been the only ones that issued from the press. The Confucian Analects were first reprinted in Japan in 1364, from which time down to the end of the sixteenth century Japanese editions of various standard Chinese works, both in poetry and prose, were published from time to time. But the impulse to a more vigorous production was given by the conquest of Korea at the end of the sixteenth century, and by the Shōgun Ieyasu's liberal patronage of learning at the beginning of the seventeenth. The Japanese learnt from the vanquished Koreans the use of movable types. These, however, went out of fashion again before the middle of the seventeenth century, the enormous number of types necessary for the printing of the Chinese written character making the method practically inconvenient.
The first genuinely Japanese production to appear in print was the Nihongi, or rather the first two books of the Nihongi, in A.D. 1599. This work, which contains the native mythology and early history, had been composed as far back as A.D. 720. The collection of ancient poems entitled Man-yōshu (see p. 378), dating from the middle of the eighth century, was also first printed about the same time. From that period onward, the work of putting into print the old manuscript stores of Japanese literature went on apace, while a new literature of commentaries, histories, poems, popular novels, guide-books, etc., kept the block-cutters constantly employed. The same period saw the introduction of pictorial wood engraving.
Since about 1870, the Japanese have adopted European methods of type-founding. The result is that movable types have again come to the fore, though without causing block-printing to be entirely abandoned. All the newspapers are printed with movable types. A Japanese movable type printing-office would be a strange sight to a European printer. Provision has to be made for, not 26 characters, but 6,100, which is approximately the number of Chinese ideographs in every-day use; and of each character there must of course be different sizes—pica, long primer, brevier, and so on. Needless to say that so vast a number of
