Today, I Guess.

Since I did something a little different today, I thought I would put it in the blog.
Today I went to something they called a "workshop", which was like three classes combined into one session and the audience was graduate students and professors.
The first section was even a Ph.D candidate's dissertation.
I was definitely the only undergrad in the whole building, so I sat in the corner and just listened.
Even thought the one running the show, my history professor invited me I did not feel a very inviting vibe from the room which was a little disappointing.
Anyway, on to the three topic.

The first one was about how cultural families in the Kamakura period used social capital to gain political capital. The terms are apparently new terms used in the Japanese history community. Social capital are the women of the families and their marriages while political capital is political influence. Using a case example, she explained that the cultural families could marry their daughters to up-in-coming warriors or court officials as an investment. Apparently, the shogun of the Kamakura period did not have the "complete" authority of the Tokugawa. These great complex web of marriages was called networking because the women in these marriages would gather information as well as provide a political relationship for the two families. This was interesting since scholars usually focus on the power relationship between the warriors and the imperial court, instead of looking at the power dynamics that the cultural families could hold.

The second topic was about the creation and characteristics of the head-temple system that arose in the Tokugawa period in the Bakafu's acquire some amount of control over the temples. The temples of the Sengoku period were closer to warriors than the typical image of a peaceful monk. They even had armies or I guess, the correct word is militia. The head-temple system is the institutionalize hierarchy of the temples. In other words, whose on top to be able to give orders and have them followed. In this way, when there was a problem the Bakafu could go to one temple instead of dealing with multiple temples at once. This was interesting because it is interesting to see that not only were the samurai institutionalized after the Sengoku era but so were the Buddhist monks. Also, all of the stupid fights about who gets to be on top are funny like demanding the mountain name on the bells of a certain temple should be erased because it is fake. Mountain names are special, a temple with a mountain name can keep its independence without joining the system. The temple shouting fraud had dominion over the temple with the bells if the mountain name is fake. Lovely, right?

The third topic was about the foreign relations of the Tosa region during the Tokugawa period. Apparently, there was more interactions with the outside world than previously believed. Why? Shipwrecks. The Tokugawa Bakafu had a policy of taking care of shipwrecked victims. There were interactions with the Spanish, the Russians, the Chinese, the Vietnams, the Koreans, etc. In fact, three barrels of flour from a english speaking country even landed on the beaches. We know this because some Japanese scholars interested in Foreign countries wrote down what was written on the barrels and of course the barrels themselves. This lecture also focused on a case study, a magistrate from Tosa. This interesting because the Japanese had deep interactions with other asian foreigners that spanned generations. It makes you wonder about the impact the foreigners (of all kinds) had on the Japanese and about just how much information the Japanese had access to about the outside world. It appears that the isolation policy was kind of one side, I guess. Also the Tokugawa government did not want anyone interacting with a foreigner so the locals lied. In those days it was easier to get away with, and daimyo area tended to be pretty autonomies, anyway.

So that was my day.
Good Night.