The development of the Japanese book is closely related to the Chinese book. It was from China that both the way of making paper, the first forms of the book, the writing system and the methods of printing, as well as most of the Buddhist content of the first books, came from China. Book form
Chinese calligraphy on bones and tortoises dates back to the 18th-12th centuries BC. According to legend, the Chinese script was invented by Cangjie, who inspired the tracks of the animals and traces of bird claws in the sand. The adaptation of Chinese characters in Japan, Kanji (漢字), began at the end of the 4th century. Until the 7th century, many Japanese scholars - primarily Buddhist monks - traveled to China, which greatly accelerated the writing of their country. In the end, kanji, as a tool for arriving in the islands of Chinese Buddhism, has become the official writing system in Japan.
Paper appeared in China around the 2nd c. n.e. - a thousand years before its appearance in Europe. Also very early, as already in 686, the Chinese began to use woodcuts, at that time appeared first printed scrolls. In Japan, the scroll (kansubon 巻 子 本) appeared in the 5th century and until the 10th century was the dominant form of the book. It was very similar to European, consisted of many glued together using glue sheets.
The roll form had many drawbacks:
While the European binders have bypassed the scrolls by creating a code, the Japanese have adopted an indirect solution - a harmonica book (orihon 折本).
Another form of the code was the butterfly book (detchōsō 粘 葉 装). It was created by folding a sheet of paper in half, thus receiving four fillable pages. Many of these sheets were glued together on the ridges, creating a book. Glue was used as a sticky-fat mixture, which was very susceptible to insect attacks. This gave impulse to create according to the same rules of the book sewed (tetsuyōsō / tetchōsō 綴 葉 装 or retchōsō 列 帖 装). It was the first Japanese book that did not have a counterpart to Chinese books.
In the fourteenth century all these forms were replaced by a book of pocketing (fukuro-toji 袋 綴 じ). This form was created for the printed book. Books of this type also consisted of folded half-cards, but these cards, unlike detchōsō and retchōsō, were sewn together not at the crease but on the opposite side. Only two printable pages were obtained from the bent sheet, eliminating problematic two-sided printing. For centuries it was the most typical Japanese book form, and it is assumed that 90% of Japanese books of the Edo Period (1600-1867) were made in this way.
The development of books in Japan was closely related to printing, in which the monks practiced monkhood. Prior to 1600 most of the books were religious content - the first were the xylographically printed Buddhist mantras.
In the later period of Edo, literacy was widespread among the population, the paper industry flourished, and many print shops were established. There were books on philosophy and life sciences and novels and picture books.
During the Meiji period (1868-1912), western printing technology began to enter Japan. Moving metal letters needed a different material than traditional Japanese methods. In the case of dies in the form of wooden blocks, hand-made, thick, one-sided, soft, very absorbent paper was used. This paper was unsuitable for printing using Western machines, new methods required hard, industrially produced paper. Very soon the traditional Japanese book, fukuro-toji, has been replaced by a typical western book of contributions.
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