K. Buhrman
unidirectional flow of texts, if not also ideas, can be seen in Buddhist contexts as well (see Enomoto
Wataru, Sōryo to kaishōtachi no higashi shinakai).
11 Togo Tsukahara et al., “Needham’s Impact on Japanese History of Science.” In the subject of astron-
omy, Shinjō Shinzō (1873–1938), a major figure in the foundation of the Kyoto school of the history of
science, was an astronomer and physicist (Tsukuhara et al., “Needham’s Impact on the Japanese History
of Science”), and many of the articles included in the Meiji zen series for the history of Japanese science
and technology included scientists by training over historians by training (see, for example, Nihon
gakushiin, Nihon kagakushi kankōkai, Meiji- zen Nihon butsuri, kagaku shi, where among the volumes,
this trend may be the most pronounced. Astronomers who have continued to play a significant role in
the history of Japanese science include Saitō Kuniji.
12 Nakayama sees Thomas Kuhn, to provide a famous name in the history of science, as attempting to
reconcile both approaches: he presents his own project as within that framework. Shigeru Nakayama,
Academic and Scientific Traditions in China, Japan and the West, xiv–xvi.
13 Sakka Kazuyuki, Tenpen no kaidoku monotachi, offers a good example of anachronistic assumptions about
the premises on which premodern “scientists” operated.
14 Most of the entries in Nihon gakushiin, Nihon kagakushi kankōkai, Meiji- zen Nihon butsuri, kagaku shi
truncate the period covered on the principle of identifying the past material as part of the modern field
of scientific inquiry.
15 Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution.
16 Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, “Introduction: The Age of the New,” and William R. Newman,
“From Alchemy to ‘Chymistry’.”
17 I am including in this count a work not often mentioned by these scholars, Kamo Yasunori’s Rekirin,
which is supposed to have been the basis for his descendant’s Rekirin mondōshū. See note 26 below.
18 Rekirin mondōshū (1414) by Kamo Aritkata is identified by both Nakayama and Sugimoto and Swain as
the first work by a Japanese author on mathematical astronomy. Here, however, we see the biases of
modern scholars. This work handles some of the calendrical concepts of the almanac that reference to
astronomical bodies and motion, and was written by an individual in charge of calendar making and
astronomical prediction at court; however, it is just as much, if not more, a work focused on divination
and day- selection. If this text can be counted as a pre- 1600 work of Japanese science, then multiple other
onmyōdō-related works also could be included in our count. A number of these works, and their textual
history, can be found in Nakamura Shōhachi, Nihon on’yōdō-sho no kenkyū, which includes a critical
edition of Arikata’s text (an improvement on the edition found in the Gunsho ruijū collection). Works
by yamabushi on rituals for and legends associated with crafts such as carpentry could increase the number
of texts to study even further, and would bring the history of technology into the field. On this genre,
see Fabio Rambelli, “Tools and Labor as Mediators between the Sacred and the Profane,” although his
use of them differs than their potential use for the history of technology.
19 The survey of technology (and mathematics) found in Keiji Nagahara and Kōzō Yamamura, “Shaping
the Process of Unification: Technological Progress in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- century Japan” uses
manuscripts and printed texts from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries to reconstruct
some of the techniques and trends evident through the development of new mines or techniques known
from archeology or brief mentions in other historical sources.
20 The idea that science or technology (“technology transfer,” a concept used not just in modern studies of
technology and society, but also by Iida Ken’ichi in “Kodai Nihon no kinzoku bunka” to describe how
iron mining and smelting techniques spread from China to Japan) move smoothly and without change
between cultures has been questioned by recent scholarship (Eden Medina et al., “Introduction: Beyond
Imported Magic”). In the East Asian sphere, Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China,
1550–1900 is a study of how elite intellectuals in Late Imperial China adopted (or did not adopt) and
adapted material from Western (initially Jesuit) sources.
21 For an illustration of work on technology transfer during the early modern period, see the papers in the
first section of Yoshida Tadashi and Li Yanju, Kagaku gijutsu.
22 The change in social consciousness produced by print culture is described in Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan
in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period; although the effects of this change on the pro-
duction of science have been less analyzed, it is safe to assume that they were analogous. The develop-
ment of a Japanese print culture required more than technical developments, which were known in
Japan earlier (Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth
Century). A useful model for the role of print in the history of science in the West is Elizabeth Eisenstein,
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern