Dr Matsuba Ryōko’s March 2025 Third Thursday Lecture marked the end of her tenure at UEA and the Sainsbury Institute. She has taken up a professorship in Ritsumeikan University’s newly founded College of Arts and Design and Graduate School of Science in Arts and Design. We wish her every success as part of this exciting new venture.
In her Third Thursday Lecture, Dr Matsuba presented two case studies dealing with continuity and change in the Meiji era and beyond. In the first, she explored strategies employed to assure the survival of the craft of woodblock printing; in the second, she examined children’s literature in a time of rapidly evolving print technologies.
From the middle years of the seventeenth century, printing from cut woodblocks was the sole technology employed by commercial publishers for the production of books and single-sheet prints. The industry prospered throughout the Edo period; its output was enormous and impressive in terms of its variety and quality. The quality of these books or prints rested on the extraordinarily high level of skill attained by the block-cutters. No text was too complex for them, no design too intricate. The mastery they attained has never been surpassed. But they were one part of a team that encompassed authors, artists, calligraphers, and master printers who relied on the strength of their arm, not a mechanical press, to produce the finished product. By the end of the 1870s, this labour intensive, collaborative craft could not compete in terms of economy or speed of production with the latest printing technologies imported from the West. These included machine-powered presses, copper engraving, type-set texts, photography, and lithography.
The production of woodblock printed books carried on but on a much reduced scale and was confined almost entirely to ‘books of pictures’ that appealed to foreign and domestic audiences, such as the many flower-and-bird books designed by Kōno Bairei. Colour woodblock prints also continued to be produced, albeit in drastically diminished numbers. As Dr Matsuba points out, while there were competent artists designing prints, publishers did not have anyone of the ‘star’ quality of Utamaro, Hokusai or Sharaku to create fresh works that would captivate the wider public. The former purchasers of ukiyo-e prints appeared to be satisfied with cheap, machine-made postcards and colour lithographs. Among the publishers who found a way to expand the market for colour woodblock prints were Matsuki Eikichi, Yoshida Kinebi and Kobayashi Bunshichi. They saw potential demand at home and abroad for high quality woodblock-printed facsimiles of ‘master prints’ by the Edo masters. These beautifully produced prints were clearly marked with the seal of their producer. There was no intention to deceive the purchaser. These facsimiles circulated widely, spreading knowledge of the great achievements of Japanese artists in the genre, and they encouraged Western artists to design woodblock prints themselves. Dr Matsuba argues that this development preserved the craft of printing from cut woodblocks while honouring the earlier print masters. She even suggests that these facsimiles deserve to be identified as a new print genre.
Dr Matsuba’s second case study examined the evolution of cheap children’s books from the eighteenth century into the twentieth century. The outstanding feature of these books is the primacy given to the images in them. It was vivid, action-packed images that captured the attention of the young. Here publishers were not interested in preserving the old technology. They appreciated the reduction of production costs possible if they employed engraved copper plates, machine-driven presses, and lithography. Their goal was to produce bright, lively books that would appeal to a mass audience of young readers. They consciously chose to reproduce well known stories that had been current in the Edo period, but they commissioned fresh images for those stories. They let go of the old printing technologies but clung to the old texts. To underline this phenomenon, Dr Matsuba presented and discussed several editions of the tale of Iwami Jutarō that were produced in the Meiji era using various technologies.
Dr Matsuba traces the ways in which the publishers of children’s books took advantage of newly introduced technologies, in particular, in the first instance, printing from engraved copper plates. To add to their appeal of their products, each of their small-scale children’s books usually include one ‘gate-fold’ spread in which each half of a double-page spread opened out to reveal a dramatic scene that extended across the four exposed pages. There was much experimentation in the 1870s and 1880s. Attempts were made to combine on the same page woodblock printed images with type-set texts. In many cases the covers were colour printed from cut woodblocks while the body of the book was printed from copper plates. Newspapers in the 1870s also experimented with a colour woodblock-printed coversheet that illustrated a current event or notorious contemporary figure while the text sheets were type-set. These hybrid experiments were soon abandoned, except for the printing of covers of children’s books in bright colours and the insertion of colour woodblock printed frontispieces in novels for adult readers. In the case of cheap children’s books, there was a shift from printing the covers from cut woodblocks to employing colour lithography by the end of the century.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, publishers began to exploit a new narrative style to produce a new kind of children’s book. These slight books are referred to as ‘punch picture book’. They were inspired by the British publication Punch and its Tokyo offspring, Ponchi, and Western comics more generally. In these books, the fuller texts of the Iwami-style historical tales gave way to comic strip format story-telling through sequences of discrete images accompanied by minimal texts. In the concluding moments of her lecture, Dr Matsuba follows the story forward from turn-of-the-century ‘punch picture books’ through to the post-war era and the emergence of manga.
This lecture presented a broad and stimulating overview of the ways in which two facets of the printing industry in early modern Japan made their journey into the twentieth century.
Dr Ellis Tinios
Visiting Researcher, Ritsumeikan University