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Rangaku and Westernization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Extract
The continuities between the study of the West through Dutch in Tokugawa Japan and the program of modernization in the Meiji period seem self evident. The influence of Holland through Deshima became the focus of the life work of Itazawa Takeo and others well before the war, and it received detailed discussion from Charles Boxer in 1936. Nevertheless issues of the importance and influence of Tokugawa rangaku continue to be debated, and that debate greatly enriches our feel for Japanese society then and now.
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References
1 Toby, Ronald P., ‘Reopening the Question of Sakoku: Diplomacy in the Legitimization of the Tokugawa Bakufu’, Journal of Japanese Studies 3: 2 (Summer 1977), p. 323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kaempfer's conclusion was that Japan's peace and prosperity must persuade its citizens ‘That their Country was never in a happier condition than it now is, governed by an arbitrary Monarch, shut up, and kept from all Commerce and Communication with foreign nations.’ Kaempfer's History of Japan (tr. Scheuchzer, J. G., Glasgow, 1906), Vol. III, p. 336.Google Scholar
2 Shōsuke, Satō, ϒōgakushi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron, 1980), pp. 146–8.Google Scholar The French Revolution was reported, though most inadequately, in 1794. American independence became known only in 1808 when Doeff was interrogated after the Phaeton incident, and when it became important for the Dutch to separate themselves from any association with England. Fūsetsugaki never clarified these problems. Honda and others took the American ships for English. For the fūsetsugaki, Sei'ichi, Iwao (ed.), Oran fūsetsugaki shūsei (Tokyo, Nichiran gakkai, Vol. 2, 1979), pp. 98ff.Google Scholar
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4 Sugita, , ‘Keiei yawa,’ in Korin sosho (rev. edn, Tokyo, Shibunkaku, 1971), p. 106Google Scholar, quoted and discussed in Shōsuke, Satō, Yōgaku kenkyū josetsu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten 1964), p. 60.Google Scholar Sun Tzu, as William Atwell has pointed out to me, had said the same thing a good deal earlier.
5 Sugita, , ‘Rangaku kotohajime,’ in Tōru, Haga (ed.), Nihon no meichō, Vol. 22: Sugita Gempaku, Hiraga Gennai, Shiba Kōkan (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron, 1971), p. 131.Google Scholar
6 Yoshida, Tadashi, ‘The Rangaku of Shizuki Tadao: The Introduction of Western Science in Tokugawa Japan,’ unpub. Ph.D. Dissertation (Princeton University, 1974), p. 66Google Scholar; also Shunsuke, Tsurumi, Tanaki Chōei (Tokyo: Asahi, 1975), p. 90.Google Scholar
7 Although Sato, in Yōgakushi kenkyū josetsu, p. 109, gives it as once in five years after Kansei, it is clear from Doeff, Hendrik, Herinneringen uit Japan (Haarlem, 1853), pp. 71, 132, and 146,Google Scholar that the Dutch went in 1802, 1806, and 1810.
8 Yoshida, ‘Shizuki’, p. 201.
9 Sukehiro, Hirakawa, ‘Japan's Turn to the West,’ forthcoming in Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. V.Google Scholar
10 Sadanobu quotation from Keene, Japanese Discovery of Europe, pp. 75–6. For the Chomel enterprise, Jansen, Marius B., ‘New Materials for the Intellectual History of Nineteenth Century Japan,’ Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies: 20, 3–4 (December 1957), P. 575.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Quoted by Satō Shōsuke, Yōgakushi, p. 200, from Ōtsuki's Yōgakushi nempyō. Iwasaki Haruko first called this example to my attention.
12 Sugita biographies in Dai jimmei jiten (Tokyo, 1942, III, p. 458.) In early Meiji Sugita Genzui and his son Takeshi mixed easily in foreign circles in Tokyo. See Clara's Diary: An American Girl in Meiji Japan (Tokyo, Kodansha, 1979), passim.Google Scholar
13 Quoted in Jirō, Numata, Bakumatsu yōgaku shi (Tokyo, Tōei Shoten, 1952), pp. 198–9.Google Scholar For the holdings, List of Foreign Books Collected under the Shogunale Regime (Tokyo, Nichiran Shiryō Kenkyūkai, 1957), p. 96.Google Scholar
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15 The paragraphs that follow owe a great deal to rewarding debate with Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi of Princeton University, who develops his own argument in his unpublished dissertation ‘Aizawa Seishisai's Shinron and Western Learning: 1781–1828’ (1982).
16 See the summary of this debate in Tazaki Tetsurō, ‘Yōgakuron saikōsei shiron,’ Shisō, 1979, November, pp. 48–72.
17 Discussed by Keene, Japanese Discovery of Europe, pp. 156f.
18 I have discussed this in Japan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 24–39.Google Scholar
19 Satō, Yōgakushi, p. 153, with reference to (Watanabe) Kazan. Shōzan, as Satō points out, held even more tenaciously to a Chinese cosmological focus.
20 Discussed in ibid., pp. 159–60.
21 Tsurumi, Takano Chōei, p. 67.
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23 Totman, Conrad, The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862–1868 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980), describes these reforms.Google Scholar
24 Satō, Yōgakushi, p. 166.
25 Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (tr. Kiyooka, Eiichi) (Tokyo, Hokuseido, 1948), p. 109.Google ScholarClara's Diary, however, leaves room for doubt about his ability to ‘speak with foreigners’ in 1879: ‘Mr Fukuzawa has a comical way of speaking, using English and Japanese in the utmost confusion…. For example, speaking of the Governor: “Mr. Kuriyama is hontō ni kind man, keredomo he is taisō busy kono setsu, yes?”’ p. 221.
26 Quoted from Ihi nyūkō roku (Tokyo: Nihon Shiseki Kyōkai, 1931, 1, pp. 244–50) in Jansen, ‘New Materials,’ p. 596.Google Scholar
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