The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-century Japan by Maki Fukuoka (review)

Maki Fukuoka has produced a piece of scholarship that is far-ranging in its scope, undertaking as it does to explore “the interdependence of the history of ideas, scientific practices, and visual culture” (p. 13). The pivotal case material that she has focused on to do this is the distinctive publication format of “shashin” (literally, “representations of the real”) as produced by the Shōhyaku-sha, an association of physicians and pharmacologists working within the Owari domain in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The association most notably included Itō Keisuke, a pioneer in the introduction of vaccination into Japan (despite political pressure to desist) who later emerged as a leading scientist within Japanese academia following the Meiji Restoration.

As Fukuoka persuasively argues, there is a great deal more significance in the use of “shashin” in this historical context than perhaps seems obvious at the outset. It is tied to the emergence of a distinctly Japanese tradition of empirical study and a distinctive technique of visualization that cuts against the binary notions of “premodern” Japanese scholarship versus “modern” Western science. The key example referred to is the Honzō shashin, a catalogue depicting flora from within the Owari domain with both Japanese and Chinese nomenclature appended. It was a work gifted to Phillip Franz von Siebold in 1826 as he traveled through the Owari domain in transit to Edo. Its distinctive feature was graphic representations of plants that had been initiated through pressing the plants into the page (p. 107, in’yō-zu-hō), leaving an unmistakable imprint of the original artifact. Fukuoka highlights the fact that it was not enough to have mere graphic accuracy but also to signify emphatically that the image had some basis in a material actuality.

The Honzō shashin case is employed to accentuate a subtle distinction from the ostensibly Western concept of a “realism” that can be attained through graphic similitude, a concept that ultimately finds its most clear manifestation in the technology of photography. Fukuoka successfully argues that the concept of “the real” in relation to shashin did not resonate in the same manner for members of the Shōhyaku-sha. For them, “the real” fundamentally informed a divergent perception of photography, although they did eventually embrace that medium for the purpose of visualizing materia medica and other scientific subject matter decades later. Her references in the latter half of the book to a variety of other practitioners of diverse visual arts, such as copper etching and the earliest forms of photographic technology (including ambrotype and the collodion processes besides the more famous daguerreotype), also illustrate how a distinctively integrated understanding of text, image, and matter came to be articulated within the broader intelligentsia.

As an exercise in clarifying the ambiguity and fluidity of scientific concepts and technologies prior to the so-called “modernization phase” of the Meiji Restoration, this is an eminently strong contribution to existing scholarship. In particular, the discussion of how honzō-kai (annual gatherings of amateur and specialist botanists that were held from the latter half of the eighteenth century onward) formed some of the first pre-Western arenas for the dispassionate and empirically verifiable cataloguing of materia medica is highly instructive (pp. 82–84). Fukuoka deftly articulates how the Shōhyaku-sha fostered a radical transformation in the epistemology of visual artifacts, tying them to an emergent culture of intellectual skepticism and open inquiry that entailed a subtle yet profound unwinding of contemporary intellectual orthodoxy. Moreover, the discussion of the role of Itō Keisuke’s use of Linnaeian taxonomy and roman lettering as enabling a neutral avenue for disentangling and reintegrating objects on the basis of verifiable knowledge is also highly effective in depicting the ambiguity of the Japanese intelligentsia’s engagement with Western systems of knowledge. The ultimate aim was not merely to mimic the Western system of botanical taxonomy but...