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2 results

  • 15 - Flows of People and Things in Early Modern Japan

  • from Part III - Social Practices and Cultures of Early Modern Japan
  • Edited by David L. Howell, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of Japan
    Published online:
    15 January 2024
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023, pp 507-536

  • Summary

    Despite the restrictions that had been imposed on domestic travel since the early seventeenth century – which included checkpoints and the need for travel permits – in early modern Japan people traveled, merchandise moved, and ideas circulated. Commercial publishers played a key role in promoting the flows of people and things, not only with guidebooks and travel itineraries, as one would expect, but also in unusual places, such as board games and parodies of sumo rankings. Their output illuminates the democratization of knowledge and the creation of an interconnected archipelago in early modern Japan. More broadly, it reflects the global expansion of the information industry and the rise of tourism in the nineteenth century, linking Tokugawa Japan to dynamics at play the world over.

  • 53 - The birth of kokkeibon (comic novellas)

  • from Part IV - The Edo period (1600–1867)
  • Edited by Haruo Shirane, Columbia University, New York, Tomi Suzuki, Columbia University, New York, David Lurie, Columbia University, New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature
    Published online:
    05 January 2016
    Print publication:
    17 December 2015, pp 523-531

  • Summary

    In the context of premodern Japan, "printing" means woodblock printing, or xylography, a technology that originated in China in the seventh century. Woodblock printing was the norm throughout the Edo period, but in the second half of the sixteenth century typography reached Japan from two very different sources and enjoyed several decades of success. The simplicity of xylography made it possible for haikai enthusiasts to have their poems printed privately and thus the poems of many local groups in the provinces, and in particular of many women poets, have been preserved in print. Commercial publishing began in Kyoto in the early years of the seventeenth century and was dominated at least until the end of the century. By the 1660s the book trade had established itself in the three main cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, although for the seventeenth century many of the booksellers of Osaka and Edo were little more than branches or agents of Kyoto firms.