The Patriarch of Dutch Learning Shizuki Tadao (1760-1806). Volume 9 of Journal of the Japan-Netherlands Institute (review)

The ten essays published in this volume to commemorate the life of Shizuki Tadao represent an ambitious scholarly undertaking. Primary sources pertaining to Shizuki's life are scarce and scattered, and we are told that the Japanese secondary literature is biased and seriously flawed. The stated intentions of these essays are to claim a rightful place for Shizuki as the patriarch of Dutch learning and to challenge the place he has been assigned in Japanese historiography.

Given the paucity of verifiable details about Shizuki's life, how might the record be corrected? This reassessment of Shizuki's contribution to Western learning proceeds through a careful scrutiny of various texts: several of Shizuki's translations, writings by his contemporaries, and research by more recent scholars who have determined Shizuki's place in Japanese history.

First, who was Shizuki Tadao? The details are far from clear. The official story, as presented in the chapters by Isabel Tanaka-Van Daalen and Harada Hiroji, proceeds more or less as follows: Shizuki Tadao was born in Nagasaki in 1760 to the merchant family of Nakano and given the name Nakano Ryūho. In 1776 he was formally adopted into the Shizuki family of Nagasaki interpreters, a circumstance that secured for him the office of apprentice interpreter. Contemporary sources indicate that at this time he took the name of Shizuki Chūjirō and became the eighth-generation head of the main branch of the Shizuki family, a hereditary interpreter lineage that served the Tokugawa bakufu continuously from 1643 to 1865. If the expectation was that he would serve as an official interpreter throughout his lifetime and then pass his position on to a chosen descendant, he must have been a disappointment. Within a year, claiming ill health, he resigned his position as an apprentice interpreter. At some point, he took the scholarly name Shizuki Tadao, by which he is generally known, but he also continued to use the name Nakano Ryūho. Following his retirement, he remained in Nagasaki, establishing himself as a private scholar, an occasional teacher, and a translator of thirty-eight Western works on mathematics, astronomy, geography, Dutch language studies, foreign countries, and the international situation.

Several contributors to this volume point out that contemporaneous sources pertaining to these basic facts do not all agree. The crucial matter of Shizuki's retirement is in question: although an official successor to his apprentice interpreter position was appointed in 1776, other records indicate that he continued to serve the interpreter community in some capacity until as late as 1786. It seems clear that he must have continued to develop his Dutch language skills and to profit in other ways from a beneficial association with the Nagasaki interpreters. The validity of the assertion by earlier scholars that Shizuki was a quasi-invalid is also questioned because he lived another thirty years and functioned as a productive scholar and effective teacher.

A number of the essays investigate Shizuki's work as a translator and his contribution to the development of Dutch language studies. The authors accept Shizuki's reputation as the preeminent translator of Dutch writings during his lifetime, and they agree that only by relinquishing his interpreter position could he have become so accomplished. His more famous contemporary, Sugita Genpaku, a leading member of the Edo contingent of Rangaku scholars, would second the high evaluation of Shizuki's linguistic skills: "Ever since the office of the 'Dutch interpreter' was created in our country," Shizuki had been "without equal" (p. 32). According to Honma Sadao and H. de Groot, the Edo scholars were in no position to judge, being far less skilled themselves. In his interesting essay, "Nagasaki Rangaku and the History Textbooks," Honma argues that the Edo scholars deliberately denigrated the superior skills of the Nagasaki interpreters in their efforts at self-promotion. He claims further that...