第111回白眉セミナー ： Kawase Yūzan and the Value of Free Print in the Late Edo Period
- Niels van Steenpaal (Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, 5th batch of the Hakubi researcher)
- 2016/04/05 5:15pm
- The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research (Research Administration Building 1F)
- English(This seminar is open for students and researchers at Kyoto Univ.)
要旨
Despite the increasing popularity of studies of early modern Japanese print culture, the field has primarily restricted itself to examinations of the commercial print industry—a bias that has come at the price of ignoring a wide variety of free publications that, based on the frequency with which they appear in the archives, clearly played an important role in people’s lives.
In order to consider the value of these free materials, both then and now, this paper will focus on the figure of Kawase Yūzan (1791-1857). Not long after he was installed as the head priest of the Suika Tenjin shrine in Kyoto, Yūzan founded a society called the Kōgakusho (Community for the Study of Filial Piety), from which he spent the following two decades publishing a variety of free books, booklets, and pamphlets that expounded on the relation between everyday life and filial piety. By examining the form, content, and distribution of this material, I aim to show how the parameter of “free” can enrich our understanding of early modern print culture.