Dutch Learning

• Initial contact 1600 - same year battle of Sekigahara ended the civil war and Tokugawa in charge

The Study of The West

• 1543 3 Portuguese cast-aways reached southern coastal island - Tanegashima
• Not long after trade established from ports in Kyuto
• 1549 Francis Xavier and 2 other Spanish Jesuits arrive
• Start of what some Historians call 'the christian century'

Sakoku (closed country) - 1640- 1853

• Only the Dutch remained so knowledge of the west became known as rangaku or Dutch Learning

Rangaku

• At first Rangaku scholars defined Dutch studies as the scholarship of Holland (Oran)
• Since the knowledge the Dutch brought was only knowledge of the West so became name for all western learning
• Two strands
• Medicine - botany, pharmacopoeia, mineralogy, physics, chemistry and zoology - wanted to save and prolong lives
• Astronomy - focus on calendrical science - cartography, geography, surveying - desire to correct calendar for better agricultural cycle
• These two categories indicate the Daimyos and Bakufu support for investigation of these fields by official physicians and astronomers
• Initially focused on the technological skills - curbed enquiries into religion, European history, philosophy, literature and law
• Didn't want repeat of 'disruptive intro of Christianity - Bakufu set limits on scope of west knowledge in Japan

Rangaku Scholars

• Most scholars government employees or well versed in Neo-confucian instruction - little inclination to see it as other than 'investigation of things and extension of knowledge'

Astronomers

• The value of the skills learnt were recognized and bakufu engaged Dutch scholars knowledgeable in western astronomy
• Traditionally court astronomers made calendars in Japan (and China) in Kyuto astronomical bureau
• The establishment of a more competent astronomical bureau in Edo gave Shogunate reinforment of claim to political and cultural predominance
• Also useful to have around in Edo as Tokugawa officials as they understood Dutch in case needed interpreter
• Some astronomers were also encouraged to study Russian and Manchu under government supervision to give Bakufu grater knowledge of problems on Japan's Northern border
• In Edo the calendar makers kept the same Chinese model but added Western elements of atronomy
• New European concepts examples - Copernicanism and Newtonian
• Even the professionals struggled to understand the concept as was opposed to the accepted Chinese dualist ying-yang cosmology
• Heaven positive - round and moving
• Earth Negative - square and motionless
• Co mpletely against Copernicus
• Heliocentric model didn't conflict with Buddhism belief in centrality of the sun goddess in Shinto and of Dainichi (Great Sun) in Esoteric Buddhism

Limits

• Many saw as useful technological addition to an already harmonious ethical system from Neo-Confucianism