I saw the term "Floating World prose" again recently, and had to remind myself what it referred to. Here's the Wiki explanation:
Ukiyo (浮世, "floating/fleeting/transient world") is the Japanese term used to describe the urban lifestyle and culture, especially the pleasure-seeking aspects, of Edo period Japan (1600–1867). Ukiyo culture developed in Yoshiwara, the licensed red-light district of Edo (modern-day Tokyo), the site of many brothels frequented by Japan's growing middle class. A prominent author of the ukiyo genre was Ihara Saikaku, who wrote The Life of an Amorous Woman. Ukiyo culture also arose in other cities, such as Osaka and Kyoto.
That author Ihara Saikaku was, apparently, Japan's first professional novel writer, after being a big hit in poetry:
...the death of his dearly beloved wife in 1675 had an extremely profound impact on him. A few days after her death, in an act of grief and true love, Saikaku started to compose a thousand-verse haikai poem over twelve hours. When this work was published it was called Haikai Single Day Thousand Verse (Haikai Dokugin Ichinichi). It was the first time that Saikaku had attempted to compose such a lengthy piece of literature. The overall experience and success that Saikaku received from composing such a mammoth exercise has been credited with sparking the writer's interest in writing novels....
Later in life he began writing racy accounts of the financial and amorous affairs of the merchant class and the demimonde. These stories catered to the whims of the newly prominent merchant class, whose tastes of entertainment leaned toward the arts and pleasure districts."
Surprisingly, his genre of "racy" writing included an entire book devoted to short stories of pederasty, The Great Mirror of Male Love. While I had previously heard of (many? some?) samurai operating a somewhat Greek like, "mentoring" pederasty system, I didn't realise that there was an entire popular book devoted to the topic written by the country's first famous professional author. It would seem from Wikipedia that the first English translation didn't appear until 1990, which is also surprising given you can imagine how popular this text would be in the gender and sexuality studies sections of some universities. Mind you, the Japanese being Japanese, apparently a lot of the stories involve bloody and tragic endings:
When the woman woke in the morning, they were both silent, lying in the same bed. She called her son: "Rise up, lazy boy!" But there was no answer. She went into the room and turned back the blanket which covered them, and saw that Shinosuke had pierced Senpatji's heart with his sword passed through his own breast and out at his back.
His mother stood there for a long time overwhelmed at the sight of these two lovers' bodies, and then, in her sorrow and distress, killed herself in the same room.
Just your standard Japanese attraction to impermanence and the tragic!
Anyway, this got me thinking about publishing in Japan in the Edo period, as well as literacy, and I found Sci-hub gave me access to an article in the Journal of the Institute of Conservation all about the topic. Here's some interesting stuff:
In 1603, Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa (1543–1616) established a
hegemony over a country that had seen intermittent warfare
between various provincial warlords over much of the past two
centuries.2 The Tokugawa shogunate controlled Japan over the Edo
period, bringing stability and prosperity to the society and economy.
By the early eighteenth century the capital Edo (now Tokyo) had
become the largest metropolitan centre in Japan, with a population
of over one million. Half of Edo’s population was the ruling class,
the samurai or warriors, and the rest were merchants and craftsmen.
The two other major cities of Osaka, the principal trading centre, and
Kyoto, for centuries the capital and craft centre, each grew to 400,000
residents.3 With the development of monetary economy, economic
power shifted from rural agricultural producers to the urban
merchants and craftsmen (a group that was known as townsmen).
With urbanisation, economic growth and the government policy of
rule by law, literacy increased during this period. The samurai class
now became civil administrators, holding national and local
government posts in addition to their military ranks. They had to
rely on knowledge rather than military power to survive the
politically and economically complex society. Merchants had to
master account-keeping and administration. Rural village leaders
had to manage records of community activities and prepare tax
reports for their local lords. To meet these needs, educational
institutions rapidly spread in both cities and rural villages. By the
end of the Edo period, there were around 270 han-supported schools
for elite samurai education, more than 1500 private academies for
scholarly studies, and over 75,000 private schools for merchants and
farmers (commoner schools) throughout the country.4 Although it is
difficult to calculate, researchers estimate that by the middle of the
nineteenth century approximately 50–60% of the Japanese population was literate.5
How do those literacy rates compare to, say, England?:
In 1800 around 40 percent of males and 60 percent of females in England and Wales were illiterate; by 1900 illiteracy for both sexes had dropped to around 3 percent.
That's a big change over the course of a century. You can read about how that happened here.
Anyway, it sounds as if the Japanese had a pretty good start on literacy.
Back to making books in the Edo period:
Until the sixteenth century, printed texts were produced using woodblocks and were made almost exclusively by Buddhist institutions. By the end of the sixteenth century, movable type had been introduced to Japan from Europe and Korea.6
From the 1590s to the1640s, court aristocrats, political and social elites, priests and commercial publishers used movable type technology, and over 500 titles were printed. However, between 1624 and 1643, woodblock printing began to re-emerge and replace movable type. The dominance of woodblock printing was mainly due to its financial advantages over the movable type.7 Except for a few bestsellers and nineteenth-century popular novels, publishers usually ran a small number of copies at one time and reprinted repeatedly, using the same woodblocks, for an extended period (sometimes over a hundred years). Block printing was ideal for this type of operation because once the wooden blocks had been carved they could be stored and used again as the market demanded. In this way publishers were able to recoup the initially high outlay of production and make a profit.8 In addition, a publisher’s right to print and the blocks themselves had a capital value and publishers could make a profit by selling their blocks, or reduce the risk of the initial investment by buying existing blocks.9 Movable type did not have the same commercial value and came to an end by 1650. At the peak of the printed culture in the eighteenth century, it is estimated that over 10,000 printed titles had been published with more than 10million copies on the market.10 A wide variety of texts, from classical to manuals, were published in response to the demands of an expanding reading population. The dominance of block printing continued into the 1890s, when it was replaced by the new western-style metal movable type and mechanised press. Binding practices also changed from the soft cover side-stitched binding to the hard cover western binding.
That's kind of surprising - moveable font being replaced for a long time by woodblock. What a curious country.
The article also explains that a sizeable paper re-cycling business was created by the book industry:
In the Edo region, recycled paper was first produced at the Asakusa temple for its own use in the early seventeenth century. A network for the recycled paper industry had been established by the early eighteenth century. Edo was the largest waste paper supplier. Below the merchant class was a class of people called eta, hinin or ‘the humble’, who lived in the slums of Edo and who engaged in waste collection, including waste paper. Their waste business was organised under government control and the gathered waste paper was sold to papermakers of recycled paper. There were several villages (communities) in the Edo region that made recycled paper. The first villages started at Asakusa, and moved to Sanyabori in the early nineteenth century, they then moved north to Senjyu in the twentieth century. These villages were located very close to the waste business communities (waste paper suppliers). The recycled paper produced in the Edo region was called Asakusashi (meaning Asakusa paper) and it retained this name even after its production had moved from Asakusa to Sanyobori and Senjyu. Various types of recycled paper including toilet paper, book text paper, book covers, building materials and stationery were made and sold to the market through the recycled paper wholesalers. The paper did not require
the kind of quality needed for writing paper. Thus, recycled papermaking was undertaken by people such as poor farmers, who had little skill in papermaking. With ever-expanding demands, the recycled paper industry flourished in Tokyo until the twentieth century.
This recycling sounds very modern-ish. And toilet paper! I don't think I have ever read much about its history before, but it would appear from this account that the Chinese and Japanese were way ahead of the West in using it:
By the early 14th century, the Chinese were manufacturing toilet paper at the rate of 10 million packages of 1,000 to 10,000 sheets annually. In 1393, thousands of perfumed paper sheets were also produced for the Hongwu Emperor’s imperial family...
...in the Western world, modern commercially available toilet paper didn’t originate until 1857, when Joseph Gayetty of New York marketed a "Medicated Paper, for the Water-Closet,” sold in packages of 500 sheets for 50 cents
Oh, and as a complete aside to this entire post, I just read this in the article about the use of the Roman toilet sponge:
The most famous example of ancient ‘toilet paper’ comes from the Roman world [during the first century A.D.] and Seneca's story about the gladiator who killed himself by going into a toilet and shoving the communal sponge on a stick down his throat,” says Erica Rowan, an environmental archaeologist and a lecturer in classical archaeology at the University of London. The sponges, known as tersoriums, may have been used once or cleaned in a bucket of vinegar or salt water and reused, or they may have been used more like toilet brushes than toilet paper.
Wait a minute: does this give an additional gruesome detail to the crucifixion of Christ? I have always been a bit puzzled about the detail of vinegar, or "sour wine" offered on a sponge - I hope it wasn't a toilet sponge. [Ugh]. I see that there are some detailed articles about whether it was actually meant to be an act of mercy or mockery - but has anyone ever thought before of it possibly being really, really insulting and cruel? (The only reason this thought occurs to me is because I had not read before about the sponge being cleaned in a bucket of vinegar - I assumed they were just rinsed in water.)
[Update: But, of course, it seems nearly every thought has been thought of before, so I see someone on Reddit speculated about this a few years ago.]
What an unpleasant note to end on - sorry.
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