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This paper uses the love poetry written by a rich peasant woman, Matsuo Taseko (1811-94) to examine the function of Japan's classical tradition in rural areas of the early nineteenth century. It draws on the work done by Pierre Bourdieu on how the haute bourgeoisie in France distinguishes itself from the middle class and by Stephen Greenblatt on crafting identities in the Renaissance, as well as making a few comparisons with the function of the classical tradition in China. It argues that Japanese rural entrepreneurs increased their cultural capital by mastering a centuries-old aesthetic vocabulary in order to mitigate the status gap between them and their political superiors, distinguish themselves from the ordinary peasants who lacked their advantages of lineage, education, and economic resources, provide a common bond with other rural entrepreneurial families, and create the opportunity to craft an emotionally and intellectually satisfying identity. For a woman like Taseko, appropriating the courtly tradition of love poetry compensated for gender-based imbalances in the acquisition of social and political capital, as well as providing the opportunity to generate and explore multiple personalities.
MATSUO TASEKO (1811-94), a peasant woman, is a minor hero of the Meiji Restoration. Depicted in Shimazaki Toson's Before the Dawn as a disciple of the Hirata Atsutane school of nativism and a political activist, she figured in prewar women's journals as a model patriot.1 This image considerably tarnished her reputation after the war, and when I took a research trip to the Ina valley where she spent most of her life, the local historians looked askance at my interest in a right-wing xenophobic supporter of the "emperor-system." I tried to explain that my concern lay less with Taseko's political stance than with how she managed to achieve it, given the restrictions on women under the Tokugawa regime, but my focus on her as a woman made sense to them only when I asked for help in reading her love poetry. Here I plan to put this poetry in its historical context by examining how peasants of her class and status, often called gono (rural entrepreneurs), appropriated a poetic tradition created nine centuries earlier in the Heian court. I will then explain how Taseko used this tradition to fashion a literary identity far...