Talk:Rangaku

Clarification needed
It's not clear from the article what the Rangaku method actually consisted of. Was it just spying on Dutch nationals in Japan? Or was there more to it than that? -- noosphere 04:25, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the comment. I added precisions in the text.PHG 04:36, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Question of pronoun use
It is really appropriate to refer to Japan in the phrase "which allowed her to keep abreast of Western technology and medicine in the period when the country was closed to foreigners, 1641–1853, because of the Tokugawa shogunate's policy of national isolation (sakoku)." --chemica 23:46, 24 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I have the same question. If it were just the one occurrence, I would go ahead and change it, but the article currently uses "her" to refer to Japan at least five times.  To my eye, this gives the article an old-fashioned flavor, but I'm not clear on Wikipedia's policy (if any) about which pronoun to use for a country.  Still, I'm strongly inclined to go in and change to "it" throughout. --Elysdir 03:49, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Tolerating the Dutch
Excellent article! The only thing missing is an explanation for why the Dutch were allowed to trade with Japan. Was it because they were prepared to forsake converting people to Christianity?

Picture formatting!
Is there nothing that can be done about the formatting issues here? There are some severe problems that no one's touched at least since I put the tag there noting the formatting problem. How can that be solved? As far as I can see, it would require either removing a bunch of pictures or adding a lot more text to balance it out, but I'm no expert. --Grenadier 05:05, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
 * It’s not the best solution, but I’ll put in the clear-all template. It doesn’t look good, just better. -BRPXQZME (talk) 22:42, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

First General Anesthesia Claim?
I've read that the ancient Romans used a form of general anesthesia by giving the patient a piece of mandrake root to chew. All parts of the mandrake (Mandragora officinalis) are rich in alkaloids such as scopolamine and hyoscamine, which have anesthetic powers. To the extent that this report is true and that the method is comparable to the Japanese method, the claim that the first successful general anesthesia was in Japan is falsified.

Difficulties: I can't give a reference to this Roman practice and it may be urban legend. And I don't know the details of the claimed Japanese first general anesthesia, so I don't know how the two techniques compare.

Floozybackloves (talk) 18:15, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Astronomy
There is a good need of information on Western astronomy in Japan. Japan before the Meiji period was an agricultural country and any advanced knowledge on astronomy in the West helped the agricultural industry a lot. Komitsuki (talk) 10:23, 19 August 2012 (UTC)