Tachibana Nankei

• Born: 1753/4/21
• Died: 1805/4/10
• Titles: Iwami-no-suke
• Other Names: 宮川春暉 (Miyagawa Haruteru; Haruakira)
• Japanese: 橘南谿 (Tachibana Nankei)

Tachibana Nankei was a Rangaku scholar and physician, known for his travel writings.

He was born into the Miyagawa clan, a samurai family in Ise province, which took their name from land granted to them by Sasaki Kyôgoku (1306-1373); the family, under Miyagawa Yasumoto, had moved to Ise in the fifth generation before Nankei's time.

Nankei moved to Kyoto at age 19 to study medicine. After studying under Kagawa Shûan and Yoshimasu Tôdô for a time, he remained in Kyoto and took on students of his own.

In 1782/4, at the age of 30, he left Kyoto for the western provinces and Kyushu along with one of his students, traveling along the San'yôdô and returning the following summer via Shikoku.

While in Nagasaki, he met with Isaac Titsingh and other agents of the Dutch East India Company, as well as with a number of Chinese traders. He marveled at Dutch technologies, especially optics (microscrope, telescope, periscope, etc.) and maps, and wrote that the Chinese differed from Japanese only in dress, language, and behavior; in other words, he recognized no ethnic or racial difference between the people of China and Japan. His treatments of ethnic/racial difference were tied into theories about the influence of geography and climate upon temperament. Since China and Japan are geographically and climatically quite similar, he described no ethnic difference between the two peoples; however, he described Dutchmen as "cold" (i.e. distant and reserved), and Ryukyuans as "too warm in personality to pass for [Japanese], although they resemble the Japanese physically," the result, in his thinking, it would seem, of their origins in climatically cold and warm places, respectively.

Following his return, in 1783, he and a group of scholars including Koishi Genshun took part in the dissection of a human body.

Two years later, in 1785/9, Nankei left for the east (Tôhoku), returning once again a summer after his departure, this time via the Sea of Japan coast. Having praised the spread of education (especially Confucian schools) into western Japan in his writings from that trip, he strongly criticized the relative lack of education he discovered in eastern Japan, including the relatively low levels of literacy compared to more central areas of Japan. Moving beyond Tôhoku into Ainu lands in Ezo, he spoke of the inferiority of the Ainu lifestyle, and unlike some other major travelers/writers of his time, advocated for the incorporation more fully of the Ainu into the Japanese cultural sphere.

His Saiyûki ("Journey to the West") and Tôyûki ("Journey to the East"), accounts of the two journeys, were both published in 1795. Several artists contributed to the illustrations of the Tôyûki, chief among them Maruyama Ôzui, head of the Maruyama school.

Nankei had by this time gained some prominence; he was appointed an Imperial physician in 1786 and granted the title of Iwami-no-suke, and was invited to Emperor Kôkaku's investiture ceremony the following year. In addition to writing numerous books on medicine, Nankei also compiled a volume on Chinese poetry, and one on Japanese poetry. In 1796, he was called to official service, and took the tonsure shortly afterwards, continuing to write and to study medicine. Sequels to his Saiyûki and Tôyûki were published in 1796 and 1797 respectively. His travel writings are organized more thematically, rather than in a geographically chronological order. He does not focus on the narrative of his own travels so much as on the surprising and strange things he saw or found, and on ruminations about them.

Nankei retired to Fushimi at the age of 50, and died two years later, in 1805.

References

• "Tachibana Nankei." Nihon jinmei daijiten 日本人名大辞典. Kodansha, 2009.
• Plutschow, Herbert. A Reader in Edo Period Travel. Global Oriental, 2006. pp75-88.
• Yonemoto, Marcia. Mapping Early Modern Japan. University of California Press, 2003. pp90-97.