Short Abstract:

This panel centers on the ways early modern scholars in and outside Japan engaged with new and old knowledge about exotic, mysterious or inexplicable phenomena. We consider how strange objects of knowledge were categorized and naturalized according to prevalent cosmological frameworks.

Long Abstract:

During the early modern period, the Japanese archipelago commenced new trade relationships with the Iberian Peninsula, the Philippines, the Netherlands, and New Spain, transcending former trade routes within the Sinosphere. These new encounters facilitated the mutual introduction of foreign cosmologies and knowledge systems, as peoples, technologies, and environments became more interconnected. In Japan, these collisions precipitated the adaptation of existing cosmological views to accommodate new knowledge, at times thought to be "strange." Inexplicable and unclassifiable objects transformed the ways knowledge was produced, disrupting well-established epistemic systems. This panel aims to examine the intersection between "strange" phenomena and the early-modern modes of rationality that surfaced to order them. Whether handling strange beasts, lands, or events, tools of rational inquiry (albums, dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, etc.) sought to classify and demystify "the strange" at the textual and also political level. Enclosed within the highly ordered reference text, strange things were not only displayed, but also subsumed under existing cosmologies.

The collision of different epistemic traditions between local Japanese/Chinese communities and incoming Christian missionaries produced hybridized knowledge that was synoptic of both Catholic and indigenous cosmologies. The bilingual dictionaries compiled by these same actors exposed the inherent strangeness of language, through the imperfect procedure of locating equivalences between foreign concepts. By the late 17th century, Japanese scholars published various compendia aiming to "enlighten the ignorant," with anomalies and aberrations being rationalized as part of that process. With the rise of honzōgaku naturalism, the Tokugawa Bakufu deployed expeditions to locate the mythical kappa and commissioned maps charting their regional morphological differences and distribution, as if the kappa were like any other animal in the realm. As these papers will demonstrate, such rational tools were also strange devices in and of themselves, often the result of collisions that enacted the powers of ordering and disseminating knowledge.