Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (review)

This is a sweeping, ambitious, elegant, and accomplished book. Berry's topic is nothing less than print culture in Tokugawa Japan, and her sources range from shogunal personnel rosters and genealogies, through travel guides to Kyoto, to the fiction of Ihara Saikaku. These different print genres, she argues, helped to create a common sense of national boundaries and national culture among a large, literate stratum of early modern Japanese society. Tokugawa readers shared a sense of where Japan ended, the location of its most important places, which people were important, and what made for a cultured traveler. Although this common print culture was a precursor of modern Japanese national identity, Berry carefully distinguishes the "nationalism" of early modern print culture from its modern variant. The To-kugawa state was vastly more powerful than any medieval polity, but it did not demand exclusive fealty. "While exercising paramount powers of governance, the shogunate established no direct ties with subjects and exacted no paramount loyalty from them" (p. 230). The coherence of the Tokugawa order was thus as much cultural as political.

The book is striking in several ways. First is Berry's surefooted and effective use of the first-person and second-person voices. Historians have long debated how or whether to insert themselves into their manuscripts, and the question has received sustained attention with the influence of ethnography and anthropology. Berry does not trumpet the theoretical bases of her approach but simply inserts us into Tokugawa life. She opens her examination of travel literature with a challenge to imagine that "you lived in Kyoto three hundred years ago and were facing your first trip to Edo, the Tokugawa shogun's capital, some 500 kilometers away. To flesh out this fantasy, let's make you a senior clerk in a firm that retails silk cloth. You are being sent on a temporary assignment from that main shop in Kyoto to a branch in Edo" (p. 1). Berry then details what books you might buy in Kyoto to prepare for your journey: an astonishing array of maps and travel guides detailing not only Edo, but the To¯kaido¯.

Berry returns to this "you are there approach" later when she explores travel guides to Kyoto. "Several summers ago I traveled across Kyoto following a tour guide written in 1706 by the Confucian polymath Kaibara Ekiken" (p. 185). She takes us along (with Ekiken) to visit the edifying sights of Kyoto. We visit To¯fukuji, Ginkakuji, and Ninnaji—a list of Kyoto highlights still reproduced by Lonely Planet, Fodor's, and countless Japanese-language tour books. Ekiken's guide, Berry shows, was part of the construction of a readily recognizable canon of important cultural sites. But although we can use Ekiken's writings, he was not writing for us. By physically rather than metaphorically using Ekiken as a guide, Berry dramatizes what Ekiken assumed about his readership: they know "dozens of names of emperors, empresses, princes, monks, priests, nuns, military rulers, generals, writers, artists, dancers, tea masters, and scholars . . . aristocratic and clerical titles . . . the ranking system of Zen monasteries, and the vocabulary of religious architecture and iconography" (p. 194). Although Ekiken's guide, Keijo¯ sho¯ran, is in some ways strikingly similar to a modern travel guide, it made assumptions about cultural literacy specific to early modern print culture.

Equally striking is how Berry playfully but powerfully inserts her own life into a discussion of how "maps are strange" (p. 54). Mapping, Berry argues, is innate: even before language acquisition, children show the ability to perceive complex spatial relationships and abstract them into mental diagrams. Yet all such abstractions involve a linguistic code, which must say some things and cannot say others. Highway maps, for example, are useful because conventions such as single lines for local roads and double lines for faster roads give drivers important information quickly. So do medieval Japanese survey maps, which...