SATÔ, Kenji (University of Tokyo), Thinking of Images/Thinking Through
Images: Shibusawa Keizô’s Ebiki Project
In a short but intriguing essay called “Is a Pictorial Dictionary Possible?” (1954),
Shibusawa Keizô proposed the production of an image database/index that is
suggestive for the study of culture today. Derived from his interests in material
culture, the ebiki project attempted to harness elements of premodern
Japanese picture scrolls that provided “unintended” resources for a historical
ethnology of Japanese culture. By considering the practical processes of
production—in both its aborted prewar phase and its successful postwar
phase—and the methodological stakes of the project, I offer a consideration of
the lessons for the contemporary study of culture.
At its core, the project raised questions about the identification, extraction,
relationality and accumulation of cultural resources as objects of investigation.
The attempt to suture object-images to their historical names relied upon
multiple technologies as well as the accumulated knowledge of the research
team. Evaluating the production of the pictorial dictionary alerts us to the
crucial roles of the material conditions of academic work. Perhaps more
importantly, we can recognize in the thirty-year emergence of the Nihon jômin
seikatsu ebiki a model of an experimental orientation to humanistic research
that enhances the opportunity for generating new questions and surprising
conjunctures.