ABSTRACT
For as long as there has been a nexus of publishers, writers, and editors in modern Japan that has determined the centre and periphery of the world of letters, there have been reports of its demise. After the death of its master chronicler Itō Sei (1905–1969), the perceived traditional meaning of the term bundan calcified to mean a social space for literature that exists of its own accord and on its own terms, separate from the wider world. The word is used in Japan today in a modern sense untethered from its previous, specific meanings, to simply mean the world of letters at large. Even in Itō’s work, however, bundan was a polyvalent term, at different times used to mean newspaper editors and their writers, masters and pupils in a guild-like system, and editors and their rosters of authors.
