講演　近世日本のヨーロッパ譬喩画（エムブレム）受容 : 文と絵の関わり（『訓蒙画解集』を軸に）

Contacts between East Asia and Europe in the early modern period have perhaps their most fascinating stage in the case of Japan. While the image of Japan as a “closed land” (sakoku) still remains alive, Japan in fact was continuously confronted with objects and concepts form Europe in this period. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period in which Japanese scholars of Dutch learning (rangaku, more broadly ‘western learning’) became intrigued, among other things, by the European concept of the ‘emblem’. The perception was that the emblem (Dutch: zinnebeeld) was a key element in the understanding of European culture. One of the persons to become most engrossed in the study of this concept was someone who operated more towards the fringe of the scholarly debate: the ‘amateur’ of Dutch studies, painter and writer Shiba Kôkan (1747-1818). Especially in the early 1810s, Kôkan wrote a number of treatises that touch upon the proper understanding of European emblems.This paper will deal with the rangaku debate concerning emblems and specifically with Shiba Kôkan’s place in it. It will outline European tripartite schematisations of the emblem and Kôkan’s responses to these. These points will function as the foundation for a discussion of one of Shiba Kôkan’s more interesting works, the Kunmô gakaishû 訓蒙画解集(Instructions Explained by Pictures, 1814). This work is a reworking of a number of Aesop’s fables, known in Japan (but also largely forgotten again) since the late sixteenth century. While Kôkan’s books has been referred to as his experiment in emulating European fables, this paper will argue that Kunmô gakaishû is rather Kôkan’s active application of his ideas about the function of emblems.In this way, the paper aims to contribute to a hitherto relatively unexplored area of early modern Japanese literature, but also show its connection to the field of early modern cultural studies