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Ashton Lazarus, "Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan" (Harvard UP, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jingyi Li
Hello and welcome back to New Books in Japanese Studies, the podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm Jingyi Li from Occidental College. Joining us today is Dr. Ashton Lazarus from the University of Utah. Earlier this year, Ashton published his new book, Performing Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan through Harvard University Press. In this book, Ashton examines non elite performance from Japan's Heian period from the 8th to the 12th century. And through documentation of these non elite performances by actually the elite class, Ashton discusses the social implications of these performances. Well, welcome, Ashton. Welcome to our channel.
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Thank you. Jing Yi. It's great to be here. I'm a longtime listener, first time participant, so I feel like I'm living the dream right now. Thank you.
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Jingyi Li
Thank you. It's great to have you here and to have you talk about this beautifully written book. Before we talk the book, of course, can you tell our audience something about yourself?
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Sure, yeah. As you mentioned, I'm an assistant professor of Japanese here at University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I am trained as a literary scholar, which you probably gathered in the book. So I like to think about text, how things are written, but I also have much kind of broader interests and one of my kind of career, long difficulties has been narrowing down into a smaller topic. So currently I'm just working on a bunch of different things. I have a next project that I'm just starting now about sound and the history of listening practices, mostly in the Heian and Kamakura periods. Thinking about how does Seish use her kind of listening to move around the world and what does she hear, how does she hear it, that kind of thing. So that's sort of the next project. And then University of Utah is also a center of game studies. We have this kind of long history in game studies. So more recently I've been teaching courses about history of games and gaming in Japan and more globally. And then actually with my colleague Dr. Cindy Tekstor, we will be hosting the next meeting of the association of Japanese Literary Studies in May of 2027. And the topic for that conference is going to be about games and gaming play in Japanese literature and culture. So if you're listening and you're a scholar of Japanese literature and or culture, please be checking your email for that cfp, which will go out later on in fall.
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Jingyi Li
What's a little bit about you that sounds really fun? I bet students really love it. And it does sound like you have this consistent interest in sound. So can I ask a little bit more about that? Why have you? Why? Yeah, why sounds? Why these performances?
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know what it is about sound and music. I think my family is quite musical, so my dad's siblings, two of them were professional ballet dancers. One was a pianist. I think there's just. There's something about music in my family. So growing up, I was. I was around it. I was always thinking about sound and music. And I took music lessons, played piano growing up, played guitar. But actually I really didn't like the kind of structured environment, structured approach to those instruments. So I sort of have this long attachment to thinking about sound and music, but I don't really have the actual technical understanding of sight reading and all of that stuff. So it's just been this kind of consistent interest of mine. I feel that I can remember sounds really well. Whereas lyrics, for example, I have an awful memory for lyrics, for words. I shouldn't admit this to the public, but I can remember sounds really well. And so I think that's kind of, in a way, driving the next project. And like you mentioned a little bit about the music and sound in this book, which is quite spread around. I don't have a single chapter about sound or music. So I think for the next project, I'm looking to delve into that a little bit more directly. But, yeah, in terms of some of the performances I write about in this book, yeah, I mean, music is. They're all gaku, right? So gaku in Japanese means music or entertainment, something like that. So dengaku, sangaku, sarugaku. There's definitely a kind of center of interest in music in those. So presumably that's one of the things about this topic, the book's topic, that kind of drew me to it initially. And yeah, I mean, there's kind of a broader story there as well. I don't know if you want me to go into it now, Jackie.
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Jingyi Li
It's, it's. It's fascinating. And I thought when I picked up the book, my immediate thought was while writing about music or performances, music in the Performances in the medieval period in Japan, a big problem is that we can't actually see the performance. We can't hear the performance. So for our listeners to get a better understanding of performance in ham here in Japan, what forms and what genres are we talking about?
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah, good question. So as I mentioned really briefly, really, the book focuses on two in particular. So one is dengaku, as I mentioned, gaku is music. Den in this case just means rice field. So dengaku would be music kind of associated with kind of wet rice agriculture and various rites and rituals connected with that. So like planting the rice and then performing a bunch of music, which is in turn appealing to the kami, to the deities, for an abundant harvest, that kind of thing. And really the whole first part of the book more or less is thinking through Dangaku and its related forms. In specific, Part 2 moves into Sangaku and Sarugaku. So we have that same character gaku music. Again, the san in Sangaku is interesting. So it's the same character for chiru, which means to scatter. But it's really referring to kind of like heterodox, unorthodox, miscellaneous types of music. And this form, Sangaku, it comes from China, it comes from the continents. It's very much used in distinction to official music, orthodox music. What in a Japanese context we think of as gagaku, right. Kind of this core, courtly, ritualistic music. Sangaku, on the other hand, is sort of like the sideshow or the variety show or something like that. So this would encompass things like juggling swords, juggling balls, breathing fire, multiple performers kind of balanced on each other, performers dressed up as various types of animals and kind of forming these interesting multi dimensional tableau for people to look at. But yeah, because the emphasis in Sangaku is on the miscellaneous, the specific forms that we find it in the archives, the documents are quite multiple and in many cases it's sort of hard to trace a through line between all of those multiple forms. So that's Sangaku. Sarugaku emerges a little bit later in Japanese history. More in the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries, really more the 11th, 12th centuries. So Saru means monkey, and that was the character that was used. So monkey music is kind of how we can think of it. And yeah, that shift from miscellaneous music to monkey music. I think one thing that's being indexed there is this move towards a more humorous, maybe subversive potential that these performances had. So there's a really well known work of literary sinitic called an account of the new Monkey music, Shinsarugakuki by Fujiwara no Akikira. This is one of the main texts that I talk about in the book. And yeah, there's lots of funny stuff happening, right? People racing around, watching performances, a lot of body things like naked bodies cavorting throughout the capitol, that kind of thing. So we do see this kind of shift, right, from the more court centered miscellaneous music to this kind of humorous performance tradition. So that's a little bit about Sangaku and Saruraku. And again, I get more into those in the second part of the book, which is really focusing on bodies in specific, and how those performers would use their bodies to do these kind of amazing things. Again, breathing fire, swallowing swords, that kind of thing. And yeah, there's a few other forms as well that I can. Yeah, maybe I can talk about a little bit later.
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Jingyi Li
Yeah, definitely. Something in the ways that you describe these performances tells me that these were performances not for the aristocrats at the time. Right. Field dances, miscellaneous dances, monkey dances. And in the book you make this important distinction of non elite performance, I assume against elite performances. So how were the elite and non elite differentiated in Han parent Japan? Social background wise? And if the performances examined here are non elite, what kinds of elite performances were there? What were the aristocrats doing?
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah, great questions. So Heian society is very much a Confucian society, very kind of hierarchical. It was also a bureaucracy. Right. So there's all these different bureaus that are administering different needs, demands, capacities of the state. And of course, many of those are intended to support the emperor. A lot is kind of revolving around the Emperor at this stage in Japanese history. So we have this kind of centralized Confucian style state that's doing a lot. And some of the forms I talk about are actually part of that state infrastructure. So the Sangaku that I mentioned before, as it comes into Japan, it actually exists as its own kind of sub bureau. So you have this gagaku Ryo, which is like the bureau of ritualistic music. And then a sub bureau within that would be the Sangaku, the miscellaneous music. And so the state was actually training musicians to do this kind of thing. What happens though with Sangaku is that sub bureau is abolished in the late 8th century. And so then it just starts kind of drifting around. So at that point it starts to move, I would say more into this non elite realm. It has this kind of elite function initially, but then things are changing and there's all this speculation about why that sub bureau is is abolished. You can kind of see the details in the book. I discuss it a little bit. But yeah, so I wanted to start there because I think that's a good example of how despite very Confucian hand, society being so hierarchical, there's still a kind of mobility within that. And I think that's one of the things that drew me to terms like elite and non elite. Um, they're really boring terms in a way, and certainly they're not terms that we see in primary sources, right? So like Fujiwara no Akihira, Hoenomasafsa. They're not using the terms elite and non elite, but I'm using them as a way to kind of capture the broader social typology. There's other terms that were used historically, so in the 11th and 12th centuries to get at some of these kind of different social statuses and ranks and things like that. So, for example, there was a whole rank and office system in Heian Japan. You have all the different ranks that elites, aristocrats, are essentially, they're aspiring to get higher and higher and higher up the rank system and then get increasingly, you know, important offices as a result. But once you get down to fifth, sixth rank, right. Things kind of bottom out. And then especially by the mid Heian period, there's really not many people that are being given rank below that. So what you have instead is all these sort of unranked, what I think of as non elites that are being employed for, for lack of a better term, employed by different bureaus to do kind of like flex work, I think, is how I would think about it. They're just being contracted temporarily, come in, help set up these tables, help us with this event. And then you go off and you look for other types of work. With elite and non elite, I was really trying to think about how it is we can develop a vocabulary that will help us get at how some of these big crowd performances that I discuss in the first part of the book, how they're actually happening in terms of who is doing the dancing, who's doing the music, where do the participants come from? Who's watching and participating? Who's just watching, right? Who's only participating? Ultimately, the kind of big argument of the book is that because elite, non elite is this sort of dialectical, has a dialectical relationship even within the language, ultimately, these kind of transgressive spaces in which elites and non elites are interfacing with each other, it's really about a kind of relationality, right? It's a way of thinking about how within hierarchical Confucian society, there are spaces in which people are interfacing with others, right? So aristocrats are interfacing with these flex workers in ways that they wouldn't otherwise interface with them. So in that sense, for me, performance becomes, I think, a special kind of extraordinary space that enables some of this interaction, negotiation, sometimes fighting, right? Violence, humorous happenings. That's kind of the matrix through which a lot of this is able to come through. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe,
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or white chocolate mocha?
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.
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Jingyi Li
That's a very interesting thing that you brought up is this dialectical relationship between the so called elite and non elite status. And your book, you kind of, you use, throughout the whole book, you use this theory or theoretical framework on identity identification to situate your discussion of these nine elite performance. So I was wondering if you can talk more about this identity identification and how you see performance as being an embodiment of this kind of angle, I guess.
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah, yeah. So I would say that for me, in the way it kind of developed as I was researching writing the book, I started to think of it as you have transgression on the one hand and identification on the other. And so maybe I'll just talk a little bit first about how those two relate to each other, how they kind of inform each other. So to back up a little bit transgression, which I mentioned in the answer to the previous question, I mean, it's a. It's a word that has a lot of meaning attached to it, right? It's kind of a very freighted word. And I think some people are maybe a little bit taken aback that I use the word transgression because I think we tend to think of it in a religious sense, right? We tend to think of it as like there is some kind of religious commandment and if you transgress, you're essentially contravening that you're breaking it, right? You're committing a sin, basically. That's kind of like the Western Judeo Christian way of thinking about it. But as I was initially reading these accounts of the great Dangaku 1096 and other kind of big mass performance events in which there was just total havoc on the streets of the Heian capital, I became more interested in this concept of breaking boundaries, of thinking about, well, what happens when the social order breaks down in these moments and at the same time, I was reading this book called, what is it? The Politics and Poetics of Transgression by Alan White and Michael Stallybrass. It's kind of like 1980s cultural studies type book. And that book, it just blew my mind. I loved it. They were thinking so big about kind of early modern European history. They were thinking about sites like kind of topoi, like the fair. They were thinking about animals like pigs, right, who are kind of demonized, right? It's like we have this association, pigs are dirty. They're really dirty animals. But at the same time, they're very smart. So what do you do with that kind of ambivalence that a figure like that provokes? And they kind of come up with this neat way of thinking about transgression, which I then adopt, really throughout the book. So they say things like that, which is socially peripheral so often becomes symbolically central. So they're really interested in how kind of marginal other figures become absolutely central for the symbolic understanding that elites have of their own lives. And again, as I was reading some of these documents from Japanese history, I was starting to sense that there was maybe a similar kind of interplay happening in the way that elites were writing about non elites. So it might not be about pigs and the county fair or whatever, but I was definitely seeing some kind of structural parallels emerge. So that's kind of where my sense of transgression came from. I did some other research about the term, but, yeah, whenever I use it in the book, I'm really thinking along the lines of kind of breaking a boundary, crossing a boundary, going over something. That's what the word transgression literally means, right? Going over, through, crossing a boundary. And then. So once that happens, the question is, what happens next? Right? If the boundary is broken, is it repaired? Is it not? Who's in control of that situation? That's really the way in which I intend or how I'm thinking about transgression, the sort of way in which identification comes into that. I guess it's a more kind of psychological. I mean, originally it's a psychoanalytical way of thinking about the unconscious. Right. So this kind of original moment of the term comes from Freud. And he was really interested in thinking about kind of. I mean, as I discuss in the book, there's sort of like these two dominant metaphors of identification. One is based on ingestion. That's kind of like the earlier model in his body of work. So, you know, he has language about kind of consuming the other, incorporating the other Making the other part of your own culture, your own kind of symbolic understanding. But then the later stuff, as he moves into crowd psychology is more about infection. Whereas previously it's all about incorporating the other. Now you are psychically exposed to the kind of the infectious capacity of the others that are kind of surrounding you on all sides. So I think again, if transgression is about creating a breach, crossing a boundary, sort of forcing this question of who's in control and who's going to fix this, we can start to see how identification gets looped in. Because if you're a Heian aristocrat and you're accustomed to going out into the avenues of the capital, serving the emperor, conducting all of your official affairs, but now you can't because there's thousands of people partying in the street, that's then going to kind of press against you, and it's going to kind of raise questions about who's in control. What should I do? Who am I actually? Right. So I think that's one of the ways in which identification starts to get kind of looped into the conversation.
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Jingyi Li
That was really helpful in, I guess, picturing this whole picture for this discussion of the more concrete examples, if we can get to the actual performances that you discussed, to see how they are reflecting this kind of fluidity, I guess, in the identity and the contagious, in a way. Shall we begin with dengaku? Since it takes such a big portion of the book. You've told us what it is, this field music kind of thing. Yeah. So more, more, maybe more details about this genre of performance, like who performed it, who watched it, how was it taught or learned on the line of transgression. And I'm very interested in chapter three, in which you discuss this so called Great Dengaku of 1096. You discuss this performance by the non elite crowd. But all the descriptions came from documentation from the elite class. So yeah, from there. How do these texts tell us. What do these texts tell us about open crowd performances and gatherings during this time period?
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah, great questions. So first, a little bit more about dengaku. My point of departure for thinking about dengaku is it's very kind of typological, I guess. So there is an ethnologist, Minzo Kugakusha, in Japan. His name is Yamaji Kozo, and he's written a lot about Dangaku over the decades, like modern scholar. And from his point of view, there's essentially three types of dengaku. So let me just talk about those a little bit Because I think it'll help us anchor to the primary sources a little bit better. So the first type for yamaji is rice planting dengaku. So as I was talking about before, these are performances that are really kind of strongly associated with wet rice agriculture. Again, it's about appealing to the kami, appealing to the divine, for some kind of salutary harvest, that kind of thing, Making sure that whatever our rural agricultural community is, that things go according to plan and we don't, for example, get a drought during the summer and get no rain, therefore crops fail. So that's the first type. The second type he calls professionalized dengaku. So this is when dengaku starts to move into more urban areas. And typically in terms of who the performers are. So if in the first type of dengaku, the performers are just members, dwellers in the village, in the second type, it's really urban commoners, non elites, who have taken on the appearance of being monks. So this is called hoshi in Japanese. They sort of look like they're monks even though they're not. And then this frees them up to do things like performance. So Yamaji refers to these kind of more spontaneous outbreaks of dengaku performance in urban areas as professionalized dengaku. And there's also kind of associations between these performers and various shrines and temples as well. The third and last type he describes, he labels extravagant dengaku. So fudyu dengaku. And in many ways, this one is the most interesting to me because, I mean, you can even see it in. In the phrase itself, right? So fudyu is this kind of performance of extravagance and very strongly associated with elites. So the idea is that, like elite, it was elites that would go out into the streets wearing really extravagant clothing, wearing colors they're not supposed to be wearing, doing things they're not supposed to be doing. So that's furyu, right? But then dengaku at the same time. So it's kind of this merging of elite and non elite into a specific form. And Yamaji talks about how, whereas the first and second types of dangaku are, they kind of last much kind of later into Japanese history. This third type, furyu dangaku, it's really kind of confined to the mid to late Heian period. And I've always thought that's very interesting too, because I think in a certain way, that's oversimplifying things, because we do see kind of similar furyu dangaku type stuff in the 14th century, as well narrated in tales like taiheiki. But it's true that the heyday of this type is the 11th and 12th centuries. So it's interesting to think about why that is and what's going on socially, structurally, even economically, in that moment in Japanese history. That's a little bit about just kind of basic thinking about what types of dengaku there are in terms of what dengaku is, what it sounds like. So typically, it's a combination of mostly percussive instruments. So you have a few different types of drums. So we have the tsuzumi, the small drum, and then we have bigger drums as well that are alternately referred to as Kochi tsuzumi, like the waist drum. And then sometimes there's something more like a taiko, something like that, a bigger drum. So there's kind of different levels of percussion, right? Different kind of loudness, that kind of thing. But the real famous dangaku instrument is this thing called a sasara. And there's a few different types of sasuras, but essentially these are instruments that are made out of wood, and the wood is tied together with string. And the idea is that you grab both sides of the instrument and you kind of make a wave shape, like a dynamic wave shape with your hands. And then that causes these little planks of thin wood to clatter together and make a noise. I have a reproduction of a sasara. Maybe I'll attempt just a really quick playing of the instruments, since this is, after all, a podcast. So you can't see it, but you can maybe hear it. So let me try to do this. Okay. Hopefully that was audible. So that's this kind of distinct dangaku instrument. And it might surprise you to know that that noise was described at length as shocking, horrifying. We've never heard anything like this before. Right. So it's really interesting to kind of think about how we can use even, yeah, Reenactments, reproductions. We can get to this a little bit later to kind of, like, clarify our thinking about, you know, how to interpret something like tengaku. So that's a little bit about the instruments. I mean, there are also flutes typically played as well. There is dancing involved. And then again, on the subject of, like, thinking about how these different non elite performance forms were kind of integrated in interesting ways, there were also elements of these miscellaneous performances, sangaku, that kind of migrated into dengaku. So it's not at all uncommon to see visual images from emaki picture scrolls depicting a dengaku performance. You'll See all the instruments I've just described, but you'll also see someone swallowing a sword, for example, or someone throwing their drum up into the air, which is really more of a Sangaku thing, right? It's like this virtuosic performance of look what you can do with the body, that kind of thing. So we definitely see that kind of mixing happening as well in terms of how, yeah, like dengaku is changing over time. And then this will lead us to the Great Dangaku of 1096. As I mentioned, we have this professionalized Dangaku form, Hoshi performing Dangaku on the streets of the capital. As you mentioned, Jing Yi, the first chapter of my book. It's really about this idea of the open crowd and how we see these open crowd performances along the avenues of the capital really starting in the 11th century, especially kind of getting into the 12th century. And I think dengaku and other performances were a big part of that. So, yeah, I mean, by as early as, like the early 11th century, it wasn't at all uncommon during, for example, like the procession of the mikoshi, the portable shrines, back to Inari Shrine right on the outskirts of the capital, it wasn't at all uncommon to see, like, performances of dengaku take place as part of that kind of wider festivity or wider parade. We see the same with the Gion Goryo. E. So like the Gion Spirit Festival, which as you probably know, is still a really big deal in Kyoto.
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Right?
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
It's like one of the. What is it? One of the three big festivals. Three big annual festivals in Kyoto. Probably not quite as raucous today as it used to be a thousand years ago. But yeah, the Gihon festival is especially interesting to me because the whole reason for it has to do with pestilence deities. It would be held during the really dry, hot summer months after the monsoon came and went. So there was this huge fear of drought and pestilence that might be associated with that. If you didn't have a good rain year, disease bacteria is going to spread much more easily. So the whole kind of structure of the festival is like, well, let's make a lot of noise, let's do a lot of performances, let's have a lot of fun, all in service of entertaining these disease deities so that they can be appeased and hopefully not kind of wreak so much havoc on our populace. And again, Dangaku becomes a big part of of that festival. So performances of Dangaku are happening regularly throughout that. So yeah, by the time we get to the late 11th century, which of course is when the great dangaku of 1096 happens, it's already become customary for dengaku to be part of this spirit Pacification Festival. There's a little bit of kind of more specific historical backstory that I think is helpful for thinking about. Why the dengaku in this particular year, right? Why the spirit pacification festival in this particular year became such a big deal and necessitated all of the writing that we have preserved in the documents about it. So I'll just kind of narrate that really briefly. I'll try not to get too far into the weeds. But yeah, feel free to cut me off if I do. So basically, in 1094, it's called the bicennial. So every 20 years, the inner shrine at Isei Jingu, Ise Shrine has to be moved, right? So you destroy. I don't know if you actually destroy. I don't know if it's destroyed before you move it, yet you fully destroy it, right? And then it's like a mirror image, right? You move it to the next plot right next to it, then you rebuild it. So this is meant to be done every 20 years for and purification purposes. In order to do this, the court customarily had to levy various types of taxes. They had to raise the funds to do this. So one of these levies is implemented in 1094, and this provokes some unrest in the provinces. In the places where the taxes are being levied, people aren't happy about it, so they resist a little bit. So that's kind of like the first step. And things are maybe not going very well for the central state, for the court. And then there's some other stuff happening earlier, so later in time, but earlier in 1096, that just has to do with some heavy handedness on the court side and putting down some. Some popular gatherings in the provinces. So all this is kind of stirring up resentment. So by the time the seventh month of 1096 arrives, people are in the capital for the Giion Spirit Pacification Festival. And seemingly they're upset, they're angry, they don't have the resources they usually have. There's been a drought, and all of this kind of converges into this mass performance, this mass crowd performance, basically. So if you read the primary documents about the primary sources. So these are things from Fujiwara no Minetada's diary to Yuki. So he's writing really essentially on the ground. Some of the stuff he observes by himself, other things he's kind of hearing via hearsay from some of his courtier colleagues. But he writes these very, very long entries in his diary about how many people there are, how unprecedented this is, how essentially unable he is to understand why it's happening, how it's happening. And so he'll kind of default to these explanations, like, oh, maybe it's like a spirit fox that's causing all this mayhem, or maybe this is like Yogen. So these strange rumors, essentially, rumors that are spreading around, and people are hearing the rumors that aren't true, and they're coming out into the streets to kind of protest and make noise and stuff like that. But it's fascinating to read because you can really feel him trying to make sense of it. But fundamentally, he can't, and he really struggles. So that's like the first phase of the great dengaku. Again, these are people. They're not elites. They're not aristocrats, right? There are people from outside the capital. There are also urban commoners who are kind of getting out to the streets. So the performances are happening. And then if you keep on reading through his diary, you get a few weeks into the future, and then all of a sudden he's talking about how now elites are organizing these performances of dengaku. And he even has this long list. So I have a table in chapter three of my book, this long list of all of the different courtiers who showed up to participate in the performance. And then he even notates which instruments they used as they were performing. And he himself participated in this specific performance of dangaku. So without really describing how we get from this first phase of kind of like pandemonium, chaos in the streets to now there's a bunch of elites performing dengaku. We're just there when we're reading his diary, right? So I was really fascinated in the relationship between those two. And I think kind of conventionally, in the sort of post war scholarship of this, there's a lot of stuff about how it's okay. Well, essentially, the non elites come into the capital, they make a lot of noise. The elites are sort of suspicious, but then they're kind of pulled in by the musicality. There's something intriguing to them about it. And so then they too start performing dangaku. That's kind of like the older interpretation of it, but newer stuff, I think, is a little bit more compelling. So I think, again, a lot of it has to do with, you know, munaytada, other elites, like, sort of inability to really understand or like render legible what was happening before them. So they're like, oh, okay, well, so we have this excessive behavior, right? Maybe, like, maybe we can do this too and try to sort of bend it towards our own kind of internal motivations and desires. There's a lot of scholarship that. That tries to interpret. Tries to read the Great Dengaku of 1096 as this moment in the establishment of the Insei, the Yin system. So this new kind of retired emperor system in which there's like a faction of courtiers that are supporting this kind of reignition of the power of the emperor after kind of the takeover of the court by the regency, right, the Fujiwara family. So some scholars kind of read this as like, okay, the pro Yin forces are seeing what's happening in the streets. And they're like, how can we use. Use this to kind of make our political point about who owns the capital and who kind of has the power? But that's kind of what I mean. To go back to what I was saying before about transgression, where it's like there's that breach, right? Someone walks across a boundary and then it creates this kind of set of questions about who's in control, who has authority, who's going to repair the breach, how. I think we're seeing all of that kind of played out in at least Munetada's kind of documentation of the Great Dangaku of 1096.
- [40:17]
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Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Almost.
- [40:37]
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- [40:47]
Jingyi Li
When I was reading about this part, my immediate thought was infection. And then to jump a little bit forward to chapter seven, where you discuss illness and contagion as observed through these documentation related to CRUD performances. That was my favorite chapter actually, because I thought it was a pretty surprising connection. So I don't know if you're making this connection between this elite in the capital suddenly decided to join the crowd performances, but at least in chapter seven, you're talking about this non elite performances being related with illness and contagion. In the text so you still don't have to make that connection. Maybe I just made that in my mind. But can you tell us something about this illness and open crowd performance?
- [41:43]
Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah, no, I think that's a great connection to make and I think in a way, and maybe I don't want to get too much into the boring details about how the different chapters of the book merged, but suffice to say that, and I think that should be obvious from the chapter itself, but that last chapter, it was the last chapter I wrote for the book. And I was really thinking about it during COVID 19 pandemic. And that's like in many ways what was kind of prompting. I think it was similar for many of us, right? We were all at home not doing the things we normally do and trying to. I mean, we were trying to, right? We had all the same responsibilities, but suddenly we were all teaching online, right? We were spending more time at home. And at the same time I was like reading these accounts of pestilence, deities and mass crowd performances that were somehow related to disease and contagion and things like that. So chapter seven in part is my way to work through some of those experiences I had and the various feelings I had 2021, 2022, right around there. So, yeah, it's kind of my COVID 19 chapter in a way. But I think the reality is that disease, epidemic, disease in particular, was just a fact of life in Heian Japan. And I think scholars like William Wayne Ferris are so good. I mean, he in particular is excellent. His work is so good thinking about demography in medieval Japan, but just this notion that every 20 years or so smallpox would just rip through the entire population, probably kill what, I don't know, 20%, something like that. That was the kind of rhythm that people live their lives through. So initially I was just thinking about how until the COVID 19 pandemic, I think that kind of fact or an experience with that kind of within post war scholarly culture had really receded. Right? And I talk about in the chapter Wakita Haruko, this wonderful scholar of performance medieval Japan, she wrote a whole book about the Guion Spirit pacification festival. And she kind of begins it by talking about how we live in the age of antibiotics, so we have no ability to understand this in the same way that someone living in 1112 century Japan would. And that blew my mind because I was just like, wow. Just because here it is, 2021, 2022. And how can we not understand it in that way, right? So that was just as A side note, that was a really interesting kind of lesson for me about how our historiographical imagination approaches can really change based on what's happening around us. But, yeah, as I thought, more about great dengaku of 1096, and then especially as you get a little bit later in the archival preservation of documents relating to dengaku in 13th, 14th centuries, there really seemed to be this equation of dengaku with disease kind of full stop. So one moment I talk about in chapter seven is this. There's an epidemic that's spreading in 1311. And we got this from a few different sources, Literary sources, historical sources. And in one of those sources, that epidemic is referred to as dengaku, byo. So the dengaku illness. And that was fascinating to me when I first came across that, because I was already kind of primed to think about how dengaku was involved in, for example, pacification of diseased deities. There's something going on with how, essentially, dengaku's double in this urban capital environment is disease. So the two are kind of related, right? Kind of like two sides of a coin or something like that. But here we are in 1311, where the writer of this document is not saying that, you know, dengaku is double as disease. He's saying dengaku is the disease, right? And so then I started to think about how what had previously been more metaphoric, right? There is a metaphoric distance between the two, is now actually being actualized, kind of as sign must. So to me, that kind of allowed me to think a little bit more intently about some of these structural similarities between performance on the one hand and disease on the other. And as I started to do that, I was noticing all these similarities. Both tend to be talked about in terms of rapid spread. Both tend to be talked about in terms of unknown provenance. So Owen Amasafsa, who's another figure I write about a lot in the book, he has his own kind of account of the great dengaku. And he actually begins it by saying, we don't know where it came from. And again, in 2021, 2022, I'm reading this. I'm like, wow. Thinking of all of the increasingly eccentric theories about where COVID 19 came from. I was like, this is a similar kind of thing, right? So, yeah, I was really trying to just deepen some kind of examination of some of those similarities to think about why is it that performance is often kind of construed in this way? And I think, ultimately, as I talk about in the chapter, it's about suggestibility again, it's about transgression, I guess would be my simple answer. Just like disease, performance will cross boundaries and then kind of create crises of containment, create questions of who's in control, who's going to write the social order. And now that we're all sick, right, now that 20% of the populace has died or something like that. Right. How are we going to kind of go back to or go forward to something that feels quote unquote normal again? In that same way performance was often treated in Heian Japan and especially beyond, I think it was really more of a 13th, 14th century phenomenon, but treated as something totally other and quite malign in its orientation. Right. It's doing bad stuff is kind of where things end up going a little bit later in time.
- [48:25]
Jingyi Li
And in both performance and illness, we can see how crowd and body, literally the titles, crowds and bodies are very important. Well, agents, without them, none of performance, crowd performance or contagious illness could happen. So I want to backtrack a little bit to the beginning of part two in your book when you explained the context of what you mean by body in detail. Yes. Just I want to make sure to leave some time for this question. Can you talk about how you interpret body in the context of popular performance in hand here in Japan, which from what I gather in the book you take very differently in the sense of, I guess, modern day body. Right?
- [49:17]
Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah. So if we think of history of Western philosophy, there's this idea of the separation between the mind and the body, this kind of Cartesian dualism. And so thinking about that and trying to think about what is a body, what are bodies in the context of Japan is really inspired by Rajyashri Pandey's book Perfume Sleeves. She has a great kind of introduction about how that kind of thinking. And then furthermore the sort of ongoing debates, again mostly in kind of Western academic contexts, between the biological position. A body is a body, it's a scientific reality on the one hand. And then like the social constructivist position. Right. Like bodies change depending on prevailing environment, social context, that kind of thing. So she, she kind of goes through that debate, but really is, is telling us in her book that that debate's not really relevant for pre modern East Asia in general, certainly kind of Heian Japan in specific. And I think a lot of that just has to do with the, the sort of lack of the mind body dualism. So I was thinking about that at the same time as I was trying to make sense of how these bodies that perform Sangaku Sarugaku are working on their audiences and then how their audiences are kind of understanding what they're doing with their bodies. And the place where I basically got was again along the lines of transgression to think about how bodies are often. Bodies in this kind of specific context are often deeply ambivalent. So sometimes elites are awestruck by the amazing things that Sangaku performers are doing. Right? How did he breathe fire? How did he swallow the sword? They don't actually say this. It's a little bit more embroidered because it's written in classical Chinese and literary Semitic. Um, that's kind of, I think, the, the basic intent of it, while at the same time they're saying, you know, that's a really scary thing. And, and by the way, like the fact that for example, the fact that this, this low ranking monk just transformed his sandals into puppies, that's actually contravening, you know, the three treasures and, and you know, the Buddhist law and stuff like that. And therefore it's like really scary and really dark what we're doing, kind of seeing happen and seeing perform. So I was really interested in how we actually see those two kind of combine within the figure of what I mostly call the virtuosic body or the virtuosic bodies that are doing some of these performances. And then one of the kind of follow on effects of that is that if you're reading the historical documents, the kokidoku part of your diaries, things like that, there are these really rich moments that are described usually in brief, typically urban street performers doing things in a way that they're not supposed to do them. So this is the very end of chapter five. And then that can then kind of provoke some kind of repercussion consequence. So people are incarcerated for not yelling as loudly as they should at just the right moment in the performance. Um, or just, you know, for, for doing something like Sangoku in general. So it can really kind of cut both ways. And again that, that takes me back to this thinking about relationality and how, you know, there's no one categorical answer to the, to the question of like, if someone performs with their body, that means it's good, or that means it's bad or something like that. It's really kind of more contextual, it's more relational. It's about, you know, who is the elite, who's watching, what's the history, what's kind of the wider context. And so I try to kind of map some of that onto my general approach to bodies in the second part
- [53:24]
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- [53:56]
Jingyi Li
Thank you. Very fascinating. And my last question is I guess more about your methodology because I was very, I was very interested in your research process because as we talked about in the beginning, you're researching about this performance, music, sound, things that we cannot see with our own eyes because there were no video recordings or audio recordings back in the time.
- [54:22]
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How.
- [54:23]
Jingyi Li
And I think this from the experience of your book, a lot of students and scholars could find this helpful. What have you found to be effective methods in researching these kind of, well, things that we cannot see firsthand anymore or listen to firsthand anymore. And especially because when researching about these non elite performances, who, I am assuming, some of them did not actually write down the documentation of their own performances. So it's rather from the observer's perspective, how did you approach this kind of documentation from the observing party and perhaps with very little direct quotes from the performers themselves?
- [55:17]
Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah, it's a great question. It's so central to the entire book. And I think the place where I get deepest into thinking about that is going to be chapter six, my chapter about Imayo. Just because vocal performance. So Imayo are these popular songs that essentially are transmitted by professional women in the capital, so kind of 10th, 11th, 12th centuries, but then become sort of picked up, appropriated by male elites, figures like retired Emperor Go Shirakawa. And then I mean, really the main way we know about Imayo today is through the text that he then wrote down. So you have this really big collection of lyrics and then kind of an accompanying treatise. So yeah, I think about method, especially with Imayo, just because I think there's something about vocal performance that feels especially transient or evanescent. Right. It's like the second the song is over, the song no longer exists or something like that. We see similar kind of approaches taken to thinking about performance in general by scholars like Peggy Phelan. So chapter six. And then in the conclusion as well, I kind of think A little bit more about method in terms of Imayo. I think what worked well for me with that material was that again, we have this, we have this text which actually was. We didn't really have it. But then one of the, I mean really the main extant scroll of both the treatise and the song lyrics, they were discovered in 1911 by a historian in Jinbocho. He was like looking through Yu's bookstore, as we all like to do in Jinbucho on Kanda and he, he found this thing and he was like, this kind of looks like Yojin Hisho. I've heard of this. He brought it to his Kokubungaku national literature friend who then looked through it, authenticated it, published it and it kind of caused this huge boom in people thinking about popular songs in the Heian period. There was this whole discourse about how the Second Man Youchu has just been discovered and, and this whole thing. So because we have this text which is completely based on non literate, unwritten, non inscribed tradition, all we now have is the text. We don't have that repertoire anymore. Some scholars have attempted to kind of reconstruct it. I talk about this in the chapter a little bit in really, really interesting ways. So like contemporary performers, scholars do this. But the kind of repertoire itself, it just dies out at a certain point in medieval times. And I just thought how, in a way, how perfect or just inspirational to my overall project in the book is this text because it's asking all of these questions about how are you, the reader, going to make sense of the various types of mediation that I'm performing right now. So Goshi Dakawa is this really powerful retired emperor. He's kind of mediating the literal voices and embodied repertoires, practices of unranked women. You have this kind of tension between orality and writing all throughout that text. Just all sorts of really rich themes to I think, think about. So yeah, that chapter was really helpful, I think for the method in general. And I think where I try to end up at the end of the chapter is by thinking about if we're trying to think about how to make sense of the text and then the treatise. For me, it's really pointing towards what I call a messy relationality. Again, some people initially, especially in the early 20th century, really wanted to understand it as this unmediated look at like all of a sudden we just have all of these songs that are telling us things about commoners and non elites and we're going to learn so much about what their lives have been like. But Then again, I'm trained as a literary scholar. Right. So I'm immediately suspicious of that because Goshitokawa is doing it in his own way. So I think in terms of the structure of that text, he's basing it on essentially a Waka anthology. And he's doing that because he's trying to elevate his own love. I mean, he loves Imayo. Right. So he's trying to elevate it to the same status as something like Waka, which had kind of undergone this revival several decades earlier. So it's complicated. Right. And I think that sort of complexity is, I think, where we need to be when we're thinking about texts like this and the way in which they're really kind of balancing a tension between the phenomenal world, on the one hand. Right. The world of repertoire, the world of embodied practices, and then this other world, this world of writing and genre and kind of like topoi and things like that. Right. I think it does a disservice, I guess, to the primary source if we're not trying to engage with both of those at the same time. So, bigger picture, I've always felt kind of caught between the historian approach and the literary scholar approach to texts like this. I think one thing I'm trying to do in Chapter six is just unpack some of that and try to figure out how I can hold both of those at the same time.
- [61:13]
Jingyi Li
I absolutely feel that struggle, too. But here I'm just more astonished by how much we can still tell about things that we think we might never know by just shifting our perspective and method a little bit.
- [61:28]
Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Yeah, And I think in that comment as well, I think oftentimes, if we study the distant past, we come in with a sort of preset mindset of I can never know everything. And so we sort of arrive in this fallen position of like, okay, we can't know everything, but at least we can know a few things. What I try to do in the conclusion is kind of push back against that mindset a little bit. I think I'm trying to liberate myself a little bit to be a little bit more creative. But, yeah, I mean, I think performance studies scholars have been really great with this kind of thing. I talk about Philip Oslander's book Reactivations, in which he argues that we can't think of performance itself as distinct or totally separated from documentation. The two kind of need each other to both exist. So for him, reactivation is this way in which we can use performance documentation to bring back to life performance. That doesn't mean that it's going to be perfect. Right. Because again, we don't want to fall into that trap of this is a window onto the past and we're going to get the. It's not about that, but it's about kind of meeting the past halfway a little bit and thinking about how whatever that documentation is, it can be meaningful to us. It can be useful for us in our teaching, in our classes. I mean, if the document didn't say anything about the repertoire, the practices, the performances, then like the classes I teach wouldn't really be possible in the same way that I actually believe they're possible. So I kind of come at it from that way as well.
- [63:12]
Jingyi Li
Yeah, yeah. That is such a perfectly positive note to end this conversation with. Thank you so much for taking the time to join our channel today.
- [63:23]
Dr. Ashton Lazarus
Thank you, Jingyu. It's been great. Thank you so much for your questions.
- [63:27]
Jingyi Li
There are a lot of great parts of the book that we didn't have the time to cover on this interview today. So for our listeners who would like to find out more about these non elite crowd performances in the medieval period, check out this new book by Ashton Lazarus, Performing Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan. It's currently available in hardcover through Harvard University Press. This is Jingyi Li with New Books in Japanese Studies. Stay tuned for our next episode.
- [63:57]
New Books Network Host
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- [64:38]
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