REVIEWS
"Opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan's relationship to its natural environment. . . . The book charts transformations not only of natural objects and studies of them in Japan, but also of the professional and social identity of scholars, the disciplinary identity of the field, the popular engagement with natural history, and the illustration of the natural world. . . . A must-read for historians of early modern science, natural history, and Tokugawa studies!"
— Carla Nappi, New Books in East Asian Studies
“The first Anglophone account of ‘nature studies’ in early modern Japan, as well as a bold attempt to provincialize Eurocentric narratives of modernity's relation to nature.”
— Canadian Journal of History
“In a brilliantly analytical, well-written study, the Italian historian of Japan Federico Marcon introduces to a Western readership for the first time the early history of natural history in Japan…. First published in Japan in 1637, Honzô kômuku revolutionized nature studies in that country and gave its naturalists an impetus to develop natural history into a flourishing Japanese science. Who those naturalists were, how they fitted into society, and what they accomplished, is Marcon’s beautifully told story.”
— Archives of Natural History
“Breaks new ground for the history of science in East Asia and represents an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reevaluate the distinctiveness of early modern European science.”
— Isis
"Federico Marcon’s rich history of honzōgaku makes an enormous contribution to the field of early modern Japanese history. Given the inseparability of honzōgaku’s scientific advances and concurrent epistemological shifts, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan is as much about the evolving state of knowledge as it is an investigation of nature studies itself....Both fascinating and authoritative, it is destined to endure as a distinguished study of early modern Japanese thought."
— American Historical Review
"The main contributions of this book lie in its sophisticated analysis of the social and institutional contexts for the production and consumption of knowledge about nature in Tokugawa Japan and in its reconsideration of prevailing discourses that equate the development of science in Japan with a process of Westernization. Its engagement with not only the history of science, but also such fields as environmental studies, economic history, the history of the book, and art history, make it an essential resource for a wide range of readers."
— Journal of Japanese Studies
"Books that invoke big thinkers' names abound, but few engage the ideas as profitably as this. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan is a magnificent work, erudite and sophisticated. This is the most stimulating work in the early modern field to appear in some time."
— David L. Howell, Harvard University
"Marcon boldly challenges the hoary notion that the disenchantment of the world through scientific investigation was unique to the West. Like their early modern European counterparts, Japan’s honzogaku scholars systematically transformed natural ecosystems into discrete objects of analysis, manipulation, and control. This exciting study places Japan’s independent scientific trajectory in the context of its growing commodity culture and professionalization of scholarship."
— Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
"Knowledge of Nature and Nature of Knowledge is a very rich work with substantial detail, going in-depth into the various aspects of honzōgaku. The book appeals to a wide interdisciplinary audience of historians of Japan and East Asia, historians of science, and environmental historians...Marcon’s book is part of a new wave of scholarship which allows us to gain a deeper understanding of East Asian Science. The book is as well researched as it is captivating to read and is a must on syllabi of courses on East Asian history of science."
— Florin-Stefan Morar, Nuncius
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue
Part I. Introduction
Chapter 1. Nature without Nature: Prolegomena to a History of Nature Studies in Early Modern Japan - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0001
[science, knowledge, nature, Honzōgaku, early modernity]
This chapter introduces the argument of the book and its analytical terminology. It presents the contradiction inherent in a project that purports to historicize a form of knowledge like science that has universalistic claims. It defends its strategy of historicizing the very notion of scientific knowledge, by which it avoids the metaphysical traps of either adopting a transcendental and a historical notion of science—which transforms it into a kind of universal—or elevating a historically specific notion of science born in 19th century Europe to an a historical, transcendental standard of judgment. (pages 3 - 27)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 2. The Bencao gangmu and the World It Created - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0002
[Bencao gangmu, Li Shizhen, Materia medica, taxonomy, species]
This chapter introduces the early history of materia medica in China and Japan before the seventeenth century. It focuses in particular on Li Shizhen’s Bencao gangmu, which after its publication in 1596 became the most influential source of natural knowledge in East Asia. It presents its structure, philosophical assumptions, terminology, and classifying methodology, which constituted the unchallenged template of all Japanese works on natural history until the nineteenth century. (pages 28 - 50)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part II. Ordering Names: 1607-1715
Chapter 3. Knowledge in Translation: Hayashi Razan and the Glossing of Bencao gangmu - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0003
[Hayashi Razan, Tokugawa shogunate, Tashikihen, semasiology, professionalization, patronage, Neo-Confucianism]
This chapter reconstructs the introduction of Li Shizhen’s Bencao gangmu in Japan and the early efforts to understand and translate it in Japanese. It focuses in particular on Hayashi Razan, to whom it is attributed the official introduction of the text in 1607. The chapter presents not only Razan’s interpretation of the Chinese encyclopedia, but also his self-fashioning efforts to establish himself as a professional scholar when no such figure was at the time socially recognized independently of Buddhist institutions. It argues that these efforts ended up affecting the early development of the field of honzōgaku. (pages 55 - 71)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 4. Writing Nature’s Encyclopedia - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0004
[encyclopedia, information overload, illustrated dictionaries, Nakamura Tekisai]
This chapter focuses on the “information overload” that followed the introduction of a large number of Chinese texts on materia medica throughout the seventeenth century. It introduces the various kinds of Chinese encyclopedias and early Japanese imitations and translations as well as the early illustrated dictionaries produced in Japan, such as Nakamura Takisai Kinmō zui. It shows how knowledge of plants and animals figured prominently in most encyclopedias. (pages 72 - 86)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 5. The First Japanese Encyclopedias of Nature: Yamato honzō and Shobutsu ruisan - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0005
[Kaibara Ekiken, Yamato honzō, Inō Jakusui, Shobutsu ruisan, Samurai-scholar, pragmatism, empiricism]
This chapter focuses on Kaibara Ekiken’s Yamato honzō, the first original encyclopedia of materia medica produced in Japan. It shows how this work was integral part of the philosophical attitude of the polymath Ekiken as well as of his social role of samurai-scholar, for whom scholarship was a form of service due to his lord. Characteristic of Yamato honzōwas a strong pragmatic and utilitarian attitude, which distinguished it from the more lexicographically oriented texts that preceded it. Another encyclopedia introduced in this chapter is Inō Jakusui’s Shobutsu ruisan (pages 87 - 110)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part III. Inventorying Resources: 1716– 36
Chapter 6. Tokugawa Yoshimune and the Study of Nature in Eighteenth- Century Japan - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0006
[Tokugawa Yoshimune, Genroku bubble, agricultural reforms, state sponsorship]
This chapter focuses on the impact that the massive reform projects of the eighth shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune had on the various fields of knowledge, including honzōgaku. These included a relaxation on the state control over imported books, which favored the introduction of various Western book on natural history, the financing of honzōgaku schools, herbal expeditions, and surveys of natural riches. In the long run, the state involvement in natural studies would impart to this disciple a utilitarian aspect that would fully develop only a century later. (pages 115 - 139)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 7. Inventorying Nature - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0007
[survey, political economy, natural resources, Niwa Shōhaku, illustrations]
This chapter reconstructs the organization, carrying out, results, and aims of a massive survey of all minerals, plants, and animals of Japan in 1736. It was conducted through a series of questionnaires distributed to all villages to be filled out and illustrated. It was probably the largest survey of natural riches produced in the world at that time. A consequence of this survey was the growth of the population of honzōgaku experts and the expansion of state financing of this field of study (pages 140 - 152)
This chapter is available at:
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Part IV. Nature’s Spectacles: The Long Eighteenth Century (1730s– 1840s)
Chapter 8. Nature’s Wonders: Natural History as Pastime - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0008
[curiosity, exhibitions, zoo, botanical garden, exotic species, commodification of nature]
This chapter introduces various forms of popular pastimes and frenzies for species of plants and animals that characterized eighteenth century Japan. It includes landscaping, ornamental gardening, interbreeding of flowering plants, pet collections, and the growth of teahouses of natural curiosities. These crazes favored the further professionalization of honzōgaku scholars—in state institutions, in private schools, and as authors of manuals—and the growth of professions connected to plants and animals. (pages 161 - 178)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 9. Nature in Cultural Circles - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0009
[cultural clubs, Shabenkai, Shōhyakusha, illustration, collection, network, social mobility]
This chapter presents how nature was studied in cultural circles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cultural circles consisted of networks of scholars and amateurs from different social classes that regularly met to discuss, exchange, analyze, reproduce, and systematize specimens of plants and animals. The circle or club, while difficult to study for the scant sources it left, was the dominant form of cultural production and consumption in early modern Japan and contributed to bring together professionals and aficionados from different social classes and from different regions. (pages 179 - 206)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 10. Nature Exhibited: Hiraga Gennai - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0010
[Hiraga Gennai, exhibition, network, Tamura Ransui, Edo, curiosity, popular culture]
This chapter focuses on Hiraga Gennai, a brilliant scholar with more talent than means, and his work in the field of honzōgaku as illustrator and as organizer on a large public exhibition of natural species held in Edo in 1763. By focusing both in his intellectual work and social situation, it embeds nature knowledge in late eighteenth century society, emphasizing the essential social elitism of natural history (pages 207 - 227)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 11. Representing Nature: From “Truth” to “Accuracy” - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0011
[illustrations, true-to-nature, objectivity, identification, species, pictorial techniques]
This chapter abandons the chronological narrative to analyze the important cognitive function that illustrations had in Japanese honzōgaku, a feature that distinguished it from its Chinese equivalent and made it similar to European natural history. Images were conceived as conveying “true-to-nature” claims about the species-specific characteristics of the specimens portrayed. They had thus the function of conveying truthful cognitive information, of revealing species-specific characteristics to simplify species recognition, and of training the scholar eyes to recognize species in nature. (pages 228 - 250)
This chapter is available at:
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Part V. The Making of Japanese Nature: The Bakumatsu Period
Bakumatsu Honzōgaku - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0012
[Udagawa Yōan, Itō Keisuke, paradigm change, Franz von Siebolt, modern science, Bakumatsu]
This chapter and the next describe how in the nineteenth century the eclecticism of styles and goals that had characterized honzōgaku in the previous centuries gave way to a more consistent discipline, institutionalized in state-sponsored Institutes of Medicine (Igakukan), and targeted to increase agricultural production. Chapter 13 describes the different attitudes of scholars vis-à-vis the new natural sciences that arrived from Europe in the early decades of the century: alongside “conservative” scholars who continued the Bencao gangmutradition and “revolutionary” scholars like Udagawa Yōan who wanted to abandon honzōgaku ideas and practices altogether to embrace the Western sciences, it was moderate scholars like Itō Keisuke who succeeded in accommodating and transforming honzōgaku language, practices, and goals into a discipline that could be more easily assimilated by modern science. (pages 255 - 275)
This chapter is available at:
University Press Scholarship Online
Chapter 12. Bakumatsu Honzōgaku: The End of Eclecticism? - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0012
[Udagawa Yōan, Itō Keisuke, paradigm change, Franz von Siebolt, modern science, Bakumatsu]
This chapter and the next describe how in the nineteenth century the eclecticism of styles and goals that had characterized honzōgaku in the previous centuries gave way to a more consistent discipline, institutionalized in state-sponsored Institutes of Medicine (Igakukan), and targeted to increase agricultural production. Chapter 13 describes the different attitudes of scholars vis-à-vis the new natural sciences that arrived from Europe in the early decades of the century: alongside “conservative” scholars who continued the Bencao gangmutradition and “revolutionary” scholars like Udagawa Yōan who wanted to abandon honzōgaku ideas and practices altogether to embrace the Western sciences, it was moderate scholars like Itō Keisuke who succeeded in accommodating and transforming honzōgaku language, practices, and goals into a discipline that could be more easily assimilated by modern science. (pages 255 - 275)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 13. Nature as Accumulation Strategy: Satō Nobuhiro and the Synthesis of Honzōgaku and Keizaigaku - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0013
[Satō Nobuhiro, Satsuma, Shimazu Shigehide, Tenpō crisis, Keizaigaku, natural resources]
This chapter continues to describe the changes inhonzōgaku practices in nineteenth-century Japan, but it concentrates on the case of the Satsuma domain in the last decades of the Tokugawa regime. Satsuma is important not only for its central role as leaders of the rebellion that would bring to an end the Tokugawa shogunate, but also because it was there that Satō Nobuhiro first conceptualized and put into practice the notion that nature knowledge should be pursued for the sake of the economic advancement and tightly controlled by state apparatuses. This utilitarian attitude will continue in the Meiji period as a defining characteristic of modern Japanese science. (pages 276 - 298)
This chapter is available at:
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Epilogue - Federico Marcon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226252063.003.0014
[modern science, Meiji, state scientists, Kanpōyaku]
The Epilogue briefly describes how in the Meiji period honzōgaku, on the one hand, lost his name, but transferred to the practitioners of the new scientific fields two centuries of knowledges, research, data, images, techniques, attitudes, styles, facilities, expertise, schools, social relations, books, and specimens; while, on the other hand, honzōgaku became the name—associated with that of kanpōyaku, now referring to traditional (Chinese) medicine in antagonistic opposition to Western medicine—of a lost tradition, of a forgotten wisdom, of alternative practices, of a repository of Asian identity.. (pages 299 - 306)
This chapter is available at:
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Acknowledgments
List of Japanese and Chinese Terms
Notes
Index
