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

Seth Jacobowitz’s ambitious Writing Technology in Meiji Japan sets out to do nothing less than “provide a unified theoretical and archival framework for understanding the media history of Meiji literature and culture” (p. 12). Central to his study is the notion of utsushi, a term that “contains the multiple meanings to write, copy, trace, inscribe, and project” (p. 3) and which would show up between 1870 and 1900 in the shape of concepts such as shashin (photography), shasei (literary sketching), and shajitsu (realism). Per Jacobowitz, 1870–1900 also saw “an unprecedented shift toward new standardizing measures of time, space, and language, as well as a profusion of new media systems and technologies,” all of which “had profound consequences for inculcating national subjectivity and training a modern out-look on the world” (p. 6). Not only that, but a “new, transparently mimetic national language and script” which “could serve as the basis for the realist novel and other contemporary genres” (p. 7) would emerge from within technologies such as the telegraph, postal system, and shorthand notation, and from related discourses of script reform and language simplification. However, Jacobowitz contends, although “‘writing things down just as they are’ would become the compositional imperative of modern Japanese realism . . . its media-historical basis would be forgotten, lost, or marginalized by successive generations of writers and scholars” (p. 6). The book’s main contribution, then, is to “re-establish the nascence of modern Japanese literature and visual culture from within a field of techniques and technologies of writing” (p. 6).

Writing Technology covers an impressively broad range of terrain over its ten chapters and 270-odd pages. Influenced by Benedict Anderson’s conceptions of imagined community, Martin Heidegger’s notion of “standing-reserve” (Bestand—namely, technology’s “capacity to purposefully reveal and transform material, form, and ends into a systematic availability” [p. 21]), and the work of German media theorist Friedrich Kittler on “discourse networks (Aufschreibesysteme—literally, ‘systems of writing down’),” part 1 first explores media technology’s role in standardizing and reinforcing the modern state. Chapters 1 and 2 highlight the effects of rail, post, and telegraph systems in standardizing previously disparate conceptions of time, space, and language in the Japanese home islands and in Japan’s colonies; such standardization is, in Jacobowitz’s terms, “a critical basis for modernity’s emergence” (p. 42). Chapter 3 contrasts two representations of media technology 50 years apart, in the shape of Hokusai’s print Shunshū Ejiri (Shunshū [post] station in Ejiri Province, c. 1830) and the 1881 kabuki play Shima chidori tsuki no shiranami (Plovers of the island and white waves of the moon). While Hokusai’s playful depiction of paper (letters?) fluttering in the wind suggests the possibility of eluding state control and surveillance, Shima chidori tsuki no shiranami, which shows criminals captured by means of telegrams and newspapers, links these new technologies to the “encompassing of territory and enforcement of state power” (p. 89).

Part 2 shifts focus slightly to consider specific individuals and questions involved in Meiji discourses of reform of the Japanese language and script. Taken together, these chapters offer an alternative history of the emergence of the “unified style (genbun itchi)”; this style, Jacobowitz contends, can be traced to “experimentation with conventional and newly invented phonetic scripts” (p. 97). As the book shows, Japanese language reformers were never trying to “catch up” with the West, but rather, as with Mori Arinori’s discussions with Yale’s William Dwight Whitney on adopting simplified English in Japan (chapter 4) or colonial administrator Isawa Shūji’s use in Taiwan of Alexander Melville Bell’s new phonetic and phonographic script “Visible Speech,” Japanese language reformers were usually working concurrently with their Western counterparts on issues of “orthography, experimental scripts, and planned or artificial languages” (p. 99). Perhaps most important to the book’s...