| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Richard Rubinger. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2007. Pp. xii, 238. $54.00.
Peruse the English-language books on Japanese history published over the past forty years and one is likely to find literacy mentioned in their discussion of Japan's transition from "feudal" to "modern." Typically, such books treat literacy both as a stimulus to modernization and as a quantifiable measure of modernity.	1
Richard Rubinger mounts a compelling challenge to this calculation in the book under review. Inspired by recent studies in the history of literacy in Europe and North America, he rejects the idea of a single, quantifiable definition of literacy. Instead, he posits qualitative gradations of literacy that change over time and that must be assessed in relation to specific historical contexts. His goal is to produce a more variegated longitudinal study of the development of literacy among the Japanese peasantry between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. The result is a qualified success: the same factors responsible for the book's originality—namely, Rubinger's openness to a different conception of literacy and to new kinds of primary sources—also raise methodological problems that resist some of his conclusions.	. . .

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