Hiroki Kikuchi, "Letting the Copy out of the Window: a history of Copying Texts in Japan", The East Asian Library Journal 4, no. (2010): 120-157
Yüklə 25,89 Mb. Pdf görüntüsü
|
5. Sanemikyō-ki, Sanjōnishi manuscript copy, vol. 4, for the tenth day of the second month of 1301, with text and a diagram of a game of kemari (kick ball). Exemplar in the Kokubungaku kenkyū shiryōkan (National Institute of Japanese Literature). Photograph from the collection of the Historiographical Institute. 6. Sanemikyō-ki, Tebori-Sanjō traced copy, vol. 13, for the twenty-fourth day of the second month of 1292. Exemplar in the collection of the Ise Shrine Library. Photograph from the collection of the Historiographical Institute. Compare with the original of the same text shown in figure 4 above. 134 hiroki kikuchi Hand-Copied Texts in Modern Scholarship– Historiographical Institute and Asakawa Kan’ichi While the number of published books increased more and more during the Edo period, diary records were published only after the end of the traditional aris- tocracy system with the collapse of Tokugawa shogunate. The establishment of the modern state changed all the court ritual absolutely. It was not necessary for each aristocratic house to individually record or research court ritual, and thus there was little need to continue to keep diary records secret.
At the same time academic interest in history was increasing partly under Western influence. The effort to describe general Japanese history had started during the Edo period, which saw the completion in 1798 of Zokushigushō (Rush Selection of the Sequel Historiography) by Yanagiwara Motomitsu (1746–1800) and in 1812 of Gunsho Ruijū (Collection of Mass Volumes) by Hanawa Hoki’ichi (1746–1821), though opportunities to access historical resources were not afforded equally to all scholars. 21 In 1869 the Emperor Meiji (1852–1912) ordered Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–1891) to undertake as a national project an official historiography, as a continuation of Rikkokushi (Six National Histories). 22 After several organizational changes in the government, this historiography project (shiryō hensan jigyō) became classified as an academic project and was placed in the Imperial University. 23
also had been gradually increasing. A number of academic research projects were begun in 1873 in order to complete the historiography project at Mito and other remarkable private libraries (bunko). 24 After 1885 this research developed into a search for unknown documents possessed by regional houses or temples all over Japan because it was thought that the historiography project would be incomplete if the research were limited to well-known documents in eminent private librar- ies.
25 Many lists, catalogues, and hand copies were shelved in the Historiographical Institute for the reference. Based on these copies, in 1901 the Historiographical Institute started publishing two series: Dai-Nihon shiryō (Chronological Source Books of Japanese History) and Dai-Nihon komonjo (Old Documents of Japan). Also about the same time, some diary records were published. For example, pub- lication began in 1897 of Bunka daigaku shishi sōsho (Historiographical Series of the College of Humanities), which included several titles of diary records. Gyokuyō (Leaves of Jade) and Meigetsu-ki (Record of the Bright Moon), both of which are basic diary records for the research of medieval Japan, were published copying texts in japan 135 in 1906 and 1911, respectively. Scholars from the Historiographical Institute were involved to a large extent in these publication projects. 26
After these first publications the document project continued to develop in the Historiographical Institute. Before photographic reproductions of manu- scripts began to be made in the early twentieth century in the Historiographical Institute, all the historical documents were copied by hand. 27 These copies can be categorized in two groups—eisha and tōsha. As I mentioned before, eisha is a precise copy, motivated by philological interest, of the original traced by skillful calligraphers. On the other hand, tōsha (transcribed copy) is simply the copy of the content of a text and was usually produced by copyists (shajisei). The section of copyists of the Historiographical Institute was composed of many kinds of people, some of whom eventually became professors. 28 They had engaged not only in copying texts, but also in helping scholars write manuscripts until 1946 when the section of copyists was officially abolished. 29 As the large-scale research of the document project began in 1887, a great number of hand copies were accumulated in the Historiographical Institute library in cooperation with copyists. 30 Before
1887 the Historiographical Institute already possessed five thousand tōsha and two thousand five hundred titles of eisha. The total of these copies increased to twice that in the next decade. By the 1940s the total number of tōsha had increased to over twenty-two thousand items, and by the 1960s eisha numbered up to eleven thousand titles. Finally the Historiographical Institute stopped producing tōsha because of ease of photographic reproduction, but the institute has continued to produce eisha for historiographical study (shiryō-gaku).
Some may argue that a photographic reproduction is certainly an effec- tive way to capture all of the physical features of a document—the style of the calligraphy, the wear on the document, the holes in the paper, etc. However, in some important ways, the human eye is superior to today’s photographic tech- nology. For example, a well-trained calligrapher very carefully observes the light and dark shading of the ink of the original document, which can be of crucial significance for the interpretation of the manuscript. And, when characters are written on both sides of the paper, ink will have soaked through to the opposite side. Photographic reproductions of such a manuscript are often difficult to read because the two layers of text blur into one. In the process of hand copying the calligrapher carefully distinguishes the text on the one side from that on the reverse side. (For a good example of the visual confusion that results in photographic reproductions of documents written on both sides of thin paper, see figure 7.) Yüklə 25,89 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|