Genpaku Writes Rangaku kotohajime

Sugita Genpaku wrote Rangaku kotohajime in 1815 and sent it to Ōtsuki Gentaku. He asked Gentaku to correct and preserve the account for later generations. The memoir traced Dutch learning through interpreters, copied dictionaries, book purchases and the anatomy project in which Genpaku had participated.

His descriptions give other people concrete roles. Maeno Ryōtaku studied vocabulary in Nagasaki and brought books back; domain officials helped Genpaku obtain an illustrated anatomy book; physicians compared its pictures with an autopsy in 1771. The subsequent translation required meetings, uncertain terminology and repeated revision. These are Genpaku’s remembered explanations, written more than forty years after that observation.

The text’s later publication was another event. A manuscript preserved through Gentaku became the basis of the corrected woodblock edition issued in 1869 by Sugita Renkei with Fukuzawa Yukichi and others’ support. The memoir consequently reached a wider readership after Genpaku’s death. It remains evidence of how a participant remembered the project and its predecessors, rather than a contemporaneous transcript of each conversation.