Sumo wrestlers are ranked before every tournament on a chart known as a Banzuke. There are two sides, the east and the west, and each runs down from the top rank (Yokozuna) through a series of other gradings (Ozeki, Sekiwaki, Komusubi, and so on) depending on recent performance. In the twenty-first century, of course, it is available online, but it also has a more traditional form, written in fairly unreadable calligraphy, with the two sides running top to bottom, right to left:
Historians are alert to the extent to which things ‘traditional’ are often more recent and mutable than they appear to be1 but the Banzuke seems to have looked this way since at least the nineteenth century. There were also Banzuke which depicted Kabuki actors, and which took a slightly different format, but it also turns out that the Sumo ranking system had another life in the form of the Mitate-Banzuke, in which things other than Sumo wrestlers were ranked.
Earlier this year I was shown an essay on the nineteenth century rabbit craze in Japan which featured a ranking of rabbit breeders, complete with illustration; more recently I stumbled upon a Banzuke of late nineteenth century photography studios.2 And with that, of course, my interest was piqued. These two encounters gave some sources for other examples (Ishii Kendo’s Jibutsu Kigen promises 21 pages of different rankings), but a bit of googling and particularly the Edo Digital museum brought up rankings of swordsmiths, hot springs (several of these), war time neologisms, mountains, regional products, festivals and practitioners of western and Chinese medicine, amongst others. Each of them is structured just like the Sumo grading, with a set of officials in the middle, and the various ranks and titles awarded to the best examples of the given category.
These examples are clustered around the mid-late- nineteenth century, spanning either side of the Meiji Ishin and the opening of Japan to greater western influence. As such, they highlight how even new and western ideas or categories (Photographers, rabbit breeders, Western style doctors) would be interpreted through existing domestic frames. It’s also a pointer to the wit of a period which perhaps is sometimes seen as very earnest. The Tokugawa period brings to mind categories of the likes of the 53 stations of the Tokkaido, or Hokusai’s 36 Views of Fuji; the Banzuke also makes me think of my childhood game of making up cricketing XIs – scientists XI, murderers XI, detectives XI, and so on (which had the added dimension of trying to decide how the likes of Miss Marple might bowl & bat – slow left arm, and a tail ender, I imagine).
Another creative Japanese system or ranking and ordering is the Sugoroku. This is a children’s game that, as I understand it, involves a snakes and ladders like progress from bottom to top, or outside to middle. There are a similarly bewildering array of thematic boards. Sometimes they narrate a journey or a story – around the world, for example, or the progression of the nineteenth century Sino-Japanese war – but in other cases there is less of a narrative and they seem closer to the Banzuke style ranking or maybe perhaps a hierarchical categorisation. Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku has a collection featuring nearly 200, including foreign nations (starts in Holland, ends in China, with some suspiciously Asian looking European nations) and famous places in Edo. I think it’s possible to question whether all of these were necessarily intended to be used for actual play (although this one based upon telephone exchanges has a sophisticated choose-your-own-adventure style method to it that presumably involved some consideration of play and a connection to the subject matter), but in a sense this reinforces the idea of using a prior cultural form to illustrate a potentially new set of ideas or events, or to delineate a thematic category. Whilst the height of the Banzuke seems to have been in the nineteenth century, Sugoroku persisted, I think into the twentieth, with examples of 1930s propaganda (like this ‘patriotic women’ sugoroku from http://www.sugoroku.net).
There are contemporary examples of sugoroku, but I’m not aware of the Banzuke being used creatively anymore. Thinking about today, one final form of categorisation springs to mind: the Nihon Sandai, or Sekai Sandai. These list the three key examples of any given category in Japan or the World – the three great gardens in Japan, the three great palaces in the world, and so on. Wikipedia Japan has another lengthy set of examples and here (although I didn’t see one of the first ones that I ever heard – the three most fearful things: Japanese earthquakes, Japanese typhoons, and Japanese fathers).
Footnotes
1. An essay in the well-known collection Mirror Of Modernity shows how Sumo tradition has changed over time, with the Yokozuna rank, the highest, as a relatively new fixture, and the system of ordering between east and west and determining opponents for bouts fluctuating.↩
2. ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’, P de Ganon, Past And Present, Vol.213/1; “Selling Portrait Photographs: Early Photographic Business in Asakusa, Japan”, Maki Fukuoka, History of Photography, 2011, 35:4.↩
Fireflies 