Book review: Japan in Print
Jan. 13th, 2011 10:36![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Berry, Mary Elizabeth. Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2006.
Main Argument: "The 'library of public information' that took shape after 1600 signifies, for me, a quiet revolution in knowledge--one separating the early modern period from all pervious time. In empirically grounded accounts of contemporary, often mundane experience, investigators created from fissured parts an integrally conceived 'Japan.'" (209)
Historiographical Engagement: Word around the department is that Prof. Berry, who is now the head of our department, began working on this book because she couldn't get the institutional go-ahead to go to Japan for research on another topic, with the consequence that it is almost entirely based off of primary source research from materials in the collections of Berkeley's C.V. Starr East Asian Library.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples After a short introductory chapter written in the second person (yes!) meant to convey the sheer diversity of texts that constitute what Berry calls "the library of public information," i.e. the body of texts--books, but also maps, atlases, guidebooks, rosters, dictionaries, calendars, almanacs, diaries, and much more--that were available to people in the early modern (Edo) period and that share across their diversity certain habits of mind--the knowability of the world through observation, the order of those observations in taxonomic systems, and the entitlement of readers in their anonymous diversity to know all of that information, through print. These texts constituted and established a certain common body of knowledge that gave rise to a certain common culture that bound society and made it knowable to itself.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Despite the fact that cartography is virtually a universal human predilection, the cartographic record has many gaps across time and within cultures; one such gap occurs in the history of Japan from the classical to the early modern eras. Very few medieval maps survive, and those that do are persistently, obstinately local in their scope and interpretation. By comparison among classical, medieval, and early modern maps, Berry argues that the abrupt flowering of mapmaking after 1600 is another sign that after the wars of reunification it had become possible again to think of the nation as a unit, and moreover that certain idioms or codes of thinking were sufficiently generalized that they could be represented in maps, which could thus in turn be understood by a national audience.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples By examining the scores of rosters of the personnel, both bureaucratic and aristocratic, of the people who made up the Tokugawa administration and which were printed in job lots throughout the entire early modern period, Berry argues that the regime propounded a bifurcated conception of rule. On the one hand, the daimyo and the shogun succeeded to and carried out their ritual roles by right of blood--they were the descendants of those who had joined in Ieyasu's peace settlement, and their responsibility was to carry out the roles of daimyo and shogun. On the other hand, officers of the shogunate, who were drawn both from the ranks of the samurai and increasingly as time wore on from the ranks of commoners, appeared in the lists by virtue not of their birth (for there were always more samurai than jobs) but by merit--and in the city and professional directories samurai and commoners were entirely mixed. The rosters and directories portray the regime as it was--"a house, a lordship, a military command, a metropolitan administration, and a statist institution" (126). At the same time, however, the scope of the regime was national, even though it remains hard to characterize pithily; as Berry notes, "the roster's intermixture in a rank order of apparently disparate offices warns against any modernist conception of this early modern regime" (126).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Guides to cities written in the early modern period, particularly Edo and Kyoto, offer multiple overlapping perspectives on them, offering the knowledge and the experience to turn outsiders and newcomers into insiders and old hands. The guides "explore a plural society best captured by overlapping inventories, not a totalistic one unlocked by a master code" (142)--the city can never be completely grasped, and the guides are constantly being revised and reissued, as the city and its inhabitants change simultaneously. in the guides, however, both market and ritual transactions are presented as part and parcel of city life, both matters of equally free choice for all within the guides' ambit--for, in other words, just about everyone. In this freedom is the acknowledgment of the increasing market power of the non-samurai classes, who cheerfully defied sumptuary regulations as samurai on stipends grew increasingly impoverished. The early modern economy was bounded by an internal consensus and complicity between merchants and the regime, but within those bounds it was wildly prosperous for most of the period.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples Texts such as walking guides to Kyoto and the popular encyclopedias widely available in the early modern period construct and portray a national collectivity--"our people"--that is bounded by geography and constituted by a common, mutual body of knowledge and knowledge of practices--together, "our country": "The social controls of the status order mutate here into the cultural disciplines of education. This ambivalent form of liberation seems characteristically modern, except that the statist component of knowledge remained comparatively small" (208).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples The early modern nation of Nihon that was reflected and constituted in the library of public information was, though indisputably not fully modern, indisputably a nation in that it conjoined a certain territory to a certain state and a certain culture; although the modern Meiji nation was emphatically not the same as the early modern Tokugawa nation, the transformation that enabled the former was predicated on the existence of the latter, and in particular the creation through print culture, among other media, of a public that exceeded the state and defied the prescribed limits of the Tokugawa status system. To deny nationhood to early modern Nihon is to deny it the coherency that it manifests through excess, the coherency that makes its texts meaningful and that animated those texts in the first place.
Critical assessment: This is a bravura work of sheer research and interpretive tenacity, as well as brilliance, and in a way it seems to me a natural progression from Prof. Berry's earlier work on Hideyoshi and on the culture of the Onin Wars in Kyoto, both of which form the backdrop and essential prerequisite for what we might call the Tokugawa settlement. It's also beautifully, marvelously written, trenchant and transparent and a brilliantly constructed narrative. As well as a meditation on early modern Japan, the book is also an interesting examination of the early modern in general, and a rebuke to the persistent conflation of modernity with the formation of nations. Certainly modern nations are different from premodern nations, but nations are not exclusively modern formations (nor are the elements of modernity unique to the modern period). Anyway, it's a fascinating, excellent book, with implications well beyond Japan.
Further reading: Harry Harootunian, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan; Karen M. Gerhart, "Visions of the Dead"
Meta notes: Prof. Berry's work is the best of all advertisements for Berkeley's East Asian Library and its collections; it's also in some ways a loving tribute to her late husband, Dr. Donald Shively, whose research focused on popular culture in the Edo period.
Main Argument: "The 'library of public information' that took shape after 1600 signifies, for me, a quiet revolution in knowledge--one separating the early modern period from all pervious time. In empirically grounded accounts of contemporary, often mundane experience, investigators created from fissured parts an integrally conceived 'Japan.'" (209)
Historiographical Engagement: Word around the department is that Prof. Berry, who is now the head of our department, began working on this book because she couldn't get the institutional go-ahead to go to Japan for research on another topic, with the consequence that it is almost entirely based off of primary source research from materials in the collections of Berkeley's C.V. Starr East Asian Library.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples After a short introductory chapter written in the second person (yes!) meant to convey the sheer diversity of texts that constitute what Berry calls "the library of public information," i.e. the body of texts--books, but also maps, atlases, guidebooks, rosters, dictionaries, calendars, almanacs, diaries, and much more--that were available to people in the early modern (Edo) period and that share across their diversity certain habits of mind--the knowability of the world through observation, the order of those observations in taxonomic systems, and the entitlement of readers in their anonymous diversity to know all of that information, through print. These texts constituted and established a certain common body of knowledge that gave rise to a certain common culture that bound society and made it knowable to itself.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Despite the fact that cartography is virtually a universal human predilection, the cartographic record has many gaps across time and within cultures; one such gap occurs in the history of Japan from the classical to the early modern eras. Very few medieval maps survive, and those that do are persistently, obstinately local in their scope and interpretation. By comparison among classical, medieval, and early modern maps, Berry argues that the abrupt flowering of mapmaking after 1600 is another sign that after the wars of reunification it had become possible again to think of the nation as a unit, and moreover that certain idioms or codes of thinking were sufficiently generalized that they could be represented in maps, which could thus in turn be understood by a national audience.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples By examining the scores of rosters of the personnel, both bureaucratic and aristocratic, of the people who made up the Tokugawa administration and which were printed in job lots throughout the entire early modern period, Berry argues that the regime propounded a bifurcated conception of rule. On the one hand, the daimyo and the shogun succeeded to and carried out their ritual roles by right of blood--they were the descendants of those who had joined in Ieyasu's peace settlement, and their responsibility was to carry out the roles of daimyo and shogun. On the other hand, officers of the shogunate, who were drawn both from the ranks of the samurai and increasingly as time wore on from the ranks of commoners, appeared in the lists by virtue not of their birth (for there were always more samurai than jobs) but by merit--and in the city and professional directories samurai and commoners were entirely mixed. The rosters and directories portray the regime as it was--"a house, a lordship, a military command, a metropolitan administration, and a statist institution" (126). At the same time, however, the scope of the regime was national, even though it remains hard to characterize pithily; as Berry notes, "the roster's intermixture in a rank order of apparently disparate offices warns against any modernist conception of this early modern regime" (126).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Guides to cities written in the early modern period, particularly Edo and Kyoto, offer multiple overlapping perspectives on them, offering the knowledge and the experience to turn outsiders and newcomers into insiders and old hands. The guides "explore a plural society best captured by overlapping inventories, not a totalistic one unlocked by a master code" (142)--the city can never be completely grasped, and the guides are constantly being revised and reissued, as the city and its inhabitants change simultaneously. in the guides, however, both market and ritual transactions are presented as part and parcel of city life, both matters of equally free choice for all within the guides' ambit--for, in other words, just about everyone. In this freedom is the acknowledgment of the increasing market power of the non-samurai classes, who cheerfully defied sumptuary regulations as samurai on stipends grew increasingly impoverished. The early modern economy was bounded by an internal consensus and complicity between merchants and the regime, but within those bounds it was wildly prosperous for most of the period.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples Texts such as walking guides to Kyoto and the popular encyclopedias widely available in the early modern period construct and portray a national collectivity--"our people"--that is bounded by geography and constituted by a common, mutual body of knowledge and knowledge of practices--together, "our country": "The social controls of the status order mutate here into the cultural disciplines of education. This ambivalent form of liberation seems characteristically modern, except that the statist component of knowledge remained comparatively small" (208).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples The early modern nation of Nihon that was reflected and constituted in the library of public information was, though indisputably not fully modern, indisputably a nation in that it conjoined a certain territory to a certain state and a certain culture; although the modern Meiji nation was emphatically not the same as the early modern Tokugawa nation, the transformation that enabled the former was predicated on the existence of the latter, and in particular the creation through print culture, among other media, of a public that exceeded the state and defied the prescribed limits of the Tokugawa status system. To deny nationhood to early modern Nihon is to deny it the coherency that it manifests through excess, the coherency that makes its texts meaningful and that animated those texts in the first place.
Critical assessment: This is a bravura work of sheer research and interpretive tenacity, as well as brilliance, and in a way it seems to me a natural progression from Prof. Berry's earlier work on Hideyoshi and on the culture of the Onin Wars in Kyoto, both of which form the backdrop and essential prerequisite for what we might call the Tokugawa settlement. It's also beautifully, marvelously written, trenchant and transparent and a brilliantly constructed narrative. As well as a meditation on early modern Japan, the book is also an interesting examination of the early modern in general, and a rebuke to the persistent conflation of modernity with the formation of nations. Certainly modern nations are different from premodern nations, but nations are not exclusively modern formations (nor are the elements of modernity unique to the modern period). Anyway, it's a fascinating, excellent book, with implications well beyond Japan.
Further reading: Harry Harootunian, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan; Karen M. Gerhart, "Visions of the Dead"
Meta notes: Prof. Berry's work is the best of all advertisements for Berkeley's East Asian Library and its collections; it's also in some ways a loving tribute to her late husband, Dr. Donald Shively, whose research focused on popular culture in the Edo period.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-13 19:33 (UTC)You review so many books that I really would like to ILL (or just run off to Berkeley to read), but this one I especially need. Thanks for the review!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-01-13 21:41 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-29 00:07 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-29 00:22 (UTC)I think the tranche methodology that Foster uses is actually quite effective, though it could have used a bit more of a through-narrative (but I think it's inevitable that such will be said about any tranche methodology). Berry was undoubtedly looking at some of the same sources, but Foster was reading for details, whereas for Berry the sheer volume and thingness of the sources is the main point. And she has the luxury of tenure, which allows her to be stylistically unusual. But yes, Berry is brilliant. And she has a real gift for engaging with sources on their own terms as well as on hers at the same time. And all this being said, yes, unequivocally, Foster's book could have been a better conversion from his dissertation.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-29 00:34 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-29 00:37 (UTC)I think the tranche method can be really apt--Joan Piggot's book on ancient Japan in particular is a really great success with it--or really dangerous. I'm thinking of using it for my dissertation, I admit, which leaves me sensitized. I should go back over Foster.
because I can't edit comments
Date: 2011-03-29 00:35 (UTC)Re: because I can't edit comments
Date: 2011-04-01 20:01 (UTC)