Kornicki 1998

Kornicki, Peter. The book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 1998.

1. The History of the Book and Japan

in Japan, shuppan-bunka (studies of "print culture") -- concerned with commercially published books in the 17, 18, 19c (9) -- but this is limiting, doesn't address popular culture like block-printed illustrated versions of popular tales, and doesn't address cultural exchange with China, Korea, and the West (10)

few instances of bookburning before 17c in Japan

"It is, I suggest, the disintegration of the old hierarchies of texts and reading, and the collapse of the privileged position in the conception of the Japanese state which sinology had for so long enjoyed, that made a revised perception of what books and texts meant to the state possible and then paved the way for the introduction of much more rigid mechanisms of control." (16-7)

"vital flow of books from China from the 5c to the 19c"; "as a transmitter of book culture Japan played a very minor role, even in the case of books written in Chinese by Japanese authors; to the small extent that there was a flow of Japanese books out of Japan, from the 17c onwards, it was at the initiative of curious Europeans. Japan was a cultural receiver, not a transmitter, whereas Chine was a transmitter rather than a receiver. There is a sense, then, in which reading in China was perforce a hermetic experience, while in japan it potentially required constant accommodation with the Other." (18)

printing began in Japan in 8c, but was "resorted to only sporadically between the 8 and 11c, and then for ritual purposes rather than for producing texts for people to read. From then until the end of the 16c, the printing of books for the purpose of erading did begin to take effect, but they were few in number (fewer than 500 titles printed in 500 years), they were produced by Buddhist monastic institutions rather than by commercial publishers, they were almost exclusively in Chinese and they were almost entirely Buddhist scriptures or doctrinal works. Very few of tem, therefore, were published in the sense of being produced with the intention or possibility of making them public property and were rather for the use of the monastic community, often just that of one particular Buddhist sect." (20-21)