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Reviewed by:
  • Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan
  • Jonathan Zwicker (bio)
Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan. By Richard Rubinger. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2007. xii, 238 pages. $54.00.

The emergence of the history of reading as a subject, if not quite a discipline, over the last quarter century has led to a remarkable convergence of interest in a number of fields that have long seemed essentially unrelated, sometimes quite solitary in their pursuits, or even, judged by one another’s standards, arcane. Bibliography—both descriptive and analytical—has reemerged as the sociology of texts and is now central to the work of intellectual, cultural, and literary historians. Economic history and legal history, which had seemed so remote from the main currents of literary criticism, from new criticism to structuralism to deconstruction, for much of the last century have become integral to the study of copyright, royalties, and the emergence of the author as well as to questions of circulation and consumption—who read what and when. And literacy has rightfully reemerged as one of the historical issues par excellence, standing at the crossroads of intellectual, cultural, and literary history and crucial for understanding the circulation of texts and the spread of ideas.

The 2007 publication of Richard Rubinger’s Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan and of Suzuki Toshiyuki’s Edo no dokushonetsu (Reading fever in Edo Japan; Heibonsha) suggests the extent to which the interests of very different fields have converged. Rubinger, a historian of education, and Suzuki, a literary historian, both aim to trace literacy in early modern Japan and they do so by considering neglected historical materials: in Rubinger’s case, signature data from petitions, ballots, and conscription records; in Suzuki’s, the social life of a single “bestseller.” These books are methodologically different and often differ in their conclusions, but their simultaneous appearance underscores the degree to which a historical understanding of literacy has become a key issue for work across many disciplines.

As Rubinger notes, his is “the first book-length study of Japanese literacy in historical perspective in any language” (p. 4); as such, it will doubtlessly become a touchstone for work in other fields: the history of ideas, historical sociology, cultural and literary history. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan is comprised of a series of microanalyses woven into a broader story of shifting patterns of literacy in Japan from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century, “woven” because that image best captures the architecture of the book. Rubinger is careful not to reduce the complexities of his sources to simple abstractions, noting repeatedly that “changing notions of what literacy was or was not for particular groups is part of the story” [End Page 488] (p. 2). Rather, the central nodes of the book are the analyses themselves, each drawing on a richly suggestive set of materials hitherto underutilized in discussions of literacy: petitions filed by farmers in the seventeenth century (chapter 1); extant data related to the use of ciphers (kaō) and other forms of signature (chapter 2); family precepts and last wills (chapter 3); literacy tests and election ballots (chapter 5); and conscription examinations (epilogue). Each archive provides a partial and fragmentary view of the complex reality of literacy across the early modern period, and Rubinger uses these to suggest a range of literacies shaped by gender, class, geography, and access to education.

Indeed, the recurring motif of Rubinger’s study is the unevenness of literacy patterns in early modern Japan. This unevenness leads to what he calls “the ‘two cultures’ of early Tokugawa villages” (p. 5) in which the relatively high literacy rates of the elite “separated them from the vast majority of other farmers, whose skills in that regard were minimal or totally absent” (p. 5). What extant data on literacy point toward, Rubinger argues, is not a gradual and even spreading of literacy to all populations in all parts of the archipelago, but “the further enhancement of the skills of the small group at the center of village life” (pp. 80–81). Underpinning Rubinger’s “two cultures” argument are assumptions about the spread of literacy and the limitations of literacy. For the bulk...

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