2012-04-04

• Students and their papers:
  Research fellow, Research student, Doctor course, Master course, and Auditor
• Abstracts of students’ papers

Students and their papers

Research Fellow

• Atsuto YAMAUCHI
  

Research Student

Doctor Course

• Takashi AMIJIMA
  Amijima, T. (2010): The compilation of hanjoki, accounts of prosperity, as trade directories for local cities during the late-Meiji Era: A case study of Yamamoto Jitsutaro’s Matsumoto-Hanjoki, Shirin 93(6), pp.119-144. Go to the abstract
  Amijima, T. (2012): Continuous agglomeration of pharmaceutical trade in the modern era: The case of Dosho-machi Town, Osaka, Japan, 1868-1923, Japanese Journal of Human Geography 64(2), forthcoming
• Makito ASAKURA

Master Course

• Masataka ASHIDA
• Yuta GEKA
• Yoshihiko HAYASHI
• Ryo IWAHASHI
• Yasutaka KOGAWA
• Natsuki SASAKI

Auditor

Abstracts of Students’ Papers

• Amijima, T. (2010): The compilation of hanjoki, accounts of prosperity, as trade directories for local cities during the late-Meiji Era: A case study of Yamamoto Jitsutaro’s Matsumoto-Hanjoki, Shirin 93(6), 2010, pp.119-144.*

In the recent studies on modern urban history in Japan, various new sources have been discovered and used to analyze the structure of historical urban space. Private organizational maps and directories have also attracted great interest. In the light of these trends in research, the present paper reintroduces and examines hanjoki, accounts of prosperity, that were published during the Meiji era (1868~1912) throughout Japan (but have mainly been treated as popular literature in earlier studies) as new material for modern urban historical research. As a case study, this paper mainly examines Yamauchi Jitsutaro’s Matsumoto hanjoki, which was published in Matsumoto town, Nagano prefecture in 1897.

First, this paper compares the hanjoki with similar publications released in Matsumoto during the Meiji and Taisho eras (1868~1926) and evaluates hanjoki published in the late Meiji era (after 1898) positively as urban trade directories rather than as an etiolated form of comic gesaku literature.

Second, this paper examines the contents of Matsumoto Hanjoki as a directory of commercial institutions and points out that there existed certain biases that reflected the reports of the selectors and resulted in an emphasis on the merchants of the southern Shinshû area and its environs etc.

These biases are analyzed in the light of a comparison with the contents about Matsumoto that are found in another directory, the Zenkoku Shoko Jinmeiroku (National Directory of Commercial Proprietors), which was published in the same year and was a typical nationwide trade directory at the time. Matsumoto Hanjoki is shown to cover retail shops and small wholesalers whose customers also lived in the vicinity in greater detail.

Finally, this paper considers the reasons behind the publication of hanjoki as an urban trade directories in the late Meiji era throughout Japan in two contexts. The first context pertains to the growth of commercial traffic at the time. The authors of hanjoki wanted to promote regional commercial development through railway construction in the mid-Meiji era (1897~1907). The second context pertains to the import of European directories. Inspired by European directories, the first Japanese directory, Nihon Zenkoku Shoko Jinmeiroku, was published in 1892 in Tokyo, and it encouraged many local city publishers to publish more detailed directories that were centered on their own regions. Such local publication of local city directories faced the problem of raising sufficient capital. To solve this problem, hanjoki publishers were required to gather advertising revenue and the contents of their local directory thus contained certain biases.

As urban trade directories, hanjoki can help in building a profound understanding of the local cities in the mid-Meiji era (1897-1906) and their social contexts.

*original language: Japanese

Acknowledgment We thank The Society of Historical Research (Shigaku Kenkyukai)  for their kind permissions to reproduce English abstracts of contributions to Shirin (Journal of History).

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