和刻漢籍鼇頭本について : その特質と沿革  [in Japanese] "On Chinese Works Printed in Japan with Headnotes  [in Japanese]

On the basis of my research notes on about 1,500 Chinese works printed in Japan that I have finished examining, I clarified the significance of works with headnotes. Judging from the circumstances of their publication, they were concentrated in the first half of the Edo period, prior to the time of Tokugawa Yoshimune. Further, an examination of their prefaces and colophons shows that their aim was to provide commentaries to facilitate the understanding of beginners. In content, they differed fundamentally from earlier commentaries aimed at beginners in that they focused on word glosses and adopted the method of concentrating on providing the sources and various explanations of a limited number of words. It is also evident that, once this method was established, they underwent a change to meet also the advanced demands of instructors rather than beginners. This change can probably be linked to improvements in the level of students of Chinese learning that accompanied the rising popularity of Confucian studies in the first half of the Edo period. These improvements led to the establishment by the bakufu and others of a provincial education system for Chinese learning in the form of domanial schools and so on, as a result of which the role played by works with headnotes also gradually came to an end, and this led to a fall in their publication. It has become clear that the significance of these works in the history of publication lies in the fact that they constitute a quite important body of material pertaining to Chinese learning in the early modern period that was closely linked to the reception of Chinese learning at the time.