Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern PeriodUniversity of California Press, 16 févr. 2006 - 325 pages A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous time. After 1600, self-appointed investigators used the model of the land and cartographic surveys of the newly unified state to observe and order subjects such as agronomy, medicine, gastronomy, commerce, travel, and entertainment. They subsequently circulated their findings through a variety of commercially printed texts: maps, gazetteers, family encyclopedias, urban directories, travel guides, official personnel rosters, and instruction manuals for everything from farming to lovemaking. In this original and gracefully written book, Mary Elizabeth Berry considers the social processes that drove the information explosion of the 1600s. Inviting readers to examine the contours and meanings of this transformation, Berry provides a fascinating account of the conversion of the public from an object of state surveillance into a subject of self-knowledge. Japan in Print shows how, as investigators collected and disseminated richly diverse data, they came to presume in their audience a standard of cultural literacy that changed anonymous consumers into an “us” bound by common frames of reference. This shared space of knowledge made society visible to itself and in the process subverted notions of status hierarchy. Berry demonstrates that the new public texts projected a national collectivity characterized by universal access to markets, mobility, sociability, and self-fashioning. |
Table des matières
1 A Traveling Clerk Goes to the Bookstores | 1 |
2 The Library of Public Information | 13 |
3 Maps Are Strange | 54 |
4 Blood Right and Merit | 104 |
5 The Freedom of the City | 139 |
6 Cultural Custody Cultural Literacy | 185 |
7 Nation | 209 |
notes | 253 |
| 291 | |
| 309 | |
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administrative appear audience authority Berkeley Brocade capital cartographic castle century Chinese classical collective common compiler concerning continued cultural daimyo detail discussion district domain early modern East Asian Ekiken entries example experience famous figure geography governance Hence houses icons identified imperial important individual institutions interest Japan Japanese knowledge Kyoto labels land landscape learning lines lists lords major mapmaking maps master material medieval military Mirrors names Nihon notes official organization particular past period physical places political popular practice Press printed productivity provinces publishing readers reference regime remained ritual rosters rule Saikaku samurai shogunal social society sources space status story street surveys temple texts things tion titles Tokugawa Tokyo towns trade units University University of California urban village ward