7. How do you use these prints to teach about the Tokugawa period?
In teaching this period of Japanese history, one of the most characteristic features was the flourishing of a commoner urban culture. Its something that cannot be adequately described simply through printed documents or through lectures. I started looking for digital images trying to present this social milieu visually. These prints provide striking evidence of how women were idealized and what were the common conceptions of womanhood during the Tokugawa period. I also find that they are evidence of a society that was becoming increasingly integrated in terms of information. Along with the commercialization and urbanization, we see a sharing of information across territorial boundaries, across status lines, and across class lines. The sharing of visual images of texts was part of a larger cultural integration that helped to create the foundation for nationalism.
When I teach with these prints, I gradually disclose more and more information about the images that would help students to make sense of them. But I would begin by simply showing them the prints, ask them to describe what they see. Most people who would view the prints without seeing the commentary would not come to the conclusion that these prints are didactic. Not only are some of them somewhat strikingly erotic, they are incredibly colorful and vibrant and beautiful and dramatic. Gradually I reveal morethe title of the series, and see if they can come up with some sort of hypothesis about the purpose of the prints.
In the process of this discussion, hopefully the students will come up with the observation that the images are not of actual individual women, but of typologies. Thats significant. I introduce the contextthe growth of an urban commercialized social milieu, the growth of the printing industry, the commodification of art. What I want them to come to is a recognition of this ambivalence between the celebration of feminine beauty and the moralization of female behavior. Id ask them whether these two elements are in fact contradictory. And most of them seem to think so, but I try to guide them along to a recognition that thats, in fact, quite common cross-culturally. The ideal of feminine beauty is accompanied by a recognition of the danger of feminine beauty and the kinds of misbehavior that are associated with that.
And so I bring them along from a strict and simple visual appreciation of the work to more complex questions of historical context and, ultimately, to the level of reading cultural idealizations, specifically idealization of women. These images dont necessarily describe how women should act, but rather theyre simply descriptions of how women did act, and that they could serve both a didactic function and simultaneously as entertainment or titillation. That ambivalence, that convergence of lots of different messages and meanings, are inherent in any work of art, and theyre certainly here in these specific prints.
These images are very striking to them. They usually contradict the impressions that students have of Japan, Japanese women. One of my purposes is to complicate those stereotypes that they might have coming into the subject matter.