Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan

Introduction

In a political cartoon some years ago, a Bill Gates look-alike stands alongside an elevated highway and motions to a group of serious-minded businessmen in dark suits to follow him along the “information superhighway” into the future. At the foot of one of the columns supporting the highway, a homeless family huddles around a makeshift campfire, trying to keep warm, roasting a single hot dog, clearly all they have to eat. While the group at the top is headed for a bright and prosperous future based on their access to the new computer technology and the ability to use it—an advanced form of literacy—the family at the bottom is merely struggling to survive, entirely outside the world of technological innovation and unprepared for any of the opportunities offered by it. The idea that the introduction of new technologies and higher literacies could push some people forward while holding others back, that is, actually increase the social distance between haves and have-nots, offers a contemporary metaphor for the multiple and often contradictory roles of literacy throughout history. Literacy is commonly thought to be a simple, universal, and abstract good. But research over the past thirty years on literacy in the West has suggested a far more comprehensive and problematic view, even while pointing to obvious benefits to societies and individuals. One of the most important lessons of recent research on literacy is that it is not a straightforward matter, one reducible to simple national averages. It is a complex process, connected to broader social problems in complicated ways, determined by particular historical contexts, which it reflects. Indeed, Harvey Graff, one of the most prolific scholars of the history of literacy, has termed the notion of a simple, universal, and abstract literacy a “myth.”1 The real value of studying literacy resides not so much in measuring its quantifiable elements but in clarifying the contexts Introduction of its transmission, acquisition, and use. Particularly in periods before schools became compulsory, there were multiple paths to literacy and a wide variety of motivations for it. Thus, it is the melancholy task of the historian to look at the whole story, viewing not only those who marched down the path to a brighter future, but also those who were left behind, and everyone in between. The ability to master new forms of technology and attain ever-higher standards of literacy often became part of the accoutrements of elite status. This means it was often in the interest of elites to raise standards of acceptability and thereby limit access to elite status. Furthermore, innovations and change favored those best placed by wealth, education, or another predisposing circumstance to benefit from them. Literacy attainment is an ongoing process but one influenced by historical legacies. This book is about the who, when, and why of literacy acquisition among people outside of elite groups in Japan. But it also looks at some of the broader social implications of literacy during Japan’s early modern period. Early modern Japan generally denotes the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). I have taken a more expanded view. Popular literacy as an early modern phenomenon may be said to have begun with the separation of warriors and peasants at the end of the sixteenth century—when the burden of administering rural communities and paying taxes fell to village headmen of the agricultural class, stimulating widespread literacy among this group—and to have ended in the mid-1880s, when the newly centralized state imposed compulsory education of four years upon the entire school-age population of Japan. It should be noted, however, that despite the imposition of a standardized national system of schools, sustained attendance did not approach universal levels until the early decades of the twentieth century. Only from this later time can popular literacy levels be reasonably correlated with school attendance, as they generally still are. The subject of this work is the period before schooling became universal and regular. Its focus is on commoners. I have dealt with the samurai leadership class only peripherally. My main attention has been on the rural farming class, the overwhelming majority of the Japanese population during the period covered. The spread of publishing in cities and the rise of readership have been covered elsewhere,2 and although they are treated in passing in this study, they are not my primary concern. I have not used a rigid definition of literacy to guide my work...