This is an account of the growth and uses of Western learning in Japan
from 1720 to 1830. These are the dates of the beginning of official
interest in Western learning and of the expulsion of Siebold from the
country, the first stage of a crisis that could be resolved only by the
opening of the country of the West. The century and more included by the
two dates was a most important period in Japanese history, when
intellectuals, rebelling at the isolation of their country, desperately
sought knowledge from abroad. The amazing energy and enthusiasm of men
like Honda Toshiaki made possible the spectacular changes in Japan,
which are all too often credited to the arrival of Commodore Perry.
The author chose Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) as his central figure. A
page from any one of Honda's writings suffices to show that with him one
has entered a new age, that of modern Japan. One finds in his books a
new spirit, restless, curious and receptive. There is in him the wonder
at new discoveries, the delight in widening horizons. Honda took a kind
of pleasure even in revealing that Japan, after all, was only a small
island in a large world. To the Japanese who had thought of Chinese
civilization as being immemorial antiquity, he declared that Egypt's was
thousands of years older and far superior. The world, he discovered, was
full of wonderful things, and he insisted that Japan take advantage of
them. Honda looked at Japan as he thought a Westerner might, and saw
things that had to be changed, terrible drains on the country's moral
and physical strength. Within him sprang the conviction that Japan must
become one of the great nations of the world.
