The Beginnings of Dutch Learning

Chapter 1: The Old Schools of Dutch Surgery

These days everyone is talking about Dutch learning. People with real ambition study it hard, and people with no learning at all puff it up for all they're worth. When I look back to how it began, it was nothing more than two or three of us, men of my own generation, who happened to take it into our heads to try. That was getting on for fifty years ago. I never dreamed it would come to this. It has flourished in a way I can only call a wonder.

Chinese learning is another story. The court sent envoys to China, the famous missions to the Tang, and sent brilliant monks over the water too, to learn directly from the Chinese themselves and come home and teach everyone, high and low. Of course it flourished. Dutch learning had nothing like that behind it. How, then, did it get to where it is now?

I've turned this over a good deal. Perhaps it's because medicine is taught by pointing at the real thing, so people grasp it quickly. Or perhaps it's because the public thinks Dutch medicine is new and strange and full of marvellous foreign cures, and so sly operators trade on its name to fish for a reputation and shoot for a profit. When I think about how things have gone, past and present, it seems to me to begin like this.

In the Tenshō and Keichō years, the late 1500s and early 1600s, Westerners began bringing their ships to our western coasts. Openly they came to trade. Secretly they came for something else they wanted. Trouble came of it, and from its founding the present government banned them as strictly as it has ever banned anything, as everyone knows. Of their wicked religion I know nothing, so I'll say nothing. But the surgery handed down from the doctors who sailed on those ships survives here and there, and this is what people call the Southern Barbarian school.

At about the same time the Dutch ships were given permission to put in at Hirado in Hizen. When all the other foreign ships were banned, the Dutch were allowed to go on coming, because there were reasons for holding that they were not of the same party. Thirty-three years after Hirado, the Southern Barbarians were driven out of Dejima at Nagasaki and the Dutch were moved into the place they left, in the eighteenth year of Kan'ei, 1641, I'm told. From then on the Dutch ship has come into Nagasaki harbour every year.

Many of the doctors who came on those ships passed on their ways of treating injuries and sores, and this is what people call the Dutch school of surgery. Of course nobody learned it by reading books in that sideways writing. People only watched the operations and copied them, and wrote down the prescriptions as they heard them. And since many of the drugs didn't exist here, it's plain they treated their patients mostly with substitutes.

Around then a surgical family arose called the Nishi school. It began with a man named Nishi Kichibei, an interpreter for the Southern Barbarian ships, who learned their medicine and practised it on people. When those ships were banned from the port he became an interpreter for the Dutch instead and picked up their medicine as well. Since he combined the two, the Southern Barbarian and the Dutch, he called his school "both schools", and the world called it the Nishi school. It was a great rarity in those days, so it was much in demand and his name was high, which may be why he was later appointed one of the shogun's physicians and took the name Master Genpo. His son, Master Sōshun, was sickly and died young, and the line came to an end. That family taught my own grandfather, old Hosen. The physician appointed after him, Master Gentetsu, grandfather of the Lord Gentetsu of today, came of a nephew's line from Master Genpo. Master Genpo was the first to proclaim himself a practitioner of Western medicine, and since the government made use of him, that was the beginning of Dutch medicine in the shogun's service.

Then there was the Kurisaki school. Its founder had Southern Barbarian blood. Their wicked sect had been strictly banned and their ships forbidden to cross, but in earlier days those people had lived side by side with ours at Hirado and Nagasaki, taken wives and had children. In time this too was looked into, and every child of barbarian blood was sent out of the country without exception. One of them, of the Kurisaki family, was named Dō. He grew up over there, but he never joined their religion. He studied their medicine instead, and because he had kept out of the sect he was pardoned and called home. Back in Nagasaki his art was in great demand, for he was extremely skilful, and his school came to be called the Kurisaki school. His name Dō, I'm told, is their barbarian word for dew. Later he fitted characters to it and wrote it Dōyū. Whether the Kurisaki who is a shogun's physician today is his heir or a branch house, I don't know for certain. The Yoshida school, the Narabayashi school and so on were opened by Dutch interpreters who learned the Dutch methods and set up as teachers.

As for the Katsuragawa family: five generations back from the present head was Master Hochiku, who was taken into service as a surgeon while His Highness Ienobu was still a provincial lord and not yet shogun. Hochiku's teacher was a physician to the lord of Hirado named Arashiyama Hoan, whom that lord had placed with the Dutch surgeons living at Dejima so that he could learn from them firsthand. The Hirado house had particular reasons for its closeness to the Dutch, going back to the days when their ships first put in at Hirado, and could deal with them freely. Perhaps, too, things were not so strict then as they are today. Hochiku was a boy when he became Hoan's pupil, and he went along with him to Dejima from time to time and took over Arashiyama's methods entire. The Dutch surgeons, I've heard, were named Daniel and Armans. The Katsuragawa were originally a Yamato family named Morishima. Since the Katsura River flows at the foot of Arashiyama, Hochiku changed his family name to Katsuragawa, meaning that he drew his water from the Arashiyama stream. All this I heard from the present Lord Katsuragawa's grandfather, Master Hosan, who was a close friend of mine when I was young. This is what the world calls the Katsuragawa school.

There has also been, from long ago, a school of surgery called the Caspar school. In the twentieth year of Kan'ei, 1643, a Dutch ship drifted into Yamada Bay in Nanbu, and some of her crew were summoned to Edo. Among them was a surgeon named Caspar, who was kept here three or four years, and some people were set to learn his treatments before he was eventually sent on to Nagasaki. Both in Edo and in Nagasaki, in the Shōhō years, the later 1640s, there were treatments said to come down from this Caspar, and I suppose it's those, though nobody knows the details, that came to be called the Caspar school. Or perhaps another surgeon named Caspar came over at some other time.

Besides these, in Nagasaki there was what people called the Yoshio school, which had treatments handed down from Dutchmen who came later. When I look at the secret manuals these families pass down, they're all recipes for plasters and nothing more. They are thin, every one of them. Still, for practical results they were far ahead of Chinese surgery, and far ahead of the ways of treating injuries handed down in our own country since ancient times.

Among them I once saw a book on sword wounds from the Narabayashi family. It said there was something in the human body called a seimen, a vital thing on which life depends. Looking at it now, I think that was the Dutch zenuw, the nerve, the thing for which our translation later made up the word shinkei, from "spirit" and "channel". Small as it is, that book is the first place where even that much was written down.

From the founding of the government, Western matters had been strictly forbidden one and all, for reasons I've given. That is why even with the Dutch, who were permitted to sail here, reading and writing their sideways script was forbidden. The interpreters had nothing but their notes in our own katakana, and memory. They carried what they knew in their heads and did their interpreting for the government that way, year after year. Under those conditions nobody at all wanted to learn to read the sideways writing.

But everything opens and comes into order of itself when its time arrives. In the days of the shogun Yoshimune, three Dutch interpreters in Nagasaki, Nishi Zenzaburō, Yoshio Kōzaemon, and one other whose name I've forgotten, put their heads together. "In the interpreters' houses we handle all the government's business," they said, "and we don't know their letters. We interpret only from words we've learned by heart. We get through all these tangled affairs, but only just, and it's too thin a way to work. What if we asked for permission for the three of us at least to learn the letters and read their books? Then everything would be clear in future, and the government's business would go better. As things stand, if the Dutch lied to us or cheated us, we'd have no way to find it out." And the three of them laid the matter before the government and begged for permission. It was granted. Such a reasonable request, it was said, that they received leave at once. That, I'm told, was the beginning of the study of the sideways writing, a hundred years and more after the Dutch first came.

Now that they could learn the letters, Nishi Zenzaburō and the others first borrowed a dictionary from the Dutch called the Konstwoord and copied it out three times over. The Dutch were so impressed by their energy that they gave the book to Nishi outright. Word of all this seems to have reached the shogun, who had never seen a Dutch book. He gave orders that one be brought to him, any one at all, and an illustrated book of some kind was sent up. When he had looked through it he said, "The pictures alone are extremely precise. If someone could read what it says, there are bound to be useful, detailed things in it. Somebody in Edo ought to learn this." And so for the first time the order went to two men, the physician Noro Genjō and the Confucian scholar Aoki Bunzō.

From then on the two of them set their minds to it. But all they could do was ask the interpreters who came up with the Dutch each spring for the yearly audience, in the few days they stayed, and those days were crowded, with no spare moment in them. There was no chance of studying properly. They kept at it for years, and all they managed in the end was words: zon, sun; maan, moon; sterre, star; hemel, heaven; aarde, earth; mens, man; draak, dragon; tijger, tiger; pruimboom, plum tree; bamboes, bamboo. That, and learning to write the twenty-five letters. And yet that was the source of it. That was where Dutch learning began in Edo.

Chapter 2: Ryōtaku, and a Warning

Now, I had a friend named Maeno Ryōtaku, physician to the lord of Nakatsu in Buzen. He lost his parents as a small child and was brought up by his uncle, Miyata Zentaku, a physician to the lord of Yodo. Zentaku was a man of wide learning, but an eccentric by nature, whose tastes in everything ran differently from other people's, and the way he raised Ryōtaku was out of the ordinary too. "If there's an art the world is about to let die," he used to tell him, "learn it, so that it won't be lost for those who come after. If there's something everyone has given up and stopped doing, do it, for the world's sake, so that it survives." Sure enough, Ryōtaku grew up true to that teaching, an eccentric of the first water himself. He worked hard at medicine and followed the school of Yoshimasu Tōdō in his practice. Among the polite arts, he took up the hitoyogiri, a kind of bamboo flute nobody played any more, and mastered even its secret pieces. And, funnier still, when he heard there were meetings for performing the old Saruwaka comic plays, he went along to take lessons in that as well.

It was this taste for the unusual that took him to the door of Aoki Bunzō, to learn the Dutch letters and a word or two of the language. (Judging by a book he wrote later, the Ran'yakusen, it started even earlier than that. A retired gentleman of his domain named Saka Kōō showed him a torn fragment of a Dutch book one day and asked whether it was the kind of thing a person could read and understand. Ryōtaku borrowed it and thought it over long and hard. Countries differ, he decided, and so do their tongues, but these are all things people have made, and what people have made, people can surely work out. He set his heart on it, then, and was only sorry that he had no way to get a hold on it. Then he happened to hear that Master Aoki had a command of this learning, and so he became his pupil and studied it, and received from him books such as the Short Account of the Dutch Letters, and wrote down whatever the master had learned and knew.) This seems to have been after Master Aoki came back from Nagasaki. I think it was in the Enkyō years, the 1740s, that Aoki went there. Ryōtaku became his pupil at the end of Hōreki or the beginning of Meiwa, around 1764, when he was past forty. I believe he was the first ordinary physician to study it, as opposed to men acting on the shogun's orders.

All the same, in those days ordinary people were wary of dabbling in sideways writing. A man named Gotō Rishun, who was what people called a herbalist, had collected what he'd seen and heard about Dutch things into a little book in plain Japanese called Talks on the Red-Haired People and had it printed. It included the twenty-five Dutch letters cut into the block, and that drew a reprimand from somewhere, and the blocks were destroyed, or so I've heard.

Later on there was a man named Yasutomi Kiseki, physician to the lord of Yamagata, who lived in Kōjimachi. He'd gone to study in Nagasaki and learned the twenty-five letters there, and had someone spell out the forty-seven sounds of our own alphabet in them for him, and brought that home, and went about boasting to everyone that he could read their books. Even I thought that was something remarkable. Nakagawa Jun'an, who served my own lord and lived in a rented house in Kōjimachi, first learned the Dutch letters from this man.

I had no idea at the time whether Ryōtaku was seriously interested in Dutch things. It was long ago and I've forgotten the year, but perhaps early in Meiwa, around 1765. One spring, when the Dutch came up to Edo for their yearly audience as usual, Ryōtaku called on me.

"Where are you off to?" I asked.

"I'm going to the Dutch inn today," he said, "to see the interpreters and ask them about Holland, and if it goes well, ask them some Dutch words too."

I was still young then and full of the hot blood of youth, the age when anything new catches your fancy. "Please take me with you," I said. "I'd like to try asking them too."

"Nothing easier," he said, and we went to the inn together.

That year the chief interpreter who came up was a man named Nishi Zenzaburō. Ryōtaku introduced me and explained what we wanted. Zenzaburō heard us out and said, "You really mustn't. Shall I tell you why? Learning their words so that you understand them is a hard thing. Suppose you want to ask how they say 'drink', water or hot water or sake. At first there's no way to ask except by gestures. To ask what 'drinking sake' is, you take up a teacup, act out pouring it, put it to your lips and say, 'What's this?' He nods and teaches you drinken. That's 'to drink'. Now, suppose you want to ask the difference between a man who loves his drink and a man who doesn't. There's no gesture for that. You can show the difference between drinking a lot and drinking a little. But some people drink a great deal and don't care for sake, and some people drink a little and love it. That's a matter of feeling, and there's nothing you can act out for it.

"Their word for liking something is aantrekken. I was born into an interpreter's family and grew up with all this from childhood, and I never knew what that word really meant. I'm fifty now, and only on this journey up to Edo did I finally understand it. Aan means 'toward', and trekken means 'to pull'. To pull toward is to draw something over there to your own side. A man who loves his sake wants to pull it over toward himself. That's what it means to like a thing. And when you're homesick they say the same, because you want to pull your home over to where you are.

"That's how tiresome it is, trying to learn more of their language. Even we, who deal with the Dutch morning and night, find it hard enough to get it right. For you gentlemen to think of learning it while living in Edo is out of the question. Why, Master Noro and Master Aoki come to this inn every year on official orders and work at it harder than anyone, and they still don't really understand it. You'd do better to leave it alone too."

That was his advice. I don't know how Ryōtaku took it. But I was born impatient. I listened, and thought he was quite right, and that I didn't have the stamina to see through anything as tiresome as that, and that wasting days and months on it would be pointless. I came home with no intention of studying it at all.

Chapter 3: Wonders off the Dutch Ships

Somewhere around that time people began, without anyone quite deciding it, to treat whatever came over on the Dutch ship as a rare treasure. Anyone with the least reputation as a connoisseur collected their imported marvels, a few or a great many, and doted on them. This was especially so while the late Lord of Sagara, Tanuma Okitsugu, held power, when the whole world was at the height of show and luxury. Year after year the ship brought every sort of instrument: the weerglas for telling the weather, the thermometer for heat and cold, the donderglas for thunder, the one they called a hoctometer, for how heavy and clear a liquid is, the donkere kamer, a dark box that casts a picture, the toverlantaarn that throws ghosts on a wall, the zonglas for looking at the sun, the roeper that carries the voice a long way. Then there were clocks of all kinds, telescopes and glasswork, more than you could count. People were thrilled by the cleverness of these things and full of admiration for the subtle reasoning behind them, and so every spring, while the Dutch were in Edo, crowds would gather at their inn.

I've forgotten the year, but it must have been Meiwa 4 or 5, 1767 or so, when the captain who came up was Jan Crans, with a surgeon named Babul. Crans was a learned man, and Babul, I was told, a skilful surgeon. The chief interpreter, Yoshio Kōzaemon, had made this Babul his particular teacher. (Kōzaemon later called himself Kōsaku, and took the art-name Kōgyū.) Kōzaemon had a great name as a surgeon, and men from all over the western provinces went down to Nagasaki to study with him. He came up with the Dutch that year too. I'd heard all about him, so I became his pupil at once and studied his methods, and went to the inn every day.

One day I watched Babul treat a young medical student named Kawahara Genhaku for an abscess on his tongue, and bleed him as well. What a master he was! He worked out in advance how far the blood would spurt and set the basin to catch it a good way off, and the jet of blood landed right in it. That was the first bloodletting ever done in Edo.

I was young then and full of energy, and I went to the inn without fail all the time they were there. One day Kōzaemon brought out a rare book to show me. It was the Chirurgie of Heister, he said, a book on surgery, brought over for the first time the year before. He had wanted it badly and got it in exchange for twenty casks of sake. When I opened it I couldn't read a word, not one line. But when I looked at the plates, they were nothing like our books or the Chinese. The drawings were so exact and so fine that just looking at them made my mind feel as if a window had opened. And I borrowed the book for a while, thinking I'd at least copy the pictures, and worked at it day and night, and finished before they left. There were nights I kept at it till the cock crowed.

Another year, I've forgotten which, Kōzaemon came up with the Dutch again, and at the Nakatsu residence the mother of Lord Okudaira Masaka had an accident in her own rooms and broke her shin. With a great lady involved, the house was in an uproar and physicians were sent for on every side. As luck would have it, Yoshio Kōzaemon was in Edo just then, and he was called at once and ordered to treat her, and she made a good recovery. Ryōtaku, as a physician of that household, was assigned to work with him, and the two became good friends. You could count this as one of the things that opened the way for Dutch learning.

After that, when Ryōtaku went to Nakatsu in his lord's train, he begged the lord's leave to go on down to Nagasaki. There he studied under Yoshio, Narabayashi and others for about a hundred days, giving himself to Dutch day and night. He took the words in a book called the Ruigo, which he had studied earlier with Master Aoki, as his base, went over it, corrected it and added to it, and came away with a little over seven hundred words. He also took notes on their letters and how their sentences go, in rough, and brought them home, and bought some Dutch books before he came back to Edo. He was the first man ever to go to Nagasaki not to train in surgery but to learn what their books said.

Gradually the world came to know that the Dutch were expert in medicine and in all sorts of arts and crafts, and people's minds began to change without their noticing. From about this time those of the shogun's physicians who had an interest in it would apply each year for what were called "interviews", go to the inn, and ask about treatments and remedies. The astronomers asked about their own trade in the same way. In those days a pupil of such a gentleman could go along with him freely, so people went in and out calling themselves his pupils. Nagasaki has its standing rules, and you can't go into the Dutch lodgings as you please. But in Edo it was only for a short time, so things were naturally relaxed.

There was a masterless samurai in those days named Hiraga Gennai. By trade he was a herbalist, a man born with a quick mind and a ready wit, just the type the times liked. In one of the years Captain Crans came up, there was a party one day at the inn, with a crowd of guests, and Gennai was among them. Crans, for fun, brought out a pouch. "Try to open this," he said. "Whoever opens it can have it." The mouth of it was fastened with a puzzle ring. It was passed from guest to guest, and every one of them tried this and that, and nobody could open it. At last it came to Gennai in the lowest seat. He took it in his hands and thought for a little while, and then all at once he had it open. Never mind the other guests: Crans himself was so struck by his quickness that he gave him the pouch on the spot.

From then on the two were very friendly, and Gennai went to the inn again and again to ask about natural products. Another day Crans brought out something shaped like a go stone, which he called a slangensteen, a snake stone. Gennai asked what it was good for and went home, and the next day he came back with one he'd made himself and showed it to Crans. Crans looked at it and said it was the same thing as the one he'd shown him.

"Is the one you showed me a product of your own country," Gennai asked, "or did you buy it abroad?"

"I got it in Ceylon, in the Indies," said Crans.

"And where does it come from, in that country?"

"What they say there is that it's a stone that grows inside the head of a great snake."

"That can't be so," said Gennai. "It must be made from dragon bone."

"There's no such thing in the world as a dragon," said Crans. "How could anyone make something from its bones?"

At that Gennai brought out a big piece of dragon bone with a dragon tooth still attached, which had come from Shōdoshima in his home province of Sanuki. "This is dragon bone," he said. "The Chinese book called the Bencao Gangmu says that the snake sheds its skin and the dragon sheds its bones. The snake stone I've just shown you is made from this bone."

Crans was astonished, and more impressed than ever by his extraordinary gifts. He asked for a copy of the Bencao Gangmu and got the dragon bone from Gennai to take home, and in return he gave him Jonston's book of birds and beasts, Dodoens's herbal, the book of shells from Amboina, and other books useful to a student of natural things. None of this, mind you, was settled by talking face to face. It was all managed through the junior interpreters who came along with the party, who got the gist across. Not a single word was understood directly. Later Gennai went travelling down to Nagasaki and bought Dutch books and instruments, and brought back to Edo a strange machine called an elekiter. He worked out bit by bit how it was used, and amazed everybody.

Chapter 4: The Book from Holland

That was how the fashion went. Nobody could really be said to understand anything about the West, but somehow people stopped feeling they had to be careful about it. Nobody had ever been formally permitted to own Dutch books, but now and then a man would have one, and that came to seem quite ordinary.

Nakagawa Jun'an, a physician who served my own lord, was devoted to herbalism and keen on the Dutch study of natural products as well. He shared that interest with Master Tamura Ransui and his son Seiko, and he used to visit the Dutch interpreters who came up every spring. In the spring of Meiwa 8, 1771, as I remember, he came back from the inn with two books of pictures and descriptions of the inside of the body, the Tafel Anatomia and the Casparis Anatomia. Someone there had said he'd let them go to anyone who wanted them, so Jun'an brought them home and showed them to me.¹

Of course I couldn't read a word. But the organs and the bones were drawn completely differently from anything I'd ever seen or heard of, and I knew at once that these pictures had been drawn from life. I wanted the book more than I can say. Besides, my own family had always called itself a house of Dutch-school surgery, so I felt I ought at least to have it in my book box. But my household was very hard up in those days, and buying it was beyond me. In the end I took it to one of the elders of our domain, a man named Oka Shinzaemon, and explained the situation, and said I wished I could buy the book, but there was nothing to be done when the money wasn't there.

"Would it be any use, if you bought it?" Shinzaemon asked. "If it would, I'll see that the price is paid from above."

"I can't promise you it certainly will," I said. "But I'll make it of use, whatever happens, and show you."

A man named Kokura Zaemon, who later changed his name to Aono, happened to be sitting beside him. "Do get it for him, please," he put in. "Sugita isn't a man to let a thing like that go to waste."

And it went through without any trouble at all, just as I'd hoped. That was the first Dutch book I ever owned.

Whenever I met Hiraga Gennai and the like, we'd talk it over. "Everything we keep seeing and hearing about the Dutch way of measuring things and reasoning them out is astonishing," we'd say. "If we could translate their books straight into our own language, we'd be certain to get enormous good from it. It's a shame nobody has ever set his heart on that. Isn't there some way to open this road? It's beyond anything we could do here in Edo. We'd have to get the interpreters in Nagasaki to read the books for us. If we could manage even one book, it would be a great gain for the whole country." And we'd sigh at how far out of reach it was, every time. But all we ever did was sigh.

And then, by a strange chance, I'd got hold of one of their books of anatomy. My first thought was to compare its pictures with the real thing. Truly the time had come for this learning to open. That the book fell into my hands that very spring I can only call uncanny, or wonderful. It was the night of the third day of the third month, as I remember, when a note came from a man named Tokunō Manbei, a retainer of the city magistrate, Lord Magaribuchi of Kai. A house physician, one So-and-so, it said, was going to take a body apart tomorrow at Kotsugahara in Senju. If I wished, I should go there.

Now, some time before this a colleague of mine, a man named Kosugi Genteki, had gone to study in Kyoto under Master Yamawaki Tōyō. While he was there Master Tōyō had arranged to look at the inside of a body, and Genteki went along and saw it with his own eyes. All the theories of the ancients, he said, were empty talk, not to be believed. In remotest antiquity they had spoken of nine organs. The division into five solid organs and six hollow ones that we use now was a careless invention of later men. That was the kind of thing he told us. Master Tōyō had brought out a book on it at the time, the Record of the Organs. I'd read it, so I'd been thinking that if a good chance came I'd like to look at the inside of a body myself. And now I had this Dutch book of anatomy, newly in my hands. I could hold it up against the real thing and find out which was true. I was overjoyed at my luck, and my heart leapt up at the thought of going.

It wasn't a piece of luck I ought to keep to myself, though. Among my friends there were men as devoted to our trade as I was, and I thought I should let them know, so that we could all see it together and help each other in our work. And I sent word to my colleague Nakagawa Jun'an first, and to this man and that, and I wanted to tell Ryōtaku too.

Ryōtaku was ten years or so older than I was, a man of the older generation. We knew each other, but ordinarily we rarely called on one another and weren't close. Still, we each knew how seriously the other took medicine, and he was not a man to be left out of a thing like this. I wanted to send word to him first of all. But it was all very sudden, and on top of that the Dutch were in town and I'd been at their inn, so it was already night, and I had no means of getting a message to him in a hurry. I didn't know what to do. Then on the spur of the moment I wrote a note and stopped at the house of a friend, and between us we hired a street palanquin man who was waiting by the ward gate at Honkokuchō, and sent him off with it. "Tomorrow morning such and such is happening," I wrote. "If you'd like to come, be at the teahouse at the far end of Sanya-machi in Asakusa early in the morning. I'll wait for you there." I told the man to leave the note at the house and come away without waiting for an answer.

Chapter 5: The Execution Ground at Kotsugahara

The next morning I got ready early and went to the teahouse. Ryōtaku was there, and all my other friends had come too, and came out to meet me. Then Ryōtaku took a Dutch book out of the front of his robe and opened it to show us. "This is a Dutch book of anatomy called the Tafel Anatomia," he said. "I bought it when I went to Nagasaki some years ago, and I've kept it at home ever since."

I looked, and it was the very same book, the same edition, as the one that had just come into my hands. What a coincidence! We clapped our hands at it.

Ryōtaku opened the book and showed us what he'd learned and been told in Nagasaki. "This is long, the lungs," he said, pointing. "This is hart, the heart. What they call maag is the stomach, and milt is the spleen." But the pictures looked nothing like the Chinese drawings, and every one of us was privately wondering what we'd find until we'd seen for ourselves.

From there we all went on together to the place that had been got ready at Kotsugahara for viewing the body. The cutting was to be done by an outcaste named Toramatsu, who was said to be good at this work, and it had been arranged beforehand that he would wield the knife that day. But on the day he suddenly fell ill, and his grandfather came in his place, an old butcher who was said to be ninety years old. He was a hale old man. He told us that he'd taken bodies apart many times since he was young, and had opened up several people.²

Up to that day, he said, what people called a dissection had meant leaving everything to the outcaste. He would point to some place and say it was the lungs, or cut something out and show it and say it was the kidneys. The men who'd gone to watch would look on, and go home, and say they had seen the inside of a body with their own eyes, and that was all there was to it. Of course the organs don't come with their names written on them, so people settled for whatever the butcher pointed out. That had been the custom until then.

That day the old butcher pointed to this and that. Besides the heart, the liver, the gall bladder and the stomach, he pointed to things that had no names. "I don't know what they're called," he said, "but I've opened up a good few since I was young, and whichever belly I've looked in, there's this here and that there." When we checked them against the plates, they turned out to be the two great trunks of the vessels that carry the blood, and the small kidneys, the little glands that sit on top of the kidneys, though that only became clear to us later.

"All the times I've done this," the old man went on, "I've shown the doctors all sorts of things, and not one of them ever asked me what this was or what that was."

Ryōtaku and I held up the Dutch plates we'd both brought and compared them with what we saw, and not one thing differed in the slightest. There were no six lobes and two ears to the lungs, as the old medical classics describe them, and no three lobes on the left of the liver and four on the right. The position and shape of the stomach and the bowels were completely different from the old accounts too. Okada Yōsen and Fujimoto Rissen, both of them physicians to the shogun, had watched seven or eight dissections by then, I've heard, and every time what they saw was at odds with what had been taught for a thousand years, so that each time they were left baffled and doubting. Each time they had drawn what looked to them like abnormalities, and I've seen a book they wrote that wonders, after long thought, whether Chinese bodies and the bodies of us outlanders might simply be built differently. This must be why.

When the dissection was over for the day, we decided that while we were at it we ought to look at the shape of the skeleton as well. And we picked up some of the bones that lay bleaching in the open on the execution ground and examined them one after another. They too were different from the old accounts, and agreed with the Dutch plates in every point. We could only stare and marvel.

The executed body that day was an old woman of about fifty, said to have committed a grave crime. She had been born in Kyoto, and people had called her by the nickname Aocha-baba, "Old Lady Green Tea".

On the way home Ryōtaku, Jun'an and I walked together, and we talked as we went. "Every single thing we saw today was astonishing," we said. "And it's shameful that we never realised it before. Here we are, serving our lords by the art of medicine, and we didn't even know the true form of the human body, which ought to be the foundation of that art. We've gone on doing our work day after day without it. It's a disgrace. If we could base ourselves on what we saw today, and practise medicine knowing the truth about the body even roughly, we might have some excuse for making our way in the world by this trade." We all sighed over it together, and Ryōtaku said he felt exactly the same.

Then I said, "Somehow or other, if we could make a fresh translation of this Tafel Anatomia, everything about the body inside and out would become clear, and it would do enormous good in treating patients today. I'd like to find a way to read it without borrowing the interpreters' hands."

"For years now," said Ryōtaku, "I've wished I could read Dutch books, but I had no good friend who shared the wish. All I've done is lament it and let the days go by. If you gentlemen really want this, well, I went to Nagasaki some years ago and I remember a little Dutch. Shall we use that as our seed and start reading it together?"

"Nothing could make me happier," I said. "If you'll join forces with us, I'll make up my mind to it here and now and give it everything I have."

Ryōtaku was delighted to hear it. "There's a saying, 'don't wait to do a good deed,'" he said. "Come to my house tomorrow, all of you. We'll find a way somehow." And we gave each other our solemn word, and that day we parted and each of us went home.

Chapter 6: A Ship Without a Rudder

The next day we gathered at Ryōtaku's house, talked over the day before, and then sat down in front of the Tafel Anatomia. It was exactly like setting out on the open sea in a ship with neither oar nor rudder. Everywhere we looked there was nothing but water, with nothing to steer by, and all we could do was sit there, at our wits' end.

Ryōtaku, though, had had this in mind for years. He'd been all the way to Nagasaki and picked up some Dutch, a few words and a little of how their sentences hang together, and he was our senior by ten years besides. That is why we made him the head of our band and looked up to him as our teacher. As for me, I hadn't even learned the twenty-five letters. I'd jumped into the thing on impulse, and I learned the letters, and then the words, a little at a time.

Then we talked over how to make a start on the book. The inside of the body would surely be impossible to work out at first. But at the very beginning of the book there were plates of the whole body, front and back. Those showed the outside, and the names of the parts were all things we knew already, so matching the labels on the pictures with the words in the text ought to be a fairly easy place to get a grip. And since they were the first plates in the book anyway, we decided to start there. That became the section of our New Book of Anatomy, the Kaitai Shinsho, called "The Names of the Parts of the Body".

In those days we couldn't make head or tail of the little words, de and het, als and welke and the like. Even where we remembered a word or two here and there, we understood nothing of what came before or after it. A sentence like "The eyebrow is the hair that grows above the eye", say, stayed hazy all through a long spring day. We'd puzzle over it until dark, glaring at one another, and still not understand a line of print an inch or two long.

Another day we came to the nose, where the book said it was something that was verheffend. We didn't know the word. We wondered and wondered what it could mean, and there was nothing we could do. There was no woordenboek, no dictionary, in those days. The only thing we had was a little abridged book that Ryōtaku had bought in Nagasaki, and when we looked it up there, the note on verheffend read, as far as we could make out, that when you cut a branch off a tree, the place where it was cut becomes verheffend, and that when you sweep a garden the dust and dirt collect and become verheffend. What could that mean? We forced our minds at it as usual, and still couldn't see it.

Then a thought came to me. When the place where a branch was cut off heals, it swells up into a lump. When you sweep and the dust collects, it makes a heap. The nose stands up out of the middle of the face. Verheffend, then, must mean "heaped up". "Then why don't we translate the word as 'heaped up'?" I said. Everyone agreed that this was exactly right, and that "heaped up" was the correct translation, and so it was settled. My joy at that moment was beyond anything I can compare it to. I felt as if I'd been handed the jade disc a king of Qin once offered fifteen walled cities for.³

In ways like this we fixed our translated words, and their number grew, little by little. Ryōtaku added to the notebook of words he had already made. Some things, though, like the word zinnen, the mind, were quite beyond our understanding. "These may come clear in time," we said. "Let's put a mark on them for now." And we drew a cross inside a circle and set it down in our notes. That mark looks like the crest called the bridle-bit cross, and in those days we called whatever we didn't know a "bridle-bit cross". At every meeting we talked over this and that, and when we hit something that wouldn't come clear however hard we thought, we'd say, out of sheer misery, "There's another bridle-bit cross! A bridle-bit cross!"

Still, as the saying goes, what must be done is up to people, and whether it succeeds is up to Heaven. We wore out our brains and sweated over it, six or seven meetings a month. On the fixed days nobody missed, and nobody needed asking. We gathered, talked it over and read it out together, and truly, as they say, a heart in earnest isn't left in the dark for long. After about a year our stock of translated words had grown, and as we read we came to understand how things were in that country without trying to. Later on we could manage ten lines a day or more of the easier passages without any great trouble. We also checked things with the interpreters who came up every spring. Meanwhile there were human dissections now and then, and we took animals apart to compare with the book many times.

Chapter 7: The New Book of Anatomy

While we kept at our meetings without a break, others of like mind gradually joined us. Each had his own aims, and they weren't all the same. As for me, once I'd got that Dutch book of anatomy and checked it against the real thing, and seen with my own eyes how East and West had differed for a thousand years, I wanted to make it of use in treating the sick, and to plant a seed of discovery in the work of every doctor in the land. My one wish was to make this single book usable as soon as I possibly could, and I wanted nothing else. Whatever we'd worked out at a day's meeting, I translated that same night and wrote up as a draft. Then I went over and over the way it was put, every way I could think of. In four years I rewrote that draft eleven times before it was ready to go to the block-cutter, and at last the translation of A New Book of Anatomy was finished.

It was in Edo, then, that this learning began. We gave the old word for cutting open a body a new translated name, kaitai, "taking the body apart", and among our circle someone, nobody remembers who, first started calling it rangaku, Dutch learning. It's a name that has since become the ordinary word for it everywhere in Japan. That was the very first arrow shot, the start of everything that has flourished since. When I think about it now: for two hundred years their surgery had been handed down here, but nobody had ever translated one of their medical books directly. And that this beginning of ours, against every likelihood, should have started with a book on the inside of the body, which is the great foundation and first principle of all medicine, was something we came to without planning it. I can only call it the will of Heaven.

Looking back over the way we came: before we'd finished the new book, we'd been working at it like this for two or three years, and as we slowly came to understand how things fit together, it was like eating sugar cane, which gets sweeter the further down you chew. We got our teeth into that sweetness, and the errors of a thousand years were coming undone, and we were getting things truly straight at last. It was such a joy that I'd wait for the meeting day from the night before, longing for the dawn like a child who's going to a festival.

Edo being the showy, fashionable place it is, other people heard about us and joined our circle because everyone else was. When I think of the men of those days, whether they saw it through or not, most of them are names in the register of the dead now. Mine Shuntai and Karasuyama Shōen, for instance, worked very hard, and they're gone. My colleague Jun'an lived to see the new book printed, but died before he was fifty. Of the men who came and went in those days, the one still living is Kiriyama Shōtetsu, the physician of Hirosaki, though he was a good deal younger than I am.

In those days the people who understood how solid our work was were the exception. Those who knew nothing of it were often deeply suspicious and full of doubt. And even among the men who came to us, there were many whose work didn't make headway. It was tiresome stuff with nothing certain at the end of it, and they ran out of strength altogether. Or else they were men pressed hard by the need to earn a living, who got tired of seeing no results, or had no choice but to give up halfway. Others who were keen enough were sickly and couldn't carry it through, and a great many died young.

Lord Katsuragawa Hoshū, who was at our meetings from the very beginning, was brilliant by nature, gifted beyond the common run, and quicker than anyone to grasp the words and sentences in every respect. He was still only a youth, and the whole circle praised him as a young man of great promise. Of course his family had been the shogun's surgeons of the Dutch school for generations, and his father, Lord Hosan, had learned from Master Aoki the twenty-five letters of the ABC and a few Dutch words besides. Perhaps because he'd heard these and picked them up, and so had a little grounding already, he never showed any sign of boredom and attended every single meeting.

The members of our band gathered like this at every meeting, but each had different aims, and that is only human. Take first Ryōtaku, our leader. A man of rare and unusual gifts, he made this learning his life's work. His great ambition was to master their language completely, use it to learn about the West, and be able to read any book of theirs whatever. What he set his sights on above all was to understand a woordenboek, one of their great dictionaries, like our Chinese dictionary of the Kangxi emperor. And so he disliked mixing much with the fashionable crowd.

(Among the ways Heaven helped this learning to open, one was this. Ryōtaku gave out that he was sickly by nature, and from about this time he kept his door shut and never went out, nor mixed with people more than he must. His one pleasure, and the way he passed his days, was this work. His lord, Lord Masaka, understood very well what his heart was set on, and said that the man had always been an odd one, and didn't take him to task for it. Even so, since he was neglecting his duties, someone reported to the lord that he was slack in his service. The lord said: "Treating the sick day by day is service. But to work for the sake of that art, so as to do something in the end that will benefit the people of the realm and of ages to come, is also doing his duty, neither more nor less. He seems to have something he's after. Leave him to follow his bent." And he let him be altogether. Around that time, indeed, the lord bought him books on internal medicine, the Praktijk of a man called Poisen and others, stamped his own seal in the margins and gave them to him. Ryōtaku's art-name had been Rakuzan, but in his later years he called himself Ranka, which he said was a name his lord had given him long ago. It came from the lord's habit of teasing that Ryōtaku was a "Dutch changeling", Oranda no bakemono, for ka is the "change" in "changeling". That was how much his lord favoured him, and so Ryōtaku could pursue his studies exactly as he liked. Many fashionable people joined in because everyone else was doing it, and not a few dropped out, tired of how slow the beginning was. But this master stayed the same all his life, as if it were all one day, firm and unshaken, and I think that's why some of those who came to us have carried the work through, as it stands today. It must be that he happened to live at the very moment when this was due to open.)

Nakagawa Jun'an had always loved the study of natural products, and what he wanted was to work at this so as to learn about the plants and minerals of foreign countries too. (He also had a taste for ingenious machines and clever devices, and worked out not a few new ones himself. He began translating a Dutch pharmacopoeia but never finished it, and early in the Tenmei years, the 1780s, he fell ill with a disease that closed his gullet and passed from the world.) Lord Katsuragawa never seemed to have any particular goal, but coming of the family he did, as I've said, he simply took to the work. He was young and full of energy, and came to every meeting and joined in.

I was quite different from all of them. I had looked into a body for the first time, held it up against the Dutch plates and been astonished to find a thousand years of error. My only wish was to get that one thing straight, quickly, to help with treatment, and to make it useful while the world's doctors were working their methods out. I set my mind, then, on making this one book something people could actually look at, as soon as I could, one single day sooner if possible. I would translate one book, and if I managed that, I would be content. That was why I learned their words so thoroughly, and I had no ambition to do anything else. Threads of five colours in a tangle are all beautiful, but I'd made up my mind to settle on one colour, red, say, or yellow, and cut away all the rest.

What I thought at the time was this. In the reign of the Emperor Ōjin, Wani of Paekche first brought Chinese characters here and carried books across, and since then emperor after emperor sent students to China to learn from their books, and only now, after so many centuries, have we come to have a Chinese learning that needn't be ashamed in front of the Chinese themselves. There was no reason why the work we'd only now begun should suddenly be complete. All I wanted was to show the world where a thousand years of teaching about the shape of the human body had been wrong, and to let people know at least its broad outline. I'd decided I wanted nothing more. And so, as I said, whatever we'd worked out at a day's meeting, I went home that very night and translated and wrote down.

My friends in the circle used to laugh at how impatient I was. I'd answer them, "A real man oughtn't to rot away with the grass and trees. You're all healthy and young. I'm sickly and getting on in years. I'm hardly likely to live to see the day this road is finished. Nobody can know in advance when he'll live or die. 'Move first and you lead,' as they say, 'move last and you're led.' That's why I'm in a hurry. On the day you finish it, gentlemen, I'll be in the ground, watching from under the grass."

Lord Katsuragawa and the others roared with laughter, and after that they nicknamed me "Under the Grass".

The months and years went by, faster than a white colt glimpsed through a crack in a wall, and before we knew it three or four years had piled up. People gradually heard about us, and some came to ask, and by then I'd reached the point where I could tell them the true face of what the West teaches about the organs, the vessels and the bones, roughly at least, from what we already knew.

Chapter 8: Into Print

Before A New Book of Anatomy had gone to the printer, a man named Tatebe Seian Yoshimasa, physician to the lord of Ichinoseki in Ōshū, heard of me from far away and sent me a list of questions he had been writing down over the years. Much of what he wrote, where it touched our trade, filled me with admiration. He was no acquaintance of mine, but he and I had the same aim, a bond made across a thousand miles. What he wrote was this: "It is a great pity that the Dutch school of surgery should have nothing to found itself on but the manuals passed down in katakana. If some learned man would arise and put the Dutch books into Japanese, as the Chinese long ago translated the Buddhist scriptures, then a true Dutch medicine could be achieved." This, I gathered, had been on his mind for more than twenty years. I was more than impressed by his insight. I was overjoyed that I should happen to be the very man he hoped for, and wrote back that this was a meeting of kindred minds such as comes once in a thousand years. From then on letters went back and forth between us without a break, and through that connection various things followed. My students collected our letters and gave them the title Questions and Answers on Dutch Learning. (Later my pupils printed it at their own expense. The book called Questions and Answers on Dutch Medicine is this.)

I am careless by nature, and unlearned, and though I managed to translate the Dutch teaching after a fashion, I didn't have it in me to put it so that people would quickly grasp it and get the good of it. And yet if I left it to someone else, what I meant would never come across. There was nothing for it: I wrote it myself, clumsy as I was, and never mind how it looked. Where I thought there was probably some fine, exact point I couldn't follow, I didn't force an explanation, though I knew it left a gap. I set down only what I had understood. It's like telling someone the way to Kyoto. You let him know there are two roads, the Tōkaidō along the coast and the Tōsandō through the mountains, and that if he keeps heading west he'll get to Kyoto in the end. That's the main thing. You're only showing him the route. That's how I thought of it, and so I put forward only the broad outline. With that as a first step, I was the first to call on the doctors of my day to take up translation.

I knew nothing, of course, of the methods the Buddhists used for translating, and translating a Dutch book was something that had never been done at any time before. At this first reading there was no way of making out the fine details. My one purpose was this: anyone who calls himself a doctor must, before anything else, know what the organs inside the body are and what they naturally do. I wanted each of us to understand how they really are, so that we could help one another in treating the sick. Because of this I hurried the translation, and put first of all getting the main lines into people's ears quickly, making it easy to grasp, so that people could compare it with the medicine they already had in their heads and see the point at once.

I wanted, as far as possible, to translate with the old names the Chinese use. But very often what they call by one name and what the Dutch call by another turned out to be different things, and I was at a loss to fix the terms. Weighing it all up, I decided that since we ourselves were the ones setting the precedent, whatever we did, we should aim at whatever people would find easiest to understand, and fix the words that way. The result was that some words we translated with an old name, some we paired with a Dutch word, some we simply spelled out by their sound, and some we coined from their meaning, in all sorts of ways. I changed this one and altered that, and worked at it myself day and night. As I said, the draft went through eleven versions, and it was four full years before the job was done at last.

Naturally, in those days we couldn't hope to understand the fine and subtle things in the ways of their country. Anyone reading it now, with the subject opened up beyond anything I imagined, will no doubt say it's nothing but mistakes. But at the start of a thing, you can't undertake anything with a timid little mind that's afraid of what people will say later. Over and over, I translated only what I could make sense of, on the basis of the broad outline. The Sutra in Forty-Two Sections, translated from the Sanskrit, grew little by little into the whole Buddhist canon we have today. That was my hope from the very first, the thing I had always meant to do. If there had been no Ryōtaku in the world, this road would never have opened. And if there had been no rough-and-ready, big-picture man like me, it would never have opened so fast. This too was Heaven's help.

In the end the translation was finished, after a fashion. But in those days there was hardly anyone who had heard the least thing about the Dutch teaching, let alone knew anything of it. I thought that once it was published, the people who would hear of nothing but the Chinese theories wouldn't trouble to judge whether it was good or bad. They'd be startled and suspicious, and call it outlandish barbarian talk, and nobody would read it. First we printed something called An Abridged Chart of Anatomy and showed that to the world. It was just like what people call a handbill.

(Two or three years after we started this work in Edo, the news reached Nagasaki through the Dutch who came up every year for the audience, and I've heard that the interpreters' families there were offended and resentful that Dutch learning had made such strides in Edo. No wonder. Up to then those families had done nothing but interpret. It was an age when nobody read books or translated them. They would put "cold rice", say, into Japanese as "wintry rice", and the word een deel, which should be rendered "one volume" or "one part", they took apart as "division the first, division the second", and that was enough for them to make themselves understood. As for medicine, or the inside of the body, there was naturally nobody there who knew anything at all. One interpreter saw our chart and objected that there was no such thing in the body as geel. It must be a mistake for gal, he said, and gal means the gall bladder. All the same, it seems that because men like me made our start here in the east, the interpreters of western Hizen, where it all began, were greatly spurred on too.)

The chart was done and the book itself was coming out. But as I mentioned earlier, even Talks on the Red-Haired People had had its blocks destroyed, and it might be that nothing to do with the West could be put forward at all, however lightly. Then again, perhaps Holland was a special case among them. It wasn't clear either way, and there was no deciding that this, for certain, would be allowed. If I brought it out on my own account, I might be punished for breaking a prohibition. That one thing frightened me badly. Still, we weren't printing their sideways writing as it stood, and anyone who read it would see what kind of book it was. It was for the advance of medicine, I told myself, so there could be no harm in it. I made up my mind, whatever happened, to be the first to make a translation public, and I settled it quietly in my own heart.

But since it was the very first of its kind, I had always wished, if I dared, to present a copy to the government, so as to put it under that protection. Fortunately, the father of Lord Katsuragawa Hoshū, one of our circle, was Lord Hosan, the old friend I mentioned before. I consulted him, and on his recommendation and through his good offices it was presented privately to the shogun by way of the inner apartments. That it went through like this without any trouble was a great mercy. My cousin Yoshimura Shinseki, besides, was living in Kyoto, and through him I presented a copy each to the Kanpaku, Lord Kujō, to Lord Konoe, the Jugō, and the former head of that house, and to the Hirohashi house. (In return the three houses sent me auspicious old poems written out in their own hands, and the Higashibōjō house sent me a poem of their own, a Chinese quatrain in lines of seven characters.) I presented copies to the senior and junior councillors of the day as well. Nowhere was there any trouble at all, and it was all settled smoothly. All this was a great relief to me about the whole enterprise. This was the first time a translation from Dutch was made public.

Chapter 9: Ōtsuki Gentaku and the Next Generation

When I first set my mind on this, I never imagined the learning would flourish and spread the way it has today. That must be because I had no talent and little foresight. Thinking it over now, perhaps Chinese learning opened slowly because it is a matter of ornamented prose, while Dutch learning opened fast and was taken up quickly because it writes down real things plainly, just as they are. Or perhaps the truth is that Dutch learning came along after Chinese learning had already opened people's minds, and that's why it went so fast. I can't tell. But I suspect the time had simply come for it to open of its own accord.

Around then, as I've told, I had begun, by a strange chance, to exchange letters with Tatebe of the far northeast, an old man some twenty years my senior. He wrote to me that my answer had made him wild with joy, but that there was nothing he could do about his age. Instead he sent his son Ryōsaku to enter my school, and after him sent up a pupil of his own, a young man named Ōtsuki Gentaku, who entered my school as well.

As for this young man's nature: he never studies anything without setting his feet on solid ground, and he never puts into words, written or spoken, anything he hasn't thoroughly understood. He's not a bold spirit, on the whole, but he has no liking for anything flimsy, and he was born with a gift for the Dutch sciences. I loved the man and his talent, and did my best to lead him on, and later I put him in Ryōtaku's hands to study the work directly. Sure enough, he worked at it tirelessly, and Ryōtaku, seeing what he was, passed on to him the bones of the method, so that before long he had grasped the general way of reading their books. In the meantime he went about with my colleague Jun'an, with Lord Katsuragawa, and with the lord of Fukuchiyama and others, studying the work together.

Then he set his heart high: he wanted to go west to Nagasaki and try learning directly from the interpreters' families there. Ryōtaku and I were both glad and gave him leave. "Go, while you're young and strong," we urged him. "Work hard. Once you've done that, your studies will go further than ever." That fired him all the more, and he resolved to shoulder his book box and go. But he was a poor student, and it was beyond his means. I was moved by his spirit and wanted to back him all I could, but I was hard up myself in those days and couldn't do as much as I wished. I helped him as far as I was able, and the lord of Fukuchiyama, who had studied alongside him, was very generous to him too, and so in the end he got there. He lodged with an interpreter named Motoki Einoshin and was taught by him, and asked one person and consulted another, and trained without letting up, and came back to Edo. After that he was able to settle in Edo for good. He had compiled a book called the Ladder to Dutch Learning, and after he came back he printed it at his own expense and showed it to the like-minded. Once it was out, not a few people of serious purpose read it and were stirred to set their minds on the study. That this man was born, and that books like these came out, I've always thought was one of the ways Heaven helped me in my real aim.

Besides him there were many who came and went at my school and made a start on this work. But one couldn't stay long in the city, another was tied down by an official post, another was hard pressed to make a living, another was ill, another died young, and none of them carried the thing very far. Still, because I started it, not a few branches and offshoots have grown out of it.

About An'ei 7 or 8, 1778 or so, a man named Arai Shōjūrō came from Nagasaki to stay with Hiraga Gennai. He had once been the adopted son of Nishi Zenzaburō, under the name Masakurō, and had worked as an interpreter. Since this was just when our circle was beginning to raise up Dutch learning, I invited him to my house, and with Jun'an and others we learned the samenspraak, the book of Dutch conversations, from him. After Gennai died he lived at the Katsuragawa house and helped with their work, and went to the lord of Fukuchiyama too, and took a hand in the lord's geography. (The lord was devoted to the study of geography, and has translated and compiled books such as the Illustrated Account of the West.) Later Shōjūrō was in another house and changed his name to Mori Heiemon. I'd say that his coming down to Edo did something to spur our circle on. He is gone from the world now.

Among the physicians of the lord of Tsuyama was a man named Udagawa Genzui. He was deeply versed in Chinese learning, a man who had read everything and forgot nothing. He set his mind on this work and learned to read their books through Gentaku, and by Gentaku's introduction came to visit me and Jun'an, and gradually got to know Lord Katsuragawa and Ryōtaku. (Later he also went to see Ishii Tsuneemon, a former Nagasaki interpreter who had become a retainer of the lord of Shirakawa, and learned a great many of their words from him. He was brilliant by nature and had iron staying power, so he made great progress in the work, and translated a book in eighteen volumes, the Selected Essentials of Internal Medicine. It is a concise book, but it was the first new translation of a work on internal medicine in our country. Alas, he died in his forties. Only after his death was the whole of it finally printed.)

In Kyoto there is a physician named Koishi Genshun, a pupil of Dokushōan, a man devoted to medicine heart and soul. He was no acquaintance of mine. The first time he read A New Book of Anatomy he doubted it where it differed from the teaching of a thousand years, so he went and looked inside bodies himself several times, and was convinced that the book was sound. From then on he took the greatest delight in it, and wrote to me with questions about the places he still couldn't follow. In the autumn of Tenmei 5, 1785, I had gone with my lord's household to his province and was passing through Kyoto on the way back, and all the while I stayed there he came day and night to put his hard questions to me. After that he came east and made his home at Gentaku's lodgings for nearly a year, constantly debating the work with our circle. He never took up the Dutch language. But after he went back to Kyoto he lectured on A New Book of Anatomy again and again to the students at his school, and showed them its real methods. That was one of the things that roused the people of the west of the country.

In Osaka there is a man named Hashimoto Sōkichi, who kept his old parents and earned his living, I'm told, by painting family crests on umbrellas. He had no education, but he was born clever, and the rich merchants of the place picked him out, put up the money and sent him down to Edo, where he entered Gentaku's school. In the short time he stayed, he worked hard and learned the outline of the subject, and after he went back to Osaka he went on working at it by himself and made great progress. Later he became a physician and has championed the work all the more. He has many followers, he has gradually made translations, and he leads people on from the five home provinces round the capital and the seven circuits beyond, the San'yō and Nankai roads and the rest. I hear it flourishes there more than ever. He came to Edo at the beginning of Kansei, around 1789. When he first went back to Osaka, Koishi Genshun too helped him in his ambition and urged him on.

Among the retainers of the lord of Tsuchiura there is a remarkable man named Yamamura Saisuke. Through his uncle Ichikawa Kozaemon he asked me about Dutch learning. I was old by then and had handed the whole of the work over to my pupil Gentaku, so Gentaku taught him, from the twenty-five letters up. He had the gift by nature and was particularly fond of geography, and gave himself to that branch. He expanded and corrected Master Arai Hakuseki's Gathered Views of Foreign Lands and turned it into a work of thirteen volumes, which through Master Shibano Ritsuzan's recommendation was presented to the government. He was privately commissioned to translate more besides, but he died before that work was finished, which is a great pity. Much of what is now known about the countries of the whole world is still unknown to the Chinese. That is what Dutch learning has achieved, having come this far.

Ishii Tsuneemon was once a Nagasaki interpreter named Bada Seikichi. He gave up his family post to another man and came to Edo, and in the middle of the Tenmei years became a retainer of the lord of Shirakawa. That lord, knowing what he had been, had him translate Dodoens's herbal, and more than ten volumes of the translation were done, but he too passed into another world before he could finish. The Halma dictionary that a man named Inamura brought out depended entirely on his strength, and that dictionary, they say, is a great help these days to people starting the study. He didn't come east meaning to take service by his old trade. But since he arrived in the middle of all this flourishing, he became a great help to the cause.

As for the Katsuragawa house, it's as I told before. Lord Hoshū was a man of outstanding brilliance, and broadly versed in everything Dutch, and his fame ran in all four directions. Of course the government knew from the start how the work had begun, so it seems he was sometimes given orders to put things touching the West into Japanese. His drafts must be in his family's keeping. I've heard he wrote translated works such as the Selected Dutch Drugs and the Essential Remedies for Use at Sea, but I've never seen them in finished form. He passed from this world before he was sixty.

Among the physicians of the lord of Inaba was a man named Inamura Sanpaku. He read the Ladder to Dutch Learning while he was still in his province, was fired up by it, came down to Edo, knocked at Gentaku's gate and studied the work. Later he had the dictionary written by a man named Halma translated with the help of Ishii Tsuneemon, and compiled from it a dictionary of Dutch explained in Japanese, in thirteen volumes. In the beginning, I'm told, Gentaku introduced him to Ishii and lent him the original as well. The first draft was finished with the help of Udagawa Genzui and a man named Okada Hosetsu, who went back and forth to Ishii's house. When it came to the revision, I've heard, others lent a hand as well. Later, for some reason or other, he left his lord's house and wandered round the Kaijō district of Ōmi, and changed his name to Zuiō in the end, and lived in Kyoto teaching the work. Now he too, I hear, is one of the departed. But having undertaken a dictionary and carried it through was a real service to beginners.⁴

Chapter 10: Udagawa Genshin

The present Udagawa Genshin was born a Yasuoka, in Ise. He came to Edo, took the name of an Okada family, and, I'm told, studied Chinese learning under the Udagawa Genzui I spoke of above. Genzui saw how solid and thorough his gifts were and wanted to lead him into Dutch learning, and, so I hear, he often spoke of him to Gentaku. Then one year, perhaps while Genzui was away in his lord's province in the lord's train, Genshin left his adoptive family and went back to his own name of Yasuoka, and for the first time, carrying his teacher's instructions, he came to Gentaku and asked to be taught. He seemed to have learned to write the Dutch letters from Genzui already, so Gentaku gave him a little book of Dutch words with their meanings to copy out, and then set him to read that Dutch pharmacopoeia.

He came every day and asked to be allowed to board as well, but Gentaku's household was in some difficulty just then, so for the time being he put him in the care of Mine Shuntai, one of our circle. Around then Shuntai fell ill and grew worse day by day, and in the end he died. After that Gentaku went to Lord Hoshū about placing the young man in his house. "He is set on Dutch learning," Gentaku told him, "and has nowhere to turn. If you would take him on, he's the kind who'll be a help to your own work in time." His lordship agreed at once, and from then on Genshin lived in the Katsuragawa house as a student. Even then he went back and forth to Gentaku's often to ask about how to translate.

The young man had fallen head over heels for the Dutch teaching because it dealt in real things. "There's nothing else I want," he would say. "If there's a teacher's house where I could study this as much as I like, I'd lodge anywhere at all." That was his long-standing wish, and it was why he had been placed with the Katsuragawa. But that house in those days was so busy with official duties and with patients that he couldn't get what he'd come for, and he kept complaining of it to Gentaku. One day Gentaku told me about it.

By then my own practice had grown so that I had no spare moment, and was in no position to keep up my real studies. But I had always cared deeply about this road, and my wish to open it further wouldn't be stopped. After A New Book of Anatomy was finished, I'd set to work on a translation of Heister's book of surgery, and had drafted several volumes of it, the sections on wounds and on ulcers. But about that time I fell ill again and again, and the people around me warned me, "This is the curse of working too hard at it. You must let it go for a while." Gentaku and the others pressed me too: "Put your cares aside and think only of looking after yourself in your old age. Unworthy as I am, I'll take the work over for you." And I was getting older year by year, and hadn't the stamina any more to finish a great work, so it has been left off ever since.

Still, my real wish wouldn't die. For years I bought every Dutch book I came across, even the big ones, as far as I could afford it and never minding the cost, and I'd gathered a fair library. Whoever it is who wants to take up this learning, I thought, if he has the will but no books, it will come to nothing. Even if I had no time to read them myself, I could lend them to my own pupils, of course, and to anyone else in earnest, and they would be of real use in opening this road. I ended up with some tens of volumes.

What I hoped, too, was to find a young man deeply set on this road, marry him to one of my daughters, take him into the family as a second adopted son, and have him carry the work through, opening up what our medicine had not yet opened and making up what it still lacked, and relieve the sufferings of people everywhere. It was on my mind morning and night. I was glad, then, that there was a Genshin, and I called him to me and asked him what he meant to do. What he told me was just what Gentaku had said. I took him into my house, and we pledged ourselves father and son. Genshin, who had got his wish, was overjoyed. He handled the books in my house as he pleased, and studied day and night without slacking, working harder than anyone, and often enough through the night. With that much energy, he made quick progress too, twice as fast as before. You can imagine how glad I was.

And yet he was still a youth, and though he threw himself into his studies, he was at the age when the hot blood is up and the fancy is easily caught, and his conduct became thoroughly dissolute. I warned him many times, but it only grew worse and wouldn't stop. I knew he was a gifted young man and that it was a great pity, but if I let him be, there was no knowing what he might do, and he could even bring disgrace on my lord's house. Not a day went by that my old heart was easy. In the end I had no choice: I dissolved the adoption and broke off all ties with him for good.

Because of this our circle broke off with him too, and he was left with hardly anyone to rely on, and fell into great hardship. Even so, he never gave up the work he loved, and I hear that Inamura and a few others helped him out in secret. Inamura and the others, I heard later, had a quiet word with my son Hakugen and arranged to have Genshin hired to translate one or two books on internal medicine from my library, so that he could keep body and soul together. In the end, I was told, he made a fresh start and mended his ways. And the Halma dictionary that Inamura was then undertaking, he helped to finish.

Two or three years later Udagawa Genzui died of illness. Having no heir, the family looked far and wide for someone to adopt, and Inamura acted as go-between and had Genshin made heir to the Udagawa house. As I said, he already had a bond with Genzui, and so even after Genzui was gone, you could say he carried on the purpose of the man who was now his late father, and achieved what he had set his own heart on. Since then he has worked harder than ever and made a great many translations, and printed a book called the Outline of Medicine, and now has a household and a name of his own.

Hakugen, Gentaku and the others came to me and said that since his conduct had changed and his purpose was firm, and he had taken the Udagawa name besides, I should allow him to visit me again. I agreed: if things stood so, there was no reason to hate him and keep him away forever. I let him come and go, and we were close as before. Genshin waits on me as on a father and teacher, and I look on him as a son, just as in the old days.

Chapter 11: A Drop of Oil

Gentaku made his name early, and recently the government went so far as to honour him with an order to translate the Dutch books in the shogun's own collection. This was learning that men like me had started almost on a whim. That I should still be alive to see such an order publicly given is a grace beyond my deserving, and I can say that the wish of my whole life has been fulfilled. We set our minds on it for the relief of the people, and toiled at a thing that offered no handhold, and the work of beginning it has not been in vain after all. Genshin, after him, received the same order, and the two of them are at it together now. I can only bow my head in gratitude. And these are no strangers, but pupils of my own school whom I led into the work, taking part in this great undertaking. What more could an old man's heart desire? I'm grateful for the long life Heaven has granted me. That I, who was nicknamed "Under the Grass" back then, should still be living in this enlightened age, and be allowed to see the thing complete, is a boundless kindness, as if Heaven itself had answered in secret.

Besides these, I hear, the schools of Gentaku, Genzui and Genshin have turned out pupils who outdo their masters, as the saying goes, like blue dye that comes out bluer than the indigo it was made from. But they are the children of my children's children, so to speak, and I don't know them well. There must be a great many of them scattered through the three cities and in the provinces of the lords.

Long ago in Nagasaki, I've heard, Nishi Zenzaburō set out to translate the whole of Marin's dictionary, but got no further than the beginning. In the Meiwa or An'ei years, I think, a man named Motoki Einoshin made translations of one or two works on astronomy and the calendar. Beyond that I've heard of nothing. Among his pupils was an interpreter named Shizuki Tadajirō. He was sickly by nature and resigned his post early, handing it to another man, went back to his family name of Nakano and lived in retirement. Pleading illness, he excused himself from all society and studied alone, absorbed in Dutch books. He read everything he could lay his eyes on, and among other things worked out and explained their books on grammar. At the start of Bunka, around 1804, Yoshio Rokujirō and Baba Sennosuke entered his school and were taught the essentials of how their sentences are put together and the rules of their grammar. This Sennosuke has changed his name to Sajūrō, and some years ago he was called to Edo on special duty. He stayed several years and has now been taken into the shogun's service and settled here for good, working entirely on translating Dutch books for the government, and everyone who loves this learning is learning his way of reading. My pupils and my grandchildren are being taught by him, so each of them will get the true method, and accurate translations will be made at last. Tadajirō, they say, is the one man of his kind in all the time there have been Dutch interpreters in our country. If he hadn't retired, but had stayed in his post, perhaps he wouldn't have got so far. It may be, too, that what spurred him on was our circle in Edo pushing ahead to read their books with no teacher to guide us. This too must be the turn of the times, in a peace that has lasted so long, for things like this to come out into the world.

They say that if you let fall a single drop of oil on a wide pond, it spreads until it covers the whole pond. It has been like that. In the beginning three of us, Maeno Ryōtaku, Nakagawa Jun'an and I, talked it over and took it up on a passing thought. Nearly fifty years have gone by, and this learning has spread through the whole country, flowing out here and there in every direction, and I hear that new translations come out every year. It's like the saying that when one dog barks at something real, ten thousand dogs bark at nothing. There must be good and bad among them, but never mind that for now. Living as long as I have, I hear of it opening up like this, and one moment I'm glad and the next I'm amazed. And since I see that many of the people who champion the work today tell the story of how it got here wrong, going by all sorts of hearsay and tales passed from mouth to mouth, I've written down these old memories as they came back to me, out of order as they are, and left them at that.

Above all, this old man rejoices. Once this road has opened, the doctors of a hundred and a thousand years from now will have the true art, and it will do great good in saving the people. That thought sets my hands and feet dancing for joy. That I've been lucky enough to live a long life, and to know this learning myself from its first beginnings and see it reach its present flourishing, I can't call simply my own good fortune. When I humbly consider it, it truly comes from the lingering grace of the great peace we live in. However much love and devotion a man might have, how could he found a thing like this, and see it rise this far, amid war and the clash of arms? This present year, Bunka 12, 1815, falls, if I may say so, on the two-hundredth year of the great god of Futara mountain. The grace by which that great god brought the whole realm together in peace has reached down even to worthless men like me, and the sun of his divine virtue has shone into every last nook and corner. No bow of awe and reverence could ever be deep enough for it.⁵

In the fourth month of the year I wrote this out by hand and gave it to Ōtsuki Gentaku. I'm growing old and tired by degrees, and I don't expect to write anything so long again. I wrote on knowing that it would be the last thing I wrote in this world. Where things are out of order, put them right as you see fit, and make a fair copy, and show it to my grandchildren too.

Jotted down by the Old Man of Nine Joys, in his eighty-third year.