Stephanie's Week 3 Response

Week 3 response

This week was a tough one, and after missing my meeting with my group and a meeting in class on Tuesday morning I had to catch up with what they were doing and talking about. I looked over the annotated bibliography to see what was posted and the Sculpt assignment and found some interesting information my other group members discovered, such as the Edo fire of 1657, and some of the information I sent to them via email. After meeting as a group again we looked over our materials and tried to narrow down exactly what it was we were looking for. We came across many materials about Chikamatsu’s life and the political atmosphere in Japan at the time, but as many times as the books and articles said that the Edo period was a time of peace, I spent an equal amount of time doubting it. After this insistence across our readings that this was a peaceful era I began to look for signs of dissent or discourse about the lower classes and what they faced. When there is power, there will always be somebody who is on the opposite end of that power—the lower classes, the dissenters, the oppressed—and I began to look for those who opposed that power and what happened to them. As I was reading though one of the books Jamie had, I discovered that the power of the Tokugawa government worked with the heads of the Confucian and Buddhist temples to create strict rules by which everybody should live by. I did find one article about dissent in the Edo period, but the amount of those who dissented seemed to be limited to that of peasants and only a few writers or artists and didn’t appear to include Chikamatsu (not yet, at least).

Surprisingly, the lower social classes seemed to be the ones to hold much of the economic power. We discovered that because of their material wealth, which they could not hold on to due to the strict Confucian social norms. As they had to spend the money they made right away, Bunraku and other arts flourished because of the money that could now freely be spent. According to one of my sources by Brian Powell, “In merchant society commercial survival in the special circumstances of low status and no political power but enormous economic influence depended on strict rules of social, business and personal conduct. Many of these rules were based on relationships of duty and obligation that were clearly understood and accepted as necessary by everyone,” (8). He goes on to describe the conflict people would have between their obligations and feelings and how this led into the development of the domestic play (sewamono) by Chikamatsu, which was a new genre that contained stories that people from the lower social classes could relate to. When we met in the library to discuss our assignment, this was a major part of the discussion and we decided to base our argument off of the fact that domestic plays, thanks the Chikamatsu, were a reason why Bunraku became so popular, and the popularity was due largely to the lower social classes, with their disposable income, who these plays were marketed towards.

Powell, Brian. “Japanese Theatre: Some Preliminaries.” Contemporary Theatre Review 1.2 (1994): 3-11. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. Web. 15 Nov. 2014.