Fifth Day

This week the course will be looking at illustrations in Japanese books from the 9th century to the 17th century. Reformating and rebinding will also be covered.

There are five types of conversion and two of them are not converting to scrolls. But one of them could then follow one of the to-scroll conversion types. Detchōsō 粘葉装 is the only major format not involved in any of them.

Here are the five.

1. Scroll to accordion
2. Accordion to scroll
3. Tetsuyōsō to scroll
4. Fukurotoji to scroll
5. Fukurotoji to tetsuyousou

It's also quite important to see the signs of format change, to know whether an accordion book was a scroll in a past life, and vice versa. Of course, after a certain amount of time, physical signs will be there, like a scroll that used to be an accordion book will have folded creases no matter what. The properties of the materials used will affect physical signs.

For formats that have writing on both sides, like the detchōsō 粘葉装 and tetsuyōsō 綴葉装, in order to convert them to the scroll, where writing is only on one side, one has to perform a process called aihagi 相剥ぎ, which is splitting the sheet into different layers.

One can perform aihagi by running one's finger through gaps and slowly peeling off the layers that make up a single sheet. Nothing complicated.

Since there are many ways to convert books to the scroll format, it speaks of the scroll format's prestige. And the fact that there is a way to convert fukurotoji books to tetsuyōsō speaks of tetsuyōsō's higher status than the fukurotoji.

It's important to know whether a book has changed formats, not just for the sake of seeing the physical signs and having a good eye for detail. It is important to know for research purposes, since if one fails to see that a scroll was once of another format, and assumes that the scroll was the most authoritative and reliable version, due to the prestige of the scroll format, the chances of making mistakes would be high.

In Japanese bookbinding, there are both gedai (outer title) and naidai (inner title). In Chinese and Korean printed books, the titling format most used is the naidai where the title is inside the book before the text. Many Japanese books do not have inner titles, which is a problem when covers were frequently replaced. This problem leaves books without titles altogether, and the books would go by working titles or aliases, without any way to determine the proper title. It strikes me odd that the Japanese wouldn't use inner titles to circumvent this problem.

So far I've gone up to [2.8]. I'll do more later. I'm going to do some review right now.