44 
The History of the Book in Japan
44 P. F. KORNICKI
Japan first became acquainted with both writing and the book from China, at some time in the first half of the first millennium AD. There can be no doubt that Chinese, as the language of Buddhism in East Asia, as the language of the intellectual tradition that is now termed Confucianism, and as the language of scholarly discourse in East Asia, was central to book production in Japan from its beginnings right up to the 19th century.
In all likelihood Chinese texts had been transmitted to Japan by the end of the 5th century, and although the dates and details given in Japanese annals are not reliable, it seems clear that books from China were increasingly valued as gifts in Japan. These would have been Confucian and Buddhist texts, and would have taken the form of rolls or scrolls rather than bound books. Imported works needed to be copied to become accessible, and this was particularly important in the case of Buddhist texts once Buddhism took root in Japan. By the 7th century, therefore, shakyō, or sutra copying, was an organized activity, both as a means of reproducing texts for study and devotion and as a pious activity in its own right. In 673, a complete copy of all the Buddhist texts so far transmitted to Japan was made at the Kawaradera Temple for the purpose of preservation, while a sutra copied in 686 was copied primarily to benefit the sponsor’s ancestors. By 727, a sutra scriptorium had been established by the government at Nara with a staff of copyists and proofreaders for the production of sutras to be used in government-sponsored temples. Most of these texts were copied in black ink on paper that had been dyed with a yellow preservative, but some were luxury copies in gold letters on indigo paper. In addition, a state library had been established in 702 with a staff of twenty copyists who were supposed to copy Confucian as well as Buddhist MSS; the Confucian texts would have been essential for the newly founded university, since the education system was modelled on that of China and required Chinese literacy.
Most of the MSS produced in the Nara period have long since perished, but recent finds of mokkan (wooden tablets used to record bureaucratic texts) and urushigami (scraps of paper preserved by lacquer) have over the last 50 years greatly enhanced our knowledge of the texts and the forms of the Chinese language in use in early Japan. A much clearer picture of the Chinese books that were available in Japan at the end of the 9th century is provided by Nihonkoku genzaisho mokuroku, a catalogue of extant books compiled at imperial command.
The oldest extant MS produced in Japan is a commentary on the Lotus Sutra which dates from the early 7th century; it is, of course, entirely in Chinese and may indeed have been written by an immigrant from the mainland rather than a native Japanese. By the early 8th century, however, the Japanese had not only written their first Chinese-style chronicle, but also two works in which the Japanese language appears for the first time: Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Man’yōshū (Collection of 10,000 Leaves), an anthology of poetry. At this stage the only technique for recording Japanese was, rather clumsily, to use Chinese characters for their sound value alone. In the 9th century, however, this developed into a syllabary of highly abbreviated forms of Chinese characters known as kana, which were used to record Japanese texts, such as poetry and, later, prose works such as the poetic diaries of the Heian period (794–1185) and, especially, the Tale of Genji and other classic works of court literature. By the late Heian period, woodblock printing was being used in Japan to print various Buddhist texts, but all works of Japanese literature circulated only in MS until the early 17th century, when the first printed editions were produced. The reasons for this exclusion of Japanese writings from the world of print are complex, but they may be summed up as: the domination of printing by Buddhist monasteries; the importance of calligraphy in the preparation of MS copies; and the hermetic court milieu in which Japanese literature was produced and consumed. As a result, large numbers of Heian texts—known now only by name—did not survive the centuries of MS tradition and some, such as the Tosa nikki (Tosa Diary) of 935, only survived by chance.
Throughout the Heian period, and indeed right to the present day, the practice of copying sutras for devotional reasons continued. The celebrated scholar and poet Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), for example, made many copies of the Lotus Sutra in his own hand for this purpose. Sutra decoration assumed ever more elaborate forms, with frontispieces and beautiful papers—and sometimes the text was superimposed on scenes of secular life. But sutras were also being copied for more scholarly reasons. In the 9th century, six monks were at various times sent to China to procure MSS of Buddhist texts; on their return catalogues were drawn up of the MSS they had managed to acquire. Subsequently, monks came from other temples throughout Japan to copy them and take copies elsewhere. From the 11th century, however, it was increasingly common for printed Buddhist texts to be imported from China or Korea, and from the 12th century Buddhist texts were being printed in Japan, so the imperative to keep making copies by hand weakened, except for devotional purposes.
During the wars of the 12th century and those that followed, many Japanese books were lost: more than half of the 493 works described in Honchō shojaku mokuroku, a 13th-century catalogue of Japanese books, are no longer extant. On the other hand, the Tosa nikki survived, because the original MS of 935 survived in a palace library until at least 1492 and was copied four times: two 13th-century copies have survived and have made it possible to reconstruct the original text.
Once commercial publishing grew in importance in the 17th century, the scribal traditions, it might be supposed, died away. This was not, however, the case. Scribal production and circulation continued up to the end of the 19th century. This was partly a matter of continuing traditions: sutra copying for devotional reasons continued, and so did the production of luxury editions of classical works of literature with fine calligraphy, which the samurai elite preferred to printed copies. A new practice was making MS copies of printed books, either for reasons of economy, or because of rarity, or as a way of learning the text: this last purpose was recommended, for example, in the case of the Onna daigaku (Greater Learning for Women), a moral primer for girls first published in the early 18th century. Another reason for preferring MS over print was to restrict the circulation of new knowledge: innovative medical techniques or new styles of ikebana (flower arrangement), for example, generated an income for the initiators, and it was therefore in their interests to restrict circulation by producing MS accounts for the eyes of their followers only. But the most significant reason for the continued circulation of MSS was the censorship legislation of the Edo period (1600–1868), which forbade the publication of scandalous or other matters concerning the samurai class as a whole. As a result, accounts of the samurai rebellion of 1651, or of the sex scandal of 1801 which embroiled women of the shogun’s household, could not be printed; although bans were placed even on the circulation of MS versions, there was no effective means of policing this practice—and the heavy demand for works of this kind, often written up in a sensational manner or semi-fictionalized, was met by circulating libraries. This is clear not only from surviving books bearing the seals of these libraries but also from legal documents generated by cases in which circulating libraries were caught with such material in their possession.
In the modern period since 1868, MS production, except for devotional or other private purposes, has diminished considerably. However, it is worth noting that, given the cumbersome nature of the Japanese typewriter, official documents were commonly written by hand until the advent of computer-generated text.
Woodblock printing is without doubt a Chinese invention, probably of the 7th century, but the oldest extant printed texts in East Asia are to be found in Korea and Japan. The first evidence of printing in Japan is on a stupendous scale: it is reported in the chronicles that between the years 764 and 770 1 million Buddhist invocations (Hyakumantō darani) were printed and inserted inside miniature pagodas. This was both an exercise in atonement and a monument to the power of the imperial institution that commissioned this exercise. Large numbers of these pagodas and their printed contents have survived, sufficient to show that at the least 100,000 were produced, if not the full million. But this was decidedly not a case of printing for the purpose of reading; it was rather a ritual act, which has other parallels in the treatment of texts in Buddhism, such as prayer wheels, and the texts were not intended for reading. Nevertheless, it is eloquent evidence of the transmission of printing technology to Japan in the 8th century.
There are some records of similar instances of the devotional printing of sutras in the Heian period, but it is not until commentaries and doctrinal works were being printed (the earliest extant one is dated 1088) that printing for the purpose of producing texts to read is encountered. These were, of course, Buddhist texts in Chinese, as was true of almost all printing up to the late 16th century. Most printing at this stage was conducted in Nara at the Kōfukuji, the family temple of the dominant Fujiwara family, but in the Kamakura period (1185–1333) printing spread to other parts of Japan. The monasteries of Mount Kōya began printing works of esoteric Buddhism and the writings of the monk Kūkai (774–835), such as his Sangō shiiki (printed in 1253), a comparative study of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Kyoto temples began printing works related to their particular sect of Buddhism, sometimes in the form of facsimile editions of imported Chinese editions. One of the very few works to be printed in the Japanese language in these centuries was Kurodani shōnin gotōroku (printed in Kyoto in 1321), a collection of the sayings of the founder of the Pure Land sect of Buddhism in Japan.
Zen temples in Kyoto and Kamakura began printing in the late 13th century, but they were concerned less with the production of sutras than with printing collections of the sayings of Chinese, or occasionally Japanese, Zen masters. In 1367, eight Chinese Zen monks skilled in printing came to Kyoto at the request of Japanese monks and worked for some years as printers. Around a quarter of all the editions produced by Zen temples were of Chinese secular works, starting in 1325 with an edition of a collection of poems by a monk of the Tang dynasty. This, like many other such editions of Chinese works, was a facsimile of an imported Chinese edition.
The first canonical Chinese text printed in Japan was an edition of the Confucian Analects printed in the trading community of Sakai, south of Osaka, in 1364, and in 1481 Zhu Xi’s commentary on the Greater Learning was printed in Kagoshima. However, given the importance of Confucian texts for elite education, it has to be said that surprisingly few were printed before the 17th century. During the 16th century more and more Chinese secular works were being printed, but these were mostly dictionaries, guides to poetry composition, and medical texts.
Throughout this entire period from the 12th to 16th centuries, very few works of Japanese authorship were printed, with the principal exception of ōjō yōshū, a treatise on the ‘essentials for salvation’, of which nine editions were printed between 1168 and 1600. The world of print was dominated in fact by Buddhist texts and texts in Chinese, and these required sophisticated Sinological literacy of their readers. There is little sign, therefore, of a book trade or of commercial publication at this stage.
In the late 16th century, Japan was brought into contact with two distinct typographical traditions, those of Europe and of Korea. As early as the 1540s, Francis Xavier had had some of his works translated into Japanese with a view to having them printed, but the printing activities of the Jesuit Mission in Japan did not commence until 1590, when the first European printing press was brought to Japan, to be followed later by others (see 9). Although many of the publications of the Jesuit Mission press were deliberately burnt by Japanese authorities in 1626 in connection with the suppression of Christianity, it is clear that in fewer than 30 years around 100 titles were printed; fewer than 40 survive today, however, many in a single copy. Jesuit Mission printing included annual church calendars and various devotional works and classical authors in Latin—and, remarkably, some devotional works in a romanized transcription of Japanese as well. The casting of a Japanese fount made Japanese publications possible, too, and in 1592 the Jesuits printed part of the Heike monogatari (Tale of the Heike) in romanized transcription: this was the first work of Japanese literature to appear in print.
The Korean tradition of movable type (see 43), which goes back to the 13th century, does not seem to have been transmitted to Japan until force intervened: as a result of the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592–8, printed books were looted and a printing press with type was taken back to Japan and presented to Emperor Go-Yōzei. In 1593, the press was immediately put to use to print a Chinese text, the Classic of Filial Piety, the first book to be printed typographically in Japan by Japanese artisans.
In a sense, both of these developments stimulated printing in Japan, the Jesuits by printing Japanese literature and the printers working for the emperor or the shogun by printing secular Chinese works. However, since the Jesuit press was located in Kyushu, far from the centre of political power, and since all Christian missionaries were subject to persecution, it has long been assumed that Korean typography had the greater impact. Recent discoveries have nevertheless suggested that Jesuit printing techniques did have an influence that was subsequently denied by contemporaries for fear of being associated with a banned religion. Whatever the case, it is clear that these developments brought print out of the monasteries and gave it a secular purpose in Japan.
In the 1590s, both the imperial household and Tokugawa Ieyasu, soon to be shogun, separately sponsored the preparation of large founts of wooden type and, then, the use of these founts for printing books. The chokuhan, or imperial editions, produced 1595–1621, were all secular works—at first Chinese works and then some works of Japanese authorship, such as the first two books of the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan). Ieyasu, meanwhile, printed other Chinese secular texts and the Azuma kagami (Mirror of the East), a 13th-century Japanese chronicle. By this time, monasteries in and around Kyoto were also experimenting with typography (the oldest surviving imprint dates from 1595), and so were some private individuals, such as the physician Oze Hoan, who printed four Chinese medical works in 1596–7.
The most impressive typographic products of these early years were the so-called Sagabon, books printed in Saga, near Kyoto, between 1599 and 1610. The calligraphy and artistic direction were provided by the arbiter of taste Hon’ami Kōetsu; a merchant intellectual, Suminokura Soan (1571–1632), brought the organizational skills. Together they printed mostly Japanese texts, such as the Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise), the first Japanese secular book to be illustrated. Through the use of ligatures, their wooden types sought to reproduce the flow of calligraphy, and aesthetic effects were enhanced by the use of coloured and patterned papers. The art of the Japanese book had its beginnings here.
At what point a book trade can be talked of is unclear. Most of the works mentioned so far seem to have been printed in small numbers, and there is no evidence of commercial distribution. By the 1620s, however, there certainly were commercial publishers in operation, and they were printing for the market.
For the first half of the 17th century, typography and woodblock printing existed in tandem, and sometimes they were used together, as in the case of woodblock illustrations to typographic texts. These were decades of extraordinary productivity as most of the classic works were put into print for the first time. Take the case of the Tale of Genji: four typographic editions were printed between 1600 and 1644; in the 1650s the poet Yamamoto Shunshō put out a large-format illustrated edition that went through innumerable reprints and also appeared in other formats; and more than twenty editions of several condensed versions were published between 1651 and 1700. In addition, annotated editions of the Tale of Genji and other classics were published, making these difficult texts accessible in a linguistic sense as well. Reprinted classics were far from dominating production, however, and the range of books was vast. Sino-logical works such as the Four Books of the Confucian tradition, which formed the cornerstone of the education system, were a staple product, but the new printed editions differed from their predecessors and from Chinese editions in being equipped with kunten (reading marks) which enabled Japanese readers to construe Chinese as if it were Japanese. In addition to these existing texts, there were also many new books, and increasingly books were being written with a view to being printed. These included new works of fiction, letter-writing manuals, and guide-books; most of them took advantage of the one feature that typography could not supply, namely woodblock illustrations, which became an indispensable part of almost all texts until the late 19th century.
Sagabon production in 1608: Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise). The books were the product of a collaboration between the merchant connoisseur Suminokura Soan and the artist and calligrapher Hon’ami Kōetsu. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Or. 64.c.36 1v-2)
By around 1650, however, all commercial publishers had abandoned typography and operated exclusively with woodblock printing. Was this a technological reversion? Why did it happen? For a number of very good reasons, typography could not at this stage compete. First, given the nature of the Japanese language, vast founts of type were needed to represent all the characters and kana signs, and since metallic type was too costly to contemplate for this purpose, wooden type dominated, although it was subject to splitting and movement in the frame; by contrast, woodblocks involved much less capital investment. Secondly, woodblocks suited the slower markets of the 17th century, for extra copies could be printed at will over years or decades, whereas typography proved less flexible. Thirdly, by the 1620s most publishers were producing books laden with kunten in the case of Chinese texts or, in the case of Japanese texts, with kana glosses beside the characters to indicate their pronunciation and thus make texts accessible to those with lower levels of literacy. There can be no doubt that it was far easier to incorporate these glosses in woodblock-printed works, to say nothing of the ease of including illustrations within the text. For commercial purposes, then, typography was dead by 1650, and did not revive until the mid-19th century; a small amount of private publishing continued to use wooden type, but the quantities were tiny.
As woodblock printing resumed its pride of place, publishers began to be more innovative and adventurous in their pursuit of the market. Periodicals and newspapers were unknown, but many types of publication had steady sales and required constant updating. One of these was maps and another was the samurai directories known as bukan. The cartographic knowledge acquired by the shogunal government in connection with its assertion of control over all the land of Japan acquired a commercial life of its own as publishers put out large, block-printed maps of cities, provinces, the whole of Japan, and even the world. One of the most significant maps was that of Japan produced in 1779 by Nagakubo Sekisui, a man of humble origins who achieved fame and position by means of his cartographic skills; his map of 1779 was the first in Japan to show lines of latitude and longitude and thus fix Japan’s position on the globe in relation to other countries. Like other maps of Japan before modern times, it did not show Hokkaidō, which at the time was not considered part of Japan proper; the many reprints and cheap versions of this map testify to its lasting popularity as the most accurate map of Japan available. All printed maps carried information in the form of text as well, and labelling included the names of prominent officials; to keep them constantly up to date, therefore, it was necessary to make frequent alterations to the printing blocks by excising text and replacing it with plugs of wood on which the new text was cut.
Bukan, on the other hand, were samurai directories—exhaustive lists of officials, giving details of rank, office, heraldic symbols, notional income, and so on. These details were naturally subject to incessant change, and the publishers usually indicated that they revised the texts every month to keep them up to date. The same applied to other such directories, such as the Yoshiwara saiken, or guides to the Yoshiwara-licensed quarter listing all the brothels and the courtesans, and the unjō meiran, guides to the Kyoto aristocracy. Print made all this knowledge public and indiscriminately available, but its susceptibility to change made these directories and maps a profitable staple for publishers in Edo.
Most publishers sought to produce a wide variety of wares, with Sinology and Buddhist texts at one end and popular fiction at the other, and in between niche publications like medical textbooks, flower arrangement manuals, poetry collections, and so forth. As early as the 1660s, there was a growing sense that printed books had become a flood, and in an attempt to bring order to the undifferentiated mass of books already on the market, the booksellers in Kyoto clubbed together to produce catalogues listing books in print according to a number of categories. The first of these appeared in the 1660s, and it was succeeded every five or ten years for over a century. These catalogues became both increasingly sophisticated in their classification systems and more detailed, giving even book prices in some cases. It was at this time that some publishers were appending notices at the end of their publications listing other books they had for sale, indicating a growing awareness of the market. By the late 17th century, there were the beginnings of a booksellers’ guild in existence in Kyoto, but it was not recognized by the authorities until 1716. This was followed by the acknowledgement of similar guilds in Osaka in 1723 and Edo in 1725; the only provincial guild was that of Nagoya, which was recognized in 1798. The shogunal government was not enthusiastic about the establishment of trade guilds, but perceived them to be a necessary evil in order to limit the scope for copyright disputes. Until the late 19th century, copyright lay with publishers, not with authors, and the most common cause of legal disputes was copyright infringement. The establishment of guilds reduced the number of cases within any one publishing centre, but did not stop disputes between publishers in different cities: thus, when an Osaka publisher put out a collected edition of Tang poetry in 1751, it was found that this replicated a book produced by an Edo publisher, and so he lost not only the copies he had printed but also his printing blocks. The guilds did not prevent such cases occurring, but they did provide a mechanism for resolving inter-city disputes like this. The guilds served one other important function as well, and that was the delegated role of censor.
A book- and printseller’s premises in the Edo period, illustrated in the first volume of Edo meisho zue (‘The Famous Places of Edo’, 1834–6): the project was initiated by Saitō Nagaaki and illustrated by Hasegawa Settan. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (16114.b.1)
Until the Edo period, censorship had been virtually unknown in Japan; there were none of the book burnings or systems of control found in earlier ages in China. There were, it is true, two or three cases of books causing offence in Japan before 1600, but these were MSS, and it is not until the Edo period that printed books began to come under scrutiny. What first prompted this scrutiny was not the development of a publishing industry in Japan, but the importation of Chinese books written by Matteo Ricci and other European missionaries in China. By this time Christianity had been proscribed in Japan, but among the imported books was a book by Ricci refuting Buddhism and justifying Christianity, as well as other books that had nothing to do with Christianity except that they were written by missionaries and concerned Europe, such as a study of European irrigation. In 1630, an edict was issued banning 32 named books of this sort, and the list was later extended. By the end of the century, a bureau was in operation in Nagasaki to check the cargoes of all incoming Chinese ships to make sure that they were not carrying any of the proscribed books or similar works. The efficiency of this bureau kept offending books out of the official trade, but could not prevent smuggling; the detailed bureaucratic records now give a good idea of what books were legally imported to Japan and when. This system of import censorship remained rigidly in force until the 1720s when the Shogun Yoshimune, who was a man of scientific curiosity, relaxed the ban to permit books written by Jesuits to enter Japan so long as they were not about Christianity, so that their writings on astronomy could be of benefit to Japanese scholars.
There was no censorship legislation aimed at domestically published books in the first half of the 17th century, but that does not mean that no censorship was exercised. It is clear from a number of book bannings that the two taboo subjects were Christianity and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98), the hegemon who had preceded Tokugawa Ieyasu and whose heirs were considered by some to have been cheated by Ieyasu. In 1657 in Kyoto and in 1673 in Edo, the authorities at last took cognizance of the rising tide of publications, and of the possibility that some might have undesirable contents, by issuing the first censorship edicts. These were vaguely worded, prohibiting books that depicted the Shogun and the samurai class (whether favourably or not) and books that dealt with matters ‘unusual’, meaning scandals and sensational events; nothing was said about policing. By 1682, public notice boards were warning people against handling ‘unsound’ books, but this did nothing to stem the tide, for news-sheets were gaining in popularity, especially after the sensational case in 1703 of the 47 samurai who avenged their master by slaughtering his high-ranking aggressor and were then forced to commit ritual suicide. An Osaka publisher put out a book on these events in 1719, fully aware that punishment would follow, but convinced that if he could sell half his copies good money could be made; he and the author had to spend some time under house arrest as a result, but the book reached the public and MS copies were made to satisfy continuing demand.
It was finally in the 1720s that legislation was issued laying down the guidelines that were to govern censorship for the remainder of the Edo period. In future, all publications were to carry the real names of the author and publisher in the colophon, and the guilds were to be responsible for ensuring that publications by members did not contravene the law. Since the guilds now enjoyed monopolistic publishing privileges recognized by the authorities, they had little choice but to cooperate. Needless to say, these new arrangements did not prevent daring publishers from publishing books without colophons, and erotic books in particular took this strategy, even sometimes ridiculing the law by appending lewd parodic colophons. The major difficulty for the guilds, however, lay in understanding just what constituted ‘undesirable’ books; for the most part they seem to have erred on the side of caution, but in the 1790s and the 1830s there were crackdowns that caught the guilds unawares and led to punishments not only for the publishers and authors but also for the guild officials responsible.
The censorship system was never effectively policed and many publications slipped under the net, but the timidity of the guilds ensured that few risks were taken with books that went through the normal procedures. On the other hand, some publishers became adept at finding ways around the law, by omitting colophons altogether or resorting to MS publication, for selling books remained their business.
From the early decades of the 17th century, publishers had been striving to make their books more attractive and accessible to readers. One practice that soon became ubiquitous was the inclusion of small kana glosses alongside characters to indicate the pronunciation; this initially constituted a service to readers with a limited grasp of characters, but it later became a means for playful or ironic use of the glosses to subvert the sense of the characters. Similarly ubiquitous was the use of illustrations, which formed an indispensable part of all literary works; some authors produced their own illustrations, some made sketches in their MSS to indicate to the artist the kind of illustration required, and others still teamed up with famous artists such as Utamaro (1759–1806) and Hokusai (1760–1849), to produce books in demand both for the text and for the illustrations. Almost all ukiyoe (woodblock print) artists undertook book illustration, and so highly was their work regarded that from the middle of the 17th century publishers were already producing ehon, books consisting solely or almost entirely of illustrations. By the end of the 18th century the development of colour printing made it possible to print exquisite books like Utamaro’s Ehon mushierami (Picture Book of a Selection of Insects, 1788) in which close observation made possible by imported microscopes was married with Utamaro’s skills as a graphic artist. In the 19th century, artists like Hokusai were as busy with book illustration as they were with single-sheet prints, and Hokusai’s illustrations for the historical novels of Kyokutei Bakin were as successful as his own picture books, such as his famous manga books.
In the 17th century, books were generally expensive and sales of more than 2,000 indicated a bestselling book. The catalogues produced by the booksellers’ guilds in 1681, 1696, and 1709 all provide prices; and although these were subject to variation depending upon the quality of the paper and the covers, they provide a glimpse of the relative cost of books at the end of the century. The Ise monogatari, one of the most popular works of classical literature, was usually published with illustrations in two volumes, and these rarely cost more than 2 monme; by comparison, the normal daily wage of day-labourers at this time was 1.5 monme, so books were becoming more affordable. In the course of the 18th century, some kinds of fiction were being produced in small illustrated booklets with poor calligraphy, and these sold for very low prices. Multi-volume works of fiction, with better calligraphy and finer illustrations, inevitably cost more, but again the price was lower for copies printed on paper of poorer quality.
Readers did not necessarily have to purchase books, however. Diaries, letters, and notations in surviving copies attest to the widespread practice of borrowing books from neighbours. This was particularly common in rural communities or in cities far from Edo or Kyoto where the supply of books could not be relied upon until the 19th century. It was also common for borrowers to make copies by hand of books they did not own, or to hire an amanuensis to do so, and this practice survived until the late 19th century.
A particularly important means of gaining access to books, almost everywhere in Japan, was the circulating library, or kashihon’ya. Unlike their European counterparts, these generally consisted of men carrying their stocks around on their backs, visiting their regular customers and collecting payment in arrears. They were definitely operating in Kyoto and Edo by the late 17th century, and it is clear that by the late 18th century they were working in most castle towns throughout Japan and in hot-spring resorts and similar places of leisure. Some of them were independent businesses specializing in book lending, but others were an arm of bookselling firms seeking to extend their customer base by taking books for sale or rent into the rural environs of big cities. For the most part their stock was dominated by current fiction, but they also carried illicit MSS, travel guides, and other non-fiction. The largest of them all, Dais in Nagoya (founded in 1767), had a stock of 20,000 books with sometimes as many as six copies of a single title in the case of illicit MSS; unusually, Daisō took the form of a shop rather than a delivery service.
Before the Edo period, Japan had made strenuous efforts at various times to maintain the flow of books from the mainland—mostly China, but also Korea. By the early 17th century, the quantity of Chinese works that had already been transmitted to Japan was huge, ranging from Buddhist and Confucian texts to Tang poetry, neo-Confucian texts of the Song dynasty, and the colloquial fiction of the Ming dynasty. This flow of books did not cease in the Edo period, even though there were no direct diplomatic relations between the shogunate and the rulers of the Qing dynasty that assumed power in China in 1644. The trade was conducted at Nagasaki, the only port open to foreign ships, at the initiative of Chinese merchants, and all imports were carefully examined and registered by shogunal officials before being offered for sale. The number of ships varied from year to year, reaching a peak of 193 in 1688, and not all of them carried books.
In the middle of the 19th century, after China’s humiliation in the first Opium War (1840–42), imports from China assumed a new importance as Japan sought to avoid China’s fate. Particularly important were two works by Wei Yuan on the threats that the Western barbarians posed: they were not only imported, for in the 1850s countless Japanese editions, at first in the original Chinese and then in Japanese translation, were published. These provided information about the Western nations who were encroaching ever more frequently on East Asian waters and about how they might be repulsed—issues which were of prime importance following the arrival in Japan of ships from America and Russia in the summer of 1853.
Of increasing significance, too, were the Dutch books imported into Japan. By the middle of the 17th century, the Dutch were the only Europeans remaining in Japan, the Portuguese and Spanish having been expelled and the English having withdrawn. The Dutch were confined to the man-made island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour, and were subject to more stringent controls than the Chinese. Knowledge of Dutch was largely limited, in the 17th century, to the official interpreters, who seem to have had little intellectual curiosity. Nevertheless, it was in that century that the flow of books from Holland to Japan began. As early as 1650, the shogunal government had placed an order with the Dutchmen for a book on dissection, and over the succeeding decades there are records of other books being presented to the shogun, including Rembert Dodoens’s herbal in the 1618 Dutch edition and a zoological treatise. In the 18th century, interest in Dutch books gradually spread, to some extent with shogunal encouragement, and a school of learning known as Rangaku (Dutch studies) began to make increasing contributions to Japanese intellectual life.
In 1771 Sugita Genpaku, a doctor with an interest in Western science, was shown an imported copy of a Dutch edition of J. A. Kulmus’s Anatomical Tables and, although he could not read the text, he was impressed by the detailed illustrations. With a group of like-minded scholars, he proceeded to carry out a dissection to test their accuracy, and having concluded that Chinese and Japanese conceptions of the workings of the body were not empirically based like those of Kulmus, he enlisted the help of Maeno Ryōtaku (1723–1803) and others to produce a translation. This was completed in 1774 and published under the title Kaitai shinsho (New Book of Anatomy). This book, of which a copy was tactfully presented to the shogun, legitimized Dutch studies and stimulated interest in Dutch books. (It should be remembered, however, that many of these Dutch books were, like the Kulmus, in fact Dutch translations of books published first in other languages.) Thereafter, the Dutchmen were requested to bring more medical and scientific books, and in the 19th century books on military science as well. In this way, a thin but steady stream of imports introduced empirical science to Japan and familiarized Japanese with European science and medicine well before the so-called opening of Japan in 1854.
From the 1850s onwards, it became easier to acquire Western books as foreigners began to settle and trade in the treaty ports of Yokohama and Kobe. However, the numbers of Japanese with a reading knowledge of any European language other than Dutch was insignificant, and it was only in the late 1870s that proficiency in English, French, German, and Russian grew to the point that it was worthwhile for the Maruzen bookshop in Tokyo to stock some foreign titles.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 had no immediate effect on print and publication except in the area of censorship, for the first efforts were made in that year to initiate a rigorous system of pre-publication censorship. A new word, kankyo (government permission), was introduced to make it clear that the government, rather than the guilds, was now to determine permission to publish. Already in that year news magazines had vigorously opposed the new government—most of them had been banned and closed down before the end of the year. As the government’s authoritarian tendencies became clearer in the 1870s and opposition became more strident, the regulations became ever more severe until in 1875 new laws were drawn up on the French model, which held newspaper editors criminally responsible for the contents of their newspapers and made it impossible to publish books deemed to be damaging to public peace or morals. In the same year, the notorious Libel Law made it an offence to publish matters that reflected badly on members of the government, even if they happened to be true.
The technology of commercial print continued to be dominated by woodblock printing up to the 1880s. Metallic movable type had been reintroduced in the 1850s and was favoured for translations of Western books and for new works of fiction, but in the 1880s it became the dominant technology, except for Buddhist sutras, which continued to be printed with woodblocks. Many of the publishers of the Edo period proved unable to cope with the shift in technology and closed their doors in the 1880s, but some, like Murakami Kanbei of Kyoto, weathered the storm and survive to this day.
The government reversed the policy of the Tokugawa shoguns and adopted a public presence in the world of print by launching an official gazette, the Dajōkan nisshi, in 1868 to make public the texts of government decrees. At first this was printed with woodblocks, but the government then established in the Ministry of Works an office for the casting of type for the use of the agencies of central and local government and the Imperial University (founded in 1877). Following the government’s lead, others founded newspapers, too; the first daily was Kankyo Yokohama Shinbun (Government-Permitted Yokohama Newspaper), which was founded in 1870 and switched from woodblocks to typography in 1873.
Circulating libraries continued to flourish in the Meiji period and continued to offer customers the fiction of the early 19th century; some, however, began to advertise newspapers, textbooks, and even books in English on scientific or professional subjects with a view to attracting students at the new educational institutions. Japanese who travelled to the West in the 1860s reported on the provision of public libraries which were free at the point of access; from the desire to emulate Western practices sprang Japan’s first public library, which was established by the ministry of education in 1872. Although this institution started charging fees in 1885, public libraries were founded throughout Japan in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, circulating libraries survived by offering their customers fiction, and later manga (comics), for the public libraries disdained to stock these categories of book.
The cover of an 1897 issue of the journal Kokumin no tomo (The Nation’s Friend). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Per. Jap. E. 39, cover)
The first decades of the Meiji period saw the emergence of a flood of periodicals, including women’s literary journals such as Jogaku zasshi (Journal of Women’s Learning, 1885–1904) and influential political magazines such as Kokumin no tomo (The Nation’s Friend, 1887–98). Other new forms of publication were translations of Western writings on law and medicine and translations of Western literature, including the novels of Disraeli and Sir Walter Scott. At the same time, however, the literature of the Edo period had not been forgotten: many works were frequently reprinted typographically, albeit inevitably without the illustrations, testifying to their lasting appeal.
Towards the end of the 1880s, new publishing firms began to replace the older businesses that had failed to adapt to the new world of typography, steam power, and modern business methods. One of these new firms was Hakubunkan (1887–1947), which established a presence with a succession of strikingly new magazines and was soon the leading publishing house in Japan. The first of these magazines was Nihon taika ronshû (Essays by Leading Japanese), founded in 1887, in which the issues discussed ranged from literature to medicine and hygiene. In 1894, upon the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Hakubunkan produced the first photo magazine, Nisshin sensō jikki (True Record of the Sino-Japanese War), and the following year launched Taiyō (Sun), a bestselling general magazine. The firm was also making its mark with major publishing projects, such as an encyclopaedia in 1889 and from 1893 Teikoku Bunko (Library of the Empire), a series of 100 volumes containing the major literary works of the Edo period presented without their illustrations as if they conformed to the conventions for current novels.
By the late 19th century, Japanese publishing had caught up technologically with Europe and North America, and the reading public’s appetite for new journals was unabated. A number of these have enjoyed remarkable longevity, such as Chūō Kōron, (The Central Review), which had its origins in a temperance magazine founded in 1887. In 1899, its name was changed and it became a serious journal containing an offering of literature and comment. It took a liberal stance, and in 1944 was suspended at army insistence following the publication of an article that was judged damaging to the war effort; it resumed publication in 1946. Another was Bungei Shunjū (Literary Times), founded by the prominent writer Kikuchi Hiroshi in 1923 and still influential today; it supports the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious prize for works of fiction in Japan. There were also important mass-market magazines aimed at women readers, such as Katei no tomo (The Family’s Friend, from 1903) and Shufu no tomo (The Housewife’s Friend, from 1917).
In the 1930s, censorship became ever more severe: a left-wing writer, Kobayashi Takiji, was brutally murdered by the police, and all left-wing journals were forced to cease publishing. Under the US occupation, which lasted from 1945 to 1952, wartime censorship controls came to an end, though criticism of the Occupation authorities was not permitted in public media, and left-wingers again came under pressure during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the more liberal atmosphere encouraged a resurgence, and new magazines were launched with information about Western fashions or ways of life.
Two of the leading publishers in Japan today are Kōdansha and Shōgakukan. Kōdansha was founded in 1909 and continues to dominate the Japanese publishing world, although in 2002 it recorded an overall loss for the first time since 1945. Today, it is known for a clutch of serious magazines as well as for its large stable of manga magazines. Kōdansha International publishes books in English and other languages on Japanese culture and society, often translated from Japanese originals. Shōgakukan is also active as a publisher of manga and, together with a subsidiary, owns Viz Media, which publishes, among other things, English versions of Japanese manga. Manga remain a prominent feature of popular culture, and have shrugged off accusations that they are violent, sexist, and racist; the rise of the Japanese animation film, or anime, has generated new tie-ins for manga publishers.
In spite of the popularity of manga, they are by no means all there is to Japanese publishing today. Every bookshop stocks large numbers of the small and modestly priced paperbacks known as bunkobon, which provide easy access to Japanese literature old and new, to foreign literature in translation, to books on contemporary issues, and so on. Bunkobon were first introduced to the reading public in 1927 when Iwanami Shoten launched their series. Iwanami, which was founded in 1913, is now a respected academic publisher responsible for a number of academic journals; the firm has issued the standard editions of many works of classical Japanese literature and has published several editions of the complete works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), one of the leading novelists of modern Japan.
There is much talk of a crisis in Japanese publishing and of a move away from print—the latter is seen to be behind the decreasing circulation figures of daily newspapers. It is also true that there has been a decline in sales of new books and in the number of bookshops (though there are still more than 8,000). On the other hand, the number of new titles published each year has continued to rise (74,000 in 2002), and when a translation of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was published in Japan, the first printing was of 2.3 million copies. This may suggest that Japanese publishing follows global trends, but the globalization of Japanese books still has a long way to go. It may be easier to buy them now in London or Seoul, but while many foreign books are published in Japanese translation, very few Japanese books are translated into other languages, except a handful of literary works into European languages and some academic or political books into Korean or Chinese.
M. E. Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (2006)
J. Hillier, The Art of the Japanese Book (1988)
P. F. Kornicki, The Book in Japan (1998)
—— ‘Block-Printing in Seventeenth-Century Japan: Evidence from a Newly Discovered Medical Text’, in Print Areas: Book History in India, ed. A. Gupta and S. Chakravorty (2004)
—— ‘Manuscript, not Print: Scribal Culture in the Edo Period’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 32 (2006), 23–52
E. May, Die Kommerzialisierung der japanischen Literatur in der späten Edo-Zeit (1983)
R. Mitchell, Censorship in Imperial Japan (1983)
G. Richter 1997, ‘Entrepreneurship and Culture: the Hakubunkan Publishing Empire in Meiji Japan’, in New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, ed. H. Hardacre and A. L. Kern (1997)
H. Smith, ‘The History of the Book in Edo and Paris’, in Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era, ed. J. McLain et al. (1994)
K. Yamashita, Japanese Maps of the Edo Period (1998)
