When, at a preparatory meeting for the Seoul Conference, I happened to voice the words "reading community," Mr. Ko Se-hyun, president of Changbi Publishers and the owner of fearsome powers of recall, took the phrase to heart and insisted that I deliver the conference's opening remarks on that very subject. I was thus keenly reminded that you must always watch what you say in front of a first-rate editor, because he will forget nothing. Although I don't think they merit billing as a keynote address, I do feel that the words "reading community" express one of the implicit hopes shared by the editors and publishers from Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan attending this conference on "Initiating Publishing Exchanges in East Asia." Please accept the phrase as a clumsy attempt to articulate something about the centuries-old culture of the printed word we share here in East Asia.

I would like to begin by describing two books in the Toyo Bunko (Eastern Library) series published by my former employer, Heibonsha Publishers, over a 45-year period.

The first is the Chingbirok (Book of Corrections), a work well known to Koreans, by Yu Song-nyong. A scholar and chief state councilor at the Joseon Court at the time of the Imjin and Jeongyu Wars (the Japanese invasions of Korea launched by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1592 and 1597), Yu was placed in command of repelling Hideyoshi's forces. After retiring from service he returned to his home in Andong and wrote this book about the Imjin and Jeongyu Wars as a lesson for future generations.

About 30 years ago, Heibonsha published a marvelous annotated Japanese translation of the Chingbirok by the Japan-resident Korean scholar Park Chong Myong; it is still in print today. The original text appeared in the Seoejip, an anthology of Yu's work posthumously published in 1633. I mention this book because it first appeared in Japan in 1695, remarkably soon after its publication in Korea. The publisher was Yamatoya Ihei of Kyoto, of whom we unfortunately know far too little, although he was clearly a commercial publisher. During the Genroku era of the late 17th century, Kyoto was home to over 100 enterprises known as shoshi that combined publishing with bookselling (according to Munemasa Isoo in Studies of Early Modern Publishing Culture in Kyoto). Yamatoya was one of these, and the name comes up here and there in historical records of the Kyoto Publishers Guild well into the 19th century, suggesting that Yamatoya did a solid business publishing Chinese books and other classics for over a century.

Not only in the modern era but long before that, Japanese publishing was overwhelmingly the domain of private commercial enterprises -- our predecessors -- notwithstanding some publishing activity by the Shogunate, the Imperial Court, and other governing entities such as the various han or fiefdoms. This predominance of commercial publishing and its consequences -- both positive and negative -- are certainly worthy of note. But I was particularly amazed to discover that only 100 -- not 400 -- years after Hideyoshi's invasion, a commercial publisher in Kyoto published the memoirs of the great Korean statesman who fostered an alliance with the Ming Court and repelled Hideyoshi's forces.

It would be fascinating to know how many copies of the Chingbirok were printed in Japan then, and who read it. Sadly, there are no written records that tell us any of this. However, we can find at least one clue to stimulate our imagination in the fact that the introduction to Yamatoya's edition was penned by Kaibara Ekiken, the foremost purveyor of moral enlightenment of the early Tokugawa period and someone who had contacts with Korean envoys. We can therefore surmise that the readers of the Chingbirok were not limited to intellectuals of the elite samurai class. I say this because recent research shows that the prolific writings of Ekiken were a major factor in the flowering of commercial publishing in Kyoto and Osaka during that period; at the same time his popularity benefited from this growth. Ekiken's works found readers not only among the wealthy merchant class but also in the upper strata of the peasant class. This same early flourishing of commercial publishing was a revolutionary era for Japanese literature that saw the emergence of geniuses like the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the poet Matsuo Basho, and the novelist Ihara Saikaku. Sustaining these developments was the explosive economic growth and accumulation of wealth that occurred during the Kanbun and Enpo eras preceding the Genroku in the mid-17th century, particularly in the farming district around Osaka. (This was a period of new rice field cultivation, light manufacture, distribution of fertilizer and other goods, and expansion of water transport for that purpose.) Readers during this time were far from passive, taking an active hand in choosing what they wanted to read (see note 1 ♦). It would not be surprising if a shrewd Kyoto merchant like Yamatoya Ihei got Ekiken to write the preface for the Chingbirok precisely to gain access to the writer's wide audience (see note 2 ♦).

The other book in the Toyo Bunko series that I'd like to mention, one that in a sense met with a more checkered fate than the Chingbirok, is the Tiangong Kaiwu by Song Yingxing, first published in Jiangxi (was this part of Jiangnan at the time?) in 1637, at the end of the Ming Dynasty. A systematically organized compendium of Chinese science and technology of the day, particularly agricultural technology, this book had a tremendous impact on the industrial and economic development of Tokugawa-era Japanese society. Although we don't know when the Tiangong Kaiwu first reached Japan, it was cited as early as 1694 as a reference in Kafu, a book written and published by none other than Kaibara Ekiken (see note 3 ♦). A Japanese edition printed in the 18th century (see note 4 ♦) was not only widely read but is credited with influencing numerous works about agriculture, technology, and thought written in Japan around this time. But in China, strangely enough, the Tiangong Kaiwu vanished from sight for many years until the 20th century, when a Tokugawa-era Japanese edition reached China and enjoyed renewed appreciation. Later, as we all know, scholars like the great historian Joseph Needham acquainted Westerners with the scientific and technical achievements of premodern China, including the knowledge found in this book, which itself became known around the world as a result.

The nearly simultaneous appearance in Japan in the 1690s of the Chingbirok and the Tiangong Kaiwu is but one illustration of the enduring and region-wide penetrative intellectual power of the printed word in premodern East Asia. There are countless other examples, we know. Japan long enjoyed the benefits of this dissemination of knowledge and thought from the continent and the Korean Peninsula. But that is not the point I wish to make here. My point is that there has indeed been a "reading community" extending across East Asia for many centuries.

The French historian Roger Chartier speaks of "communities of readers," but his concept relates to the "interpretive communities" described by the American literary theorist Stanley Fish. In the narrow sense this refers to communities of readers who share a common interpretation of written texts. However, I want to talk about reading communities in the broader sense, one that precedes "interpretation": a common sharing, across time and space, of books read. The existence of such a community in East Asia surely merits attention. "Interpretation" is inevitably limited to a certain time and place; a given interpretation arises from the traditions and cultural context of that particular society. More significant, surely, is the fact that different societies separated by space or time read the same books, and these books trigger a wealth of activities, studies and discoveries. Equally significant is the fact that this shared experience of reading brings people together across temporal and spatial barriers, for it is through this sharing that we learn to accept the "Other," and it is through acceptance, even leavened with resistance, that we achieve understanding.

I believe that East Asia once had such a reading community, one that shared books across time and space. Did the ties among these readers really engender a sense of "community"? If I may be permitted to cite yet another very old source, we can find inspiration in the words of a 14th-century hermit scholar in Japan, one well-versed in the Chinese classics, who likened the reading of books to "making friends with those who are no longer to be seen in this life" (see note 5 ♦). It is particularly interesting that he used the word "friend" (友 tomo), which in contemporary Japanese suggests a very egalitarian relationship -- an unheard-of concept at the time this was written. The friendship he felt toward those of past generations and other lands -- through the medium of the written word -- shows that this recluse, who had foresworn the world of medieval Japan, was truly part of an East Asian "reading community."

In his Humanism and Democratic Criticism, posthumously published in Japanese translation by Iwanami Shoten, Edward Said wrote forcefully that the most pressing intellectual problem of our age is the defense and revitalization of humanistic criticism, and that we must recognize the importance of reading, specifically critical reading, as the wellspring of the humanistic spirit. In other words, Said asserts that critical humanism depends on reading. Reading attentively, broadly, and "more receptively and more resistantly" is itself the essence of criticism. And criticism, he declares, is an act that emancipates, enlightens, and serves as a force for further creativity.

In the publishing process, the first person to shoulder this burden of reading is not the author, of course, but the editor. The author is not a "reader" of his own work. And the vast majority of the book's readers lie beyond the editor. Today, most of the technical obstacles to sharing this reading process throughout East Asia have been overcome. Literacy, too, has never been higher, thanks to improved educational systems and the achievement of other preconditions throughout our region. Yet we cannot say that our societies share with one another the books that we all should be reading today. We do not yet have a true reading community in East Asia, one in which we share not only the books we read but our thoughts on them. Indeed, it seems as if the bygone era when preconditions of technology and literacy were lacking saw a more vigorous display of the power of such an invisible reading community.

What, then, can those of us gathered here -- the editors and publishers who are the "first readers" of these texts we share -- do to foster such a community? I hope this conference will prove fertile ground for discussions toward this end.