Now I'm curious what would be a good dynamic condition for the appearance of the
printing revolution institution (that is, the development of a significant "commercial print culture", since obviously the printing press is an advancement, not an institution). Evidently mere presence of printing presses wasn't the case. Given that chunk, it seems that the flurry of commercial print culture came in the late Ming. I wonder why it took as long as it did?
Or whether it actually did, or if we're just missing evidence in our sources of such a significant commercial print culture existing in earlier periods? Gonna have to dig into it more.
(Apologies for the formatting, I’m posting from my phone)
I’d say the issue is less technological, and more to do with whether the society in question has large enough urban/middle class sector to generate enough demand for a commercial print culture. Japan and Korea both had access to woodblock printing since at least the 8th century, but for most of their history it was limited to the government and religious institutions. (Like the Tripitaka Koreana) Things only really started to diverge after Japan underwent massive increases in urbanization and literacy during the Tokugawa/Edo period (1603-1853), which saw the development of Ukiyo-e prints and popular novels like Ihara Saikaku’s “Life of an Amorous Man” (1682) or “Nansou Satomi Hakken” by Takizawa/Kyokutei Bakin (1814-1842). Outside of Hanseong/Seoul Korean society was overwhelmingly rural, and envoys from Joseon tended to be shocked by the commercial development of China and Japan during their visits.
From volume two of Strange Parallels
https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Parallels-Southeast-c-800-1830-Comparative/dp/0521530369
“Until the late 18th century the chief schools were private academies (shijuku) run for samurai and wealthy chonin. Urban at first, by the early 19th century shijuku were tutoring sons of rural traders, village headmen, and well-to-do farmers. From the 1780s and more especially the 1820s three other types of schools also proliferated: official domain academies, chiefly for samurai and thoroughly Confucian in outlook; small parish elementary schools (terakoya), which community leaders founded to provide basic skills for local youths; and schools tied to particular religious sects, whose clientele was also plebian. 333 Supplemented by home tuition, these institutions by 1850 had produced a male literacy rate of 40 to 50 percent and a female rate of perhaps 15 percent. Although these levels were similar to Indic Southeast Asia, unlike those societies but as in France and Russia, in Japan the ability to read remained far less common in the countryside than in cities, where in fact male literacy became normative. 334
Rising literacy supported an urban publishing industry in a push-pull relation reminiscent of France. With similar populations and literacy rates, France in the 1770s and Japan in the 1840s produced annual titles in the same order of magnitude. 335 And in both countries printing was symbiotic with market intensification. From 1690 to 1840 the number of new Japanese titles rose over fivefold, while print runs and the number of bookstores, rental libraries, and itinerant lenders also increased markedly. Edo in 1808 had as many lending libraries as barbershops and bathhouses. 336 But if Japanese publishing resembled France in its urban focus, Japan's print revolution relied not on movable type, but woodblocks (which proved more economical and better able to reproduce Japanese script 337) and took root in the 1590s, almost a century after comparable developments in Europe. Japan's chronology reflected, above all, rapid urban growth associated with unification.”
“335 Some 1,500 titles a year in France and 1,000 in Japan, with editions of 500–1,000 in both cases, according to Smith, “History of the Book,” 335–36. However, Yonemoto, Mapping, 15 suggests that on average over 3,000 titles per year were published during the entire Tokugawa period. Berry, Japan in Print, 31 refers to 7,000 titles in print in Kyoto alone in 1692. Discussion of commercial publishing, including French comparisons, draws on these three sources, esp. Berry, Japan in Print, chs. 2, 6, plus Berry, “Was Early Modern Japan Integrated?” 116–35; Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan (Leiden, 1998), chs. 1, 4–9; Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, esp. ch. 11; Moriya, “Urban Networks,” 114–18; Shively, “Popular Culture,” 725–33.”
en.m.wikipedia.org
Woodblock printing was invented in China under the
Tang dynasty, and eventually migrated to Japan in the late 700s, where it was first used to reproduce foreign literature.
[2] In 764 the
Empress Kōken commissioned one million small wooden pagodas, each containing a small woodblock scroll printed with a Buddhist text (
Hyakumantō Darani). These were distributed to temples around the country as thanks for the suppression of the
Emi Rebellion of 764. These are the earliest examples of woodblock printing known, or documented, from
Japan.
[3]
By the eleventh century,
Buddhist temples in Japan produced printed books of
sutras,
mandalas, and other Buddhist texts and images. For centuries, printing was mainly restricted to the Buddhist sphere, as it was too expensive for mass production, and did not have a receptive, literate public as a market. However, an important set of fans of the late
Heian period(12th century), containing painted images and Buddhist sutras, reveal from loss of paint that the
underdrawing for the paintings was printed from blocks.
[4] In the
Kamakura period from the 12th century to the 13th century, many books were printed and published by woodblock printing at Buddhist temples in
Kyoto and
Kamakura.
[3]
From “A New Middle Kingdom: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Choson Korea (1700-1850)”
“Most Korean visitors to Japan were genuinely impressed by the prosperity of its urban life and the vigor of its markets and commerce. Even as early as 1607, Kyöng Sõm (1562-1620), vice ambassador of the first envoy after the Japanese invasion, expressed amazement at the obvious wealth.
{The streets are neatly organized and commoners' houses are well maintained. The goods are piled high in the stores of the market. They trade with China, Holland, Portugal, Ryuku, and others. There is no country too distant for them to reach. Many regions in the Kanto area as well as Iwami, Tan'go, and Nagato prefectures produce silver and gold in enormous amounts. In the market, they use bronze coins brought from China. The merchants form huge crowds everywhere and the state flourishes. Their market system is very similar to that of China.}
Such admiration is also found frequently in records written by later visitors. Kang Hongjung (1577-1642), who visited Japan in 1624, noted: "The goods are stored in great abundance at the market while commoners' houses have plenty of rice. The wealth of their people and the richness of their commodities are well beyond comparison with our state.?»80 Sin Yuhan also made a similar observation about Japanese economic prosperity and its amazing network for international trade. 81”
“Another area that dazzled the Korean envoys in Japan was the print culture and book trade, which was far advanced compared with Korea and even Qing China. Most Korean visitors to Japan in the eighteenth century could not fail to recognize the flourishing print culture in terms of both its quality and quantity. Sin Yuhan was amazed by bookstores in Osaka where he found not only hundreds of books from Korea, but also thousands from China. He estimated that the size of the publication market in Osaka alone was ten times larger than in all of Korea.85 Similarly, Chõng Yagyong, in a letter to his second son, explained how Japanese scholarship benefited from their superb book industry: "In retrospect, Japan originally obtained books from Paekche [an ancient kingdom in Korea, 18 BCE-660 CE]. The Japanese were quite uncultivated in the beginning. However, since they traded directly with Jiangsu and Zhejiang [in China], there is no good book that they have not obtained. Furthermore, Japan does not have the evil practice of state examinations; thus, nowadays their scholarship is ahead of us. How shameful it is!"86
Nevertheless, even as they recognized the superior economic prosperity in Japan, some other Choson visitors remained trapped in the age-old confidence that justified their underdeveloped commerce and poor living conditions: they celebrated the relative poverty of their society as a sign of their frugal lifestyle, a virtue that harkened back to puritan Confucianism.
For example, Cho Öm disparaged the high degree of prosperity in Japan as an unnecessary luxury.® Even Sin Yuhan, who acknowledged Japanese economic prowess, simultaneously tried to tarnish its success by excoriating the men's hairstyle and the samurai's practice of carrying swords. He claimed that such customs were clearly aberrant in an authentically Confucian civilization. The implication in such comments was that regardless of their economic development, the Japanese remained a barbaric state and inferior to civilized Korea. Such nitpicking ethnocentrism was later criticized by more progressive Korean scholars. Chõng Yagyong reprimanded Sin Yuhan for failing to learn anything useful from Japan during his mission. Chõng decried the Choson diplomats' hubris as inexcusable since it prevented them from seeing the positives of Japanese civilization. 84“
“Wön Chunggõ (1719-1790), after his 1763 visit to Japan, offered an evaluation of the Japanese in terms of their literary talent. His comment suggests that attitudes toward Japanese culture at large were changing among the elite Koreans.
{Overall, the people in this country are keen and intelligent from an early age. At four or five, they can wield a brush and by their early teens they can even compose poetry. Among their women are many who can write poetry and create calligraphy. It is quite like Chinese women who so indulge in poetry writing that they neglect their other duties. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to call [Japan] the home of civilization in the ocean.89}“
Two years after Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, Pak Chega’s (1750–1805) Discourse on Northern Learning appeared on the opposite corner of the globe. Both books presented notions of wealth and the economy for critical review: the former caused a stir across Europe, the...
books.google.ca
Two years after Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, Pak Chega’s (1750–1805)
Discourse on Northern Learning appeared on the opposite corner of the globe. Both books presented notions of wealth and the economy for critical review: the former caused a stir across Europe, the latter influenced only a modest group of Chosŏn (1392–1897) Korea scholars and other intellectuals. Nevertheless, the ideas of both thinkers closely reflected the spirit of their times and helped define certain schools of thought—in the case of Pak, Northern Learning (Pukhak), which disparaged the Chosŏn Neo-Confucian state ideology as inert and ineffective.
Years of humiliation and resentment against the conquering Manchus blinded many Korean elites to the scientific and technological advances made in Qing China (1644–1911). They despised its rulers as barbarians and begrudged Qing China’s status as their suzerain state. But Pak saw Korea’s northern neighbor as a model of economic and social reform. He and like-minded progressives discussed and corroborated views about the superiority of China’s civilization. After traveling to Beijing in 1776, Pak wrote
Discourse on Northern Learning, in which he favorably introduced many aspects of China’s economy and culture. By comparison, he argued, Korea’s economy was depressed, the result of inadequate government policies and the selfishness of a privileged upper class. He called for drastic reforms in agriculture and industry and for opening the country to international trade. In a series of short essays, Pak gives us rare insights into life on the ground in late eighteenth-century Korea, and in the many details he supplies on Chinese farming, trade, and other commercial activities, his work provides a window onto everyday life in Qing China.
Students and specialists of Korean history, particularly social reform movements, and Chosŏn-Qing relations will welcome this new translation.
(I have the book somewhere but I haven’t been able to find it yet, so I’ve just posted the description for now)
