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Literacy in Early Tokugawa Villages 1 The origins of popular literacy in Japan are obscure. The beginnings of reading and writing among members of the provincial elite may be traced as far back as the ritsuryō state of the eighth century, when aristocratic families in the metropolis of Nara were building a bureaucratic centralized government on the Chinese model. Mokkan—ancient wood or bamboo strips used for reports from the provinces and other official communications, as well as for graffiti and writing practice1—have been discovered in great quantities in areas as remote as the archeological site of Akita Castle in Dewa Province at the northern tip of Honshu.2 These were written in Chinese by the emergent Japanese state’s officialdom both in the central organs of government and in provincial outposts. Indeed, the central “university” (Daigakuryō)—said to have been founded under Emperor Tenji (reigned [661] 668–672), and its various provincially administered branches, meant to educate the sons of local officials— followed a curriculum based on the Analects and Book of Filial Piety as in the educational system of the Chinese empire.3 Family registers kept by local officials and village heads, as well as other documents in Chinese that were part of the routine of regional administration, suggest the early spread of literacy to the provincial elite even in the most remote regions of the emergent Japanese imperial state. By the ninth century, the use of written instruments in Chinese had clearly moved beyond the limited circle of the earliest monopolizers of literacy skills, a highly circumscribed civil aristocracy and Buddhist clergy in the environs of Nara and Kyoto. These were men who were either descendants or students of the Chinese and Korean scribes responsible for introducing Chinese characters into practical use on the Japanese islands from the fifth century onward. 10 -- LITERACY IN EARLY TOKUGAWA VILLAGES While there is little evidence of literacy spreading in any form beyond the clergy and the political leadership, it is worth noting that its diffusion within those groups must have been extensive. Because Buddhism was a religion that depended on scriptures, the ability to read and write was essential for priests. By and large, the texts they studied were Chinese translations of Sanskrit or Prākrit sutras, which did not begin to be translated into Japanese until the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). So the medium of clerical literacy was Chinese. As far as the political leadership was concerned, the ritsuryō state required that documents and written communications pass back and forth between center and periphery in all areas under its command. As central and regional administration became more complex and pervasive, the need for provincial administrators who could read and prepare the documents necessary for sustaining the state’s thrust increased. By the early ninth century, techniques of abbreviating Chinese logographs were being used extensively in Japan to create the predecessors of the modern phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. Purely phonetic written characters provided a much simpler means of representing the Japanese language than had been possible with earlier methods, which retained unabbreviated Chinese characters while seeking to use them for their phonetic value only. The new kana syllabaries greatly facilitated the development of a native literature both in prose and poetry. Court ladies who were kana-literate—and, indeed, in some cases literate in Chinese—produced some of the world’s greatest literature during the Heian period (794–1185) using almost exclusively the hiragana script.4 Perhaps more pertinent to the subject at hand, it cannot be overestimated how important the syllabic kana, written by themselves or in combination with Chinese logographs, were to the spread of literacy beyond the confines of the clergy and the aristocracy. At the end of the twelfth century, Japan came under the domination of a warrior government that had its headquarters in Kamakura. One effect was to inject a new spirit of practicality into the writing of official and semiofficial documents. The new practicality meant moving away from Chinese, which had remained the official written language, toward a more flexible, hybrid style that combined Chinese characters with the Japanese phonetic syllabaries in a way more closely reflecting indigenous linguistic forms and conventions. The trend toward mixing Chinese characters with kana orthography intensified over time. Hiragana usage mushroomed at the end of the 1200s, and even more so in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Looking at the evidence from one local area...

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