A Brill Calendar: February 17

Siebold's Japan

Few modern Japanese tourists visiting Leyden – not excluding their present Emperor - fail to pay profound respect to Philipp Franz Balthazar von Siebold (Würzburg, Bavaria, February 17, 1796 – Leyden, October 18, 1866).

You can pay your respects in the famed municipal ‘Hortus Botanicus’, (an institution almost coeval with Leyden University), before a fine sculptured bust in stone of the adventurous & controversial scholar, (botany being one of von Siebold’s prime interests): or at the following address; Breestraat 46, housing from 1859 his collection of ‘orientalia’, from then on called ‘Rijks Japansch Museum von Siebold’.

Nippon honours in von Siebold a national icon, connecting the Asiatic Empire with European cultures. His biography and achievements are taught to all Japanese citizens during elementary education; an absolute contrast to what Dutch school-children learn about him; while only the city of Leyden honours this controversial, self-centred, but passionate man as founder of Japanese studies in Holland.

That lack of general awareness is not restricted to the country which enabled the sensational career of von Siebold. ‘The New Encyclopaedia Britannica’ (15th Edition, 1986), for instance, omits to mention him altogether. However, it is seldom that on the place where one would expect to find information on this phenomenon – in the ‘Micropaedia’, Vol. X, pp. 786; between ‘Siebengebirge’ and ‘Siedlce’ - the ‘Britannica’ is mentioning another Von Siebold, born in Würzburg as well, albeit exactly eight years minus one day later, February 16, 1804: Carl Theodor Ernst, a ‘zoologist who specialized in invertebrate research and contributed significantly to the development of parasitology’.

The lemma doesn’t fail to inform its readers that Carl was born in a family of biologists, but leaves it at that. As coincidence will have it, exactly one year after Carl’s birth Würzburg city registered the one of Johann Joseph Hoffmann, the first Leyden Professor in the Japanese language. Miracles never cease.