Tachibana Nankei
Tachibana Nankei was a Rangaku scholar and physician, known for his travel writings.
Born into a samurai family in Ise province, Nankei moved to Kyoto at age 19 to study medicine; he then stayed 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, returning the following summer. 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 marvels at Dutch technologies, especially optics (microscrope, telescope, periscope, etc.) and maps, and writes that the Chinese differ from Japanese only in dress, language, and behavior; in other words, he recognizes no ethnic or racial difference between the people of China and Japan. His treatments of ethnic/racial difference are tied into theories about the influence of geography and climate upon temperament. Since China and Japan are geographically and climatically quite similar, he describes no ethnic difference between the two peoples; however, he describes 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,"[1] the result, in his thinking, of their origins in climatically cold and warm places, respectively.
Two years later, in 1785/9, he left for the east (Tôhoku), returning once again a summer after his departure. 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 gained some prominence; he was appointed an Imperial physician in 1786, and was invited to Emperor Kôkaku's investiture ceremony the following year. 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.
References
- Yonemoto, Marcia. Mapping Early Modern Japan. University of California Press, 2003. pp90-97.
- ↑ Yonemoto. p93.
