The knowledge of nature and the nature of knowledge in early modern Japan

429 Pages·2016·7.003 MB·English

by  Marcon, Federico

Knowledge of Nature
The 
Nature of Knowledge
and the 
Early Modern Japan
in
Studies of the
Weatherhead East Asian Institute,
Columbia University
The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of
Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to
a wider public the results of significant new research on modern
and contemporary East Asia.
Knowledge of Nature
The
Nature of Knowledge
and the 
Early Modern Japan
in 
Federico Marcon
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
Federico Marcon is assistant professor of Japanese history in the Department of History
and the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by the University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 25190- 5 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 25206- 3 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marcon, Federico, 1972– author.
The knowledge of nature and the nature of knowledge in early modern Japan /
Federico Marcon.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-226-25190-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-25206-3
(ebook) 1. Nature study—Japan—History. 2. Science—Japan—History. 3. Japan—
History—Tokugawa period, 1600–1868. I. Title.
qh21.j3m7 2015
508.52—dc23
2014047538
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
A philosophical interpretation of world history
would have to show how the rational domination
of nature comes increasingly to win the day, in spite
of all deviations and resistance, and integrates
all human characteristics.
— Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

Contents
Prologue ix
Part I. Introduction 1
Chapter 1
Nature without Nature:
Prolegomena to a History of Nature Studies in Early Modern Japan 3
Chapter 2
The Bencao gangmu and the World It Created 28
Part II. Ordering Names: 1607– 1715 51
Chapter 3
Knowledge in Translation:
Hayashi Razan and the Glossing of Bencao gangmu 55
Chapter 4
Writing Nature’s Encyclopedia 72
Chapter 5
The First Japanese Encyclopedias of Nature:
Yamato honzō and Shobutsu ruisan 87
Part III. Inventorying Resources: 1716– 36 111
Chapter 6
Tokugawa Yoshimune and the Study of Nature in Eighteenth- Century
Japan 115
Chapter 7
Inventorying Nature 140
Part IV. Nature’s Spectacles:
The Long Eighteenth Century (1730s– 1840s) 153
Chapter 8
Nature’s Wonders: Natural History as Pastime 161
Chapter 9
Nature in Cultural Circles 179
Chapter 10
Nature Exhibited: Hiraga Gennai 207
Chapter 11
Representing Nature: From “Truth” to “Accuracy” 228
Part V. The Making of Japanese Nature: The Bakumatsu Period 251
Chapter 12
Bakumatsu Honzōgaku: The End of Eclecticism? 255
Chapter 13
Nature as Accumulation Strategy:
Satō Nobuhiro and the Synthesis of Honzōgaku and Keizaigaku 276
Epilogue 299
Acknowledgments 307
List of Japanese and Chinese Terms 309
Notes 329
Index 397
Prologue
...........
The Sanjō Guest House, where I spent the summer of 2013, is located
in the middle of the Hongō campus of Tokyo University. It stands near a gar-
den, the Ikutokuen, which was built in the 1630s in what was then the Edo
residence of the powerful Maeda Toshitsune, domainal lord (daimyō) of one of
the wealthiest regions of Tokugawa Japan, Kaga.1 The garden expands around
a pond shaped like the character 心, or kokoro (“heart- mind”), today known by
most as “Sanshirō’s pond” (Sanshirōike) from the name of the protagonist of
Natsume Sōseki’s novel.2 The vegetation around the pond is so exuberant that
one cannot help but perceive a sense of disordered and disquieting wilderness.
At least, that is what I usually felt when I walked the narrow and uneven paths
around the lake. It is populated by a variety of birds: crows, cuckoos, thrushes,
woodpeckers, ibises, kingfishers, bushwarblers, rufous turtledoves, and a bevy
of green parrots. One night I even met a Japanese raccoon dog (Nyctereutes pro-
cyonoides viverrinus), or tanuki, as it is called here, protagonists of a mass of
folktales that describe them as creatures endowed with supernatural powers—
mischievous tricksters, masters of disguise, often portrayed with portentously
huge testicles.
At a closer look, however, the disordered luxuriance of the garden is far from
being a sign of its wilderness. In the trunk of many trees and among short herbs,
in fact, one can spot plastic labels with the names of many of the plants growing
there. These tags catalog the vegetation of the garden in a precise inventory of
its natural riches. They represent an odd contrast with the first impression of
wilderness it gives. They suggest design, planning, artifice, and, most important,
dominion over nature. If you visit the parks of Tokyo in search of an improb-
able relief from the sultriness of Japanese summer, you will have the same odd
experience: a sense of disordered wilderness that vanquishes as soon as you no-
tice labels bearing the name of trees and herbs, sometimes with even the Latin
scientific name attached.
Knowledge of the natural world is as old as human beings. Information on the
nutritional, curative, and venomous properties of plants constituted a matter of
life or death for early Homo sapiens. Even today, biologists routinely use the “bo-
tanical” knowledge of tribes of hunter-g atherers in Southeast Asia, Africa, and
South America to explore the remotest recesses of the last surviving rainforests.
But the kind of knowledge natural sciences like botany and zoology produce
ix