Oranda tensetsu [和蘭天説] = Dutch astronomy explained

Tōto [i.e. Tokyo] : Shunharō, Kansei heishin [1796]. Octavo (267 x 180 mm), original Japanese fukurotoji binding of patterned blue paper, stitch bound, printed title label (rubbed); 38 folded leaves, illustrated with woodcuts of astronomical diagrams; a fine example.

The Copernican Revolution comes to Japan: the first publication of the heliocentric model of the universe in Japanese.

Shiba Kôkan (c.1738-1818; born Andô Kichirô 安藤吉次郎); also known by various other names) was a Japanese painter and printmaker, recognised for his Western-style paintings. Unsurprisingly, his work was heavily influenced by Dutch art, as during the eighteenth century the Dutch were the only Westerners permitted to carry on trade in Japan. Amongst other achievements, Kôkan is credited with being the first Japanese artist to produce copperplate etchings in the European manner. His interest in European culture, though, extended further and deeper than art: he was a keen rangaku-sha (蘭学者) – a scholar of rangaku, the body of learning developed by the Japanese in the Tokugawa period through their contact with the Dutch enclave, which embraced practical knowledge and theoretical concepts in the fields of science, technology and philosophy. Dutch language books were the only available sources of Western knowledge available in Japan at the time, and they were circulated among a community of progressive Japanese artists and scholars receptive to new ideas from Europe.

In 1792 Kôkan published his Complete World Map (Yochi zensu: 輿地全圖, later revised as Chikyû zenzu: 地球全圖). This he based on the French map in the possession of the rangaku scholar Ôtsuki Gentaku (大槻玄沢), Alexis Hubert Jaillot’s revision of Guillaume Sanson’s map of the Eastern and Western hemispheres, issued by Covens and Mortier in Amsterdam around 1730. Kôkan’s map included revisions of the way Japan was depicted, based on the latest information; it also featured Copernican astronomical figures in the borders. The map was published in several editions, all of which were accompanied by a small explanatory booklet that provided a commentary on the geographical information, but no description of the astronomical figures.

Four years later, in 1796, Kôkan published Oranda tensetsu (=Dutch astronomy explained), which marks the first appearance in print of the astronomical theories of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) in the Japanese language. The central principle of the Copernican theory of the universe is the notion that the earth revolves around the sun; and from the time Copernicus published his definitive statement of his heliocentric system in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI (Nuremberg,1543), geocentric theory was essentially replaced by the Copernican model.

Thus, Copernican theory – like Newtonian – arrived in Japan remarkably late: one quarter of a millennium late, to be precise. Copernicus’s ideas were not referred to in Japan at all until 1769, when they were alluded to by the independent astronomer Asada Goryu, and his name was first mentioned in passing in a scientific manuscript written by Motoki Ryoei in 1772 – although Ryoei would make an in-depth study of Copernican theory in another manuscript twenty years later (James R. Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan, Yale University Press 1989, p. 16).

Following its publication in 1796, the revolutionary ideas of celestial motion, solar and lunar eclipses, and sunspots expounded and illustrated in Oranda tensetsu would displace traditional Chinese theories of astrology and astronomy in Japanese thought. Oranda tensetsu can be considered one of the key printed treatises to exert a major influence on the opening up of Japanese culture and society to Western influence during the Tokugawa period.

A rare and important work.