Seth Jacobowitz's Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture is a long overdue, historically grounded critique of the common theoretical musings of the field of modern Japanese literature that were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s. By placing literary and, indeed, national history within the context of cultural material in Meiji Japan, the book takes as its organizing principle the notion that writing as we now know it was significantly transformed by practices and media cultivated and developed through the late nineteenth century. Without arguing that such methods of visualization, inscription, transcription, circulation, and standardization determine writing as we know it, the book makes the more nuanced claim that to understand modern writing (and particularly modern literature) we must understand its indebtedness to such techniques and their history. It is a thoroughly convincing argument and one that will have the field thinking for years to come, simply because of the historical truths it exposes, synthesizes, and explains.
As Jacobowitz explains in his tour de force introduction, literary history forgets the technologies at the focus of the book, because the nature of our recording media is that they become more and more transparent over time. And once they have become so clean and clear, we forget there was even ever anything else. This is as true today for high-definition television as it was for realist fiction in the decades after its inception in Japan. To use a visual metaphor, rather than being a lens for focusing our attention on various salient features, the book then conveys a feeling as if a distorting lens is being removed from our gaze. Thus, again and again Jacobowitz shows us how what we thought we understood about the impact of, say, language reform on Japanese literature is not quite right, and we need to see it again and more directly through his connection of that story to the history of standardizations of time and space, the development of a postal network, and phonography.
Of course, many pieces of the puzzle the book assembles have been discussed before, for instance, in studies on the unified style (genbun'itchi) movement by Karatani, Twine, and Tomasi, among others. But Jacobowitz contextualizes these pieces within the larger frame of a synthetic argument about multiple techniques and apparatuses of writing, including those that are not obviously linguistic. Focusing on the discursive rise of the concept of what would become the word for photograph, Maki Fukuoka's The Premise of Fidelity is probably the closest to the core of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan’s contribution to Japanese studies.Footnote 1 But the present book brackets that entire discourse within transformations of scopic and aural “transcriptive realism.” Jacobowitz shows us how the aesthetics of realism change to keep pace with the innovations of mimetic machines, including the human machines. So the attention is not only on discourse analysis of what writing meant for writers (though it is on that too), but also on Kittlerian “discourse networks,” something like the physical infrastructures that enable such discourse to flow, from paper to woodblock, phonograph to photograph.
The book is divided into four parts, considering the roles of networks and flows of writing, modernization and standardization of linguistic practice, various efforts to make writing reflect the world of speech and sound, and finally how the aesthetic practice of two writers problematize realism. Each part is composed of two or more of the book's ten chapters. The book's ten chapters address what Jacobowitz calls (after Kittler's Aufschreibesysteme) “systems of writing things down.” Themes and terms that connect the various parts include attention to the growing technical concern for mimetic representation of the world in “new forms of verbal and visual media capture,” whether wax and vinyl, through wires, or on paper.
Bringing us back to an age of when the “incommensurability of speech and writing” was a given, Jacobowitz's media archeology of modern Japanese writing shows us how the current writing system is thoroughly contingent on personal whim, industrious invention, and studious arguments. Though Jacobowitz never states it as such, the agents of change he explores are not solely technics and technologies, but also those who develop them; hence the book's attention to a motley crew of bureaucrats, technologists, educators, and artists. They (Maejima Hisoka, Mokuami, Hokusai, Mori Arinori, Nishi Amane, Takusari Kōki, Isawa Shūji, Yano Ryūkei, Wakabayashi Kanzō, Sanyūtei Enchō, Futabatei Shimei, Masaoka Shiki, and Natsume Sōseki) too are media of modern Japanese writing conjured by our medium Jacobowitz to tell stories of a bygone age.
The ne plus ultra high point of the book is Jacobowitz's rereading of Futabatei's Ukigumo. This is putatively one of Japan's first modern novels, but Jacobowitz incontrovertibly links it not only to the Edo gesaku but to rakugo. He firmly grounds this argument with a thoughtful reading of an image from the first edition of the book.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Jacobowitz's book is what his scholarship means for the field of Japanese literature after New Historicism, namely that to write theory one has to label it “history.” Though the book is historical to be sure, the force of its arguments are not solely confined to the historical, but allow us to see the world differently. We see this issue of history obscuring theory in some close analogues to Jacobowitz's work such as Edward Mack's Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature, which perhaps suffers more because it is more earnest in its engagement with history, or Jonathan Zwicker's Practices of the Sentimental Imagination, also equally ambitious in its scope and approach.Footnote 2 Thus, the biggest problem is not a problem with the book per se but a problem with the field. The next group of books in Japanese studies will surely struggle to solve this macro-level conundrum.
On a more micro scale, a word of concern for me arose as I read the book. We all have our own pet words that we love to return to again and again, and for Jacobowitz in this project it is “amanuensis” (surrogate writer), used about ten times in the present volume by my count. And, of course, in a book about writing technologies and media and their affordances and disabilities, we should not be surprised by the appearance of such a word. But at times it seems Jacobowitz is simply fond of the word, as he uses it in ways that drift from its typical English-language meaning. More precision in usage here would have been helpful.
Finally, on a minor note, there was occasionally also an odd Eurocentricist undercurrent to claims that whatever Japanese technology or historical development is “on par with any in the world” (p. 43), a note also sounded in the enlightening work of Sheldon Garon and Carol Gluck, as if we Japanologists still need to argue overtly for relevance. My sense is that these sorts of refrains are unnecessary and unhelpful to our field, and attest to or reify our own marginalization. But, to be sure, it is a refrain that Meiji figures themselves made; witness Isawa's concern, quoted by Jacobowitz, that Japan develop a “worldwide standard for phonetic script” (p. 161). The question is whether there is a way we can show our relevance, proving it, rather than telling it.
By shifting our attention from overly and overtly aestheticized subsets to the entire array of writing writ large, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan brackets problems and issues that have hitherto been seen as being confined to literature or art history and shows how they are related directly to major policies of modernization. The result is that the connections (too often obscured by otherwise interesting scholarship) between art movements like modernism, national and corporate technological movements like modernization, and world historical periods like modernity are elucidated. Here modernity, modernization, and early modernism converge into a clear picture that will be pored over by the field for a long time.
