The Documentary Virtues of Makiko's Diary
By Yuuko Nishikawa

The journal of a twenty-year-old woman named Nakano Makiko is situated at an interesting moment of change in the history of Japanese diary-keeping. By 1910, the year of her diary, forty-three years have gone by since the Meiji Revolution. Japan has established a full array of institutions for governing a modern nation-state. The country has enacted a constitution, opened a parliament, set up a school system, developed modern industries, and completed its networks of railways and telecommunication services. About to come is a massive transformation in people's everyday lives, especially in the cities.

People are enjoying more opportunities to attend public performances--dramas, concerts, art exhibits, festivals--along with more opportunities simply to move around. Communicating by post and by telephone is becoming an ordinary everyday activity. Waves of modernization are washing across even historic cities such as Kyoto. If we look in under the Nakano roof to see what is happening there, we notice a cluster of people running a family business in shop spaces fronting the street, and eating and sleeping and relaxing in living quarters in the interior. Though they are carrying on within a framework of daily routines passed down from the early modern era by generations of predecessors who ran the family pharmaceutical firm, they have a forward-looking stance towards life. They are eager to take in what is New and to be in tune with the new era.

Makiko's account of daily lives--hers and that of people around her--is interesting not just for what she notices: it is interesting for the way she writes about events and for the way that the diary functions as a repository of knowledge. Her journal opens a window for us into a period of change in the history of Japanese diary-keeping. Let's examine the document itself--the binding and format, the writing implements she used, the events and rituals she records, the people she mentions--but also consider her reasons for writing, her style and her modes of discourse.


Binding and Format
Makiko writes in a bound volume whose pages had been formatted by the publisher with the day's date and a series of lines on each page. At the beginning of the year she writes with a brush and India ink; later she switches to a pen. Japanese of earlier eras wrote their diaries with brush and ink on rice paper. Those three technologies combine into a wonderful recording instrument because rice paper is durable in Japan's humid climate and India ink does not readily fade. Thanks to this triad, we have in Japan an archive of diaries that spans more than a thousand years and that includes records kept by people in many social classes.

Not all early diaries are bound in the same way, but the common practice was for an author to fold sheets of rice paper in half and to sew the loose ends together. In 1895 Hakubunkan, the largest publishing house of the Meiji Period, began issuing a portable version it called kaichuu nikki or "pocket diary." It used Western paper, and included a pencil. It was a commercial success, so Hakubunkan next began selling a desktop version called tooyoo nikki or "standard diary." This was a smash hit. The standard diaries had a sturdy binding and high-quality Western paper that was suitable for pens and pencils. To boost sales the publishers added a supplement that offered instructions on how to conduct holiday rituals, plus an array of useful everyday information ranging from omnibus and railway schedules to menus and recipes as well as sayings and proverbs.

It is said that the tooyoo nikki was designed after a line of diaries issued by the Collins corporation of England, but improvements were added, time and again, to make the volumes more appealing to Japanese customers. In addition to Hakubunkan, many other publishers launched diary series, and as competition grew severe the books came to be crammed with gimmicks. Soon publishers were marketing to sub-populations, offering diaries tailored by age or gender or occupation. The end of each year saw advertising wars over diary sales.


Content
How did Makiko come to have this blank book? Did she buy it herself or might it have been a gift from her husband? We don't know for certain. Before he published his mother's diary, Professor Nakano had already used his grandfather's diary as a primary source for his study of the structure of pharmaceutical firms run by extended-household units. It is the diary of the head of the house and manager of the firm, and it mostly records what happened in the shop spaces of the house. Makiko's diary by contrast is the record of a shufu, the woman who manages the living spaces.

A year earlier, in 1909, Hakubunkan had begun issuing a housewife's diary (shufu nikki)--evidence that people had in mind a clear division of labor inside the house. Shufu nikki sold well, and years later they were also included as supplements to the new monthly magazines being edited and marketed for women. Makiko did not use a shufu nikki for her 1910 record, she used a tooyoo nikki: a version not tailored by gender but thought to have been intended primarily for men. It is possible that her husband had bought it.

There is no evidence to indicate that Makiko tried to hide her diary-keeping activities, so we can assume that her husband and his mother were well aware of what she was doing. Though she was in a large extended-family household, Makiko was able to preserve some personal time plus at least enough personal space for continuing to work on the diary.

The Nakanos encouraged her record-keeping not just because they had rather modern views about respecting personal freedom; they knew that the diary was a way for Makiko to preserve (by writing them down) the knowledge, the skills, the strategies that the previous shufu--Mine-san, her mother-in-law and wife of the preceding head of the house--had learned to use as manager of the living spaces. Across the span of a year we see documented, without omission, all the annual events this merchant household celebrates. Makiko learns menus from her mother-in-law, and recipes for pickling. The amounts of food are quite substantial: she has to provide enough for her husband, his mother, his siblings, the employees in the store, and the maids in the living quarters. Then there are monthly occasions when special foods such as sushi and rice-cakes must be distributed to every unit within the extended-household organization, which means that food enough for several families has to be prepared. And at each change of season the shufu of a merchant house is also responsible for having new workclothes ready for the employees.

Makiko's is not the usual kind of shufu nikki that focuses on family consumption activities. Her house runs a productive enterprise, and so she mixes mention of shop operations with her reports of activities in the living quarters. She is taught household procedures by her mother-in-law. A few years later, in the women's magazines and the shufu nikki volumes, home economics experts began preaching modern ways of doing housework to their clientele--mainly graduates of the women's higher schools. The contradictions between what a wife learned in school, or from the magazines and handbooks, and what was taught by her husband's mother, became a root cause of the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law battles that recur so often in extended families in modern Japan. No such conflict is evident in Makiko's diary: she gives clear priority to her mother-in-law's teachings. Indeed, judging from the way Mine-san is presented in the diary, Makiko seems almost too eager to follow the example set by her husband's mother.

For Makiko the world of a merchant house in the pharmaceutical trade held few surprises: her natal family was in the same line of commerce. Her parental house and the Nakano house were linked as members of the pharmaceutical guild, and Makiko's older brother Manzoo became friends with her future husband when the two men were students. So Makiko's marriage came about through joint influences from old and new types of social networks, one via a traditional guild and one via the new school system.

A striking feature of Makiko's record is the large number of people it mentions. She is positioned firmly within a vast social network. Every few days, for example, she visits her natal home out of concern for her father and younger siblings, who are struggling on without the help of Makiko's mother, recently deceased. Makiko frets over securing good servants for her natal house; she helps with preparations for the wedding of her older brother, who is working on the continent and so on, to the point where you might think that the Nakanos have a bilateral kin network. Then too, Makiko's father comes over fairly often to visit the Nakano house, not just to see his daughter but also, presumably, to conduct pharmaceutical business.

As an alumnus, Makiko's husband is making efforts to support the School of Pharmacy, and he is active in local politics. In addition he is a member of the Folktale Club organized by Iwaya Sazanami, a noted performer of folktales from around the world; and he has wide circles of acquaintances connected with his interests in music and painting. He also is a key figure in the movement to transform the pharmaceutical guild into a modern professional association of pharmacists. If we classify the people mentioned in the diary, we see a double structure with old- and new-style social networks. Makiko is a flexible woman who cheerfully trains herself to be wife to this new kind of head of the house.


Style
Makiko uses a style of writing that was new at that time. For centuries after the Chinese script was borrowed, Japanese had been written very differently from the way it was spoken. But in the modern period there was a movement to unify spoken and written modes of expression. Makiko's diary entries are almost all in spoken phrasing. Hers is a Kyoto vocabulary filled with merchant-class phrases and idioms. But she often adds wa at the end of a phrase, along with other touches characteristic of female student speech in that era. Makiko herself did not have an opportunity to attend a women's higher school after she finished the required primary school course, but her younger sister was in a women's higher school at the time of the diary so it does not seem all that odd for Makiko to be talking like a student.

Makiko's colloquial phrases sound at times as though she were talking to or pleading with some person in particular. When she ponders memories of her late mother, or worries about whether her younger sister also misses their mother, or describes servant troubles that she is not reporting to her husband and mother-in-law, Makiko can be very persuasive.

At times Makikio's writing is self-indulgent, sentimental, over-emotional; at other times she depicts objectively, even humorously, what she sees, including herself. The diary as a whole is both a factual record of household activities and a stage on which she can dramatize her inner worlds. The entries are, by and large, neutral and factual in the early months, only later does Makiko make comments she might not have wanted her husband or mother-in-law to read.


Conclusion
Makiko's diary is valuable primary source material for investigating a turning point in Japan's modernization. The diary incorporates both new and old features of the process of documentation, whether we look at the binding and the pens and other tools for recording, or look at motives for writing or the content of entries, or consider details of phrase-style and argumentation. Makiko lives in a large merchant household but already within it smaller worlds are forming--a world for herself and her husband, a nuclear family that will include children born later, and a private world all her own. Makiko's diary vividly portrays the lives of people in a social class that is shaping wider changes in Japanese society.

Only a limited number of people in those days could afford to buy diary books or find time for journal-jotting. Many of those who appear in Makiko's diary probably were not keeping diaries of their own. But sales for diary books increased every year after 1910, each publishing house boasting that it sold tens of thousands of copies, and eventually millions. Those expanding sales numbers map the expansion of the new middle classes within Japanese society. We can begin to glimpse their new world if we read carefully what Makiko records about hers.