The Media Trajectory of Kano Naganobu’s Merrymaking under Cherry and Aronia Blossoms

The standard analysis of the relationship between manuscript and print media is based on the history of the book in Europe, where movable type printing predominated and the processes of typesetting and of producing illustrations were strictly delimited. In East Asia, however, the predominance of woodblock printing, the visual character of calligraphy, and the merging of visual and textual formats meant that print often retained manuscript characteristics, meaning that the distinction between the two media was much less strict. Given such differences, how can we still talk holistically of manuscript and print cultures while integrating cultural variations? To address this initial question, I propose to reframe the relationship between manuscript and print as a particular instance of a larger phenomenon: that of the relationship between an initial original artifact and its reproduction. For this purpose, I use the term ‘manuscript’ in a broad sense, to include hand-written as well as hand-painted artifacts and focus on an original artifact — an early 17th-century painted folding screen — and its reproductions in various media, both in an art historical and in a philatelic context.