- Convenors:
-
Samuel Kuivenhoven
(Leiden University)
James Morris (National Museum of Japanese HistoryNational Institutes for the Humanities)
Jose Manuel Escalona Echaniz (University of Cambridge)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
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.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how people in Edo Japan engaged imaginatively with exotic animals exhibits (misemono). Viewers attributed medical, social, and protective benefits to animals and their byproducts, revealing contested processes of knowledge creation and exchange.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the different ways that people interacted with exotic animals during the Edo period. Focusing on prints and literature about animal exhibitions (misemono), it contends that people were not passive observers of exotic animals but engaged in imaginative exchanges with the animals on display. These exchanges extended beyond entertainment into the realms of health care, relationships, and disasters. Stones that had passed through the digestive tract of cassowary birds were sold as charms for safe childbirth, camel urine was sold as an ointment against skin complaints, and the act of viewing exotic animals or their images were thought to bestow the viewer with different benefits.
Although most exotic animals were transported by the Dutch, the imagined benefits and uses of these creatures and their byproducts seem to have emerged within Japan. An interesting tension emerges here: contemporary Japanese sources claim Dutch or Chinese points of origin for their knowledge, which cannot be traced. In other words, the lineage of knowledge about exotic animals appears to have been important for lending it credence. At the same time, we can observe that Japanese officials often questioned more fantastical claims made by the Dutch, such as the idea that they were selling unicorn horn. The example of exotic animal exhibits therefore speaks to wider questions about the creation and contestation of knowledge, and about Japan’s trade in both goods and knowledge with other countries during the Edo Period.
The paper will describe and analyse contemporary sources, including single sheet prints related to misemono and popular literature such as Wagō: Rakuda no sekai (1825), to create a cultural history focused on human-animal relationships and knowledge creation during the 19th century.
Paper short abstract
This study analyzes representations of the Other in late Edo Japan through castaway records. By examining interrogations, accounts, edited narratives, and scholarly texts, it explores how commoners and scholars shaped hierarchical views of non-Japanese peoples within diverse intellectual frameworks.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines representations of the “Other” in the late Edo period through an analysis of castaway records (hyōryūki 漂流記). During the Edo period (1603–1868), a substantial body of castaway accounts emerged, documenting the experiences of Japanese individuals who drifted to foreign lands. These narratives range from official interrogation records to richly illustrated texts edited by scholars associated with the Bakufu and circulated primarily in manuscript form.
This study explores how non-Japanese peoples were depicted in Edo-period castaway narratives and how Japanese intellectual traditions shaped images of the Other within a framework that combined Dutch Studies (Rangaku 蘭学), National Studies (Kokugaku 国学), and Zhu Xi–influenced Neo-Confucian thought (Shushigaku 朱子学). By examining firsthand interrogation records and self-authored reports by shipwrecked sailors, the paper seeks to clarify how commoners in the Edo period perceived foreign peoples and cultures.
Furthermore, through an analysis of works such as Hokusa bunryaku 北槎聞略 (Abridged Account of a Northern Raft, 1794), Funaosa nikki 船長日記 (A Captain’s Diary, 1822), and Aboku shinwa 亜墨新話 (New Stories about America, 1844), this study investigates the influence of contemporary geographic treatises (chishi 地誌)—including Zōho Ka-i tsūshō kō 増補華夷通商考 (Augmented Treatise on Sino–Foreign Trade, 1708) and Shin’u shōshiki 新宇小識 (Brief Notes on the New World, 1816)—as well as Sino-Japanese encyclopedias such as Kinmōzui 訓蒙図彙 (Illustrated Dictionary for Beginners, 1666) and Wakan sansai zue 和漢三才図会 (Illustrated Compendium of Japanese and Chinese Knowledge, 1712). These sources played a significant role in shaping and expanding images of the unknown and reveal how Edo-period scholars engaged with concepts of “civilization,” “indigeneity,” and “colony” that challenged the prevailing Sinocentric worldview.
By integrating the perspectives of both commoners and scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this study seeks to elucidate the intellectual framework through which a hierarchical system of values concerning the Other was produced in the late Edo period.
Paper short abstract
This paper traces so-called tengu claw stones (fossilised shark teeth) from Edo-period folklore to global natural history, showing how Japanese scholars reinterpreted these objects through European texts on the same, revealing the entanglement of curiosity, translation, and unresolved science.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines tengu claw stones (天狗爪石), enigmatic objects associated with tengu folklore that illuminate the intersection of Edo-period collecting, natural history, and transnational knowledge exchange. Focusing on a composite manuscript held at Leiden University Library and compiled between 1796 and 1818, it traces how interpretations of these stones evolved from descriptive curiosity to comparative natural-historical inquiry. The earliest layer centres on the work of stone aficionado Kiuchi Sekitei 木内石亭 (1734–1808), whose Tengu tsume ishi kidan (1796) meticulously records findspots, dimensions, and networks of collectors while explicitly suspending judgment on the stones’ origins.
Later additions, associated with Ōtsuki Gentaku 大槻玄沢 (1757–1827) mark a decisive shift. These sections integrate translated excerpts from European natural-historical works discussing glossopetrae, fossil shark teeth long known in the West and traced back to classical authorities such as Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE). Through references to authors including Egbert Buys (fl. mid-18th century) and Johann Hübner (1668–1731), the compiler situates tengu claw stones within a global comparative framework that juxtaposes Japanese folklore with European fossil theory.
The paper argues that the manuscript does not simply document a linear transition from superstition to science. Instead, it reveals a layered epistemology in which folklore, empiricism, translation, and classical authority coexist without full resolution. Particular attention is paid to textual variation among surviving manuscript copies held in the Netherlands and Japan, including the selective omission of passages engaging directly with the tengu itself, suggesting shifting sensibilities concerning the boundary between natural history and the supernatural.
By approaching tengu claw stones as objects of knowledge rather than mere curiosities, this study highlights how Edo-period scholars negotiated uncertainty, authority, and foreign learning at the margins of early modern science.