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This article investigates factors that underly the establishment of commerical publishing in early modern Japan. In permodern China or Korea, civil service exams were the most significant inducers in the establishment of a viable publishing industry, unlike the Japanese case where the civil services were not introduced in full-scale. Thus, a book-subscribing class of civil service examinees failed to appear in the Japanese society, and as a result it was not until the Edo period that commercial publishing was finally established in Japan. A unique aspect of early modern Japan was that the Tokugawa shogunate did not assert its political legitimacy through the monopolization of scholarship and culture. Thus in Edo-period civil society, there developed a number of cultural authories that were not subsumed by the state. Institutions such as Buddhist sect head temples and Urasenke schools of tea ceremony and the Ikenobō school of flower arranging, were all said to be representatives of this cultural authority in the Japanese private society. Within this socio-cultural context of the Edo period, official booksellers were formed for each Buddhist sect, which became the foundation for the formation of commercial publishing in Japanese society. With the formation of these official booksellers associated with each Buddhist sect, highly edited Buddhist texts were regularly circulated, and the standard for exegetical scholarship in early modern Buddhism improved significantly. A by-product of such monastic curriculum based on sectarian relationship with a single publisher led to a focus on the teachings of their own sect in the seminaries of the Buddhist sects. Such over-emphasis on the teachings of one’s own sect consequently led to an isolating effect and a formation of a framework of scholarship confined to a singular Buddhist sect, which made exchanges of ideas and teachings between sects impossible and in effect the calcification of exegetical scholarship.
