No. 113, March 2000

Selections from the NDL Collection
"Mimeguri no kei"

Title: Mimeguri no kei (View of the Mimeguri Shrine) Author: Shiba Kokan (1747-1818) Imprint: 1783 Description: 26.5 x 38.7 cm. NDL call no.: WA33-9 Click on the little image left to go to the standard size image or on the title to go to the large image.

Contents:

"Mimeguri no keiEby Shiba Kokan is first etching (a kind of copperplate engraving) in Japan. Shiba Kokan was the outstanding Japanese pioneer of painting in the European style. He was among the earliest in Japan to produce copperplate engraving and paint in oils. Kokan nevertheless preferred to call himself as a "kyuri gakusha" (scholar of natural law) and introduced Western scientific knowledge to Japan. He produced world atlas by copperplate etching and wrote many books on astronomy and geography. 

By Kokan's time, no one in Japan knew the proper method of etching. Otsuki Gentaku, Japanese scholar of Dutch learning, translated for Kokan western documents describing the method. Kokan spent a long time to master the technique, but finally, he succeeded in making a etching. 

This etching is a landscape of the Mimeguri Shrine viewed from the lower course of the Sumida River, Edo. The perspective is not quite accurate and the Sumida River in the middle looks more like a lake than a river. The mountain in the distance is Mt. Tsukuba. 

The picture was described in mirror image, because it was produced as a "perspective view" enjoyed by optical diagonal machine (right). Audience looks picture with an illusion of recession through convex lens and mirror, as if it was a 3-D picture.  The title "Mimeguri"on the top margin , the signature "Produced by Shiba Kokan, Shiba-mon" on the right border, and "September 1783" at the left border are written in Chinese characters in mirror image. Color is added with a brush.  He described the same scene also in 1787. This 1783 version is rare.

Optical diagonal machine