JAPANESE 'ON LIBERTY'
MILL, John Stuart; 中村 敬太郎 NAKAMURA Keitarō [i.e. 中村 正直 NAKAMURA Masanao], translator.
On Liberty. 自由之理 [Jiyū no kotowari].
Shizuoka, Ken’ichiro Kihira, Meiji Mizunoesaru/Jinshin [i.e. 1872].
Five parts in six vols, 8vo; printed in Japanese on double leaves, vol. I with half-title on pink paper and 3-page English preface; clean and fresh throughout, in the original yellow patterned wrappers, printed title-label to front cover of each volume, blue silk corners (kadogire); some light blemishes to covers, thread of vol. III split in parts, but withal a lovely set; red publisher’s seal in English and Japanese to interior of vol. I.
First edition, rare, of the first Japanese translation of Mill’s On Liberty, published twelve years after the English original, and very popular in Japan as a result of this translation by the philosopher and educator Masanao Nakamura (1832–1891).
Nakamura had led a group of students to Britain to study in the 1860s, and it was only a change of government in Japan that led him to return with them in 1868. He returned also with an interest in British philosophy, and soon set to work translating both Samuel Smiles’s Self Help and the present work into Japanese. The preface, in English, is by the American educator Edward Warren Clark (1849–1907), who had moved to Japan as part of a Japanese government scheme to encourage the country’s students to have better knowledge of Western science; Clark was to go on to establish the chemistry department at the University of Tokyo.
Clark states that ‘the progress and enlightenment of society at large, is but the sum of that of the individual; and so far as the single life fulfils the functions most plainly its own, just so far will the civil and collective life of the people be advanced. The time was when diversity of thought and belief was considered heresy; but the world has now reached a point in which it may discern, that those things which it once attempted to stifle and suppress, have eventually become the very main springs of its advance’. Chief among these, Clark argues, is Liberty, highly prized and often mistaken.
Outside Japan, OCLC records complete sets at UCLA, HRC, and SOAS only. Cornell and Emory hold two volumes each.
