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Article ID: CBB000930696

Sinophiles and Sinophobes in Tokugawa Japan: Politics, Classicism, and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century (2008)

Elman, Benjamin A. (Author)

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Volume: 2
Pages: 93--121

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Medicine and politics Transmission of texts Medicine, Chinese traditional Medicine and society Medicine and economics Language and languages Cross-national interaction Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence 18th century Edo period (Japan, 1603-1868) China Japan

This article first reviews the political, economic, and cultural context within which Japanese during the Tokugawa era (1600--1866) mastered Kanbun as their elite lingua franca. Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges were based on prestigious classical Chinese texts imported from Ming (1368--1644) and Qing (1644--1911) China via the controlled Ningbo-Nagasaki trade and Kanbun texts sent in the other direction, from Japan back to China. The role of Japanese Kanbun teachers in presenting language textbooks for instruction and the larger Japanese adaptation of Chinese studies in the eighteenth century is then contextualized within a new, socio-cultural framework to understand the local, regional, and urban role of the Confucian teacher--scholar in a rapidly changing Tokugawa society. The concluding part of the article is based on new research using rare Kanbun medical materials in the Fujikawa Bunko at Kyoto University, which show how some increasingly iconoclastic Japanese scholar--physicians (known as the Goiha ) appropriated the late Ming and early Qing revival of interest in ancient Chinese medicine rather than continue to follow more recent Song-Jin-Yua medical practices (Goseiha ) based on Song interpretations of the Huangdi neijing (Yellow Emperor's inner classic). This group favored ancient treatment formulae and empirically based diagnoses, which drew on the Shanghan lun (Treatise of Cold Damage Disorders) as a medical text and Zhang Zhongjing as a pioneering physician. Although many Japanese physicians favored Western medicine (transmitted via Dutch Learning ) over Chinese medicine in the mid-nineteenth century, most in the mid- and late-eighteenth century focused on mastering classical Chinese, and then Ming and Qing medical books entering Nagasaki from China. These new, critical currents of Chinese medicine in Japan provided the impetus later for growing Japanese interest in Dutch Learning and modern Western medicine.

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Description “The concluding part of the article is based on new research using rare Kanbun medical materials.” (from the abstract)

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