Portents and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Japan: Kurosawa Tokiko and the Comet of 1858

Kurosawa Tokiko (1806-1890) was born and raised in Mito domain, where she ran a small temple-school (terakoya). As most women in her day and age, she did not pay much attention to political issues. Then, on the evening of September 30, 1858, a neighbor rushed over announcing the arrival of a large, bright comet. In her later writings Tokiko would identify the comet as the spark that ignited her political activism: she embraced the loyalist faction and, in 1859, surreptitiously traveled to Kyoto to deliver a petition to none other than the emperor. This presentation will draw on Tokiko’s unpublished diaries (preserved in Ibaraki Kenritsu Rekishikan) to follow the trajectory of her political awakening and examine the pivotal role of the 1858 comet as part and parcel of her political vocabulary.
Laura Nenzi received her Ph.D. from the UCSB in 2004. After five years as Assistant Professor at Florida International University in Miami she is now moving to the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She is the author of Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).

Cosponsored by the East Asia Center, the East Asian Cultures Research Focus Group, the Department of East Asian Cultural Studies and Languages, and the Department of History.

For more information visit the East Asia Center web site or call (805) 893-3907.

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