The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan by Federico Marcon (review)

Since Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1989), the “rational domination of nature” has been acknowledged as a key characteristic of Western modernity. In turn, non-Western countries such as Japan have appropriated this claim to construct their own national counter-identity. Once, we are told, Japanese nature was pristine, unspoiled, sacred. Only later came the West, with its factories, steamships, and trains.

Federico Marcon’s The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan meticulously dismantles this mythology. Over the course of thirteen chapters divided into five sections, Marcon argues that Japanese scholars of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) had already embarked on an analogous path toward the rational domination of nature, independent of Western influence. Marcon demonstrates this through the history of Japanese honzōgaku, a field of knowledge which he translates as “nature studies.” Honzōgaku began in early seventeenth-century Japan with the importation of the Chinese pharmacological tradition of bencaoxue. By the nineteenth century, honzōgaku had evolved an ideological structure startlingly similar to Western natural history. In particular, honzōgaku had objectified “nature” as a target of scientific inquiry, reified “nature” as a market commodity, and secularized “nature” as an exploitable resource for economic development. Freeing Adorno and Horkheimer from their Eurocentric trappings, Marcon shows that Japan, too, had its “dialectic of Enlightenment.”

After a literature review, part I surveys Chinese bencaoxue pharmacology. Special attention is reserved for the Bencao gangmu (1596), the most authoritative materia medica of early modern East Asia. Ostensibly a practical aid for physicians to identify substances and their properties, the Bencao gangmu was simultaneously a work of Neo-Confucian philosophy. In its nomenclature and taxonomy, it expressed a belief that the proper naming and classification of nature would reveal a fixed metaphysical hierarchy governing all things.

This tension between utilitarian practice and philosophical metaphysics marked the two poles of the Bencao gangmu’s reception in Japan. Part II covers the early years of this reception in relation to the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate. As a new form of inquiry, honzōgaku became grounds upon which the shogunate and its scholars might stake their cultural legitimacy against entrenched intellectual networks held by Buddhist monks and imperial courtiers. This legitimacy was further enhanced via the publication of numerous reference works based on the Bencao gangmu. Examining these, Marcon shows that Japanese scholars struggled between adapting the Bencao to Japan’s different empirical conditions, on the one hand, and preserving the book’s metaphysical claims, on the other.

Metaphysics lost the battle. This process began under the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (r. 1716–45), who believed honzōgaku instrumental in his plans for agricultural reform. Part III looks at the infrastructure of honzōgaku research established under Yoshimune, including his sponsorship of botanical gardens, his importation of European books on natural history, and his commission of a nation-wide survey of plants and animals. Part IV then considers how market forces in the late-eighteenth century transformed honzōgaku into an engine for the commodification of nature — discussed in urban salons, exhibited in public fairs, and visualized in increasingly elaborate forms. In this way, honzōgaku’s utility came to be prized above its vision of a Neo-Confucian chain of being.

If only latent in the eighteenth century, this break came to be consciously articulated by the 1830s. Part V, Marcon’s final section, details two key indicators of change: the acceptance of Linnaean natural history, and the appropriation of honzōgaku as a handmaiden of political economy. Both of these forces gave rise to an explicitly utilitarian approach to honzōgaku, whose goal thenceforth would be to provide such knowledge that governments might exploit nature as a resource for economic growth. This shift, Marcon suggests, in part laid the ground for Japan’s rapid rise as a modern industrial...