Panel 49: Commerce, Art, and the Sea in Premodern Japan and India

Chair: Roderick Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Panelists

Michelle Damian, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, “‘A Rare Sight’: Commemorating Whale Encounters in Early Modern Japan”

In early modern (17th – 19th c) Japan, people were likely to memorialize their encounters with whales through artwork, permanent monuments, and even in ritual practices. In this paper, I argue that the medium of commemoration was largely determined by the type of community interacting with the whales. Whaling groups, who sought out whales to hunt and kill for sustenance and profit, tended to focus on memorializations that would teach hunting techniques, display their prowess to outsiders, and atone for the Buddhist sin of killing another living creature. Nonwhaling communities, who usually encountered whales through more limited beachings or strandings, also found those situations worthy of commemoration. Their memorials, however, celebrated the spectacle of the whale from the observer’s viewpoint, or expressed gratitude for the financial windfall the dead whale brought to the community. Whaling community memorials generally strove for multigenerational longevity, while other communities’ memorials often were more focused on the immediate impact of their encounters with whales.

Daniel Feldbaum, Michigan State University, “What’s in a Wave: Maritime Commodities of a Thirteenth Century Japanese Estate”

Despite being an archipelago surrounded by water, the maritime history of Japan has been underrepresented in English language scholarship. This is especially true of the medieval period where most scholarly attention has been placed on rice producing estates. By examining the well-documented case of Yugeshima-no-shō, an island estate located in the Inland Sea, this presentation aims to cast a light on how medieval Japan interacted with its seascape. The over four hundred extant documents in the Tōji Hyakugo Monjo archive mentioning Yugeshima-no-shō show how highly prized it was by its proprietors not for the scant agriculture possible on the small mountainous island, but rather for its bounty of maritime goods, chiefly salt. These documents reveal not just the variety of annual rent products, but also how different shiki holders, those owed a portion of the annual dues, received different products based on their needs. In this paper, I analyze a thirteenth-century document to explain how and why the estate paid different types of goods, including maritime products, to its Kyoto-based temple proprietor and its local custodian. Although one might suspect that the differing forms of payment reflected status, I argue that they instead reflected the estate’s multifaceted production and the varied needs of each recipient.

Garrett Field, Ohio University, "A Royal Fleet in the Indian Ocean: Boat Building, Sailing, and Seamanship in the Dhivehi Poem, 'Dhivehi Arumaadhu Raivaru‚' (1804)"

One gap in the scholarship on Indian Ocean studies is scholarship on literature from the Maldives that portrays forms of maritime culture. In this paper, I address this lacuna through the examination of a Dhivehi-language long poem, “Dhivehi Arumaadhu Raivaru” (The Raivaru about the Maldivian  Royal Fleet). It was composed in 1804 by the Maldivian poet Ban’deyri Hasan Manikufaanu. In the poem, Manikufaanu documented a journey undertaken by Maldivian Sultan Muhammad Mueenuddeen I (r. 1798– 1835) from Malé to Ari Atoll. My analysis focuses on the poet’s descriptions of boat building, sailing, and seamanship.