Rangaku and Westernization

Abstract

The continuities between the study of the West through Dutch in Tokugawa Japan and the program of modernization in the Meiji period seem self evident. The influence of Holland through Deshima became the focus of the life work of Itazawa Takeo and others well before the war, and it received detailed discussion from Charles Boxer in 1936. Nevertheless issues of the importance and influence of Tokugawa rangaku continue to be debated, and that debate greatly enriches our feel for Japanese society then and now.