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Japan
Early seventeenth century Japan saw a large amount of extremely detail oriented text being produced. For instance, Hitomi Hitsudai spent thirty years taking field notes on 492 types of edible flowers and animals in his book Honcho shokkan(The Culinary Mirror of the Realm). This overly detailed style of writing was characteristic of the years prior, when the majority of literate people were of higher classes. Soon after, literacy rates began to increase as hundreds(by some accounts thousands) of schools taught children the vocabulary of geography, history, and individual crafts and callings. The highly detailed style still persisted as it was consistent in many gazetteers, emerging as a social lexicon. In some instances family almanacs and encyclopedias were put together regionally.

While the highly detailed writing form persisted, a simpler reading style developed in the 1670’s that were written for popular readership. It was characterized by a simpler vernacular language, written almost directly for first time book buyers. These original tales of fiction were popular among common samurai as well common townspeople. Works went beyond stories of fiction, but also would depict certain crafts and manuals specialized for that topic. The writing of these more popularized books was a newly emerging form of script. Authors had, for the first time, to deal with the idea of the “reading public” for the first time. Authors took into account the differing social stratas of their audience and had to learn “the common forms of reference that made the words and images of a text intelligible” to the layman.

Authors had reached a new market with their more simplistic writing. After passing this hurdle, they began writing about more than specified crafts and social lexicons. For the first time, writers had opened the power to make once private knowledge public and moved into more regional information guides. Yet still, the detail oriented writing persisted as writing became understand as something that needed to be “quantitative evidence in order to measure continuity against change.” The increasing literacy across Japan as well as the proliferation of authors made writing a semi-autonomous system, but there were still instances of censorship in the late seventeenth century. Despite the vast depiction of landscape, governmental powers ensured areas that entailed sensitive subjects, such as military households, foreign affairs, Christianity and other heterodox beliefs, and disturbing current events, were kept out of public works. This self censorship did have drawbacks as social commentary stayed in the higher social caste where this information was more readily available. Despite these censors, public readings increased across Japan and created new markets that could be shared between the higher elites as well as middlebrow peoples, albeit differing subject matter.