Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution by Terrence Jackson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution by Terrence Jackson Noell Wilson Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution by Terrence Jackson. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 198. $55.00 cloth. Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution is an ambitious attempt to identify the social and cultural influence of Dutch-studies specialists in early modern Japan. At a methodological juncture when Tokugawa studies have embraced a transnational turn, a project that examines social structure within Japan proper is refreshing. Jackson’s production team astutely places the term “Western” in the title to leverage contemporary interest in the roots of early modern globalization. But the unexpected interpretive twist emerging beyond the cover is that the most significant contribution of imported Rangaku 蘭学 (Dutch studies) ideas was to transform domestic social ties and internal knowledge transmission rather than to accelerate interaction with the outside world. Jackson’s story explores new intellectual webs among scholars from varying status groups and regional origins, incorporating outlying provinces, such as the Tōhoku area of northern Japan, as central to mid-Tokugawa cultural integration. Given the recent focus on this very area’s experience in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tidal wave disaster, it is timely to revisit the cultural history of the protagonist scholar Ōtsuki Gentaku’s 大槻玄沢 (1757–1827) home domain, Ichinoseki 一関, reinserting it as a core motor of nineteenth-century social ferment. Through the life of Gentaku, Jackson assigns new relevance to a modest web of early modern scholars as progenitors of Meiji-period civil society. At the center of Jackson’s analysis is the Dutch-style physician Ōtsuki Gentaku, who becomes a lens through which to understand the “interplay between social structure and intellectual/cultural production” in Tokugawa Japan (p. 2). As Jackson asks, given that most Japanese today do not know the name of Ōtsuki Gentaku, how important could he possibly be to understand the cultural ferment of the early modern period? The answer is “very important,” particularly given that numerous studies, including the recent work of Federico Marcon and Maki Fukuoka, identify the precise era in which Gentaku taught and wrote, the turn of the nineteenth century, as one of the most critical [End Page 598] time periods for exploring the development of early modern science in Japan.1 Not only did Gentaku produce three hundred different texts during his lifetime, his school, the Shirandō 芝蘭堂, also trained roughly one hundred students, cultivating important Rangaku scholars who mentored future generations of Western-studies scholars around Japan. Extant scholarship on Western learning generally emphasizes the period after 1840, when an interest in Dutch studies shifted from medicine and the natural sciences to military strategy and weaponry as Japan confronted foreign naval pressure. However, Jackson’s study proposes the novel argument that the webs of knowledge transmission undergirding this 1840 shift originated in networks of information exchange developed between 1770 and 1830, the decades of Gentaku’s greatest influence. As the title suggests, the book explores early modern Japan through two central questions: First, how did Dutch-studies scholars at the turn of the nineteenth century shape Tokugawa social networks of knowledge? Second, to what extent did these communities advance and modify a larger information revolution already underway? Jackson answers the first question with an interesting, if at times hyperabstract, methodological intervention. He applies the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (particularly his concepts of habitus, capital, field, and practice) and other scholars, such as Bonnie Erickson, to analyze community building and prove that Gentaku “did more than anyone to expand” the web of Rangaku scholars during his lifetime (p. 41). Arguments about how these ties propelled an information revolution, however, are less carefully constructed and less persuasive. The book is divided into seven thematic body chapters, the first six of which explore how Gentaku cultivated a Dutch-studies network with the seventh examining the legacies of this community-building effort for civil society in Meiji Japan. Chapter 1, “Ōtsuki Gentaku: Network Facilitator,” leverages Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, an individual’s predisposition toward certain actions and choices based on past experience and social background (p. 17), to...