Event

Co-sponsored with Penn Forum on Japan Third Thursday Series

Hayashi Razan (1583-1657) has often been described as a yes-man, a paid lackey and an ideological fixer for the early Tokugawa shoguns. He has been labelled as a Neo-Confucian scholar and unoriginal as a scholar - so not very promising as a subject for a lecture! But the reality is rather different, and this talk, based on his manuscripts, his block-printed publications and some of the books he once owned, will show both his connections with Korea and his extraordinarily wide-ranging efforts to make Chinese texts accessible and understandable for his contemporaries. The lecture will start with his dramatic death and instead of trying to be comprehensive will focus on some key episodes and texts to identify his real significance in early 17th-century Japan.

Peter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies at Cambridge University. Professor Kornicki did his BA in Japanese and Korean at Oxford and his D.Phil. in 19th-century Japanese literature. He has spent about six years in Japan in total, mostly in Kyoto. From 1978 to 1982, he was associate professor at the Humanities Research Institute of Kyoto University. Professor Kornicki has been based in Cambridge since 1985. In 1992 he was awarded the Japan Foundation Special Prize (with Hayashi Nozomu). He is a fellow of The British Academy, and in 2012, he was elected a member of the Academia Europea.