6 IshizuValeriani



Intellectual Networks and Exchange of Useful and Reliable Knowledge: Case Studies of Early Modern Japan and Europe

Authors: Mina Ishizu (m.ishizu@lse.ac.uk) and Simona Valeriani (s.valeriani@lse.ac.uk)

Affiliation: London School of Economics and Political Science[1]

Abstract

This article is concerned with the diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge between Western Europe and Japan in the early modern period. Its primary focus is placed on the intellectual network of the scientific-minded peoples in the East and the West who praised what Harold Cook described as the ‘powers and pleasures of accurate descriptive knowledge’. Under Japan’s ‘semi isolation’ policy, for two and a half centuries since the beginning of the sixteenth century, Japan’s importing and adaptation of foreign knowledge was confined to that from Holland and from China (either originated there or imported from Europe). Through the Dutch East India Company’s factory in Batavia, and its monopoly over trade with Japan, Dutch books and scientific minded individuals entered into Japan.

Focusing particularly on the study of botany, the article argues that the diffusion of European scientific ideas was made possible by an indigenous Japanese intellectual movement parallel to developments made in Europe. Practical science characterised the seventeenth century European, and more specifically Dutch, intellectual tradition. A new intellectual aspiration for observation and description of the natural world to address economic problems arose under the Tokugawa regime (1603-1868), and paved the way for the diffusion of Western knowledge.

We make speculations about possible analogies and contrasts in the way Japan and Europe re-acted and put to fruition respectively the inheritance from ancient China and the classic Greco roman world.

Keywords:

Dutch Learning, Useful Knowledge, Intellectual Exchange, Botany Comparative approach.

Introduction

In his book Matters of Exchange, Harold Cook writes: ‘The powers and pleasures of accurate descriptive knowledge were not only praised by the chief advocates of the new philosophy’ but were ‘also noted as the chief concern of European science by others such as Japanese scholars who interested themselves in such matters’.[2] Cook illustrates this point with reference to the intellectual exchanges between the VOC surgeon William ten Rhijne and the Japanese scholars in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both parties were scientifically minded and ten Rhijne enhanced his interests in Japanese botany with the aid of the local scholars while his accurate and practical anatomical knowledge fascinated the Japanese.

Japan’s cultural encounter with Europe through the Dutch East India Company (VOC)[3] is well known to historians. Between the expulsion of the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries in 1639 and until the establishment of trading relations with the United States in 1858, the Tokugawa regime (1603-1868) effectively controlled its nationals’ direct or indirect contacts with foreigners. The threat of Christianity became real for the newly established Tokugawa regime when the revolt arose from peasants converted to Christianity in the 1620s in the Kyushu region. It was put down severely by the government and Christianity was banned.[4] All the foreign nationals were expelled except for the Chinese merchants and the Dutch who showed little interest in evangelical initiatives. No Japanese nationals were permitted to travel overseas and imports of foreign books with reference to Christianity were under strict censorship of the Tokugawa government.

The Dutch Republic as a leading political power played a major role in European cultural life and stood at the centre of a worldwide network for commerce and the exchange of information. As Karel Davids puts it, “from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, the Dutch Republic became a hub in a global network of knowledge. A knowledge hub as a nodal point or crossroads in regular, long- and short-distance flows of knowledge where knowledge is being supplied, assessed, exchanged stored or disseminated”.[5] In contacts between Japan and Europe the exchange of empirical and practical knowledge became significant and the role played by VOC officials became increasingly prominent and their attitudes and education also influenced the kind of knowledge that was exchanged. Carl Thumberg, who arrived in Nagasaki from Sweden in 1775, had studied under Linnaeus at Upsala University. During his stay in Edo (today’s Tokyo) as well as in Nagasaki, he was repeatedly visited by Japanese scholars who were interested in European books and knowledge. This exchange, as in many other cases, is likely to have been mutual. While the Japanese had strong interests in Western science and particularly medicine, Thumberg was surely eager to acquire information about local flora. On his return to Sweden, he succeeded his master as professor in botany.[6]

In global intellectual history, Nagasaki in Tokugawa period can be represented as a repository that stored the European knowledge which prepared Japan for a rapid assimilation of western technologies and for industrialisation. Nagasaki’s intellectual encounter needs to be historicised by asking: was the interest shown by the Japanese incidental? And why was Dutch knowledge particularly acceptable to the Japanese regime?

Historians have assumed that the tendency towards the investigation of nature based on detailed observation and practical application was “a quite uniquely European coloured mode of investigation.”[7] Indeed, Europe seemed to develop this mode of investigation into the natural world as early as in the late fifteenth century. As this article will show, however, an interest in the natural world had developed in Japan at least by the late seventeenth century. It had developed methods of investigation based on detailed descriptions of observed phenomena and objects and had created diffusion patterns clearly motivated by the practical application of such knowledge. Importantly, the development of such (indigenous) practical and utilitarian orientation in the mode of investigation in Japan played an important role in the intellectual interactions with the Europeans (Dutch). The Japanese only took notice of the European scientific and technological development when it had developed its own research tradition into the observation and practical application of such knowledge. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in Japan and Europe we see developments in attitudes towards the scientific and philosophical understanding of nature that are comparable.

Our paper will elaborate upon comparisons by focusing on the intellectual and social origins in both regions. In the Japanese case we show that the aspiration for practical and utilitarian science emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Western Europe the shift from the late medieval Scholastic tradition towards more practically orientated, ‘modern’ science was an accelerating phenomenon and Holland and England were at the forefront of the new developments.

1. The Recognition and Increased Importance of Useful and Practical Knowledge: Japan

a. Useful and Practical Knowledge in Japan

An orientation towards practical and useful knowledge was clearly evident throughout the Tokugawa period. The meaning of such terms as concrete and practical learning such as nichiyo(日用), jitsuyo(実用) and jitsugaku(実学) in the Tokugawa discourse were debated among historians of Tokugawa intellectual history.[8] Of course the discourses of Practical Learning need to be carefully assessed by more empirical studies within the wider interdisciplinary perspective of economic and social history. Clearly, practical and useful knowledge were significant in the circulation of knowledge among shoguns and fief lords to village farmers, useful and reliable knowledge of production. By the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Japan was arguably the most urbanised country in the world.[9] The location of the Tokugawa government in Edo (today’s Tokyo) was the largest city in the world with a population of over one million. Osaka, the mercantile capital of western Japan, had a population of nearly half a million. Kyoto, with a population of about a third of Edo, was the cultural and imperial centre. These Great Three Cities were linked via the commercial networks. Five Highways and coastal navigation routes were integrated port towns and provincial cities in the national commercial and informational networks.

The “Three Great Cities”, and the official foreign trading port of Nagasaki were under the direct administration of the shogunate in Edo. The Tokugawa government controlled roughly one-third of the land while the rest of the country was divided into some two hundred fiefs with semi autonomy under fief lords called Daimyo in trading, military and economic policies.[10] In this multiple state system, travel promoted the accumulation of useful and reliable knowledge particularly for agricultural production. Thus the Genroku era (1688-1703) witnessed significant increases both in agricultural and industrial production and the arable margin was extended significantly by irrigation. Productivity increased through more intensive application of fertiliser and human labour. The rise of commercial economy promoted the institutionalisation of artisanal skills. Agronomists often under the patronage of local Daimyo lords published agricultural treatises, local almanacs and technical manuals. The development of printing technology and relatively high literacy rates popularised those texts which contained local knowledge of ‘how-to, when-to, where-to’ related to agriculture, mining, textile production, and hydrological engineering.[11] In the service of a fiefdom, the late seventeenth century agronomist Miyazaki Yasusada (宮崎安貞) spent thirty years travelling to collect and record agricultural techniques across western Japan and used this knowledge in experiments on his own land. His enterprise culminated in the agronomical treatise called Nogyo Zensho (農業全書) in 1697. Unlike Chinese model agronomical treatise Nosei Zensho Nose Zensho(農政全書) (1639), written by the Ming court scholar徐光啓 (based on bibliographical records), Miyazaki’s treatise drew upon his observations and experiments which included techniques with Chinese origins used by Japanese farmers. Miyazaki’s treatise was printed and widely circulated across the country and promoted the accumulation of knowledge on agricultural production.[12]

This example 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 the Japanese vernacular publications. For example, when encyclopaedias came from China in the medieval period, Japanese versions were published following the Chinese model.[13] These volumes were primarily hand-copied for the personal libraries of court aristocrats and used mainly for reference in reading Chinese poetries and Confucian texts. There were 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.[14] Advanced printing techniques, the expansion of a reading public and basic schooling were behind this movement, but of foremost importance was the desire to make knowledge accessible.[15]

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 herbal and flora of China and Japan. Learning from the Ming text, Kaibara modified the Ming classification to a more suitable one for Japanese use. He made more precise classification of the items according to their locations – mountains, rivers, seas and land.[16] Kaibara served as Confucian official scholar to local Daimyo in the Fukuoka fiefdom. 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 who published collections of “Ekken books” drawn from Kaibara’s practical knowledge and observation.[17]

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.[18]

b. Encounter with and Diffusion of European Knowledge

The early Edo period, western texts translated into Chinese constituted the main source of western scientific knowledge. From the 1630s, imports of foreign publications remained under strict censorship of the Bakufu’s Nagasaki Magistrate. Books flowed in. Orders were made almost every year throughout the seventeenth century to Chinese merchants and the VOC to supply with books on such practical subjects as medicine, history and world geography. The eminent Neo Confucian scholar Arai Hakuseki (新井白石 1657-1725) who acted as a consultant to the fifth shogun studied the Chinese translations of European texts to acquire knowledge about world geography.[19]

Before the 1730s, most Dutch books ended up unread into the court library. Only occasional references by curious shoguns and their court members were recorded. Books particularly favoured for the practical information they contained included herbal remedies and zoological texts such as Dodonaeus’ Cruijdeboeck (1554)[20] (presented to the shogun in 1618) and Jonston’s zoological treatise[21] (presented in 1663). Shoguns and daimyo lords sometimes requested books on medicine and botany “with many illustrations” and “preferably in Portuguese”.[22] The supply of books came from Amsterdam, the most active book trading centre in Europe, via the Company’s Factory in Batavia. Imports of foreign books increased after the relaxation of the censorship in 1726, when the eighth shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune (徳川吉宗1684-1751) ordered over three hundred Chinese and Dutch texts on western science and practical subjects. While Chinese texts remained the main source of Western knowledge, the study of Dutch language was encouraged. Yoshimune ordered the herbal scientist Aoki Konyo (青木昆陽 1698 -1764) to learn Dutch language to study Dutch texts.

Japan’s encounter with Western knowledge was also established through direct contact with men in the service of the VOC with both practical and academic training acquired at Dutch educational institutions. Initially the VOC had employed mere ‘barber surgeons’, medical doctors with ambitions to achieve quick fortunes from smuggling in East Asian trade. Later the company selected young physicians with university qualifications, chosen thorough interviews and on the basis of references who turned out to be highly appreciated by their Japanese interlocutors. The Company even received an official request to bring to Japan persons who would have more grounded understandings of medical matters and not mere practitioners.[23]

The publication of practical compendia and technical manuals can, however, be connected to an array of governmental initiatives put into place as a reaction to large trade deficits that Tokugawa Japan experienced in relation to its trades with China and Korea. The increased urban consumption of goods such as silk and medicinal herbs imported from China and Korea had led to a drain of silver from Japan. The Bakufu then shifted economic policy in a mercantilist direction in order to boost national production of raw silk, medicinal drugs and sugar to deal with these deficit.[24] One initiative was the establishment of the Koishikawa pharmaceutical research institute in Edo. Herbalists were sent across the country to collect unknown plants and send them back to the institute.[25] The herbalists involved in this project were, in fact, well acquainted with traditional Chinese herbal knowledge and botany as well as some European herbal knowledge. 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 himself a keen herbalist, was eager to acquire the Western knowledge. Under him, the herbalists Aoki and his colleague Noro Genjo (野呂元丈1694-1761) attempted to translate Cruijdeboeck presented to an earlier shogun in 1618 by the VOC and stored in the court library. The accurate reproduction of plants by Dodonaeus through numerous illustrations caught Yoshimue’s attention.

By mid eighteenth century, the usefulness of European science became more widely recognised among Tokugawa elites. For example, the distinguished government councillor Matsudaira Sadanobu (松平定信1759-1829), wrote: “In the barbarian countries they know much about principle: especially in astronomy and geography and armament, or internal and external cures there is much one can profit from”.[26] The attitude that Matsudaira held towards Western scientific knowledge became very important for its diffusion in Japan. Between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, he acted as the Bakufu’s Prime Councillor and commissioned the commoner Rangaku scholars to diffuse the institutionalise the western knowledge they had acquired. Thus two herbalists and the Nagasaki translators embarked on the translation of Cruijdeboeck. Yoshio Kogyu (吉雄耕牛1724-1800), from the family of Nagasaki translators, attempted to identify European species with their Japanese counterparts. Yoshio died but the species identification was completed by the Kyoto herbalist Ono Ranzan (小野蘭山1729-1810) who was working independently.[27] Another of Matsuidaira’s initiatives was to commission a gun smith Kunitomo Ikkansai (国友一貫斎1778-1840). In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Kunitomo, (originally from Nagahama domain), found himself among the Edo circle of scientifically minded intellectuals and their patrons and given the opportunity to study, adapt and refine European instruments such as pumps guns and telescopes operating as a proto scientist. Kunitomo compiled and published his knowledge on air pressure gun making.[28] The book included his experiments with air pressure, which were applied by many smiths making domestic mechanical items such as oil pressure lamps by the first quarter of the nineteenth century.[29]

2. Recognition and Increased Importance of Useful and Practical Knowledge: Europe

a. Studying Nature for a Purpose

Before the end of the 17th century the Japanese were engaged in a new kind of scholarly enquiry into the natural world and produced numerous encyclopaedic texts that responded to practical economic needs. This phenomenon occurred at roughly the same time in Europe.[30] Dodoneus’ work, for example, had probably been chosen as a present for the Shogun because of the great success it had enjoyed in the Netherlands, where it was produced, as well as all over Europe, it was translated into French in 1557, into English in 1578 and into Latin in 1583. Success originated not merely from the book’s intellectual and scientific contributions but also from its immediate agronomic and medical uses. In Europe and Japan economic demands fostered the publication of botanical knowledge. Before Dodoneus finished his famous Cruijdeboeck, he published part of it in the book De frugum historia.[31] This was to meet demands made by many of his Belgian and foreign friends interested in cereals and legumes. He described many lesser-known species of grain and a number of different kinds of beans and peas for human and animal consumption.[32] His effort in this direction, together with the studies of many other botanists, was to build up the basis for the advances in agronomy that came on stream in the 18th century. The interest shown by his contemporaries is an indication of the process of improving agricultural output through the selection of better varieties of seeds, new crop rotations including for the cultivation of plants for animal consumption that also enriched the soil. In Japan and Europe we therefore see a development of applied knowledge in the field of botany, driven by intellectual curiosity allied with economic preoccupations. In Europe this was a movement brought forward mainly by individual botanists while in Japan the effort became more ‘institutionalised’ under the patronage of the Shogun and the Daimyos.

b. New ways of ordering knowledge

Systems developed for the ordering of knowledge in encyclopaedic volumes in which we also see similarities and differences between the Japanese and European cases. Between the 16th and the 18th centuries in Europe there was an extensive debate about plant taxonomy that culminated in the establishment of the Linnaean system. From a utilitarian or an alphabetical way of classifying plants Europe’s botanists moved towards a taxonomy of plants according to species and “families”, a division that was trying to reflect nature’s order. This was started by the German school in the 16th century and was than developed further, Dodoneus’ work can be read as one of the milestones on this route.[33]

This trend away from alphabetical ordering seems to be peculiar to botany because if we look at general encyclopaedias compiled in Europe towards the 17th century, we see that alphabetic ordering starts to take over. This change -against the thematically ordering of the Middle Ages- was linked to the use of the printing press and the different relationship people developed with letters as ‘bricks’- building words and alphabets.[34] Encyclopaedias evolved from the idea of a “circle of knowledge”; a locus in which man could organise all that was worth learning and therefore a sort of curriculum. In this sense early works tried in their structure to reflect the world and the way it had been conceived. By the 17th century –however– scholars began to percive that the pieces of knowledge available are too numerous and the attempt to organise them in an ‘organic’ system is beyond reach. The alphabetical ordering seems, then, a feasible alternative.

c. Tradition and Novelty: Towards More Integrated Systems of Knowledge

We can consider similarities and differences with the developments in Japanese botany. Specifically a comparison can be drawn with the move “away” from the Chinese originals and the use of Chinese writing. In Europe the new developments came about as a consequence of the fact that scholars (who until the 15th century had been using reference texts from antiquity for their studies), realised that the plants described in those books were not necessarily co-extensive with or identical to the ones people saw around them. This stimulated a trend towards direct observation of the natural world that harmonised well with general developments in natural philosophy from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Natural philosophers allied and consolidated their observation with the retrieval of local knowledge through consultations with peasants and absorbed the latter. The choice of the vernacular emanated from several circumstances. Knowledge displayed in the books was local and compiled in primis for a local readership (thus we find many small format compendia of local flora published in the second half of the 16th century).[35] Secondly, it has been argued that it often reflects a religious-political agenda, whereby Protestant scholars pushed for the use of the vernacular as opposed to Latin.[36] It needs however to be noticed that in general the relationship between the use of Latin and the use of the Vernaculars was a complex one. The former was in fact at the time the international language, used by scholars –both protestant and catholic– to reach wider audiences. But this tendency to use vernacular languages in scientific writings is observable in many areas and is not necessarily connected to protestantism. If we take, for example, Italy, the stronghold of Catholicism, we see that many original writings are composed in the vernacular (famously by Galileo) and that translations of classical texts into the vernacular are a major preoccupation. Telling examples of the latter are the editions by Daniele Barbaro of the classic text on architecture by Vitruvius which is published in 1556 in Italian and is followed in 1567 by a double edition in Italian and Latin. If we consider the scientific circle in Urbino we see the famous Mechanicorum Liber by Guidobaldo del Monte appearing in 1577 in Latin but being translated in 1581 –explicitly to make it more easily available to a wider public– by Filippo Pigafetta. In 17th century Europe we also observe a wide discussion amongst scholars (particularly among mathematicians) expressing doubts about the advantages and perils of making knowledge available to a wider public through the use of vernacular languages. For example Billingsley’s translation of Euclid’s Geometry[37], famously enriched by a ‘Mathematicall Preface’ by John Dee (1527 – 1608) in which the necessity of enlarging the reading public of scientific works by translating them into vernacular languages is stressed. Billingsley also explicitly makes the link between the availability of this knowledge in the vernacular and the development of new, useful technical applications:

“Our Englishe tounge shall no lesse be enriched with good Authors, then are other straunge tounges: as the Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanishe: in which are red all good authors in a maner, found amongest the Grekes or Latines. Which is the chiefest cause, that amongest them do florishe so many cunning and skilfull men, in the inuentions of straunge and wonderfull thinges, as in these our daies we see there do.” [38]

This reflects a tendency towards opening up knowledge to a wider public that becomes evident in Europe also in other contexts. One of the most striking examples are educational theorists, who in this period are pleading for a reform in many different European locations: from the German Countries and England, to Central Europe, France and Holland with writers such as Francis Bacon, Jon Amos Comenius, Johann Heinrich Alsted, Samuel Hartlib[39], John Milton[40] and Renè Descartes[41]. John Amos Comenius (1592 –1670, one of the most well known European pedagogists of the time)[42], famously advocated universal education (for the poor and the rich, female and male).

Comenius’ project for reform exemplifies the European tendency in the period towards a more empirical and practically oriented kind of scholarship that culminated in the writings by authors such as Bacon and Descartes. Comenius urged a broadening of the subjects being taught in primary and higher education and he reflected upon the necessity to confront students with the natural world, material objects and practical problems. For secondary and higher education

“the pupils should learn four languages and acquire an encyclopaedic knowledge of the … seven liberal arts. ... But our pupils must aim higher than this, and in addition must be Physicists, who know the composition of the earth, the force of the elements, the different species of animals, the powers of plants and of minerals, and the structure of the human body, and who, beside knowing these things, can apply them to the various uses of life. Under this rubric is thus comprised a part of medicine, of agriculture, and of other mechanical arts.”[43]

Comenius devoted a whole chapter of his “Didactica magna”[44] to “The method of the sciences, specifically”, in which he stresses the importance of direct observation and of experiencing with the senses the materiality of things.[45]

Although Comenius was very influential for educational theory and its practice in Europe and beyond, his principles were not put into practice during his life time.[46] Nevertheless it interesting to notice that the recommendations to study the material world through observation, were diffusing beyond the ranks of the most advanced natural scientists and philosophers and started to percolate among a wider constituency.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, we have highlighted the comparable orientations in the modes and diffusion patterns of practical and useful knowledge in early modern Europe and Japan. Compilers of such knowledge in both cultures were encouraged to develop the methods of accurate and detailed description of natural objects and phenomena. They were motivated to avail themselves of the knowledge in practical use by the people in many strata of the society. The knowledge was indeed widely utilised in commercial production as well as for people’s well-being maintenance, as we have discussed in the example of botanical knowledge and its commercial use. In the seventeenth century intellectual movements, both in Europe and Japan, promoted a shift from a dependency on, what was considered in each locality, the Classical tradition to independent modes of enquiry into the natural world. Furthermore, the promotion of the use of simplified language, more attuned with that used in everyday life, paved the way to a wider exchange of and access to useful and practical knowledge. In Japan, the mercantilist motivation of the Bakufu and daimyo lords promoted the diffusion useful knowledge of agricultural production. Economic motivation was behind the circulation of practical knowledge in Europe as well. Access to useful and practical knowledge was further promoted in Europe through attempts at reforms (sometimes only much later enforced) of the educational system, which started to be used by a larger proportion of citizens.

The success of intellectual exchange between the scientifically minded men of Europe and Japan through Nagasaki occurred through objects, conversations and books and was based on comparable scientific reordering and orientations in both cultures. This is clear from the fact that some European books which contained practical knowledge and were descriptive in their form, did not receive official recognition before such knowledge came to be more widely appreciated in late seventeenth century.

We have also investigated the role played by the conduits or cultural and social conditions or institutions in promoting this type of knowledge in Europe and Japan. The role of publication media, education, and the states have been discussed.  Nevertheless the role played by institutions in each culture remains to be studied in more detail, in a comparative way. For example, the importance of urban cultural circles has been increasingly recognised by social historians of Tokugawa period.[47] The circle of scientifically minded intellectuals in which Kaibara Ekken and Kunitomo Ikkansai developed their inquiry modes might be another example of this. But we need to analyse carefully to what extent such Japanese associational culture functioned in a similar manner with the European one. Also to be investigated in more depth is the extent to which these tendencies towards a direct study of nature to practical aims involved other fields of knowledge and human activities outside the case study of botany analysed here.

Acknowledgements:

The authors are indebted to the generous funding by the ERC, that made the URKEW project and their collaboration possible. Furthermore they would like to thank the participants to the URKEW seminar “The Encounter of Learning Traditions: Japan and Europe in the 17th century” (May 12th 2010) where first ideas connected with this paper were discussed, as well as the participants to the workshop “Intellectual Networks and Exchanges”, and particularly Isabel DiVanna for their feedback. For comments on earlier drafts of this paper and editorial work a huge thank goes to Prof. P. O’Brien and Ms. L. Long.

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[1] Both authors are members of the URKEW Project (Useful and reliable Knowledge in the East and the West from the accession of the Ming to the Industrial Revolution) funded by the European Research Council and located at the Economic History Department, LSE. This article is the first result of an ongoing collaborative project adopting the comparative method.

[2] Cook, H. Matters of Exchange (Yale University Press 2007), 410.

[3] The Dutch East India Company: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC)

[4] J. Elisonas, ‘Christianity and the daimyo’ in: Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 4, ed. J.W. Hall, J.L. McClain (Cambridge, 1991), Chapter 7. esp. 368-72.

[5] Karel Davids, ‘Dutch and Spanish global networks of knowledge in the early modern period: structures, changes and limitations’, paper presented at the International Workshop Iberian-Netherlandish Knowledge Exchanges, Barcelona, Institu d’Estudis Catalanas. 27-28 November 2009, 2 available at , accessed in March 2011.

[6] T. Screech, Japan extolled and decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s realm 1775-1796 (London, 2005), 79.

[7] F. Cohen, ‘The onset of the scientific revolution’ in: ed. PR. Anstey, A. Schuster, The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century, (Dordrecht, 2005), 9.

[8] There are some English sources available on this matter, see De Bray’s introduction of the seminal works by R. Minamoto in Principle and practicality: essays in Neo Confucianism and practical learning, ed. W. T. De Bary, I. Bloom, (New York, 1979).

[9] N. Nakai and J. L. McClain, ‘Commercial change and urban growth in early modern Japan’ in: Cambridge History of Japan, ed. J. W. Hall, Volume 4, (Cambridge, 2008), 519.

[10] Fief is a territory of domain and the Japanese term is han.

[11] I. Sugimoto, Kinsei jitsugakushi no kenkyu: Edo jidai chuki niokeru kagaku gijutsu gaku no seisei (Tokyo, 1967), 290-95.

[12] H. Kandatsu, Kinse ichi nosy90-95.

[13] H. Kandatsu, Kinse ichi nosyo no seiritsu, (Tokyo, 2005), Chapter 6.

[14] The Far Eastern term of encyclopaedia is Ruisyo (類書).

[15] Sugimoto, Kinsei Jitsugakushi, 341-45.

[16] On literacy rate and reading public in Tokugawa period, 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 period, see R. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Michigan, 1965), 252-70. Tokugawa schooling for commoner pupils has been studied extensively by historians but teaching of practical knowledge, we are concerned, in these schools remains to be explored.

[17] 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.

[18] F. Yokota, ‘Ekken bon no dokusha‘ in: T. Yokota ed. Kaibara Ekken: Taihe waraku no bunmei gaku, (Tokyo, 2007), chapter 11.

[19] The first alphabetically ordered European Encyclopaedia was the English Lexicon Technicum (Harris in 1704).

[20] It is known that Arai studied the Chinese texts of Matteo Ricci’s world geography.

[21] R.Dodonaeus, Cruijdeboeck (Leiden, 1554).

[22] J. Jonston, Beschryving van de Natuur der Viervoetige Dieren (Amsterdam, 1660)

[23] W. Boot, ‘The transfer of learning: the impact of Chinese and Dutch books in Tokugawa Japan’ in : Canton and Nagasaki compared 1730-1830: Chinese, Japanese relations, transactions, ed. E. Groenendijk, C. Vallé, L. Blussé (Leidenm 2009), 51.

[24] Cook, Matters, 275,

[25] For Tokugawa mercantilism, see T. Fujita, Kokueki shiso no keifu to tenkai, (Osaka, 1998) ; Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan, ed. B. Gramlich-Oka, G. Smits (Leiden, 2010).

[26] K. Kasaya, ‘The Tokugawa Bakufu’s policies for the national production of medicines and Dodonaeus’ Cruijdeboeck’ in: Dodonaeus in Japan: translation and the scientific mind in the Tokugawa period, ed. W.F. Vande Walle, K. Kasaya, (Leuvenm 2001), 180-90.

[27] Boot, ‘Transfer of learning’, 51.

[28] K. Matsuda, ‘Ono Ranzan kyozo Weinmann “Kafu” mosyazu nit suite’ in: Ono Ranzan ed. Ono Ranzan Botsugo nihyakunen kinen shi hensyu iinkai (Kyoto 2010), 39-40.

[29] K. Ota ‘Kunitomo Ikkansai to Edo jidai no kagaku gijutsu’ in: Kinsei Nihon ni okeru kagaku gijutu no genryu, ed. Monbu kagaku sho Tokutei ryoiki kenkyu ‘Edo no mono zukuri’ Dai 3 kai Kokusai Symposium jikko iinkai, (2003), 63 - 65..

[30] K. Hirose, ‘Kunitomo Ikkansai ga tsukutta Gyokuto to Toukagu no rekishi’ in: Kagaku gijutsu, 89-91.

[31] We will here concentrate only on the field of botany, which is the case study at the centre of the present paper, a discussion of technical and scientific manuals deserves separate consideration.

[32] R. Dodonaeus, De frugum historia, (Antwerp, 1552).

[33] M. Ambrosoli, ‘Botanical Practice and Agricultural Demands in Early Modern Europe: the Contribution of Rembertus Dodonaeus’, in: Dodonaeus in Japan, ed. W. F. Vande Walle (Leuven, 2001), 59-76; for a treatment of the spread of new agricultural practice in this period and its links with botany see Mauro Ambrosoli, The wild and the sown (Cambridge, 1997).

[34] R. Visser, ‘Dodonaeus and the Herbal Tradition’, in: Dodonaeus in Japan, ed. W. F. Vande Walle (Leuven, 2001), 54-58, exp. 51-52.

[35] Tom Mc Arthur, Worlds of Reference, lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, (Cambridge et alia, 1986), 77.

[36] Ambrosoli, ‘Botanical Practice’, 64.

[37] On the dissemination of new ideas through the use of the vernacular in protestant countries as opposed to the persistence of Latin in catholic circles see U. Rublack, Reformation Europe, (Cambridge, 2005).

[38] H. Billingsley, ‘The Translator to the reader’, in: Euclide of Megara, The Elements of Geometries of the most ancient Philosopher Euclide of Megara. Faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe toung, by H. Billingsley, Citizen of London… With a very fruitfull Præface made by M. I. Dee.., (London, 1570).

[39] The twenty-fourth book of Alsted’s famous Encyclopaedia is concerned with education. J. H. Alsted, Encyclopaedia Cursus Philosophici, (Herborn, 1630). For a discussion of Alsted’s views on this see P. R. Cole, A Neglected Educator: F. H. Alsted, (Sydney, 1910).

[40] Hartlib published two studies on Comeniu’s theories on education: S. Hartlib, Conatuum Comenianorum praeludia (Oxford, 1637) and S. Hartlib, Comenii pansophiae prodromus et didactica dissertatio (London, 1639). He was a strong supporter of educational reform in England and was instrumental to the coming of Comoenius to England in 1641.

[41] J. Milton, Of Education, (London, 1644).

[42] See in particular the first chapter of René Descartes, Discours de la method (Leyden, 1637).

[43] Comenius, a protestant Czech teacher, later became a bishop. Religious wars forced him to live and work in many different countries such as Sweden, Poland, Transylvania, The Holy Roman Empire, England, the Netherlands and Hungary.

[44] J. A. Comenius, The Great didactic, translated into English and edited with biographical, historical and critical introductions by M.W. Keatinge, (New York, 1967) 374-275. This work was written between 1627 1nd 1638 but was first published only in 1657.

[45] Comenius, The Great didactic.

[46] Comenius, The Great didactic, 183- 184.

[47] He was particularly influential in his home country, in Sweden and Holland. It took until the 19th century before the principle of universal education, for example, came into operation.

[48]

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