The year 1868 is usually considered to be the beginning of modern Japan. In that year the Tokugawa government, a feudal samurai government in Edo (today’s Tokyo), was replaced by a modern imperial government (initially based in Kyoto, the old imperial capital) at a time of internal crisis and the fear of colonization by European imperial powers. This revolutionary political change is named the Meiji Restoration because the ancient imperial system was nominally restored under Emperor Meiji. The new government began as a mixture of ancient Japanese and modern Western imperial systems, but it soon became a completely Westernized government, which adopted a policy of full-fledged modernization. However, the introduction of Western science had already started long before the Meiji Restoration. During the Edo Period, the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867) strictly controlled overseas trade and the Netherlands was the only European country with which Japan had diplomatic relationship from the middle of the seventeenth century until 1853. In the second half of the eighteenth century some books in Dutch on science, technology, and medicine were imported into Japan. For the introduction of Western medicine, physicians played an important role. During the Edo Period there was a class system: the samurai class (warrior) controlled the common people in villages and towns. All the professions were considered to be hereditary. However, physicians could move rather freely along the social ladder (hierarchy). If physicians were employed by feudal lords, they became accepted as members of the samurai. There was a reform movement among physicians during the eighteenth century. In 1754 Yamawaki Toyo (1706–62), a physician in Kyoto, received official permission to inspect the anatomy of a human body, using a cadaver of a condemned criminal, after he had inspected otters (a small animal with four webbed feet), the structure of which was quite different from Chinese medicine’s teaching. After him physicians were allowed to inspect condemned criminals’ bodies.
Speaking for the People in Early Modern England*
