FINAL FALL SEMESTER HISTORY OF THE BOOK SEMINAR:
The Disorder of Books: Print Culture and Popular History in Tokugawa, Japan.
Thomas Keirstead--IUB Departments of History and East Asian Languages and Culture.
Lilly Library Lounge, 4PM
Monday, December 2, 2002.
ABSTRACT
Once a month, from the spring of 1823 through the winter of 1824, a group of writers, book aficionados, and others "addicted to curiosity" assembled in Edo (as Tokyo was then called) to show off the rarities they had collected. The record of these meetings, published in 1832, is a jumble of old documents, rubbings of inscriptions and seals, antique maps, samples of calligraphy and painting, descriptions of interesting birds, tools, rocks, weapons, and costumes. Although anything that could be considered curious, whether ancient or modern, foreign or domestic, was grist for the mill, materials that had a connection to the nation's past seem to have been especially valued.
Miscellanies such as this one (called, appropriately, Tanki manroku, or Random Record of the Society of Those Addicted to Curiosity) were a fairly common product of the publishing industry in the late Tokugawa period. Unlike the encyclopedias of the seventeenth century (which were among the mainstays of the early growth of the book trade in Japan), these collections made little attempt to be systematic or comprehensive. For the most part, the curious nature of the objects and anecdotes recollected seems to have been regarded as sufficient recommendation. Sometimes, as the preface to one collection suggests, they pretended to instruct readers about the wider world. Another collection, intriguingly, offered itself as a way to cope with the information explosion of recent times, which, as "books pile up without number," had made it impossible for individuals to keep pace. Writers, the compiler of this collection suggested, might use the work as a crib to add detail and substance to their books.
Edo's huge and increasingly literate population created opportunities to which booksellers and authors responded. This paper looks at the information explosion of late Tokugawa Japan and the effects it had on the consumption of history. The curiosity on display in the miscellanies became the model for a new way readers might relate to the past. Writing for a popular audience, concerned to find ways to excite their readers' curiosity, authors offered new ways to experience the past. History, hitherto conceived primarily as a mirror for princes, became instead a source of interest: something one might unexpectedly unearth in old objects or encounter in strange tales.
BIO
Thomas Keirstead has been Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of History at Indiana University, Bloomington since 2001, having taught previously at McGill University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is author of The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan (Princeton, 1992) and is engaged in writing another book-length study, Inventing Medieval Japan.
Posted December 02, 2002