Short Abstract

This panel examines how late Edo Japanese texts staged encounters with the unfamiliar through objects, people, and images, focusing on fossils (tengu claws), castaway accounts, and materials dealing with exotic animals.

Long Abstract

This panel explores how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan conceptualized encounters with the unfamiliar across three distinct but mutually illuminating genres: natural history folklore surrounding fossils known as tengu-claw stones (天狗爪石), castaway accounts (漂流記), and materials depicting exotic animals such as camels. Although emerging from different domains—village discovery, maritime experience, and commercial print culture—these sources reveal a shared epistemic horizon in which Japanese readers confronted the strange, the foreign, and the unclassifiable at a moment of expanding global awareness.

The study of tengu-claw stones highlights material encounters with enigmatic objects whose ambiguous nature invited explanations ranging from tengu lore to honzōgaku and Dutch natural history. Castaway narratives frame human encounters with distant geographies, communication difficulties, technologies, and customs, producing hybrid ethnographies that mediated otherwise inaccessible global knowledge. Gōkan and prints featuring camels and other unfamiliar animals stage visual and narrative encounters driven by imported images, speculative imagination, and the popular desire to grapple with the exotic.

By analyzing these corpora together, the panel argues that late Edo Japan was characterized by a dynamic culture of encounter that spanned scholarly, experiential, and popular domains. Objects, bodies, and images served as conduits through which Japanese writers, sailors, artists, and readers negotiated the boundaries between marvel and empiricism, local knowledge and global curiosity. This comparative approach illuminates how different textual traditions processed the unfamiliar, revealing the intellectual flexibility and imaginative strategies that shaped Japan’s engagement with a widening world on the eve of the modern era.