Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection: An Introductory Manual with Selected Texts by Naohiro Ōta

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection: An Introductory Manual with Selected Texts by Naohiro Ōta Daniele Lauro Naohiro Ōta. Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection: An Introductory Manual with Selected Texts. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2021. ix + 134 pp., color illustrations, maps. ISBN: 978-88-210-1076-7. Achief challenge that all scholars of premodern Japan are bound to encounter in the course of their careers is acquiring sufficient skills to read and understand komonjo, a term used to describe various types of documents produced before the Meiji period (1868–1912). The challenge is twofold. First, komonjo feature grammatical structures and words that are no longer in use or that have assumed different meanings in modern Japanese. Second, premodern documents are often written using kuzushiji, a cursive style in which the original shape of the characters is altered, thus making the task of reading texts particularly daunting. In Japan, where the field of paleography emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, an abundance of komonjo manuals and dictionaries have been published over the years. Additionally, Japanese universities, museums, and other research institutions routinely offer classes for the study of premodern documents. Outside of Japan, however, opportunities are more limited, despite the initiatives launched in the past decade by European and American universities. In this context, Naohiro Ōta's volume, Reading Japanese Documents from the Marega Collection, possibly the first komonjo primer in English, is a long-awaited and much-needed contribution. Ōta, a professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (Tokyo), developed the volume as a by-product of an international project involving Japanese and European scholars to catalog and digitize a forgotten collection of premodern Japanese documents donated by Mario Marega, a Salesian missionary to Japan, to the Vatican Apostolic Library in the 1950s. The approximately 14,500 documents that Marega collected during his time in Ōita Prefecture were produced between the seventeenth and the nineteenth [End Page 152] century and pertain to the institutions used to control and prevent the spread of Christianity, a religion that had arrived in Japan in the mid-sixteenth century but had been outlawed by the military government of the Tokugawa in the early seventeenth century. The volume, whose primary aim is "to introduce the basic skills for reading Japanese early modern records," is divided into five chapters (3). The first chapter provides an overview of the collaborative efforts that started in 2012 to study and digitize the Marega Collection. The chapter also discusses the genesis of the volume and some of the challenges that the editors, three Italian scholars of Japan, tackled to make the volume as approachable as possible to non-Japanese readers. Chapter 2 introduces foundational knowledge for the study of komonjo, and it is divided into four sections. The first explores the material dimension of documents by examining traditional Japanese writing implements and the formats of paper used for administrative purposes, as well as common techniques to wrap and seal documents. The discussion of the "documents as objects" is noteworthy because, in addition to supplying the reader with the technical knowledge to talk about premodern administrative documents, it casts light on the wealth of information that can be gathered by analyzing the material aspects of written records. For example, we learn that the type of paper and the format used in official documents depended on the social and power dynamics between the sender and the receiver. The second section examines "writing and language as gateways to a full understanding of the documents' content" (15). Ōta starts with an explanation of the traditional scripts as well as the writing styles used in premodern administrative documents. Next, he introduces some techniques to decipher texts written in the complex cursive style (kuzushiji) and some conventions that are adopted in premodern texts to read characters in the correct order. Finally, the author examines the various parts of a document and their position in the text, and general grammatical aspects of sōrōbun, a literary style commonly used in administrative documents. This section is beneficial because the structure of Japanese premodern administrative sources follows conventions that are not necessarily intuitive for non-Japanese readers. For...