Who Had the Right to Reprint a Book in Japan?

In 1868, an expanded edition of Fukuzawa Yukichi's Seiyō jijō, an account of the Western world, appeared with official permission. Kuroda Kikuro had added explanations, reading aids, and an appendix. The book acknowledged Fukuzawa as the original compiler and identified Kuroda's contribution. It did not pretend to be an entirely unrelated work.^[1]

Fukuzawa nevertheless objected. In a submission to the new government, he complained that Kuroda had altered and republished his work without even consulting him. The official permission was part of his grievance: an authority had allowed someone else to reproduce a book whose production and sale he regarded as his business.^[2]

The disagreement cannot be explained simply as a contest between someone respecting authorship and someone denying that authors existed. Fukuzawa's name was on the rival edition. What remained unsettled was what his authorship entitled him to control.

Following that question from the Tokugawa book trade into Meiji legislation reveals several possible objects of protection: an established edition, an investment in printing, an author's decision to publish, and the reproduction of a work beyond its original format. These interests overlapped, but they did not begin as one indivisible right.

Commercial publishing in Tokugawa Japan relied extensively on woodblocks. A carved block retained the arrangement of a page: its writing, illustrations, and the relationship between them. Printing another impression required paper, ink, and work, but not a complete new setting of the page. The stored blocks made it possible to return to an edition after the first printing had been sold.^[3]

This gave a publisher two kinds of stock. Finished books were ready to sell. Blocks represented a capacity to supply more books later. A successful title could therefore have a commercial future that exceeded the copies presently on the shelves.

The distinction becomes clear at the moment of sale. A reader buying a bound volume acquired an object containing the text. A publisher acquiring the means and recognized right to issue that edition acquired a position in its future production. The two purchases could concern exactly the same words without conveying the same opportunity to profit from them.

The publishing rights conventionally called hanken were closely associated with the blocks. As Ōtani Takushi explains in his study of the Edo-period arrangement, such rights could be transferred and shared. They could also remain recognized after a fire had destroyed the wood itself.^[3] That last possibility shows why the arrangement was more than simple ownership of a tool.

After a fire, somebody would have to pay to cut replacement blocks. Continued recognition of the earlier right reserved a future undertaking to its holder; another publisher could not assume that the destruction had made the edition available to everyone. The material object and the protected commercial position could come apart.

Nor did shared ownership mean that several people had independently written the same book. It offered a way to distribute the investment in producing it and the expectations of subsequent returns. A title could connect several commercial interests even when it named only one author.

These arrangements addressed a recurring production problem. A publisher committed resources before knowing how many copies would sell. A rival entering after demand became evident could benefit from information that the first publisher had paid to discover. Protection of an edition could shelter that initial commitment. It could also reserve a profitable title long after the first costs were recovered. The existence of an investment explains an interest in exclusivity; it does not settle how extensive or lasting that exclusivity ought to be.

The booksellers' associations gave publishers a forum for objections to unauthorized reprints and competing editions. Rotating officers handled such complaints. The terminology distinguished jūhan, reprinting, from ruihan, an edition considered unacceptably similar.^[3] Identifying an established right was only part of the work. Someone also had to decide what the newcomer had done to it.

A study of publications associated with Edo's Nakamuraza theater reveals a response more complicated than simply stopping the rival. The theater's songs appeared in small printed booklets, useful afterward for practice. Music historian Urushizaki Mari traces their repeated publication through surviving editions. A performance could finish while demand for its words continued.^[4]

The publisher Murayama Genbē established an exclusive relationship with the theater. Competing printers then reused his editions as the basis for their own. In Urushizaki's account, Murayama subsequently incorporated such producers as joint publishers who bore publication costs. She interprets the arrangement as a way to obtain compensation for the unauthorized use.^[4]

The proposed solution redirected production rather than making it disappear. A rival's capacity to print could become useful once attached to an arrangement recognizing the earlier publisher's claim. Cooperation did not require the parties to have begun with the same understanding of who was entitled to issue the book.

By the Kansei era, 1789–1801, the publisher Sawamuraya Rihei was storing the blocks and repeatedly issuing these works. Other publishers participated in shared editions while his interest in the original blocks remained identifiable.^[4] Repetition had acquired a more stable commercial organization.

This example brings the object of protection into focus. A song could have writers and performers, while its printed version supported another set of claims. Those claims concerned who could manufacture and sell future copies, who paid for doing so, and how proceeds could remain connected with the established edition. An author's name alone could not describe the entire arrangement.

It also explains why the history cannot begin with modern legislation as though earlier printers had no interests to defend. They had investments, agreements, and methods of resolving competition. The later question was how far a general law should preserve those arrangements, replace them, or assign a different starting point for the right.

A diplomatic request made in 1867 offers an unusually precise alternative to an unlimited claim over a text.

James Curtis Hepburn's Japanese–English dictionary had been printed in Shanghai. A letter from the American legation in Edo, dated 31 May, told the Japanese foreign magistrates that 1,200 copies of the first edition would shortly be offered for sale. The secretary, Portman, asked them to take the matter to the shogunate's senior councillors.^[5]

His argument joined usefulness to financial exposure. Japanese readers would value the dictionary, he maintained, but that very demand could encourage immediate local reprinting. Hepburn might then fail to recover the cost of the first edition. The letter presented protection as a means of keeping a useful undertaking from imposing a large loss on its producer.

The foreign magistrates' subsequent report made the proposed duration concrete: reprinting should be prohibited until those 1,200 copies had sold. An instruction went to the relevant military and educational offices that applications to reprint this dictionary were not to be accepted.^[5]

Here the protected interest was attached to a stock of books already made. Success in selling the first printing, rather than a fixed number of years after the author's death, supplied the requested endpoint. The proposal gave the initial producer an opportunity to recover expenditure before domestic competitors could enter.

The accompanying deliberation also refused to make this one dictionary the automatic model for all foreign books. Officials considered whether other cases should continue to be handled as before unless an objection arose. The particular restriction and the reservation about general policy survive in the same documentary sequence.^[5]

That pairing matters. The authorities could recognize a foreign author's complaint without already possessing a comprehensive rule that governed every translated or imported book. The arrangement was negotiated around a known undertaking, an identifiable printing, and a specific diplomatic request.

It also reveals how the location of manufacture complicated the question. The first copies were produced outside Japan for a readership substantially inside it. Control over a local printer would not by itself explain whose expenditure deserved protection. Somebody had to connect the overseas production with the market in which the copies were expected to sell.

The documents establish a requested protection and an official response, not an audited account of how many copies Hepburn eventually sold. Their importance is the shape of the proposed bargain. Protecting a book could mean protecting the sale of a particular printing, rather than assigning its author an indefinitely expandable command over every future version.

Fukuzawa's position becomes clearer when writing is placed beside the work of publication.

He arranged production himself: buying paper, employing block cutters, printers, and binders, and using booksellers to distribute the result for a commission. Tokura Takeyuki's study of the surviving blocks describes this organization of the business. Fukuzawa was not simply delivering a manuscript and waiting for a publisher's payment.^[6]

The colophon of his Minkan keizairoku, issued in 1877, makes the combined role explicit. It names him as author-publisher, records a publishing-rights licence dated 5 December, and lists booksellers responsible for distribution.^[7] These were separate activities even when one person coordinated them.

Writing created the text. Financing and arranging manufacture put copies into existence. Distribution placed them before buyers. When another edition appeared, Fukuzawa could object both to the use of his writing and to competition with a production undertaking he had organized.

Return to Kuroda's 1868 version. The publisher's application, reproduced in Horii Kenji's research, reported that the work had already been prepared for printing before the change of government and asked permission to sell it. The request went through booksellers' representatives, and permission was recorded.^[1] This was not an edition operating wholly outside the administrative process.

Fukuzawa's own complaint recognized that permission had been granted. He objected that the reviser had made no approach to him before changing his book. He asked for action against the resulting edition and challenged the suggestion that adding corrections was enough to justify it.^[2]

We do not need to adopt either side's accusations about the other's character to identify the conflict. A publisher had obtained one kind of approval. The original author-publisher maintained that another consent was still necessary. Giving credit on the title page had not secured that consent.

The case also resists an easy division between traditional copying and modern creativity. Fukuzawa himself wrote about knowledge obtained from abroad. Kuroda presented his additions as assistance to readers. Both could understand a book as a vehicle for making knowledge usable. Their disagreement concerned the conditions under which that work could be done with an already published text.

An author's financial independence could sharpen this dispute rather than make publishing interests disappear. By retaining the business, Fukuzawa retained both its possible proceeds and its exposure to competing editions. His objection was not evidence that authorship and commercial investment had suddenly become the same thing. It shows how forcefully their claims could be combined in one person.

The 1887 Hanken Ordinance supplied a more general framework. Article 7 assigned the right to the author and, after death, to the author's heirs. Article 8 permitted its sale or transfer, with or without restrictions.^[8]

These provisions separated the starting point of the right from its eventual holder. An author could possess it initially while a publisher later acquired it by agreement. The statement that a right belonged to authors therefore did not mean that only authors could ever control reprinting.

The ordinance also required formal action. Someone seeking protection had to apply for registration before publication. Registered books were to carry the prescribed notice of ownership during the protection period; omitting it deprived the registration of effect. The Home Ministry maintained the register and issued certificates.^[8]

The consequences were practical. A person might have written a work but still need to organize the application, identify the proper holder, and ensure that the required notice appeared in the books. Authorship supplied a basis for entitlement; protection depended on completing the process.

The ordinance confronted revisions directly. Article 19 treated unauthorized additions, annotations, illustrations, translations, and continuations of unfinished works as forms of infringement when they invaded the protected right. Article 12 separately provided that alteration of a work's contents or format did not change the protection already attached to it.^[9]

These rules addressed the kind of argument visible in the 1868 dispute. Adding material could no longer be assumed to remove the underlying question of consent. The statute did not say that revision lacked intellectual value. It established that such value did not automatically dispose of an existing right.

A further provision drew a narrower boundary around translations. Under Article 20, the holder of a translation could not prevent another person from independently translating the original merely because both versions drew on the same source. The rule preserved an objection when the later producer had appropriated the existing translation.^[9]

The distinction protected an accomplished version without giving its maker a monopoly over every attempt to bring the foreign work into Japanese. A translator had to identify what had been taken: the underlying source available to another translator, or the particular rendering already produced.

Nor did the ordinance leave every disputed book to private pressure. It provided for damages and for temporary restraint of sales while a case was examined. A claimant whose restraint proved unwarranted could be answerable for the resulting loss.^[10] Recognizing an exclusive right thus required procedures for testing claims to it. An allegation alone could not be made equivalent to a final judgment.

The Copyright Act promulgated in 1899 organized the subject around an author's exclusive right to reproduce a work. Its opening provision extended beyond printed books to several literary, scholarly, and artistic forms. It expressly included translation rights for literary and scholarly works and performance rights for scripts and musical scores.^[11]

The unit of protection had become more clearly separable from a particular set of blocks or stock of finished volumes. A work could remain relevant to the law when it moved into another form or was reproduced by another method. The statute's categories required attention to the relationship between versions, not merely to who possessed the original printing equipment.

This was still a historical arrangement with particular limits. Article 7 allowed a translation right to lapse under specified conditions if the right-holder had not published a translation within ten years. The wording cannot be replaced by whatever rules a reader associates with present-day copyright.^[11]

Registration also remained consequential. Article 15 allowed registration and required it before the holder of a published or performed work could bring a civil action for infringement. Transfers and pledges needed registration to be asserted against third parties.^[12] It would therefore be misleading to describe the change simply as the disappearance of formalities.

Most revealingly, the act set out reproductions that were not to count as infringement. For works already published, Article 30 included non-mechanical, non-chemical copying without an intention to publish, quotation within proper bounds in one's own work, and bounded excerpting for general-education moral textbooks and readers. It required acknowledgment of the source in the cases it covered.^[13]

A reader copying by hand for private use and a bookseller printing a rival edition consequently did not fall into one undifferentiated category of copying. Purpose, method, extent, and attribution could affect the treatment of an act. The provisions did not create an unrestricted permission to take anything for education, nor did acknowledgment alone authorize every republication.

The law thus had to define uses left outside exclusivity at the same time as it defined the exclusive right. Otherwise every ordinary act of studying, discussing, or reusing a passage could be mistaken for the production of a substitute edition. Protection made copying a more carefully classified activity, rather than making all copying disappear.

Across these arrangements, the answer changed because the thing being protected changed. Tokugawa publishers defended continuing interests in editions and printing investments. The Hepburn correspondence sought protection for the sale of an identifiable first printing. Fukuzawa combined authorial control with a business he financed himself. Later statutes assigned rights, permitted their transfer, and specified both infringement and allowed reuse.

These were not successive discoveries that books had owners. Books, blocks, commercial privileges, and texts could already connect several people. The difficult work lay in determining which connection entitled someone to prevent another act of reproduction.

Nor was the new legal order simply a victory that placed every book permanently at its author's disposal. A right could be transferred. A term could expire. A particular use could fall outside infringement. Bringing a civil claim could require an administrative step. The law made the answer more general while retaining several conditions that had to be checked.

The authorized edition that angered Fukuzawa therefore remains an instructive beginning. It had a named original compiler, a named reviser, manufactured copies, and permission to enter the market. The dispute survived all of them. What it still lacked, in Fukuzawa's claim, was agreement from the person whose work and publishing undertaking the new edition used.

Who could reprint a book depended on more than who owned a copy. It depended on whose interest the prevailing arrangement recognized, what act the newcomer proposed, and which approval could make that act permissible.