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

Modern scholarship on Tokugawa intellectual history has typically focused on ethical, political, religious, and aesthetic thought, an approach that contributes to a picture of the Tokugawa period as governed by “traditional values” that were then radically disrupted by the introduction of Western scientific modes of thinking, starting on the relatively limited scale of Dutch Learning (rangaku) and then permeating Japanese intellectual life more comprehensively after the Meiji Restoration. In The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, Federico Marcon offers a valuable corrective to this view through his analysis of Tokugawa honzōgaku, which he describes as “a scholarly field that encompassed subjects ranging from materia medica and agronomy to natural history” (p. 5). He leaves the term honzōgaku untranslated, which perhaps could be seen as unfriendly to non-Japanese-speaking readers but is ultimately a wise choice given that such possible translations as “herbology” do not adequately convey the scope of the discipline as it was practiced in the Tokugawa period. He sees honzōgaku as following a trajectory analogous to that of premodern natural history in the West and depicts the emergence of modern science in the nineteenth century as a truly global phenomenon, rather than as a simple spread of Western values to the non-Western world. Japan and the West, he argues, went through a similar process of secularization and commodification of the natural world, in which plants and animals lost the religious or metaphysical significance that had been ascribed to them in premodern times and came instead to be seen as “discrete objects to be described, analyzed, consumed, or accumulated in the form of standardized and quantifiable units as products, natural species, or collectibles” (p. 5).

In his methodological preliminaries, Marcon frames his approach to scientific thought against, on the one hand, a naive realist faith in science as a steady march toward perfect knowledge of the objective world of nature and, on the other hand, an extreme postmodernist view of science as a purely social construct with no reference point outside its own discourse. In contrast to these, he defines his own approach as a “critical realist (or critical materialist) stance that conceives of knowledge as an active and mutual making of both the community of inquirers and their objects of study” (p. 16). He describes how honzōgaku in the early Tokugawa period was tied to the emergence of a new class of professional Confucian scholars, for whom it was one scholarly activity among many, and then came to be an independent field of study under the sponsorship of Shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune, who promoted it as part of his agricultural reform program. Later in the Tokugawa period, he writes, honzōgaku became more diverse and eclectic as it was pursued not only for practical utility but also as a popular spectacle and a leisure activity enjoyed by circles of amateurs. Marcon’s analysis of the workings of cultural and social capital within communities of honzōgaku practitioners has similarities to the approach taken to aesthetic networks in Tokugawa Japan by scholars such as Eiko Ikegami, although Marcon has reservations about Ikegami’s definition of such networks as a version of the “public sphere” (p. 181).¹

While the study of medicinal herbs based on Chinese traditions had a long history in Japan, Marcon dates the emergence of a new version of nature studies in Tokugawa Japan to the importation in the early 1600s of the Bencao gangmu, an encyclopedic work on plants and animals that was published in Nanjing in 1596 and that, in addition to being reprinted and studied in Japan, served as an inspiration for encyclopedias of Japanese plants and animals such as Kaibara Ekiken’s Yamato honzō. Marcon describes how the Bencao gangmu uses Zhu Xi’s metaphysical schema in which all things are seen as a combination of material qi and the...