The Work of Realism, Shin, and Materia Medica in Nineteenth-Century Japan

This chapter elaborates on a type of pictorial realism that thrived in early modern Japan. It focuses on medical and herbal texts from the Tokugawa period, where scholars and medical practitioners known as the Shōhyaku-sha questioned the pictorial and textual accuracy of the books they studied. This entry introduces the significance of pictorial methods and processes in evaluating and accepting the accuracy of received knowledge. A printing method known as ink-rubbing offers a critical insight as a mechanism by which medical doctors and enthusiasts revealed and acknowledged the realness of their encounter with represented specimens. The realism of the pictures in this context does not rely on symbolic schemata often associated with western pictorial realism, such as one-point linear perspective. Instead, these images cohere with a set of realist values hinging on ontology, epistemology, and accessibility, which emerged in Japan out of urgent necessity in local pursuit of medical knowledge. This chapter challenges and decenters the idea of European preeminence in realism and examines how, among the Shōhyaku-sha, a small group in Owari, Japan, the notion of the real has been articulated and negotiated visually, textually, and experientially. By historicizing the primary material and contextualizing it within its local context, one can begin to probe the possibilities of other forms and manifestations of realism.