Network of Knowledge
Terrence Jackson · University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2016
Network of Knowledge examines the development of Dutch studies (rangaku) during the crucial years of 1770-1830 as its scholars wove a network that stretched across Japan. Rangaku was the title given to the pursuit of Western science and medicine through the medium of Japan’s sole link to Europe, the Dutch East India Company. This books focuses on the scholar Ōtsuki Gentaku and his colleagues in Edo in order to explain how the community expanded across the whole of Japan. It investigates their cultural world of salon gatherings, private academies, study-travel, letter-correspondence, and book-circulation, and argues that it is impossible to assess rangaku without understanding the strength of its community formation within those spaces. The community’s social significance helped make rangaku one of the integral developments in a Tokugawa era (1600-1868) information revolution. This information revolution included an increase in information gathering among all classes and new methods for collecting and storing that information. Changes in information culture were intricately tied to social developments, and this book reveals how the history of rangaku reflects that. The book ends with a discussion of the longevity of the social and cultural values of the rangaku network as they influenced the Meiji period (1868-1912).