TANAKA, Yoshio.

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Taisei kunmo zukai ("An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the West"). First edition of this colourful illustrated encyclopaedia, produced by the Ministry of Education to introduce various Western items and their names in English, French, and German. It was released only four years into the Meiji period by Tanaka Yoshio, a prominent naturalist and zoologist who oversaw the founding of the National Museum of Natural History and Ueno Zoo.Taisei kunmo zukai adopts the format of traditional Japanese encyclopaedias but applies multi-lingual captions. It opens with examples of European architecture, houses, and furniture, before moving to kitchen utensils, tools, clothing, gardening equipment, domestic animals, sports, railways, ships, and weaponry. The categorisation reflects the ongoing process of modernising scientific and technical knowledge in Japan. For example, as noted by W. Puck Brecher, the separation of animals into "domesticated" and "wild" subsections was a holdover from the early modern period, where animals were classified by their usefulness or danger to society. Taisei kunmo zukai "interprets 'wild' not simply as undomesticated, but as unmanageably savage and ferocious... The wildlife section includes illustrations of a hunter and a forest to instruct readers about the propriety of human dominion over the wild" (Brecher, p. 86). This contrasts with emerging Western models of zoological classification, showing how the late 19th century was in a state of flux between tradi

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