Japan^ Contributions to Gulliver S Travels

Japan^ Contributions to Gulliver s Travels Maurice J o h n s o n , Muneharu K it a g a k i, Philip W il l ia m s Perhaps the ultimate proof of recognition of an earnest project in scholarship is a request for reprinting of an article within a year of its publication. After more than a dozen years of collaboration of an American scholar, Dr. Williams, and a Japanese scholar, Prof. Kitagaki, under the advice and guidance of a senior Swift scholar, Prof. Johnson, such has been the reception of Gulliver s Travels and Japan: A New Reading广 No. 4 in the Moonlight Series (published January 1977 by Amherst House, Doshisha University, Kyoto, illustrations, xii, 50 pp.). As stated in the Foreword, the Moonlight Series *'tries, among other things, to throw light on areas of study which might otherwise remain eclipsed, and to bring together compatible pieces which might otherwise never be found together—and so lost in the process. Especially ap propriate are cross-cultural problems which have been approached previously from only one side. Thus the exploration of Japanese prototypes in Swift’s Travels seems a particularly apt suoject... a distillation of research and interpretation by three craftsmen. .. result ing in a vigorous collaboration/7 With this excerpt (most documenta tion omitted), “Amherst House and her Moonlight Series are happy to be able to contribute towards breaking new paths in old fields.” Otis Cary, Editor, Moonlight Series, (The original monograph may be obtained from Amherst House, Doshisha — i — University, Kyoto 602, Japan, for ¥ 5 0 0 plus Y 140 m ailing cost, or S 3 00- mail three one-dollar bills.) Over 250 years ago, in words that seem more suitable for our cybernetic age, Jonathan Swift introduced the world to a prototype computer in the middle of Part III of Gulliver s Travels. The Projector- Professor of ^the grand Academy of Lagado^ had programmed a machine into which he “emptyed the whole Vocabulary. and made the strictest Computation of the general Proportion there is in Books between the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs, and other Parts of Speech.’’1 Swift has the inventor make the remarkable claim that he can produce great documents of the arts and sciences by even the most random opera tions of the machine. Significantly enough, the illustration of this table of language is the only non-map plate in the whole book, except for the frontispiece portrait of “Captain Lemuel Gulliver.’’2 It is, more over, immensely significant that to a trained eye, the characters in the earliest plate (quite distorted in later issues and editions) 一 256 characters in all—show striking resemblances to the ancient Japanese syllabaries wmch, as we shall demonstrate, were available to Swift in the travel literature he is known to have read and often parodied in his masterpiece. It is quite possible that Swift himself suggested the Japanese model for the illustration of this wonderful machine, for he has Gulliver refer quite specifically to f*the Form and Contrivance... as in the figure here annexed'' [GT, p . 185, our italics). This discovery, which may be studied by comparison of the plates reproduced here (Plates II and III), is important for both general and specific aspects of research in the Travels as they relate to Japan, the one realf'exotic^ nation included with the imaginary lands visited by Gulliver, and the country which provides the framing at the beginning and the end —— ii — of Part III, where Swift takes pains to show the superior ways of the Japanese people. The plate for the "Alphabeta Japonum,> is taken from Engelbert Kaempfer’s monumental two-volume study, The History of Japan, which was published in London under the date of 1727.3 Professor Louis A. Landa has suggested to us that this may be post-dating; the work may have appeared the same year as Gulliver and conceivably at a time prior to Swift’s book. At any rate, as J. Leeds Barroll has pointed out, Swift might well have had access to this work in manuscript form as it circulated among his friends of the Royal Society for more than ten years before actual publication.4 Scholars of Japan studies are agreed that the exhaustive accounts and illustrations Kaempfer provided were ‘(the main source of knowledge about Japan in Europe throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.”5 The symbols in the Gulliver ^Figure*7 show an almost complete cor relation with those of the Japanese syllabaries as Kaempfer printed them. Like the parts of the Projector’s Contrivance, the language signs in Japanese are not genuine “alphabet elements’’ but syllable forms numb3ring in ths hundreds and thus comprising a word stock for writing. There are three styles of Japanese Kana syllabaries: the Hiragana and Katakana which are still used very much as Kaempfer reproduced them and which seem to dominate Swift’s system, and the more complicated Hentaigana which dropped from usage about a century ago (these are seldom seen in the Gulliver plate). By close comparison and the compilation of parallels, we find evidence suggesting that Swift and/or the designer of his plate drew directly from a table of the Japanese language as given in Kaempfer^ History. To designate the blocks of the 256 characters in Swifts plate, we have — vi — labeled the horizontal rows from top to bottom “A, B, C，’’ etc. and the vertical rows from left to right ‘‘1 ,2, 3,’’ etc. To the Kaempfer plate we applied a similar system of letters and numbers, prefixing (K) for each such designation. We have tried to decipher each of the symbols in the Gulliver “figure,” comparing it carefully with the script of Kaempfer’s “Alphabeta Japonum，” and checking our impressions with Japanese scholars and with foreigners familiar with the syllabaries. In deciphering these figures, we found it necessary to look at them from every possible angle or position. Seen upside down, for example, B -l is the same as (K)C-10:s/w.b)ofKaempfer’s_KaM々awa.6 No two blocks in Gulliver are the same, showing that the designer was not just scribbling random doodles for Swift but scrupulous in making his symbols and in avoiding repetitions. That they are Japanese language forms is no accident. We have noted two categories, finding at least 46 figures of Swift’s table that are clearly legible as single Japanese Kana, and at least 205 more that are composite forms involving two or more Japanese symbols. Only five of the 256 are not reasonably legible as direct elements of the “Alph- abeta Japonum.”7 Using our plates for a block-by-block comparison would go far beyond our limits of space and time. We have worked over such detail with colleagues for years and find an amazing consensus in “naming” the parallel forms. In this test subjective judgments always make tidy “conclusions” suspect, but we think some of the identifications can be accepted instantly by any viewer. Beginning in the right column of the plate in GT (this is Japanese reading form, as Kaempfer noted in his caption), we find at least nine of the Kana figures suggested clearly in this line alone: A-16 is like (K) 1-8 and B-16 is like (K) H-14, for example, while composite forms account for most others as in the case of — vii — P-16 which is clearly based on (K)D-8: i.e.， h ( と ) in modern form. Beginning at the top left corner, in A—1 we have the composite of (K)F— 16 and (K)G-16 which appear in Kaempfer in just the same position that the GT designer's compound has them, one above the other. We have already noted that B -l is a Kana figure of (K)C-10 upside down, while C-l is very close to (K)J-6. Generally, towards the left and the bottom of Swifts plate the designer has moved from his Japanese models as simple forms to combinations of freer improvisation. Since no other source for the plate of the projector’s language is known, Kaempfer apparently being the first to present this “alphabet” to English readers, parallels in these plates seem to confirm BarrolFs theory that the History was available to Swift and his circle. The consequences of this particular association reach far beyond the conclu sions he presented. This will be detailed in due time, but the fact that this crucial device in Part III links Gulliver so specifically to Japan has far wider consequences. What emerges is a new picture of Swift’s use of Japan in an otherwise wholly imaginary list of ^Several Remote Nations of the World” visited by Gulliver. Our evidence will show that records of the early travelers to Japan must have provided a major source of materials for the fertile, not to say fevered, powers of his imagination. There are many more reasons than thus far recognized for the fact that Japan should be the scene of important episodes and that its name should even be included in the title of one of the four voyages. While Part III contains most of the direct references to Japan, the name also appears in the first two parts and the influence of the early travel histories marks the whole work.8 If it is noteworthy that Swift was the first English author to deal directly with Japan in important imaginative literature, it is also signifi- — Vlll— cant that his interpretation was obviously indebted to accurate historical sources and that he expresses himself sympathetically toward the Japanese to the point of showing their superiority over other nationalities, not least the Dutch (as in I I I ,1 and 11), who were of course Swift’s satirical target.

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