A Social History of Literacy in Japan ed. by Richard Rubinger (review)

Anyone who has sought out scholarship in English on the history of literacy in Japan has likely encountered the work of Richard Rubinger. His publications on the subject span three decades, the best known being his 2007 monograph, Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan, through which he also introduced the research of Japanese scholars with whom he has collaborated.¹ A Social History of Literacy in Japan goes a step further by providing English translations of nine essays by seven of those scholars.

Rubinger's influence on this volume extends beyond his role as book editor, coauthor (with Ohto Yasuhiro) of the preface, and translator of the first five chapters. Indeed, the preface states that "the present work is indebted to Rubinger's research" (p. xvii), and four of the essays also acknowledge his contributions. During his tenure on the faculty at Indiana University, three of the contributors each spent a year working with him on the history of literacy in Japan, and in November 2006 members of the Literacy Research Group gathered there for a conference funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The essays in this volume were originally presented in 2011 at Kyoto University.

What, then, distinguishes this edited collection from Rubinger's earlier publications? What new knowledge does it purport to offer an English-language readership, and how well does it succeed? The results are mixed. It succeeds in extending the temporal scope beyond the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods to include the Heian and medieval periods. It offers a broader geographic sampling of the Japanese population, encompassing both urban and rural settings in different regions of the country. And, some of the contributors creatively enlist nontraditional definitions of literacy to pursue intriguing topics, develop plausible arguments, and provide rich descriptions of the diverse social contexts that affected the reach of literacy among the population.

However, with a couple of exceptions the core essays fall short of the book's declared aim "to provide some good historical evidence not just for school attendance, but direct evidence for the who, when and where of the ability to read and write among non-elites in Japanese history" (p. xiii), owing to the difficulty in locating reliable, objective primary sources that would rigorously and convincingly support their arguments. This challenge is not new, as a review of Rubinger's earlier publications will attest. In a 1990 article he probed the failure of scholarship on Japanese literacy to keep pace with that of Western historians researching literacy in Europe and North America who, "eschewing simple quantitative estimates of literacy … sought to analyze the quality and meaning of its possession, investigating the revealing problems of who was literate, what was the kind of literacy, when did literacy exist, and for what reasons."² He placed part of the blame on the outsize influence of two books published in 1965—Ronald P. Dore's Education in Tokugawa Japan and Herbert Passin's Society and Education in Japan—which relied on records of school attendance and analyses by Ishikawa Ken and Ototake Iwazō, respectively, to estimate nationwide rates of male and female literacy in Tokugawa Japan.³

So began the ongoing search for untapped or underutilized primary sources capable of advancing empirical research on the social history of literacy in Japan. Examples of the trial-and-error character of that process are found in the present volume and in Rubinger's other work. In his aforementioned 1990 article, he cautioned that the European method of analyzing personal signatures to determine degrees of popular literacy cannot be employed in Japan for two reasons. First, "the Japanese attached relatively little significance to signatures as marks of personal identification."⁴Records were instead kept by local officials, and on the rare occasion that individuals put their own hand to documents they used seals. Second, "in the sequence of rudimentary learning at local schools (terakoya) during the Tokugawa period, the ability...