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

The early modern period in Japan was an age of translation, and now we finally have a monograph that presents the critical impact that translations had in the cultural life of that time. The flourishing of cultural production has become the uncontested trademark of Tokugawa Japan in the historiography of the past few decades. This “quiet revolution” in knowledge, as Mary Elizabeth Berry has defined it, was a result of sociopolitical stability (the so-called Pax Tokugawa), rapid urbanization, the growth of a market economy, the expansion of literacy, and the burgeoning of book consumption in print and manuscript forms. It was founded and sustained by a massive effort in translating texts of various genres from different languages—from classical Japanese and various Sinitic scripts and from Dutch, Russian, English, French, Latin, and Manchu. The translations of these texts conformed to scholarly needs, but were often motivated by commercial gain after the establishment of a print industry in the early decades of the seventeenth century. A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan is an encyclopedic study that carries on the legacy of Peter Kornicki’s “Cambridge school” on the history of the book and reading practices in Japan. Author Rebekah Clements argues convincingly that the age of translation began not in the Meiji period, as conventional narratives have thus far held, but instead well before.

“Translation” is a concept that Clements adopts quite loosely to refer to a variety of textual practices that Tokugawa scholars never rigorously conceptualized or systematized. These practices ranged from word-for-word translations (yaku, hon’yaku) and translation with elaboration (yakujutsu) to various forms of interpretation (yakkai, wage), simplification (yawarage), vernacularization (genkai, rigenkai, zokuge, hinakotoba, and so on), and reading annotation (kun, kunyomi, kunkai, and others). A convenient table on page 11 summarizes the terminological constellation of different forms of textual transference. The evidence Clements provides of incessant rewriting of texts in different scripts, languages, and semiotic systems further validates efforts by scholars in recent years to disprove once and for all that early modern Japan was a secluded and isolated country: Clements persuasively demonstrates that the 5,887 Chinese ships and 727 Dutch ships that docked at Nagasaki between 1624 and 1860 did not unload only textiles, medicinal herbs, silver, and copper, but also books in different languages and on various topics, bringing to Japan information, knowledge, and images from different parts of the world. If Clements is at times cautious on the subject and does not renounce completely the idea of sakoku, her research provides all the necessary ammunition to contest the idea of an isolated Japan that still persists among nonspecialists.

This wealth of translation also reveals, both as symptom and cause, the structural multilingualism of Tokugawa society, whereby scholars and educated consumers of cultural goods had to negotiate a multiplicity of written and spoken languages and dialects. And it discloses as well an unprecedented “language consciousness” in the work of a number of scholars, from Itō Jinsai, Ogyū Sorai, and Okajima Kanzan to nativist thinkers like Keichū, Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Suzuki Akira. The centripetal force of modernity, with its insistence on the monolingualism of the national “imagined community,” has often concealed the degree of multilingualism that characterized pre- and early modern societies worldwide. Echoing Umberto Eco’s famous remark that “the language of Europe is translation,” we might then say that Clements’s study perfectly portrays how translation paved the way to the creation of modern Japanese: the language of early modern Japan, too, is translation.

The book consists of five numbered chapters and a brief introduction and conclusion. The three central chapters focus on translations of classical Japanese texts (chapter 2), “Chinese” texts (chapter 3), and texts from Western languages (chapter 4). Chapter 1 takes up intralingual translations, and chapter 2 opens with the bold claim that “[p]erhaps nowhere was the Tokugawa-period shift in literacy and scholarship … felt more greatly...