The is an illustrated

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

ese '' leishu'' encyclopedia published in 1712 in the

Edo period The , also known as the , is the period between 1600 or 1603 and 1868 in the history of Japan, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and some 300 regional ''daimyo'', or feudal lords. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengok ...

. It consists of 105 volumes in 81 books. Its compiler was Terashima or Terajima (), a doctor from

Osaka is a Cities designated by government ordinance of Japan, designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the List of cities in Japan, third-most populous city in J ...

. It describes and illustrates various activities of daily life, such as

carpentry Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, Shipbuilding, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc. C ...

and

fishing Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish. Fish are often caught as wildlife from the natural environment (Freshwater ecosystem, freshwater or Marine ecosystem, marine), but may also be caught from Fish stocking, stocked Body of water, ...

, as well as

plants Plants are the eukaryotes that form the kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars f ...

and

animals Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia (). With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have myocytes and are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a ...

, and

constellations A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms a perceived pattern or outline, typically representing an animal, mythological subject, or inanimate object. The first constellations were likely defin ...

. It depicts the people of "different/strange lands" (''ikoku'') and "outer barbarian peoples".

Sources used

As seen from the title of the book ( wa , which means Japan, and kan , which means China), Terajima's idea was based on a

Chinese encyclopedia Chinese encyclopedias comprise both Chinese language encyclopedias and foreign language ones about China or Chinese topics. There is a type of native Chinese reference work called '' leishu'' (lit. "categorized writings") that is sometimes tra ...

, specifically the Ming work ''

Sancai Tuhui ''Sancai Tuhui'' (, ), compiled by Wang Qi () and his son Wang Siyi (), is a Chinese '' leishu'' encyclopedia, completed in 1607 and published in 1609 during the late Ming dynasty, featuring illustrations of subjects in the three worlds of heave ...

'' ("Pictorial..." or "Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers") by Wang Qi (1607), known in Japan as the . Reproductions of the ''Wakan Sansai Zue'' are still in print in Japan.

References

External links

Scans
of the pages are available in th

of the

National Diet Library The is the national library of Japan and among the largest libraries in the world. It was established in 1948 for the purpose of assisting members of the in researching matters of public policy. The library is similar in purpose and scope to ...

, Japan. * * Scans of copies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are available at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

: volume
1-89-1516-3637-4748-6066-7272-7778-8788-9596-105 with index
1712 in Japan 1712 non-fiction books 18th-century encyclopedias Edo-period works Japanese encyclopedias Illustrated books Leishu {{ref-book-stub