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words Newton in Japan Translators of scientific texts add their own, cultural interpretations. “Introduction to the True Natural Philoso- Scott L. Montgomery phy and Astronomy”. This was itself a Dutch saac Newton wrote in Latin and in English. translation from an original popular-science Today his works, and the vocabulary they book by the English author John Keill, one of Iintroduced, are found in every major lan- Newton’s most ardent promoters. But what guage of the world. Are all these versions of did Shizuki do with it? the ‘founder of modern physics’, roaming the In Western terms, Shizuki might be shelves and classrooms of the planet, essen- called both an ‘ancient’ and a ‘modern’. As tially the same? Is the terminology of ‘force’, an official interpreter and a scholar of ‘velocity’ and ‘acceleration’, for all practical the Chinese classics (as purposes, identical in tongues otherwise as nearly all scholars were), different as English and Japanese? he felt the need to inter- The story of Newton’s entry into Japanese pret the heliocentric view is an interesting one. The man responsible in accord with the ethic- for this epochal feat was Shizuki Tadao, a al prerogatives of neo- rangaku-sha (scholar of Dutch studies), Confucianism, to whit: who, between 1798 and 1802, composed a “There exists a governing work of three volumes in which Newtonian centre in all things: for an physics and astronomy formed an essential individual, the heart; for core. The title of this work is revealing: Rek- a household, the father; ishô Shinsho, “New Writings on Calendrical for a province, the gov- Phenomena”, indicating allegiance to the ernment; for the whole traditional focus of astronomy in Japan, country, the imperial court; and for the Ancient city, new ideas: Tokyo in Shizuki’s time. which had been guided by Chinese neo- entire universe, the Sun.” Thus could a Sun- Confucian natural philosophy for centuries. centred cosmos be made acceptable. the daily use of this language today rehearses BRIDGEMAN But Shizuki’s title was also something of a What of his translations of newtonian such a moment. screen, behind which lay a revolutionary set terms? Here Shizuki showed himself a mod- For most of the eighteenth century and of introductions that would help overturn ern thinker of great ingenuity. For many well into the early nineteenth, translation neo-Confucian science even while incorpo- basic words — force, gravity, velocity, elas- was the dominant work performed by people rating portions of it. ticity, attraction — he employed a simple involved in Japanese science. ‘Scientists’ we Shizuki composed his work at a crucial system. This involved using the ideogram for may call them, but they were translators first, moment in the history of Japanese science. a related action in each case — movement, and because of this, their influence was pro- From 1630 to 1720, no Western books had weight, speed, stretch, pull — and combin- found. The creation of a new vocabulary in been allowed to enter the country, and ing it with the ideogram for strength or science is no mean feat. To a degree, Shizuki exchange with Europe was restricted to trad- power (chikara). Thus force became ‘move- Tadao deserves a place beside Lavoisier, Lin- ing with the Dutch, who continued as the ment power’ (power to create movement); naeus and their peers. sole supplier of things Western up until the gravity was ‘weight power’, velocity ‘speed How, then, to answer our initial ques- nineteenth century. Only after about 1770 power’, and so forth. Each term thus gained a tion? Is Newton’s terminology the same in did scientific books become a significant concrete sensibility, a link to everyday expe- all languages? The case presented here sug- part of this exchange. These were handled, rience, and also a degree of self-explanation gests that there are, in fact, a host of ‘New- and either partly or wholly translated, by the largely lacking in the English or Latin. For tons’ roaming the globe today — that new- rangaku-sha, who were employees of the other terms, Shizuki returned to the neo- tonian language has been adapted signifi- government. The Tokugawa shogunate Confucian influence: vacuum rendered as cantly to each new linguistic context, not the remained suspicious of Western texts, and shinkû, ‘true emptiness’; corpuscle as bunshi, other way around. Can this be said to chal- especially condemned any reference to ‘child part’ (which later became the term for lenge the paternity of this great ‘father’ of religious matters or the word “God” (thus molecule); centripetal and centrifugal, as modern physics? Only if we demand that making scientific books the safest to trade). kyûshin and enshin, meaning ‘seeking the such an image must be absolute, that it must But by the 1790s, when Shizuki was active, a heart’ and ‘receding from the heart’. erase all those workers who made newton- few translations of European medical and All these terms remain in use today, as ian thought a living thing in other lan- astronomical works had finally been pub- part of the basic vocabulary of modern guages. For Newton is today much larger lished and made available, allowing scholars physics. Indeed, later translations of New- and more polymorphic than he was in the access to new styles of explanation, drawing, ton’s own books were forced to obey Shizu- past. The Japanese example teaches us that and prediction. A burgeoning interest in ki’s choices, so widely had they been adopt- his intellectual parenthood is as much a European science resulted among Japanese ed. Moreover, they set patterns that were fol- matter of what the world has done with his intellectuals. lowed in coining new terminology in the legacy as of its original content. I The larger situation was thus uncertain. nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New- Scott L. Montgomery is a geologist and independent Shizuki would have been ill-advised to use tonian language thus condenses a moment scholar. His most recent books include Science in the real name of his principal source: Inlei- when loyalties to both China and the West Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2000). dinge tot de Waare Natuuren Sterrekunde — were in motion. To the knowing eye or ear, e-mail: [email protected] NATURE | VOL 411 | 3 MAY 2001 | www.nature.com © 2001 Macmillan Magazines Ltd 25.

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