Rangaku is the term used for “Dutch Learning” and started the Japaneses curiosity about the west from finding an anatomy book. From there it moved to all sorts of subjects some examples are: Political Science, Astronomy, Medicine, Physical Science and Cooking, and many more.

The Dutch were the first westerners to find Japan and they had limited access from 1640 on. Seeing as how the Japanese had never met anyone like the Dutch they were very curios, and so were the Dutch of the Japanese. In general most of what the Japanese learned about the west was from the Dutch traders and priests.

What really kicked off Rangaku, or “Dutch learning”, was when some Japanese doctors obtained an anatomy book that had highly detailed drawings of the internals of human bodies. This was very interesting to the Japanese as apparently they had never done an autopsy to learn what the insides of a person looked like. So they decided to do an autopsy on a dead criminal, and learned these books were exact. This spawned helped spawn a great curiosity of the west.

From there it lead into almost every subject imaginable. It was also quite easy for the Japanese people to learn since 70 to 80% of Japanese were literate so as soon as books were translated from dutch they were sent off into Japan for people to learn from, that is a little over reaching but close’ish.

Much like everything else things evolve and so has/did Rangaku. Naturally with the curiosity of the Japanese about the west the same is true of the west about the Japanese. Eventually it lead down the road to Commodore Perry’s visit and forcing open Japan to trade.

One of the best positives of Japan starting to learn about the west was their intensity of it. The leaders setup groups of people to study and learn all about the west. By the time Commodore Perry forced open Japan they already knew about the politics and ways of the rest of the world so they were able to make effective decisions about opening Japan, trade agreements, and general good decisions for the future.

I found this topic quite interesting. While it is not earth shattering information it is just one of those little tidbits of history which makes things fun. So many things I take for granted with US history that I have learned, even the littlest of things, it is fun to start learning the little things of Japanese history. I hope to do more posts like this in the future.

The question now is have you read of this before or know much about it?

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Japan has a lot of family names and it kind of makes it hard to remember names because I haven’t grown up with them. However, it is important to start learning names to better remember names and get along using the language. The Japan Times released an article with the top 100 most common family names in japan.

Here are the top 10 please visit the the article for all the rest.

1. Sato
2. Suzuki
3. Takahashi
4. Tanaka
5. Watanabe
6. Ito
7. Yamamoto
8. Nakamura
9. Kobayashi
10. Kato

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The Ainu are considered the natives to Japan, similar to Native Americans being the original peoples to the United States. They are actually very similar to the Native Americans because their culture/economy was based around farming, hunting, fishing and gathering; along with having their own language, culture, and religious distinctions.

The Ainu were originally concentrated throughout the Honshu and Hokkaido islands. They called Hokkaido Ainu Moshir, which was annexed by the Japanese in 1868 to prevent the intrusion of Russians. This fact alone is interesting because according to a historical census in Russia there were over 1000 people that claimed Ainu as their main language. This means the Ainu not only were in Japan, but also parts of Russia as well, even though now most Ainu do live in Japan. Now, most Ainu live in Hokkaido on the southern and eastern coasts.

There are probably less than 100 people whom speak Ainu left, so basically the language is about to go extinct. The Ainu language has next to no correlation to Japanese and is part of the reason the language is going extinct because most people try to record the language using a Japanese writing system, since there isn’t one, and words are getting changed because of it.

There are a few distinctions in the culture too. For one the Ainu tend to be more hairy, I am guessing this is because they live in a colder climate longer the hair helps keep them warmer, total speculation on my part. This is mentioned because after a certain age the men stop shaving, and grow out there beards and mustaches. The women on the other hand keep their hair trimmed around their shoulders. As for food, ironically enough, all their food is cooked. They don’t eat raw foods like sushi, which in my ignorance would have thought is where Japan started eating sushi. I do have to say their system of accountability is quite intriguing and should maybe be incorporated again, in some places. Basically, a group of people, like jurors, sit in judgment of an action and the only punishment is basically how severely you get beaten. However, if you murder someone your nose and ears were cut off and the tendons in your feet where severed.

The religion is animist, which one can construe as Shintoism that most Japanese favor today. Basically everything has a spirit or god, similar to Greek mythology. The most important of spirits is fire, or earth. Most Ainu believe they will ascend to kamui mosir (land of the gods)

With all this said the Ainu haven’t exactly had the easiest of lives. To roughly sum up they were forced into assimilating into Japanese culture with a law made in 1899. Under the law they were denied the right to continue traditional practices and forced to learn the Japanese language. Biggest hit of all was they were only allowed to have 0.15% of they land they originally had. Basically, look a bit at American history with Native Americans transplant that onto the Japanese and Ainu. It wasn’t until 1997 that the Ainu started getting some rights back, and are still discriminated against. Finally, in 2008 the Japanese Diet officially recognized the Ainu as the indigenous people of Japan and rescinded the laws of 1899.

I hope you enjoyed this post. I have a strong passion that understanding history of a region helps you better understand the modern culture. I plan to do more history posts in the future. Please let me know what you think and how I can improve as history is not my strong point.

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Japan has a colorful and long history compared to america. If it is half as interesting as my own country then it should prove to be fun to research. I know in learning the history of the United States I have learned a lot of valuable life lessons and especially things not to do. First though lets look at how we can even break down the history in more logical units of something to research. Fortunately, wikipedia makes that easy by listing them all out. I hope to do a summary post on each era as more of a primer then maybe more detail later.

• Paleolithic (35000–14000 BC)
• Jōmon period (14000–400 BC)
• Yayoi period (400 BC – AD 250)
• Kofun period (250–538)
• Asuka period (538–710)
• Nara period (710–794)
• Heian period (794–1185)
• Kamakura period (1185–1333)
• Muromachi period (1336–1573)
• Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568–1603)
• Edo period (1603–1868)
• Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Taishō period (1912–1926)
• Shōwa period (1926–1989)
• Heisei period (1989–present)

Please leave comments on what you may find interesting in each era or things you might find interesting about an era. What are some things I should look for while researching?

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