“Conduits and Contexts Across the East China Sea: The Transmission to and Reception of Medical Knowledge in Pre-modern Japan.”

This paper will explore a combination of general factors and specific historical circumstances that catalyzed substantial changes in the shape and quality of medical information in two periods of Japan’s pre-modern era. Period One covers the late 13th and early 14th centuries; period Two spans the late 15th and early 16th centuries. In each period we also note a shift in the prevailing locus of medical authority from one social group to another.

In Period One we examine the impact on Japanese medicine of access to Song medical writings that was facilitated by the Song print revolution and the parallel growth of non-state trade and religious networks that spanned the East China Sea, and which were integral parts of what we term an emerging East Asian macro-culture. The role of priests and institutions associated with new and emerging Buddhist sects is highlighted. We will also examine the content of new medical knowledge, focusing on medical writings, and on the imported materia medica attested in both formulas and in other sources. The focus is on the warrior capital of Kamakura.

In Period Two we examine changes in Japanese medicine in two broad contexts. The first is the Japanese domestic context (focusing on the Kyoto region) of emergence from the fragmentation of civil war, the new phenomenon in Japanese history of urbanization (with its attendant opportunities for enhanced circulation of medical information), and the growth of the new professional group of secular clinical physicians. The second context encompasses a variety of transnational elements: the transmission of a publishing mindset linked to greater Japanese understanding and use of Korean and Chinese print technology; an appreciation of printed medical works by a new group of patrons (warlords eager to establish cultural credentials); and a greater familiarity with and importation of Ming medical works made possible by a combination of an apparent loosening of Ming maritime restrictions and more extensive trading routes. The end result of these dynamics was the establishment of what we now recognize as Japan’s early modern Kanpō medical culture.

The paper concludes with some thoughts on the broader topic of the transmission of medical knowledge.