Written Texts--Visual Texts: Woodblock-Printed Media in Early Modern Japan (review)

Reading this lavishly illustrated volume on the rich and varied history of early modern visual and print culture, one is struck by how seldom continental European scholarship on Japan finds its way into the mainstream of the English-language Japanese-studies literature. This is most regrettable, especially for students of the pre- and early modern periods, for European "japanologists" seem to devote relatively more scholarly energy to the pre-Meiji period than do their counterparts in the United States. It is a rare treat to see a collection of thirteen essays devoted entirely to early modern cultural history, and both the editors and publisher of the present volume have done a great service by bringing the essays in Written Texts-Visual Texts to an English-reading audience.

The volume consists mostly of translations of essays published in German by the same editors a decade ago as Buch und Bild als gesellschaftliche Kommunikationsmittel in Japan einst und jetzt (Vienna: Literas, 1995). Some of the 1995 pieces have been omitted and several new ones added for this edition. Like most essay collections, the quality of the contributions varies, as do their interpretive and methodological frameworks, but in general, Written Texts-Visual Texts succeeds in enriching our understanding of the integration of text and image in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods (for reasons they do not adequately explain, the editors define "early modern" as the period between 1770 and 1880).

The first four chapters in the book, which are among the collection's most substantial, fall under the somewhat vague heading "Modes of Reading Written and Visual Texts." Ekkehard May, who has published pioneering work in German on Tokugawa print culture, gives a straightforward overview of the integration of visual and written texts in Tokugawa literature in "Books and Book Illustrations in Early Modern Japan." He argues that the trend of incorporating the visual and the written began in Japan's classical era with the emergence of illustrated narrative picture scrolls (emakimono), flourished during the early modern period in various genres of published vernacular fiction, and continues to characterize Japanese literature to this day in the form of the ubiquitous manga comics. In a concise and sweeping conclusion, he proposes that the central (if not the only) reason for this durable integration lies in "the Japanese system of mixed scripts," in which "ideograms in their role as an optical code meet with the indigenous Japanese syllable script, which, in its turn, is a primarily phonetic code; thus, in many cases, purely phonetic renderings are not sufficient to transmit the complete information contained in a given text" (p. 43). Japanese readers, May argues, have over a long period of time become conditioned to the simultaneous apprehension of verbal and pictorial discourses.

In the second chapter, "The Illustrated Household Encyclopedias That Once Civilized Japan," Yokoyama Toshio presents a summary of several decades' worth of his research on the encyclopedic texts known as setsuyōshū, which he translates as "compilations for [household] economy" or "compilations for occasional use" (p. 47). Setsuyōshū began as simple kanji dictionaries, but evolved into encyclopedias covering a wide range of information, including proper language usage, etiquette, geography, history, mathematics, cooking, first aid, the calendar, ritual observances, and more. In the seventeenth century setsuyōshū began to be used by educated commoners who increasingly had occasion to write formal correspondence. Yokoyama is most interested in the "civilizing" functions of early modern setsuyōshū, namely, the ways in which they defined for readers the "essential cornerstones of their national identity" by providing information about Japan, its land, and its people and "add[ed] refinement to their daily lives" by offering education in proper "manners, taste, morals, and beliefs" (pp. 50-51). By combining computer-aided analysis of the wear patterns on the pages of setsuyōshū with background information about their owners, Yokoyama argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, highly...