war-time publications of pre-modern works

[Sharon Domier]

Dear colleagues,
I should do a little more research before posting, but everyone on
this list is kind and full of good information, so I am going to put
my question out there.

This morning I am cataloging some newly acquired materials for Amherst
College and once again I am struck by the number and quality of
reproductions of pre-modern works done during war-time, especially
once the paper controls were put into place.

This morning I had a copy of Eiri ichidai otoko, first republished in
1926, but our copy has an additional colophon giving it a 1939 date.
Next I have a beautiful copy of Kankyo no tomo from 1940, issued as
part of Sonkeikaku sokan. Both are hibaihin.

Has anyone on this list done any research on the publication of
pre-modern works during 1935-1945? I would think it would be a great
research project for a bibliophile or if any of you have grad students
who are leaning towards librarianship.

Sharon Domier

[Travis Seifman]

Dear Prof. Domier,

This might fall a little outside of the sort of thing you were looking for, but, in case it is of interest, the Tokugawa Reiten Roku 徳川禮典録, an 1889 compilation of bakufu protocols, was republished in 1942 by the Tokugawa Reimeikai (associated with the Nagoya/Owari Tokugawa branch family). This is a text I have begun to use fairly extensively for my research.

Cheers,

Travis Seifman

PhD candidate, History

UC Santa Barbara

Sharon Domier

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[guel...@waseda.jp]

Dear Sharon,

you can use the National Diet library catalogue, setting the filter on
the publishing years 1939 to 1945
and looking for books (I found 93511 titles). And then check the list
for pre-modern works.

Niels

[Sharon Domier]

Niels and Travis,
Thank you for your suggestions. I probably should have prefaced my question by saying that I am a librarian, so I am quite used to using library catalogs to locate materials by dates or publishers. The Kindai digital library is particularly useful for this kind of search. I have also been extremely fortunate to having been allowed into the closed stacks of some of the nicest research libraries in Japan to see what is hidden away in their collections.

Why I thought I might be able to tap the wisdom of the group is in the pre-publication stage of negotiations. This information is likely only available through research on a particular author or publishing house (which proposals were accepted/rejected/changed made). I have seen some research on this topic relating to censorship, meaning the manuscripts that were rejected or modified. I have also done research on materials that were banned post publication and their effects on libraries. But, I am somewhat fascinated by the types of facsimile reprints that were done by museums, archives and special libraries during this time period. What rationale did they have for making reproductions of these works? Were they considered beneficial to the war effort? Did they support Japan's efforts to parade its cultural heritage abroad? Or, is this kind of thinking totally off the mark?

Best wishes for a further conversation,
Sharon Domier
Librarian and staunch supporter of academic scholarship

[Oleg Benesch]

Dear Sharon,

Thank you for raising some very interesting questions. One relatively major collection comes to mind. In the case of the 13-volume Bushido zensho, a collection of primarily early-modern materials published in 1942, the purpose was very clearly in support of Japan's war effort, and the introduction credits the victories in Singapore and Malaya to Japan's bushido spirit. The involvement of the bushido propagandist Inoue Tetsujiro is further evidence of this, and the collection built on Inoue's 3-volume Bushido sosho, published in 1905 in support of the Russo-Japanese War. Both of these collections consisted of carefully selected and edited pre-modern and early-modern writings by and about samurai that could be integrated into the "imperial bushido" ideology formulated by Inoue and others, which found its way into the military and civilian education systems. As an aside, it has been reprinted "as is" since 1998 and continues to be widely available.

This is just one example, but there are a number of other, similar collections, and I think this subject would certainly be worthy of further research.

With best regards,

Oleg

Oleg Benesch, PhD FRHistS

Anniversary Research Lecturer (Assistant Professor)

Department of History

University of York
olegbenesch.com

Out now from Oxford University Press:
Inventing the Way of the Samurai
Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushidō in Modern Japan

(Recent reviews in the Journal of Military History and H/Soz/Kult)

Article in Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident no. 38 (Jan. 2015) pp. 129-168:

"The Samurai Next Door: Chinese Examinations of the Japanese Martial Spirit"

[Linda H. Chance]

Dear Professor Benesch,

Do you have or have access to the 1942 edition of Bushido zensho, and could you comment on the physical characteristics of the series? Was it on high quality paper, with good bindings?

I am particularly focused on Sharon Domier's mention of the material quality of some war-time reproductions of pre-modern works. The history of the facsimile in Japan is a topic well worth looking into, because it does seem that there were efforts to appeal domestically as well as abroad the depth and glory of Japan's literary and intellectual traditions. Beautiful reproductions could be appreciated on some level even by those who did not read Japanese. But were they? A lot of good work remains possible here. The beauty of such a research project, in turn, is perhaps related to the range of materials, since typically Kankyo no tomo and Eiri ichidai otoko and not seen as works of the same, shall we say, moral value, let alone how they would line up next to Bushido zensho. Archival evidence of how publishers were allocating material resources at the time would reinforce discussions of the types of war-supporting content that were produced. (Or even better, could help us break down the material vs. content distinction.) 

I have nothing to offer in response to the call for pre-publication information, but just wanted to agree that this seems like a great topic.

Best,

Linda Chance

pre-modernist and first-time poster to PMJS

UPenn East Asian Languages and Civilizations

[Robert Borgen]

Dear Sharon, et al.,

I remember a Japanese friend pointing out that the Japanese homeland remained reasonably prosperous, even while war raged in China, and didn’t begin to seriously deteriorate until well after the attack on Pearl Harbor. If that is so, then there would be nothing remarkable about the appearance of high-quality publications in 1939-40, regardless of their subject matter.
I put off writing because I’m a Heian specialist, and so my comments don’t carry much weight. We need a specialist in 20th century Japan to comment on the vagaries of publishing during the war years.

Robert Borgen

[Oleg Benesch]

Dear All,

Perusing my shelf, I have a copy of one volume of the 1942 edition of the Bushido zensho. It strikes me as being of a slightly higher quality than the other texts I've seen from that time, but lower quality than books from the 1930s. It's a hardback edition, but the cover and binding are thin cardboard (with a red background printed in white and black) rather than cloth. It's also degenerated considerably more than almost all the books I have from the period 1900-1940. Of course, it might just have had a particularly hard life, but the paper also seems considerably thinner than in comparable earlier texts, with at least half again as many pages than earlier books of comparable thickness. I know very little about the material aspects of the publishing industry, but this one strikes me as something that was supposed to look high-quality but with scarce resources. Of course, this is speculation on my part.

A comparable work might be Matsunami Jiro's Hagakure bushido, which was frequently republished during the period. It is essentially an annotated selection from the Hagakure, with comments and prefaces by prominent military officers. I have copies from 1939 and 1942. The earlier one is a nice 3-tone hardcover, also of card rather than cloth, but in very good shape. In comparison, the 1942 edition was bound with paper and was printed on thinner and (I assume) lower-quality paper as it is disintegrating badly.

Obviously, this is not a representative sample as it just happens to be based on the texts I happened to collect, but when I think back to similar works I've found in the National Diet Library, the Yasukuni Archives, and elsewhere, Robert's suggestion that quality didn't really deteriorate until after 1941 seems plausible to me.

All the best,

Oleg

Oleg Benesch, PhD FRHistS

Anniversary Research Lecturer (Assistant Professor)

Department of History

University of York
olegbenesch.com

Out now from Oxford University Press:
Inventing the Way of the Samurai
Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushidō in Modern Japan

(Recent reviews in the Journal of Military History and H/Soz/Kult)

Article in Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident no. 38 (Jan. 2015) pp. 129-168:

"The Samurai Next Door: Chinese Examinations of the Japanese Martial Spirit"

[david.wa...@utoronto.ca]

I own or have handled quite a few Japanese publications from the war years, especially on art and music; and it is remarkable that until about 1944 work of high quality continued to be produced, if often in small editions. Some noteworthy examples: Matsubara Bankō 松原晩香, Nanpō no shibai to ongaku 南方の芝居と厭樂 (Tōkyō: Seibi Shokaku, 1943; 35, 328 pp.; red cloth, silver & black spine titling; gold & impressed figure of wayang puppet on back cover; decorative slip-case; colour and black-and-white illustrations; facsimile of a manuscript preface by Tsubouchi Shōyō; edition of 1000 copies); Kishibe Shigeo 岸邊成雄, ed., (Tanabe sensei kanreki kinen) Tō-A ongaku ronsō (田邊先生還暦記念) 東亜音樂論叢 (Tōkyō: San-ichi Shobō, 1943; 33, 867 pp.; silk cloth; gilt spine titling; pictorial dust wrapper; frontispiece photograph of Tanabe Hisao; music examples; black-and-white photographs; line drawings; tables); Wakamori Tarō 和歌森太郎, Shugendō-shi kenkyū 修験道史研究 (Tōkyō: Kawade Shobō, 1943; 360 pp.; cream boards; dark brown cloth spine; protective transparent dust wrapper; limited edition, 500 copies); Yoshida Teruji 吉田暎二 , Harunobu zenshū 春信全集 (Tōkyō: Takamizawa Mokuhansha, 1942; small 4to; 685 illustrations, including tipped-in colour frontispiece; silk spine; limited edition). Of course, these were not editions of "pre-modern" works.

David Waterhouse

Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies,

University of Toronto