This is the Tsunami by Hokusai which was printed is a very interesting way by the Japanese people. They used wood block printing to make this picture of a wave. What is wood block printing?
Wood block printing is demonstrated in this video.
Something that is interesting about woodblock printing is that unlike printing which happened in much of Europe woodblock printing didn't use oil based inks. Now what benefit might that give to people you may ask well what it does for people is that it allows for printing in multiple colors and brighter colors.
Woodblock printing also had one really nice advantage for the time period that it was used in once you had made the design that you wanted to print from you were able to print as many copies of the document as you wanted.
Much of the time when messages were printed though as you were making your wood block you had to remember that if you were going to have to carve a mirror image if you were going to make it possible for people to read what you printed after the printing was transferred to what ever was going to be used to absorb the ink.
Woodblock printing originally happened in mass amount when Empress Shotuku commissioned one million small wooden pagodas which also all had the Kompon Dharani, Storin Dharani, Jishin-in Dharani, and Rokudo Dharani which are the four texts that were printed along with the one million pagodas. (Link to Empress Shotuku go to 21.2)
Once woodblock printing was established it ruled the world of printing in Japan for many generations. Woodblock printing even went so far as to manage to not be replaced by the printing press when it was introduced in the 1590. The Japanese preferred the running script style of Japanese writing over the style of block printing. So much that by 1640 almost all printing was being done by the woodblock printing again.
New technologies can make somethings easier but not all new technologies make writing easier. Just like we talked about in class on the 8th of November. How is and has technology changed the medium of how information is conveyed?
Woodblock printing looks very labor-intensive. It's especially impressive that the printing press did not immediately replace it as well. It shows how useful and well-established this method was in Japanese culture and society.
ReplyDeleteOne medium that technology has altered are how presentations are given. The majority of people now use PowerPoint on a regular basis to convey their message. Before, there would be flip-board charts or just simple poster boards.
I liked your post Montana! I thought it was really interesting to see just how intregal a part of Japenese culture woodblock printing was, even to the point that it remained dominant over the printing press for some time. Like Shuan's example of technology changing presentations, I think an important example is social communication. With each advance in knowledge medium there has been an accompanying shift in how we communicate in social settings- form strictly face to face, to written communication, to telephone, texting, email, and social networking sites that we have now.
ReplyDeleteIt's not surprising that the printing press didn't do much to help the Japanese. In English, we have 26 letters (plus 26 capital versions) and a bunch of punctuation (let's say 8 necessary marks)totaling 60 different pieces of movable type required. Now imagine that we need about 50 copies of each letter to build a page of text. That's 300 little pieces of crafted metal! Now imagine that the letters aren't the right size... ahhhh!!! 5 different sizes of text would be 1500 pieces.
ReplyDeleteNow Japanese has many more than 26 characters... hundreds if not thousands of characters are used! It would be impractical to use movable type! I'm sure that's one of the biggest reasons why Japan stuck with the woodblock printing method. Some mediums just don't work with other scripts.
Today I received a giant slab of stone with straight lines etched into it as part of the Rosetta Project. There is no way that I could carve Sanskrit (my assigned script) into a stone like that! I'll just stick with my palm fronds thank you very much!