The Transfer of Learning: The Import of Chinese and Dutch Books in Togukawa Japan

Abstract

I have often said, though mainly to captive audiences of students of Leiden University, that the mental map Japanese intellectuals had of their country counted three important hubs: Kyoto, Edo, and Nagasaki. Kyoto had the highest density ofjuku; it was the place where people studied. Edo was the place where everyone, and certainly the samurai, met; it was a clearing-house of all kinds of information. Nagasaki, finally, was the place that all self-respecting scholars and physicians would want to visit at least once, to get a whiff of the atmosphere of their “source country,” be it China or the Netherlands, and to acquire books.This thesis, such as it is, breaks down into three questions that can, in principle, be answered. (1) Who travelled to Nagasaki? When? What did they do there? How long did they stay? What are the aggregate numbers? (2) Did an appreciable quantity of the imported Dutch and Chinese books remain in Nagasaki? (3) Did there exist an intellectual establishment in Nagasaki that catered to the needs of visiting students? In practice, it might well be a life's work to answer these questions. In this article, I will concentrate on one aspect of the second of these questions: the import of foreign books through Nagasaki. The context, however, should be kept in mind.This idea has been with me ever since I read that Hayashi Razan(1583–1657) visited Nagasaki twice—once as a private person in the autumn of Keichō 7 (1602), when he stayed for over one month, and the second time in Keichō 12 (1607), immediately after he had been taken into the employ of Tokugawa Ieyasu's (1542–1616; shogun 1603–5).