The Nagasakiya: Japanese-Dutch Intellectual Exchange in the Shogun's Capital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Japanese scholars of European science, medicine, and culture, known at the time as rangaku in Japanese, began to form an expansive network that connected individuals in the major cities of Edo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagasaki and also reached into provincial areas that were separated from those metropoles.The central government was slow to realize the value of Western knowledge, and thus offered no true patronage.Even more challenging, the government created policies in the seventeenth century which ultimately impeded access to European books and people.In such a discouraging environment which could occasionally border on hostile, the network was crucial to the spread of Western medicine and science.And, it functioned remarkably effectively.United by a common spirit of curiosity and the belief that Western science would benefit Japan, and encouraged by a societal confidence in the power of information, the rangaku network expanded between the 1770s and the 1820s. 1 The term rangaku, which can be translated as 'Dutch studies', came into use at the beginning of that period and was formed by a combination of the characters ran ('Holland') and gaku ('studies').The word reflected the fact that the only conduit to European science and medicine for most of the Tokugawa Era (1600-1868) was through contact with a Dutch trading company.Although not all of the knowledge originated in Holland, the Dutch language was the medium of transfer.Accordingly, the portal through which intellectual and cultural contact could take place was quite small, and those that pursued Dutch studies, known as rangakusha, were forced to learn a lot from a little.They had to optimize the limited 'contact spaces' available to them.In 1991, Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of 'contact zones' in which cultures 'meet, clash, and grapple' within 'asymmetrical relations of
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".