The first translated book in Japan (Ryotaku Maeno)

I admire Ryotaku Maeno. He was a doctor and scholar in the Edo period, which is the 18th century.

The most well known of his achievement is the translation of a Dutch anatomy book. He and his comrades started to translate the book written in Dutch with almost no reference material.

At that time, there were no one who can speak Dutch. There were few other Dutch books, and most important thing, no Dutch dictionaries. There were no other European language dictionaries in Japan.

Despite the hostile environment, they decided to do that because they were moved by how advanced European science was and strongly realized that they and Japan had to learn the latest information in the world.

No wonder, the translation was the hardest task. Can you imagine translating without a dictionary? No one knows the meaning of almost all the words. Their work was like translating, while making a dictionary by imagination and inspection. The essential clue was anatomy illustrations in the book but they lacked knowledge of anatomy. Dissection was prohibited in the 18th century so they had to ask for permission to dissect which took a long time.

One of his comrades said that the work seemed as if they voyaged across ocean in a boat without paddles.

The work was the first translated book from a European language to Japanese.

Thinking about his work, I feel my trouble to learn English is much smaller.