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Paper short abstract

This paper examines sumo e-banzuke and publications such as the Tosei sumo Kongo-den as key media in early modern Japan’s information culture, showing how visual ranking shaped popular knowledge, memory, and imagination, fostering a shared culture and a unified sense of social and geographic order.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyzes e-banzuke (pictorial ranking sheets) as a central medium in the development of early modern Japanese print culture and practices of information organization. It argues that these prints played a formative role in the emergence of an early modern information culture by shaping how non-elite audiences perceived, remembered, and shared knowledge. Rather than merely reflecting existing bodies of information, e-banzuke functioned as mnemonic and imaginative tools that actively produced collective understanding and cultural integration.

The broadsides known as banzuke first appeared as playbills and announcement sheets in the late seventeenth century and quickly became integral to the urban entertainment economy. Throughout the eighteenth century, they underwent significant formal elaboration and functional expansion, gradually moving beyond simple performance records. In sumo wrestling, in particular, banzuke developed into a standardized documentary format for organizing tournament knowledge and were subsequently adapted for a wide range of classificatory and data-recording purposes. By around 1800, illustrated variants known as e-banzuke had become popular objects of mass consumption.

Focusing on e-banzuke from the first half of the nineteenth century and using the 1844 publication “The Biography of the Current Greats” (Tōsei sumō Kongō-den) by Tategawa Enba II as a case study, the paper demonstrates how visual systems of ranked representation shaped the cognitive habits of urban readers. By arranging wrestlers within fixed visual hierarchies that combined names, images, ranks, and symbolic markers of affiliation, e-banzuke transformed complex social and geographical information into legible, memorable arrays. These visual matrices encouraged repeated comparison, recollection, and evaluation, training audiences to think of knowledge as something that could be mapped, surveyed, and collectively possessed.

At the same time, e-banzuke fostered a shared cultural sphere by standardizing representations of prominence, reputation, and social position. Their visual conventions linked readers in Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto through shared symbols and interpretive practices, contributing to the emergence of a unified popular imagination in Edo-period Japan, in which the archipelago appeared as a coherent field of knowledge structured by visible hierarchies.