The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830

by Donald Keene

Book Overview

This is an account of the growth and uses of Western learning in Japan from 1720 to 1830. These are the dates of the beginning of official interest in Western learning and of the expulsion of Siebold from the country, the first stage of a crisis that could be resolved only by the opening of the country of the West. The century and more included by the two dates was a most important period in Japanese history, when intellectuals, rebelling at the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804706697
• ISBN13: 9780804706698
• Release Date: June 1969
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

If you even wanted to know...

If you even wanted to know how the Japanese saw themselves as a county and as a people in relation to the Europeans and other citizens of the world during the height of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, this is the book to pick up and read. Donald Keene offers a respectful, insightful, and tenored work that explores in detail the relationship that the Japan of the time period had with the Dutch traders and other foreigners who brought with them new and exciting inventions and ideas. The proselytizing Portuguese pushed their rugged brand of Catholism, eventually getting them kicked out. The empire making Russians had territory just North of Japan's main island. Though written in the mid 1960's Keene stirs clear from putting the Japanese and the Europeans on pedestals of influential superiority, which gives this book it's enduring qualities. As I read it. I got the sense that all of the players (countries) involved were acting and reacting to the world in which they lived. Among some of the major historical figures, Honda Toshiaki, one of the original rangaku (Dutch culture in Japan) scholars, along with Otsuki Gentaku, Shiba Kokan, Sugita Genpaku, and others are mentioned in Keene's informative book as big men in Japan's pivotal age.

classic history of ideas

This is an expansion and revision of a book from early (1954) in the career of the great Columbia Japanologist Donald Keene. It surveys "the growth and uses of Western learning: in late-18th and early 19th-century Japan. The primary figure Keene writes about is Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821). 74 of the books 246 pages are a translation of parts of Honda's Secret Plan for Managing the Country and Tales of the West.Keene provides a fascinating account of Japanese views of what Europe might be like based on emerging understanding of European knowledge and technology. Before American gunships forced Japan open and the Meiji "restoration" embarked on a program of rapid industrialization (and militarization), there was a base of thought on trying to adapt what seemed useful from the west in ways compatible with Japanese conceptions of the essence of Japaneseness. Keene's classic book provides valuable background to understanding the rapid "modernization" and militarism of the late-19th-century (with successful wars with first China, then with Russia just before and just after the turn of the 20th century).