SpecialArticle 2

Publishing: from National Development
to International Relations

By Prabhu Guptara
Introduction
If you speak Japanese, you will know that the word for “society” isshakai. And given how much we Asians traditionally valuecommunity, do you know how long the word has been used in thisway? Only since the 19th century!
The same goes for words such as jiyū and kenri, which are theterms for “liberty” and for “rights” (as in “human rights”: jinken). So
you can see the important though often invisible or at least
unremarked effects of language and publishing.
Let me tell you a little of how I came to discover such things.

Story of My Publishing BusinessAt the age of 71, I entered the world of publishing, having had noearlier experience of it at all. I did so in memory of my wife, and forthe purpose of nurturing democratic and humane values among
Indians and others who love India. As those values are under threat,that focus is easily understandable, but why in memory of my wife?
Because she had started a small publishing effort – though that driedup very soon, when we moved as a family to another country.
My wife had gone into publishing at a time in history (the 1990s)
when barriers to becoming a publisher had fallen but there hadn’t yet
been the explosion of self-publishing that hit the publishing industry,
particularly from the 2000s. Today, there are almost no barriers toself-publishing, but too many people suffer from the illusion that
their book will sell widely just because it is published. The hugeincrease in supply of titles has meant much greater competition for
the attention of customers, so that publishing has become a far morevigorous battle in terms of marketing. And “real publishers” nowneed much greater investment of time, effort, and money to merely
remain in the game.
I launched Pippa Rann Books & Media in August 2020. The
pandemic had spread through the world months earlier. In India, thepublishing industry ground to a nearly complete halt. For example,
the largest publisher in India, which used to publish 40 or more titles
a month, cut back to publishing only one or two titles a month.
As my publishing in relation to India was paralysed, my mind
looked about – and struck upon the fact that there is no imprint that
focuses on global challenges from a global perspective. So I
conceived my second imprint, Global Resilience Publishing, which
focuses on topics such as climate change, the international financialsystem, international corporate governance, global philanthropy,
https://www.jef.or.jp/journal/

Author Prabhu Guptara

corporate sponsorships, public-private partnerships, the ethics andimpact of the transformations wrought by the latest technologies,
and possible reform of the United Nations.

Changing Publishing Business in Recent Years
Given that background, the most important things that strike me
about the changes in publishing in the quarter century between mywife’s publishing imprint and my imprint in her memory are that:• there is a much greater permeability between genres: manga andanime, which used to be created primarily for children, are now
increasingly being produced also for adults, and now haveinfluence worldwide;• proofing and formatting are now almost entirely theresponsibility of authors, because the dominant publishers have
moved into machine-like “smooth processes”, so that theboundaries of the industry have become much more permeable,with much greater cross-fertilization, and opportunities as wellas threats often arising on the interface between what wastraditionally considered “publishing” and what were traditionally
thought of as “other industries” – for example, book andmagazine publishers are moving into, or are partnering with,organizations in the worlds of information technology,
broadcasting, movies, social media, conferences, education, andvideo games.
Beyond the changes in publishing itself are changes in the global
context of publishing: from increasing freedoms, to there-ascendance of tyranny. What used to be the province of isolated
and small countries, such as North Korea and Cuba, is sadly now
also the province of countries such as China and Russia, as well asof countries where we had thought tyranny abolished for theforeseeable future, such as Poland and Eritrea. Indeed, even incountries that won freedoms centuries ago, such as the UnitedStates, there is a real threat of the return of censorship and selfcensorship due to the rise of political correctness, “woke” fashion,and the deployment of modern technology to prevent and attack thespread of knowledge. For example, in India, the regime of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, in pursuit of making India a country fully
ruled by Hindutva (as distinct from traditional Hindu thought andpractice, and in opposition to the values of the Indian Constitution)
has put people in prison for simply publicising the fact that cow
urine does not cure Covid19.
In other words, repressive regimes have acquired a second breath,
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and it will take much more determined effort to root them out. Thatis why it is worth keeping firmly in mind that the whole history of
publishing as an industry starts with the Gutenberg Bible and its
being smuggled, sometimes across borders, to be sold clandestinely
to customers – and, if one was caught, the penalty was death,because neither emperors nor popes wished to tolerate the Bible’s
subversive content.
Was it because publishing was then an industry only for the mostdaring that the Bible became, and has remained, the all-time
bestseller? However, that is less important than the fact it has been
the most influential book in international relations, and that from it
have flowed the liberties – and indeed the DNA – of the modernworld, as the Indian scholar Vishal Mangalwadi documents in hismagisterial publications The Book That Made Your World and This
Book Changed Everything.
The whole framework for modern international relations would
have been impossible were it not for the modern understanding ofwhat is a nation, for what is the rule of law, for what constitutes
human rights in relation to the freedom to be educated and to betreated fairly and equally, for women’s rights, for environmental
concern, and so on.

History of Japanese Publication Businessin Relation to Politics
Let us look at this in the case of Japan, from the perspective ofbooks and publishing:
The Analects of Confucius were introduced to Japan in the third
century AD, and the study and dissemination of books from Chinaand Korea created new types of books, such as commentaries. In816, Shingon Buddhism was founded by Kukai, who traveled toChina and studied Sanskrit as well as Chinese Vajrayana. Though
Kukai’s work was sponsored by several Japanese emperors, theimpact was primarily on the elites so far as education and thewidening of mental horizons were concerned. Japanese was marked
by a great variety of words expressing emotion and feeling, but it hadvery few words for intellectual concepts – or indeed even for moral
concepts such as honesty, justice, integrity, probity, or goodness.
Japanese literature remained emotional and subjective, emphasisingrefinement of sentiment and elegant phrasing. Japanese writers whowanted to express intellectual or abstract meanings wrote inChinese, or borrowed from the Chinese language, with the result thatroughly half the vocabulary of literary or scholarly Japanese was40 Japan SPOTLIGHT • September / October 2021

borrowed from Chinese.
Then came the very first book in Japan to be published in themodern sense: Aesop’s Fables. This was also the very first Westernbook to be translated into Japanese – by Western missionaries, whopublished the book in 1593. Culturally exceedingly influential, thebook sowed the seeds of the transformation that was to follow theMeiji Restoration. Up to that time, Japanese culture had been marked
by relative material stability and the cultivation of individual
sensibility and inner feeling. The opening of the Japanese mind andculture to influences beyond China, Korea, and India, meant that thefocus was reversed: material progress became the focus, with thecultivation of feeling shifted to the margins of national and corporateconcern.
The publication of the Japanese Bible in the 1830s contributed to
the growing antagonism between the government and the people
which is central to early Meiji political discourse, when Japanese
intellectuals fiercely debated such Biblical and Western politicalconcepts as popular suffrage, religious liberty, and press freedom.
There was a struggle to agree the appropriate Japanese terms,
eventually resulting in the standardization, for example, of jiyū , kenri,and shakai as the terms for “liberty”, “rights” and “society”. Many
Meiji reformers accepted that reforms were necessary for achieving
equality with other countries. But, perhaps because they were overlyimpressed by Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships”, they
mistook those as essential to the West, rather than an egoistic andgreed-inspired distortion of the real values of the West. Meiji leadersseem to have focused on the fruit of progress in the West but
remained unaware of its roots. In a culture where appearances andexternalities are so important in public life, their strategy was hugely
successful, though at a huge cost: the emphasis on military strength
subverted the path toward democracy by leading to a narrow kind ofnationalism, and eventually to the tragedies of World War II.
On the other hand, positive Meiji initiatives included theintroduction of compulsory education, the implementation of land
tax reforms (even though those were not nearly as successful or
thoroughgoing as those of General Douglas MacArthur during theperiod of the postwar Allied occupation of Japan), and investment ineverything from banks and railroads to modern printing presses.
The most widespread impact of these printing presses was thedevelopment of newspapers – the Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun in
1871, the Yomiuri Shimbun in 1774, and Japan’s foremost businessdaily the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei) in 1876. Many magazines
were also launched, many of which produced enough profit to create

what have become some of Japan’s largest publishing houses. Therecan be no democracy without the free circulation of information anddiscussion, enabled by newspapers, magazines, and nowadays alsosocial media. However, more significant is the fact that books had
not begun to reach a wider audience till the latter half of the 18thcentury, and a mass market emerged only in the Meiji Era.
That was also the time when a flood of translations from Western
literature gave Japanese prose fiction a new direction. Maejima
Hisoka was the first person to formally petition, in 1866, that written
Japanese be reformed by substituting colloquial speech for theChinese-influenced literary language (kanbun) used then. Thisechoed William Wordsworth’s plea in the Preface to his LyricalBallads, published in 1798. Hisoka had studied English and would
have been familiar with Wordsworth, one of the most popular poetsof the time – though Wordsworth was, of course, in one sense
merely carrying forward the tradition of the brave early translators of
the Bible who sought to make its wisdom available to everyone intheir own language. However, Ukigumo (“The Drifting Cloud”,published in three volumes from 1887 to 1889) by Futabatei Shimei,
was the first novel written in colloquial Japanese. And Futabatei’s
original works, such as Sono omokage (1906), as well as histranslations of Russian authors such as Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy,and Fyodor Dostoevsky, were what succeeded in fulfilling thedemand for gembun itchi – i.e., constructing a language appropriate
for the literature of contemporary Japan. By 1908, novels no longer
used the formal elegance of classical kanbun and, by the 1920s, thesame was true of all newspapers, though government documents
remained in classical Japanese until 1946. The process ofdemocratizing the language had taken over a century, but thattransformed the entire universe of Japanese thought. And without
democratization of writing and thought, there can be no
democratization of a nation.
After World War II, there was the further impact of democraticvalues, and the much greater impact of English, which has speededup over the last four decades. Important people, such as Count
Shinken Makino (1861-1946), Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru
Yoshida (1878-1967), and Vice Minister of Finance Kohki Naganuma(1906-1977) have declared that reading in English is both instructive
and essential.
The difference between pre-Meiji Japan and today’s Japan may be
best symbolized by the printed form of modern Japanese books.
Most (including manga) are printed to be read from right to left in
the traditional fashion, whereas technical books and textbooks areprinted according to the Western model – and are therefore readfrom left to right. In other words, modern Japan has been influenced
by many people inspired by the power of ideas from other parts ofthe world, to move from its past without abandoning it.

Japanese Publications: Influence on Other Partsof the World
Naturally, Japan has also influenced other parts of the world
through the power of its traditions and ideas. One of the firstJapanese works translated into a European language was Sangoku
Tsū ran Zusetsu (1832). Two years later, the translator, Julius
Klaproth, also published a translation of Nihon Ōdai Ichiran. Poetry
was the earliest form of literature in most languages, and remained
the most influential internationally till at least World War II. So it wasKlaproth’s inaccurate translations of Japanese poetry which
portended what was to come: by far the most influential form ofJapanese literature is also the shortest: haiku. Some Western poets
try to copy the Japanese form closely (5–7–5 syllables). Others don’t
follow the form but try to evoke the “spirit of haiku”: intense
imagery, usually drawn from nature, rendered in as few words aspossible. Naturally, there is the objection from some purists, for one
reason or another, that English poets aren’t writing “real” haiku – but
haiku remains a key way in which Japanese poetry has influenced
world literature, world lifestyles, and world politics.
From the 1890s, Ernest Fenellosa, Lafcadio Hearn, and Percival
Lowell (elder brother of the poet Amy Lowell) each wrote extensively
about what they saw and experienced in Japan. Their books became
massively popular, and remained bestsellers for years, creating theclimate in which translations of haiku, tanka, and Noh plays werewell received in English and in French. In 1904, separately, theJapanese poet Yone Noguchi, and the American critic, anarchist andpoet of German and Japanese descent Sadakichi Hartmann,published influential articles on Japanese poetry. Hartmann was afriend of Walt Whitman, Stéphane Mallarmè and Ezra Pound. And
there were articles on haiku written in French by Paul-LouisCouchoud, who was a physician, a man of letters, controversialist,and adapter of Japanese haiku into French. His work was read by theearly Imagist theoretician F. S. Flint, who passed on Couchoud’s
ideas to members of the proto-Imagist Poet’s Club, including Ezra
Pound.
One of the first American poets to write extensively about
Japanese subjects was Amy Lowell (1874-1925). Even as a young
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girl, due to her brother Percival’s letters from Japan, her knowledgeof the country was far more extensive than that of most people in theUS. Her brother also sent her ukiyo-e prints, of which she had a large
collection. Some of her poems describe the scenes depicted, andrelate what she thought were the stories that went with them. Lowellmade a trip to London specifically to meet Pound and learn about
haiku. On her return to the US, she worked hard to interest others inthis “new” form.
So, streams from different angles converged to make Japanese
ideas popular in French, British and American literary and arts
circles. In fact, Japanese literature may have been the mostinfluential force in the American Poetic Renaissance of the 1920s.
Ezra Pound’s Imagist movement gave Modernism its start, and was
the first organized literary movement in the English language.
Pound’s haiku or hokku-inspired poetry came to represent Japanese
poetry to most European and American writers such as Conrad
Aiken, John Gould Fletcher, and Carl Sandburg. And it is mainly
Pound’s interpretation of Noh that is mediated via William Yeats to T.
S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Kenneth Rexroth.
The influence extended, in the postwar period, to the Beat
Generation, whose work had as its central elements: rejection ofstandard narrative values, interest in Eastern religions, a turn awayfrom materialism, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, andexploration of sexuality without commitment to traditional marriage.
Gary Snyder, an important member of the Beat movement, was alsoa member of the West Coast group, the San Francisco Renaissance,
which developed independently, and brought San Francisco toprominence as a counterculture hub not only of avant-garde
American poetry but also of the visual and performing arts,
philosophy, interest in Asian cultures, and new social sensibilities.
The Hippie years of the 1960s spread the word to the world
through the songwriters of rock-music (e.g., San Francisco Sound).
That was also the time when the “underground press” (e.g. the SanFrancisco Oracle) spread from America, giving prominence to Beat/
San Francisco writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Michael McClure, Jack Kerouac, and Snyder (who is also anenvironmental activist).
So much for poetry. What about Japanese prose? The Tale of Genjihas beautiful use of language, of course, but has never had much of
an impact either in literature or in any other field. It is not till theearly 20th century that we find novels which have been influential,
such as those of Natsume Soseki, and Mori Ogai. David StephenMitchell (born 1969) is an English novelist, television writer, and42 Japan SPOTLIGHT • September / October 2021

screenwriter who lived in Japan for 15 years, and has written ninenovels, two of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His work
uses a Western perspective to cater to his Western readers’preference for Japan’s traditional and cultural elements, and at thesame time subverts stereotypes in the manner of the Japanese
author Haruki Murakami. Kazuo Ishiguro, who moved to Britain in1960 with his Japanese parents when he was five, and has been
educated entirely in the UK, has won a string of awards and honors
for his work since 1982, including the Nobel Prize and the BookerPrize.
Ishiguro provides a good segue from fiction to related arts, as hehas produced not only novels and short fiction but also lyrics andscreenplays. Two of his novels have been made into films, and one
has been adapted into a musical. The best-known Japanese filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, has influenced, among other movies, George
Lucas’s Star Wars. The high-tech images of contemporary Japan inscience ﬁction (e.g., Neuromancer and Blade Runner), remind us offilm scholar and critic Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto’s comment that “Thefuture world does not seem to be able to function without things
Japanese.”

Publisher’s Role in Promoting a Nation’s Culture& Intercultural Exchange
Finally, I return to the crucial question of what was and is thepublisher’s role in all this. Is not the publisher’s role that of agatekeeper? In the case of each work mentioned after the start ofmodern publishing, it was the publisher who decided what waspromoted to the public. The publisher exercised faith that the work
being published was important or was at least going to be popular.
And publishers not only put their talents and life into horizon
scanning, spotting trends, scouting for the best manuscripts, andproducing the highest possible quality of book; they do all that byputting their own money behind the works they choose to publish.
Great writers, great publishers, great artists shape our collective
identity and institutions, whether regionally, nationally, or globally.
Could it be that it is not writers but publishers who are theunacknowledged legislators of mankind?

Prabhu Guptara helps boards of companies with issues of technology strategy
and implementation. He is also a poet, and the publisher of www.pipparannbooks.
com.