WESTERN PHYSICS FOR MEIJI SCHOOLS
[PARKER, Richard Green; Junkichi KATAYAMA 片山 淳吉, editor.]
物理階梯 [Butsuri kaitei; 'A Guide to Physics'].
Gifu Prefecture, Ministry of Education, Mizunoesaru/Jinshin [i.e. 1872].
Three vols, 8vo; printed on double leaves, f. 60 of vol. III misbound after f. 64, c. 115 woodcut diagrams in-text; occasional minor stains, wormtrack to head of most of vol. III touching a handful of characters but sense intact, tear (mostly closed) to title affecting one character; else a good set in original yellow paper wrappers, yotsume-toji stitching; covers somewhat creased and soiled, stitching loose or split in a few sections but holding firm, silk corners (kadogire) a little worn, perished for vol. I; manuscript character (元 or え) in red to each front cover, red ownership seals of the 林 (Hayashi/Rin/Lin) family and of a normal college to the first page of each volume.
First edition, very rare, of Japan’s first elementary science textbook, a major catalyst for the introduction of Western physics after the Meiji Restoration.
Titled A Guide to Physics, the work is chiefly a translation of the American pedagogue Richard Green Parker’s First Lessons in natural Philosophy (first published in the 1840s), also making use of G.P. Quackenbos’s A Natural Philosophy (1859). Published for use in schools by the Japanese Ministry of Education in an effort to introduce modern Western science to the newly open nation, the Guide covers subjects in physics, chemistry, and biology, including matter, mechanics, light and gas theory, acoustics, electricity, magnetism, the structure of the eye, and astronomy.
Accompanying the text are more than a hundred woodcut diagrams showing graphs, anatomical parts, and all manner of devices and inventions, such as pulleys, thermometers, pumps, a hot air balloon, and a camera. The preface, by the editor Katayama, puts a distinctly Neo-Confucian spin on the new science, applying to it the concept of qi (or ki in Japanese). The work was revised and reprinted many times in the later nineteenth century – some versions excising the section on astronomy after curricular revisions – and it remained dominant in Japanese schools for several decades after. Through its use in Japan and its promotion by the government, the Guide played an ‘important role’ in disseminating the eponymous term and concept of physics (物理) – butsuri in Japanese, wuli in Chinese, mulli in Korean, vật lí in Vietnamese – both in Japan and the broader Sinosphere (Yang, p. 57, trans.).
Not in Library Hub. OCLC finds only one complete copy outside Japan, at UC San Francisco. Chicago and Cornell each holds an incomplete set (vols I–II and II respectively).
See Masahisa Makino 牧野 正久, 「科学史入門：明治初期の小学教科書『物理階梯』」, 『科学史研究』 46 (2007); Keiko Shinohara 篠原 圭子 and Ken Kawasaki 川崎 謙, 「『物理階梯・總論』にみる日本人の自然科学理解」, 『日本理科教育学会研究紀要』 30/1 (1989); Yang Yu 楊玉, 〈關於中譯「物理學」名稱的由來〉, 《物理》 16/1 (1987).
