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LANGUAGE, INFORMATION, AND TECHNE
Seth Jacobowitz (SFSU), Postal Modernity in Meiji Japan: From Hokusai’s Post Card to Mokuami’s Telegraph
Friday October 26, 2012 | 04:15 -06:00 PM | Building 200 Room 307

This paper examines practices of inscription and post integral to the rise of the imperial nation-state and a unified national language in Meiji Japan (1868-1912). It offers a close reading of two texts that expose the disparity in writing technology from Edo to Meiji. Hokusai’s woodblock print “Shunshu Ejiri” from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (1830) depicts a windswept scene of paper and leaves blowing above and beyond a letter collection box on the Tokaido post road, suggestive of a mode of circulation that circumvents official discourse. By contrast Mokuami’s kabuki play “The Thieves” (1881) displays the totalizing effects of print and postal media at the behest of the state in the formation of the imagined community.