V.  Information on Commerce (Part 2) Destination: Tori 1-Chome during the Period from the late Edo Period to the Meiji Period

2024.07.04

The network in Edo that supported Suwara-ya

Suwara-ya opened a major store in Tori 1-Chome of Nihonbashi and became a leading bookstore representing Edo. Suwara-ya Mohē the Fourth (Kakusai), who was adopted from the Kakiuchi family of Suhara Village, is said to have been a person who strengthened the business of Suwara-ya. As mentioned in Part 1, a conflict arose between Minami-gumi and Torimachi/Nakadori-gumi over Ruihan (a partially modified version of a previously published book) in 1750, around when Kakusai is said to have taken over the family business.

 

Suwara-ya was defeated by the Kamigata-founded bookstore group in that conflict. But not discouraged by the defeat, Suwara-ya was very active in publishing and expanded their business to Kyoto. Remaining on the offensive, Suwara-ya came to outperform Kamigata-founded bookstores, which had held sway in Edo. Between 1748 and 1764, the number of publications in Edo significantly increased, and the market itself expanded, but it is not enough to explain the reason for Suwara-ya’s rapid growth. It is not certain the reason for its favorable business, but I think one of the backgrounds against which Suwara-ya could keep a strong attitude might be the wide horizontal network they had.

 

Kakusai, the fourth generation of Suwara-ya, left behind Kumano Yuki, a travel book compiling the topographies of Kumano in classical Chinese. It is said that this book was published as Kakusai was asked by Shibui Taishitsu, a Confucian under whom he studied. This episode proves that Kakusai was well enough educated and close friends with intellectuals at that time, including Confucians and scholars of Chinese classics. These personal connections must have been an advantage in publishing and selling books.

 

In addition, Suwara-ya Mohē had connections formed through affiliations. When I read materials about bookstores at that time, I am surprised at the fact that there were many stores named Suwara-ya all over Edo and the number increased year after year. According to Edo no Honya-san (Bookstores in Edo) written by Konta Yozo, the number of Suwara-ya-affiliated bookstores belonging to Minami-gumi was only six between 1748 and 1751, but increased to nine in 1804, and soon reached to twelve.

  • Edo Kaimono Hitori Annai [Shopping Guide in Edo] edited by Nakagawa Gorozaemon, published in 1824, introduces stores in Edo. Including Suharaya Mohē appearing first in the section of bookstores, six Suwara-ya-affiliated bookstores are featured in the guide. (Source: National Diet Library Digital Collection)

Among those affiliates were famous bookstores, including Suwara-ya Shinbē (Kobayashi Shinbē), which located their store in Tori 2-Chome and published books of the Sorai school, and Suwara-ya Ichibē, which moved around the north area of Nihonbashi and was well known as a publisher of books written by Hiraga Gennai and Ota Nanpo and Kaitai Shinsho (New Text on Anatomy) written by Sugita Genpaku and others. In addition, Haibara, a Japanese paper store that was started in 1806 and is doing business in Nihonbashi still now, was originated from a paper wholesaler founded by Suwara-ya Sasuke that became independent from Suwara-ya Mohē.

 

In the publishing industry at that time, there was a scheme called Aihan (publishing a book with cooperation of more than one bookstore), and books were sometimes co-published by Suwara-ya-affiliated stores. One of the examples was Edo Meisho Zue [Guide to Famous Edo Sites] whose publishers were Suwara-ya Mohē and Suwara-ya Ihachi in Asakusa-Kayacho. In terms of these days, Suwara-ya developed something like a huge chain in Edo. But what was different from today was that it was a looser network through which each independently displayed originality while sometimes cooperating with one another. It is not hard to imagine that the quantum development of the network let the name of Suwara-ya known across the country and enabled the prevalence of their books.

Scenes of bookstores in the Edo Period

So, what scenes could be actually seen in the Suwara-ya Mohē’s bookstore?  Referring to the section of Honya (bookstores) in Edo Hanjoki [Record on the Prosperity of Edo] written in 1831 by Terakado Seiken, a Confucian from Mito Domain and a cultured person, I would like to describe the scene when a samurai, who was one of honored customer, visited the bookstore.

 

When the samurai is walking on a busy main street, he sees a box sign on which “Shoshi” was written. “Oh, I will visit it and check to see if there are any unusual books in there,”  he thinks and so walks in the bookstore. Books in classical Chinese and Zappon (miscellaneous books) are stacked as high as the bookshelves in front of him and those on each side of him, respectively. In the bookstore, some sheets of paper indicating the titles of recently published books are attached, fluttering in the wind. There is an elderly person who seems to be the owner, sitting at an accounting desk and looking around while doing bookkeeping, which was seen through the lattice at the back of the bookstore. The bookstore is thriving, and several apprentices are hustling back and forth with books in their hands.

 

When the samurai sits on a tatami-matted seating area, a mercantile clerk bows as he approaches, saying, “Yes, yes.” I ask, “Do you have any unusual books that were recently published?” The mercantile clerk heads toward the bookshelf at a quick pace, saying, “Yes, yes, we do.” Then the clerk takes some books from it and puts them on the tatami mat in front of the samurai. He picks up the top one and flip over the pages to find that he already has it. When he says, “I already have this,” the mercantile clerk says, “So how about this one,” holding out another book. As he thinks it seems to be interesting, he says, “I will buy it,” and settles the price. When he stands up, the mercantile clerk bows deeply, saying “Thank you very much for your patronage of our books. We will promptly deliver this book tomorrow.”

  • Toshinokure Ikikai no Zu [Picture of People Coming and Going at the End of the Year] depicting the scenes of the end of the year from Toto Saijiki [A List of Annual Events in the Eastern Capital] published in 1838 (edited by Saito Getsushin, illustrated by Hasegawa Settan). As a box sign indicating Shoshi (a bookstore) and a signboard indicating Edo Meisho Zue Nijussatsu Shuttai (Guide to Famous Edo Sites: Twenty Ones Available) can be seen on the upper left of the picture and on the right side of the store respectively, it is found that the bookstore is a publisher Suwara-ya. This publication is co-published by Suwara-ya Mohē and Suwara-ya Ihachi, so it is not certain which publisher was depicted, but the bookstore on this picture is located facing a large street, so it is likely to be Suwara-ya Mohē. (Source: National Diet Library Digital Collection)

Every bookstore always put a box sign in front of it, indicating that it was so, like Shoshi and Honya. It was placed on the street when a bookstore is opened and returned it inside the bookstore when it was closed. The side of the box sign facing a bookstore had a small hole, and people passing by it threw paper waste into the hole. (Edo no Honya to Honzukuri [Bookstores in Edo and Bookmaking] by Hashiguchi Konosuke). The paper waste was recycled to make paper again, so it was quite a reasonable system.

 

Japanese-style bound books were not suitable for setting them on their edges like modern books, so they were stacked or laid flat on bookshelves to show their front covers. If you find a book you want, you ask a mercantile clerk of the bookstore or their assistants to bring it. High ranking persons such as samurai and Buddhist monks had books they bought delivered to their homes without payment on the spot or their assistants made the payment on behalf of them.

 

In the Edo Hanjoki [Record on the Prosperity of Edo], various episodes follow the mentioned above, including the story that a poor scholar gets the cold shoulder from a tactful mercantile clerk of a bookstore because he borrows books from the bookstore and does not return them at all times, and the story that a country fellow who comes to a bookstore and makes a pretense to knowledge is treated with a quiet chuckle. Furthermore, the story of long-unsold old books, which reveal their unhappy situations after the bookstore is closed and sorrow for each other, is also written with abundant irony. Surprisingly revealing that some scholars, who appear to cherish books, just display them in their dens without reading them, Edo Hanjoki is so interesting that I suddenly feel closer to people in the Edo period. This was just the book that got banned in the Tenpo (1831–1845) Reforms due to the reason that it would corrupt public morals.

Surviving the turbulent period as a second-class drug seller and by meeting the needs for textbooks

The Edo Hanjoki was written at around the end of the period when the mercantile culture of Edo matured, generally called Kasei Culture. At that time, the head of Suwara-ya was Mohē the Seventh (Shigehiro) who was adopted from the Kitabatake family. Shigehiro, Mohē the Seventh is said to have been a reviver of Suwara-ya who turned around the family business deteriorated by the Fifth and Sixth. As Suwara-ya the Seventh, Shigehiro also competed with Izumoji over the monopolization of Bukan (A Guide to Samurai Houses) and expanded business to second-class drug distributing to diversify the business.

  • “Nihonbashi Tori 1-Chome Nishigawa (The West Side of Tori 1-Chome of Nihonbashi) from Kyoka Edohana Hisenryo [Kyoka (comic tanka poems) about Major Spots in Edo Where a Thousand-ryo Is Used per Day] published in 1853 (selected by Tenmei Rojin, illustrated by Utagawa Hiroshige). The store in the left front is Suwara-ya Mohē’. A box sign indicating a bookstore and a bag-style sign indicating a second-class drug seller can be seen. (Source: National Diet Library Digital Collection)

Furthermore, what was favorable to Suwara-ya was the development of temple schools from the Bunka/Bunsei Periods (1804–1830) to the end of the Edo Period. As trade and manufacture developed in this period, the need to learn to read, write and calculate arose among the common people, which led to rapid increase in temple schools. And Nihonbashi was the most typical as a commercial area. Perhaps focusing on that faster, Suwara-ya published textbooks for temple schools and succeeded in surviving the turbulent Bakumatsu period (the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate).

 

About Suwara-ya in the early Meiji period, Yoshida Kyubē the Eleventh of the Asakura-ya Bookstore, which was located in Asakusa at that time, wrote in his personal note as follows (Shoshigaku 1-kan 6-gou [Bibliography Vol. 1, No. 6], 1933 Bunenkaku Yawa (Night Stories about the Library of the Chinese Imperial Palace in the Past).

 

〈The warehouse with earthen walls had a bookstore on the right and a second-class drug store on the left. Each of the stores had a mercantile clerk, and all the personnel were male from Kishu Province. The mercantile clerk at that time was Shimizu Sosuke. He liked Chinese books, and often delivered books to Imperial Library which was located in Seido at that time. There were a few storehouse keepers on the second floor, and when a customer came, they brought books according to the requests from the staff. When I visited it to buy Prajna Paramita, I was taken upstairs and treated to Kaiseki-zen (a simple meal served before a ceremonial tea). Suwara-ya had long been a publisher of Bukan and Edo Ezu (Pictures of Edo), its name was known throughout the country. And a medicine for women called Kaden Junkisan also spread everywhere along with those publications.〉

 

The phrase “All the staff were male from Kishu Province” probably means that Suwara-ya originated from Kishu Province; therefore, it employed men from the province as staff. Receiving orders from customers, the staff brought the ordered books to the customers from the storage on the second floor. A customer who made a big purchase like Prajna Paramita composed of 600 volumes was said to have been specially treated to the Kaiseki-zen meal. Kaden Junkisan was a primary product of Suwara-ya’s second-class drug business, which was a medicine for women that was effective for perinatal discomforts and sold across the country following the sales channels of books.

  • The advertisement of Junkisan appearing in Edo Kaimono Hitori Annai [Shopping Guide in Edo] cited before. It describes that Suwara-ya Mohē located in Tori 3-Chome sold a medicine called Junkisan in partnership with the store in Kyoto. (Source: National Diet Library Digital Collection)

This personal note continues with the episode about a bookstore in Tori 2-Chome called Yamashiro-ya Inada Sahyoe (commonly called Yamasa) complaining that there was no end to customers who came in saying, “Is this Suwara-ya?” despite the most thriving bookstore in Tokyo and this situation made the owner say, “I want a noren (short split curtain) of Suwara-ya.” Though times changed to the Meiji Period, Suwara-ya was a name well known to people as stated in the episode. However, the glory did not last long.

  • Suwara-ya had a store on the west side of Tori 1-Chome for a long time, but it moved to the east side of Tori 2-Chome (presently near Tokyo Nihonbashi Tower in Nihonbashi 2-Chome) before it went out of business.

Bookstores in Edo vanishing under the influence of modernization

In Nihonbashi Fukin [Near Nihonbashi] written by Tayama Katai mentioned at the beginning of Part 1, Suwara-ya in around 1881, when Katai was apprenticed to a bookstore, is described as below.

 

〈In the area where current Kuroe-ya or Shiose was located, two large bookstores called Suwara-ya and Yamashiro-ya were side by side with a few buildings between them, and such a large square Shohei (?) as seen in the illustrations of books in the Edo period were put in front of their stores, like exhibiting the status of a long-established prestigious business. Anyway, what lonely and gloomy bookstores they were. A few mercantile clerks tying Kaku-obi (a stiff sash for men) were sitting here and there boringly, and customers who came in to buy a book could not be seen.〉

 

Kuroe-ya is a long-established lacquerware store still in Nihonbashi now, and Shiose is a Manju (bunz) store relocated from Nihonbashi and now in Akashi-cho of Tsukiji. Shohei is probably a box sign. Not only Suwara-ya but also Yamashiro-ya was no longer the bustling place it once was.

 

And it is no wonder because Maruzen opened in Tori 3-Chome in 1869 and Okura Magobē, who started the business as Soshiya (a bookstore dealing in popular recreational books), founded a bookstore called Okura Shoten in Tori 1-Chome in 1875. In addition, Hakubunkan, which adopted a new printing technology earlier, started business in Hongo in 1887 and became a leading publisher in the Meiji period. At that time, the tide of modernization from woodblock printing to letterpress printing was rising rapidly in the world of bookstores as well. Suwara-ya could not respond to the change, and in 1904, finally ended its more than 200 years of history.

 

It must have been inevitable that Kamigata-founded bookstores gathered in and around Nihonbashi where the Tokaido Road connecting Kyoto and Osaka intersected with the ship channel of the Nihonbashi River. And the bookstore industry went through a lot of turnovers over the prime location. In this context, Suwara-ya stayed in business for a long time focusing on highly reliable products; however, they could not follow the dramatic change in times because of such a focus. It is very similar to these days when information publications shifted to a new field on the Internet. The rise and fall of Suwara-ya show the timeless fact that “History repeats itself.”

References:
Study on Townspeople in Edo, Vol. 3 (1973) Matsunosuke Nishiyama, et.al., Yoshikawa Kobunkan
Bookstores in Edo (1977) Yozo Konta, NHK Books
Record on the Prosperity of Edo (Part 2) (1980) Terakado Seiken, translated by Chojiro Taketani, Kyoikusha Shinsho
Publishing in the Edo Period and People: Yayoshi Mitsunaga Writings 3 (1980) Mitsunaga Yayoshi, Nichigai Associates, Inc.
Bibliography Vol.1 (1982) Japan Society of  Bibliography, Kyuko Shoin
Record on the Prosperity of Great Tokyo: Downtown Part (1998) Akutagawa Ryunosuke, et.al., Heibonsha Library
Directories of Samurai Houses in Edo: Guides to Samurai Houses and Competition over Publishing (2008) Kumiko Fujizane, Yoshikawa Kobunkan
Bookstores in Edo and Bookmaking【Cont.】Introduction to Japanese Books (2011) Konosuke Hashiguchi, Heibonsha Library
History of Book Commerce in the Edo Period (2012) Haruo Uezato, Meicho Kankokai (first edition was published by the Times in 1930.)

Yuko Shibukawa
Writer/Editor

Editor and writer mainly on food and crafts. Author of The Secret of Rice Omelets and the Mystery of Melon Bread – The Story of the Birth of Popular Menu Items (Shincho Bunko). Editor and compiler of Hand-crafting Your Life – The Earthenware and Life in Iwai Kiln in Tottori by Noriyuki Yamamoto (Stand! Books), Nichiniimashi – Ryukyuan Cuisine and Okinawan Words that Will Create a Better Tomorrow by Ayaka Yamamoto (Bungeishunju) and more.

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