The following case study relates not simply to an increased production of compendia of useful and practical knowledge in the period, it represents the transition from Chinese originated practical manuals to Japanese vernacular publications. In the medieval period, when encyclopaedias (its East Asian term Ruisho 類書) came from China, Japanese versions were published following the Chinese model. These volumes were primarily hand-copied for the personal libraries of court aristocrats and used mainly for reference in reading Chinese poetry and Confucian texts. Ten collections of such reference works appeared between the late tenth and the sixteenth centuries but seldom contained information relevant for material production. In contrast, the early and mid Tokugawa period (1610-1739) saw the publication of some fifteen printed
collections of encyclopaedias and compendia of herbal and geographical data.10 Advanced printing techniques, the expansion of a reading public through basic schooling were behind this movement, but of foremost importance was the desire to make knowledge accessible.11
Of particular interest is Yamato Honzo (大和本草) (1708) by the Confucian scholar and herbalist Kaibara Ekken (貝原益軒) (1630-1714) which was designed for the utilitarian ordering and understanding of botany and the properties of herbal medicines. It was in fact a Japanese version of a Ming model Honzo Komoku (本草綱目) (1590) but Kaibara clearly intended to make his version more relevant to production. For example, he paid much attention to agricultural products as well as herbs and flora of China and Japan. Learning from the Ming text, Kaibara modified the Ming classification into a more suitable one for Japanese use. He made a more precise classification of the items according to their locations – mountains, rivers, seas and land.12 Kaibara served as Confucian official scholar to a local fiefdom lord in Kyushu. He frequently travelled on official duty to other fiefs. He held a position among the cultural and intellectual circle of Kyoto scholars, with useful connections to Kyoto publishers of collections of ―Ekken books‖ drawn from Kaibara‘s practical knowledge and observation.13 Furthermore Kaibara wrote most of his books in simplified Japanese letters – as opposed to philological Chinese contained in many texts circulating in Tokugawa Japan. He ordered their contents alphabetically. His clear intention was to diffuse useful knowledge, in an accessible form, to Japan‘s medical, technical and manufacturing professions.
The publication of these ‗practical‘ compendia can be connected to an array of governmental initiatives put into place as a reaction to large trade deficits Tokugawa Japan was suffering in relation to China and Korea. Growing consumption amongst urban residents for imported goods such as silk and medicinal herbs had led to the drain of silver from Japan. As a result the Bakufu shifted its economic policy in a mercantilist direction. The need to increase the domestic production was identified and policies of import substitution were initiated. The government‘s establishment of the Koishikawa pharmaceutical research institute in Edo needs to be seen in this context: scholars were sent across the country to collect unknown plants and send them back to the institute to be studied.14
In this initiative different systems of knowledge meet and intertwine. The herbalists involved in this project were, in fact, well acquainted with traditional Chinese herbal knowledge and botany. The plants and minerals they collected from across the country were tested and identified against Yamato Hozou, its Chinese original Honzo Komoku and other Chinese herbal texts. At the same time the shogun Yoshimune (1716-1745), himself a keen herbalist, eager to acquire the Western knowledge, ordered the herbalists Noro Genjo and Aoki Konyo to translate Dodonaeus‘ Cruijdeboeck which, as we have seen previously, had been presented to an earlier shogun in 1618 by the VOC yet stored in the court library unused. The accurate reproduction of plants by Dodonaeus through numerous illustrations had caught Yoshimue‘s attention.
A similar development of scholarly enquiry that produced encyclopaedic texts in response to economic needs can be observed at the same time also in Europe. Dodoneus‘ work, for example, had probably been chosen as a present for the Shogun because of the great success it had enjoyed all over Europe (it was translated into French in 1557, into English in 1578 and into Latin in 1583). This success originated not only in its intellectual and scientific interest but also in its practical usefulness. Similarly to what we have been describing for Japan, also in Europe there was an underlying economic preoccupation that fostered botanical works. In the case of Dodoneus we know that before finishing his famous Cruijdeboeck he published part of it in De frugum historia.15 This was to comply with pressures made by many international friends interested in improving agricultural output through the selection of better varieties of grains alternated with the cultivation of soil enriching plants, apt to animal consumption.16 A process that will lead to the agricultural revolution of the 18th century. Both in Japan and Europe we therefore see a rise of applied knowledge, particularly in the botanic field, driven by intellectual interests but also by economic preoccupations.
Botany is also an important discipline for the development of systems for ordering knowledge and differences between Japan and Europe need to be underlined. Between the 16th and the 18th centuries in Europe there is a large debate about plant taxonomy that will culminate in the establishment of the Linnaean system. From an utilitarian or an alphabetical
10 Sugimoto (1967), pp.341-45.
11 On literacy rate and reading public in Tokugawa Japan, see R. Rubinger, Popular literacy in Early modern Japan (Hawaii, 2007) and Shikiji to dokusyo, ed. S. Matsuoka, T. Yakuwa (Kyoto, 2010). For English sources on schooling in Tokugawa Japan, see R. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Michigan, 1965), 252-70. Tokugawa schooling for commoners has been studied extensively by historians but the teaching of practical knowledge in these schools remains to be explored.
12 In the preface to Yamato Honzo, Kaibara stated a number of criticisms on the classification of Honzo Komoku. One of his doubts was that the Ming text did not distinguish seaweeds from acuatic plants.
13 Yokota (2007), chapter 11.
14 Kasaya (2001), pp.180-190.
15 Dodonaeus (1552).
16 Ambrosoli (2001), p.62.
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the ESHS, Barcelona 2010 57
way of ordering plants slowly botanist moved towards a ‗natural‘ division according to species and ‗families‘, a division that was trying to reflect nature‘s order.17
This new generation of botanical studies developed as a consequence of the fact that scholars, who until the 15th c.
had been using reference text from antiquity for their studies, noticed discrepancies between the plants described in those books and the ones they could see around them. This stimulated a new trend towards direct observation of the natural world that harmonised well with the general developments of natural philosophy from the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Alongside direct observation a further important point became the retrieval of local knowledge through consultation with peasants, whose nomenclature became used also by the intellectuals. The choice to use the vernacular had different backgrounds. It was related to the fact -just mentioned- that the knowledge displayed in the books was local knowledge compiled in primis for a local audience.18 Secondly it often reflected the intent by Protestant scholars to push the use of the vernacular as opposed to Latin.
This trend away from alphabetical ordering in Europe is peculiar to botany. General encyclopaedias until the Middle Ages were organised thematically and the alphabetic ordering starts to take over towards the 17th century. This development is linked to the use of the printing press and the deriving new understanding of letters as ‗bricks‘ building a word.19 Moreover while early encyclopaedias tried in their structure to reflect the world and the way it had been conceived, by the 17th century it was felt that organising knowledge in an ‗organic‘ system was beyond reach. The alphabetical ordering seemed, than, a feasible alternative. As observed for Japan, also in Early modern Europe technical reference books proliferate. From the 17th century so called Hard-word lexicons (which only explain unusual terms, often addressing technical and scientific matters) appeared, than dictionaries of specific disciplines became more common and finally the dictionaries of arts and sciences were developed.20
Conclusion
This paper has analysed how different cultural tradition meet in Japan in the 17th and 18th centuries and exchange ideas and practices about observing and classifying the world. Stress was placed on the understanding and describing of plants and the organization of knowledge about natural resources. More practical oriented, utilitarian taxonomical systems merged with cosmological traditions with a growing interest for details which took different forms in different cultures. Notions about what is useful became entangled with ideas about how to organize knowledge and to make it accessible to different users: from government officials to common citizens. In this context intellectual trends are strongly connected with the makeup of educational systems that, as we have discussed, developed between the 17th and 18th centuries, in different forms, both in Europe and in Japan.
Interesting similarities between the Japanese and the European case can be found: as scholars in Japan start
‗adapting‘ traditional Chinese knowledge to the local situation, Europeans are adapting and appropriating knowledge from antiquity. In this processes of acquisition in both cases we observe a reverence towards the classical canon and, at the same time, an effort towards making that knowledge more ‗fitting‘ and useful to the own place and time. Related to the attempt to produce more useful and widely usable knowledge we observe in both cases the rise of a more broadly understandable language (the vernacular in Europe and simplified characters in Japan). It seems that the success of these enterprises aiming at collecting and classifying knowledge leys not only in their intellectual value, but also in the fact that they produced instruments that can be used to solve economic preoccupations.
The similarities and differences in institutional terms remain to be analysed. An in depth analysis of the changing role of different actors such as the Shogun, the domain Lords and private academies in Japan as well as individuals, private enterprises, scholarly societies and the state in Europe will allow a better understanding of the dynamics underpinning these phenomena and their different outputs.
17 This process was started by the German school in the 16th century (Visser 2001).
18 Many small format compendia of local flora were published in the second half of the 16th century (Ambrosoli 2001: 64).
19 McArthur (1986), p.77.
20 Yeo (2001), p.20. Thomas Blount introduced the term ‗hard-word dictionary‘ in his Glossographia (1656).
References
AMBROSOLI, M. (2001). ‘Botanical Practice and agricultural demands in early modern Europe: the contribution of Rembertus Dodonaeus’ in: Dodonaeus in Japan, pp. 60-75.
BLOUNT, T. (1656). Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue, London.
BOOT, W. (2009). ‘The Transfer of learning: the import of Chinese and Dutch books in Tokugawa Japan’, in:
Canton and Nagasaki compared 1730-1830. Dutch, Chinese, Japanese Relations, Transactions, edited by Evert Groenendijk, Cinthya Viallé, Leonard Blussé, Intercontinenta 26, Institute for the History of European Expansion, Leiden.
Johann Amos COMENIUS ([1631] 1967). The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius, translated into English and edited by M. W. Keating, New York.
COOK, H. (2007). Matters of Exchange, New Haven.
DODONAEUS, R. (1552). De frugum historia, Antwerp.
DODONAEUS, R. (1554). Cruijdeboeck, Antwerp.
DORE, R.P. (1965). Education in Tokugawa Japan.
FURETIÈRE, A. (1960). Dictionnaire universel, Rotterdam.
HARRIS, J. (1704). Lexicon Technicum: Or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Explaining not only the Terms of Art, but the Arts Themselves, London.
KANDATSU, H. (2005). Kinse ichi nosyo no seiritsu, Tokyo.
KASAYA, K. (2001). ‘The Tokugawa Bakufu’s policies for the national production of medicines and Dodonaeus’
Cruijdeboeck’ in: Dodonaeus in Japan.
JOHNSTON, J. (1660). Naeukeurige Beschryving van de Natuur dre Vier-voetige Dieren, Vissen en Bloedlooze Water-Dieren, Vogelen, Kronkel-Dieren, Slangen en Draken, Amsterdam: J. J. Schipper.
MCARTHUR, T. (1986). Worlds of Reference. Lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, CUP, Cambridge et alia.
NAJITA, T. (1987). Visions of virtue in Tokugawa Japan: the Kaitokudo merchant academy of Osaka, Chicago.
RUBINGER, R. (1982). Private academies of Tokugawa Japan, Princeton.
SCREECH, T. (2005) Japan extolled and decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s realm 1775-1796, London.
SUGIMOTO, I. (1967). Kinsei jitsugakushi no kenkyu: Edo jidai chuki niokeru gijutsu gaku no seisei, Tokyo.
SUGIMOTO M. and SWAINE, D. L. (1978). Science and culture in traditional Japan A.D. 600-1854, Cambridge: Mass.
TUCKER, J. A. (1998). Ito Jinsa’s Gomo Jigi and the philosophical definition of early modern Japan, Brill, Leiden.
VANDE WALLE, W. F. and KASAYA, K. (eds.) (2001). Dodonaeus in Japan. Translation and the Scientific Mind in the Tokugawa Period, Leuven University Press, Leuven.
VISSER, R. (2001). “Dodonaeus and the herbal tradition”, in: Dodonaeus in Japan, pp. 45-56.
YEO, R. (2001). Encyclopaedic Vision. Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Cultures, CUP, Cambridge.
YOKOTA, F. (2007). ‘Ekken bon no dokusha‘ in: T. Yokota ed. Kaibara Ekken: Taihei waraku no bunmei gaku, Tokyo.
ROCA-ROSELL, A. (ed.).(2012) The Circulation of Science and Technology: Proceedings of the
4th International Conference of the ESHS, Barcelona, 18-20 November 2010. Barcelona: SCHCT-IEC, p. 59.