Historian Wins Fellowship To Study Medieval Period In Japan

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Thomas Keirstead, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received a $65,000 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Faculty from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

The ACLS Burkhardt program is a new one, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to assist tenured scholars engaged in long-term, unusually ambitious interdisciplinary projects in the humanities and related social sciences.

Keirstead will work on a long-term study of Japan's "medieval" period to suggest how a society may produce and consume its own historical past, regardless of its literal accuracy.

The fellowship will support an academic year of residence at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, N.C., beginning in September.

Keirstead points out that it wasn't until the 19th century, shortly after they came in contact with the West, that the Japanese began to conceptualize their culture as having a medieval period.

"The remarkable thing," he says, "is that this 'foreign' idea took hold rapidly and without resistance. One of my chief aims in this study is to figure out why this was the case."

Not only did the Japanese assert that their Middle Ages were synchronous with Europe's own, roughly from the years 1100 to 1500, says Keirstead, but, as in Europe, they heavily gendered the period as male.

"That is to say, the qualities and values linked to the Middle Ages in both the European and the Japanese imagination are those traditionally attributed to men. Physical courage, honor, strength and loyalty are the qualities celebrated in the period's heroes: knights and kings who became romantic, mythical and even saintly figures in the popular imagination."

Why did this happen? Keirstead points out that to 18th- and 19th-century Europeans, the Middle Ages not only described a period in their own historical past, but came to be considered by them a necessary transformative period in the development of any nation.

It may have been to Japan's benefit, then, to 'reimagine' a Japanese history more in line with that of the Europeans with whom they were then engaged, says Keirstead. For if the European mind could not conceive of a "real" nation that had no medieval era, then Japan would need such a historical era if it was to be regarded as a "real" nation in European parlance.

"Consider as well," he says, "that Europeans writing in the 18th and 19th centuries tended to feminize Asian cultures and to characterize them as physically weak, passive, decorative, soft and loathe to fight. Given the respect paid to 'masculine' societies vis a vis 'feminine' societies by the powerful Europeans, Japan may have had a powerful incentive to assert a difference between their culture and those of their neighbors."

As Keirstead points out, however, that 19th-century version of their "Middle Ages" is not the only one Japanese have known. He says that in his research he will be looking at how the "Middle Ages" were described by Japanese writers, historians and artists over a long span of time -- from the period before there was a notion of Middle Ages as such, through to the present day.

"Japanese have long made use of this historical period to work through or think about contemporary problems," he says. "Eighteenth- and 19th-century Japanese writers, for instance, produced many historical romances set in the period between 1000 and 1500. One common practice was to disguise political criticisms of the current regime by hiding it in stories set in the medieval period.

"Then, in the 19th century, when Japanese historians began to describe this era in earnest, they made new use of its stock of medieval characters, reinvented as national heroes, to draw lessons about Japan as a nation and to sell them to the public," Keirstead says.

He says later historians, novelists, and filmmakers have made different uses of this period. In the 1920s and '30s, for example, "medieval Japan" became a resource for asserting the uniqueness of Japanese culture and contesting the validity of Western ideas.

After World War II, he says a "new" medieval Japan was formulated, one that asserted the normalcy of Japan's historical foundations.

"Finally," says Keirstead, "in the period since about 1980, coinciding with Japan's full emergence as a dominant, global economy, yet another, phenomenally successful medieval Japan has emerged. This time we're getting a version of the Middle Ages that stresses its exoticism and foreignness and suggests that Japan really isn't such a closed society as it seems."

Says Keirstead, "It's these twists and turns in the tale of Japan's Middle Ages -- and what they might tell us about the production and consumption of history -- that I'll be investigating."