Review of Maki Fukuoka's The Premise of Fidelity

For some decades, scholars of Japanese visual culture have been fascinated by the rise of pictorial realism in the late Tokugawa period. Much of this scholarship centered on Satake Shozan (1748-1785) and Shiba Kōkan (1747-1818), who were famous for their Western-style paintings. In retrospect, Shozan’s and Kōkan’s promotion of realist Dutch paintings at the expense of the “imprecise” Chinese paintings sounds particularly foreboding. The fifty years after Kōkan’s death saw the steady rise of pictorial realism, a process that, in conventional narratives, culminated with the introduction of photography in the mid-nineteenth century.

Maki Fukuoka’s book is a compelling rebuttal of this dominant narrative. At the heart of her book is the term shashin 写真, which was used by Kōkan to refer to his Dutch-style paintings and later became the standard translation for photography. The genealogy of this term seems to corroborate the argument on pictorial realism’s continuous development in the late Tokugawa period. Fukuoka, however, sets out to disrupt this continuity. By shifting the focus from Kōkan’s Edo to Nagoya, the castle town of the Owari domain, Fukuoka finds a circle of scholars and physicians called Shōhyaku-sha 賞百社　whose usage of the term shashin dramatically complicates the term’s genealogy. In this particular context in Nagoya, shashin, rather than photography avant la lettre, referred to a set of practices developed by Shōhyaku-sha’s members to correctly match specimens with their names and illustrations. Establishing this representational fidelity was the highest priority for physicians and scholars in early nineteenth-century Japan, who recognized the frequent mismatches among the Chinese canon of materia medica, the Dutch natural history sources, and the local flora and fauna. In this alternative genealogy of shashin, the introduction of photography was not the fulfillment of long-held realist ideals, but just one more instance of negotiation among locally available epistemological and sociological forces. By investigating a world previously excluded from the genealogy of shashin, Fukuoka successfully challenges our hegemonic understanding that regards the history of Japan’s modernization as a history of importation and adaptation from the West.

Fukuoka sets out the epistemological quandary facing Japanese physicians and scholars in Chapter 1. Matching plants with their names in the Chinese canon of materia medica had been a long-running concern in the study of materia medica in Japan (known at the time as honzōgaku 本草学). In the Tokugawa period, the introduction of Western natural history, which often conflicted with the Chinese canon, compounded this problem. Members of the newly formed Shōhyaku-sha, including Mizutani Hōbun (1779-1833) and Itō Keisuke (1803-1901), lived in this epistemologically uncertain world and struggled to establish the correct relationships among the specimen, textual knowledge, and illustrations--a trio that would keep resurfacing in Fukuoka’s narrative. The struggle to secure the relationships within this trio crystallized in Hōbun and Keisuke’s meeting with Philipp Franz von Siebold, a Dutch physician stationed in Nagoya, in 1826. The Japanese men brought Siebold a manuscript titled “Honzō shashin,” which included dozens of folios imprinted with impressions of local plants, and asked him to identify each plant’s Latin and Dutch names. For Fukuoka, this translingual encounter not only shows shashin as a particular pictorial technique associated with plant impressions, but also demonstrates the importance of shashin in Shōhyaku-sha’s struggle for epistemological certainty.

Chapter 2 illustrates how Shōhyaku-sha’s members tried to achieve fidelity between plants and names through the usage of Linnaean binomial system and the Latin alphabet. Since the early eighteenth century, honzōgaku specialists had recognized that knowledge in Li Shizhen’s materia medica text did not match the Japanese flora. Li’s compendium could no longer serve as the unified authority transparently reflecting what existed in Japan. The decline of this equivalence between texts and things, which Fukuoka provocatively characterizes as an epistemic shift comparable to Europe’s, motivated Keisuke to adopt new classificatory schemes for materia medica. Instead of using the classifications in Chinese materia medica, Keisuke used the Linnaean binomial system and the Latin alphabet, which not only fixed each species in a rigid categorical hierarchy, but also arranged everything in strict alphabetical order. This chapter will prove especially relevant for scholars interested in linguistic infrastructure and the Foucaultian study of episteme.

Chapter 3 brings us into the settings of honzō kai 本草会, exhibitions where honzō specialists observed plant specimens and discussed amongst themselves to identify specimens. Shōhyaku-sha, as well as organizations in Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, organized hundreds of these exhibitions in the last century of Tokugawa rule. For Fukuoka, these exhibitions illustrated the collective epistemological process in which people worked to match specimens with their correct names. Participants engaged in a recursive process between seeing and knowing: while their knowledge enabled them to identify what they saw, what they saw also contributed to their knowledge. In this negotiation between the visible and knowable, participants drew from a heterogeneous set of sources, including both textual records and first-hand experiences. Despite this epistemological heterogeneity that participants brought to honzō kai, Fukuoka argues that they shared a similar dedication to observation of the actual specimen.

Chapter 4 examines two imaging techniques, copperplate engraving (known as shashin) and ink-rubbing (known as shin’ei 真影), that Shōhyaku-sha members used to produce illustrations of specimens. Both methods enabled honzō specialists to produce faithful representations of specimens through different techniques of impressions. Interestingly, Fukuoka argues that in the example of ink-rubbing, the primary goal of these prints was not to generate a precise representation, but to show an undisputable encounter between the print maker and the specimen. Similar to honzō kai, ink-rubbing demonstrates the utmost importance of a first-person encounter with an actual object. As in every other chapter, Fukuoka analyzes this specific practice to probe the meanings of shin. For Shōhyaku-sha members, shin referred to an unmediated contact with the actual specimen. Unlike prints generated (and hence tempered) by artisans or previous textual authorities, shashin and shin’ei prints seemed to remove processes of mediation. This pursuit of the unmediated actual specimen was a theme that ran through most of Shōhyaku-sha’s activities.

Chapter 5 is the story of how shashin became photography. The two genealogies of shashin, one centered on the circle of Dutch studies in Edo and the other centered on Shōhyaku-sha in Nagoya, finally came together at the behest of an increasingly ambitious state, which saw pictorial and imaging techniques as integral to its governance toolkit. Keisuke, who in his youth met with von Siebold to verify the names of plants, met his Dutch informer again in 1861, this time with another batch of specimens. Though the nature of the meeting was similar, Keisuke came to it with a different title. He had joined the bakufu’s Academy of Western Studies in Edo, where a different connotation of shashin was in operation. Through the activities of Keisuke, Fukuoka successfully demonstrates how previously different notions of shashin as Western-style realist painting and as fidelity between name and specimen intertwined into a single notion, which was later used to translate the term "photography."

Scholars from many different fields will find Fukuoka’s book relevant. Fukuoka skillfully situates her work at the intersection of visual studies and the intellectual, technological, and social history of late Tokugawa Japan. Aside from art historians and intellectual historians, The Premise of Fidelity can also speak to scholars in Science, Technology, and Society, who can benefit from Fukuoka’s close reading of visual sources but might find her exposition of sociological and technological processes somewhat lacking. At times, Fukuoka’s focus on tracing the conceptual history of shin might have caused her to overlook the larger social and technological infrastructure that undergirded Shōhyaku-sha’s activities. In the chapter on honzō kai, for example, Fukuoka could have paid more attention to the social and technical protocols that maintained this space of knowledge production.

The absence of a rich contextual picture might have also caused Fukuoka to inadvertently naturalize the pragmatism and empiricism of Shōhyaku-sha members. At times, Fukuoka’s narrative gives one the impression that the actual object--whether it is a human corpse in Chapter 1 or a plant specimen in Chapter 3--is a natural source of valid knowledge. These objects seem to have the magical ability to automatically settle disputes and create consensus. Fukuoka’s treatment of Shōhyaku-sha members and their methodological opponents is, as a result, somewhat asymmetrical: whereas Shōhyaku-sha members derived solid findings from actual objects, their opponents, who relied on book learning, often seemed stubborn in their denial of reality. While producing a symmetrical account was not her objective, Fukuoka could have elaborated more on the ideological formation of both sides.

Readers of this book might also find Fukuoka’s usage of shin ambiguous. As Fukuoka recognizes in chapters 2 and 3, the term shin was never a stable semantic entity. Sometimes shin referred to the idealized real, e.g., the species, and sometimes it referred to the actual real, e.g., the individual specimen. Fukuoka’s narrative seems to conflate, or at least give the impression of confusing, these different connotations of shin. Without clearly specifying what shin means in each instance, Fukuoka might have missed a great opportunity to explore the dynamic between the idealized real and the actual real, which, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown, is a productive field of inquiry.

Despite these minor issues, Fukuoka’s book is an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of late Tokugawa visual culture and natural history. Fukuoka, who combines the visual acumen of an art historian with the abstract sensibility of an intellectual historian, gives us a book that is a must-read for scholars in a variety of fields.