Writing Technology in Meiji Japan

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan boldly rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture from the perspective of media history. Drawing upon methodological insights by Friedrich Kittler and extensive archival research, Seth Jacobowitz investigates a range of epistemic transformations in the Meiji era (1868–1912), from the rise of communication n...

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Writing Technology in Meiji Japan boldly rethinks the origins of modern Japanese language, literature, and visual culture from the perspective of media history. Drawing upon methodological insights by Friedrich Kittler and extensive archival research, Seth Jacobowitz investigates a range of epistemic transformations in the Meiji era (1868–1912), from the rise of communication networks such as telegraph and post to debates over national language and script reform. He documents the changing discursive practices and conceptual constellations that reshaped the verbal, visual, and literary regimes from the Tokugawa era. These changes culminate in the discovery of a new vernacular literary style from the shorthand transcriptions of theatrical storytelling (rakugo) that was subsequently championed by major writers such as Masaoka Shiki and Natsume Sōseki as the basis for a new mode of transparently objective, “transcriptive” realism. The birth of modern Japanese literature is thus located not only in shorthand alone, but within the emergent, multimedia channels that were arriving from the West. This book represents the first systematic study of the ways in which media and inscriptive technologies available in Japan at its threshold of modernization in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century shaped and brought into being modern Japanese literature.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Balloon Ride
Systems of Writing Things Down
The Paper Trail
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List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Balloon Ride
Systems of Writing Things Down
The Paper Trail
I. Discourse Networks of Meiji Japan
1. Standardizing Measures
Standing-Reserve
Standards and Conventions
2. Telegraph and Post
Maejima Hisoka
Instant Messaging
Secret Correspondences
3. Wiring Meiji Japan: From Hokusai’s Postcard to Mokuami’s Telegraph
The Postcard That Goes Undelivered
Telegraphing the Imagined Community from Yasukuni Shrine
II. Scripting National Language
4. Japanese in Plain English
Mori Arinori and the Anglophone Roots of Modern Japanese
Nishi Amane’s Case for Romanization
5. Phonetic Shorthand
Phonography and Verbal Photography
Hooked on Phonics
6. Parsing Visible Speech
Alexander Melville Bell and the Human Speaking Machine
Isawa Shūji and Imperial Linguistics
III. “Writing Things Down Just as They Are”
7. Regime Change
Utsushi: Between Calligraphy and Photography
Hanashi: Constellations of Speech
True History, Duly Noted: Yano’s Political Novel Illustrious Statesmen of Thebes
8. The Haunted Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
The Transcriptive Realism of Sanyūtei Enchō’s The Peony Lantern
The Transparency of the Novel
IV. The Limits of Realism
9. Masaoka Shiki’s Scribblings
The Statistical Death of Japanese Poetry
Sketching from Life
10. Scratching Records with Sōseki’s Cat
Feline Amanuensis
The Discourse of Noses
Bibliography
Index
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