5 - Crossways of Knowledge in the Private Collection of a High-Ranking Woman in Nineteenth-Century Japan

In this presentation one mode of knowledge production, transmission, and circulation is taken up, but from its tail. The material to pursue this kind of inquiry is the extant library of ninety titles formerly owned by a high-ranking woman in nineteenth-century Japan. 
Naitō Shigeko (1800–1880) was the daughter, sister, and later wife of daimyo, and thus belonged to a distinct group of privileged women who led a stationary life in the city of Edo until they were required to leave their homes when the alternate attendance system was first suspended and later abolished in the 1860s. Her collection, including her own writings and also many works which she copied in her own hand, presents us with a multi-layered ensemble. The collection of producers and consumers of ideas and texts exhibits the crossways of knowledge and Shigeko’s individual access to knowledge with her links to a broader community. To see if her rank and gender determined the collection’s content and how her act of copying gave texts new meaning will be among the questions that I aim to investigate.
The specific purposes and what meaning the collection had then and today requires navigation through various temporal spheres. To document and preserve the data, I will utilize the digital tools of the Japan Biographical Database (jbdb.jp)—a relational database that manages large amounts of data on social interaction. JBDB visualization tools in particular illustrate more vividly the transmission and circulation of knowledge as found in Shigeko’s collection.