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SHAKING UP JAPAN: EDO SOCIETY AND THE 1855 CATFISH PICTURE PRINTS
| By Gregory Smits |
Pennsylvania State University |
| At about 10 pm on the second day of the tenth month of 1855 (November 11 in the solar calendar), an earthquake with a magnitude estimated between 6.9 and 7.1 shook Edo, now known as Tokyo. The earthquake's shallow focus and its epicenter near the heart of Edo caused more destruction than the magnitude might initially suggest. Estimates of deaths in and around Edo ranged from 7,000 to 10,000. Property damage from the shaking and fires was severe in places, destroying at least 14,000 structures. As many as 80 aftershocks per day continued to shake the city until nine days after the initial earthquake. Despite a relatively low 1 in 170 fatality rate, the extensive injuries and property damage, lingering danger of fires, a long and vigorous period of aftershocks, and the locus of the destruction in Japan's de facto capital city exacerbated the earthquake's psychological impact.1 |
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Two days after the initial earthquake, hastily printed, anonymous broadsheets and images began to appear for sale around the city. After several weeks had passed, over 400 varieties of earthquake-related prints were on the market, the majority of which featured images of giant catfish, often with anthropomorphic features.2 These metaphoric catfish did not necessarily correspond to an actual species of fish, and I refer to them here by their Japanese name, namazu. The general name of catfish prints, which included visual elements and text, is namazu-e, with "e" meaning picture. |
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Namazu images appeared because of the folk image that movements of a giant subterranean namazu cause earthquakes. This point, however, is not sufficient to explain why namazu-e appeared in such large numbers and in such variety after this particular earthquake, especially in light of the paucity of namazu images in prints connected with other destructive urban earthquakes in Japan. The namazu-e of 1855 are a window on the political and social consciousness of Edo's residents during the final decades of the Tokugawa period. Noguchi Takehiko points out that natural disaster often serves as a catalyst, accelerating and bringing to the fore problems, contradictions, and tensions below the apparently calm surface of societies.3 The Ansei Earthquake shook the social and political foundation of Edo along with the earth's crust, and the namazu-e were the reaction of the common people to this event in its broadest sense. |
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Cornelis Ouwehand published a study of namazu-e in 1964 as part of a structuralist examination of Japanese folk religion.4 The present essay does not attempt to improve on Ouwehand's analysis of religious phenomena, although religion plays a key role in parts of my analysis. Instead, I discuss namazu-e in the context of Japanese urban society at a time when the existing social and political order was weakening, ultimately to be replaced by a modern-style centralized state in 1868. My focus is on the state of political consciousness among Edo's commoners in 1855, and I argue that they used namazu-e to express an emerging consciousness of Japanese national identity and to make veiled political statements. In this way, I seek to augment the small but growing body of literature in English that examines the final decades of the Tokugawa period (1603–1867) from the standpoint of ordinary people.5 |
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