee a time when the Mon-Khmer dialects of Vietnam and Southern Laos will again be studied in situ. We are particularly grateful, therefore, for these two volumes and for the fact that, although the material for some of the articles could not be completed or revised with informants, because the authors had to leave Vietnam, the work has nevertheless been made available to us, including the last researches of Henry Blood, to whose memory Volume v is dedicated. Among the papers are studies of languages which have virtually not been treated in print before: Central Mnong, Nyaheun, Ngeq, Hre and Todrah. Seventeen authors, working in collaboration with each other in some cases, have contributed thirty articles of very varied length. The writers are almost all with the Summer Institute of Linguistics though they include missionaries with other societies and two researchers from academic institutions.

The Mon-Khmer languages covered in these two volumes are all spoken in Vietnam apart from Khmer and three dialects of Laos (Nyaheun, Ngeq and Khmu). They comprise Vietnamese itself; two dialects spoken in North Vietnam (Brfl and Pac6h); many dialects spoken in Central Vietnam (Jeh, Cua, Kotua, Sedang, Todrah, HalAng) and two spoken in South Vietnam (Chrau and Mnong). There are two dialect maps in Volume IV and a pronunciation guide in Volume v.

A variety of approaches are used and a variety of subjects within the general range of Mon-Khmer linguistics are treated. A theoretical subject is found in Thomas's demonstration via English of transformational clause batteries, while practice rather than theory is the basis of C. P. Miller's discussion, in her generative description of

the Vietnamese relative clause, of the techniques used

in working with an informant. Bibliography is represented by a list of recent works on Mon-Khmer in Iv and Smalley's collection of works on Khmir in v. There are phonological studies of the following topics: phonological shifts in Cua and Kotua (K. D. Smith); Middle Khmer phonological development (Jenner); phonic interference in English spoken by Vietnamese (J. D. Miller); the phonemes of Ngeq (R. L. Smith) and of Rclom (Blood); the vowels of Brfi (Phillips and J. and C. P. Miller); and of Hr& (Phillips). Two of the above articles, those on Uon Njuft Rolbin and Brfi, demonstrate alternative procedures and results, as they deal with the familiar Mon-Khmer dilemma of how to give a simple account of the vowel-system.

A number of articles are concerned with the question of register. The Sedangs' own terms for the features of register in their language are reported by K. D. Smith in an article which also shows how the process of denaso- laryngealisation is reversed in loanwords. Phillips demon- strates in his study of Mnong initial stops that the way in which vowels vary according to the preceding stop in one group of Mnong dialects seems to illustrate Haudricourt's idea of the state of Mon-Khmer languages before the loss of distinction between voiced and voiceless initial consonants and the consequent significance of the register distinction. Gregerson and K. D. Smith discuss the development of register in Todrah (a name used to cover a group of languages spoken in the province of Kontum) and show that it seems to be alone, in the context of Vietnam's register languages, in having at any one stage a three-way vowel contrast of laryngealised, breathy and clear. The occur- rence of 'deep' register in conection with words denoting large objects is mentioned by Gradin, writing on Jeh.

Morphology is represented by articles on reduplication in Ngeq (R. L. Smith) and affixation in Old Khmer (You Sey) and Jeh (Gradin). For the two modern languages here, very full vocabularies are given, with translations which are helpful and detailed-though they might baffle students of other language families (e.g., for the reduplicative harmik harmuk "many good-looking sprouts")!

Articles on syntax range from a brief outline of Nyaheun (Davis) to more detailed treatment of particular aspects of grammar. These include studies of inter-clausal relations in Jeh (N. Cohen); ambiguities in relative clauses in Viet- namese (C. P. Miller); the noun phrase in Chrau (Thomas), in Jeh (P. Cohen), and in Pac6h (Watson), and the verb phrase in Jeh (Gradin) and Mnong (Phillips). Khmer polar interrogatives are illustrated by Thomas and Sedang pronoun referents by K. D. Smith. The question of structural ambiguity arises in the two articles on Viet- namese by C. P. Miller, a phenomenon well-known not only in Mon-Khmer but in South-east Asian languages gen-

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