Asian Research Materials this quarter will focus on training in the Sino-Japanese script known as Kanbun.

As you will be aware, pre-modern Japan was a bi-literate culture in which official documents, chronicles, laws, judicial decisions, diaries, medical texts, some poetry, and Buddhist texts, were generally written in Kanbun. Broadly speaking, "Kanbun," or, too, a "kanji-rich" "Japa­nese script," was the language of "record" in Japan through at least the middle of the 20th century. Private letters, popular fiction, hymns in the Pure Land tradi­tion, some poetry forms, some works of intel­lectual history and chroni­cles, some diaries, and some works of clinical medicine tended to be written in a more vernacular form of Japanese (either "classi­cal" bungo or a contemporary colloquail) with varying propor­tions of phonetic syllabary being em­ployed, the script often known as kana majiri form.

"Kanbun" was (is) not a monolithic entity. Kanbun writings run the gamut from works which are in effect writings in classical Chinese, to those which reflect Japanese modifications and the emergence of indigenous conventions that mark them as similar to but not straight Chinese. In different periods differ­ing forms of kanbun sometimes emerged in conjunction with new cultural and intellectual dynamics. For example, the Kanbun styles of medieval "Zen writers" may be seen as a specific form of Kanbun usage, and in any event no under­standing of "Zen culture" is possible without a good knowledge of Kanbun.

Active participation in class discussion; serving as a "discussion leader" at least twice (this is normally done in conjunction with one to three others, rather than being a solo effort).