Rangaku, or the Wonders of Samurai Science

The Perry Expedition presents technologically advanced gifts to the Japanese Emperor at Yokohama Bay in 1854. The wires of the telegraph they brought are visible in the background. Public Domain image.

One of the enduring “what-ifs” of history is China’s inward turn from the fifteenth century onwards, a policy often credited for allowing Europe to catch up and pass China technologically with tragic consequences in the 20^th century. It’s inconceivable to many of us—sitting here on the pinnacle of three centuries of industrial development—that any culture would want to cut itself off, but China set the pace for much of northeast Asia. Korea rebuilt itself as a hermit kingdom in the 16^th century (which goes a long way to explaining present-day North Korea’s bizarre and hostile stance against the rest of the world), and Tibet was the quintessential closed country until the beginning of the 20^th century.

The most important of the isolated East Asian nations outside of China was Japan. In that particular case, Japanese society was struggling simultaneously with near-constant civil war and with the introduction of Christianity—as much as two percent of the population had converted before the official backlash began in 1587. Eventually, the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu began closing off the country entirely, looking to control the flow of ideas into Japan and culminating in the Closed Country Edict in 1635. Outsiders were permitted to come to Japan only at three points: the Ainu through Matsumae in Hokkaido, the Chinese via the subordinate kingdom of the Ryukyu Islands, and the Dutch through Nagasaki in Kyushu to the south.

The Sakoku (Japanese for “locked country”) period is generally assumed to have been a technologically stagnant time, but that’s not entirely true. Unlike China, which truly sought to cut itself off from outside influence, the Japanese had always been open to new ideas (witness modern Japan’s intermixing of no less than four writing systems, two native and two foreign). What the Tokugawa Shogunate was looking to do was control the flow of information. Dangerous philosophy was to be weeded out, but the Japanese continued to be highly interested in practical science like medicine, metallurgy, and agriculture; for example, tomatoes and coffee were introduced to Japan right in the middle of sakoku. What held Japan back was solely a lack of people to innovate: 30 million Japanese (and much less at the start of the isolation), were no match for an entire world full of people that could talk amongst themselves when someone, anywhere, discovered something interesting.

What kept Japanese science afloat was a tiny minority of people who paid close attention to their restricted contacts with Europe. Under the 1635 edict, Japan had a tiny keyhole to the west in Dutch traders who were allowed to trade through the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay; this became even more true when the Shogun Yoshimune liberalized import rules in 1720. Rangaku, or “Dutch learning” was a legitimate thing for Japanese people to study from that point onwards, and even became quite faddish: just as an example, Leyden jars that stored static electricity produced by friction became commonly available novelty “medical” devices during the 18^th century. Schools dedicated to western learning began to spread. Under that kind of stimulus,  the country did develop a few native geniuses who produced their own hybrid brand of technical science.

A good example of that cross-pollination is Seishū Hanaoka. Born in Osaka, he was trained in both Western surgical techniques and Chinese medicine. Like many surgeons from ancient times until the 19^th century he was was interested in dulling the pain of his patients while working. Following up on a few hints in Chinese medical records, he developed a herbal infusion that proved to be a successful anaesthetic. The primary ingredient of tsusen-san was datura, likely devil’s trumpet or jimson weed, themselves immigrants from North America (where the Navajo knew about datura’s soporific properties even if they didn’t use it—their oral herbology for the plant begins “Eat a little, go to sleep”). Seishū mixed it with Japanese aconite, as well as other, less powerful ingredients; it was just as well, as with the atropine and scopolamine those first two packed the mixture could easily be fatal. A modern anaesthesiologist would run from it, but it worked. After taking tsusen-san a patient would start to feel numb, and within a few hours would fall into unconsciousness for up to a day.

Using it, Seishū specialized in mastectomies for breast cancer; records written during or shortly after his lifetime (likely by his son) list the names of 150 women on whom he operated, and he was largely successful. Putting aside probably apocryphal stories, Seishū’s first patient—a woman named Kan Aiya—is the first person known to have undergone general anaesthesia before surgery. This is best contrasted with Crawford Long, who was the first to do it anywhere outside of Japan—and not for another forty years. On the other hand, Japan’s isolation made Dr. Long one of the fathers of modern anaesthesiology while consigning Seishū to obscurity outside of his home country.

That sort of anticipation shows up multiple times in the history of rangaku. One of the double-edged gifts Commodore Perry brought to Japan in his successful attempt to end sakoku was a telegraph; this was 1854, so it was less than twenty years after the electrical telegraph was commercialized in the West. It, along with the locomotive and the steam-powered warship (of which the Commodore’s USS Mississippi was a cutting edge example) was a symbol of how the West had advanced. By giving the telegraph as a gift, and demonstrating its miraculous ability to transmit messages essentially instantaneously, the United States was hoping to overawe the shogunate. The only problem with that plan was that the Japanese already had one.

The man responsible was Sakuma Shōzan, a samurai from central Honshu, who had become interested in rangaku after receiving a Dutch translation of Noël Chomel’s Dictionnaire Œconomique, a 1767 encyclopedia. From it he taught himself or rediscovered much of 18^th century European physics, including theories of optics and magnetism. On that base, when he learned about the existence of electricity in 1849 he was able to rapidly catch up with Western science and produced his first telegraph based solely on a description in a book. It was no experiment either—his apparatus was used to communicate between the inner and outer parts of his lord’s castle near Nagano. Unfortunately, Sakuma fell victim to the cultural conservatism of sakoku Japan: it was acceptable to study rangaku only so long as it didn’t upset the larger scheme of things. Few had heard of his telegraph when Perry arrived, and Sakuma was murdered by anti-Western assassins in the turbulent period following the Convention of Kanagawa.

The ultimate expression of Japanese science in isolation was Tanaka Hisashige, who acted as a bridge from sakoku into the modern era. In the period following his death he came to be known as “The Japanese Thomas Edison” which, while condescending, is a clear sign of how things had changed since the end of sakoku: the Japanese and the rest of the world now had enough mutual awareness to even draw the connection between the two. Tanaka’s work before and after Commodore Perry was less remarkable than Sakuma’s (though he did make fairly impressive clockwork automatons), but his focus was on the sort of thing the newly opening nation thought most useful: reverberatory furnaces for steel, accurate clocks, and steam-powered machines. He was also responsible for building the first native steam-driven warship.

By the time he died in 1881, Japan was well on the way to making good the gap between it and the West on a foundation of rangaku-trained engineers. All of northeast Asia was blown open by the West in the latter half of the 19^th century and most countries didn’t fare well. Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world as late as 1950, when it ranked with Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire. China was doing even worse at the same time. Meanwhile in Japan, Tanaka Hisashige’s son had founded an engineering company, and his more distant successors grew the company through mergers and acquisitions until it eventually became Tokyo Shibaura Denki—or, as you probably know it, Toshiba. As one of the largest hardware and technology companies in the world, it’s a worthy legacy for its technologically precocious ancestor.

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