Hiraga Gennai — The Man Who Would Not Be a Retainer

The Man at the Foot of the Table

"Please try opening this mouth. I will give the bag to whoever opens it."

The head of the Dutch trading post, Kalans, took out a bag at a drinking party. It happened at the Dutch inn in Edo (today's Tokyo), Sugita Genpaku wrote.

The mouth of the bag was fastened with a puzzle ring.

The guests took it one by one. They tried this and that, but no one could open it. The bag was passed from hand to hand, and at last it reached the man sitting at the lowest seat.

The man took the bag and thought for a while.

Then, quickly, he opened the mouth.

The guests were impressed, and so was Kalans, at how fast his head worked. The bag became the man's on the spot.

The man's name was Hiraga Gennai.

He was quick to grasp the reason of things, Genpaku wrote, and quick of wit. And he suited the tastes of the day well. That is how Genpaku described Gennai. The two had been friends for a long time.

From that day, Gennai began to visit the Dutch inn often.

One day Kalans showed him a stone shaped like a go piece. It was said, he told Gennai, to come from inside the head of a great snake.

Gennai asked what it was good for, and went home. The next day he brought a stone he had made himself.

Kalans said it was the same as the one he had shown the day before. A stone that was supposed to come from a great snake's head, Gennai had made in a single day.

A human hand had made the same thing, and in one day. Then Kalans's stone surely did not come from a snake's head either. So what was it made of? Dragon bone, Gennai said. Kalans answered back:

"Between heaven and earth there is no such thing as a dragon. How can it be made from its bone?"

So Gennai brought out a large bone, joined to a dragon's tooth, that had been dug up on Shodoshima, an island in his home province of Sanuki.

Here was the dragon's bone, he showed. He showed it to a man who had just said there were no dragons.

Kalans was astonished. He asked for a book of Chinese medicine, took the bone home, and in thanks sent back many Dutch books: books on animals, on plants, on shells.

Still, the two did not talk face to face. An interpreter stood between them, and they did not understand each other word for word, Genpaku added.

So, with an interpreter between them, they had argued over whether dragons exist or not.

The man at the foot of the table had come from Sanuki, on the island of Shikoku. The story goes back to the time when Gennai was still in Sanuki.

He was born in 1728, or the year after. His family was a low-ranking one: his father guarded the rice storehouse of the Takamatsu han. A han is something like a small country ruled by a lord. From his boyhood he studied honzogaku, the study of plants, stones, and animals that can be used as medicine, it is said.

When the lord made him a petty official, Gennai sighed and said this. Genpaku later wrote it down on the stone of Gennai's grave.

"If a man is born into this world, he must be of use to his country. How can I stay quietly in my home province?"

After about a year of study in Nagasaki, Gennai went to Edo. In 1759 he took the lead in holding a bussankai, a products fair where people brought medicines and goods from many places to show each other.

The man running it was still in a lord's service.

In 1761, Gennai asked his han to let him leave.

Unless he gave day and night to training in medicine, he would not gain the skill. But if he did, he would neglect his duty. So he asked for a long leave.

The lord was sorry to lose him, but he understood Gennai's aim and allowed it. As an allowance for study, he even gave him three fuchi. A fuchi is the rice a lord gives to a retainer, a servant-soldier who serves him, as a stipend.

Now Gennai was a free man.

But one more line had been added at the end of the paper of permission.

He was not allowed to enter the service of any other house.

Not Worth the Trip

"It was not worth coming to Edo after all."

In a letter that seems to be from the twelfth month of the lunar calendar, the year he left the han, Gennai wrote this to a friend in Sanuki.

He should have been a free man. Instead he was terribly busy. Whenever the lord went out to Meguro, he often had to go along. Coming and going at the lord's mansion was to go on as before, just as the paper of permission said.

The goods he had gathered and his medical books lay scattered about. His studies were getting nowhere.

"Though my heart is one, it seems I cannot get anything done. It is truly the height of unpleasantness."

Yet the same letter also says thanks. The three fuchi for his studies were a blessing. Since it was not service but an allowance for study, he apparently could receive it wherever he lived. He was very grateful, he wrote.

Once, a young Confucian scholar, Shibano Ritsuzan, visited Gennai's house with his friend Tachihara Suiken. This story has been handed down.

Suiken had never met Gennai. When he asked for an introduction, Ritsuzan is said to have told him:

"Well, he is not a man you need to admire. But his character is quite fine, so he may be worth meeting once. He has no learning, though."

It was summer, and Gennai came out wearing silk hakama, the wide trousers worn over a kimono. His character was indeed fine, and he spoke with ease.

Soon Gennai brought out a bellows brazier he had recently thought up himself. He got the fire going just right, grilled dengaku (skewered tofu with miso) with his own hands, and served it to the two.

The man who was said to have no learning was grilling dengaku on a brazier he had made.

Around 1765, Gennai went deep into the mountains of Chichibu. He went to dig for gold and iron. He opened the Arakawa River to boats, and now even the trees of the mountain, which had been left to rot, could be burned into charcoal and sent to Edo.

His letter to Gondayu, the husband of the sister who had carried on the family post, is in high spirits.

"There is a great mountain and great trees with no equal under heaven. Truly, it is a brave thing."

But in the same letter, the talk suddenly turns hard.

"Five at the charcoal mountain, seven on the river boats. At the iron mountain, two even when it is idle, four oxen, six river boats. All this I feed by my own strength alone."

The early costs had been hard to meet, the letter goes on, and he had not been able to send money home. It will be a little easier from now on, he wrote. According to another letter, because a wholesaler had put up his capital, he got only a quarter of the profit from the charcoal.

In 1770, Gennai went to Nagasaki again.

There he bought Dutch books and instruments, and came back with an Erekiteru. It was a Dutch device that was said to draw fire from a person's body and cure illness. Gennai finally worked out how it worked and astonished people, Sugita Genpaku wrote.

It was a little later that the Erekiteru came to work, and the mansions of great lords began to call him, asking him to come and show it.

A letter to a doctor of the Matsushiro han survives, dated the third day of the seventh lunar month of some year. I will come tomorrow. So please send people. The device is heavy, so three or four to carry it. And three bearers for the palanquin.

"I am heavy too, so please send strong ones."

There was a postscript as well.

I am very fat and suffer in the heat, so in the summer I do not go to other lords' houses, he wrote. But I want to show it while you are staying here, so I will come. Then he made this request:

"Above all, I beg you to put me in a cool place."

I cannot drink, so please do not trouble about meals, he added. And once more:

"I beg you only for a cool place."

There is another letter to the same man, dated the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. The day before, the lord had been pleased. But when he showed it to the people of the household, it had not gone well.

"When I showed it to the gentlemen of the household, the fire would hardly come, and it was a miserable scene. I am sorry."

I am very tired today, and my writing is messy. Please forgive me, the letter goes on.

Now, in 1771, Gennai wrote this to friends in his home province:

"Whatever I do, I have plenty of skills to earn my keep, so I will not take a grain of rice. From now on, please do not urge me to take a post."

The grain of rice probably means the rice a lord gives. The same letter had a haiku added to it.

"How cool it is! Wait in bed for good luck. News from Edo."

It plays on the saying that good luck comes to those who sleep and wait. In a letter the next day, he wrote that the mountain of Yoshino was all silver and copper, and that he had asked leave to dig it and had not yet had an answer. Then he boasted:

"I have searched nearly all the land from Hizen in the far southwest to Settsu near Osaka. I have become the greatest yamashi of all time."

A yamashi is someone who searches mountains and digs ore. It was also a word for a person who cheats others with money-making schemes.

His resolve was tested two years later.

The han of Akita, in the far north, said it would give Gennai a fief of two hundred koku.