Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/107

 of later times. This embryo journal was in manuscript. It contained accounts of natural calamities, conflagrations, fights, vendettas, and other striking events. Another more aristocratic sheet, called the "official intelligence" (go-sata-gaki), was compiled by the chief of the tea-cult in the Shōgun's palace and sold privately. Its contents were taken chiefly from the archives of the Government Secretariat, and consisted of appointments and dismissals of officials, copies of administrative ordinances, and notes on current events. Neither of these publications attained permanent vogue or suggested any expansion of the enterprise. Not until 1863 did a real newspaper make its appearance. Its publisher, Fukuda Meiga, was inspired by the hope that if fuller knowledge of foreign countries were disseminated among the people, the policy of national exclusion might become distasteful. He therefore made translations of the Batavia News, and published them in the form of a journal printed from wood-blocks. The following year (1864) Joseph Hiko — a Japanese who had just returned from the United States, where he had lived since boyhood, having been rescued from a sinking junk and carried to San Francisco by an American ship — combined with two of his countrymen to publish a periodical which they called shimbunshi (newspaper), a term destined to become permanent in the language. As yet, movable types were not employed. But that innovation followed quickly