[Dissertation] Philological Botany: The Poetics of Plant Classification in Early China and Japan

Author:

Loren Waller

School:

Yale University

Year:

2023

30312999

Abstract: 

Flowering plants are a primary topic in Chinese and Japanese poetry, often used figuratively to express human emotions. Over time, as poets alluded to earlier works, these plants developed conventional metaphorical meanings. It is natural that such meanings would shift over time, but what is also striking is that historical understandings of the plants themselves, as well as the names used for the plants, also changed over time. An examination of three case studies will show how the identities of these plants changed over time as they were collected within literary texts and commentaries.
Chapter 1 on the hibiscus (Ch. mujin; J. asagaho, kikkyō, kenikoshi, mukuge) demonstrates the broad diversity of different flowers that share the same name, as well as the references to this ambiguity within some poetic works themselves. This chapter also introduces the complexity of the textual commentary tradition and considers how texts may be interpreted through reading between the lines of commentaries on literary works.

Chapter 2 on the orange tree (Ch. ju; J. tachibana) shows how the trope of regional loyalty to southern China changed as it was adopted in Japan. More than other plants with a shared cultural heritage between China and Japan, the Japanese tachibana developed dominant allusive connotations based on a well-known poem in the Kokinwakashū (905). Still, Chinese examples were not unknown in Japan, and it is productive to consider how Japanese texts might be reinterpreted considering alternative pretexts.

Chapter 3 on the plum looks at how a plant marked as representative of China became domesticated in Japan over time. While there are no plum poems in the Kojiki (712), Nihonshoki (720), or the early period of the Man’yōshū, plum poems and banquets suddenly became popular around the time of a well-known plum banquet at the residence of Ōtomo no Tabito in 730, making plums the second most popular plant in the Man’yōshū poetic anthology. The proliferation was so thorough that plum poems were anachronistically attributed to earlier times. The most extreme case was one commentary’s claim that the plum was the subject of the famous Naniwazu poem, which was also associated with an encounter with a Wani, a scribe from Paekche who was said to have brought writing in Japan in the early fifth century. Another wonderous tale of the plum is the famous flying plum of the apotheosized statesman-poet Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), whose plum tree from Kyoto uprooted and flew to be with him when he was exiled to Dazaifu. Such narratives show how the plum could be seen as a representative Japanese plant.

In addition to tracing the literary history of these important plant tropes, this study also offers cases studies of how plant metaphors are used in cases when the identities of the plants themselves change over time, between languages, or between genres.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chapter 1. Of the Hibiscus and Fleeting Faces
Chapter 2. Of Orange Trees and Transplantation
Chapter 3. Of Plums and Origins