Sometimes writing is like pulling teeth, but boy oh boy, trying to read Japanese for research purposes, now that's pulling teeth. I can barely get through a whole page of any one book before I start flipping through other books.

My paper topic for my research seminar is supposed to be women and politics with a focus on Tenshouin Atsuhime (wife of the 13th shogun, Tokugawa Iesada)...But I have this distinct feeling that I'm just getting sucked into the world of the Great Interior Quarters, the Oooku. It's super interesting in ways not entirely beneficial to my research paper. I spent about five minutes studying diagrams on how to partition and tie up one's hair in the way of the women back then. And many of the books that talk about the Oooku have a ton of information on clothing and hair and accessories. It's perfect material for my stories, but as for my research paper...well.

Oh, and today I finally looked at two of the library books I'd borrowed a couple weeks back. They're so awesome that I squeed with nerdy glee. See, I do have a researcher in me, somewhere, deep, deep inside, who gets excited by old books. One book, published I think in the 1930s, came with huge fold-out maps of the Oooku, while the other one, published in 1902 (!!!It's great how Yale lets you take such old books out of the library as long as they're not falling apart--on a related note, they wouldn't let me take a copy of the Analects out because it was falling apart) has a few awesome fold-out color prints and all the kanji text is glossed with hiragana. Win! Although I still have doubts about how much of these books I can actually get through or make use of, but it's exciting to flip through them.

Shrug

It's strange the things you end up researching. I keep falling making the fallacy of imposing our culture onto the one I'm writing about. If I want my character to show indifference, she shrugs. Only did she? I felt sure that I was imposing my own cultural norms onto hers. They didn't shrug in 17th century Japan, surely. So I went on Wikipedia and looked up the shrug gesture, and voila, it says that it's a Western thing and is "relatively absent from Eastern culture." As I thought. No shrugging. Yay for accuracy. Now I have to figure out if there's another (accurate) way to express the same sentiment nonverbally.

Setting

So. I need to do more research and re-envision this home in 17th century Japan. It's hard (and why I need to re-think this whole chapter) because a lot of the things that we think of today as traditionally Japanese didn't come into being until some point in the Tokugawa/Edo period. And my story takes place in the early Tokugawa period. The time frame is one thing I don't want to change, due to a certain historical personnage that shows up in an early chapter. So I really need to figure out just what is available and plausible for that time period.

Also, I need to think about status. Even if say, there were shoji doors and fusuma doors and genkan in the early Tokugawa period, those were more likely to be found in the homes of samurai and wealthy nobles. My character, K-chan, is not of that class, and yet I had her living in a home suitable for a samurai (I am still so tempted to give her the finer things in life just because they're more "traditionally Japanese" and more known to us, but I need to be more realistic). Perhaps the first thing I need to do is to figure out exactly where she falls, socially, and what that implies for her material world.

It's hard to write about things you don't know. For example, cotton was introduced to Japan in the 14th and 15th centuries, but it didn't become widely used and grown in Japan until the 17th century (IIRC). Before that, people wore clothing made from hemp or ramie. I can look up hemp and ramie all I want online, but what do they feel like? How do they crinkle? How rough are they on the skin? And if you wore that material all your life because you were too poor to afford silk, how much or little discomfort/annoyance would you perceive? And how would your world change when you finally obtained a cotton kimono? ...Thank goodness cotton did become more widely used by the time my story starts. That's one less thing to worry about (and I hope cotton was as widely used by the time my story starts as I'm going to assume it was, or I will have more headaches trying to explain that people back then didn't have bedding; they just slept with their clothing covering them). Oh pre-modern Japan. You are fascinating to no end, but equally frustrating.

I am so paranoid that one day, after this gets published, critics will be cutting it to pieces for taking so many liberties with historical details, and for being historically inaccurate in general. Artistic license is not an excuse for ignorance or laziness.