A glance at Japanese libraries. A map in the making

Abstract

The article offers an interpretation of Japanese libraries as mediating devices between tradition and modernity, observed through a direct travel experience and re-read through the relational perspective of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon. From the Kyoto Prefectural Library to the Japan Kanji Museum & Library and the Katsura Library, the gaze becomes an epistemic instrument able to question the relationship between observer and object, between linear and cyclical time, between toshokan and bunko. Considering the methodological features of comparative librarianship, the reflection adopts the concept of transduction to describe knowledge as a metastable process, in which libraries emerge as relational thresholds oscillating between continuity and transformation. The resulting cartography delineates an evolving geography, in which the library is understood as a temporal form of knowledge.