Listen, Copy, Read : Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan

Listen, Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan endeavors to elucidate the mechanisms by which a growing number of men and women of all social strata became involved in acquiring knowledge and skills during the Tokugawa period. It offers an overview of the communication media and tools that teachers, booksellers, and authors elaborated to make such knowledge more accessible to a large audience.
Schools, public lectures, private academies or hand-copied or printed manuals devoted to a great variety of topics, from epistolary etiquette or personal ethics to calculation, divination or painting, are here invoked to illustrate the vitality of Tokugawa Japan’s ‘knowledge market’, and to show how popular learning relied on three types of activities: listening, copying and reading.

With contributions by: W.J. Boot, Matthias Hayek, Annick Horiuchi, Michael Kinski, Koizumi Yoshinaga, Peter Kornicki, Machi Senjūrō, Christophe Marquet, Markus Rüttermann, Tsujimoto Masashi, and Wakao Masaki.

Matthias Hayek, Ph.D. (2008), is Associate Professor at Paris Diderot University. He has published articles on Early Modern Japanese divination, and co-edited, with Hayashi Makoto, a special issue of Japanese Journal of Religious Studies: Onmyōdō in Japanese History, (40/1, 2013).
Annick Horiuchi, Ph.D. (1990), is Professor of Japanese Studies at Paris Diderot University. She has published Japanese Mathematics in the Edo Period (1600-1868) (Birkhäuser, 2010) and co-edited Repenser l’ordre, repenser l’héritage: Paysage intellectuel du Japon (Droz, 2002).