Paper short abstract:

By looking at how Terashima Ryōan's Wakan sansai zue (1715) deals with prodigious denizens of faraway lands and elusive beasts, I will attempt to shed light on the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary within the scholarly perception of environment in the first half of the Edo Period.

Paper long abstract:

The Wakan sansai zue, or Japanese and Chinese illustrated Encyclopedia of the Three Powers, is a well-known work in 105 sections distributed among 81 fascicules. It has sometimes been compared to 18th centuries Western encyclopedias, insofar as it encompasses the knowledge gathered since the beginning of the Edo period in a broad range of fields, such as astronomy, calendar, and honzō. The author, Terashima Ryōan, a physician from Ōsaka, claims to have spent some thirty years before completing what appears to have been his lifework. To do so, he drew inspiration from late Ming encyclopedias and essays starting with Li Shizheng's Bencao Gangmu (1596). Wang Qi's Sancai tuhui (1609), and Xie ZhaoZhe's Wuzazu (1616). He was also able to build on a local trend of scholarly discourses, such as Hayashi Razan, Nakamura Tekisai and Kaibara Ekiken's, which, while emulating those of these Chinese forerunners, had been taking Japanese context into account.

An epitome of a 'typological' worldview that includes Western conceptions imported through Chinese sources, Terashima's encyclopedia gives an important place to foreign countries and their people, from well-documented East-Asian neighbors to the prodigious denizens of faraway lands. Animals, also, are presented in there diversity, including elusive beasts such as dragons, kappa or sea-monks.

What is the place of these entries, and what kind of information and representation do they convey? Were these creatures described in the same way as more familiar one's? Did they pertain to specific, separate categories, and if so, on what ground were such distinctions made? And what about animals like foxes or turtles, which could supposedly display uncanny, if not divine, properties?

By trying to look at how these discourses fit within the general economy of the book, and how they relate or not to each other, this paper will attempt to shed some light on the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary within the scholarly perception of environment of the late 17th - early 18th century, and on the existence, or lack thereof, of a criteria-based conception of an objective 'nature'.