Thursday Lecture: Professor Dr Edward Kamens

Screens and Songs for a New Emperor: The 2019 Reiwa Daijōe Edition

Professor Dr Edward Kamens (Yale University)

Since ancient times, the Japanese court has celebrated an annual autumn harvest festival (Niinamesai) in especially grand style at the beginning of each new Emperor’s reign, as the Daijōe, or 'Great Banquet Assembly'. Since the 11th century, at least, celebratory screens with landscape paintings inscribed with auspicious poems, along with sacred rice and other foods, songs and dances and their performers and other tribute goods produced from representative provincial sources, have been part of this ritual. The extant corpus of hundreds of these Daijōe poems and songs is part of the larger canon of traditional Japanese verse, shedding much light on the history of that genre and this practice.  But the form of these offerings and the manner of their presentation has undergone many changes over the centuries, tracing the vicissitudes of the Imperial institution itself.  This lecture will review the Daijōe tradition and then focus on the ways in which the screens, songs and poems for the Reiwa occasion, held in the autumn of the first year of the current Emperor Naruhito (in 2019) retain, adapt, or depart from precedent, thus re-calibrating the meaning of these ritual offerings.