(Japan Series) Peter Kornicki – Hidden knowledge: why Edo-period Japan was not a print society

This event is part of the Japanese Studies series organised in collaboration with the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC) and The Courtauld Institute of Art.

About the Talk

Although the Edo period has often been branded the age of print culture, in fact manuscript production increased in the Edo period and huge numbers of literary, historical, philosophical and scientific works circulated only in the form of manuscript books. What is more many of these works survive today in hundreds of copies, while many printed editions paradoxically survive in far fewer copies. However, manuscript culture in the Edo period has largely been ignored in both Japanese and Western scholarship. In this paper I shall explore some of the reasons for the decision not to print but to circulate in the form of manuscript. For example, one of Ogyū Sorai’s best-known writings is his Political Discussions (Seidan), which he completed in 1727: it was printed for the first time in 1859, but in a limited private edition. Until that time, for over 100 years it circulated solely in the form of manuscript copies and today more than 100 of these manuscript copies are extant. What is more, within two years of Sorai’s completion of this work, a village headman in Kurashiki already owned a manuscript copy. From this example, we can see that even works that were not printed in the Edo period nevertheless managed to achieve a wide circulation and have an impact. What were the motives for the avoidance of print in this and other cases? There is, of course, no single explanation, but in this paper I will explicate some of those motives and demonstrate that focusing on print culture inevitably leads to a major distortion in our understanding of cultural production in the Edo period.

About the Author

Peter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. His most recent publications are Languages, scripts, and Chinese texts in East Asia (2018), Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain’s War with Japan (2021), Printing technologies and book production in 17th-century Japan (2025) and Soto kara mita Edo jidai no shoseki bunka: shahon, hanpon, zaigai shoseki (2025).

Free and open to all. In person and online via Zoom.

To attend online, email emd@royalasiaticsociety.org for a link.