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Obiya Ihei, a Japanese Provincial Publisher^ OBIYA IHEI, A JAPANESE PROVINCIAL PUBLISHER^ p. F. KORNICKI COMMERCIAL publishing came of age in Japan during the Tokugawa period (1600- 1868). Both at the beginning and at the end of this period there was a vogue for experimenting with movable type, but from the middle of the seventeenth century the burgeoning publishing industry relied almost exclusively on wood-block printing, and it continued to do so until the 1870s. The industry developed to such an extent that there was by the early nineteenth century a national, albeit informal, network of publishers and distributors and a national market for the printed book. So at the time of the opening of Japan in 1854 and the subsequent Meiji Restoration of 1868 there already existed in Japan the means of publishing and communication which could serve to inform the inhabitants of Japan about the world from which they had long been cut off. The first newspapers and magazines were predominantly wood-block publications, but soon after the Meiji Restoration wood-block printing began to lose ground rapidly to printing with movable type, which enjoyed the stimulus of newly imported Western technology. There can be no doubt, however, that the foundations of the Meiji publishing industry were laid in the Tokugawa period. Until recently, studies of the publishing history of the Tokugawa period have concentrated exclusively on the so-called 'three capitals', Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, the last of which was designated the capital in 1868 and renamed Tokyo, The received opinion is that commercial publishing began in Kyoto and rapidly developed in Kyoto and Osaka in the seventeenth century but that in the course of the eighteenth century Edo gradually assumed ever greater importance, until in the nineteenth century it achieved a dominating position that was further strengthened in the Meiji period, when Tokyo had no serious rivals. Publishing outside the three capitals, defined as provincial publishing, has no place in this scheme and consequently has received little attention. In 1981, however, the Nagoya City Museum mounted an exhibition devoted to the history of publishing in Nagoya in the Tokugawa period, and since then several studies have appeared which elucidate, among other things, the growing strength of the publishers' guild in Nagoya and the threat it was held to pose to the guilds of the three capitals.- Similarly, in 1982, an exhibition was held in Sendai City Museum devoted to the history of publishing in Sendai, which dates back to the early part of the Tokugawa period.^ Provincial publishing was certainly a factor to be reckoned with in the Tokugawa period and this is nowhere more apparent than in a recently published index to the publishers of the Tokugawa period. This work includes a table which gives the numbers of publishers appearing in the body of the index according to their locations and the periods during which they are presumed to have commenced their publishing careers, and the figures are as follows:''" 1598-1703 1704-88 1789-1868 Kyoto 701 538 494 Osaka 185 564 504 Edo 242 493 917 Elsewhere 43 135 407 These figures have to be treated with some caution. In the first place, there are some errors of identification and omission, as is inevitable in a work ofthis kind. Secondly, some of the establishments listed in the body of the index were not so much publishers as distributors of books for other publishers, although both were covered by the same word, shorin, in the Tokugawa period and the names of both might well appear in a colophon. Thirdly, the figures convey only the number of publishers and say nothing about the level of their activity as measured, for example, in numbers of publications. And lastly, the figures are based on the number of new publishers commencing operations in each of the three periods. Thus if there were differences in the survival rates from area to area, then the totals represented by the second and third columns of figures might not be accurate as a portrait of the relative strengths of the publishing industries in the three capitals and the provinces during the second and third periods under consideration. Supposing, for example, that most of the Kyoto publishers from the first period had survived, then there would in the second period have been far more publishers in Kyoto than in Osaka. Nevertheless, these points do not affect the striking increase in the numbers of new provincial publishers, particularly in the third period, which is apparent from the table. The increase bespeaks a growth of publishing activity outside the three capitals. There can be no doubt that Nagoya was pre-eminent among the provincial publishing centres, but there were also flourishing publishing industries in a number of other castle towns, including Sendai, Hiroshima, Kanazawa, and Wakayama, a town on the coast some thirty-five miles to the south-west of Osaka. During the Tokugawa period Wakayama enjoyed a diversity of local industry, excellent communications inland by river and to other parts of Japan by sea, and a vigorous intellectual and cultural life centring around the Gakushukan, the local fief school, which was opened in 1713.^ In the closing years of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the nineteenth, a number of booksellers in Wakayama started turning their attention to publishing, and several of these were to grow in strength and continue operating beyond the Meiji Restoration. They were joined by one or two others just before the middle of the nineteenth century, 132 one of whom printed a number of works using wooden movable type.'^ The most active of them all, however, was the establishment of Obiya Ihei, and it is fortunate that the British Library possesses not only one of Ohiya Ihei's most famous publications but also some rare material relating to the range of his output and his ambitions in the early years of the nineteenth century. The founder of the establishment as a printing concern was Takechi Shiyu, whose trade name was Obiya Ihei.^ He was born in Wakayama in 1751 to a merchant family under the patronage of the local daimyo, and he died there in 1823. Thereupon the family business was taken over by his son, Takechi Shibun, who also inherited his father's trade name, as was customary. At about the age of seven the first Obiya Ihei made the long trip to Edo by himself and became apprenticed there to a pharmaceutical business, where he worked until he was in his twenties. By 1778 he was back in Wakayama and had applied to the daimyo for permission to sell a patent medicine for palsy both within the fief and elsewhere. By 1793 he had also become the author of an illustrated catalogue of old coins which gave their current values. This work was published in Osaka in the same year and according to a note immediately preceding the colophon, Obiya was actually engaged in the numismatic trade in Wakayama at this time, probably as a sideline.^ In subsequent years he persuaded fellow Wakayama merchants to help alleviate the fief's financial difficulties, arranged for essential dredging work to be undertaken in Wakayama's waterways, which were in danger of silting up, established the first theatre in Wakayama, and engaged in numerous other ventures that testify not only to a certain public- spiritedness but also to an unusually close relationship with senior samurai in the fief, including the daimyo himself.^ It is not clear when Obiya Ihei turned to publishing and bookselling. His name first appears on a colophon in a collection of ghost stories entitled Kaidan tabisiizuri. The colophon is undated but the preface and the end of the text on the obverse of the colophon leaf are both dated 1791. In the colophon the name of Obiya Ihei appears third in a list of four shorin, the others being Akitaya Zenbei of Kyoto, Maekawa Rokuzaemon of Edo, and Yamaguchiya Mataichi of Osaka. Both Maekawa and Yamaguchiya were well-established publishers by this time and, as would be expected both by his position at the end of the list and by the presence on the rear endpaper of a list of his other publications, Yamaguchiya appears from contemporary booksellers' catalogues to have been the principal publisher. The same catalogues state that the author of this work, one Koyoen Shujin, who is otherwise unknown, was a Wakayama man. It is therefore likely that the inclusion of Obiya Ihei's name in the colophon indicates little more than the local connection and the right to distribute the work in Wakayama itself. It is possible, though, that he may have contributed to the costs of publication.^^ By the middle of the 1790s Obiya Ihei was definitely involved in publishing. In the first place, his name appears in the colophon of Haikai shosen, a collection of haiku, which bears the date 1794. Again four shorin are named: Asaiya Genkichi of Wakayama, who is otherwise known for only one other publication; Obiya Ihei; Noda Jihei of Kyoto, who is better known as Tachibanaya Jihei and was a prolific publisher for almost the entire span 133 of the Tokugawa period; and Shionoya Chubei of Osaka, who was active throughout the second half of the Tokugawa period and was evidently the principal publisher of this work. The compiler was Tadokoro Hachigo of Tanabe, a subsidiary castle town to the south of Wakayama, but Obiya's involvement as a publisher rather than just as a distributor is indicated by the existence of another issue of the same work with an undated colophon giving only Obiya's name, and of a revised edition published under Obiya's name alone in 1840.^^ Secondly, towards the end of the same year, 1794, Obiya was involved in a dispute over a case of alleged plagiarism.
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