Profound Depth of the Edo Era Seen Through Medicine

Spirit of Merchants Who Always Looked Ahead of Their Time

The history of medicine in Japan is profoundly deep yet still shrouded in many mysteries, and although the countless techniques for compounding and using medicines invented by the Jōmon and Yayoi peoples certainly continue to trickle faintly into the headwaters of Japan’s pharmaceutical culture today, they needed no writing at all, so everything was passed down orally from generation to generation; yet as time went on under the influence of China’s advanced civilizations, Japan, too, could not avoid a trend toward the systematization and monopolization of medical techniques, and eventually a great turning point arrived—that was the Edo period, and when we consider this intriguing era in the history of medicine, a place we should focus on in particular is Doshomachi (道修町) in Osaka.

The history of Doshomachi, located in one quarter of Osaka City, is old, and it goes back to the time before the Edo period, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) seized national hegemony and, in building Osaka Castle as his base, launched a large-scale castle-town construction project; at that time there was “a certain quarter,” the source of what would become the development of Doshomachi, and that was Semba (船場); in today’s map Semba lies to the west of Osaka Castle and corresponds to the core of modern Osaka’s business district, but because the scenery is already completely transformed from Semba as it once was, we can only imagine its former appearance; today Semba’s surroundings have been reclaimed into land, and buildings crowd the area so the traces remain faint, but formerly Semba was an enclave surrounded on four sides by rivers—Tosabori (north), Nagahori (south), Higashi-Yokobori (east), and Nishi-Yokobori (west); positioned as a strategic stronghold of the Toyotomi clan that had seized power, Semba was a principal base that supported Toyotomi finances, and the roles and responsibilities placed upon it were exceedingly heavy; however, the character of Semba would later undergo a great transformation as hegemony shifted from the Toyotomi to the Tokugawa; because the Tokugawa established Edo Castle and the shogunate far away in Edo rather than in the vicinity of Osaka Castle under Toyotomi influence, the loosening of surveillance opened room for great development; among these changes, with the transfer of hegemony from Toyotomi to Tokugawa, Semba was in a sense released from Toyotomi pressure, and room opened for the merchants who had gathered there to begin building a town on their own terms, which was also possible because there already existed a merchant culture that had developed in autonomous cities like Sakai and Hirano in south-central Osaka.