What did people in Nagoya read during the 1800s?｜Associate Professor Dylan McGee

This is a translation of the article below.

What were Edo period Nagoyans reading, and how were they reading it? Piecing together fragments of evidence to answer that question has been a life project for Dylan McGee, an American researcher at Nagoya University.

Dr. Dylan McGee, Associate professor at Graduate School of Humanities Department of Humanities, Nagoya University

Famous for his encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese baseball, particularly Nagoya’s own Chunichi Dragons, McGee is a popular figure around the university. We visited him on a rainy summer’s day to find out about his research, and a little about the Dragons too.

A chance encounter with Japanese culture at the age of 3

McGee first came into contact with Japanese culture early in life. ‘My grandparents had a collection of Meiji period ukiyo-e prints and oriental tableware,’ he recalls. His grandmother, who had attended Columbia University at a time when female students were still few and far between, had been introduced to these collectibles by Japanese people she met there. Whether these items were originals, or how much value they had is uncertain, but to the young McGee these pretty objects were fascinating.

Coming to Nagoya

After completing a master’s degree in Asian literature, McGee spent time in the historic Japanese city of Kanazawa during his doctoral studies, and first visited Nagoya in 2005. Why Nagoya? Time for a history lesson.

‘Maeda Toshiie [16th century ruler of Kaga Domain, modern day Ishikawa Prefecture, in which Kanazawa is located] was originally from the Owari House [rulers of Owari Domain, headquartered at Nagoya Castle]. The Owari district in modern day Kanazawa takes its name from the Owari House, so I was keen to find out more about the history of Nagoya,’ McGee explains.

Returning to the US and finishing his PhD, McGee spent 7 years at the State University of New York. On the verge of getting a tenured position there, he made a difficult decision: to leave and apply for a post at Nagoya University. ‘I had my interview and was accepted for the post in September 2010,’ he recalls. ‘When the Tohoku earthquake happened in March 2011, I had some mixed feelings and faced some opposition from family, but I knew that I really wanted to work here.’

What about the readers?

With his desire to come and work in Nagoya winning out, McGee arrived here in May of 2011 and began his research into Edo period literature. Seeing that there was plenty of research already being done into the writers and publishers of the period, McGee decided to focus on a less well explored part of the literary world: the readers.

‘It’s not too hard to find out who wrote or published a book. But who read the book, and under what circumstances? That’s a mystery. Did they smoke or eat as they read, for example? These things piqued my interest and I began looking deeper and deeper into them,’ he explains.

His research led him to a Nagoya book lender known as Daiso (no relation to the modern 100 yen shop chain), which traded in Nagashima (now known as Nishiki-cho and located in modern day Minato ward) for around 150 years, from the middle Edo period through to the Meiji period. At the time of its closing it had the largest collection in Japan, at around 22,000 books.

An image of the Daiso store as it might have appeared in the Edo period,
painted by McGee’s daughter

Turning detective

The first thing that McGee found out about Daiso…was that it couldn’t be found, and the site where it once stood is now occupied by a 7/11. With the store itself gone, the books had been sold to secondhand dealers and wholesalers and scattered around the country.

‘The National Diet Library, University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, University of Tsukuba - I’ve been all over, and so far I’ve found about 70% of the books,’ he says.

Even with so many books found, there was still no real evidence to show who had been reading them. Maybe it was time to give up, some said. But, like something out of a detective novel, tenacious research paid off. McGee recalls one example, buried amongst the thousands of notes and doodles made by readers. ‘In one book from Kyoto University’s collection, I found a child’s drawing of a horse, and later an identical drawing in the collection held by the University of Tsukuba.’

A further key discovery was the notebook of Hirade Juneki, who lived near the Daiso store and read over 1000 books over the course of 20 years, keeping notes on them as he went. This notebook became a key source of information about the reading habits of the time.

The interior of Daiso. As its collection expanded, the store ended up with three warehouses just for book storage.

Gokan: a predecessor to modern fashion magazines

Daiso appears to have been a prolific producer of gokan, large bound volumes of books containing detailed illustrations and descriptions of the characters’ clothing and appearance that were very popular with contemporary women.

However, the Japanese in these gokan is relatively complex and would have been difficult to read for someone with an average level of literacy for the time. McGee suggests that many people might have viewed these volumes in a similar way to modern fashion magazines. Advertisements for beauty products, for example, are seen throughout the books, and are considerably easier to read than the books themselves. McGee suggests that Daiso, choosing the advertisements themselves, understood the level of literacy that was actually possessed by their Edo period readers in Nagoya.

Daiso’s most important customers were likely women in their 40s and 50s, and their choice of advertisements reflects that, with most being targeted at a female customer base. For comparison, in the capital Edo (modern day Tokyo) the population was 70% male, and customers of book lenders were mostly men, including a large number of samurai. These noblemen, who had a traditional literary education, would have had a higher level of literacy than commoners in Nagoya, and thus the advertisements targeted at them are wordier and more formal.

McGee’s investigations into Daiso’s customers has spanned over ten years, and he now has enough material to be in the process of publishing a book on the subject. And while you might think that ten years of scouring the margins of books for doodles was enough, he has a new project in his sights - an investigation into the reading habits of book borrowers following the Second World War, this time incorporating interviews and the first hand accounts which were sadly not available from the 18th and 19th century people of Nagoya.

The Dragons

And so, to the topic of the Chunichi Dragons. It is not an understatement to call McGee, whose knowledge of the team is such that he has been asked to appear on local sports radio to discuss them, a Dragons superfan. Once again, it all began in New York.

‘I grew up very close to the New York Yankees’ stadium,’ McGee recalls, ‘and my grandmother was a real Yankees fan, often taking me to games when I was a kid. I came to love the community that surrounded the idea of the local team, and when I came to Nagoya, I wanted to become part of that community again.’

Even on the topic of baseball, you can see the researcher’s mind at work. McGee’s knowledge of the Dragons, particularly up-and-coming young players, is encyclopedic and engaging, enthralling all three of us who came to speak to him that day, despite our complete dearth of understanding of the baseball world.

Dylan McGee (right) with his former student and now International Communications Office staff member Edmund Rhind-Tutt (left).

Thank you to Dylan McGee for his time and insights into his research.
The interview was conducted by Megumi Maruyama, Edmund Rhind-Tutt and Reiko Matsushita.
The article was written by Megumi Maruyama and translated and localized by Edmund Rhind-Tutt.

◯Links
・Dylan McGee
・Research articles
Book Refurbishment Practices of the Daisō Lending Library
Reader Graffiti in the Daisō Rental Books｜大惣本の落書. (Japanese)