Knowledge of nature and craftNotes
1 On the relatively recent development of the English word and European equivalents, see Sydney Ross,
“ ‘Scientist’: The Story of a Word.”
2 General information on Gennai in English can be found in Tessa Morris- Suzuki, The Technological Trans-
formation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty- first Century. Yumemakura Baku is perhaps best
known for his Onmyōji novel series about Abe no Seimei (921–1005), although he has written series
about other historical characters before Gennai. Shibukawa’s personal name can be alternately read as
Harumi, as it is in Masayoshi Sugimoto and David L. Swain, Science and Culture in Traditional Japan.
3 Timon Screech, The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo
Japan (2002); Maki Fukuoka, The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in
Nineteenth- century Japan (2012); Federico Marcon, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in
Early Modern Japan (2015).
4 Morris Low, “Japan: General Works.” Although Masayoshi Sugimoto and David L. Swain’s 1978
Science and Culture in Traditional Japan dates from the subsequent decade, its contents effectively match
material found in works such as Sugimoto Isao, Kagakushi (1967).
5 The one major exception to the near dearth of generalized studies on premodern science is a survey of the
history of mathematics by Ōya Shin’ichi, Wasan izen, which takes as its task and premise the explanation
of mathematics before the development of the early modern wasan tradition exemplified by Seki Takakazu
(1642–1708). In most surveys in which the pre- 1600 period appears, it is safe to say that the premodern era
is presented as ground or build- up against which to contrast the developments of the early modern age.
The historical work of the astronomer Saitō Kuniji (including Kotenmongaku no sanpomichi: tenmon shiryō
kenshō yowa) in the 1980s, greatly built upon by the historian Hosoi Hiroshi (particularly the articles written
with Minezaki Ryōichi, “Rikkokushi mishūroku no nisshoku to kokushi” and “Nihon tenmon shiryō
mishūroku no nisshoku to kiroku”), used courtier diary sources and later chronicles to show that the post-
ninth-century practice of mathematical or calendrical astronomy was more active than Nakayama Shigeru
(A History of Japanese Astronomy: Chinese Background and Western Impact), and consequently Sugimoto and
Swain who rely greatly on Nakayama’s work, presume. Sugimoto and Swain, Science and Culture in Tradi-
tional Japan remains the standard reference in English- language works. Meiji- zen Nihon kagakushi series (a
summary of the project and an outline of a history of science and technology in Japan) can be found in
Nihon gakushiin, Nihon kagakushi kankōkai, Meiji- zen Nihon kagakushi sōsetsu nenpyō).
6 On the difficulties, even impossibility, of defining science, see the introductions to Peter Dear, The Intel-
ligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World, and Thomas F. Gieryn, The Cultural Boundaries of
Science: Credibility on the Line.
7 Rangaku has long been a subject of interest in the intellectual history of Japan, as attested by a relatively
early Ph.D. dissertation on the subject (Yoshida Tadashi, “The Rangaku of Shizuki Tadao: The Intro-
duction of Western Science in Tokugawa Japan”), although recent work has tended to focus on its
influence on art history. A study of how the Dutch connection was important for the history of medi-
cine in the late Edo Period can be found in Ann Bowman Jannetta, The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical
Knowledge, and the “Opening” of Japan. In Japanese, a typical work of Edo Period science, which dismisses
the possibility of science in pre-1600 Japan, is Nakamura Kunimitsu, Edo kagaku shiwa. For an example
of a history of science that begins with the “opening” of Japan to the West, see Honda Ichiji, Nihon no
kagaku hyakunen. Such a periodization dismisses the importance of Rangaku scholarship, emphasized by
the scholars above.
8 An example of this approach can be found in the pre- war Kokuritsu kagaku hakubutsukan, Edo jidai no
kagaku.
9 While the contribution to modern “global” science was the initial justification presented by Joseph
Needham for the study of the history of Chinese science (The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East
and West), this pre- occupation is less strongly present in later volumes of the Science and Civilisation in
China series that he spearheaded, in which the subject itself serves as its own justification.
10 Most notably, Japan appears in the mathematics section and in the volume on ceramics in Needham’s
Science and Civilisation in China. Chinese elites seem to have had an appreciation for Japanese swords and
paper products (Charlotte von Verschuer, Across the Perilous Sea: Japanese Trade with China and Korea from
the Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries), although Japan’s raw materials were perhaps the bulk of such trade
(see also Yasuko Suzuki, Japan–Netherlands Trade 1600–1800: The Dutch East India Company and Beyond
and Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640–1868 on the effects of,
and thus the scope of, Japan’s international metal trading in the early modern period). The largely