www.asiachem.news December 2021 | 105 Dutch, to some level German, even Latin and Greek, English, Russian, and copied a list of Arabic letters. Figure 1. Udagawa Yōan. Courtesy of the Kyō-U Library, Takeda Science Foundation Published from 1837 to 1847, Udagawa Yōan’s Seimi kaisō is considered the first extensive book on chemistry in Japan. It includes seven books; each is divided into three volumes and numbered chapters. Six books are considered inner, main text; the seventh book is called an external book. Altogether it has more than 1100 pages, printed in kanji and katakana, including drawings of tools for chemical experiments (see the drawings above). In Seimi kaiso, Udagawa dealt with topics such as chemical affinity, solution, caloric, alkali, salts, phosphoric acid, ammonia, oxidation and reductions of metals, glass, and constituents of plants. He studied the ingredients of water in hot springs in Japan and described chemical ingredients of hot springs in foreign countries.8 He cited fifty-eight elements, and five of them were found to be mistakes, among which are caloric and light.9 The chemistry studies that Udagawa started continued after him, and some of the chemistry terms that he coined are still in use today.10 Where did those foreign books come from? A thorough survey in archives was carried out by J. MacLean, searching for the years 1712-1854. He studied the records of the Dutch Factory in Japan, preserved in the Rijksarchief (State Archive) in The Hague. MacLean listed the year that a ship arrived in Japan, its name, its captain’s name, and the scientific instruments and books that were imported;11 Udagawa Yōan might have had access to some of those books and instruments. Seimi kaisō is based on more than 24 chemistry books from Europe of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including William Henry (1774-1836), A. L. Lavoisier (1743-1794), and Adolph Ypey (1749-1822).12 A partial list of authors that Yōan mentions in the first book of Seimi kaisō includes: P. J. Kasteleyn, (1746-1794), J. F. Blumenbach, (1752-1840), J.J Plenck, (1735–1807) G. Niewenhuis, L. B. Guiton de Morveau (17371816), J.B. Trommsdorff, (1770-1837), O. Ségur (1779-1818), Dutch Pharmacopeaia 1826, and Catz Smallenburg. Udagawa studied other contemporary European authors who were cited in the books that he had, e.g., Berzelius (1779-1848), Davy (1778-1829), Dulong (17851838), Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) and others.13 He actually considered and chose which text and authors to cite. In 1975 Udagawa Yōan’s Seimi kaisō was translated into modern Japanese with translators’ commentaries. The translation is written in kanji, hiragana, and katakana. The editor who contributed a preface is Tanaka Minoru, and five Japanese scholars joined in this important project.14 In 2014 Endō Shōji and his colleagues published Studies on Udagawa Yōan’s Botanical Works housed in the Kyō-U Library, Takeda Science Foundation.15 These Figure 2. Title Page of Seimi kaisō, Book 1, First volume. Courtesy of the National Diet Library By Yoshiyuki Kikuchi and Yona Siderer1 https://doi.org/10.51167/acm00030 Courtesy of the National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan
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