Translating Technology in Japan's Meiji Enlightenment, 1870–1879

Abstract

The enthusiasm for translation during the early Meiji period is well documented. However, beyond Fukuzawa Yukichi, the publishing sensation of the era, little is known about those who translated works on technology or their motives for doing so. During the 1870s, the heyday of Japan's Meiji enlightenment, over fifty works on technology were translated from Western languages. Although the government often spearheaded this drive, many translators took advantage of inexpensive printing technologies and an accessible book market to publish their own works on Western technologies. This article examines who translated such works and their motives for doing so. It sheds light on how translators exploited traditional means of asserting their authority to ensure the spread of new, “modern” knowledge.

Keywords:

• Meiji era
• bunmei kaika
• civilization and enlightenment
• translation
• technology
• publishing

Acknowledgments

An earlier draft of this article was presented at the “New Horizons in Modern Japan History of Technology” workshop at the Needham Research Institute in May 2014. I thank the organizer, Aleksandra Kobiljski, for her invitation. I am also grateful to Erich Pauer, Dagmar Schäfer, Togo Tsukahara, Francesca Bray, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to acknowledge the continued support of Takehiko Hashimoto, with whom I have had many productive discussions about Meiji industrial history.

Notes

1 Telegraphs were also destroyed by anti-Meiji government forces during civil disturbances, and in some cases vandalism was linked to a general frustration with the government for its new impositions into people's daily lives (Wakai and Takahashi 1994: 88).

2 Typically wage were identified as such by suffixing this term to the title of the book, whereas the term yaku would be suffixed to the translator's name.

3 Chartier (1994: 50) notes that investigating reading poses a particular challenge because it is “a practice that rarely leaves traces, that is scattered in an infinity of singular acts, and that easily shakes off all constraints.”

4 It is possible that some technical translations were more expensive than this, but this is the highest price verifiable from the colophons.

5 This translation is based on rendering of the kanbun text into modern Japanese provided by Miyoshi (1992: 182–83).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruselle Meade

Ruselle Meade is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on the circulation of scientific and technical knowledge, particularly through translation and popularization, in modern Japan. She is currently working on a monograph that explores how popular representations of technology have helped shaped notions of Japanese identity from the Meiji period onward. This article was completed during a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tokyo.