Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Overview

1231 Bioethics Overview In spring of 1771, a small group of Japanese doctors gathered to perform an autopsy on the cadaver of an executed fifty-year old woman criminal known as the Green Tea Hag, with a copy of a recently acquired Dutch work on anatomy lying open on the table before them. One of their number, Sugita Genpaku (1733–1817), who was later to translate that book, recalls: Comparing the things we saw with the pictures in the Dutch book, we were amazed at their perfect agreement.… The Shōgun’s official doctors… had beheld dissections seven or eight times before, but always what they saw was different from what had been taught in the past thousand years, and their puzzle had never been solved. They said they had been making sketches every time they saw something that struck them as strange. On this basis, I suppose, they had written that perhaps the Chinese and the Japanese were different in their internal structures. This I had read. After the dissection was over, we were tempted to examine the forms of the bones too, and picked up some of the sun bleached bones scattered around the ground. We found that they were nothing like those described in the old books, but were exactly as represented in the Dutch book. We were completely amazed…. On our way home, three of us… talked of what a startling revelation we had seen that day. We felt ashamed of ourselves for having come this far in our lives without being aware of our own ignorance. How presumptuous on our part to have served our lordships and pretended to carry our duties as official doctors when we were totally without knowledge of the true makeup of our bodies which should be the foundation of the art of healing! Sugita and his colleagues in Edo (present-day Tokyo) banded together to pursue the matter, forming the core of what would come to be known as rangaku or Dutch learningž. Their enthusiasm knew no bounds: We came to realize what wrong ideas we had been fettered to for many long years in the past. Having those misconceptions shaken off one by one, we were 1232 | b i o e t h i c s impatiently looking forward to another appointed day for study like women and children anxiously awaiting the dawn of a festival day. Regarding his struggles with translating the Dutch text, he recalls his initial plan to imitate the Chinese translations of the Buddhist sutras in order to introduce the new ideas with a solid basis in tradition. In the end he abandoned the plan: I wanted to make the translation entirely with the old Chinese terminology, but I soon found that there was quite a difference in the concept of naming between the Dutch and the Chinese, and I was often puzzled for the lack of a definite rule. After considering from all angles, I decided that as this was after all an attempt to make myself the ancestor of a new learning, at any rate I would make my writing plain and easy. With this as the basic rule, I sometimes tried to find an appropriate Japanese word for translation, sometimes created a new word, sometimes transcribed the Dutch sound in Japanese. Trying this and trying that, I groped for various means day and night. Putting my heart and soul in the task, I rewrote the manuscript eleven times… and it took me almost four years before it was completed. (Sugita Genpaku 1815, 35–6, 43, 51 [30–2, 38, 47]) This scene would be played out again and again in the Meiji era as Japan found itself exposed to a tidal wave of ideas and scientific advances from the West against which its reliance on the authority of its own traditions left it largely unprepared to defend itself. Not without considerable strife did the strong undercurrent of moral sensitivities and cultural values passed down over centuries—what Maruyama Masao* has called the basso ostinato—manage to retain its role in the formation of modern Japan. Nevertheless, problems at the intersection of science and culture were rather slow to find their place in Japanese philosophy. Perhaps more than any other current of western philosophy, the logical positivism and analytic thought introduced in the postwar period was remarkable for its reluctance to engage the prescientific philosophical resources of Japan. During the final two decades of the last century, this situation has begun to change...