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So go and get some books. Hi, I'm Carla Knappi, and this is New Books and East Asian Studies. Welcome and thanks for joining us. I just spoke with Joshua Fogle about his great new book, Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 CE.
Relic Text Object Fake. This came out in 2013 with braille publishers. On the surface, this is a story of a seal. It's a gold seal.
It was purportedly uncovered in the 18th century, and it was supposedly from 57 CE. And you'll hear details about it in the course of the conversation. And it is about scholarships surrounding the sealness about this artifact. But it's also about much, much more than that.
This is a book that takes the seal as an exemplar, as a touchstone for thinking about and taking us through what Vocal describes as transformations in the evidentiary framework, the historiographical frame and texture, the ways that it has looked to do history over more than 200 years of time in the scholarship of Japan and about Japan. So it's a story that is just as much about transformations in what it has meant to tell a story about the past, as it is a story about the seal itself. And because of that, it's important and relevant to much, much more than just the field of East Asian studies, although it's undoubtedly important for our field as well. Now, for the course of the conversation, you'll hear us talk about the important moments of transformation that Vocal identifies in the course of the book.
I also want to emphasize here, we briefly talk about it in the course of the interview, but it really deserves emphasis that he's translated and included as appendices a bunch of the foundational essays that he describes as really game-changing in the course of the book. And these are really important resources as we move forward for historians, and also just for readers who want a flavor of the texture and the kind of taste of the nature of the argument that he's describing. So it's a really impressive book. It's got beautiful pictures as well, as you'll hear about a little bit at the end of our conversation.
And it was a pleasure to talk with Joshua about it. So I hope you enjoy the book, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. We're here today to talk with Joshua Fogle about his new book, Japanese Historiography, and the Gold Seal of 57 CE, Relic Text Object Fake. Welcome to new books in East Asian studies, Josh, and thanks very, very much for making the time to talk with me today.
Thank you, Greta. So can you start us off by saying a little bit about yourself and your background, and specifically, how did you come to the field of history of Japan, or really, as we're going to sure get into when we talk about the book, this is really the history of Japan and integrating some elements of the history of China as well. So what brought you to the field? Well, actually, I'm a card carrying Chinese historian, but I'm old enough so that when I was first I understood in China in 1969, 1970, Americans were not allowed to go to China, but unless your name was Edersonal, it was the third way or third, William Hinton.
So China was to be studied from it. And in those years, and for quite some time before, and to a certain extent, a few years thereafter, the study of Japanese was very, very much pushed in American graduate schools, probably elsewhere, but I only knew America at that time. So I did a lot of Japanese in graduate school, in addition to Chinese. And then, of course, I didn't go to China, so I ended up going to Japan, but working on a topic at the time, Japanese historian of China, Michael Kona, who was the subject of my dissertation, and then my first real book.
So I've always been interested in the interaction between China and Japan and the cultural sphere and the cultural sphere. And this book is, in its own way, derived from that interest. Great. Now, the book itself explores transformations of an artifact, and we'll talk about that artifact.
Read through changes in the way it's been understood historically. And just as much, at least for me as one example of one reader, just as much as it's a book about the gold seal of 57 CE, it's also a work of historical epistemology. And really importantly so, and I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk about that in the course of our conversation. So how did you come to this particular topic?
Can you situate the book within the broader trajectory of the kinds of things that you've been working on? Yes, sure. In the year 2007, I was honored to be asked to give the Rieschauer lectures at Harvard, which is a lectureship named, obviously, in the name of Edwin Rieschauer, a Harvard professor, and then before that, well, during that time, Ambassador to Japan. And because Rieschauer had a background in China, is happening back in Korea as well, the lectures were supposed to encompass China and Japan together.
And then over the years that they've been given at Harvard, to varying degrees have dealt with China and Japan interactions. And several of the faculty members at Harvard, infirmally, kind of, signed up to me and said, you know, Josh, what we really like. And they're both social scientists. What we really like is that full of history of Chinese-Japanese relations.
It would really be useful. Rod McFarquhar and Ezra Vogel, you know, for social scientists for whom history began three or four days ago. And they really want someone else to do all this work. Well, I took it positively because I love this stuff.
And decided, oh, by the way, when I remember mine and the years later that they were the inspiration for the first of those three lectures, they both denied having ever asked me to do it. It doesn't matter. I enjoy doing it immensely. So I wrote up this lecture, which was a survey from my integrity through the 19th century, and boiled it down into a lecture that first of the three lectures at Harvard in 2007.
And then I got so interested. And I said, you know, this would make a great book. We don't have a book like that. So I started down and started writing it.
And I thought, it's very interesting to me. But I think I'm going to probably put lots of readers right to sleep. So I need to break up the narrative in some way. And I suggested to myself, because I never went much further, that I break it up by having little potty biographies of really important people in sign of Japanese relations, or really important artifacts, or really important wars or events, or somehow with pictures and so on.
And the very first one was the gold seal. And at the time I knew next to nothing about it, and did a little research and scratched the surface and discovered there were hundreds of articles about this. The gold seal is one of those things, and there are interesting to create a list of them that are widely known in East Asia, in this case in Japan, but are completely unknown outside. Every schoolchild in Japan knows about the gold seal.
It's in comic books, as I pointed out in several of those. It appears in several manga, historical manga. It's just part of the culture. However, it's simply unknown, except to ancient Japanese historians, or people who teach surveys of Japan sometimes will know about it, because it's the first event they might touch on when they were talking about Japan's relations with the mainland.
So the more I got interested in it, I said, let's come and put this big project, the big sign of Japanese history project on hold. And let's look at this artifact more closely. I can't believe that there's something A I've never heard of and B for hundreds of articles about it. So that's what got me going on.
It's quite brilliant, because again, we'll talk about this over the course of our conversation. But it manages to tell a history of historiography by focusing in on this very particular, very concrete object that becomes an object and it doesn't start as an object, and we'll kind of get into that. So I think Bravo, an awesome job, finding a way to tell what could be, on other hand, this amazingly out of control broad kind of a story in a way that's perfectly clear, totally manageable, and makes perfect sense. So again, I'm really excited to talk with you about it today, and I'm really thrilled to have had a chance to read it.
So let's get right into it. The book follows what you call in the introduction of the biography of a gold seal that was purported to have been given by an emperor, Emperor Guang Wu, the founding ruler of a dynasty called the Later Han, to an emissary from what's now Japan in the year 5757 CE. So as you mentioned in the introduction, it's the only seal of original Chinese provenance that's been found in Japan. It's also the oldest extant material object of which we have any kind of corroborating evidence that had passed from the mainland, from what we now call China, to what's now the Japanese archipelago.
And more than 200 years of debate have surrounded this object. So it's an amazing case study here. OK, so why? Let's start off with a kind of broad question, but with a question that I think motivates a lot of the book.
And so let's talk about it in whatever sense you'd like. Namely, why has this seal become so important in Japan? Why is this such? Why is this something that right now, as you mentioned, school children know about, why does this cause 200 years of debate?
What's the big deal, basically? And this will answer where's the beef? And this will also answer in part the question of why it's not known outside of Japan. I think, and I argue this in the book, even though the gold seal itself goes through a number of transformations that is from the perspective of Japanese scholars and interested lay people who have approached it, goes through a number of transformations and what signifies throughout.
It is tied in some meaningful way, and that changes to Japanese identity. But what we would now call Japanese identity, this identity, of course, is an obsession of our own time. But I think whatever language they may have used at different times, it's tied into, because the inscription on the seal and the rank of the seal within the hierarchy of seals and inscriptions and cords that are attached to seals, et cetera, et cetera, these are some of the great details. It took a little self-taught knowledge on it.
Anyway, because it places Japan in a subordinate position to the mainland, that requires a certain amount of explanation. And right from the back, the very first and really quite brilliant essay by the time of the discovery of the farmer discovered the gold seal in 1784 when he was working on a irrigation dish. But the scholar that was called into this thing, what this little piece of gold was all about, he immediately saw this. He knew what it was immediately, because he knew from the inscription where it was mentioned in one place in the entire Chinese corpus of historical records where it was mentioned.
And so being a good neo-confusion, this was a wonderful event. He called it an auspicious event in the history of Japan. Namely, there was an artifact that proved that Japan's relationship with the mainland, which he was perfectly well-into admit was superior, culturally superior to Japan, went back in his day, 1700 plus years. Now that was fine for neo-confusions, for whom the fountain of culture was on the mainland, some place and had them spread to other places, including Japan.
But it was not okay for native scholars, so we did not buy that at all. And so their option was either to ignore it, which is very, very hard to do, or to somehow try to debunk its importance. It wasn't probably, you couldn't ignore it. What's interesting is that it takes almost 60 years before anyone comes along and says that it's an outright fake.
One native scholar who does that. But in the first 15, 20 years, I don't have the exact numbers, but something like that. There are several dozen essays written about this. And the native scholars jumped in with both feet to make all sorts of claims based on thin air, most of it.
Because you only have five characters there on the seal. It's not evidence. And it's mentioned very briefly in the history later on Dynasty, as you just mentioned, Perala. So you have to try to fix it in some sort of historical context, which relies a great deal on your imagination.
This was before the era of massive historical archaeological digs in Japan. So there was none of that kind of corroborating evidence around. So all sorts of fascinating essays are written about it, trying to say, oh, it was from a, this is a minor state. It doesn't represent all of Japan.
It just went to China and claimed that it represented the entire archipelago. This was definitely not the kingdom of law. It was the impostors, their rebels, all sorts of fascinating. And again, completely unprovable.
These were put out there by the native scholars in opposition to the Neo-Conficians. Neo-Conficians kind of dropped off the states very quickly. They're there. But the first generation of scholars, the nativeists come up with a different reading for the inscription.
The power of the inscription is read is very important. And they're reading places that very localized. It's the nativeist reading, very localized kingdom or stately, I call it. These are states that would make Rhode Island seem like a continent.
And they claim that this state then somehow would either understood to represent all Japan or represented itself as well as Japan. In any event, this debate goes back and forth. But as I say, it's quite interesting that they didn't know for 50 or 60 years. I'm not sure why.
I think that it was just a fake. Now would that deal with it quite quickly? It's just a fake. All right, if it's just a fake.
But the problem is that maybe I do have an idea. Problem is if you're going to say it's a fake, it's an often expensive thing to fake. Where are you going to find pure gold and someone who can carve pure gold? And when I look at it, or when most scholars look at it, now it looks nice to me.
It looks like a well done thing. But there were lots of seal specialists in Japan, and of course, elsewhere in East Asia. And they could tell if it was carved a long time ago and they were how they carved. There's different ways you can carve straight into it or in an angle.
And if you did that wrong, it would be immediately seen as fake. So it was probably, and by the way, that essay, the first essay is not one of the strongest pieces of scholarship in the world. I translated it as an appendix to the book because I thought it was a unique piece. And it wasn't published until 50 or 60 years after it was written.
So it had no real impact in its own time. So anyway, that's the long answer to your question about why is this little block of gold so productive in terms of scholarship? Why did the Japanese care so much about it? I think it's because being the first object, and as you just said, Carla, and being the first object inscribed with Chinese characters, that's what this first scholar coming on me is his name.
It is the arrival in Japan of culture itself, in the sense of the culture and writing of the same phenomenon. Right. No, I think this is great. It gets us right into the core of the issue.
So for listeners who aren't familiar with the seal, this is a seal that is gold. It's inscribed with five Chinese graphs. That the inscription, I think you give a roughly modern translation early on in the first chapter, something like seal awarded to the ruler of the state or statelet of nah within wa under the Han. So what exactly that means, whether that's the right way to read the inscription, these are all things that are going to come up in a little bit.
But just to sort of give listeners a sense, there's a snake or a serpent card on top, and that's going to become really important for some commentators on the seal later on, and there's a purple cord involved. And so as you mentioned early on, this was a gold seal that was purportedly unearthed by a farmer named Jinby in the village of Shekanoshima on Kyushu in the late 18th century. And this is important, as you mentioned, because it marks potentially the entrance of the statelet into international affairs, which is a world that was defined by the Han Empire. So this is a really, really important document, sort of object document or a relic or a fake, as it's going to turn out to be for all kinds of reasons.
Now you just mentioned, and just to set out for listeners, the book, one of the things that the book is going to do is use the case of the seal to show the ways that grounds of scholarly debate transform over time, as does the nature as part of these transformations of what is considered to be evidence. And so one of the contributions that the book makes, among many others, is that some of these major moments in these transformations of what it looks like to do history, what counts as evidence, are marked by really important, important as construed in different ways, landmark essays. And you include appendices, as you alluded to before, that consists of translations of some of the most important of these essays, each marking an era in the history and historiography of the seal. So we'll talk about those eras in just a moment.
OK, but before we leave the first part of the book, as a historian of science, I have to ask. Because one of the points that you make early on and that comes up repeatedly in different chapters of the book is a point about the engagement of how you're thinking about this in terms of paradigms, right? In terms of science studies or coons structure of scientific revolutions. Now this is going to make sense for listeners once we start talking later on about the importance of science and scientific evidence as part of the biography of this object.
But before we gather, for someone reading a book on Japanese and Chinese history, it always strikes me when the author engages coon and structured scientific revolutions and the idea of a paradigm into a work of Chinese history. I think it's a really wonderful, kind of transdisciplinary moment here. So can you talk a little bit about that? Or in what ways did science studies scholarship, if at all, impact how you were thinking about this project?
You hit right on it. It's times coons structure of scientific revolutions. I was thinking of, I didn't want to say hard and fast that this is Newton's world that's transformed by Einstein's world, et cetera. Because I don't think it's quite worse quite in lockstep with that notion.
But it's incredibly suggestive. And I see the historiography shifting as the basis of what constitutes proof in an argument, what constitutes truth, the basis of truth, changing as well. So that in the first, it's almost 100 years. It's actually a little bit more than 100 years.
The founding of the just rediscovering of the gold seal in 1784 through the very end of the 19th century, we have this debate going back and forth between Confucians and nativists and arguing for the most part across purposes. And in the sense that each of them has a set of classics that they consider the root of all truth. And it's sort of like when Arwini and creationist argue, they're not really arguing with each other because one has, they have different concepts of what constitutes truth. So for the Confucians, it's the Confucian classics.
And for the nativists, it's the ancient Shinto classics. And those are the ones they refer to. And it's almost as if it's not mentioned, for instance, for the nativist, if the gold seal is not mentioned as it isn't in the neon shokie, the ancient history of Japan, then it can't have existed in the time or bit of any importance if it was ignored. And when this argument is thrown out, Confucians will say, it's not mentioned because the neon shokie was written seven centuries later.
And at the time, if the gold seal, the Japanese had no written language. So it was very hard to write about it. These kinds of arguments go back and forth. But in the in the Meiji period, as most students and scholars know, things began to shift in Japan, as everything became shift in Japan.
And history, historical studies, was no exception to that. It was heavily influenced by Germanic, central European modes of scholarship, philology, philonology, all of these disciplines come in with gangbusters. And at this point, the gold seal is now no longer invested with any kind of quasi-religious almost or what I refer to in the book as a relic. It no longer has that resonance any longer.
Now, it's begun to be seen as a kind of text. And the great scholar at the end of the 19th century named Miyakianichi approaches it using all the best knowledge that he has at his fingertips in primarily phonology and historical philology and reconstructs what the inscription must have meant at the time. He makes the interesting argument that, to us, it's almost natural. But at the time, it must have been relatively new.
That Chinese and Japanese did not read those characters the same way in the first century, as they had them in the 18th or 19th century, that characters change their regional dialects, both in China and in Japan. And in order to get at what those were pronounced like in their day and time, you have to use the new sign of for Japan, at least, even in Europe. They're relatively new sciences, in quotation marks, philonology and philology. And he brings those to bear.
And it's wonderful if you ever see a picture of Miyakianichi because it seems that every picture that I've been able to find of him is wearing a cone of tails. It looks like several of the faculty's Japanese could have walked out off the podium at a European university at this at the same time. And his reading of the Gold Seals' inscription, the one that you just mentioned, Carla, is the one that still is the one that, you know, when you look at your average textbook in Japan, it's the one that's given it, and it's referred to always as a taste, that's, you know, the definitive thesis. They're countless people will contend against that.
But still, it's become, tastes that's can be overturned, and it may be overturned someday, but right now it's the standing thesis. Of course, Japan went through some serious changes in the first half of the 20th century, and the ordinary scholarship was not always easy to do. But after the war, again, everything undergoes transformation, everything undergoes reevaluation in Japan. And in the mid 1960s, a Japanese scholar, Loki Zaki, goes, and I can't say his essay as well.
And he's actually given access to Gold Seals. And this is, the Gold Seals was found originally. It goes to the local magistrate. He has the Neo-Confusion scholar I mentioned earlier in the 18th century, evaluated right up in the essay, and then it's sent off to the dineo of that domain's storehouse.
It just disappears from history forever, not forever, but for a very, very long time. Now, when the imperial, when talking about family, exactly, falls, and the Metis period comes in, it's moved to the new national museum, but it's not sitting in a museum the way it is now. You can go to Fukuoka and see it now. But it's not available.
It's somehow he gains access to it through connections. And he and a bunch of science friends, I guess, assistants, carry out the first, well, I should say, the level of science in the 1960s, whatever it was, those levels of expertise are brought to bear on the Gold Seals for the first time, really. So they get the exact four decimal points, the weight of it, in milligrams and so on. And you get the exact size of each of the sides.
It looks like a perfect square, but if you go to three or four decimal points, it's not quite a perfect square. I don't know what they were expecting a first century of seals, but anyway, and it looks very carefully at the scales on this serpent or snake, whatever it is that forms the handle. And so it's a very, very interesting essay. Okazaki has also looked at dozens of other seals that have been dug up in Korea and China, and compares it all the Gold Seals that are found, all the seals that are with snakes on them, all the seals that had potentially had purple cords.
Now the purple cord that's mentioned all the time, long ago must have disintegrated. The cord material doesn't last quite as well as Gold as over the centuries. So anyway, he writes this wonderful essay, but now it's all science. Now the rounding of truth is hard, cold science.
It's still pretty, it's still a nice shiny gold seal, but it's nobody invested with anything more than the fact that I call it an object at this point. It's become an object, and it's, and as I said in the book, it's worth no more than its weight and gold. It won't people be another few decades boy before anyone else comes along to contest that piece. It's like, you can't contest science.
We live in an era where science is the grounding of everything, right? I mean, we lived 200 years ago, it might have been the Bible, religion, or in Asia, it might have been Confucianism or something else, but now it's science. And so, and I say in the book, or in the introduction to the book, just if you doubt that for a second, look how many people are being led out of prison of because of the DNA evidence. I mean, the juries have appeared, sent them away to prison, often for a very long time.
It's extremely sad, actually. And then you come along the scientific study proves that with the advancement that we have in DNA sampling, and they're out very quickly. There are similar kinds of big sciences now, the ground. So what's the choice if you don't, we haven't moved beyond that.
There's no, I think very few of us other than, you know, hardline post-moderns beyond that to the next stage. So what happened is that in the last few years, several people, one in particular, has come along and argued that it's a total fake, a complete fake. But now he's filled in all the arguments that I mentioned a minute ago. We're lacking in the earliest claim of a fake.
He's got the carver picked out, he's got the source of gold, he's got all sorts of things. Now, Neil's the same one, when this guy, Muiras Pukki, his name, when Muiras came along to the professor, he's not some crackbox. He may get crackboxed, I don't know, but he's also a professor. He published this book about five years ago, and it raised quite a stir all over Asia, China, too, Taiwan, too.
And it led to all kinds of magazine interviews and debates and so on. I think those two doesn't go away. It's there. And that's what we say enough.
Somewhere between people lining up to call it a fake, or those who claim that it's, you know, by heart, scientific evidence demonstrates that it's the real thing. We had had more sophisticated, quite a bit more sophisticated, scientific analysis of the gold seal, based on the 50 years or 45 years since Okazaki had access to it. But of course, you know, science is not the kind of thing that naysayers are allowed to get in the way. Look at the truth, there's the United States, the birthers or the truth, whatever they're called.
I mean, even when President Obama showed his birthers to the Cape, you know, it's a fake or something like that. They'll come up with a reason to deny it. So the debate over the gold seal is not going away anytime soon. Thank you.
Now what the book does, I think, really beautifully is it takes this kind of architecture of transformations that you've just really nicely shown us, the outline of marked by these major moments that are typified by particular essays, by particular scholars, each of which kind of encapsulates an era of the transformations of historiographical and mode sort of evidentiary regime in which, and within which the seal is understood. And that is the understanding of the seal really exemplifies. And it gives us this really rich account, taking us through in detail the biography of these transformations. And so these transformations being alluded to frequently, occasionally in the language of paradigms and cune, and again, the kind of science studies approach that I think is really beautiful here.
So we won't have time to talk about all of the detail regarding all of the eras. But that's what I hope listeners will find the book and get the book and read for that, because again, it's extraordinarily rich. But let's talk about some of these landmarks as a way of understanding what are some of the most important changes in terms of the history of evidence here that you give us so beautifully. So you've mentioned already this neo-confusion scholar who really launches the debate.
This is the figure who typifies era one, Kameh Nameh, and he lived from 1743 to 1814. So he's got a really important position in the domain's educational system at that point. And he puts forth this argument about the seal. That is in terms that, as you mentioned a little bit later on, nativist to take issue with.
So what are the most important elements of Kameh Nameh's argument and the ways that he's thinking about evidence that we and the listeners need to know in order to understand, by the end of the story, how he then resurfaces as the main figure in this conspiracy theory once the object becomes a fake. So what are the most important elements, basically, of his argument, that ground, the architecture of the story? Yeah, I should say that reading Kameh Nameh's essay, it's not that long, it's only about 14 or 15 pages. And unlike everything else he wrote, he wrote this in literary Japanese.
He wrote everything else in Chinese. And reading this essay was, it had to have been the most brilliant thing I'd ever read at the time. I brought tears to my eyes. This doesn't happen very well.
I'm reading literary Japanese. You got four conditionaries in front of you and you're constantly going back and forth. He seems to have anticipated every possible counter argument and dealt with it by, he wrote in a familiar Confucius style of what Chinese call wind off, this question and answer. Except he wrote the questions too, of course.
So he knew the answers. He was going to write. But sometimes the questions seem like, oh my god, how is he ever going to answer that question? It's such a difficult question.
And then you have to pinch yourself and remind yourself that he wrote the question too. So he's got to have the answer. But it makes the essay seem that much more brilliant. And you have to realize he wrote this in three weeks between what he was introduced by the magistrate to the difficult seal.
And when he delivered up his essay to as an evaluation of the goal seal. So he anticipates, in fact, I should add to that, that in later generations, people think his answers and his essay is too good. They've come to the scholars. They've come to the conclusion that no human being can write an essay is really in such a short period of time.
And that for them is further proof that he was involved in the conspiracy to advocate it. I don't buy that at all. But I should mention that it's out there. He deals with all the possible questions.
Is this the real thing? How could it have ended up, where it ended up? And nobody knows how it ended up in this irrigation ditch lodged between some stones and Kyushu. But he comes up with a plausible answer.
And others come up with other plausible answers. How, why is it important that there's writing on it? Is it one of the really touching issues between the confusion and the old confusion and the nativist? Is that the middle character of the inscription, which he reads as, I forget exactly, he doesn't have a particularly convincing explanation of the reading.
But that middle character can be understood to mean servant or slave or some sort of underling, which was in service to the Han dynasty. Now, he, of course, no one has yet questioned him on this when he writes this up. But he said, no, no, don't worry. It's just there as a space filler for, I forget what he thinks is the genetic particle.
No, it's similar, no in Japanese. But he anticipates that the nativists are gonna be really bothered by this. And it's gonna force them to either deny it for us, it's very similar to, or they're gonna have to, they're gonna have epilepsy. So he comes up with this explanation before, even before, and it's funny because his explanation is quite good.
It's not the one that will win the day, but it's not bad. All things considered. But that won't stop anybody from bringing it up over and over and over to the master of his other arguments too. It's as if they didn't read his essay.
I mean, it's not exactly unknown in the world of scholarship that people don't listen to each other. But it's quite interesting to see, and it's also, you have to remember, this is not a time when you could go to your computer and send your essay off to 2,000 people in two seconds. Not only was communication limited by people walking, carrying the males from place to place, but there was also very strict regulations about traveling Japan at this time. Nonetheless, word gets out, somehow word gets out in personal connections.
And then this essay is then, has to be copied, you can't take it over to your zero, to your local kinkos and make 400 copies of it. So people have to copy it off by hand, and they do. And it then spreads in the arguments, get out there, but still, many people seem to have missed the last memo. Bring back repeatedly arguments that he's dealt with rather well.
I mean, not everything, like I just said, is reading up the interpretation of how we should understand rather than reading the inscription. That's, nobody buys that. That just appears as quickly as it suggested. But the arguments are pretty interesting, and most of them fall by the way, so I mean, people ignore them.
If they don't, if they want to deny the gold seal, it's place of importance. They have to ignore those arguments, and they're very good at doing that. So this is really the first era in the interpretation of the seal, and as you mentioned in this part of the book, the period is really exemplified by debate between the old Confusions as evidenced by coming on me, and nativist over issues of Japanese identity. Now, in this debate, both camps are relying, as I think you mentioned just a little bit ago, on belief in the authority of classic texts.
They may be different classic texts, but that's still the ground for the evidentiary basis of this debate, which brings us to the second era. Now, this is an era which sees a transformation of this, and the transformation of the seal from a relic then into another form, in which the way, in the wake, as you described it here, the Western influences of various types, with Western, having scare quotes as we do, our alliance on philology and historical phonology really replaces these earlier approaches, and the grounding of evidence also changes quite importantly. So do you wanna talk about this second era? What do we need to know about this, then to understand the transformation that's gonna happen after?
Yeah, I touched on this a moment ago. I think when we get into the middle major years, if it's no longer, you can't say, oh, and it says in the Nihon Shoki, dah, dah, q-e-dah, you can't, or Confucius says, end of discussion. It doesn't work that way anymore. All you have to do is something more familiar, at least, to Western scholars, and that is, you have to show that there's some textual evidence, or that there is a way to understand something philologically, meaning the use of language as the basis of proof, somehow, and in this period, after a long time of trying to figure out what the, for instance, the description should be read in Japanese, in other words, interpreted.
This is the period when Mihoniki comes along, and says, now, let's take each of the characters apart, and look at them very closely, and let's try to figure out, in its time and place, how, I should point out, let me just backtrack, and point out that other five characters on the inscription three of them, the first and the last two, are completely transparent. There's nobody debates them, really. It's the second and third characters that are the troubling ones, and he comes along with this explanation based on history, based on language, based on how they would have been pronounced in this case, 1900 plus years earlier, or 1900 plus years earlier, and on that basis comes up with an explanation, and therefore, based on the reading, based on philology, based on language, you can explain the transmission of the gold seal from the Hanhans later on, Dynasty to this, the Sailor in Japan. So, now, nobody's looking for a reference in an ancient Chinese or Japanese text any longer.
Now, it has to be done on the basis of this kind of, I guess we call it social science, or in Europe, it's called, it isn't a shop, it's a science, so we'll put science in its gear quotes at that time, and so that's where the discussion moves, and so if we were using the cutie and model, this is where we have a paradoxical. Great, thank you. So, as we move into part two, we've already seen that the seal has transformed from a relic into a text, here we have the seal transforming from a text into what you call an object. Now, we've seen the first era, the second era, in this part of the story, in this part of the book, doubts started rising about this farmer, Dendy and his rice field, and what happened in the three weeks before, he putatively discovered the seal, and it was reported to authorities.
There are also problems raised according to, or that have something to do with the topography of the site, how did it end up in this particular kind of land? And you mentioned that a little bit earlier, and you talk about that, and your own, actually, right? I think you mentioned visiting the site yourself in 2008, and also having some questions about the topography of the site. Okay, so this brings us to the third era, and here we see the emergence of modern scientific apparatus, and its displacement of philology as a mode of evidence.
This is typified in the third era by the work of Okazaki Takashi in the late 1960s, who really bases his arguments on scientific evidence, and you've talked a little bit about that already, so I don't ask you to talk too much more about it. One of the really interesting things that happens though, is the course of talking about this third era, and the concomitant transformations in terms of the historical epistemology surrounding this object and beyond, as you talk about the importance of post-war Chinese archeology to what's happening here. This is really a theme that, the more I talk with historians of China, where archeologists who China, Chinese studies specialists, and also Japanese studies specialists, more and more lately, I mean, this is what people are pointing to in their work as something that needs to be understood if we're to understand most, actually, eras of Chinese history. So we're really seeing, I think, for us, in our epistemic moment right now, you and I, we're really seeing a kind of remarkable turn to acknowledging and celebrating the importance of archeology to historians, really explicitly in a way that's maybe not new, but certainly very noticeable in terms of the way our colleagues talk about history.
Here, you're pointing to a particular historical moment where post-war Chinese archeology becomes a really important part of the story, so do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Because that seems really important here. There is no more nationalistic discipline than archeology. Particularly in cultures in East Asia which celebrate their antiquity, or at least traditionally have celebrated antiquity as a golden age.
So when the People's Republic, even when it was very poor, poor tons of money into archeological digs, and came up with the very first tourists that started with the East from the United States and Europe and the inventories and became big, the thing they wanted to see was, in Twitter they said the Great Wall, the Ming Tunes, but they really wanted to see the Starekott warriors that have been dug up near Xi'an. So I mean, if you can prove your past goes back really far, that's, the money has just been poured into archeology. It's really, it seems to somehow prove the longevity of a regime, somehow long and ancient at old, is very important in East Asia and China in particular. And that has not stopped for a moment.
There are archeological digs all over China. The problem of course, with China, is that as soon as you make a statement about archeology, I know this only from the limited area of seals that have been dug up, someone will disprove it the next week. But you only have to do it at your hand at the ground, and you find something that disproves their previous theories. It's very dangerous as a result to make arguments like this never happened, or that couldn't have existed.
Because, you know, literally within a few years, Chinese archeologists are somebody on a team who's gonna find something to disprove you. And this has happened repeatedly with the gold seal. We have these very, very brilliant scholars in China or in later in Japan, who will make claims like, well, this doesn't fit into the Hanan system of seals, from what we know, and therefore, it's very doubtful. And then, you know, a job within the generation, hundreds of seals are dug up, and the whole idea of the system of seals has gone through many changes, but we'll go through a change, and then all of a sudden it does get somehow into it.
So, archeology is a hugely important field into which, and it's in Japan as well, by the way, there's archeological digs all over Japan as well, that are going on all the time. So, there's no way to underestimate the importance of this. I'll give you just one funny example. There's, in the book I talk about several seals, golden seals with some, that are roughly contemporaneous, and both of you only that are used to place it, and it's time and possibly in the foundry worlds, where it was made.
And one of them was dug up outside the city of what is now Guangzhou Canton. So, I mean, I was giving it, but at the time that it was made, this area around Guangzhou was part of a Northern Vietnamese kingdom, and so I, when I was giving the very first talk I gave on this was in Australia, both places. I mentioned that it was, you know, what this kingdom was founded by the second or third generation Chinese immigrant who had succeeded from the Han Empire, and created his own little kingdom. And so I gave it to the Vietnamese reading, and I said that this is probably a, probably best thought of, although, you know, it's hard to impose national boundaries 2000 years ago, but still, anyway, it's one of the, one of the new audience sets to me, I'm a chief graduate student at the University of Sydney, I think, I'm from Guangzhou, and I know that that is a Chinese object there, that's not Michael's seal, so not a cool seal.
I said, well, you know, that's possible, but I think we're posing names that are important now on times long ago when even the concept of China was very different, and I don't know, she's got me, no, no, it's a Chinese object. So you can see that, I said, all right, fine, I'll show you that. It's a very nationalistic discipline, archeology, or at least it feeds nationalism. I think archeologists are not necessarily more nationalistic than anybody else, but their work gets supported in a big way, probably more than other disciplines.
One of the things that's feeding archeology, and I've heard a fascinating talk about a few years back, I think I mentioned in the book, here at the Royal Ontario Museum, a young Chinese woman working on the six-timesties period, and she said that there's been an explosion of artifacts discovered in China in just the last 20 or 30 years. Why? Well, as the former modernizations have moved on, and goods are being transported across great distances, and goods are being brought to cities and villages that are far from the main centers of population, they've had to widen the highways, to facilitate larger trucks to carry things, and when you dig into mountainsides, it's like sticking your hand in the ground in China, they found all kinds of incredible things, in all parts of China. So there's no end to this, this is going to go on and on and on.
But it is, and as you point out, it is a fascinating topic. Thank you so much. So as we move into the kind of last era that you described here, and then beyond, we move from the seal as an object to a seal as a possible fake, and you bring us into the fourth era here, with Mio de Sogoyuki, who you've already talked about a little bit, chapter nine's devoted to talking about his 2006 book, in detail, and to taking us through really the texture and the fine-grained analysis of what his critique was, and how it actually really nicely ties back to the first era and the kinds of claims made by the new Confucian scholar who typified that era. So it's really quite nice.
Now, this is a way of understanding in this era, the seal as, as you call it, pure fakery. And you call, or you refer to Mio de Sogoyuki as a conspiracy theorist, and he's a conspiracy theorist who's focused on Kameh Nane, as the main culprit in the conspiracy, the fake the seal, and then to spread it locally and then nationally. So. I think we should have a spoiler alert here.
Okay. Sorry, yeah. So listeners will have to read that chapter in order to figure out exactly what's going on there. So I guess without totally spoiling the surprise, is there anything in particular about this era, and about this way of, not for the first time, trying to claim that the seal is a fake, but certainly in a new way, claiming that the seal is a fake, and grounding it in a new kind of evidentiary base, is there are, what are some of the most important elements of that without giving anything away that you don't want to give it away for listeners?
That's of course the hardest thing to say because we live in this era about it. Yeah, we have no distance from it. But you know if I were to be asking, as you just did, I think part of it is now that, at least we like to think that the sky, the limit we can criticize, anything where all things in, nothing is wholly any longer. So you can, you know, the gold seal is not, you know, it may have once had some resonated with some sort of importance, he's now attempting to show this guy, Professor Mura, that it's a total fake.
And he, as I said a moment ago, he is a modified scholar who has written other books where he's tried to show other things, of medieval and ancient Japanese literature, tried to show chapters of other Japanese texts, are fakes. So this is, you know, if somebody once asked me what I thought his primary interest in doing this was, I think maybe it's his bank account. But I think, you know, this book that he wrote, which immediately was published in paperback, will sell more than almost any other book on this subject. But it has to be taken seriously, which is why, as you just mentioned, Carlisle wrote a whole chapter about it, because he is a smart guy.
And he's got important and interesting arguments. Even if he ultimately don't buy his argument, he has questions that have to be answered. And he doesn't, he's not definitive about a lot of it. A lot of it is, he throws open questions, he raises the doubts.
Now this is a tactic conspiracy theorists use all the time, namely, they raise a bunch of doubts without connecting them, and then they go, see, you know, that sort of, you know, you don't think of Kennedy's assassination conspiracy or whatever, as long as you raise some doubt in the received thesis that tastes that's here, then all of a sudden, one is to assume the whole explanation collapses and we go back to the drumboard. No, he's not that, he's not like that, but he does do that a number of times where he'll just raise a large number of doubts. But as I said before, he's better than that, because he also wants to, he has to come up with an explanation for how it could have been faked. It's no mean feat, as I said before, how this could have been faked in the early 1780s.
And he does a reasonable job of that. There are those who have come along and have been very critical of him, of course, but nonetheless, he is someone that has to be dealt with. In my chapter, I try to take each of his points that I think are important one by one, those that I think, you know, he scores points on an instrument where I think he's argument is a bit shoddy. I also mentioned it, but I think he deserves to be treated with evenly fair hand.
He's not a nut who's, you know, he's not Donald Trump here, who's just come up with a wild thesis about. He's a serious about whether or not his argument will hold that we don't know. It has, as I said, attracted some followers. It's alienated other people.
But more recently, and I think it was 2009, a scholar, Suzuki is his name, Stone, who really had access to the gold seal and took signs to a new level with it, but this incredible micro photography that he did where he enlarges these pictures many times the size of the seal itself. And he can get it scratches on the inside of where the individual characters were carved. And he makes arguments based on, he's a metal-urgist himself, history of metal-urgies, his field. And the book is almost impossible to read, but it's like reading a word of science.
He's got a whole vocabulary at the back, and for his Japanese readers, he's got a whole vocabulary at the back. But it's, again, it's suggestive, and he throws open down. He makes no argument one way or another. Except that he finds humanists and social scientists kind of ridiculous.
That's kind of funny, actually. But being the kind of, I don't know, hard-no scientist that he appears to be. But it's interesting that he's decided to take on this subject now and write this book. So yeah, I think we're very much on Terry and Kajita at this point, which is great.
I think that's where scholarship needs to be. And from here, I don't know. As I say in the book, just last day, which I called one of the objects that may be gold seal as a fake, it's unclear whether this is going to sustain itself. I just don't know.
But come back to this in 50 or 60 years, and we'll have to be a little too bold to that point. OK. We're just in the midst of it, and it's hard to gain any perspective on what you're in the midst of. Well, the final chapter of the book, Chapter 10, does get a little bit of perspective on it nonetheless.
And so I won't ask you to talk about this in detail, because we've taken up a lot of your time already. But I'll just mention for listeners, this is a really nice concluding chapter that talks about the institutionalization of the gold seal and focuses on two measures in particular that have done this, a gold seal steely, and also the designation of the gold seal as a national treasure. And it talks about how these have impacted scholarly investigation and the attitude toward evidence of that scholarly investigation in this current era of work on the seal. You also talk about some of the most promising areas of future research, including, as you've done, actually here, ways of understanding the seal as you call it a token of changing times.
And so this is really, I think, an exemplary work in that vein. You also suggest some other ways in which, right now, thinking with the seal might help transform how we think about Japan its topography, its regional centers in a really different way. So there's a lot here that's really promising for listeners who may not be inherently interested in the history of gold seals, but are interested in a lot of the other kinds of fields and questions that you're bringing to bear on this object. So it's really, really nice.
You end with, and this is the last substantive question that I'll ask you before we wrap up. You end with a discussion of the fact that people have asked you a lot when you give talks about this, whether or not you think the seal is a fake or not. And I'm not going to ask you that question, because I completely agree with you, as you put it in the book, that whether or not it's a fake doesn't really impact your argument. But I thought I'd give you a chance in case you want to talk a little bit about that for listeners to talk about why that is.
Why does the issue of whether or not the seal is fake, not really? How does that question engage with or not the kind of work you're trying to do with the seal? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for not asking that question.
Yeah, you're great. I'm frequently am asked now that you spent whatever X number of years, what do you think? I don't think of myself as part of this discussion. I'm not an expert on seals at all.
There's a word for that philageology or something like that. But I'm approaching this as someone interested in historiography, as someone interested in the history of the debate over the gold seal and the changing perspective on the gold seal by Japanese scholars over the last two plus entries. So for me, it's less important. If the gold seal turns out to be a fake, that's very, very interesting, of course.
And if it had been proven that it was a fake before I finished the book, I mean, it's definitely proven somehow that would have been great. But it whether or not it is for a historiographer for the person who's studying changing views of history, that's not a relevant question. I did want to mention if it's OK, Carla, one thing that Professor Mura, the guy who wrote this recent book, blaming him for the fake, says, you know what, he claims that he hasn't had access to the gold seal and the gold seal is not easily. I mean, it sits in the glass case.
You can't take pictures of it. But you can't study it. He says, you know, science is, he's writing in 2006. Science has developed quite a level.
We could, I don't know, shoot gamma rays at it or something and find out pretty quickly whether the gold seal is 200 years old or 2,000 years old. But why hasn't the government done this? And he doesn't answer the question. I mean, presumably the question would be answered because it would then upset the whole mythology around the gold seal and it would then tourism to do so with the way off, to fall away off, domestic tourism, of course.
But he says, do it. Let's look at him and go in there. Let him do whatever the scientific tests are that can prove whether the thing is from the Han Dynasty or from the Edo period in Japan. And he says, if I'm wrong, and it turns out that Kami Nami is not the culprit here.
Sorry, spoiler alert. If he's not the culprit here, I will go to Kami Nami's grave, fall to my knees, and apologize to his spirit. Incredible, dramatic gesture that he makes. But he gets the very effective, I have to say, in police and police, it's very effective.
Well, Josh, thank you so much. That was a really, I think, lovely note to end on, in terms of the substantive part of our discussion of the book. And it's really been a pleasure to talk with you about this. We've talked about some aspects of the book.
It's such a rich study. There's no way we will have gotten to all of the really, even the really fascinating parts of the book in the course of an hour. So with that in mind, is there anything in particular that we didn't have a chance to talk about, but that you'd like to mention for listeners, and perhaps especially for listeners who haven't had a chance to read it? You know, I think, Carla, I think you managed to touch on all the important things.
The one thing that we didn't talk about, I touched on briefly was the handful of other seals, three or four other seals from roughly a contemporaneous period, which are always brought into the discussion. One of the nice things about publishing, there's a downside to this, but one of the nice things about publishing this book with Grill, is that they allowed me to put a handful of color prints in, so we can see all those seals very nicely. The downside, of course, is that real books are very expensive. So I suggest to readers who are very interested, that they just order the book and deal with it and later they're very expensive.
You know, so I think you managed to cover a couple of other appropriate bases. Great. So now that the book is out and congratulations, as I think is, I'm sure, abundantly clear to listeners, it's a really fascinating book, and it's really a tremendous accomplishment just taking into account all the work. And all the historiographical reading and translation that went into it in addition to all the really interesting conceptual work that it's doing.
But now that it's out, what's next for you? Is there any project or are there any projects right now that are particularly inspiring you? Well, I've got a couple of things. And I won't be laboring them, but one is, we've just accepted it's going to come out by University of California President.
It's not like I wrote it in the last six months. I've been working on this on and off for decades. And it's a study of the very first Japanese mission in the modern era to China, 1862. And there were all these travel reports that were written by the Japanese.
And then a few years ago, we discovered the Chinese correspondence on the Urukrat correspondence on the other side, and then that with the Shanghai official. And so I put all that together and have a manuscript on that. But that's done. And it'll be, I hope sometime later this year.
The thing that I've just started working on, and will probably occupy me for quite some time, is I want to write, I don't know why I didn't do this earlier, but for whatever reason. I write a textbook for teaching Japanese to students of Chinese history and culture. So I've come up with one or two people, and I've come up with a kind of model for how to outline such a textbook and then we deal with important sources and how to read them. And then it's going to be very simply a text, how to read it, and how I don't understand it, and what it buzzwords, and who is the author, and so where does it appear, and what does that mean?
And it's got those kinds of basic kind of questions that we living in the Anglophone world, we know when we pick up a copy of modern China, as opposed to say a copy of critical Asian studies, as opposed to a copy of the Journal of Asian Studies, what the theoretical thrust is. But, and we probably don't, for China, and Taiwan too, but as students are trying to, we don't necessarily, unless we've lived in that world, know what for Japan. And so that's going to be the part of the baggage that I'll explain. And then it's very simple, not very simply, but very point by point, all of the vocabulary, and how to understand it, and how to read sentences, and basic stuff.
For students who have had elementary, maybe two years of Japanese, it'll be the next step. Well, that sounds completely fabulous, and I want to copy immediately, as does the first project. So, let's keep in touch, and I'll look forward to talking with you in future months or years about either or both of those. And in the meantime, thank you so much.
It's really been a pleasure, and thank you so much for making the time, Josh. Thank you. You've been listening to new books and Asian studies. Thanks very much for joining us, and we'll see you next time.