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Book review: Japan in Print
Jan. 13th, 2011 10:36Bibliographic 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)
( Print, nation, and the early modern )
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)
( Print, nation, and the early modern )
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.