1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910823983103321

Autore

Berry Mary Elizabeth

Titolo

Japan in print : information and nation in the early modern period / / Mary Elizabeth Berry

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, CA : , : University of California Press, , [2006]

©2006

ISBN

1-282-36046-9

1-4237-5264-3

9786612360466

0-520-94146-2

1-59875-928-0

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (347 p.)

Collana

Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes ; ; 12

Disciplina

686.209520909032

Soggetti

Printing - Japan - History - 17th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-308) and index.

Nota di contenuto

List of figures -- Acknowledgments -- 1. A traveling clerk goes to the bookstores -- 2. The library of public information -- 3. Maps are strange -- 4. Blood right and merit -- 5. The freedom of the city -- 6. Cultural custody, cultural literacy -- 7. Nation -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

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 1600's. 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 Print shows 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.