Who Gets to Define a Culture?

Hokusai made the Great Wave. That is the name we remember.

But the print also had a publisher: Nishimuraya Yohachi, whose firm issued it as part of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji in the early 1830s. Hokusai's design reached its first buyers through a business. Between drawing and purchase stood the work required to turn an image into multiple impressions on paper.^[1]

Remembering the publisher does not make Hokusai less important. It changes the question.

Instead of asking only how an extraordinary artist imagined an extraordinary image, we can also ask how that image became something people could encounter, acquire, and recognize. Who arranged for it to be made? Who expected it to sell? And what part did people without either the artist's talent or the publisher's capital play in its success?

These questions become especially interesting in Tokugawa Japan. The country's formal political order was dominated by warrior houses. Yet some of the works through which we now recognize its culture emerged from playhouses, publishing shops, and circles of readers rather than from a ruler's commission.

How could people with little governing authority help decide what a society watched, pictured, and remembered?

The answer is not that money secretly replaced political power. It is that cultural influence could be assembled through other relationships—and those relationships had their own opportunities, inequalities, and limits.

Start by separating two kinds of importance.

An official could authorize an activity, restrict it, or make life difficult for the people conducting it. A theater proprietor faced another question as well: would enough people want to see the performance? A commercial publisher needed readers willing to obtain the book. An enterprise had to reckon with both the authorities and the people it hoped to attract. Neither relationship could simply be reduced to the other.

The expanding cities of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka brought writers, performers, craftspeople, and customers into sustained contact. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, kabuki was developing within this urban world alongside other literary and artistic activities. Its public was not confined to powerful patrons: it included traders, artisans, employees, and servants.^[2]

This did not mean that everyone had the same money, leisure, or access. It meant that people outside the governing elite could matter to an enterprise that needed an audience.

A single customer might be unimportant to a great lord. Many customers returning to a playhouse could affect whether its company continued. Their importance arose from the relationship between their choices and the work someone else wanted to keep doing.

This is the first part of the explanation: cultural influence need not resemble a command. It can consist in giving an activity enough support to become repeatable.

But scattered wishes do not automatically produce an art. People may enjoy a story without being able to hire its performers, organize its venue, or pay for its next production. Their interest has to pass through someone capable of turning it into an undertaking.

The crucial figures are therefore not only the rulers at the top or the public at the bottom. They include the people in between: those who connect talent, practical work, and a possible audience.

A woodblock print begins with work that its first buyer does not see.

A design has to be translated into carved blocks. Separate areas of color have to align when paper meets the blocks in successive impressions. Carving and printing are skilled contributions to the finished image, not mechanical steps performed after the artist's real work is complete. In the commercial industry, a publisher coordinated the undertaking and might initiate the subject as well as arrange its production.^[3]

Reproduction changes the economics of that work.

The effort needed to prepare a design for printing can serve more than one impression. Each further sheet still needs materials and labor, but it does not require the whole project to begin again. If enough copies find buyers, an enterprise can be supported by many purchases rather than by one person commissioning a unique object.

That is a possibility, not a guarantee. Blocks do not abolish the cost of paper, the skill of printing, or the risk of unwanted stock. Nor does “reproducible” mean that every publication was inexpensive enough for everyone. A luxurious book and a modest print could use related techniques while addressing very different customers.

The important shift is in how a work can be supported. Many people need not agree to finance it together in advance. A publisher can anticipate their interest, organize production, and take the chance that enough of them will buy.

This gives the audience influence, but gives the publisher influence too. Before buyers make their choices, someone has decided which designs they will be offered, at what level of finish, and through which outlets. Demand reaches the workshop through a person who interprets it.

The finished print can look effortless: one image, one sheet, one artist's name. Its availability rests on a chain of decisions about effort, expense, and uncertain response.

Hokusai's ability to imagine a wave and a printer's ability to give it convincing form are different achievements. An account that notices only the artist misses how the work became available. An account that notices only the business misses why anyone wanted this image rather than another.

A surviving book allows us to see an intermediary doing more than arranging a sale.

The Sparrows of Edo, published in 1786, combined Utamaro's pictures with kyōka, witty poems that played with the language and conventions of classical verse. Its publisher was Tsutaya Jūzaburō. The British Museum's curators read the preface as evidence that Tsutaya planned the project and asked Utamaro to depict places in Edo. He appears then to have solicited poems to accompany the pictures.^[4]

The sequence matters. It suggests that the book was not a finished manuscript carried to a shop by an author who needed someone to reproduce it. A publisher helped establish what it would be and brought contributors into a shared undertaking.

Choosing a subject is already an act of interpretation. Choosing which people will address it changes the result again. Pictures and poems may illuminate one another, contradict one another, or allow the reader to notice something neither would convey alone.

Here the publisher's connections were a creative resource. Knowing an artist, knowing poets, and understanding how their work might fit together could help make a new kind of object possible. The ability to organize was not outside the making of culture. It entered the composition of the book.

Yet this should not become a story in which the publisher was the hidden genius and everyone else merely fulfilled instructions. The evidence reveals coordination, not ownership of every idea. Utamaro's skill did not originate in a publishing plan, and the poets were not interchangeable suppliers of words.

The more useful picture is of people whose different capacities met within a project none of them would have made in quite the same way alone.

There was power in that position. Someone who could bring a project into existence could also decide not to pursue another. A flourishing market did not remove selection; it relocated some of it into shops, workshops, and personal networks. The public encountered choices that had already been shaped before a book reached the counter.

Theater shows the relationship from the other side.

A play is not necessarily organized only to carry its plot forward. Kabuki developed scenes that offered spectators the pleasure of watching particular actors display what made them distinctive. Roles were written with performers in mind, and a moment that might seem implausible as ordinary behavior could be exactly what an audience had come to enjoy.^[5]

Consider the famous gathering of five thieves in a nineteenth-century play commonly known in English as The Five Thieves. Pursued criminals present themselves with extravagant confidence, displaying umbrellas that advertise their identity and competing in accounts of their exploits. As a way to avoid capture, the scene is absurd. As an occasion for five actors to command the stage, it is splendid.^[5]

The point is not that the audience failed to notice the absurdity. Enjoyment depended on understanding what kind of occasion the performance was offering.

A desire for narrative suspense, admiration for a performer, delight in costume, and appreciation of technique could coexist. There was no single thing called “what audiences wanted” waiting to be discovered. A production could teach spectators a new pleasure; spectators could reward a moment the company then had reason to develop.

The audience did not write every scene. It helped make certain kinds of scene worth writing.

Prints extended this relationship beyond the performance. A 1794 design by Sharaku, published by Tsutaya, shows the actor Matsumoto Kōshirō IV in a particular role. It is not simply a picture of an imaginary man. The identity of the performer belongs to what the image offers.^[6]

Such an object makes a theatrical reputation portable. An encounter that normally requires actor and spectator to share a time and place can acquire another life on paper. The picture and the performance are different experiences, but each can give the other meaning.

This helps explain why it is misleading to divide the period into unrelated histories of drama, prints, and publishing. Their audiences could recognize connections across them. An actor might matter to a print buyer; a printed image might preserve interest in a role. Cultural influence moved through relationships between forms as well as through any single masterpiece.

Buying a new copy was not the only way to become a reader.

Edo-period books circulated through booksellers, lending libraries, and informal exchange. Illustrated publishing served several kinds of interest: fiction and poetry, travel and natural history, practical instruction and design. The same broad world of print could offer a story to enjoy, a place to imagine, or something useful to learn.^[7]

A book shared or lent could reach people beyond its first purchaser. The cost of obtaining it did not have to be borne in the same way by every reader. What counted as an audience was therefore wider than the group whose names might appear in a record of new-book purchases.

This is a small point with large consequences. A work's social reach and the number of copies sold are not identical measures. Ownership tells us something about access, but not everything about use.

Nor should the presence of pictures be treated as evidence of an unsophisticated public. An image could help someone follow a scene. It could also demand familiarity with an actor, poem, place, or visual joke. The illustrated page accommodated different kinds of knowledge, not a neat division between educated people reading words and everyone else looking at pictures.

We need to be equally careful with the phrase “ordinary readers.” It can hide considerable differences. People varied in reading skill, money, time, and proximity to the channels through which books circulated. A prosperous urban household and someone working long hours with little to spare did not encounter the same range of possibilities. The existence of a lively book trade is not proof of universal access.

Still, circulation beyond a small group of private owners changes what a publication can do. A book can bring a subject into conversation among people who have not commissioned it and will never meet its author. Its reach depends not only on being made, but on the quieter work of lending, carrying, recommending, and making it available.

The public is not waiting at the end of production like an empty container. It also participates in the movement of a work through the world.

There is an important exception to a simple story of ever-larger audiences buying ever-cheaper things.

Hokusai also made prints for much smaller circles. A print dated 1797–98 in the British Museum shows women and a boy viewing cherry blossom, accompanied by comic verse. The catalogue identifies the poems with a poetry club and infers that the club commissioned the work. It belongs to the world of surimono: privately commissioned prints, often made for New Year's exchanges rather than for sale to a general shop audience.^[8]

Here some of the people receiving the art were also helping bring it into being.

Their contribution was not limited to choosing from goods already on sale. They supplied an occasion, a circle of recipients, and words to appear with an artist's image. The division between audience and contributor became less straightforward.

This is a different arrangement from the publisher anticipating numerous unknown buyers. A small group could support work that made sense within its own relationships. An allusion or joke might be valuable precisely because not everyone would understand it. Shared knowledge could make a modestly sized audience culturally productive.

It could also make that audience exclusive. Belonging to a circle, mastering its references, and contributing to its activities all required resources of one kind or another. Cultural participation was not made equal simply because it took place outside a palace.

The contrast matters because it gives us more than one explanation for artistic innovation. A large market can make repeated production viable. A smaller circle can provide a reason to make something unusually particular. Neither scale is intrinsically more creative. The question is what the relationship between makers and recipients allows them to attempt.

The political categories do not divide this world cleanly either. Tsutaya's literary connections included writers of samurai background, among them Ōta Nanpo. Men associated with the governing order could also take part in the poetic and publishing life often described as “townspeople's culture.”^[9]

We should not imagine warriors producing only government while merchants and artisans produced everything worth reading. Formal status and cultural activity overlapped in less orderly ways.

A paying public did not give artists a separate country in which to work.

Kabuki's development makes that clear. The form began with performances associated with Okuni and other women. Restrictions on women's troupes, followed by restrictions on the performances of young men, helped shape its development into a theater dominated by adult male actors. What later audiences encountered as an established performance tradition had been formed partly through prohibition.^[10]

Demand had not been enough to keep every kind of performer on the stage.

It would be a mistake to treat the artistic responses to those restrictions as proof that the restrictions were beneficial. Performers found ways to work within changed conditions. Their ingenuity does not cancel the exclusion that helped create those conditions.

Publishing was subject to intervention too. In 1791, during the Kansei reforms, the writer Santō Kyōden and his publisher Tsutaya were punished over three books dealing with the pleasure quarters. Tsutaya lost property; Kyōden received a sentence of confinement in manacles. The people who helped make books successful could themselves become the targets of official discipline.^[9]

This exposes the limit of the public's influence. Readers could want a book without being able to protect the people who produced it. An enterprise might be commercially attractive and politically hazardous at the same time.

It also complicates the position of the intermediary. A publisher connected creators to buyers, but stood where financial exposure and official liability could meet. Choosing what to publish involved more than identifying a promising subject. It also involved judging what risks the business and its collaborators could bear.

Inside the entertainment world, inequalities remained visible. Earlier kabuki theaters distinguished exposed, lower-level audience areas from better-protected reserved seating. The presence of many sorts of spectators did not put them all in equivalent positions.^[11]

The same caution applies to cultural visibility. A woman's image could be celebrated while other people controlled its production and sale. A performer could become the object of admiration without acquiring the standing of a patron. Being indispensable to an attraction was not the same as having authority over the arrangements that sustained it.

We can acknowledge real cultural participation without turning it into a claim that society had become equal. An audience had a kind of leverage. It did not possess every kind.

The examples suggest a pattern, but not a law explaining all of Japanese culture.

When artists could reach recurring audiences through theaters, publishing businesses, lending networks, or organized circles, people outside the governing elite gained ways to influence what was made. Sometimes their purchases sustained a company. Sometimes their enthusiasm gave a performer a reputation that traveled beyond the stage. Sometimes their poems and commissions became part of the work itself.

These were not identical mechanisms. They shared an ability to turn dispersed interest into practical support.

That support depended on organization. The publisher who assembled a book, the performer who could hold a room, and the people who kept works circulating all helped convert possibility into something another person could actually encounter. Influence belonged not only to whoever supplied the largest sum, but also to whoever could connect the necessary people and make their work usable together.

None of this guarantees a masterpiece. A popular work can be forgettable. An ambitious one can find too few supporters. A small group can sustain remarkable art or simply flatter itself. Commercial production creates opportunities and pressures; it does not supply a final judgment of artistic worth.

Nor should recognizing collaboration make individual ability disappear. No list of contributors explains away the particular arrangement of forms in Hokusai's wave. Another artist, supported by comparable workshops and businesses, would not necessarily have made that image. Conditions help explain how a work could reach the world. They do not exhaust what the work became.

The most interesting history holds both things in view: the distinctive achievement and the less visible relationships that allowed it to matter beyond its maker.

This is also why the culture of a period cannot be read directly from its hierarchy. The people who governed did much to establish the conditions under which others lived and worked. But a list of their offices will not tell us which actor held an audience, which picture someone wanted to keep, or which book made a place beyond the reader's experience imaginable.

For those questions, we have to leave the official record of precedence and follow the making, exchange, and use of particular works.

Hokusai remains at the center of the Great Wave. Around him, the publisher and the workshop come back into view. Beyond them are people whose names we mostly do not know: those who bought an impression, showed it to someone else, or kept it when other things were discarded.

They did not all share an intention, and they did not contribute equally. Together, however, they helped give an image a life beyond the moment of its creation. A culture belongs neither entirely to its rulers nor entirely to its greatest artists. Much of it takes shape in the relationships through which one person's work becomes part of another person's life.