Du Noir cosmologique au bleu aérien : une brève histoire de la couleur du ciel dans le Japon d’Edo (1603-1868)

Abstract

During the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Japan inherited a centuries-old Chinese tendency to disdain chromatic questions. However, one of these questions, originating in the famous words of Zhuangzi who wondered about the celestial “azure,” was able to override this elitist tendency: that of the color of the heavens. The question further deepens as we discover a two-colored sky, tinted in black, but also in blue. The former, which cannot be questioned because of its status of cosmological legitimacy according to the orthodox frame, will conversely push various Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist theories, but also, in the spirit of the times, Jesuit and Dutch theories, to explain the origin of the latter. The way Japanese scholars solved the question of the color of the sky during the Tokugawa period leads us to a better understanding of the classical chromatic perception of these phenomena on the eve of the modernization of the Meiji period (1868–1912).