Japanese Studies Teaching Staff
Prof Peter Kornicki
Contact Information
Email: pk104@cam.ac.uk
Tel: 01223 335173
Current Position
Professor of East Asian Studies
Biographical Details
I did my BA in Japanese and Korean at Oxford and then did a D.Phil. in 19th-century Japanese literature. I have spent about six years in Japan in total, mostly in Kyoto. I first taught Japanese at the University of Tasmania, in Australia, where I also acquired a taste for Australian wine and bushwalking in the Tasmanian Wilderness. After four years there, from 1978 to 1982, I became associate professor at the Humanities Research Institute of Kyoto University. From the beginning of 1985 I have been based in Cambridge.
For much of my career I have been studying the history of the book in Japan, in order to get a better idea of how ideas and literature circulated, how books were read and what factors determined their reception. I have published catalogues of the large collection of early Japanese books in Cambridge University Library and of various other collections in Manchester, Lille and Moscow; in 1989 I launched the Union Catalogue of Early Japanese Books in Europe project, which is now accessible on-line. In 1998 I published The book in Japan: a cultural history from the beginnings to the nineteenth century which explores a range of issues from censorship to lending libraries, and in 2002 I published a translation of the fourth volume of the diary of the Iwakura Mission, which travelled around Europe in 1872-3 and which observed contemporary Europe from unfamiliar perspectives.
Education
| 1972 | BA Oxford |
| 1975 | MSc Oxford |
| 1979 | DPhil Oxford |
| 1992 | Japan Foundation Special Prize (with Hayashi Nozomu) |
| 1993 | Japan Festival Award (with Richard Bowring) |
| 2000 | Elected Fellow of the British Academy |
| 2004 | Elected Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford |
Research Interests
History of the book in East Asia
History of the book in Japan
History of the book in Korea
History of the book in Vietnam
Manuscripts in the age of print
Cultural translation in East Asia
Japanese bibliography
Current Projects
I am currently working on reading practices in the Tokugawa period, particularly those of women readers, and am putting together a book on the subject with two Cambridge PhDs, Gaye Rowley, now a professor at Waseda University, and Mara Patessio, now a lecturer at Manchester University. This follows a workshop we organized in Cambridge on this theme in September 2006.
I have also been expanding my interests into other parts of East Asia and in 2005 spent some time in Korea and in Vietnam looking into strategies used to make Chinese texts more accessible to local readers. In this connection, I shall be giving the Sandars Lectures in March 2008 on Chinese books in East Asia and the rise of the vernacular book.
Publications
| Books |
|
| 2004 | Catalogue of the early Japanese books in the Russian State Library, vol. 2 (Moscow: RSL Centre for Oriental Literature), pp. 87 |
| 2002 | The Iwakura Embassy 1871-73, volume IV Continental Europe 2, translated with introduction and notes (Matsudo: The Japan Documents), pp. xxii + 440 |
| 2001 | Catalogue of the early Japanese books in the Pushkin State Museum of Arts, the State Museum of Oriental Art, and the Russian State Library, with B. G. Voronova and A. Yusupova (Moscow: Pashkov Dom), pp. 144 |
| 1999 | Catalogue of the early Japanese books in the Russian State Library (Moscow: Pashkov Dom), pp. 143 |
| 1998 | Meiji Japan, editor, and author of introductory essay; (Routledge), 4 volumes, pp. xxxiii + 296 + 304 + 322 + 362 |
| 1998 | The book in Japan: a cultural history from the beginnings to the nineteenth century (Leiden: E. J. Brill), pp. xviii + 498 [paperback edition published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2001] |
| 1996 | Bibliography of Japanese history to 1912 (Faculty of Oriental Studies), pp. 91 |
| 1996 | Religion in Japan: arrows to heaven and earth, co-editor with I. J. McMullen (Cambridge University Press), pp. xv + 318 |
| 1994 | La bibliothèque japonaise de Léon de Rosny (Lille: Bibliothèque Municipale de Lille), pp. x + 93 |
| 1993 | The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Japan, co-editor with Richard Bowring (Cambridge University Press), pp. 400 |
| 1991 | Early Japanese Books in Cambridge University Library: A Catalogue of the Aston, Satow and von Siebold Collections, with N. Hayashi (Cambridge University Press), pp. xx + 520 |
| 1987 | Japan, with P. Spry-Leverton (Michael O’Mara, London), pp. 192. [Dutch translation published by Van Holkema & Warendorf in 1988; German translation published by VGS, Köln, in 1989] |
| 1982 | The Reform of Fiction in Meiji Japan, Oxford Oriental Monographs No. 3 (Ithaca press, London), pp. v + 133 |
| Electronic Publications |
|
| 2000 | Bibliography of Japanese history to 1912, revised edition loaded onto the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies website and kept constantly up to date http://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/jbib/bibtitle.html |
| 1998 | Union Catalogue of Early Japanese Books in Europe, now partially loaded onto the website of the National Institute for Japanese Literature (Kokubungaku Kenkyû Shiryôkan) in Tokyo; the database consists at present of 8,000 entries describing early Japanese books in European collections and is continually being added to. Project initiated by Hayashi Nozomu and myself and maintained by me in Cambridge; launched in 1988 and supported by the Leverhulme Trust for four years from 1989–94 (£88,000), by the late Mr Shigeo Sorimachi (£100,000) and by Apple Japan (computer hardware). http://base1.nijl.ac.jp/~oushu/ |
| Articles in Journals and Books |
|
| 2007 | ‘Japan, Korea, and Vietnam’, in A companion to the history of the book, ed. Simon Eliot & Jonathan Rose, (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 111-125 |
| 2007 | ‘New books for old’, Monumenta Nipponica 62: 97-105 |
| 2006 | ‘Les femmes lectrices dans le Japon du XVIIe siècle’, in C. Galan & J. Fijalkow, eds, Langues, lecture et école au Japon (Arles: Editions Philippe Picquer), pp. 305-319 |
| 2006 | ‘Manuscript, not print: scribal culture in the Edo period’, Journal of Japanese Studies 32: 23-52 |
| 2005 | 「ヨーロッパ人による日本古銭と古銭書の収集 —江戸時代を中心として—」『出土銭貨』23号, pp. 23-34 |
| 2005 | ‘The publishing trade’, in A. R. Newland, ed, The Hotei Encyclopedia of Japanese woodblock prints (2 vols), vol. 1, pp. 303-317; and entries on c50 publishers in the reference section in vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Hotei) |
| 2005 | ‘Unsuitable books for women? Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari in seventeenth-century Japan’, Monumenta Nipponica 60: 147-193 |
| 2004 | 「江戸時代における写本のパブリケーション」磯辺章編『東アジア出版文化の研究—こはく』（和泉書刊）, pp. 195-202 |
| 2004 | ‘Collecting Japanese books in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries’, Bulletin of Portuguese/ Japanese studies 8: 21-38 |
| 2004 | Aston, William George’, ‘Dickins, Frederick Victor’, & ‘Tristram, Katherine’, in New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press) |
| 2004 | 「江戸前期の女性と漢籍」紀平英作編『文学と言語に見る異文化意識』（京都大学大学院文学研究科 5-20 |
| 2004 | 'Block-printing in seventeenth-century Japan: evidence from a newly discovered medical text', in A. Gupta & S. Chakravorty (eds), Print areas: book history in India (Delhi: Permament Black), pp. 227-241 |
| 2003 | ‘Kamakura shogunate’ & ‘Muromachi shogunate’, in R. McKittterick, ed., Times Medieval World (HarperCollins), 258-65 |
| 2003 | ‘Japanese medical books and illustrations’, in Nigel Allan, ed., Pearls of the Orient: Asian Treasures from the Wellcome Library (London: Wellcome Institute), 194-209 |
| 2003 | 「寛政十年の近江国犬上郡東沼波村農民所蔵の書物に関する報告書「書物留帳」 ー 翻刻と解説」『書籍文化史 4: 1-12 |
| 2001 | ‘Le nationalisme et la construction d’une tradition philologique au Japon au XIXe siècle’, Luce Giard & Christian Jacob, ed, Des Alexandries I: du livre au texte (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale), 483-91 |
| 2001 | ‘Literacy reconsidered: a response to Richard Rubinger’, Monumenta Nipponica 56: 381-94 |
| 2001 | ‘Overcoming the limitations of woodblock printing in Japan’, in J. Michon & J.-Y. Mollier, eds, Les mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000 (Laval, Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval), 392-8 |
| 2000 | ‘Julius Klaproth and his works’, Monumenta Nipponica 55: 579-591 |
| 1999 | ‘The exclusion of women from the imperial succession in modern Japan’, Asiatica Venetiana 4:133-152 |
| 1999 | ‘Introduction’, Collected works of Frederick Victor Dickins, 5 vols (Bristol: Ganesha), 1: ix–xxxi (Japanese translation of the introduction separately published by Edition Synapse, Tokyo) |
| 1998 | ‘Agriculture, food and famine in Japan’, in P. K. Fox, ed., Cambridge University Library: the great collections (Cambridge University Press), pp. 107–117 |
| 1997 | ‘Japanese medical and other books at the Wellcome Institute’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60: 489–510 |
| 1995 | Review article on Gardner’s Descriptive catalogue, in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55: 237–247 |
| 1994 | ‘The emergence of the printed book in Japan: a comparative approach’, in A. C. Milner & C. A. Gerstle, eds, Recovering the Orient: artists, scholars, appropriations (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers), pp. 229–243 |
| 1994 | ‘Japan at the Australian exhibitions, Australian Studies 8:15–60 |
| 1994 | ‘Public display and changing values in nineteenth-century Japan: exhibitions in the early Meiji period and their precursors’, Monumenta Nipponica 49:167–196 |
| 1993 | ‘The Japanese Collection in the Bibliotheca Lindesiana’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 75.ii:209–300 |
| 1993 | ‘European japanology at the end of the seventeenth century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 56:502–524 |
| 1992 | 「オーストラリアの博覧会におけるジャパン」『視覚の一九世紀』横山俊夫編 (京都、思文閣出版),pp.183–206 [a study of the representation of Japan in the 19th-century Australian exhibitions; in a book edited by Yokoyama Toshio] |
| 1991 | ‘William George Aston (1841–1911)’, and ‘Ernest Mason Satow (1843–1929)’, in H.Cortazzi & G. Daniels, ed., Britain and Japan 1859–1991: Themes and personalities (Routledge), pp.64–85. Aston piece reprinted as the introduction to Collected works of W. G. Aston, 6 vols (Bristol: Ganesha/ Tokyo: Oxford University Press Japan, 1997) 1: xii–xxv; both pieces translated into Japanese and included in 大山瑞代訳、『英国と日本』 (京都、思文閣出版, 1998), pp.107–46; both pieces included in H. Cortazzi, ed, 2004, British envoys to Japan, 1859-1972 (Folkestone: Globe Oriental, 2004), pp. 222-240 |
| 1990 | ‘Provincial publishing in the Tokugawa period’, in Yu-Ying Brown, ed., Japanese Studies, British Library Occasional Papers 11 (London), pp.188–197 |
| 1986 | 「明治五年の和歌山博覧会とその周辺」『万国博覧会の研究』吉田光邦編(京都、思文閣出版), pp.116–129 [a study of the 1872 exposition in Wakayama; in a book edited by Yoshida Mitsukuni] |
| 1985 | ‘Obiya Ihei, a Japanese provincial publisher’, British Library Journal 11:131–142 |
| 1985 | 「地方出版について」『十九世紀日本の情報と社会変動』吉田光邦編(京都、京都大学人文科学研究所), pp.449–466 [a study of provincial publishing in Japan; in a book edited by Yoshida Mitsukuni] |
| 1984 | 「貸本文化比較考」『人文学報』 57:37–57 [a study of the role of lending libraries in Japan; in the journal Jinbun gakuhô] |
| 1984 | ‘Disraeli and the Meiji novel’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44:29–55 |
| 1982 | ‘The Enmeiin affair of 1803: the spread of information in the Tokugawa period’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42:503–533 |
| 1981 | ‘The survival of Tokugawa fiction in the Meiji period’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41:461–482 |
| 1980 | ‘Some books from Japanese circulating libraries in the British Library’, British Library Journal 6:188–198 |
| 1980 | ‘Some former kashihonya books in the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 43:544–547 |
| 1980 | ‘The publisher’s go-between: Kashihonya in the Meiji Period’, Modern Asian Studies 14:331–344 |
| 1977 | ‘Nishiki no Ura: an instance of censorship and the structure of a Sharebon’, Monumenta Nipponica 32:153–188 |
Links
欧州所在日本古書総合目録 (Union Catalogue of Early Japanese Books in Europe)
Bibliography of Japanese History up to 1912
