A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan by Rebekah Clements (review)

Rebekah Clements has produced an important study of the kinds of texts that were translated into contemporaneous Japanese(s) throughout the early modern period. Her introduction considers what one might consider “translation” in the early modern period and the plethora of terms used then to describe the rendering of one text into another. The first chapter, “Language and Society in Tokugawa Japan,” provides background for the following chapters, considering urbanization, literacy, the printing industry, “multilingualism,” kokugaku, and “language consciousness among Tokugawa sinologists,” among other issues. Individual chapters consider three kinds of source texts: pre-Edo classical Japanese texts, “Chinese” texts, and texts in Western languages. A penultimate chapter takes up “late Tokugawa ‘crisis translation’” and is followed by a conclusion.

The scope of this study is truly vast, and a reader might wonder how any one person could cover such a range of material. Clements’s methodology is similar to that of her mentor Peter Kornicki and his History of the Book in Japan (Brill, 1998). For their vast subjects, both Kornicki and Clements provide essentially a kind of annotated bibliography. You will not find in Clements a detailed analysis of how Ueda Akinari translated or adapted vernacular Chinese stories in his Ugetsu monogatari. Rather, the author sets herself three questions: “what forms of translation were practiced, who were the translators, and what, exactly, were they translating (or not translating)?” (p. 6).

Such a survey by definition makes it difficult for the study to have an argument, but Clements’s point, simply put, is: “In the case of translation, the Meiji period has been given star billing as the period when modernity suddenly gave rise to and was fuelled by large numbers of translations. The chapters that follow reveal that translation was if anything equally significant in Tokugawa Japan” (p. 46). However, this analogy is missing a term: translation in the Meiji period is to modernity as translation in the Tokugawa period is to—what? Early modernity? Clements checks herself several times from appearing to be teleological—that Tokugawa practices inevitably led to Meiji modernity. Nonetheless, her study gives fine evidence of how translation was “significant” in shaping several discursive spaces in early modern Japan.

This book fits into a constellation of recent studies that, while sometimes on seemingly very different topics, are concerned with book-related practices in Japan’s early modern period. Thus, in addition to recent works on the emerging field of translation studies, and the aforementioned study by Kornicki, Clements’s topic resonates with Mary Elizabeth Berry’s Japan in Print (University of California Press, 2007); Richard Rubinger’s Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); Peter Kornicki, Mara Patessio, and G. G. Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010); several studies by Laura Moretti; and Michael Emmerich’s The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (Columbia University Press, 2013). Emmerich’s monograph presents a spirited argument for “replacement” rather than “reception” of texts that applies to translation as well, and it is a shame that Clements does not engage it more fully.

While most readers, I suspect, like myself, will feel more competent to engage with only one or two of the kinds of source texts Clements examines, it is the great strength of this work that her range is so broad. For me, the chapter on the vernacular translation of classical Japanese texts is the most rewarding. It is wonderful that this topic is included, though it has not been quite as “overlooked or even unknown” (p. 47) as the author makes out. Print was of course essential to breaking the monopoly of the elite on what we now think of as the Japanese classics, and after the early 1600s anyone with the money could buy not only copies of the texts themselves but also formerly secret commentaries. According to Clements and...