Vernacularization and the Book in Japan
Vernacularization is a process that has occurred in most societies with a gap between the written language, and particularly those societies in which the prestige written language is quite different from the spoken language, such as Europe when Latin was dominant, India when Sanskrit was dominant and East Asia when Chinese was dominant. In this paper I will sketch the significance of the growing research on this phenomenon for the history of the book in Japan and consider some of the problems that continue to intrigue scholars, such as the lack of vernacular printing before the Edo period and the quantity of publishing in Chinese in the Meiji period.