As a 1987 publication that will have been printed with modern kana spellings, so I think we can lay the kanji choices and so on at the feet of the people at Kodansha. I think the Aozora volunteers are quite careful about following the texts they are copying as exactly as they can: they will note minor unavoidable deviations, like for this text:
※底本は、物を数える際や地名などに用いる「ヶ」（区点番号5-86）を、大振りにつくっています。
The Diet Library has a scan of a 1936 edition if you want the classic prewar experience.
Thank you for the bluffer’s guide and Diet Library links! I bookmarked them so I can find them again. The 1936 edition has so many great illustrations.
Some illustrations from Week 1-9 (Diet Library 1936 edition)
oh… thanks for posting that! I have to admit I started ignoring those because they seemed too modern. I assumed a modern typesetting would be copyrighted, is it not? That would give barely any incentive to modernise things like this.
That was my first thought, too!
those are great, thanks for pulling them out! I’m considering reading the rest in that format, too, now. That looks so much nicer than the random kana / kanji soup I’m reading. I got used to the older Japanese quite quickly thanks to Aozora advent and pm215’s fantastic guide - it’s not as big a barrier as you’d think!
Does anyone have a good recommendation for an Android app to read pdfs from? This is where I have to naively ask, is this what the ePUB app is for? The only pdfs I look at on my tablet are things like refrigerator manuals, so I’m rather behind the times on finding a better solution than my default viewer for actually reading a book.
Aozora have a section in their manual for contributors about this. The gist of it is that they believe that the conversion to new kana spellings and kanji usage isn’t a creative act covered by Japanese copyright law. (Some things you can do with old texts are, like for instance making a poetry anthology by selecting out of copyright poems – anybody else copying your specific selection and ordering of the poems in your anthology would be infringing the copyright in that editorial arrangement.)
The modernization for pretty much all these texts happened back in the 50s to 80s, and the incentive at the time was the same for why publishers still do editions of classic texts – it’s a work of known quality and you don’t need to pay royalties on it. Aozora only came along later, in the 1990s.
So interesting!
To continue on that timeline, one of the non-fiction books I have read in Japanese was a collection of 60 interviews or so. The interviewees had in common that they all took the subway in Tokyo on the morning of March 20th, 1995. It was CRAZY how many of them were working for an 印刷 company at that time.
Nice, bookmarking too!
This looks really cool making me want to read this version too! Maybe I’ll just add the link to the main post
I fell of reading japanese last week but finally caught up to this weeks reading.
Not much to add to the excellent discussions this week only some minor thoughts
When the thief just left with all of them strung up I was honestly a little worried about their life’s. Nobody comes to the manor and they are all bound. Since it’s a children book I’ll just imagine them getting free instead of dying a horrible death by starvation…
The thief said he got the information for the train arrival of akechi from some 筋. I really want to know who the source is. He only tells the arrival to his wife and Kobayashi. So maybe someone is reading akechis letters before they are delivered?
Great discussions this week, just got distracted reading articles about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (I knew vaguely about it but it’s never a bad thing to know more!) Then I started looking at interesting books on history and had to close the tab because I have too much nonfiction to read and I’m a bit slow to finish any nonfiction book in the first place
those are great, thanks for pulling them out! I’m considering reading the rest in that format, too, now. That looks so much nicer than the random kana / kanji soup I’m reading. I got used to the older Japanese quite quickly thanks to Aozora advent and pm215’s fantastic guide - it’s not as big a barrier as you’d think!
making me want to read this version too! Maybe I’ll just add the link to the main post 
