How deep we read
Each history in our Philology library that has been placed on the ladder carries a line among its authors like Research depth: step 3 of our 10-step ladder, foundation complete · October 2026. The number counts the steps of research completed, not a grade out of ten: every step must be done before the next one counts. The month says when.
Each rung below is a fixed list of things done. A history stands on a rung when everything on that rung, and on every rung beneath it, has been done and marked in its research record. The number is worked out from those marks, and before it appears on a page, a reader who did not write the record checks each mark against what the record holds.
The foundation: rungs 1 to 3
1. Identified. The text is fixed as we sell it, its reading is settled, and the text and each of its words are looked up in current Japanese dictionaries.
2. Earliest known copy. The meaning of each word is written out from its dictionary entry, and the earliest copy of the text our searches found has been opened and read whole, at an address you can open too.
3. Foundation complete. The main English translation in print has been read on its page. Every sentence on our scroll page and word page has been checked against the history. Any question for Master Takase has been asked, and each text the history quotes has a link that takes you to it.
Rung 3 is where every text Master Takase brushes for our new scrolls begins.
The research beyond the page: rungs 4 to 10
4. Sources traced. Every copy of the text from before 1700 has been read whole, and the classic texts set beside it have been opened at their own addresses.
5. Libraries searched. The National Diet Library's digitized books have been searched in full text, for every name the text goes by, oldest first, and every entry for the text and its words in Japan's main online dictionaries has been read.
6. English sources. The bilingual dictionaries and early English books on our shelf have been searched, along with the Internet Archive's full text and the editions of the text in English.
7. Read and signed. The history follows how the text has been read across the centuries, reads the scholarship since 1949, gives our own signed reading, and lists what it did not read and why, with every search we run closed.
8. Every quotation verified. Every quotation in the history has been read on the page image of its source, wherever that page can be reached. Then a model from outside our house, given only the published history, has opened every address it cites and confirmed each quotation there.
9. Beyond the internet. Every source that could change a sentence of the history, and that we do not hold, has been read through a library loan, a subscription or a purchase. Where one could not be had, the history names it and says why.
10. No known gap. Nothing the history names is left unread. While a source is beyond our reach, scholarship since 1945 held only in Japan included, no history stands here, so a 10 is rare by design.
Why the month is there
The readers improve. A history read in October 2026 can be read again when a later reader would find more, and the month tells us, and you, which histories are due.
Why ten, for now
Ten is the top of today's ladder. When we learn to read further, a rung is added or split, the line on every history changes with it, and each history is placed again from the marks its record already holds.