Japan in Print : Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period

by Berry, Mary Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9780520254176
• ISBN10: 0520254171
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-20
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous time. After 1600, self-appointed investigators used the model of the land and cartographic surveys of the newly unified state to observe and order subjects such as agronomy, medicine, gastronomy, commerce, travel, and entertainment. They subsequently circulated their findings through a variety of commercially printed texts: maps, gazetteers, family encyclopedias, urban directories, travel guides, official personnel rosters, and instruction manuals for everything from farming to lovemaking. In this original and gracefully written book, Mary Elizabeth Berry considers the social processes that drove the information explosion of the 1600s. Inviting readers to examine the contours and meanings of this transformation, Berry provides a fascinating account of the conversion of the public from an object of state surveillance into a subject of self-knowledge. Japan in Printshows how, as investigators collected and disseminated richly diverse data, they came to presume in their audience a standard of cultural literacy that changed anonymous consumers into an "us" bound by common frames of reference. This shared space of knowledge made society visible to itself and in the process subverted notions of status hierarchy. Berry demonstrates that the new public texts projected a national collectivity characterized by universal access to markets, mobility, sociability, and self-fashioning.

Author Biography

Mary Elizabeth Berry is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
A Traveling Clerk Goes to the Bookstores	p. 1
The Library of Public Information	p. 13
Maps Are Strange	p. 54
Blood Right and Merit	p. 104
The Freedom of the City	p. 139
Cultural, Custody, Cultural Literacy	p. 185
Nation	p. 209
Notes	p. 253
Bibliography	p. 291
Index	p. 309
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