The argument according to which the origin of many elements of Japanese modernization has to be found in indigenous developments rather than in importation and adaptations from the West seems to be a recurring motif in the scholarship on early modern Japan of the last two decades. We are today persuaded that capitalist dynamics generated from within, that scientific inquiry had its roots in the vibrant intellectual life of Tokugawa scholars, that certain aspects of political liberalism unfolded in the context of peasant protests of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that beliefs in nationhood and in a (invented) national community were inspired by the literary studies of eighteenth-century scholars that would be later called “nativists,” and so on. Maki Fukuoka similarly argues, quite convincingly, that the origin of modern photography (shashin) in Japan—if not its technology, at least its cognitive and aesthetic aspects—predated the introduction of the ideas of René Dagron (1819–1900) and has to be looked for in the activities of herbalists and naturalists in Nagoya, the castle-town of the Owari domain, in the first half of the nineteenth century.

With an abundance of information and exegeses of rare and difficult texts, Fukuoka introduces the activities of the Shōhyaku-sha, a circle of scholars and physicians in Nagoya who researched the pharmacological properties and correct identification of medicinal plants. Known at the time as honzōgaku, this field of materia medica of Chinese origins enjoyed great popularity among scholars and amateurs of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) and counted among its practitioners men of learning as renowned as Kaibara Ekiken, Hiraga Gennai, Ono Ranzan, and Itō Keisuke, among many others. Itō Keisuke, a member of the Shōhyaku-sha, is a central figure in Fukuoka's story, from his first meeting with Franz von Siebold in 1826 to his appointment as the first Japanese professor of biology at the Imperial University (as the University of Tokyo was renamed in 1886). Keisuke and his colleagues of the Shōhyaku-sha struggled to develop new ways to correctly identify and describe the flora and fauna of Japan (and in particular of Owari Province).

Correctly matching names and plants had been a perennial struggle of honzōgaku specialists. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, scholars have attempted various solutions to this semasiological problem with very concrete implications: in preparing medicines, the correct identification of a medicinal herb was of vital import to prevent unpleasant surprises. “The Shōhyaku-sha's interests”—but it was the case of many other honzōgaku practitioners—“were rooted in a practical drive to find and apply knowledge that served a curative purpose” (p. 26).

Throughout the early modern period, scholars adopted various strategies to correctly match Chinese names with actual plants growing in Japan, but a textualist and lexicographical approach dominated their research. Shōhyaku-sha's scholars adopted instead a more complex methodology. They engaged in a dialectical “triangulation” of multilingual texts in Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch; in chapter 2, Fukuoka reconstructs Itō Keisuke's efforts to grasp and systematically apply the Linnean binominal nomenclature to the plants he and his colleagues studied. They tested the textual information through collegial observational practices in the field and in public exhibitions that encouraged shared participation and open discussion—honzō-kai, to which Fukuoka dedicated chapter 3. And they developed pictorial representations faithful to the observed plants—analyzed in chapter 4, probably the most crucial chapter in the book. Fidelity to actual objects is the motivating goal behind the various techniques that the Owari naturalists adopted: from “realistic” pictographical renditions and the plastering of dried specimens on paper to ink-rubbing (in-yō-zuhō) and shadowing methods (shin'ei). Faithful renditions of actual specimens, that is, supported a complex epistemology whereby images continuously negotiated with multilingual texts, descriptions, observational practices, and open debates with the aim of reaching an authoritative knowledge of actual plants. Fukuoka identifies in shashin the conceptual core behind the (proto-) scientific activities of Shōhyaku-sha naturalists. Shashin—the modern Japanese term for “photography,” which Fukuoka renders throughout the book as “the transposition (sha) of the real (shin)”—worked for them as the conceptual interface upon which a correct identification of a plant could connect the pharmacological information contained in manuals and encyclopedias with real objects.

“The efficiency of shashin in attesting to the existence of a particular specimen and the direct observational experience of the specimen” (p. 106) allowed scholars to ground their epistemological claims to objects rather than to the received knowledge of canonical texts. This is, in my understanding, the motivation behind Fukuoka's decision to render the semantic complexities of shin as “the real.” But I see in her gesture the source of possible heuristic problems. Fukuoka never justifies her choice of the term “the real”—a term loaded with philosophical connotations, many of which, especially those relating to the uses of the term in Lacan and Barthes, she (rightly, I would claim) rejects (p. 215 fn. 5). “The real,” in the book, stands for “really existing objects,” individual specimens that became, in specific circumstances, the object of communal inquiry. Their faithful representations, then, had the function of an evidentiary material memento that such an investigation had taken place, reaching a successful identification—that is, the correct naming—of a plant. This indeed represented a pivotal epistemological change in the field of honzōgaku—although, I would add, we could trace an antecedent in the illustrations attached to the many shanbutsuchō (notebooks of natural products) that recorded the nationwide surveys ordered by Tokugawa Yoshimune in 1736.Footnote ¹⁸ However, by rendering shin as “the real” Fukuoka risks missing the novelty of Keisuke's gesture. Shin, in fact, appeared in older texts like Kaibara Ekiken's Yamato honzō and Inō Jakusui's Shobutsu ruisan, where it referred to the essential properties of natural species, whereas Keisuke and his colleagues used it, according to Fukuoka, to express the actual physical existence of specific objects—the specific plant, herb, or shellfish, etc. they observed on particular occasions. If Fukuoka is right, then what happened to the concept of shin in the works of the Owari naturalists is tantamount to a semantic shift from the ontological (the elucidation of the essential properties of things, their true nature) to the ontic (the evidence of their actual, real existence). But, if we do not want to transform Keisuke into a naïve realist, we should be more precise in reconstructing this change. In fact, the verification of the actual existence of an object (which, by the way, is already a mediated procedure) does not immediately and directly imply the attribution to it of certain properties (morphological, functional, therapeutic, etc.): the body of a plant, that is, does not reveal in itself those properties. And, in fact, as Fukuoka rightly notices, Keisuke never really questioned the validity of the pharmacological tradition of honzōgaku—as his contemporary and friend Udagawa Yōan did in his flamboyant manifesto Botanika-kyō (pp. 67–68)—but integrated it with new observational, representational, and indexical practices and with knowledge of Western texts (but Ono Ranzan already did that in Honzō kōmoku keimō). Rather, what happened to shin in the texts of Shōhyaku-sha naturalists is a semantic shift from the realm of “truth”—that is, shin as the essential properties of things—to the realm of “certainty”—that is, shin as the result of discernment through measurements, observation, experiments, etc. Furthermore, rendering shin simply as “the real” leaves open the question of the relation of species and individuals: if shin once revealed the essential properties of all members of a species, shin as “really existing object” does not solve the problem of subsuming different individual specimens under a unified species—in itself, a purely metaphysical procedure whereby actual objects are sublated under a conceptual unit (for example, species). Emphasizing this semantic shift would have allowed Fukuoka to see a homology between the practices of these naturalists and the practices of early modern European natural philosophers. If Fukuoka is right in emphasizing the importance of the Shōhyaku-sha in the history of natural knowledge in Tokugawa Japan—and I think she is—then what we should acknowledge in their activities is a progressive disavowal of the notion of truth—the conventional translation of shin, which laced together ontological, epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and political judgments—in favor of empirical accuracy and certainty. That meant that inquiries on the essential qualities of objects ceased to be a metaphysical problem and became what was intersubjectively determined by the justified consensus of an epistemological community sharing protocols of observation, measurement, and symbolic representation, as the etymological root of “certainty” (from the Latin cernere, “to distinguish,” “to decide,” “to sift,” “to separate”) suggests. In other words, shashin became the focal point of a conceptual labor that constituted the objects of inquiry—plants, animals, minerals, etc.—in a new, purely instrumental fashion.

This conceptual disagreement notwithstanding, I think that Maki Fukuoka's The Premise of Fidelity is an important addition to our scholarship on nineteenth-century Japan. It is a sophisticated book that rewards the careful reader with an understanding of this important moment of Japanese modernization. It is a genuinely interdisciplinary book that addresses issues common to historians of all areas and specializations: this, I think, is the direction Japanese studies should take from now on.