Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies ISSN: 0874-8438 [email protected] Universidade Nova de Lisboa Portugal

Kornicki, P. F. Collecting japanese books in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies, núm. 8, june, 2004, pp. 21-38 Universidade Nova de Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal

Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=36100802

How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative BPJS, 2004, 8, 21-38 Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 21

COLLECTING JAPANESE BOOKS IN EUROPE FROM THE SEVENTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURIES

P. F. Kornicki University of Cambridge

Most of the great collections of Japanese books in European libraries had their origins in the private collections of nineteenth-century scholars, diplomats, missionaries and travellers. Their collecting activities are of more than antiquarian interest, for they reveal the process by which began to impress itself on the intellectual awareness of Europeans. This process undoubtedly reached its peak during the high tide of European imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century, and this is no coincidence, for the expansion of book-collecting activities to embrace the whole world is but a reflection of the expansion of European trading and diplomatic interests to cover most of the world. So at the same time as the opportunities to collect books in Asia increased so too did engagement with Asian countries, stimu- lated by geopolitical as well as by intellectual interests. This process undoubtedly had its beginnings in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when missionaries and traders from Portugal, Spain, and the first visited Japan. We know very little of their book-collecting activities, but some at least of the books they acquired reached Europe early in the seventeenth century. John Saris (ca.1579-1643), the first manager of the English ‘’ in Hirado, returned to England in 1614 with some erotic Japanese books, presumably illustrated manu- scripts. His successor, Richard Cocks (1566-1624), recorded in his diary that he had bought a set of 54 volumes on the history of Japan, and some time later he sent back to London a printed Japanese almanac which was in 1619 shown to King James I.1 In 1629 three Nô texts printed ca.1615 reached the Bodleian Library in Oxford, presumably brought back to England by employees of the English Factory in Hirado, and at around the same time several volumes of an early printed edition of Azuma kagami, an extensive history of the Kamakura shogunate, reached other collectors in England and

1 Igirisu shôkanchô nikki ( Daigaku Shiryô Hensanjo, 1978), vol. 1, p. 343; Anthony Farrington, The English Factory in Japan, 1613-1623 (London, The , 1991), pp. 239, 265, 753. 22 P. F. Kornicki

Ireland; these may well have been the surviving volumes of the history of Japan referred to by Cocks in his diary.2 Needless to say, there was no one in England or Ireland who could read any of these books, so they were little more than a curiosity. Since the English traders were able to purchase books in Japan without difficulty, it would be surprising if the more numerous Portuguese and Spanish traders, to say nothing of the well-educated mission- aries, had not also bought some books, at least as souvenirs, but as yet no records or surviving volumes have come to light to give us any glimpses of such purchases. By the second half of the seventeenth century the Portuguese, Spanish and English operations in Japan were no more than a memory and it was, of course, only employees of the Dutch East Company who had access to Japan. Several of them appear to have taken an informed interest in Japan before the end of the seventeenth century and to have used Japanese books as a means of acquiring knowledge. Amongst them was Willem ten Rhyne (1647-1700), who from 1674 spent two years at Deshima, the Dutch ’s post in Japan. He is known to have made some investiga- tions into the Japanese writing system and to have possessed at least a book of Japanese coats-of-arms (possibly a reference to the samurai directories known as bukan) and a map of the route from to .3 Another interested Dutchman was Herbert de Jager (1636-1694), who never visited Japan but from Batavia sought Japanese books from colleagues in Deshima. Although his collection does not survive, the list of desiderata he sent to Deshima does survive and affords us a glimpse of the intellectual agenda relating to Japan at the end of the seventeenth century.4 The fate of these books remains unknown, but some books were definitely finding their way back to Europe by the end of the seventeenth century. For example, the printed copy of the Nô play Kiyotsune which dates from around 1650 and which reached the library of Sidney Sussex College,

2 Izumi K. Tytler, ‘The Japanese collection in the Bodleian Library’, in Yu-Ying Brown, ed., Japanese studies, British Library Occasional Papers 11 (London, The British Library, 1990), p. 114. Two volumes of Azuma kagami in the library of Trinity College Dublin (Tr.1645) were given by John Parker, archbishop of Dublin in 1679-81, and three further volumes that reached Cambridge University Library in 1715 carry an inscription indicating that in 1626 they belonged to an English clergyman who never left England: Nozomu Hayashi and P. F. Kornicki, Early Japanese books in Cambridge University Library: a catalogue of the Aston, Satow and von Siebold Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 1. 3 On ten Rhyne see John Z. Bowers, Medical pioneers in feudal Japan (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 31-38; Kornicki, ‘European japanology at the end of the seventeenth century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 56 (1993), pp. 510-511, 520-522. 4 On de Jager and his list see Kornicki, ‘European japanology at the end of the seventeenth century’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 56 (1993). Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 23

Cambridge, before the end of the century, can only have left Japan through Deshima. Similarly, Nicholas Witsen (1641-1720), the long-standing mayor of , owned a small collection of Japanese printed books and maps which he obtained from Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), the German doctor who spent two years on Deshima in the 1690s.5 It was in the same way, too, that the German sinologist Andreas Müller (1630-1694) acquired some Japanese books and began to take an interest in the language.6 Mean- while, the Prussian State Library had by 1702 acquired a Japanese calendar, a Japanese botanical manuscript executed in 1683 and a copy of the 1637 edition of Honzô kômoku, a Japanese edition of a famous Chinese botani- cal work. Needless to say, all three items reached Berlin from Deshima via Batavia, and the botanical manuscript at least was sent home by Andreas Cleyer, a German who served two terms as doctor on Deshima in the 1680s.7 Kaempfer’s own collection was much more substantial and much more significant; it was purchased from his widow by Sir , the founder of the , and 43 books and maps acquired by Kaempfer in Japan are now to be found in the British Library.8 Kaempfer was more than simply a collector for there can be no doubt that he engaged with Japanese books, including maps, dictionaries, almanacs and historical works, as is amply evident not only from his extensive description of Japan but also from the detailed notes he took on his books, which also survive in the British Library.9 How much Japanese he actually knew and how much he was dependent upon his Japanese informants are questions that cannot be answered precisely, but it is clear that his was a working collection, not just a set of curiosities.

5 See the auction catalogue of Witsen’s possessions, Catalogus Van een Heerlyk Kabinet Met Oost-Indische en andere Konstwerken en rariteyten (Amsterdam, 1728). A letter of Kaempfer to Leibniz indicates that he gave books to Witsen: Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey and Derek Massarella, eds., The furthest goal : Engelbert Kaempfer’s encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Folkestone, Japan Library, 1995), p. 186, n. 22. 6 Kornicki, ‘European japanology’, pp. 505-506, 515. 7 Eva Kraft, ‘Die Japansammlung der Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz’, Bonner Zeitschrift für Japanologie 3 (1981), pp. 111-120. 8 K. B Gardner, ‘Engelbert Kaempfer’s Japanese library’, Asia Major, n.s., 7 (1962), pp. 74-79; Yu-Ying Brown, ‘Japanese books and manuscripts in Sloane’s Japanese library and the making of the History of Japan’, in Sir Hans Sloane: collector, scientist, antiquary, founding father of the British Museum, edited by Arthur MacGregor (London, British Museum Press, 1994); the books are fully described in K. B. Gardner, Descriptive catalogue of Japanese books in the British Library printed before 1700 (London, British Library, 1993). 9 For Kaempfer’s notes on his Japanese books, see British Library, Sloane Ms. 3062, fol. 64a, 121-311; his description of Japan is newly translated from his manuscript in Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey. Kaempfer’s Japan : Tokugawa culture observed (Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). 24 P. F. Kornicki

In the eighteenth century there are only two important figures whose collections of Japanese books reached European shores. The first was Isaac Titsingh (1744-1812) who has serious claims to being considered the founder of modern japanology in the sense that he was able to read and use the Japanese books he collected during his five years as , or head of the ’s operations at Deshima, from 1779 to 1784. In 1803 he presented the Bibliothèque impériale in , the forerunner of the Bibliothèque Nationale, with several items from his collection, including the encyclopedia Wakan sansai zue and some sinological works.10 It should be noted here that some these books were put to some use in Paris within a few years: the young and talented sinologist Jean Pierre Abel Rémusat (1788-1832) made a lengthy study of Titsingh’s copies of Wakan sansai zue and a similar work, Kinmô zui, in the Bibliothèque impériale which was published in 1827.11 At his death in Paris Titsingh bequeathed the remainder of his collection to the British Museum; however, 1812 was not a propitious year for a bequest to an enemy and the collection was seized by the French state; it was later returned to his son and it was gradually dispersed through a succession of auction sales in Paris.12 Thanks to the herculean efforts of Frank Lequin, it is now possible to appreciate the size and significance of Titsingh’s collection, which is now scattered around the world, having passed through the hands of many of his successors as European japano- logists. Many of the items clearly reflect his own interests and carry his own annotations indicating his understanding of the contents; they include, for example, printed books on funeral etiquette and marriage ceremonies, and both manuscripts and printed books on Japanese history, numismatics, botany, etc. Further, many of his own translations into Dutch of the books he owned have survived, testifying to his command of the language.13

10 These were not the first Japanese books to reach the library, for three were listed in Etienne Fourmont’s catalogue of the Chinese books, which was published in 1742; two were publica- tions of the Jesuit Mission Press, but the third was a printed chronology of Japanese and Chinese history. For the details of these books and the Titsingh donation, see K. Kosugi, ‘Pari Kokuritsu Toshokan ni okeru jûhachi-jûkyû seiki shûshû wakosho mokurokukô’, Nichiran Gakkai Kaishi 17i (1992), pp. 91-92. 11 On Rémusat see H. Walravens, Zur Geschichte der Ostasienwissenschaften in Europa: Abel Rémusat (1788-1832) und das Umfeld (1783-1835) (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1999). Rémusat’s article was entitled ‘Notice sur l’Encyclopédie japonoise et sur quelques ouvrages du meme genre’ and it appeared in Notices et extraits des manuscripts de la Biblio- thèque du Roi 11 (1827), Part 1, pp. 123=310. 12 Frank Lequin, A la recherché du Cabinet Titsingh; its history, contents and dispersal. Cata- logue raisonné of the collection of the founder of European Japanology (Alphen aan der Rijn, Canaletto/Repro-Holland, 2003), pp. 23-26. 13 See the catalogue contained in Lequin, A la recherché du Cabinet Titsingh. Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 25

The other eighteenth-century figure is not a European at all but an edu- cated Japanese sailor, Daikokuya Kôdayû (1751-1828). He was shipwrecked off the coast of Kamchatka in 1783 and, after a hazardous journey, managed to reach St. Petersburg and be received in audience by Catherine the Great before being repatriated by the Dutch East India Company by way of Batavia and Deshima. Kôdayû managed to keep hold of his collection of books during his adventures and they ended up in the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg in 1791, where they are still to be found, complete with Kôdayû’s own annotations in Cyrillic script.14 These books include several jôruri play-books and works of fiction, maps of Japan, Edo, , Osaka and Nagasaki, a guidebook to the thirty-three pilgrimage sites dedicated to Kannon in western Japan and one of the encyclopaedic dictionaries known as setsuyôshû. The collection was described, more or less accurately, in a catalogue published in 1818.15 The books were not put to any use, however, for no Russians at this time were capable of reading the language well enough, in spite of the existence of a school of Japanese established by Peter the Great and staffed by a succession of Japanese castaways.16 It was in the nineteenth century that the great European collections of Japanese books were formed, but this is a result not only of greater opportu- nities after 1854, when the efforts of Commodore Perry and Admiral Putyatin secured the ‘opening’ of Japan, but also of growing interest in Japan through- out Europe. Indeed, the first big collections were formed when there were still formidable difficulties in the way of collectors and scholars. One of them was the collection put together by Julius Klaproth (1783-1835), who was indisputably the greatest linguist of the nineteenth-century. By the age of 21 he had taught himself Chinese, had launched the Asiatisches Journal to publish articles on East Asia, and had attracted the attention of Goethe as a prodigy.17 He moved to St Petersburg to take up a position as professor of Asiatic languages, and in 1805 he was appointed a member of the scien- tific party accompanying the ambitious Russian embassy to Peking led by

14 O. P. Petrova, ‘Kollektsiya knig Daikokuya Kodayu i eyo znachenie dlya Russko-Yaponskich kul’turnykh svyazey’, in Istoriya, kul’tura, yazyki narodov Vostoka (Moscow, Nauka, 1970), pp. 51-58. 15 P. Kamenskii and S. Lipovtsov, Katalog Kitaiskim i Yaponskim knigam v Biblioteke Impera- torskoi Akademii Nauk (np, nd [St Petersburg, 1818]), pp. 53-55. 16 On the school of Japanese see Mariya Sevela, ‘Aux origins de l’Orientalisme russe: le cas des écoles de japonais (1705-1816)’, Archives et documents de la société d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences du langage, second series 9 (1993), pp. 1-66. 17 On Klaproth see H. Walravens, Julius Klaproth (1783-1835): Leben und Werk (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1999), H. Walravens, Julius Klaproth (1783-1835): Briefe und Dokumente (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1999) and Kornicki, ‘Julius Klaproth and his works’, Monumenta Nipponica 55 (2000), pp.579-591. 26 P. F. Kornicki

Count Golovkin; the mission was not a success and failed to pass beyond Urga (= Ulan Bator), but it gave Klaproth the opportunity in Irkutsk to meet Shinzô, one of Daikokuya Kôdayû’s companions, who had settled there as a teacher of Japanese. Klaproth spent some time studying with Shinzô, who was by no means illiterate, and he seems to have acquired some of the books Shinzô had had with him when he was shipwrecked. By the time of his death Klaproth had in his possession more than fifty Japanese books, which are listed in the catalogue produced for the auction of his library after his death.18 A few of these he had obtained from Shinzô and others he had bought at the sales of Titsingh’s collection, but some of them were published in Japan as late as 1826 and must therefore have reached Europe later, pre- sumably via Deshima; it seems clear, then, that a determined person could get hold of Japanese books in Europe by this time without needing to travel to Japan. Although Klaproth’s Japanese was probably inferior to Titsingh’s, he did make use of it to produce several translations, most notably one of ’s Sangoku tsûran zusetsu, an account of , the Ryûkyû islands and , which was published in London in 1832.19 Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866), on the other hand, had ample opportunity to purchase books during his two sojourns in Japan, 1823-9 and 1859-62, and he made substantial contributions during and after his lifetime to the collections of Japanese books held in many European libraries: 60 books and maps acquired by von Siebold during his first stay in Japan had already reached the Royal Library in Vienna by 1837 and were described in print by Stefan Endlicher, a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences with an interest in Chinese and Japanese.20 A substantial number of the books von Siebold acquired in Japan are preserved in Dutch collections, but in 1868 the British Museum purchased 1,008 titles from his collection from his son, Alexander.21 From these scattered parts of his collection it is clear

18 Catalogue des llivres imprimés, des manuscripts et des ouvrages chinois, tartars, japonais, etc., composant la bibliothèque de feu M. Klaproth (Paris, 1839), Part 1, lots 15, 39, 69-73, 98-104, 118-121, 133-145, 156-7, 220-228, 258-260, 266, 269-271, 276 & 286. 19 There is a puzzle over how Klaproth managed to get access to this book, which was banned in Japan: see Kornicki, Castaways and orientalists: the Russian route to Japan in the early nine- teenth century (Venice, Università Ca’ Foscari, 1999), p. 26. 20 The Chinese, Japanese, Manchu and Korean books in Vienna are described in S. Endlicher, Verzeichniss der chinesischen und japaniscen Münzen des K. K. Münz- und Antiken-Cabinetes in Wien (Vienna, 1837), pp. 115-138. See also Peter Pantzer, ‘Die Japonica der Oesterreichischen Nationalbibliothek Wien’, Bonner Zeitschrift für Japanologie 3 (1981), pp.131-141, and Jutta Verdino, ‘Verzeichnis der japanischen Werke bis 1868 in der Druckschriftensammlung der Ostereichischen Nationalbibliothek’, MA dissertation, Universität Wien, 1992. 21 L. Serrurier, Bibliothèque japonaise: catalogue raisonné des livres et des manuscripts japonais enrégistrés à la bibliothèque de l’université de Leyde (Leiden, Brill 1896), introduction; this cata- logue has now been superseded by H. Kerlen, Catalogue of pre- Japanese books and maps Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 27 that here for the first time we have a large and comprehensive collection of Japanese books covering most fields of knowledge and literature; they were of course put to use in von Siebold’s voluminous writings on Japan. It should be mentioned here that getting books and maps out of Japan was not without risk. Golownin, who had endured several years of captivity in Japan, wrote in his published account of his experiences, that, ‘Amongst the prohibited exports are coins, chests,maps, books descriptive of Japan’, and the truth of this was to be shown a decade later when the von Siebold was caught trying to leave Japan with Japanese maps in his possession.22 Although the most famous one, von Siebold was by no means the only Deshima resident to collect Japanese books for scholarly use, and some other examples should be mentioned here. One is Jan Cock Blomhoff (1779- 1835), who served as Opperhoofd from 1817 and brought back a large eth- nographic collection including books and paintings.23 Another is Johann Frederik van Overmeer Fisscher (1800-1848), who served several spells of duty on Deshima in the 1820s and published a description of Japan on his return. He, too, brought back a substantial collection of books, paintings and coins; most of these are now in Dutch libraries, but some of his books were sold and dispersed.24 Somewhat later, in 1852 Jan Hendrik Donker Curtius (1813-1879), reached Deshima as the last Opperhoofd and stayed until 1860, when he left Japan for after having negotiated the Dutch commer- cial treaties with Japan. When he finally returned to the Netherlands it was with a large collection of Japanese books, which he presented to .25 Once it became possible in the 1850s for foreigners other than Dutch- men to reside in Japan, it naturally became much easier to acquire Japanese

in public collections in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, J. C. Gieben, 1996). On von Siebold as a collector, see Eberhard Friese, Philipp Franz von Siebold als früher Exponent der Ostasienwis- senschaften: ein Beitrag zur Orientalismusdiskussion und zur Geschichte der europäisch-japa- nischen Begegnung (Hamburg, C. , 1986), pp. 73-92. 22 Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin, Recollections of Japan, comprising a particular account of the religion,language, government, laws and manners of the people (London, Henry Colburn, 1819), p. 207. 23 On Blomhoff, see Matthi Forrer, ‘Nineteenth century Japanese collections in the Nether- lands’, in Leonard Blussé, Willem Remmelink & Ivo Smits, eds, Bridging the divide: 400 years the Netherlands-Japan (Leiden, Hotei, [2000]), pp. 159-165. 24 On Overmeer Fisscher, see Matthi Forrer, ‘Nineteenth century Japanese collections in the Netherlands’, in Blussé, Remmelink & Smits, eds, Bridging the divide, pp. 159-165; for books from his collection now preserved elsewhere, see Kornicki, ‘The Japanese Collection in the Bibliotheca Lindesiana’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 75.ii (1993), p. 214. Overmeer’s Fisscher’s description of Japan was Bijdrage tot de kennis van het Japansche Rijk (Amsterdam, J. Müller, 1833). 25 On Donker Curtius, see Blussé, Remmelink & Smits, eds, Bridging the divide, pp. 184-190. 28 P. F. Kornicki books, and here we should mention a number of men who strove to do so without travelling to Japan, including several of the first generation of professional japanologists. One was Léon de Rosny (1837-1914), who in 1868 became the first holder of a chair of Japanese in France and who published extensively on Japan, including an anthology of Japanese poetry, Anthologie japonaise: poesies anciennes et modernes (Paris, 1871). Some of his Japa- nese books he had inherited from his father (though where he had obtained them is unknown), but most he acquired either from Japanese friends who had visited France, among them Fukuzawa Yukichi, or from Ivan Makhov, a Russian Orthodox priest who had been attached to the Russian Consulate in Hakodate ca.1860.26 However, the first professor of Japanese at a Euro- pean university was not de Rosny but Johann Joseph Hoffmann (1805-1878), who was a friend and assistant of Philipp Franz von Siebold and who was appointed to a chair of Chinese and Japanese at Leiden University in 1855. Like de Rosny, he never visited Japan and the extent of any collection of Japanese books he may have had is unknown, though he was presumably able to avail himself of von Siebold’s library.27 Much the same is true of other early japanologists. The Austrian August Pfizmaier (1808-1887) also never visited Japan, and the books he used were those donated by Philipp Franz von Siebold to the Royal Library in Vienna; in 1847 Pfizmaier published Sechs Wandschirme in Gestalten der vergänglichen Welt, a translation of a novel by Ryûtei Tanehiko, which was the first translation of a Japanese novel into any language, but he is not known to have had a substantial collection of his own.28 The Italian Francesco Turrettini (1845-1908) is best known for the journal he launched in Geneva, Atsume-gusa (1871-81), in which many of his translations from Japanese appeared, while his compatriot Antelmo Severini (1827-1909), who had studied under de Rosny in Paris, was in 1863 appointed professor of Far Eastern languages at the Scuola Regia di Studi Superiori in Florence. It seems that neither of them ever visited Japan, but the collection of books now in the library of the University of Florence bearing the seal of the Scuola Regia were presumably collected by Severini.29

26 Suzanne Esmein, ‘Une bibliothèque japonaise en France au milieu du XIXe siècle: celle de Léon de Rosny’, Nouvelles de l’Étampe 85 (1986), pp. 4-15; Kornicki, La bibliothèque japonaise de Léon de Rosny (Lille, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lille, 1994). 27 On Hoffmann see Ivo Smits, ‘Japanese studies in the Netherlands’, in Blussé, Remmelink & Smits, eds, Bridging the divide, p. 241. 28 On Pfizmaier see Hartmut Walravens, August Pfizmaier. Sinologe, Japanologe und Sprach- wissenschaftler. Eine Biobibliographie (Vienna, Literas-Universitäts Verlag, 1984). 29 See Adolfo Tamburello, ‘Japanese studies in Italy’, The Japan Foundation newsletter, 4.iv (1976), p. 3. Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 29

Quite a different type of collector was Lord Lindsay, who in 1869 became the Earl of Crawford. Japan was by no means a special of interest of his but he was a voracious collector of books from around the world and as early as 1862 had instructed Bernard Quaritch, the London bookseller, to look out for Japanese books so that could be represented in his library. Some of his Japanese books he purchased from earlier collec- tors, for example at the sale in 1863 of the collection of the Belgian recluse Baron Pierre Léopold van Alstein: some of van Alstein’s books had in turn earlier belonged to Klaproth or Overmeer Fisscher. But Lindsay also pur- chased some books from Japanese students sent to London by the Bakufu who found themselves short of money when the Bakufu collapsed in 1868; another part of his collection came from the early British japanologist Frederick Victor Dickins(1838-1915), of whom more will be said below.30 Lord Lindsay was the first Briton to build up a collection of Japanese books in England, but this was many decades after the first collections had been built up in Paris, Berlin, Leiden, Vienna and St Petersburg, and he was of course unable to make any use of his books for he knew nothing of the language. By the 1860s much more professional collectors, often with a good knowledge of Japanese, were at work in Japan; they were also often reflexive collectors and have left records of their collecting activities. Their collections eventually provided the foundations of some of the richest collections in Europe, those in Kraków, London, , Cambridge, and Stockholm, for example. A rough typology of these collectors can be established: on the one hand there were the japanologists, who built up collections for their schol- arly use, and on the other hand there were cultured travellers or residents who built up collections not necessarily or exclusively out of an interest in the arts but usually without any knowledge of the language. Apart from de Rosny and Pfizmaier, who have already been mentioned, the most prominent japanologists of the late nineteenth century were the Britons Frederick Victor Dickins, William George Aston (1841-1911), (1843-1929), and (1850-1935), and the German Karl Florenz (1865-1939). Dickins resided in Yokohama as a naval officer from 1863 to 1866 and then practised as a lawyer in Japan from 1871 to 1879. By 1865 he had published a translation of Hyakunin isshu, one of the first translations from Japanese literature into English, and in 1880 he published a study and translation of Hokusai’s Fugaku hyakkei, the first scholarly study of Hokusai in any language. As mentioned above he had sold

30 Kornicki, ‘The Japanese Collection in the Bibliotheca Lindesiana’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 75.ii (1993): 209–300. 30 P. F. Kornicki some of the collection of Japanese books he had acquired during his first stay in Japan to Lord Lindsay via Bernard Quaritch in 1871; he retained a substantial number of books and continued to write on Japan in England, and in later life he gave some lectures on Japan at Bristol University, where the remainder of his collection was until recently kept.31 Aston reached Japan in 1864 as a student interpreter attached to the British Legation, and remained in East Asia for a quarter of a century. Within a few years of arrival he had published grammars of the written and spoken languages of Japan, and even after his return to England in 1889 he continued with his studies, producing several books including his pioneering A history of Japanese literature (1899). Aston built up a substantial collection of Japanese books starting soon after his arrival, which are now preserved in Cambridge University Library; it includes not only block-printed editions of the Edo period and earlier but also current works of fiction published while he was living in Edo and Tokyo. During his two years in (1884-6) as Consul-General he also built up a collection of Korean books, which are now in St Petersburg.32 As a collector, however, Ernest Satow stood alone; in his diaries and letters he refers extensively to his book-purchases in Kyoto and elsewhere, and he wrote out in Japanese meticulous catalogues of his collection.33 Satow sought out rare editions voraciously, including many block-printed books of the Muromachi period and many movable-type editions of the early seven- teenth century, and he published several bibliographic studies. He donated the cream of his collection in 1884-5 to the British Museum and in 1892 gave most of his remaining books to Aston, who was then working on his history of Japanese literature; these books came to Cambridge with the rest of Aston’s collection.34 We should remember here that in the years before 1868 there remained some difficulties in the way of collectors, for the Bakufu attempted to prevent

31 On Dickins, see Kornicki, ‘Introduction’, Collected works of F. V. Dickins, 7 vols. (Bristol, Ganesha, 1999), vol. 1, pp. ix-xxxi. 32 On Aston, see Kornicki, ‘William George Aston (1841–1911)’, in H. Cortazzi & G. Daniels, ed., Britain and Japan 1859-1991: Themes and personalities (), pp.64–75. Aston’s books in Cambridge and St Petersburg are listed in Hayashi and Kornicki, Early Japanese Books in Cambridge University Library. 33 Satow, A diplomat in Japan (London, 1921), pp. 55-58, 67-68, 336; Public Record Office, London, PRO 30/33, Satow diary (entries for 1.12.1879, 12.11.1881, etc), Satow’s letters to Aston (29.11.1881, 18.1.1882, etc). For Satow’s catalogues, see Hayashi and Kornicki, Early Japanese Books in Cambridge University Library, pp. 92-93, #15-28. 34 See Kornicki, ‘Ernest Mason Satow (1843–1929)’, in Cortazzi & Daniels, ed., Britain and Japan 1859–1991, pp.76–85; his books are described in Gardner, Descriptive catalogue, and Hayashi and Kornicki, Early Japanese Books in Cambridge University Library. Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 31 some kinds of books from falling into the hands of foreigners. In 1859, for example, an edict was issued in Edo banning the sale to foreigners of books giving details of Bakufu laws, of military texts, of maps showing castles, of unpublished manuscripts and of bukan and unjô meiran (directories of the names and ranks of samurai and of the court aristocracy in Kyoto, respec- tively).35 Nevertheless, it was not difficult to circumvent these restrictions. In 1862 a Prussian diplomat in Edo protested when a bookseller pretended not to have a current bukan for sale and conducted a ‘sit-in’ until the book- seller relented and sold him one, but Satow noted that it was not necessary to resort to such extreme measures, ‘as we could easily procure what we wanted in the way of maps and printed books through our Japanese teachers.’36 Chamberlain reached Japan in 1873 and was from 1886, extraordi- narily, the first professor of Japanese at the Imperial University. He built up a very large library of Japanese books, and was he and Satow sometimes exchanged books. His library, however, did not accompany him when he left Japan for good in 1911 for he disposed of them before he left and they are to be found now in the library of Nihon University and other institutions in Japan.37 Florenz taught and literature at Tokyo Imperial University from 1889 to 1914 but also became a serious scholar of Japanese literature, and his principal monument as a japanologist was his Geschichte der japanischen Litteratur, which was published in 1906. Sadly, however, the ship carrying his possessions, including his library, from Yokohama to Hamburg was sunk at the beginning of the First World War, and what remained of his personal effects was destroyed during the British fire- bombing of Hamburg in 1943.38 The first of the second group of collectors, who knew no Japanese but were particularly drawn by Japanese illustrated books, is Théodore Duret (1838-1927) visited Japan in 1871-2 on a round-the-world trip and made the rounds of Tokyo booksellers in search of illustrated books of the Edo period, inspired by the opportunity he had had to see some Japanese albums exhib- ited in Paris at the Exposition Universelle in 1867. In 1882 he published a

35 Matsuzawa Rosen shiryôshû (Musashi-Murayama, Seishôdô Shoten, 1982), pp. 96-97. 36 Satow, A diplomat in Japan, pp. 67-68, 336. 37 On Chamberlain see Richard Bowring, ‘An amused guest in all: Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850-1935), in Cortazzi & Daniels, ed., Britain and Japan 1859–1991, pp.128-136. For some of Satow’s catalogues of Chamberlain’s books, see Hayashi and Kornicki, Early Japanese Books in Cambridge University Library, pp. 93-94, #29, 30, 33, 35. 38 Masako Sato, Karl Florenz in Japan. Auf den Spuren einer vergessenen Quelle des modernen japanischen Geistesgeschichte und Poetik (Hamburg, Ostasien Gesellschaft, 1995), p. 177. I am grateful to Dr Herbert Worm of the University of Hamburg for help with this point. 32 P. F. Kornicki study of , L’art japonais, and in 1900 a catalogue of the Japa- nese books in the Bibliothèque Nationale, many of which came from his own collection and which included many rare seventeenth-century illustrated books by Hishikawa Moronobu and other artists.39 A few years later, in 1879, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832-1901) reached Japan on the ship Vega after having successfully pioneered the North-east passage from Sweden to the Bering Strait through the northern waters of . In the course of two months he assembled a collection of 1,000 titles, many of great rarity; as he acknowledged in his report on his epic voyage, he was assisted in his book-purchases by Ôkuchi Masayuki, a young Japa- nese who spoke French. Ôkuchi, he recalled, ‘searched through the stocks of countless antiquarian book dealers in Yokohama and Tokyo. When finally no further additions to the collection could be made in these towns, I sent him to make additional purchases in Kyoto. … I was guided by the desire to bring home a more valuable and more enduring memento than could be conveyed by the natural history collections [which he also put together in Japan].’ Nordenskiöld was well aware that it was a good time to buy antiquarian books because of the upheavals that had affected the livelihoods of daimyo and other senior samurai: ‘a large number of private collections of old books … have thus come into the antique shops.’ He also noted that, ‘these scarcely read books from earlier times are not counted as valuables,’ and this is clear from the prices he paid for his books: he kept careful record of these and they indicate that he paid less than the cost of a newspaper for some of the Muromachi-period editions he bought, though the nineteenth-century fiction of writers like Tamenaga Shunsui and Kyokutei Bakin was consider- ably more expensive because it was still in demand.40 He donated the entire collection to the Royal Library in Stockholm upon his return. This was one of the most extensive collections of Japanese books available in Europe at the time apart from those of Leiden; de Rosny compiled a catalogue of it, albeit without travelling to Stockholm to see the books, and the catalogue

39 Duret, Livres et albums illustres du Japon (Paris, Ernest Leroux, 1900), pp. ii-v. 40 J. S. Edgren, Catalogue of the Nordenskiold Collection of Japanese Books in the Royal Library (Stockholm, Royal Library, 1980) (quotations from pp. vii-viii); J. S. Edgren, ‘Illustrated Early Japanese Fiction in the Nordenskiold Collection’ Biblis 1977-1978, pp.9-62; J. S. Edgren, ‘The Nordenskiold Collection of Japanese Books in Stockholm’, in Yu-ying Brown, ed., Japa- nese Studies, pp.40-45; Gunilla Lindberg-Wada, ‘Reflections on the Nordenskiold Collection of Japanese books in the Royal Library in Stockholm’, in Urban Wrakberg and Gunilla Lind- berg-Wada, eds, An arctic passage to the Far East: the visit of the Swedish Vega expedition to Meiji Japan in 1879 (Stockholm, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Center for History of Science, 2002), pp. 81-93; Hiroshi Koyama, ‘The Nordenskiold book collection: an evaluation from a Japanese perspective’, in Wrakberg and Lindberg-Wada, eds, An arctic passage to the Far East, pp. 94-118. Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 33 was published in 1883, the first published catalogue of early Japanese books in Europe.41 Another short-term visitor was Christopher Dresser (1834-1904), who is well known as the leading British industrial designer of the nineteenth century. In 1876-77 he visited Japan in a semi-official capacity, both col- lecting materials for the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London and offering instruction in industrial design to interested Japanese. During his sojourn in Japan he acquired a number of illustrated books, particularly books showing carpenters’ designs, and some of these were acquired in 1905 by Henry Wellcome, the founder of the Well- come pharmaceutical firm, and are now preserved in the Wellcome Library in London.42 While Dresser lived in Japan for but a few months, Edoardo Chiossone (1833-1898) resided there from 1875 to 1891 as an employee of the Japanese government and was responsible to the Ministry of Finance for the design of Japanese banknotes and stamps. During his long stay he built up a superb collection of Japanese art including many illustrated books in very good condition, and these, together with the rest of his collection of Japanese art, are now housed in the Museo Chiossone in Genoa.43 A similar case to that of Théodore Duret is that of Feliks Jasienski (1861-1929). In the 1880s he became a great enthusiast for Japanese art and began assembling a large collection of Japanese books, as well as ukiyoe prints, swords and other objets d’art, in Europe. He later added to the collec- tion in Japan, and in 1901 held the first exhibition of Japanese art in Poland. He donated his collection, including the many Edo-period illustrated books he owned, to what is now the National Museum in Kraków in 1920.44 Simi- larly, Josef Hloucha (1881-1957), the author of several Czech novels set in Japan and of various other books on Japan, bought a quantity of illustrated Japanese books of the Edo period while in Japan in 1906 and 1926; these are

41 Léon de Rosny, Catalogue de la bibliothèque japonaise de Nordenskiold (Paris, 1883); this has of course been superseded by Edgren’s catalogue mentioned in the previous footnote. 42 Kornicki, ‘Japanese medical and other books at the Wellcome Institute’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60 (1997), pp. 489-510 43 On Chiossone see Donatella Failla, Edoardo Chiossone: un collezionista erudito nel Giappone Meiji (Genova, Comune di Genova, 1995), and Lia Beretta, ‘Edoardo Chiossone’, Transactions of of Japan, 4th series 10 (1995): 69-84; his illustrated books are described in Luigi Bernabò Brea and Eiko Kondo, Ukiyo-e prints and painitngs from the early masters to Shunsho: Museum of Oriental Art Genoa (Genova, Sagep, 1980). 44 Manggha: wystawa kolekcji Feliksa Mannghi Jasienskiego (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie, 1990); Zofia Alberowa, Sztuka japonska w zbiorach polskich (Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, Warsaw, 1987); Japan in the Fin-de-Siecle Poland: Feliks Jasienski’s Collection of Japanese Art and Polish Modernism (Tokyo, Seibu Hyakkaten, 1990). 34 P. F. Kornicki now housed in the National Gallery in Prague.45 Meanwhile, the foundations of the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art in Moscow were laid by Sergei Nikolaevich Kitaev (b. 1864), a Russian naval officer who spent much of the 1890s cruising the Pacific. Whenever his ship took him to Japan he took the opportunity to purchase works of art, including illustrated books of the Edo period, and in 1896 he held an exhibition of his Japanese art in the St Petersburg Academy of Arts. He entrusted his collection of books and prints to the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow in 1916, but they were trans- ferred to the Pushkin Museum in 1924.46 Other European collections were also in their formative stage at this time, including that of the Austrian Museum of Applied Art in Vienna. The Museum was founded in 1864 and the collection of Japanese books goes back to 1907 when it acquired the collection of the Vienna Handelsmuseum. That collection included books purchased by the Austro-Hungarian expedition to the Far East in 1869-71, books from the Vienna Exhibition (Weltausstel- lung) of 1873, and books from the collection of Alexander von Siebold.47 The collection of the University of St. Petersburg, however, owes its foundation to Prince Arisugawa, who passed through Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1882. While in St. Petersburg learnt that Japanese was taught at St. Petersburg University. In order to promote the study of Japan he sent a collection of books to St. Petersburg in 1883.48 The collection of the Prussian State Library, which had received its first Japanese items at the end of the seven- teenth century, likewise began to grow after 1854. The first occasion for growth was the return of the Ostasien-Expedition in 1861. This had travelled to Japan to conclude a commercial treaty between and Japan and had consisted not only of Prussian diplomats but also of scientists, doctors, artists and merchants; upon their return several of the members of the

45 Helena Honcoopova, Masatane Koike & Alam P. Dezner, Japanese illustrated books and manuscripts from the National Gallery in Prague: a descriptive catalogue (Prague, National Gallery, 1998). 46 Kitaev’s books are described in Kornicki, B. G. Voronova and A. Yusupova, Catalogue of the early Japanese books in the Pushkin State Museum of Arts, the State Museum of Oriental Art, and the Russian State Library (Moscow, Pashkov Dom, 2001). 47 Herbert Fux, ‘Die Japansammlung im Osterreischischen Museum für angewandte Kunst Wien’, Bonner Zeitschrift für Japanologie 3 (1981), pp. 167-184; Peter Pantzer & Johannes Wieninger, Verborgene Impressionen Hidden Impressions (Exhibition catalogue, Oesterreichis- ches Museum für Angewandte Kunst, 1990); the books are described in Harald Suppanschitsch, ‘Die Japonica der Bibliothek des Osterreichischen Museums für angewandte Kunst, Wien: kommentiertes Verzeichnis der edo- und meijizeitlichen Drucke’, MA dissertation, Universität Wien, 1993. 48 The collection is described in Maria V. Toropygina, Descriptive Catalogue of Japanese Books in St. Petersburg University. A Catalogue of the Arisugawa Collection.(Tokyo, Benseisha, 1998). Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 35 mission donated the books they had bought to the Library. Somewhat later Walter Dönitz (1838-1912), who had taught anatomy at the Imperial Univer- sity from 1873 to 1886 have the Library his collection of antiquarian numis- matic and botanical books bought in Japan.49 The American collectors fall outside the range of this article, but brief mention should be made of Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925) and William Elliot Griffis (1843-1928). Morse made three visits to Japan in 1877, 1878-79 and 1882; during part of that time he was employed by the Imperial Universit as its first professor of Zoology but he became more famous for his archaeo- logical finds. He also assembled a very substantial collection of Japanese artefacts, including books, which are now preserved in the Peabody Museum in Salem, of which he was the director for much of the rest of his life. Griffis, on the other hand, was both a missionary and an educator in Japan from 1870 to 1874, and his book The Mikado’s empire (1876) was one of the most widely-read accounts of Japan in the nineteenth century. His collection is now to be found in Rutgers University.50 Most of the other major collec- tions of pre-Meiji Japanese books in the United States were assembled in the twentieth century, although it is worth pointing out that several of the officers on Perry’s expedition appear to have bought illustrated Japanese books home with them.51 In the course of this article I have mentioned many of the largest collections of Japanese books in Europe, but not all. Some collections, such as that of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and many others, were only formed in the twentieth century, while in other cases the provenance is unclear.52 It will be clear nevertheless that many of the greatest collections owe their existence to the perseverance and discrimina-

49 Kraft, ‘Die Japansammlung der Staatsbibliothek’; Kurt Meissner, Deutsche in Japan, 1639- 1960, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, Supple- ment 26 (1961); Heinrich Seeman, Deutsche Botschafter in Japan, 1860-1973 (1974). 50 On Morse see Money Hickman and Peter Fetchko, Japan day by day: an exhibition honoring Edward Sylvester Morse and commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his arrival in Japan in 1877 (Salem, Peabody Museum, 1977). On Griffis see Edward R. Beauchamp, An American teacher in early Meiji Japan (Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1976). D. E. Perushek, ed., The Griffis collection of Japanese books; an annotated bibliography, Cornell University East Asia papers, 28 (New York, 1982). 51 Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the expedition of an American Squadron to the China seas and Japan (New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1857). pp. 459-463. The Library of Congress can throw no light on the present whereabouts of these books. 52 The Union Catalogue of Early Japanese Books in Europe now contains data on the provenance of all European collections: the Catalogue is accessible on-line at http:// asuka.nijl.ac.jp/xml/ korn/index.html and the provenance data is viewable in English and Japanese by clicking on the names of the libraries in the List of Libraries. 36 P. F. Kornicki tion of the nineteenth-century collectors described above, many of whom were active in the early years of the Meiji period. The Japanese scholar Mizutani Futô (1858-1943) once described the first ten years of the Meiji period as a time of martyrdom for Japanese antiquarian books.53 We might question the word ‘martyrdom’, for the books were not lost to the world nor, for the most part, were they ‘sleeping’ in foreign libraries as is sometimes suggested. More importantly, it should not be forgotten that the formation of these collections was not so much due to the rapaciousness of Japanese collectors or the weakness of the Japanese currency as to the shift in contem- porary tastes away from Japanese antiquities towards imported books from the West and towards translations. As Mantei Ôga (1818-1890), a popular writer and acerbic observer of the mores of the Meiji period, noted, people were quite prepared to dispose of old books for scrap-paper: the problem lay with shifting attitudes towards the past.54

53 Mizutani Futô chosakushû, 8 vols (Chûô Kôronsha, 1973-7), vol. 6, pp. 200-202. 54 Meiji bungaku zenshû, vol. 1, p. 198. Collecting Japanese Books in Europe 37

Abstract

Europeans began collecting Japanese books during the so-called ‘Christian cen- tury’, but after the expulsion of the missionaries in the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch presence on Deshima became the only conduit for the acquisition of Japanese books. Engelbert Kaempfer, Isaac Titsingh and later Philipp Franz von Siebold were the three main employees of the Dutch East India Company who used their precious opportunity of visiting Japan to acquire Japanese books out of schol- arly interest. The only other source of Japanese books in Europe was the steady flow of Japanese castaways who reached European Russia via Kamchatka; these included the famous Daikokuya Kôdayû, and many of them seem to have had books with them; it was from these castaways that Julius Klaproth was able to learn some Japanese and acquire his first Japanese books. After the 1850s it became easier to acquire Japanese books and the expatriate communities in the treaty ports grew larger. Subsequent collectors can be divided into three types: those who never visited Japan but were greatly interested and in some cases learnt much of the language, like Léon de Rosny and Antelmo Severini; residents of Japan who mastered Japanese and used their books for their study, like Ernest Satow and Karl Florenz; and visitors who knew no Japanese but were drawn particularly by the illustrations in block-printed books, like Sergei Kitaev and Feliks Jasienski. It is thanks to the collecting activities of these various individuals that European libraries possess such superb collections of pre-modern Japanese books.

Resumo

Os europeus começaram a coleccionar livros japoneses durante o denomi- nado ‘século cristão’. Todavia, depois da expulsão dos missionários em meados do século XVII, a presença holandesa em Deshima tornou-se na única via de aquisição de livros japoneses. Engelbert Kaempfer, Isaac Titsingh e, mais tarde, Philipp Franz von Siebold foram os três principais funcionários da VOC que, graças aos seus inte- resses intelectuais, aproveitaram a preciosa oportunidade de visitarem o Japão para adquirirem livros japoneses. A única outra fonte de entrada de livros japoneses na Europa, advinha de um fluxo regular de náufragos japoneses que chegavam à Rússia europeia via Kamchatka. Muitos desses náufragos, entre os quais se incluía o famoso Daikokuya Kôdayû, transportavam livros consigo. Foi graças a estes náufragos que Julius Klaproth conseguiu aprender algum japonês e adquirir os seus primeiros livros japoneses. Depois da década de 50 do século XIX tornou-se mais fácil adquirir livros japoneses, ao mesmo tempo que as comunidades expatriadas nos portos abrangidos pelos tratados aumentavam. A partir de então, os coleccionadores podem ser divi- didos em três grupos: os que nunca visitaram o Japão mas tinham um grande inte- resse pela cultura, e em alguns casos adquiriram um conhecimentos assinalável da língua, como por exemplo Léon de Rosny e Antelmo Severini; os residentes no Japão, que dominavam o japonês e utilizavam os livros para desenvolver os seus estudos, como Ernest Satow e Karl Florenz; e os visitantes que não tinham conhecimentos de japonês, mas que foram atraídos particularmente pelas ilustrações que apare- ciam em livros estampados com xilogravuras, como Sergei Kitaev e Feliks Jasienski. É graças às actividades de muitos destes coleccionadores que as bibliotecas euro- peias possuem esplêndidas colecções de livros japoneses pré-modernos. 38 P. F. Kornicki

要約

ヨーロッパ人として初めて日本の書物を集めたのは島原の乱までの百年の間 に来日した宣教師，商人たちだったようだ。しかし、「鎖国」の時代になると、出 島にあったオランド商館の役人しか日本で日本の書物を集めるチャンスがな かった。その中に、ケンペル、ティッツィング、シーボルトなどが一番知られてい る。同時にまた、日本人の漂流民がロシア首都のサンクト・ペテルブルクまで自 分用の書物を持参した例が少なくなく、そのお陰でクラップロットのようなヨー ロッパ人が、日本の書物を入手し、日本語の勉強をはじめる可能性ができあが った。開国以後、入手することが容易となったのは当然だが、幕末・明治の収 集家は三種類が認められよう。つまり、第一に、パリのレオン・ド・ローニのよう に、渡日したことがないのにどうしても日本に興味を持っていた人たち、第二に、 アーネスト・サトーのように、長いこと日本に滞在して、日本の書物を研究資料 として使っていた学者たち，また最後に、ポーランドのジャシエンスキーのよう に、日本語能力がなくても、渡日して、特に絵本を沢山集めた好事家たち、とい う三種類なのである。ヨーロッパ各国の図書館などに、まともな日本学の基礎 となるべき資料が現在揃っていることは、以上のような書籍収集活動のお陰だ と認めなければなるまい。