The Journal of Japanese Studies

Those of us embroiled in the day-to-day realities of university level-education may find striking similarities between our current labor conditions and the publishing world of Edo-period Japan. University educators today face demands to specify learning objectives, to restructure curricula and disciplines around learning paths, to recognize our students as knowledge consumers and ourselves as knowledge dealers, and to package our courses for delivery to the global market. The dizzying pace of these opportunities is matched by the innovation-driven scenarios of academic publishing in early modern Japan, where authors and booksellers raced to create popular learning books whose “language, layout, illustrations and diagrams were devised to anticipate and satisfy the readers’ needs, tastes and queries” (p. 13). Listen, Copy, Read comprises an extended consideration of the cultural boom in knowledge acquisition in Tokugawa-era Japan (1600–1868). With a particular focus on popular learning and on the material traces of that learning, the authors create a detailed account of the ways in which [End Page 148] extant texts—carefully gleaned from special collections and archives—can be diligently placed back into the lived environments of learning.

This ambitious volume works at the nexus of three fields: book history, intellectual history, and the history of education. Scholars of early modern Japanese intellectual history and education history will find much to learn from the wealth of primary sources the volume’s contributors bring to light, and, indeed, the volume’s editors seem to have conceptualized the study specifically with these advanced audiences in mind. Aside from questions of particular interest to specialists of early modern Japan, however, the volume also addresses the globally comparative field of book history. One of the real delights of Listen, Copy, Read is that it brings insights from the best Japanese scholarship on this subject (touching on the work of Maeda Ai, Tsujimoto Masashi, Nagatomo Chiyoji, Suzuki Toshiyuki, Murakami Masataka, Ōto Yasuhiro, Ishikawa Ken, Yokoyama Toshio, and Konta Yōzō, among others) into conversation with vibrant scholarly discussions of reading, publishing, authorship, and learning in Europe and North America. In this sense, the volume builds on the groundbreaking scholarship of Peter Kornicki and Mary Elizabeth Berry, allowing us to gain a four-dimensional view of the book, not only as an object in and of itself, but as the material trace of a networked set of social interactions centering on the activities of learning.

As editors Matthias Hayek and Annick Horiuchi suggest, Listen, Copy, Read is deeply invested in understanding the learning experiences of Edo-era commoners. “In the absence of direct testimonies,” they write, this volume draws on a series of “close examination[s] of educational books, produced in great numbers during [the Edo] period” in order to sketch out an understanding of what learning consisted of, how the physical formats of books shifted to meet the growing demands for popular learning, and for what reasons—and in what settings—learners pursued their objects of knowledge (p. 11). One of the real boons of this approach is that we can start to get a “worm’s eye” view of learning and textual culture, an intellectually rich and stimulating counterpart to the more “bird’s eye” views heretofore available in English-language monographs. The editors’ introduction notes four main themes: “the transposition of elite culture onto commoner culture and its effects on personal worldviews,” “the acquisition of basic knowledge together with the tools and methods used in the process,” “the evolution of schools and the transmission of Chinese knowledge in Kyoto from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century,” and “the disclosure, development, and dissemination of technical knowledge through specialized guidebooks” (p. 2, italics added). The italicized words showcase what I find to be the most useful thing about the set of collected essays, namely, the level of specificity which each of the chapters brings. [End Page 149]

Koizumi Yoshinaga’s and...