"A Forgotten Aesop: Shiba Kōkan, European Emblems, and Aesopian Fable Reception in Late Edo Japan"

Abstract

When Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century entered a period of rapid modernization and orientation towards the West, Aesopian fables became a prominent presence in didactic literature of the modern age, with several translations into Japanese from 1873 onwards. When Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were expelled from Japan in 1639, this marked the beginning of the suppression of European books in that country. The only title introduced by the Jesuits to survive in Japan was a collection of Aesop’s fables.2 Its contents were not seen as Christian by the authorities and therefore they were not potentially dangerous. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, a number of Japanese editions of the fables were published. However, after the middle of the century, Aesop appeared to have faded from sight in Japan. In a sense, Aesop’s fables bookend early modern Japan’s image of a “closed country,” and their appearance, disappearance, and subsequent reappearance seem to symbolize the bracketing of its isolation from European literature. Between 1639 and 1854, Japan’s contacts with the Western world, especially Europe, were limited to its contacts with its sole European trade partner, Holland, and to a lesser extent through mediation by Chinese traders. Bleak views of these contacts paint a history of missed opportunities. In such narratives both parties learned little from each other; or, worse, if they tried to learn, they misunderstood. This misunderstanding arose largely from the inability of both parties to frame outside of prevailing worldviews whatever was learned; no one was capable of “thinking outside the box.” For Japan, this translates as the view that the study of Europe was framed within templates for studying Chinese classics, neo-Confucianism (or perhaps better “Zhu Xi learning,” Jp. shushigaku 朱子学), A Forgotten Aesop: Shiba Kōkan, European Emblems, and Aesopian Fable Reception in Late Edo Japan1