Republic of Letters Comes to Nagasaki: Record of a Translator’s Struggle

Abstract

The essay is framed by the story of an early translation of the metaphorical expression “republic of letters” into an East Asian language. The story itself—reconstructed from primary archival materials—is then used as an illustration of the processes of transmission, translation, and communication that brought into existence something like a republic of letters on a Eurasia-wide scale. 

Although scholarly consensus is no longer marked by the uncritical acceptance of the description of Tokugawa Japan as a “closed country,” the trope of isolationism continues not just to shape the popular awareness of the period, but to determine disciplinary agendas. This is particularly true of the disciplinary culture of intellectual history, which has mostly taken “Japanese thought” for its self-evident object.

Yet, in the face of considerable geopolitical and logistical odds, by the eighteenth century there was a quite densely interconnected sphere of textual culture that can be seen as Eurasian in its scope. Japan was part of this network to such an extent that the trope of a “closed country” is unfitting to characterize the intellectual activity of the early modern period.

This micro-historical study of a particular translation’s conditions of possibility is an attempt to demonstrate how we could do intellectual history differently, in this case by recasting Japan as a nodal point within a Eurasian network of the transmission of texts, metaphors, and imaginaries that partook in the generation of knowledge.