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 1600s. 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.

Made in Japan examines the artistic dialogue between East and West as it played out between 1945 and 1970. During this post-World War II period, Japanese printmakers effectively acted as ambassadors, bringing their aesthetic traditions into fruitful interaction with contemporary American trends and forging ties with artists, scholars, museums, and collectors. This volume presents for the first time an integrated history of innovative visual experimentation and pioneering cultural patronage. The creative print (sosaku hanga) movement originated in the early twentieth century, when Japanese artists sought to modernize their practice by embracing Euro-American concepts of originality and autonomy. The movement matured in the decades following World War II, when second- and third-generation sosaku hanga printmakers continued to experiment in stylistic, technical, and thematic terms. From the early 1950s, Japanese printmakers participated in a newly global art scene, achieving great success at international art exhibitions sponsored by the American and Japanese governments. The prints in this book range widely in treatment and medium, embracing woodcut, stencil, lithography, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, and screenprint. Made in Japan includes essays by Alicia Volk and Helen Nagata and biographies of the artists.

The shin hanga ("new print") movement flourished in Japan for almost fifty years after being set in motion and nurtured by publisher Watanabe Shozaburo (1885–1962). Employing the traditional "ukiyo-e quartet"—a production system consisting of artists, carvers, printers, and publishers—shin hanga attracted Western as well as native artists. The studio teams created woodblock prints that updated traditional ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world") prints by including Kabuki actor portraits, "beauties," and landscapes and other nature themes, often birds and flowers. With lavish illustrations and expert commentary, Shin Hanga: The New Print Movement of Japan details the shin hanga movement and presents splendid reproductions of works by its principal artists.

In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination explores how this commercial print revolution transformed Japan’s media ecology and traces the possibilities and pitfalls of type as a force for radical social change. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he considers the meanings and functions of print as a staple commodity and as a ubiquitous and material medium for discourse and thought. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Typographic Imagination brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, language reform debates, works of experimental fiction, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, Esperanto primers, declassified censorship documents, and printing press strike bulletins. Combining the rigorous close analysis of Japanese literary studies with transdisciplinary methodologies from media studies, book history, and intellectual history, The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformations of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.

Printing Landmarks tells the story of the late Tokugawa period’s most distinctive form of popular geography: meisho zue. Beginning with the publication of Miyako meisho zue in 1780, these monumental books deployed lovingly detailed illustrations and informative prose to showcase famous places (meisho) in ways that transcended the limited scope, quality, and reliability of earlier guidebooks and gazetteers. Putting into spellbinding print countless landmarks of cultural significance, the makers of meisho zue created an opportunity for readers to experience places located all over the Japanese archipelago. In this groundbreaking multidisciplinary study, Robert Goree draws on diverse archival and scholarly sources to explore why meisho zue enjoyed widespread and enduring popularity. Examining their readership, compilation practices, illustration techniques, cartographic properties, ideological import, and production networks, Goree finds that the appeal of the books, far from accidental, resulted from specific choices editors and illustrators made about form, content, and process. Spanning the fields of book history, travel literature, map history, and visual culture, Printing Landmarks provides a new perspective on Tokugawa-period culture by showing how meisho zue depicted inspiring geographies in which social harmony, economic prosperity, and natural stability made for a peaceful polity.