Reviewed by: The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan's Age of Modern Print Media by Nathan Shockey Seth Jacobowitz The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan's Age of Modern Print Media. By Nathan Shockey. Columbia University Press, 2020. 336 pages. ISBN: 9780231194280 (hardcover; also available as e-book). Nathan Shockey's The Typographic Imagination makes the latest contribution to studies of modern print culture in Japan by exploring how a new regime of reading, writing, and thinking was inaugurated at the dawn of mass culture (1890s–1930s) through widely affordable and available books and magazines. In many respects, this is a meticulous work of scholarship, brimming with a wealth of analytical and anecdotal perspectives about the state actors, publishers, intellectuals, and writers who, in Shockey's formulation, understood typographic print to be "a powerful heuristic means and method for their efforts to reconstruct the modern world, regardless of ideological orientation" (p. 3). In contrast to earlier research publications that emphasized the linkages between the rise of a new vernacular language and realist literature for the conception of modern subjectivity, Shockey insists upon recognizing the commodification of mass-produced print matter as a material basis for rethinking the marketplace of ideas and social relations. The book is divided into two parts, each consisting of three chapters. Part 1 sets the frame for the supersession of existing xylographic forms by typographic book and magazine publishing, which shepherded knowledge production, dissemination, and lively debate to a newly constituted national audience. Shockey is at his finest weaving together a seamless account of how three of the leading publishing houses—Hakubunkan, Iwanami, and Kōdansha—delivered print to the masses as what he calls a "staple commodity" (p. 5). Part 2 shifts gears to assess a handful of topics within a still-evolving media ecology through a close reading of avant-gardist literary theory and texts by Yokomitsu Riichi and the Shinkankaku-ha (Neo-Perceptionists); a survey of orthographic reform, Romanization, and Esperanto movements as Japan grappled with script as a "fundamental, atomistic building block of consciousness" (p. 159); and lastly, a study of how Marxist thinkers and Communist activists worked through the medium of print capitalism despite the hostility of the imperial state. [End Page 145] In his introduction, Shockey defines his three-part methodology drawn from the Toronto school of communications theory of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan; histories of the Western book by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, and Roger Chartier; and work on modern literature and media studies by a dozen or so figures based in Japan, including, most prominently, Kōno Kensuke, Hyōdō Hiromi, Suzuki Sadami, Komori Yōichi, Nagamine Shigetoshi, and Toeda Hirokazu. Inexplicably lost somewhere along the way, however, is the lion's share of recent American scholarship on modern Japanese literature and print culture in English, which Shockey only glancingly signals. This odd maneuver diminishes the ability of The Typographic Imagination to participate in a larger conversation. In actual practice, the "typographic imagination" appears closer to a sociology of print culture consistent with Pierre Bourdieu's notion of socially ingrained skills, dispositions, and behavioral patterns. Shockey combines Bourdieu's habitus with Harry Harootunian's call in Overcome by Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2000) to investigate everyday life under the conditions of mass culture: "This book explores the habituation of modern forms of reading and writing in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth as the rapid growth of the typographic publishing industry made mass-produced print media an inexorable part of everyday life" (p. 2). Curiously, neither Bourdieu nor Harootunian are mentioned in this volume. They are simply included in the bibliography, as are the American Japanologists. Harootunian's emphasis on everyday life under the conditions of mass culture took cues not only from thinkers of the Frankfurt and Chicago schools, but also from the groundbreaking work of prewar Japanese sociologists (Kon Wajirō, Gonda Yasunosuke), Marxist intellectuals (Tosaka Jun, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke), and detective fiction writers (Edogawa Ranpo). Shockey, conversely, ascribes historical agency to mostly top-down accounts of actions by the state, major publishing houses, and literary elites such as Kawabata Yasunari and Yokomitsu...
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Apr 3, 2024
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