THE BOOK EVOLUTION IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN (1603-1867)

THE BOOK EVOLUTION IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN (1603-1867)

Borriello, Giovanni

For about 265 years in Edo there was a period of relative peace. The four successors of Ieyasu (15431616), the first Tokugawa shōgun, through the bakufu, ruled the country organized in a rigid social system that saw society divided into four classes: 1) aristocracy divided into civil (kuge) and military (buke), 2) peasants, 3) craftsmen and 4) merchants.1 As philosophy of state the shōguns adopted the so-called Neo-Confucianism of Chu Hsi (1130-1200). This philosopher, who lived under the Sung and whose doctrines were disseminated in Japan by Fujiwara Seika (1561-1619), argued that the supreme good consisted in the social order, in the stability of the institutions and in the obedience to the authorities, philosophy that well suited to the spirit of the supremacy of the bakufu. The phenomenon that characterized and influenced the most the whole period was the rise and the success of a new social class, the chōnin (lit. “townspeople” or more precisely “people in the city wards”), the city merchants, who at first were the users and then the authors of the so-called “chōnin culture”, which developed especially among the merchant classes of Edo and Ōsaka. The cultural phenomenon was fed in particular, by three factors: the spread of printing, the organization of the pleasure districts and the great impact of the kabuki and the jōruri theatre. In this paper in particular we will deal with printing.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

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