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The NCC is collaborating with institutions and scholars to release a monthly series on our blog entitled Japanese Studies Spotlight. These features showcase exciting online collections available to researchers and students in Japanese Studies, introducing the archive or project, describing their contents, and demonstrating how they can be usefully engaged in research or in the classroom. If you are interested in submitting something to the series, please contact Paula R. Curtis, NCC’s Digital Media Manager, at digitalmediamanager@nccjapan.org.
Kiyoe Minami, Research Associate, Curatorial Dept., Honolulu Museum of Art
Opened in 1927 by Anna Rice Cook (1853–1934), daughter of a missionary family, the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) in Hawaiʻi hosts a collection that exceeds 55,000 pieces spanning 5,000 years. Among them, the collection of Japanese art is particularly noteworthy. In 2003, approximately 6,000 titles of Japanese woodblock-printed books (mainly from the Edo period, 1615 to 1868), 3,000 Japanese, Chinese, and Korean paintings, and 850 shunga (erotic art) and ukiyo-e collected by Dr. Richard Douglas Lane (1926–2002) were added to HoMA, which now is home to one of the largest Japanese art collections in the United States, both in quality and quantity. The Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki (Picture scrolls of A Match of Crickets in Ten Rounds of Verse and Image), created in 1782, is also included in the Lane Collection. This article introduces the background of the Lane Collection and the Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki Research Project, an international scholarly collaboration that launched a website in early 2024 to showcase images, original text, English translations, and commentary on this fascinating work.
Fig. 1: Image from the Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki, Painting Accompanying Round 9, Right Poem, Mitsuru. Collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Purchase, Richard Lane Collection, 2003 (TD 2011-23-415)
Richard D. Lane was a prominent figure in the postwar Japanese art world, a scholar of ukiyo-e, a collector, and an art dealer. He was born in Florida in 1926, grew up in Queens, New York, and served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a Japanese interpreter during World War II. After the war, he studied Japanese and Chinese at the University of Hawaiʻi, going on to study Asian languages at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of London. He received his M.A. in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 1949 with a study of the Edo period author Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693). From 1950 to 1952, Lane studied Japanese literature at the University of Tokyo, Waseda University, and Kyoto University, while interacting with Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965) and Itō Seiu (1882–1961). He then received his PhD in classical Japanese literature from Columbia University in 1958. When James A. Michener (1907–1997), Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tales of the South Pacific (1947), began donating ukiyo-e to HoMA in 1955, Lane joined the staff of the museum in 1959 and until 1971 continued to research and catalog Michener’s ukiyo-e collection, which amounted to some 5,400 prints over the years. Communication between HoMA and Lane continued thereafter. Known for his many excellent academic publications, including Images from Floating World: The Japanese Print (1978) and Hokusai: Life and Work (1989), Lane was fluent in reading kuzushiji (calligraphic characters written in cursive style) and seal scripts found on ukiyo-e. With a deep knowledge of classical Japanese art and literature, Lane had many accomplishments as a scholar. It was through his many engagements with Japanese art as a scholar and collector, as well as his close relationship HoMA, that the museum purchased the Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki a year after his passing.
The late eighteenth century in Japan experienced a revival of court culture from the Heian period (794-1185), and mono-awase (object contest), an aristocratic pastime of that time, was actively practiced by Edo period elites. This pair of scrolls depicts an event called Jūban Mushi-awase, held in 1782 at the Mokubo-ji temple by the Sumida River in Edo (present-day Tokyo). There were twenty participants representing various social statuses, including daimyo, hatamoto (bannermen), shogunate-approved merchants, doctors, and male and female poets. The twenty poets were divided into two groups, with one group on the left and the other on the right. The group on the left created arrangements of objects inspired by the bell cricket, incorporating live bell crickets, and composed waka poems about them, while the group on the right created arrangements inspired by the pine cricket (see the close-up images in Fig. 2), incorporating live pine crickets, and composed waka poems about them. With each team competing to create poems of technical skill and aesthetic refinement, their poems were then judged against one another to determine the winners for each of the ten rounds.
Those scrolls feature beautiful illustrations created by artists following the tradition of court painters, depicting each of the arrangements, while the text section includes each waka poem, judges' comments on both the arrangements and the poems, and the outcome of each round. The poems and arrangements were inspired by classical works from the Heian period such as The Tale of Genji and Wakan Rōeishū, and others, allowing one to gain a sense of their deep appreciation of Heian court culture from these scrolls.
In 2019, then-Professor (now Emeritus) Robert Huey of the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa (UHM), along with graduate students, began using the Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki as teaching material for his graduate students. Then in February 2020, Professor Teiko Morita of Kyoto Sangyo University and Professor Emeritus Yōichi Iikuara of Osaka University visited HoMA to begin researching the scrolls.
After many discussions between Professor Huey and Professor Morita on the value of better understanding the scroll and conveying information about it to a broader audience, they decided to organize an international collaborative research workshop focusing on deciphering the Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki. Over several years UHM, HoMA, and scholars and graduate students in both Japan and the United States took part in the reading of and research on the work. A full list of the over two-dozen collaborators can be found on the Jūban Mushi-awase website. The research findings were published in March 2024 through a book, published by Bungaku Report 文学通信, and website. The book features the original text, illustrations, modern Japanese translation, annotations, an English translation, and a critical introduction. The website, too, is largely bilingual and includes both text and images. Our research team is particularly grateful to Professor Kiyonori Nagasaki of Keio University for his contributions to the creation of the website, which offers many interactive features. Below I will introduce how to use the “Mushi-awase viewer” feature on the website.
The Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki website consists of three sections: “About this work,” “About this project,” and “Mushi-awase viewer.” Like the simultaneously published book, it is available in both Japanese and English, and the language can be toggled from the navigation bar at the top of the browser. The “About this work” section includes an introductory essay (an excerpt from the formal publication) by Morita Teiko that situates the scroll in its historical context and helps guide readers through the project. It also features a brief introduction by myself to Richard Douglas Lane and the Lane Collection. As a whole, the site aims to provide interactive, bilingual tools that make it easier to understand and navigate the structure of the Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki, thereby facilitating an understanding of Mushi-awase and Uta-awase (Poetry Contests) from a technical perspective as well. Clicking either the text “十番虫合絵巻” on the landing page of the site or clicking on “Mushi-awase viewer” will take you to the text of the scroll. The viewer portion of the site primarily comprises six sections (Fig. 4): ① The original text written in the scroll, ② the modern Japanese translation, ③ links for each waka poem, ④ information about the poets, ⑤ the English translations, and ⑥ annotations in English. Readers can therefore choose a particular aspect of the scroll or a specific language to begin their exploration of the Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki.
One particularly helpful feature of the Mushi-awase viewer is that the entire scroll has been uploaded using TEI encoding. This means that it is possible to link segments of the texts or images to one another across different areas of the viewer. So, for example, when you hover over the original text, modern Japanese translation, or English translation, the corresponding section will be highlighted in another column. Clicking the “image” icon (marked in Fig. 5 with a red circle) will display the poem’s corresponding illustration on the right side. The images can also be enlarged. It is also possible to highlight the judges' comments section in the same way.
As a viewer, you are also given control over which content you would like to view. On the bottom right of the screen (the red rectangle in Fig. 6), you can select which language content is of interest to you. For example, if you uncheck all the checkboxes for “English,” “Modern Japanese,” and “Romanized ruby”, the viewer will display only the original text as it appears in the actual scroll.
When you click on the “WAKA” tab at the top right (framed in red in Fig. 7), it will display waka poems, the judge’s comments for each arrangement, the outcome of each object arrangement, and the outcome of each waka poem from 1 to 10 for the left and right sides respectively. When you hover over the desired item, the corresponding original text, modern Japanese, and English will be highlighted, allowing you to easily switch between linguistic options. When you click on the “PERSON” tab, you can see detailed information about each poet (currently only available in Japanese).
The left-hand column for English content also features footnotes, which appear as red numbers next to the relevant text (circled in red in Fig. 8). These notes provide important references and contextualizing information to help readers appreciate the complexity of the scroll’s content and seek further information. When you click on the red numbers, the corresponding annotation will be highlighted. Conversely, clicking on the numbers in the annotation section will underline the corresponding text in the English translation in red.
Above is the basic usage of the Mushi-awase viewer on the website, much of which may be enjoyed by scholars, students, or everyday readers thanks to its bilingual interface. The Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki website will be of interest to students studying Japanese art or literature, translation from Japanese to English, or even those interested in reading kuzushiji. Scholars of both the Heian and Edo periods will find the scrolls to be an invaluable source of information on historical interpretations of Heian court culture into the Edo period. Although not every feature on the site is currently translated from Japanese (such as information on the poets), we hope to complete translating the content in the future to make the entirety of the site’s features accessible in both Japanese and English. We hope that the Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki and the Mushi-awase viewer will be utilized by many students for learning and by scholars for research purposes.
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