Hi Availle, Thanks for reading this description of the artistic process called Japaning. It is PL OK!
As to your question about reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Japan, I took a brief survey of the main section of that article, which is contained in Volume XV, Slice 2.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41264/41264-h/41264-h.htm#ar105. I also did a word count on that section, which, if correct, was 133,045 words. I suppose that the EB11 section on Japan could be read as a solo, if one wanted to read the entire thing.
Some of the subsections of the Japan article would, in my estimation, make excellent reads for the SNF Collection. There are, for instance, sections on Early History, Geology (including Japan's volcanoes), Art, and Literature, which looked, to me, very informative and interesting. Other sections are, frankly, out of date--containing long tabulations from the years 1897-1906 on things like the output of the mining industry (gold, copper, lead, iron, sulphur, antimony, manganese, etc.). There are also a few sections, which, if I were choosing what to read for LibriVox, I would avoid as cringeworthy; for instance the section titled "Physical Characteristics" (p. 165).
As you know, LibriVox's theoretical goal is "liberation of all the books in the Public Domain," so I do not dictate what can be read for the SNF if it qualifies as PD Nonfiction. However, I would, personally, pick and choose some sections from the Japan article rather than attempt the whole thing verbatim.
) I also noticed that I misspelled "encyclopedia" in the previous file's name.