Despite the increasing popularity of studies of early modern Japanese print culture, the field has primarily restricted itself to examinations of the commercial print industry—a bias that has come at the price of ignoring a wide variety of non-profit publications. This lecture will focus on two Kansai region case studies of freely distributed print (sein) to show that it was not the trivial and ephemeral genre that current research makes it out to be. Rather, it represents a vast repository of voices seeking an audience for messages they considered to be of urgent and long-lasting importance.

Niels Van Steenpaal is an associate professor of Japanese History at Kyoto University. He is a cultural and intellectual historian with a primary research interest in “moral culture”, a term that he uses to describe the pathways, processes and media through which morality and (material) culture mutually influence each other.