Paper short abstract:

In late Tokugawa, naturalists turned their investigative methods to study weird beasts and uncanny phenomena. This naturalization of “monsters” offers a unique perspective to grasp the taxonomical reason and observational practices that sustained the study of nature in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Paper long abstract:

In 1820, physician and naturalist Kurimoto Tanshū participated in a bakufu-sponsored expedition to investigate the distribution, appearance, and behavior of kappa in different regions of the realm. Eventually published as Suiko kōryaku (A Study of Water Tigers), the report was based on hundreds of eyewitness reports and observation of taxidermized kappa corpses that completed the information from canonical encyclopedias. This and other contemporary investigations on weird beasts like sirens (ningyo) and tanuki racoons as well as a plethora of uncanny phenomena offer a unique perspective to understand the epistemological labor of Tokugawa naturalists and the dialectic between received knowledge and observational practices.

This paper focuses on the “semiotic reason” at work in the investigation of the uncanny and the monstrous in late Tokugawa Japan. It shows how the conceptual apparatus of honzōgaku scholars, despite its empiricist tendencies, was flexible enough to adjust its taxonomy and “true-to-nature” illustrative techniques (shashinzu) to liminal and monstrous phenomena. Tanshū and the other members of the 1820 expedition subjected kappa to the same analytical procedures as any other natural species. These monsters were by them naturalized: they became objects to be studied, understood, classified, and researched in the same manner as the exotic plants and animals imported by Dutch and Chinese merchants.