"Notes on Confucian Household Festivities and Events," written by the scholar Shunsui Rai in ca. 1808, is an important historical document for studying Confucian household festivities conducted during the latter part of the Edo era. These notes are in three parts: house cleaning at the end of the year and ceremonies for the New Year; the schedule for each month; and the preparation and conduct of Confucian household festivities. These festivities celebrated the conjunction festival, full moon festival, auspicious day festivals (1/7, 3/3, 5/5, 7/7, and 9/9), anniversaries of ancestors' deaths, and seasonal festivals (chosai and jisai). More than 40 festivities in total were held in each year. Sake and relishes were conventionally prepared as a votive offering for the conjunction festival, tea and sweets for the full moon festival, rice porridge with seven spring herbs, side dishes and sake for January 7th, lozenge rice cakes for March 3rd, rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves for May 5th, and melon for July 7th. Seventeen ancestors' death anniversaries were celebrated going back to the great-grandparents and other relatives. Seasonal festivities were held in February and August, jisai in particular being a grand banquet to which many relatives and close acquaintances were invited. New Year's breakfast consisted of rice cakes boiled with fish and vegetables, and an event for cutting New Year's rice cakes is also mentioned in the notes. Entries on the death anniversaries of successive lords of the Hiroshima feudal clan indicate the feudalistic ideas of the Edo era.

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This article will introduce Yamamoto Bōyō's handwritten directory of his students, correspondents and Kyoto-based hikyaku couriers, covering nearly 25 years from 1830 to around 1856. The manuscript is composed of 305 items and includes 132 students and exhibitors to the bussankai (naturalistic annual workshops) held in the Kyoto school or by related naturalist groups in Osaka, Ise and Nagasaki. The naturalistic activities of the Yamamoto School depended on the hikyaku courier system which facilitated nationwide scientifi communication and exchange of specimens with students and related scholars in 41 ancient countries from Ōshū to Satsuma. In this article, the human network of this school is analyzed and described using the directory, here transliterated, and new documents discovered in the Yamamoto family archives.

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The Yamamoto Dokushoshitsu, a private school of natural history and Chinese classics in Kyoto, continued its activities over a 120-year period 1784 to 1903. Yamamoto Bōyō (1778– 1859), a disciple of the naturalist Ono Ranzan, inherited the school from his father Yamamoto Hōzan (1742–1813). The school reached its peak during the Ansei period (1854–1859).Yamamoto Ayao (1827–1903), the third son of Bōyō, reopened the school in 1875 as a means to maintain the Confucian and educational traditions of the Yamamoto family until his death in 1903. In 1893 he wrote the Senjin Genkōroku as a life of his late father following Confucian ideas of filial duty, but ten years later, in 1903, he rewrote it as a memoir containing, not only anecdotes about his grandfather Hōzan and his father Bōyō, but also histories of students, brothers and relatives and his own autobiography. Here we present for the first time the 1903 manuscript of Senjin Genkōroku with an introduction and notes. The introduction analyzes the process of its transformation using the family’s biographical documents.

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