Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture by Seth Jacobowitz (review)

This long-awaited book joins a series of groundbreaking and illuminating works examining the ways in which technology is not only instrumental to but also formative of literary production. Counterparts include, in premodern studies, Thomas LaMarre’s Uncovering Heian: Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription (Duke University Press, 2000) and David Lurie’s Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) and, in visual studies, Maki Fukuoka’s The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Stanford University Press, 2014). Writing Technology in Meiji Japan is an original contribution that integrates knowledge from multiple fields, stimulating our awareness of the dynamic and mutually transformative relationship between the humanities and sciences, corporeality and materiality, and the human and its environment.

The title of the book incorporates a double entendre: Seth Jacobowitz’s study is not only about the technology of writing and how it changed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also about the writing of technology—i.e., writing about technology—and how it unfolded during roughly the same period. The book discusses the textual output produced by a diverse range of agents including politicians (Mori Arinori, Nishi Amane), visual artists (Baisotei Gengyo, Katsushika Hokusai, Kobayashi Kiyochika), technical innovators (Takusari Kōki, Maruyama Heijirō), bureaucrats (Isawa Shūji), literary writers (Kawatake Mokuami, Masaoka Shiki, Natsume Sōseki), scholars (Tsubouchi Shōyō), oral performers (San’yūtei Enchō), and scribes (Wakabayashi Kanzō). Jacobowitz uses these texts to present discourses on the technology of writing while revealing traces of technological change within their written (and in other ways visual) presentations.

The book does not simply trace the history of communications media, but relates how media complicated the history of many other entities and phenomena relevant to human life in the modern age. Thus, an impressive spectrum of subjects is brought into conversation: transportation (most notably, but not limited to, railway), image making (such as photography), punctuation of time (clock, calendar), measurements (weight, length), communication systems (postal services and telegraphs), language research (ethnographic and administrative documentation of locally varied pronunciations), and education (curriculum, textbooks, faculty). Jacobowitz’s clear and authentic linkages give the reader a sense that no one of these subjects could have been fully explored autonomously of the others. The overarching master narrative, if there is one, is that amid schemes for unilateral surveillance and control there exist multiple individuals who inhabit the space between the powerful and the powerless, and the stories of these individuals cannot be reduced to a script of submission and resistance. Jacobowitz notes: “Mokuami’s plays . . . cannot simply be understood in terms of a facile endorsement or opposition to state power. Rather, these are works in which new print media and postal technologies (such as the newspaper and telegraph in ‘The Thieves’) mark the tensions between the ideals of national ideology and the ethos of the floating world” (p. 82).

Though each chapter focuses on a specific aspect manifested in particular practices, the book is not fragmented. Chapter 1 is about measurements; chapter 2, modern communication systems; chapter 3, pictorial and literary representations of modern communication systems; chapter 4, modern reforms of English and Japanese; chapter 5, shorthand; chapter 6, visible speech; chapter 7, narrative and inscription; chapter 8, transcription and realism; chapter 9, sketching things as they are in haiku and other modern poetic forms; and chapter 10, the framing of human speech and sensations in a cat’s writing. Cross-references are appropriately made between narrative strands where applicable, signaling how technological changes surrounding particular events and individuals were enmeshed. Thus we see the history of technology, language, and education not as a map of striated space, but rather as a network of trajectories between complex, interconnecting nodes. Maejima Hisoka is introduced to us not merely as the founder of...