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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20 (2013)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20

(2013)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Peter Kornicki
Recent work on the history of the book in Japan*

Over the last ten years the monographs and journals devoted mainly or partially to the history of the book in Japan and to Japanese bibliography have inevitably been supplemented by internet resources, many of which have made themselves indispensable. One of the most important of these is an online catalogue and finding list of all Japanese books and manuscripts produced before 1868. The cut-off date is that of the so-called Meiji Restoration, which is commonly taken to mark the birth of ‘modern’ Japan, but it did not in fact mark the end of woodblock printing, so its relevance for bibliographic purposes is debatable. Be that as it may, this online database was initially based on previously-published catalogues but it is constantly being supplemented by new data; the books listed are, with a handful of exceptions, all to be found in libraries in Japan, but the contents of European libraries are covered in a parallel database, and both are available on the website of the National Institute of Japanese Literature.1

It should be noted that the definition of what constitutes a Japanese book is not the same in these two invaluable databases: in the former, texts written in China or Korea and (re)printed in Japan are excluded, while in the latter such texts are included, on the ground that they contain prefaces and explanatory glosses aimed at Japanese readers. There are, however, other databases which record, respectively, the locations of Chinese texts in Japanese libraries, irrespective of whether they were produced in Japan, Korea or China, and the locations of Chinese texts written by Japanese authors.2 So far, however, there are no similar databases for finding rare Japanese books held in North American, Chinese or Korean libraries, and even published catalogues are few.3 In addition to these

databases, there is also a growing number of digitalised versions of rare books available on the internet, to be downloaded as pdfs or to be examined on screen, but there are far too many to be listed here.

The development of reliable electronic archives and databases does not mean to say that monographic publishing is being replaced by digital. In the 1970s two series of volumes on bibliographic topics were launched, consisting either of monographs or of reprinted source materials: the series published by Yumani Shobō, Shoshi shomoku shiriizu [Bibliographic catalogue series], was launched in 1976 and now amounts to 98 titles in 616 volumes, while the other, Nihon shoshigaku taikei [Japanese bibliographic compendium], launched by Seishōdō Shoten in 1978, now amounts to 100 titles in 168 volumes. The most recent volume in the latter series is a catalogue of calligraphic manuals published in Japan in the Edo period (1600-1868), compiled by the renowned bibliographer and historian of the book, Nakano Mitsutoshi. These books all come from his own collection and many are not recorded elsewhere: the accompanying volume of plates demonstrates the potential of xylography for reproducing calligraphic art and reveals that many of these books were printed with white text on a black background, in an attempt to approximate to the results when rubbings are made from stone engravings.4

In addition to these two massive series, the publication of several detailed bibliographies and a thorough encyclopaedia of bibliographical terminology testify to a growing interest in the history of the book in Japan.5 It remains largely true, however, that resources for the history of the book held in libraries outside Japan are neglected. For example, in 2011 a volume was published which attempted to identify all extant copies of all dated imprints produced between 1591 and 1658. This period is important because it was during those years that typography flourished, after its introduction both from Korea and, in the hands of the Jesuits, from Macau, and then waned as the ease of including glosses and illustrations gave xylography the edge, and this volume is the first attempt at a comprehensive bibliography year by year.6 However, it is regrettable that although it includes books printed in Japan during those years in Chinese and even Latin in addition to Japanese, it pays no attention to imprints in foreign libraries. Thus the 1595 edition of Hokke shiki engi, a commentary on the Lotus sūtra in Cambridge University Library, is ignored, for there is no copy in Japan; and the many dated imprints produced between 1591 and 1658 now preserved in the British Library, in the Nordenskiöld Collection in Stockholm and in other collections are overlooked altogether. This neglect is unnecessary in view of the fact that many foreign collections are fully described in catalogues written in Japanese and most collections in Europe are covered by the online database mentioned above.



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Figure 1. Tōsō kaiso jijojō, a collection of prefaces supposedly in the hands of Buddhist monks of the Tang dynasty. This Japanese edition, printed with white text on black background like a rubbing of an inscription, was published in 1661. Author's collection


Books and manuscripts in the Edo period

Like most of the databases and reference materials mentioned so far, studies of the history of the book in Japan concentrate on the Edo period, when commercial publishing came of age and when, in the space of a few decades, books - which had once been rare and precious objects - became familiar goods to be bought in shops or borrowed from circulating libraries. In research on that period, one of the principal developments over the last decade in Japan has been the extension of research from mainstream topics into areas that have largely been neglected hitherto.7 The first of these is manuscript publication and circulation, the second is the rural consumption of books, and the third is the flow of books from Korea and China.

The most important recent contribution on manuscript traditions was made by Hashiguchi Kōnosuke, who is the owner of an antiquarian bookshop in Tokyo and has published several volumes on the book trade in the Edo period. He has made a thorough assessment of the proportion of books in circulation in the Edo period that were manuscripts and his conclusion is that they amounted to around two-fifths of all books.8 Although the simultaneous presence in the book market of manuscripts and printed books in this period is not a new discovery, Hashiguchi has forced us to realise that we have long been underestimating the importance of manuscripts in the book trade.

His figures are borne out by the preponderance of manuscripts in many rural collections that have survived intact. Many of these manuscripts were either copies of printed books or local histories that would be unlikely to have been commercial propositions, but there was also a large number of illicit manuscripts in circulation. This is also indicated by edicts issued in the 1720s that sought in vain to restrict their circulation, and these illicit manuscripts have now begun to be studied as a genre of literary production, for many of them were fictionalised versions of contemporary scandals.9

The second area is book consumption in rural areas in the Edo period. One of the most productive and original historians of the book in recent years has been Suzuki Toshiyuki. His recent study of what he calls the ‘reading fever’ that took hold of Japan in the late eighteenth century and its impact upon the book trade analyses the spread of the reading habit from the big cities to rural areas.10 Using farmers' diaries, book trade records and other sources he shows how the major booksellers of Edo (modern Tokyo) and Osaka spread their operations into rural areas and how local markets developed and were furnished with books, increasingly in the case of rural towns and cities by their own retailers. The most striking part of the book, however, is that in which he unravels the publishing history of a series of editions of Chinese classics published

under the rubric ‘Keiten yoshi’ (‘Too many teachers’).



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Figure 2. Katakiuchi hashibasusumi, an early nineteenth-century illicit manuscript on a vendetta involving a samurai. This copy carries numerous impressions of the seal of a circulating library in Sendai. Author's collection


The first set was an edition of the Four Books of the Confucian tradition (The Analects, Mencius, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean), published in ten volumes in 1786. These were designed to be accessible to readers with minimal education who nevertheless wished to acquire some sinological learning, which was the hallmark of being educated throughout pre-modern East Asia. Thus they included the most basic information, explanatory essays and even, in the upper margin, a complete guide to reading the Chinese text aloud in Japanese, in a translation based closely on the original. The Chinese classics had never

been made so accessible before, but Suzuki's real achievement has been to prove just how popular they were: by comparing dozens of extant copies he has established that the printing blocks for that 1786 edition quickly became worn out and were replaced in 1794, and again in 1824, 1842, 1852 and 1871. To put this in perspective, we need to remember that xylographic printing blocks are generally thought to have been capable of producing around 8,000 copies, depending on the kind of wood used, and that many sets of printing blocks prepared in the seventeenth century were still being used a hundred or more years later. In this case, the blocks needed replacing (requiring a renewed capital investment) within twenty years of publication and the demand required this to be done every twenty years. Not even the most popular works of fiction at the time could match this level of popularity. What Suzuki's research has shown, then, is that we have been too quick to assume that fiction dominated the market, and that teach-yourself books, exemplified by the ‘Too many teachers’ series, demonstrate a thirst for sinological knowledge among readers who had hitherto not been able to approach Chinese books. These books gave them access not only to prestige texts but also to the vocabulary, diction and ethical maxims that gave them a claim to be educated. At the heart of this phenomenon was growing social differentiation especially in rural areas where the literate successfully distinguished themselves from their humbler neighbours by collecting books and aligning themselves culturally with their samurai superiors.

Over the last two decades there has been growing interest in the contents of rural book collections, which in many cases have survived unscathed and intact from the Edo period to the present day in rural households, while urban collections have mostly long since been broken up or destroyed by fire. The contents are often surprising: banned books, poetry collections, local histories, and so on, most of them manuscripts. Apart from testifying to the profusion of manuscripts in circulation they also bear witness to rising levels of cultural sophistication in rural areas, particularly in the cases of village headmen, who were required to be literate in order to communicate by letter with the authorities. Sugi Hitoshi has produced a detailed study which explores the cultural life of people living in rural areas, focusing on some harbour towns, a post town on the Tōkaidō between Edo and Osaka and a mountain village in Shinano. In each case there is ample evidence of literary and cultural activities in the form of book collections, poetry composition and even local publishing.11 Collections of haiku poetry published privately by the members of a local poetry club were the most common, but there were also collections of poetry in Chinese, a volume of biographies of local celebrities in the port town of Uraga put together by the leader of the local dried-sardine producers' guild and treatises on the rearing of silk worms. It is clear that certainly by the early nineteenth century educated and literate men and women in rural areas formed ties with likeminded people in the neighbourhood not only to exchange books originating from the big cities but also to be creatively productive themselves.

Finally, connections with continental Asia and the flow of books to Japan have begun to be taken seriously and to be explored in detail by a few scholars. Ōba Osamu and Wang Yong have been meticulous in their examinations of the importation of

books from China: diaries and extant copies of imported books provide a wealth of information and, for the Edo period, we have even cargo manifests listing books imported via Nagasaki.12 In the case of Korea, Fujimoto Yukio has published numerous bibliographical studies and, more recently, the first of four projected volumes of an exhaustive catalogue of old Korean books in Japanese libraries, many of which were brought to Japan during the invasion of Korea launched by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1590s.13 Meanwhile Mayanagi Makoto and Machi Senjūrō have explored the impact of Chinese and Korean medical treatises on Japan.14



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Figure 3. Rokuso daishi hōbōdangyō, a Chinese Zen text known as the Platform sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. This Japanese edition, printed in 1634 with glosses for the convenience of Japanese readers, carries extensive marginalia which are dated 1645. Author's collection




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Figure 4. Zōho shojaku mokuroku, the booksellers' catalogue of 1670, showing the end of the table of contents, listing ephemeral items at the end, and, on the left, the colophon giving the date 1670 and the names of the two publishers in Edo and Kyoto. Author's collection


Studies by European and American scholars

Although most of the work done on the history of the book in Japan is being undertaken by Japanese scholars, there is a growing number of European and American scholars whose works are significant and in some cases fill lacunae in the Japanese research output.15 Prominent in this connection is the work of Lukacs on marginalia in Japanese medical books: hitherto marginalia have attracted little attention, with the rare exception of those written by some famous individual, and there has been no systematic study of the phenomenon in Japanese.16 Lukacs has made a detailed study of the extensive marginalia, for the most part written in literary Chinese, in his collection of Japanese medical books. Amongst them he found, astonishingly, some marginalia dated before the date of publication of the book in which they were inscribed. The explanation, he rightly concludes, is that marginalia by learned commentators were sometimes so highly valued as to be copied from perhaps a borrowed original edition into a newer edition, with the dates transcribed as in the original edition.

Some other recent studies in European languages deserve mention here. Firstly, Moretti has published a detailed study of the booksellers' catalogues which were printed in the Edo period from the 1660s onwards.17 The earliest catalogues reveal quite clearly that the mainstay of the publishing industry in the seventeenth century was not the thin stream of new works of Japanese literature that have been the focus of much research, but the veritable flood of reprinted Chinese works, including both Buddhist texts and doctrinal works on the one hand and Confucian texts on the other: the latter in particular were available in a bewildering variety of formats that is evidence of the strong demand. Moretti reveals the shifts in the hierarchy of genres over time and emphasizes that the booksellers' catalogues were primarily a commercial tool produced by commercial booksellers to facilitate sales. They naturally ignored the competition provided by manuscripts and imported editions, and thus cannot be taken to be a snapshot of books on the market, but they do tell us how booksellers categorised and prioritised their wares and this provides us with a very different perspective on the book market from that of literary historians who focus on Japanese literary works, which turn out to have been a rather small part of the market. Secondly, Amaury García Rodríguez has taken advantage of the recent acceptance of erotic publishing of the Edo period as a subject of serious study to produce a thorough examination of the vexed question of censorship as it affected erotic publications.18 And finally, Mary Berry, in a wide-ranging book partly based on her familiarity with the superb collection of old Japanese books at Berkeley, has explored the social consequences of print from the seventeenth century onwards.19 She points to the creation of a public market for books as commercial publishing made them familiar goods and then to the emergence of new kinds of knowledge once knowledge ceased to be the privilege of the educated elite. She describes this as a ‘library of public information’ and as components she draws attention to the huge number of commercially-published maps in circulation and to the publication of directories of goods and services, guidebooks, household encyclopaedias and a host of works which purport to convey up-to-date information. The ingenuity of publishers in devising new informative print genres and creating markets for them reveals the degree to which knowledge was being driven by commerce.

Reading traditions

In many other areas of study there have been important developments which are worth mentioning. The most important of these is the study of Japanese writing in Chinese, which for long had been much neglected, and the study of the practice of kundoku. Kundoku is a method whereby texts written in Chinese can be read in Japanese, by means of the addition of various glosses and pointers which enable readers to rearrange the



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Figure 5. Onna teikin gosho bunko, a conduct book for women based on supposedly courtly tastes and published in Kyoto in 1790. The page shown introduces various games involving shells and perfumes associated with the Tale of Genji Author's collection


order of the Chinese words so that they conform to Japanese word order; it had its counterpart in Korea, and it is thought that it was transmitted to Japan in the eighth century. This practice developed before the invention of scripts to write Japanese and Korean, and it is probably best understood as a form of translation which is realised by the reader but which is bound by the vocabulary of the Chinese text being read. Two substantial collections of essays have explored the phenomenon throughout East Asia and have exposed the multiplicity of kundoku practices: each set of glosses represented an interpretation of the Chinese text, and so the same text could generate quite different glosses depending upon the interpretation chosen.20 To some extent this created the illusion that ancient Chinese texts were actually written in Japanese, and in the eighteenth century Ogyū Sorai emphasized that Chinese texts were written in a foreign language and that the only authentic ways in which to approach those texts were either by having a thorough grasp of literary Chinese or through written translation in which obscure vocabulary in the original was rendered comprehensibly in Japanese. Nevertheless, kundoku remained the standard way of reading Chinese texts and is still taught in Japanese schools today.

There has been a growing interest in women's writing and reading in the Edo period and in the publication of calligraphy manuals and moral primers for women. Many of these primers and manuals have now either been reproduced in facsimile or are available as images on the website of Nara Women's University.21 The most notorious of the conduct books for women was Onna daigaku (Greater learning for women), which seems to have been first published in the early eighteenth century, but it has now come to be understood that the moral message became gradually attenuated in later editions, to the extent that they became compendia of useful and practical information rather than conduct books.22 Needless to say, conduct books for women were by no means the only books actually read by women, and a number of studies have focused on women's reading as revealed in diaries and letters or on their activities as poets and writers in various genres.23

Mention should also be made here of recent work in a few other areas. Firstly, ownership seals provide valuable information about the provenance of books and make it possible to reassemble the dispersed collections of significant figures from the past. Since these ownership seals are often written in decorative script they are frequently difficult to read and to identify correctly. For this reason volumes providing indices and

reproductions of seals and identifying their owners are invaluable, and there have been some recent additions to the growing number of such volumes.24 Secondly, paper has been in extensive use in Japan since the seventh century at least, and it goes without saying that its quality and characteristics are essential considerations when assessing the authenticity and age of manuscripts. The recent publication of an encyclopaedic work on the usage of paper in documentary contexts as well as books of all kinds has served to draw attention to the fundamental material that underpins book culture in Japan and to the significance of variations in its usage.25

Official constraints and the socio-political context

Let me continue this survey of work on the history of the book in Japan by considering the writings of Fujizane Kumiko, who has published two major monographs, which are provocative and more ambitious in their scope than most other works. The first of these was a detailed investigation of bukan, which were directories of samurai giving their ranks, stipends and crests and which were published from 1644 until 1868, when the samurai regime collapsed.26 These directories provided an intimate glimpse of the ruling class in Japan and were constantly updated by altering the wooden printing blocks. In general commercial publishers were not allowed to print anything containing the names of the ruling samurai class but an exception was made for bukan, and it is clear that the compilation and publication of these works depended upon official patronage as well as the commercial nous of Kyoto publishers who realised that the newly-established samurai regime generated a need for information about its membership that could be satisfied by print.

Fujizane's more recent and even more ambitious book is a wide-ranging examination of Edo-period book culture in its socio-political context.27 Having emphasized in her previous book the official constraints under which publishers operated, at the outset of her second book she explores these constraints further, noting not only that the regime began to direct censorious attention to commercial publishing in 1644, much earlier than hitherto accepted, but also that the formation of guilds in all walks of commercial life imposed sanctions and controls on members of the same trade. She then considers seventeenth-century books from the point of view of their role in the distribution of knowledge, seeing books which did not circulate through commercial networks - such as manuscripts and private publications - as constituting a ‘closed’ form of knowledge distribution. Although it is refreshing to encounter an approach that attempts to see the book in seventeenth-century Japan in all its manifestations, it seems to me that a binary distinction does not stand up to close scrutiny, for some manuscripts were pro-



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Figure 6. Daibirushana jōbutsu kyōsho, a Buddhist commentary printed on Mt. Kōya, to the south of Nara, in 1278. This is one of the few texts printed in medieval Japan which was accompanied by some illustrations. Author's collection


duced in multiple copies for illicit sale and for distribution through circulating libraries: in effect they were published. What is original and interesting about her analysis, however, is her ensuing focus on regime historiography, which shows that some historical accounts which touched upon the sensitive matter of the foundation of the regime remained in the form of manuscripts for controlled circulation while others were permitted to be published by commercial publishers connected to the regime. There is insufficient space here to do justice to this rich and rewarding book, which successfully makes the case for the importance of book history to social and political historians.

The one obvious lacuna remains the economic aspects of the history of the book in the Edo period. Some of the booksellers' catalogues give prices for the books listed, but we do not even know whether these represent the retail or the wholesale prices. Detailed information on the economic costs of producing a book in terms of the proportional costs of the materials, of the labour involved in carving the printing blocks, of the finishing and binding processes is wanting, and publishers' archives that might cast light on the economics of publishing have yet to be found. This is particularly unfortunate, since most publishing in the Edo period was carried out by commercial publishers whose livelihood depended on commercial success.

The history of the book before the Edo period

This essay may have given the impression that there was no history of the book before the Edo period, and it is undoubtedly true that an overwhelming proportion of work devoted to the history of the book is devoted to the Edo period. However, since printing began in Japan in the eighth century and was practiced continuously, albeit not commercially, from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, there is clearly a rich field of study yet to be exploited. This is not to say that there have not been studies of the earliest uses of printing in the eighth century, or of the manuscript tradition of the Tale of Genji, which has recently been shown to have been more complex than hitherto supposed.28

The manuscript culture and limited print culture of medieval Japan have been the subject of some precisely focused studies, but there has hitherto been little effort to grasp the role and significance of books in medieval society. Gomi Fumihiko has attempted to do just this in a book entitled ‘The medieval history of the book’, but it should be noticed that his attention is focused on Japanese literary writings and he neglects to consider the role of imports from Song and Ming China, to say nothing of nonliterary texts or literary texts written by Japanese in literary Chinese.29 Until the 1590s, the few books that were printed in Japan were almost exclusively Buddhist texts in Chinese, with the sole exceptions of a few Chinese medical texts and editions of the Analects and the Great Learning. As a result Japanese texts were only available in the form

of manuscripts, often transmitted through families that kept their treasures from prying eyes, and the only non-Buddhist printed texts in circulation were imports from China and occasionally from Korea as well.

Gomi begins his study with a consideration of Honchō shojaku mokuroku (Catalogue of the books of our country), a rather mysterious catalogue which probably dates back to the late Kamakura period (1185-1333) and survives today in more than seventy manuscript copies. It lists 493 Japanese works. What it is a catalogue of is unclear, for the compiler clearly had some of the works listed to hand while others are mentioned by title and are said not to be available. Nevertheless, it is important for the fact that 299 of the books listed are no longer extant and are known solely or principally from this catalogue, and for the fact that the compiler divided the books into twenty categories, this being the first attempt to bring order to the multitude of books by categorising them. Thus the world of the medieval book that Gomi describes is inevitably a partial one, constrained on the one hand by the loss of many works of Japanese literature during the centuries when Japanese writings circulated only in manuscript, and on the other hand by adopting the same focus as the catalogue and leaving out of the picture the many texts in classical Chinese which circulated either in manuscript or in imported printed editions. This side of the picture is becoming clearer thanks to the works mentioned above and to studies like that of Takahashi Satoshi, which unravels the complex antecedents of the Japanese manuscript tradition of Zhu Xi's commentaries on the Analects.30 But there is much work to be done, particularly with regard to imports from China and Korea before 1600, manuscript traditions and the uses of print. Why, for example, was neither the Tale of Genji nor any other work of Japanese literature printed before 1600, even though individuals were happy to sponsor the printing of works in Chinese? The voluminous diaries of the courtier and scholar Sanjōnishi Sanetaka (1455-1537) reveal that, while printed texts were already familiar objects either as imports or as Buddhist texts printed in Japan, scholars still lived and worked in a scribal world in which a courtier with a fine calligraphic hand was constantly required to produce manuscript copies of classic works.31 This scribal world is described in detail in his diaries and those of other courtiers, but it is yet to be studied; so great is the current concentration of effort on the Edo period.


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