Wasōbon
[4] Japan has had a long history of printing that has included a variety of different methods and technologies, but until the Edo period most books were still copied by hand.
In the printing which used the kana syllabary before the Meiji period, the letters aimed to mimic the hand-written calligraphic style and often resulted in near-perfect imitations that are difficult to distinguish from actual hand-copied works.
Printing began in Japan in the Nara period with the creation of a remarkable piece of Buddhist material called the Hyakumantō Darani (百万塔陀羅尼), or the Million Dharani Towers.
Large Buddhist temple complexes began producing printed copies of sutras for the devotional use of monks studying at these locations.
As before, the cost of undertaking a printing project using this method remained out of the reach of any individual or institution smaller than these great temples, so books were still primarily reproduced by hand.
This edition receives its name from the printing practices unique to the five most important temples in Kyoto (Kenchō-ji 建長寺, Enkaku-ji 円覚寺, Jufuku-ji 寿福寺, Jōchi-ji 浄智寺, and Jōmyō-ji 浄妙寺), as selected by the Muromachi bakufu government.
Two different new printing methods came to Japan almost simultaneously at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, techniques that originated from widely divergent sources and were used for similarly diverse purposes.
One of these methods, called Chōsen kokatsuji (朝鮮古活字, Old Korean type) and was originally developed in Goryeo, was brought back from Joseon dynasty after Toyotomi Hideyoshi's military invasions of that country in 1592 and 1597.
These people were unwilling to waste time and money on fiction and other morally suspicious works, instead ordering the publication of official histories and politically valuable texts that had previously only been available in manuscript editions.
By the end of the 16th century, missionaries associated with St. Francis Xavier's Society of Jesus began producing books using the Gutenberg press, more or less contemporaneously with the Chōsen kokatsuji publications.
The dominant method of book reproduction in this time changed from manuscript copying to seihanbon woodblock printing, as this technique had been refined to the point that individual commercial institutions could afford to open their own presses.
Early translations of western works, for example, were typically released in fukurotoji formats, indistinguishable in appearance from concurrent productions of native writings.
Even with the fuller transition to western technologies for textual reproduction and binding, such as the "board book" (ボード本) or hardcover format introduced in these decades or the western-style internal bindings of the early twentieth century, full color woodblock print frontipieces, called kuchi-e (口絵) were still in high demand by the reading public, and remained a key feature of literary works.
However, most books are printed to be read top-to-bottom and right-to-left, which includes manga, a prominent part of Japanese culture today.
The notable exception in arrangement is various technical books and textbooks, which tend to be printed according to the western model and are read left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
