Publishing culture in eighteenth-century Japan: The case of the Edo publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo (1751--1797)

During the ideological program of the Senior Councillor Matsudaira Sadanobu of the Tokugawa bakufu government, Tsutaya Juzaburo's aggressive publishing venture found itself on a collision course with Sadanobu's book censorship policy. The result was the confiscation of half of Tsutaya's wealth. This thesis explores the social background leading to this conflict and proposes to examine this conflict not in the context of ideology, but rather in that of a social metamorphosis. In this context, Tsutaya and Sadanobu were in fact inseparable in the creation of the reality of eighteenth-century Edo. The author concludes that Tsutaya as a social figure should not be viewed as an ideological antagonist of Sadanobu, thus making Tsutaya an illegitimate citizen of the Edo bakufu and Sadanobu an illegitimate citizen of the Edo townspeople world; rather, Tsutaya's success and his eventual failure were genealogically linked to the political tradition of his counterpart.