Practical Pursuits: Takano Chōei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan (review)

In this clearly written and well-researched work, Ellen Gardner Nakamura sheds new light on important aspects of social and intellectual life in Japan in the early nineteenth century. Through the examination of the relationship of the physician Takano Chōei, one-time student of Philipp von Siebold, and his affluent farmer (gōnō) disciples in rural Kōzuke (present-day Gunma Prefecture), Nakamura explores the social networks and practices involved in the diffusion of new forms of knowledge from Europe and argues that ranpō (Dutch method) physicians created new "hybrid" therapies as a result of their "adaptive" and "creative" use of Western medicine.

There has not been a book-length English-language monograph on rangaku (Dutch learning) since the publication of Grant Goodman's Japan: The Dutch Experience 20 years ago.¹ Goodman offered a perspective on rangaku that departed sharply from that of Japanese scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, which had characterized rangaku as antifeudal and rational in nature and asserted that it had aided in the rapid adoption of Western science and technology after 1868. Goodman, in contrast, argued that rangaku did little more than foster "curiousity about the West" (p. 234). Its influence was limited to a few urban areas, particularly Osaka, Edo, and Nagasaki, and its practitioners had access to only a small number of out-of-date works, which they studied without an understanding of the evolution of, or larger philosophical framework of, Western science.

In the last two decades, however, Japanese researchers have opened up important new avenues for the exploration of rangaku and made possible reconsideration both of the progressive view of rangaku offered by those working within the framework of modernization theory and of the pessimistic picture painted by Goodman. In 1985 Tasaki Tetsurō published Zaison no rangaku, a collection of essays documenting research begun in the late 1960s. Tasaki's detailed empirical study of rangaku at the village level (his focus was the region of modern-day Aichi Prefecture) can justifiably be said to have contributed to the formation of a new field, the social history of grass-roots rangaku. In the wake of Tasaki's research, works such as Aoki Toshiyuki's Zaison rangaku no kenkyū and more recently an important collection of essays published by the National Museum of Japanese History have revealed that in villages all over Japan, physicians and others were studying European medical, botanical, and other texts and experimenting with new technologies, most notably smallpox vaccination.²

In Practical Pursuits, Nakamura adeptly negotiates recent scholarship on grass-roots rangaku by Tasaki, Aoki, and others. Her focus on the case of Takano Chōei and his Kōzuke student, Takahashi Keisaku, allows her to illuminate the connection between elite and local practices and avoid the parochialism that frequently flaws works of local history. Takano Chōei, of course, is best known for his imprisonment in 1839 after he authored a critique of the bakufu policy of firing on foreign ships. In chapter one of Practical Pursuits this celebrated incident is examined within the larger context of Chōei's life and is used to explore the training and social status of nonelite physicians (that is, those not in the employ of the bakufu or a domain), as well as relations between the various groups involved in rangaku in the early nineteenth century. Nakamura argues that ranpō in particular created a new social arena that enabled a talented scholar like Chōei to move between circles of high-ranking scholars and officials in Nagasaki and Edo and local elites in the countryside. In chapter two, Nakamura turns to focus particularly on the latter group. She explores the phenomenon of grass-roots rangaku by examining Chōei's relations with his students in Kōzuke in the 1830s, a relationship characterized as "collaborative" in nature. While Takano made his knowledge...