How one evaluates ignorance is inseparable from what they regard as the condition for knowledge. At least, this was the case with Shirai Mitsutarō (1863–1932), whose contribution to the development of botanical sciences in Japan went beyond his research of plant pathology and extended also to an endeavor to chronicle the country’s scholarly tradition in natural history (Marco 2015, 153). While there is no doubt about Shirai’s erudition, the botanist did not consider all types of plant knowledge equal. Ignorance about the benefits of certain plants, according to Shirai, was not necessarily a sign of backwardness but could also signify enlightenment.
To be more precise, Shirai was gentle with those who lacked knowledge about edible wild plants suitable for consumption during periods of food shortage. Following the historical crop failure that swept across the northeast region of Japan in 1902, a famine ensued in multiple prefectures and eventually drew national attention. By March 1903, the Meiji Emperor had himself received a sobering report on the famine’s human toll (Asahi shinbun 1903, 2). Shaken by the victims’ suffering, Shirai published the compact, 105-page Kyūkō shokubutsu (Plants for famine relief) in early May the same year (Shirai 1903a). Notably, this was preceded by the April release of another monograph of his on the necessity of public investment in botanical museums and gardens (Shirai 1903b).
While both publications preached the value of knowledge about plants, their points of departure diverged subtly though in no small measure. In the preface to his book on botanical museums, Shirai lamented the absence of anything comparable in Japan to the Berlin Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum, where he once examined plant specimens collected from around the world while conducting research in Germany in 1899 (Shirai 1903b, 2). Writing upon his return to Japan and as a faculty member of the Imperial University of Tokyo, Shirai commented that such an absence was puzzling from the perspectives of academic research and a country’s dignity (kokka no taimen) alike (ibid., 4). To be sure, Japan’s dignity, or rather the lack thereof, was made obvious due to the specific direction of comparison. Believing that botanical museums and gardens had already become a common feature across the cities of Europe and the United States, Shirai went so far as to imply that his country’s lacking in this regard could be taken as “strong evidence” that “botany or rather the enlightenment (kaika) of Japan is far behind that of Western countries” (ibid., 1, 4).
In sharp contrast was the botanist’s approach to knowledge about Japan’s native famine-relief flora in Kyūkō shokubutsu. Having defined “famine-relief plants” in terms of “plants which grow by themselves in the mountains and fields and which suffice to relieve hunger during years of poor harvest,” Shirai went on to assert that “when it comes to knowledge about famine-relief plants, it is on the contrary the unenlightened races (jinshu) who are superior to those who are enlightened” (Shirai 1903a, 2) As an example, he claimed that the Ainu people in Hokkaido foraged and hunted for food more than cultivating crops, who were therefore “rich in their knowledge about famine-relief plants by the merit of experience” (ibid., 2). Meanwhile, those who often consumed crops and vegetables for food “as is the case with our people,” and who had hence come to “forget about the use of natural products,” must learn about famine-relief flora, as famine was not necessarily a result of climate alone but could also happen in times of war (ibid., 2–3). To the extent that Shirai had identified plant knowledge enshrined in botanical museums and gardens as proof of a country’s enlightenment, he too suggested that the blissful ignorance of famine-relief flora was an indicator of a race’s enlightenment.
Shirai was by no means the first Japanese author to write about famine-relief flora. The bygone Tokugawa period (1600–1868) witnessed generational efforts in producing knowledge on the subject among scholars of Honzōgaku, Japan’s own intellectual tradition of natural history (Shirasugi 1997, 55–72; Lin 2023). This lineup of predecessors include the herbalist Matsuoka Gendatsu (1668–1746) and his student Ono Ranzan (1729–1810), whose research facilitated the local adaptation of Chinese scholarship on famine-relief plants in Japan (Shirai 1903a, 6–7). In addition, Shirai also cited the work of physicians who came to study native famine-relief flora upon witnessing the impact of famine unfolding in real time (ibid., 8–13). Within this group, the physician Takebe Seian (1712–1782) compiled the two-volume Minkan bikōroku (Records of the people’s famine preparation) when the “Hōreki Famine” of 1755 raged on in his home domain Ichinoseki in northeast Japan. Furthermore, Takebe shared in the preface to Minkan bikōroku that he developed the title’s content by documenting the “measures taken by ordinary people for famine relief (minkan kyūkō no jutsu)” to show his gratitude to farmers whose labor fed the country (Takebe [1755]1824, 1). In Takebe’s eyes, the ability to forage and prepare wild plants for safe consumption was no evidence of backwardness but wisdom of and for the common people.
Unlike Takebe, Shirai’s commentary on plant knowledge and ignorance bears the distinct characteristics of a civilization discourse where the high and low of knowledge was linked to the hierarchization of people. What the German-trained Japanese botanist omitted to mention is the specific power dynamics that had rendered the Ainu into a people of hunter-gatherers in his telling of history. As the archeological and historical analyses of Yuriko Fukasawa (1998, 12–14), Brett L. Walker (2001, 85–87), Mark J. Hudson (2014, 126–127) and others have shown, the Matsumae domain located in today’s Hokkaido, which controlled and profited from the Ainu-Japanese trade during the Tokugawa period, actively deterred the Ainu from grain cultivation. Although the soil and climate allowed rice, among other crops, to grow well in today’s Hokkaido, the Matsumae domain restricted the supply of agricultural tools and seeds to Ainu communities. While some engaged in rice cultivation in secrecy, the Ainu came to consume rice at large as an imported Japanese good alongside locally sourced foods such as deer, salmon, and roots. One can therefore argue that the Ainu society’s superiority in knowledge about edible wild plants to their Japanese counterpart was an inadvertent consequence of the latter’s historical oppression of the former.
While it is easy to fault Shirai’s take on ignorance about famine-relief flora in 1903 for its racist undertones, the botanist was not wrong in implying a negative correlation between knowledge about wild plants for subsistence and the accessibility of their cultivated substitutes. Shirai did not live long enough to experience the harrowing food insecurity during the Asia-Pacific War, when the consumption of yomogi, yukinoshita, and other plants he had himself recognized for famine relief was recommended by mainstream women’s magazines in light of the food shortage on Japan’s home front (Matsushima 1941, 241; Tabata 1942, 208). At the height of its colonial ambition, Japan turned to edible wild plants again in the shadow of war. One must wonder, then, if Shirai would have registered the irony in this wartime dissemination of knowledge about famine-relief flora and interpreted it as “strong evidence” of Japan’s own decent into an “unenlightened race” in an era of darkness.
This is the second entry in the essay series “Plant Something,” which is also part of “Multi-Life Humanities: Possibilities and Challenges,” a multiyear collaborative research project at the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) of Tohoku University in (northeast) Japan. Please reach out if you are interested in collaboration!
Featured Image
Portrait of Shirai Mitsutarō (public domain) from the digital exhibition “Portraits of Modern Japanese Historical Figures,” National Diet Library https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/e/datas/6427
References
Asahi shinbun 朝日新聞. 1903. “Tōhoku kikin sōjō 東北飢饉奏上.” March 19. Morning Edition.
Walker, Brett L. 2001. The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800. University of California Press.
Fukasawa, Yuriko. 1998. Ainu Archaeology as Ethnohistory: Iron Technology among the Saru Ainu of Hokkaido, Japan, in the 17th Century. John and Erica Hedges.
Hudson, Mark J. 2014. “Ainu and Hunter-Gatherer Studies.” In Beyond Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives, edited by Mark J. Hudson, ann-elise lewallen, and Mark K. Watson. University of Hawai’i Press.
Lin Jie 林潔. 2023. “Ichinoseki han’i Takebe Seian ‘Minkan bikōroku’ no seiritsu keii 一関藩医・建部清庵『民間備荒録』の成立経緯.” Jinbun gakuhō 人文学報, no. 121: 119–139.
Marcon, Federico. 2015. “Honzōgaku After Seibutsugaku: Traditional Pharmacology as Antiquarianism After the Institutionalization of Modern Biology in Early Meiji Japan.” In Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology: From Early Modern to Modern Sino-Japanese Medical Discourses, edited by Benjamin A. Elman. Brill.
Matsushima Ikuyo 松島郁代. 1941. “Oishiku itadakeru yakusō to shokubutsu 美味しく頂ける薬草と植物.” Shufu no tomo 主婦の友 25 (4): 241.
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Shirasugi Etsuo 白杉悦雄. 1997. “Kyūkōsho no shisōshiteki kenkyū 救荒書の思想史的研究.” PhD diss., Kyoto University.
Tabata Toyo 田畑とよ. 1942. “Yomogi no kairobai よもぎの懐炉灰.” Shufu no tomo 主婦の友 26 (2): 208.
Takebe Seian 建部清庵. (1755) 1824. Minkan bikōroku 民間備荒録. Vol. 1. Suharaya Mohee. https://kokusho.nijl.ac.jp/biblio/100306739/10?ln=ja
