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Article ID: CBB737130212

Making and Using Scientific Instruments in Japan: How Scholars and Craftsmen Cooperated, 1781–1853 (April 2021)

Technology and Culture
Volume: 62
Issue: 2
Pages: 401-422
Publication date: April 2021
Language: English

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/794370

DOI: 10.1353/tech.2021.0059

Publication Date: April 2021
Edition Details: Special Issue: Technology Is Global: The Useful and Reliable Knowledge Debate

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Scientific apparatus and instruments Microscopes Telescopes Technology Crafts and craftspeople 19th century Edo period (Japan, 1603-1868) Japan

This article examines five separate but interrelated cases concerning scientific instruments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan. Instruments like telescopes and clocks were not typically traded goods on the early modern Japanese market, but their use and production show us the inventive activities carried out in later Edo Japan. The first two cases highlight academic activities in Osaka, where scholars, in collaboration with craftsmen, made and used instruments in order to study Western natural sciences. Their activities were possible thanks to wealthy merchants, who promoted the active circulation of things and information. The three other cases are ingenious craftsmen who demonstrate the importance of their contact with academic intellectuals for making and elaborating optical and mechanical instruments. An analysis of their career paths reveals to what extent the goals and outcomes of their inventive activities were constrained and promoted by their social and occupational standing in the feudal society.

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Article Dagmar Schäfer; Simona Valeriani (April 2021) Technology Is Global: The Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate. Technology and Culture (pp. 327-347). unapi

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