8 - Foreign Knowledge: Cultures of Western Science-making in Meiji Japan

Summary

The term ‘transfer’, most of us realize, is a misleading description of how scientific or technological knowledge travels. It reduces a partial, unpredictable, and culturally nuanced process to the simple action of sending a parcel through the mail. Historians of religion or art are not likely to write of the ‘transfer’ of their subject from one geographic location to another. Yet historians of science and technology, whose topic is in no sense less complex, still sometimes fall back on ‘transmission’ or ‘replication’, terms too casually borrowed from the mechanisms or laboratory procedures of the actors we study. Even when the perfect transfer of a technical or scientific regime from one place to another is the actor's intention—and one cannot invariably assume that it is— different circumstances at the ‘receiving’ end invariably produce different narratives, events, and forms. Certainly it is part of our job to notice these, even when historical actors invested in a story of transfer dismiss them as ‘local anomalies’.

Meiji Japan is one of the most iconographic sites of scientific and technological ‘transfer’ in world history narratives. In the last decade or so, historians have begun to revisit and retell this story with cultural issues foregrounded, giving the narrative more depth and life than it was allowed as a prop to modernization theory. This article is an attempt to further that scholarly trend. I intend to focus on an example of scientific knowledge-making in the Meiji academy at a time when it was still staffed largely by foreign professors—men whose official role was to perform as switches through which foreign knowledge flowed. My story is about how they were not perfect switches; how the ‘Western knowledge’ that was taught to the first generation of Japanese was in fact a local conversation, even when European teachers were speaking mainly to themselves. It is about how ‘Western knowledge’ in Meiji Japan inevitably mixed words, references, concepts, and evidence from far away with others invented or discovered close-at-hand.