Japonifying the Qin: Ogyū Sorai’s Kingakutaiishō

Abstract

The treatise Kingakutaiishō, compiled by the Japanese scholar Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728) in the early eighteenth century, draws on the only two surviving sources of qin music and qin-music related materials pre-dating the thirteenth century: manuscripts Hikone, Hikone-jō, Hakubutsukan V633 and Tōkyō, Tōkyō Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, TB1393. By way of bibliographical and historical analysis, this paper seeks to examine the motives that informed its preparation and the reasons for its continuing influence across the eighteenth century. Written in Japanese and comprising merely seventeen sections, Kingakutaiishō has been looked upon as a short introductory essay prepared for non-literati musicians. However, Sorai’s writing, which manipulates the facts behind a mask of naïveté, is an emotional and ideological force to be reckoned with. His studies of music were not intended solely for academic purposes. Rather, they can be viewed as a manifestation of proto-nationalism, for Sorai treated qin music as preserved in the two manuscripts as a cultural “trophy” and thus claimed for Japan the role of privileged repository of Chinese orthodoxy.