The year 1543 marked the beginning of a new global consciousness in Japan with the arrival of storm-blown Portuguese merchants on Tanegashima Island in southern Japan. As other Portuguese rapidly followed, Japan soon became aware of a world beyond India. While this is not a new story, it is the first time that Japanese, Portuguese, and other European accounts have been brought together and presented in English. The arrival of the Portuguese was recorded in the Tanegashima Kafu, the Teppoki, and the Kunitomo teppoki, which are translated and presented together with European reports.
Toward the end of his life, the Japanese Confucian thinker Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) wrote a memorandum entitled Seidan, Political Discourse, about the political and economic situation in Japan, probably at the request of the authorities and possibly the shogun, Yoshimune, himself. It is an extensive treatise which touches practically all fields of life around 1725-1727 and it is therefore a goldmine for anyone who wishes to acquaint himself with Japanese history in mid-Tokugawa times. The work was written in secrecy and it was therefore not known even by his students. It began to circulate in handwritten copies in the 1750s. Today it is a central work and a monument in the socalled keizaigaku genre of Japanese political-economic literature and is found in every collection of Tokugawa intellectual literature and referred to by all scholars who deal with Tokugawa history. The present work includes a full translation of the Seidan.
Ki emerged first and is the thread that runs through the millennia of Chinese philosophy. Ri was added later in Sung times and, together, ki and ri became the mainstay and core of Chinese beliefs in Sun (960-1279), Ming (1279-1644) and Ch’ing (1644-1911) times. In this remarkable and inspirational study, researched over many years, the author takes the view that ki can profitably be compared with European philosophy. In China, the ki thread appears as an original ‘primal ki’ (genki), which is the source of all things and affairs. The search is for the whole. In Greece, and later in Europe, the thinking goes in the opposite direction: it searches for the exact truth in the independent units of the cosmos, the atoms, the truth being found in the part. The study has three separate but interrelated parts. Part I delineates the ki and ri philosophy as it developed in China; Part II presents Confucian study and learning in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868); Part III finishes with conclusions about things East and West and the situation in today’s world. From Taoism to Einstein will have wide appeal to students of Eastern religion and philosophy, as well as students of East Asian history and political science, and Chinese and Japanese studies in general.
The year 1543 marked the beginning of a new global consciousness in Japan with the arrival of shipwrecked Portuguese merchants on Tanegashima Island in southern Japan. Other Portuguese soon followed and Japan became aware of a world beyond India. After the merchants came the first missionary Francis Xavier in 1549, beginning the Christian century in Japan. This is not a new story, but it is the first time that Japanese, Portuguese and other European accounts have been brought together and presented in English. Their arrival was recorded by the Japanese in Tanegashima kafu, the Teppoki and the Kunitomo teppoki, here translated and presented together with European reports. Includes maps, and Portuguese and Japanese illustrations.
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