Japan America Society of Southern California

   Building Japan-America Relationships Since 1909

  • Home
  • Japan and the Culture of Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

Japan and the Culture of Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

  • Friday, March 08, 2013
  • 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
  • Leavey Library Auditorium, USC (Los Angeles, CA)


Friday, March 8, 2013

2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Leavey Library Auditorium
University of Southern California

University Park
651 West 35th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90089


Keynote address by Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University.


Elegant representations of nature, explicitly the four seasons, fill a wide range of Japanese genres and media - from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremony flower arrangement, and screen painting to tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and annual observances. Haruo Shirane shows, for the first time, how, when, and why this occurred and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings these representations embodied.

This lecture, based on his recently published book, demonstrates how elegant representations of the four seasons first emerged in an urban environment among nobility in the eight century. They became highly codified and then spread to different social classes, eventually settling in popular culture and the pleasure quarters. Shirane accounts for all types of manifestations: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh drama, festivals), ang gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, frequently fostered a sense of harmony with the natural world - just at the point at which it was receding. Eventually, alternative representations of nature derived from farm villages and elsewhere began to intersect with these elegant representations in the capital, creating a complex web of competing associations.


HARUO SHIRANE is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Japanese literature, including: Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts; Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho; and Bridge of Dreams: Poetics of the Tale of Genji.


This event is part of a symposium organized by the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture entitled "Forests, Waters, and Cities: Approaches to the Environment in Japan and Global Contexts."


Please RSVP by Wednesday, March 6, 2013 here.
©2020 Japan America Society of Southern California
1411 W. 190th Street, Suite 360, Gardena, CA 90248

tel (310) 965-9050    fax (310) 965-9010   email info@jas-socal.org

Powered by Wild Apricot Membership Software