Channeling the Undercurrents: Fūsetsudome, Information Access, and National Political Awareness in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Abstract

While knowledge and network revolutions spread information publicly across social classes in early modern Japan, the emergence of fūsetsudome—private compilations of political documents—reveals that intellectuals, even in far-flung regions, increasingly accessed uncensored political information. This article contextualizes fūsetsudome alongside public media and demonstrates how merchant-class painter and kokugaku scholar Hirao Rosen of Hirosaki in Japan's distant north made two such compilations to document Matthew C. Perry's arrival and the Meiji Restoration. Fūsetsudome indicate wide national political awareness by the 1850s and reveal how commoner-class intellectuals accessed uncensored political information through interaction with samurai connected to political authority.