Kaibara Ekken

Who was Kaibara Ekken?

Kaibara Ekken or Ekiken, also known as Atsunobu was a Japanese Neo-Confucianist philosopher and botanist.

Kaibara was born into a family of advisors to the daimyo of Fukuoka Domain in Chikuzen Province. He accompanied his father to Edo in 1648, and was sent in 1649 to Nagasaki to study Western science. At his father's urging, he continued his studies in Nagasaki as a rōnin from 1650 through 1656. He then re-entered service to Kuroda, which led to his continuing studies in Kyoto. After his father's death in 1665, he returned to Fukuoka.

Kaibara's two most significant contributions to Japanese culture were the study of nature on based on a blend of Western natural science and Neo-Confucianism, and the translation of the complex writings of Neo-Confucianism into vernacular Japanese.

Kaibara's science was confined to Botany and Materia medica and focused on the "natural law". Kaibara became as famous in Japan as people such as Charles Darwin when it came to science. He advanced the study of botany in Japan when he wrote Yamato honzō, which was a seminal study of Japanese plants. The 19th-century German Japanologist Philipp Franz von Siebold called him the "Aristotle of Japan."