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Abstract:

From the early 1920s the League of Nation’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and their national counterparts, in Japan the Gakugei kyōryoku kokunai iinkai, aimed at globalizing education through the international exchange of educational works. While the Japanese ministries had been trading official government publications with a number of countries since the 1890s, the systematic exchange of scientific and literary publications for educational purposes was only introduced to Japan in the mid-1920s by the initiative of the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. This paper explores the interaction among members affiliated with the League of Nations’ committees, ministerial bureaucrats and publishers involved in institutionalizing the educational book trade and shaping the global practical and legal framework behind this new form of trade. While it cannot be denied that the ministerial bureaucrats remained heavily involved in the administrative and law-making processes following the First World War, they became increasingly reliant on the expertise of publishers and sought their advice on numerous topics, demonstrating the key role that publishers as non-governmental actors played in the early globalization processes of the Japanese publishing industry.