Imperial expansion and the making of the Japanese centre of botany

‘Escaping Asia towards Europe’ (脫亞入歐), Fukuzawa Yukichi's (福澤諭吉, 1835–1901) earnest call for Japanese modernization, was the most influential catchphrase in Meiji Japan.Footnote ¹² In this appeal, showing Japan's capacity for ‘European’ science became a matter of the utmost national importance.Footnote ¹³ In botany, the leading role was taken by Tokyo Imperial University, home of the nation's only college-level department in the field between 1877 and 1918.Footnote ¹⁴ Launching the ‘modernization’ of Japanese botany, with an obvious awareness that this was in step with the larger national project of Meiji Japan, the department faithfully followed the path of ‘Escaping Asia towards Europe’, fastidiously copying the European way while denying its own ‘Asian’ past.Footnote ¹⁵

Japan was not an obtuse student in following European ways, as was widely acknowledged after their consecutive victories over Qing China and Russia.Footnote ¹⁶ These in turn secured the colonization of Taiwan and Korea, often cheered as its most astute moves of modernization.Footnote ¹⁷ As was the case for Europe, Japanese imperial expansion was not only a manoeuvre by politicians and the military, but also a collective social movement involving the participation of entrepreneurs, intellectuals and professionals.Footnote ¹⁸

Botanists at the Imperial University were eager participants in the making of the Japanese empire. They gradually placed imperial expansion at the core of their strategy for ‘Europeanizing’ Japanese botany. Yatabe Ryokichi (矢田部良吉, 1851–1899), the sole Japanese professor amongst an otherwise foreign scientific professoriate at the university's foundation, simply thought that there was no botany in traditional Japan worthy of attention. Thus he taught ‘modern botany’ in English, exactly as he had learned it at Cornell University.Footnote ¹⁹ However, he soon found that there was already a ‘Europeanized’ past in Japanese botany that he could not ignore.

Many of the Japanese plants that Yatabe collected to prove his skills as a botanist had already been classified and named by European botanists, including none other than Carl von Linné (1707–1778). Yatabe learned that three European botanists had already made very fruitful investigations of Japanese flora through the Dutch trading post in Dejima, Nagasaki. Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) had done so between 1690 and 1692, Linné's pupil Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1828) had done so from 1775 to 1776, and Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866) from 1823 to 1829. All three produced sumptuous works on Japanese flora, not least the thirty volumes of Flora Japonica (1835–1870) that resulted from Siebold's final visit. These scholars were mostly confined to the small island of Dejima and thus their works owed less to their authors' skills as collectors or botanists than to the strong Japanese tradition in natural history – of which, through books and able Japanese associates, they made extensive use.Footnote ²⁰ Yatabe and his successor, Matsumura Jinzo (松村任三, 1856–1928), were unaware of the contribution of Japanese naturalists to this European science. They still considered the history of Japanese botany to be disappointing, dominated by foreigners, who ‘had greedily collected Japanese plants since the eighteenth century’. As a result, when Japanese scholars finally started their own investigations at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘descriptions for most Japanese plants were [already] finished’.Footnote ²¹

This feeling that foreigners had dominated the study of Japanese flora was exacerbated by the sense that the dominance continued. All the type specimens of Japanese plants, against which any new specimens had to be checked, were found not in Japan, but in the European centres of botany. The standard literature on Japanese flora, published in European languages, was not to be found in Japan either. Yatabe found that sending specimens to European centres for the verification of his findings was a frustrating process. He commented,

In 1890 he thus decided to make an official declaration of independence from European botany, in an article written in English. It bore the apparently modest title ‘A few words of explanation to European botanists':

This cautious declaration of independence was built on the specimens and books on Japanese plants that Yatabe had collected with Matsumura, who had just made himself ready for the professorship by having duly studied abroad in Germany. Upon succeeding Yatabe's professorship in 1890, Matsumura showed a clear determination to make Japan a new centre of modern botany by re-enacting the core European strategy in making its centres: he embarked on serious botanical explorations to Japanese peripheries to collect specimens for the university herbarium, located in the university botanical gardens in Koishikawa, Tokyo. Matsumura himself explored, or sent his associates and students to explore, all of the newly acquired territories of Japan. These included Taiwan (1896), Okinawa (1897), Hokkaido (1899), and Karafuto and the Kwantung Leased Territory (1906); the dates follow in the steps of Japan's imperial expansion. The fruits of these expeditions came to appear in his series on ‘East Asian Plants’ in the Botanical Magazine, Tokyo (植物学雑誌) from 1901 and were compiled in the Index Plantarum Japonicarum (帝国植物名鑑, 1904–1912) and Icones Plantarum Koisikavenses (新撰植物図編, 1911–1921). These works, based on Japanese-collected specimens in the Koishikawa Botanical Gardens, ‘displayed’, according to one Japanese assessment, ‘the name of Koishikawa to the world as the Japanese centre of botany’.Footnote ²⁴ With these works, the creation of a Japanese centre of botany, largely owing to Japanese expansion, seems to have come to fruition.

The making of a Japanese splitter in the Japanese centre

The imperial path that the Japanese botanical establishment took, interacting with Western botanical establishments to create a proper centre of botany within Japan, appears to have been chosen to overcome the colonized status of Japanese botany. However, botanists were not just followers of political and military advancement. Matsumura's move towards Korea was in fact pre-emptive. He sent a botanical collector from Koishikawa to Korea twice, in 1900 and 1902. These visits occurred well before the establishment of the Oriental Development Company for the land and resource development of Korea in 1908 and the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910.Footnote ²⁵ The Korean plant specimens accumulated through these ventures were given in 1906 to Nakai Takenoshin, one of Matsumura's students, so that he could write his thesis on Korean flora without ever having to set foot in Korea.Footnote ²⁶ ‘It must have been his [Matsumura's] long desire’, Nakai reflected, ‘that the Korean plants should be studied by Japanese botanists’.Footnote ²⁷ Matsumura perceived Korea, a land unknown to the West, as a strategic site on which to build modern Japanese botany. There was little competition with Western botanists in this land, which was expected to become more and more accessible to growing Japanese power.

Becoming the pre-eminent expert on Korean flora was an easy coup for Nakai, as Matsumura predicted. Nakai's thesis, Flora Koreana (1909), written entirely in Latin, managed to report 149 families, 661 genera, 1,970 species, and 183 varieties of Korean plant, including about two hundred new species and varieties. It far surpassed the most comprehensive work then extant on Korean flora, written by Russian botanist Ivan Vladimirovich Palibin (1872–1949).Footnote ²⁸ Nakai's achievement in such a short time was, of course, due to his access to the systematically collected specimens at the Japanese centre of botany. But it also owed much to his unique classification method, which in turn was a product of his study of Korean plant specimens in an imperial setting.

This ‘armchair botanizing’, which had been common for many European botanists, stemmed from the comfort and the power of Nakai's secure setting.Footnote ²⁹ By taking on such an immense number of specimens to study in just his junior year at university, he had neither the need nor the opportunity to go out into the field and see plants in their natural habitats. Books and dried specimens were Nakai's major guides in learning how to classify and identify plants and Matsumura's lack of guidance made his reliance on them even heavier.Footnote ³⁰ This seems to have resulted in a strong predilection towards morphological descriptions and details in disregard of local contexts, reflecting the general constitution of the standard, European botanical descriptions.Footnote ³¹ Clearly marked by words or fixed on ‘representative’ dried specimens, these details must also have been quite reliable reference points that he could check back on whenever he felt confused or insecure about his identification.

In his commitment to morphological detail, Nakai had a specific reason as well: he wanted to distinguish Korea's plants from those of its better-known neighbours with similar botanical characteristics. Thus he hoped to make his work on Korean flora more important. Korea was not only underdiscovered botanically, but it had also failed to inspire much interest among botanists because of a general consensus that it was barren or just an in-between place sandwiched by China and Japan, lacking any significant botanical characteristics of its own. After his train trip passing through the peninsula, the world-leading authority Heinrich Gustav Adolf Engler (1844–1930) told Matsumura that ‘there would be nothing for botanical research in Korea as it seemed just a barren land with a few willow trees’.Footnote ³² Accordingly, Engler did not even register Korea as a separate region but dealt with it partly as an extension of Chinese flora, partly as an extension of Japanese. Similarly, the Index Kewensis, the catalogue of world plants published by Kew Gardens, registered Korean plants as ‘Chinese’ from 1895 to 1905.Footnote ³³

Thus to talk about ‘Korean flora’, let alone become an expert in it, one had to prove that this flora was distinct. This was not an easy task because Korean plants were indeed similar to those of neighbouring territories. Nakai had to admit that about two thousand out of the 3,600 species of Korean plant that he recorded by 1926 were identical to Japanese ones. Another 1,100 species were identical to Chinese ones.Footnote ³⁴ Nakai's obvious tactic was to note any differences by paying attention to minute details on the specimens, such as the shapes of veins and edges of leaves as well as the shapes of hairs on the backs of the leaves.

This strategy of focusing on botanical differences rather than similarities, and thus splitting genera and species by those differences, was a strategy shared by many botanists, especially by those who came late to the scene and wanted to show their contribution by coining new scientific names. Systematists refer to such people as ‘splitters’, in contrast to ‘lumpers’, who tend to combine similar plants into one category.Footnote ³⁵ By his painstaking attention to detail, Nakai found enough plants native to Korea to legitimate his classification of plants as ‘Korean’ in the Index Kewensis (1929).Footnote ³⁶ It was ironic that this Japanese botanist had to make Korea a botanically independent territory during the same period that Japan annihilated its political existence.

Nakai's eye for detail was not the only reason for his success. The unusual thirty-year sponsorship of his academic work on Korean flora by the Government-General of Korea from 1913 was crucial in reinforcing his success. Nakai took the initiative of making a bold proposal to the governor-general of Korea; he asked for sponsorship for publication of ‘academic works for domestic and foreign scholars instead of plain reports’ for colonial resource development. ‘Understudied yet academically important’ Korean plants could bring long-awaited international recognition for Japanese science. The Government-General of Korea was open to this idea. It had already been publishing reports in English with photographs and impressive statistics in an attempt to advertise its scientifically enlightened governance and justify to Western critics its forceful subjugation of Korea.Footnote ³⁷ The government readily accepted Nakai's proposal. He was encouraged to ‘demonstrate that Japan makes advances in the scholarly fields as well as in the colonial governance’ in Korea.Footnote ³⁸ By displaying his ability to re-enact European scientific practice for a Western audience, he secured his first job as the government botanist of Korea.

Imperial sponsorship greatly fostered Nakai's success. In particular, the series of works funded by the colonial government made Nakai a world-renowned expert on Korean flora. Twenty-two volumes of Flora Sylvatica Koreana (朝鮮森林植物編), written in a mixture of Latin, English and Japanese, with numerous illustrations, were published between 1915 and 1940. Orders from foreign institutions for these volumes arrived. According to Nakai himself, ‘extraordinary praise’ poured in from around the world for informing botanists of the unknown world of Korean flora.Footnote ³⁹ He was elected a member of several botanical societies in Europe and, in 1926, was nominated for the International Committee on Botanical Nomenclature at the International Botanical Congress, although both of these accomplishments may point to the unknown nature of Korean flora and his growing control of the Japanese centre of botany rather than reflecting acknowledgement of Nakai's taxonomic talent.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nakai was the sole non-Western member of the committee, proudly achieving what modern Japanese science had intended: becoming a part of Western authority and thus being able to set the universal rules within it.Footnote ⁴¹

From copying to leading the West

Nakai seems to have set out on his path as a standard-bearer for modern botany very early on. From his first major article on Japanese Aconitum, written in English in 1908, and before the publication of his thesis, he made it clear that his intention was to lead botany in the right direction. The two-part 1908 article was his answer to what ‘the venerable J.D. Hooker’, a former director at the Kew Gardens, called ‘a task awaiting the labour’ of ‘a very judicious botanist’. Being a most influential lumper, Hooker's task was ‘the reduction of the species and varieties of Aconitum’, which he believed had been recklessly increased up to three hundred where thirty would suffice. Nakai, showing his confidence in his self-taught systematics, turned Hooker's task on its head.Footnote ⁴²

Nakai implied that Hooker had misunderstood the origin of the problem. The solution lay in creating more, not fewer, species in Japanese Aconitum. Already firm in his splitter's approach, Nakai did not believe that the new scientific names for each small variation had caused the problem. The problem was rather that these small variations were poorly delineated in botanical descriptions: they were blended and overlapping. It was not obvious which species had which characteristics. Nakai did not indulge in idle speculation about the creativity of nature producing such variety. He found no problem in nature; the problem was rather in botanists’ inability properly to describe its variety. He said, ‘The fault is perhaps due to the indefinite descriptions of it by different authors’, which were too ‘comprehensible [sic] and varied’ to yield a useful guide. Nakai decided to provide a clear guideline for those who were ‘at a loss how to classify a specimen’, clarifying that his task was not about classifying real plants. With his specimens as standards, he devised a series of dichotomous keys based on numerous single characteristics such as hood shape, flower colour, stem shape, indentation of leaves, shape of leaves, and carpel numbers. Using this rigorous guideline, Nakai produced descriptions of about thirty distinct Japanese Aconitum, with some new species, varieties and forms.Footnote ⁴³ This seemingly added to Hooker's concerns, yet challenging Hooker was apparently not Nakai's intention. Nakai was trying to posit an unexpected solution for Hooker by demanding that all other botanists follow this exacting method of describing plants.

Nakai's confidence in his method, and his identification of it as a proper European one, seemed justified for a while. In the preface to his first Flora Sylvatica Koreana, Nakai asserted, ‘In such places like Germany, England, Russia, Austria, France and Sweden where the botany was most advanced, they now weightily consider small details like vein shapes and edges of leaves, which systematists once thought to do away with.’Footnote ⁴⁴ After thus aligning his extreme splitter method with that of the leading botanists in Europe, he further explained that this renewed concern with small details was due to the new genetic understanding. The new genetics implied that any morphological characteristics, being ‘complex mixtures of genetic materials within cells’, did not vary by chance and only within a very limited range. Written in Japanese, this preface targeted a domestic audience. While it seems that Nakai needed to explain his focus on such minute details to this audience, he was not at all apologetic, claiming that he had the authority of European systematics on his side.

However, the authority of European plant systematics upon which Nakai wanted to rely was at the time being challenged. As if the task of considering evolutionary relationships between plants was not difficult enough, the entrance of non-Europeans to the discipline was diversifying opinion regarding established genera and species, creating an abundance of new names for similar plants. Despite Nakai's wish to be part of the solution for botanical progress, new splitters like himself were increasingly seen as a problem.

Reordering performed by splitters on the level of genus especially alarmed some botanists in European centres. When a botanist split a genus, he or she was then able to name all the species in the genera and could replace the European names. It was a process to which Nakai was quite accustomed.Footnote ⁴⁵ The 1926 and 1930 International Congresses of Plant Sciences, with which Nakai was involved, hotly debated the issue. At the Cornell congress in 1926, Marshall A. Howe from the New York Botanical Gardens declared that different conceptions of the limits of genera were ‘largely a subjective mental matter concerning which no International Congress can ever hope to legislate successfully’. He predicted that the new four-volume work on the Cactaceae, funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington – which proposed 124 new genera instead of Engler's current twenty-one – would be accepted as ‘the last word on the subject’ by majority support.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Swedish botanist Carl Skottsberg voiced European concerns. He pointed out that recent attempts at splitting were often not as comprehensive or as thoughtful as the former ones proposed by great systematists like Linné. To split a genus without contemplating all considerations about the natural relations of plants could be ‘a dangerous thing, even unscientific in some instances’. Skottsberg suggested that if botanists simply wished to show affinities more clearly, there was an alternative to generic splitting that could serve the same purpose, namely the creation of subsections within that genus. He wondered whether ‘these latter-day splitters’ had not ‘a good deal of personal vanity’ in claiming the seemingly unnecessary new genera.Footnote ⁴⁷

European concerns for nomenclatural stability did not easily change the newcomers’ minds. At the 1930 congress in Cambridge, H.H. Allan from New Zealand maintained his and his fellow newcomers’ rights to name their own flora. He challenged the wide concept of species proclaimed by Hooker, who had explicated his propensity to lump by the dictum that ‘species vary in a state of nature more than is usually supposed’. Hooker allowed only one species to all New Zealand Rubus, the Rubus australis. Yet ‘long experience in the field and garden’ by New Zealand botanists, claimed Allan, taught them that those characteristics could not be just one-time variations. They were constant and meaningful characteristics that in fact constituted several different species.Footnote ⁴⁸

Newcomers did not merely heighten the nomenclatural instability that had been on systematists’ agendas since the mid-nineteenth century. They had different solutions to the problem. They knew that the priority rule, proposed by Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle (1806–1893) and adopted at the first, all-European, International Botanical Congress in 1867, was in shambles. European botanists had realized that its simple solution (keeping only first-given scientific names) caused too many familiar names to disappear. They had already unravelled it with various subsidiary measures like the Berlin and Kew codes, which had provisions for such names to be preserved. In 1907, some American botanists decided to make their voices clear as well, proposing an ‘American code’. This code suggested having representative type or types within each group whose name would be retained; other names in the group would be modified according to this. Moreover, its demand to scrap Latin as the stipulated language for botanical description jibbed against European dominance in systematics.Footnote ⁴⁹

Neither the integrity of the allegedly universal standard of botany nor the authority of European centres was safe. What finally produced the much-awaited ‘international’ consensus over this division was the 1930 congress, to which Nakai was invited. The consensus was, in principle, to accept the American code: revolution indeed. However, Nakai's report sent to the committee in 1926 demonstrates that he neither expected nor wanted European centres to make such compromises.Footnote ⁵⁰ He was ready to fight for the authority and integrity of the Euro-centred standard against this American challenge.

Proclaiming the universality of the European standard was Nakai's first shot:

Nakai apparently found it problematic for the profession that botanical rules were in essence just voluntary guidelines.Footnote ⁵² For the unity of the profession, any unauthorized interpretation of the rules should not be allowed and the rules should be enforced universally. He argued that the much-maligned Priority Rule would be perfect for such unambiguous application, so long as no exceptions were condoned. He added that ‘[t]he family name when not written in Latin should not be accepted under any circumstances, even if its description is given accurately’.Footnote ⁵³ His attempt to distance himself from the troublemaking newcomers was clear.

Nakai's proposition about colour terminology displays his strategy to perfect the rules to render them more enforceable. It was remarkably in line with the efforts being made in other soft sciences at the time in their pursuit of exactness and standardization.Footnote ⁵⁴ He proposed, ‘The terminology of shades should be standardized and uniformed, otherwise we may never be able to know the exactness of the natural colours described or defined by our colleagues’. One of his references for a uniform colour terminology thus offered names for distinguishing 1,115 colour shades. And, he added, when these suggestions were not heeded and descriptions were still ambiguous and confusing, it should be clear that the standard specimens were to have the last word.Footnote ⁵⁵ He was a keeper of the Euro-centric status quo, seeking to maintain and strengthen the standard, to make it truly universal.

Localizing the universal? ‘East Asian’ plant systematics

There can be no doubt that Nakai's allegiance was with the European standard in this international debate. Nonetheless, he himself could not accept the authority of that universal standard without exception. The problem was that in spite of the European blueprint for Nakai's systematics, the imprint left by not-so-distinctive Korean plants was too strong. His care for details, unusual by European standards, was too extreme to go unnoticed by his colleagues and competitors.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nakai refused to change his criteria for classification to be more in tune with the Euro-centred majority; it would threaten the status of many native Korean plants and in turn undermine his authority as a representative Japanese systematist. Instead, Nakai took the approach of other newcomers in claiming regional specificity for his work.Footnote ⁵⁷

However, Nakai's claims for the regionality of his systematics struck a very different chord from those of other newcomers. It seems that he neither could nor wanted to follow their ways. He could not use the non-European splitters’ favourite tools in his challenge against the botanical establishment. As shown, these splitters often emphasized their familiarity with the local habitats and life cycles of plants to justify their splitting. Nakai, however, was too much of an armchair botanist to be able to do that. Although he made eighteen field trips to Korea during his thirty years of service, they were all short trips during his summer vacations from the university. Most of the specimens for his investigation were sent from naturalists in Korea.Footnote ⁵⁸ He presided over an international centre of botany, in a network of exchange (using a growing number of specimens from Japanese colonial peripheries) with centres like Kew and the Arnold Arboretum.Footnote ⁵⁹

What most set Nakai apart from the other newcomers was his self-positioning in relation to the European establishment. Other newcomers set themselves against Europe by denying the power of the plant collections at its centres. Those specimens alone, they argued, could not give European botany the right to classify and name peripheral flora. Basing peripheral taxonomy on central collections was nothing more than remote armchair classification. In sum, theirs were the voices from the peripheries criticizing a centre to which they felt little sense of belonging.

From his imperial centre, Nakai's tone was different. His sense of responsibility as a standard-bearer of botany – shown from his earliest works – never faltered. He always sought to align his Japanese centre with other imperial centres in Europe. Even when he adopted the regionality claim of newcomers in protecting his classification, he did not play the role of outsider to the European establishment. Instead of loosening his allegiance with the European universal, he tried to excel alongside European botanists. He did so by playing the imperial scientist, and by assuming the regionalism of an imperial centre rather than that of a defiant periphery.

Nakai's main tactic was claiming distinction and authority for his systematics beyond its regional origin, in close association with expansionist imperial rhetoric. It is important to note that it was not only in botany that Japanese scientists took pride in their imperial presence in the world.Footnote ⁶⁰ Under the influence of mass media whipped up into a frenzy over Japan's two imperial wars, modern Japan had lived in a kind of nationalistic fervour even before its more totalitarian transformation of the 1930s. The Japanese seemed ‘obsessed with nation by saying “nation,” “nation” from morning to night’.Footnote ⁶¹ Nakai, who equated his first collection trip to Korea with General Kato Kiyomasa's valorized military expedition to Korea in the sixteenth century, was most responsive to such nationalistic rhetoric.Footnote ⁶²

In echoing such rhetoric, Nakai associated his systematics not just with one but with several different regions from 1914 to 1935. Fairly early on in his career, in 1914, when he made his first attempt to associate his methodology with a certain region, Nakai evoked the ‘Orient’:

Although his attempt to divide the Orient and the West through the unnamed great ocean seems confusing at best, it was obvious that this regional claim was made to position himself as belonging to some region defined specifically by its separation from the ‘Great West’. Yet only three years later, he adjusted this ambitious vision and now aligned his project simply within Asia, by saying that his method was proper to ‘Asiatic species’. Then in 1927 he renamed his method ‘East Asian plant systematics’, apparently shrinking his boundary even further.Footnote ⁶⁴

If Nakai's method could be this freely associated with several different regions, could it really be said to be about any region? His morphing regions, however, did not lack a certain consistency; all these regions variously justified his extreme splitter's approach based on rootless, dried specimens. In claiming the ‘oriental’ method in 1914, he said that because ‘there were many plants extremely similar to each other in such adjacent lands like Korea, Japan, and China’, he could not use the usual characteristics as identifiers and instead relied on ‘extremely detailed differences between plants’.Footnote ⁶⁵ His 1917 claim for the Asiatic nature of his systematics was a more direct defence of his classification of Aconitum, so confidently proposed in 1908. Nakai's attempt was not appreciated and many European botanists supported measures that successfully combined the many recent species with more established ones. European botany accordingly recombined many of the Japanese Aconitum that Nakai had split. Nakai protested that characteristics that European botanists thought ‘too trivial for the European species’ made for a ‘good and precise [distinction] for the Asiatic species’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Finally, in 1927, he contended that his ‘East Asian plant systematics’ was necessary because the differences between East Asian and ‘Euro-American’ (歐美) plants were ‘so subtle as to be often overlooked’. In order not to overlook these subtle differences, he had to rely upon carefully observed details to set them apart, he explained.Footnote ⁶⁷

This 1927 claim for ‘East Asian plant systematics’, made in front of a Japanese audience honouring his research on Korean flora with the prestigious Imperial Academy Award, seems most revealing of what his regional systematics was about. First of all, though it became much smaller and possibly more concrete than ‘the Orient’, East Asia was again defined by Nakai only in terms of its being set against another region, ‘Euro-America’. This category of ‘Euro-America’, although commonly used in the Japanese empire, was not a common category for botany, as it combined two large and separate regions. Euro-America made sense as a botanical region only if one considered what were, for Nakai, the most familiar forms of plants – the dried specimens. Euro-America was the region where numerous dried specimens were stored at its authoritative centres.Footnote ⁶⁸

Similarly, the choice of ‘East Asia’ (東亜, To-a) seems to have been political. The term was originally coined in the fields of history and the arts to replace the then usual ‘Chinese’ (中華, 中國) epithet for describing ‘Japanese’ things. Thus the new term answered the needs of the expansionists to claim the primacy of Japan, not China, within East Asia. It became more common in the 1930s, in response to Japan's more direct competition with the West. It helped transform Japanese imperial ideology, which had previously rested mostly on Japan's earlier acquisition of Western modernity, by stressing Japan's commonality with its To-a brothers. The claim that Japan had the unique ability to combine To-a traditions with good things from the West was the key. In supporting this new imperial ideology, this term became ‘a geo-political concept with strong political implications in the 1930s and 1940s’ in every discipline, in line with the Japanese claim for the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (大東亜共栄圏).Footnote ⁶⁹ Nakai astutely adopted this newly circulating term To-a to explain the value of his research on Korean flora. He explained that his imperial research on Korean plants allowed him to learn the ‘East Asian’ characteristics of Korean and Japanese plants and thereby to establish his distinctive systematics.

Neither the Orient nor Asia nor East Asia was a definite geographical entity; they were all political concepts set against ‘Great Western’ or ‘European’ or ‘Euro-American’ centres. Although Nakai claimed familiarity with plants from the Orient, Asia and East Asia, this familiarity meant, at most, his contact with dried specimens accessible at his imperial centre. Even the modest ‘East Asia’ was not a concrete region reflecting his regional botanizing experience, given his limited field trips.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet if he needed a territory to assert his authority for his ‘original method’, it could be a plausible choice. Nakai came to make his most serious attempt to define East Asia as a viable botanical region, testifying to his belief in its potential.

Nakai's first attempt was his effort to overcome the problem of incorporating Japan's island flora into an otherwise continental ‘East Asia’. To resolve this problem, Nakai literally tried to connect Japan to the rest of the continent, inspired by a geological argument about the ancient continent between Korea and Japan.Footnote ⁷¹ He argued that the flora on the volcanic island of Ullŭng – which lay between the two lands – made it a place to ‘imagine the forest in the lost continent’. The evidence for this was that it contained many native Japanese plants such as hemlock spruce, Japanese white pine and beech, whose seeds were too heavy to be transplanted without a land connection. Moreover, the beech was a fossil tree, showing the antiquity of the island.Footnote ⁷² Nakai's attempt to connect Japan to the rest of the continent received political but not scientific support. The most convincing counterevidence was suggested by Japanese scientists in Korea, including Ishidoya Tsutomu (石戸谷勉, 1891–1958), Nakai's closest associate for his colonial investigation. Ishidoya, by pointing out the island's distinctive fauna – the lack of land animals, insects and freshwater fishes – was able to strongly suggest its isolated emergence.Footnote ⁷³

Nakai did not give up on demarcating East Asia so easily. When he made his second attempt to define East Asia in 1935, he chose a completely different tactic. If his previous attempt had relied on nature, his new definition was critical of naturalistic approaches, now identified as characteristic of most Western attempts at plant geography.Footnote ⁷⁴ He singled out for criticism the approach of the then authority on plant geography, Engler. Though this first direct charge against a Western authority was intended only for a Japanese audience (it was written in Japanese), Nakai's criticism targeted the fundamental assumption underlying Engler's approach: ‘although this division looks sophisticated at a glance, the method of division and union has many seriously unnatural elements. It is absolutely impossible to consent to for a scholar who actually contacts the East Asian flora all the time’.Footnote ⁷⁵

‘Unnatural’ might mean something more like ‘strange’ than ‘not natural’ here. Engler's was, in fact, a seriously naturalistic approach. It was the result of an exclusive utilization of elements of nature, such as climate and geography, based on numbers obtained through well-standardized instruments such as the thermometer, barometer, altimeter and so on. As discussed in historiographies of European science, these ‘natural’ elements adopted by European scientists became tools to demarcate the natural world as separate from the social one, allowing them to establish their autonomous authority for all things in ‘nature’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Nakai found this exclusively naturalistic demarcation unnatural, although he did not specify why he thought so. Instead he just provided his alternative ‘natural’ division. His East Asia was demarcated simply by the governmental borders of China, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, each of which in turn was composed of separate botanical regions. For example, the botanical region of Japan was further divided into several regions in chronological order of each entity's inclusion within Japanese territory. The botanical region of Korea was likewise divided into five regions – the northern, middle, and southern regions within the peninsula, plus the Ullŭng and Chechu islands.Footnote ⁷⁷ One might say that Nakai considered ‘natural’ categories like latitude in deciding northern and southern regions and used geographical entities like an island as a category of division. However, the guiding factor for Nakai's natural division seems to be his consideration of political dominance. If Engler's linkage of the Russian Maritime Territory to the adjacent Chinese Heilongjiang Province was unnatural to Nakai, what made it so seems to be that the domain was divided by different political authorities. Hence the Ullŭng and Chechu islands, under the rule of the colonial Korean government, could not be combined with any part of Japan in spite of Nakai's own claim of their botanical affinities with the Japanese archipelago.

Nakai's labelling of European scientists’ careful exclusion of cultural categories as ‘unnatural’ is significant. It suggests that the European attempt to impose a separation between nature and culture, and its concomitant claims of universality, may not have been clear to non-European botanists. Nakai was not impressed; neither the global interconnectedness of nature, nor these scientists’ concern to define nature solely based on ‘nature’, left a strong impression on him. Needless to say, he could not see that European scientists had the naturally endowed right to apply their science everywhere, by virtue of having successfully ‘identified’ this one grand natural world first.

Nakai found separating science from politics unnatural. He did not buy into Western claims that its scientific authority could stem from nature alone, or that nature was separable from society. Instead of feigning political aloofness, Nakai had connected his botanical vision with the political possibilities offered by Japanese imperial expansion. ‘East Asia’ was a promising territory where the political dominance of the growing Japanese empire could be linked to the growing authority of Japanese scientists.

Universalizing the local? Expanding ‘East Asia’ to the world

Upon assuming the task of achieving botanical authority for the Japanese empire, Nakai seems to have been unable to stop even with his expanding boundaries of East Asia. This imperial botanist took away the modest title of ‘East Asia’ from his systematics around the late 1930s, and named it simply ‘new’. He applied this new method to all the plants of the world, in place of the former European one.

Just ahead of Japan's deeper invasion of China in 1937, Nakai made his first attempt at applying his classification to the plants of the entire world. In his Japanese preface for volume 21 of Flora Sylvatica Koreana, published in 1936, he said that he decided to ‘try not just the Flora Sylvatica of Korea but comprehensive monographs on the seven families of plants’. He was, he wrote, ‘inspired by extraordinary praises from botanists, dendrologists, foresters from all over the world’ for his previous volumes.Footnote ⁷⁸ It was ambitious of him to attempt to fit monographs on seven families with hundreds of genera and thousands of species into a single volume.

Nakai soon found a more plausible strategy. He came to focus on families and genera known to be particularly thriving in ‘East Asia’, such as tea trees and honeysuckle families. This strategy was timely because he could now obtain many specimens from mainland China, a fact about which he did not hide his satisfaction. ‘The natural world of China was open only to Euro-American scholars for a long time to keep Japanese, even scholars, in the dark about its secret’. Owing to the war, ‘this artificial and unnatural situation disappeared’. He promised to work day and night to ‘enlighten our knowledge on the Chinese natural world’ and thus to hasten the arrival of the day ‘when all people in East Asia could be truly happy’. The aim of this civilizing work was to ‘place the research originating from East Asia on the legitimate lineage of study’.Footnote ⁷⁹ His classification, not the European universal, would be the legitimate classification for all plants related to East Asia.

Nakai's new classification of the genus Lonicera, the honeysuckles, and Camellia, the tea tree family, revealed that there was nothing new in his classification itself. Showing an amazing consistency, he displayed his preference for minute details in dried specimens, although by then he could provide a somewhat more developed rationale for his splitter tendency. He said that ‘East Asian plants, particularly those from the Japanese archipelago, manifested a uniquely wide variation’. Applying the ‘Great Western’ method based on ‘Euro-American or South Pacific plants’ was impossible.Footnote ⁸⁰ He had to split genera and species more minutely to fully express the rich variation; he created eight new sections in Lonicera.Footnote ⁸¹ His new classification of the genus Camellia revived the once-discarded genus Thea first proposed by Linné, and added some subsections. His new classification for Thea certainly failed to undo the international consensus made in 1887 to combine the genus with Camellia, and most of the new names that he proposed were not even adopted by his contemporary Japanese scholars.Footnote ⁸² Neither East Asian nor new, his systematics could not go beyond the confines that the Japanese imperial centre created with dried Korean plant specimens in the beginning. Nonetheless, the confined centre was sufficiently universal to sustain his international authority on Korean flora even to the present day.Footnote ⁸³

Conclusion: universal systematics from the Japanese Kew

Nakai's claim for the universality of his systematics may sound grandiose and even preposterous to most people. That he was at the same time hardly hesitant to claim the Oriental, Asian, or East Asian nature of his systematics would not seem to increase his credibility. But was there really anything unusual about Nakai's alternating evocation of both universality and regionality in his systematics? The similar claim that modern science was pan-European or Western yet at the same time universal is a familiar one.Footnote ⁸⁴

However, this European claim has not seemed preposterous. Rather it has provoked historical inquiry as to why it could have come to sound so true. Historians have been thinking hard about what unique qualities ‘modern science’ had, and what institutions and strategies Europeans mobilized to obtain those qualities.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nakai's story strongly suggests that these qualities could be perceived as political, not just by historians but by historical actors. It was not the innate, universal qualities of European science that led him to adopt it. His re-enactment of European science and his committed advocacy for the universalism of European systematics was much more political and pragmatic. Nakai was not making any logical evaluation of the universality of botanical classification, the vulnerability of which had been made all too manifest on the global botanical scene. And on the political and pragmatic level, his advocacy of universalism was in perfect harmony with his concurrent claims of the regional specificities of his classification.

This political and pragmatic nature seems to reflect an important aspect of the non-European re-enactment of European knowledge practices. It was, at least in this instance, crucially associated with nation building. Among newcomers, Japanese botanists at the Imperial University were special in taking the imperial initiative after complaining that it was too difficult to modernize Japanese botany merely by applying European methods to their own flora. In competition with other more pressing demands for building modern Japan, their path towards an imperial botanical centre worked as an easy way to secure social support for their research. The eminent mobility and reproducibility that European scientists had built into modern scientific practice functioned well for them, too. The standardized references and dried specimens, exchanged with and duplicated from European centres, easily symbolized the new Japanese centre's place within the powerful world of science. Without providing much in the way of a practical tool or onerous demand for nation building, the Japanese botanical discipline could establish itself by a fastidious re-enactment of European ways.

Nakai inherited and benefited from this successful strategy. However, his laborious struggle to distinguish Korean plant specimens from very similar Japanese ones at his lab left indelible marks on his systematics. In safeguarding his rewarding method, Nakai was always careful not to alienate European centres, which conferred substantial authority upon his classification. However, as he could not simply assert that his systematics was identical to the European universal, he needed to create a botanical authority of his own. The fervent nationalism that cheered on his international success was his ally here. From his imperial botanical centre, as imposing as any European one, Nakai developed a regional systematics fitting his imperial position. He never called his method ‘Korean’. He instead asserted the oriental, Asian, and East Asian nature of his systematics, eventually claiming a new universal in lieu of the European one, a universal that resonated with the most expansionist voice of Japanese nationalism. If there was any fundamental understanding of the universalism of science to Nakai, it was this expectation that the political power exercised over the region would allow his systematics to be accepted there.

In this non-European theatre, universalism and regionalism were not philosophical creeds but useful tools that lent necessary authority to non-European practitioners. Furthermore, for an imperial scientist like Nakai, imposing one's standard beyond its regional origin – an act well rehearsed by his European predecessors – became a natural choice inscribed in Japan's imperialistic modernization.