The title of this book is to be taken literally. "Japan in Print" is not about Japanese prints or printing in Japan, but about printing and its impact on the making of Nihon.
Japan traces its history back to the mythical times of Jinmu Tenno, but when did it become a nation?
Many scholars treat "nation" as a quintessentially modern idea and reality closely linked with its ideological underpinning, nationalism. For many countries in Europe and North America as well as the postcolonial world this is surely an accurate description. In Japan, however, as historian Mary Elizabeth Berry argues, the emergence of a self-conscious collectivity that has all the defining properties of a nation can be found in early modern times, that is, in the 17th and 18th centuries of the Tokugawa Period.