Japan's Kampo & Herbal Medicine Culture

About this book

The only English guide that takes Japan's kampo tradition itself — not its remedies — as its whole subject. Two hundred entries read the tradition the way its own keepers do: the word kampo and the Han classics behind the shelf; the wall of drawers and its dried kingdom of roots, barks, peels and fungi, read as graded materials; the famous formula names read as inheritances with pedigrees; the medicine shop, the wholesale street of Doshōmachi and the Toyama pedlar with his trunk, register and paper balloons; the medicinal gardens, gatherers and drug roads that supplied the shelf; the yagen, the pill board and the folded powder paper of the maker's bench; the family medicine chest in the farmhouse alcove, audited once a year like a small bank; and the etiquette of the consultation and the calendar of the medicine year.

Every entry follows one uniform four-field structure, so the two-hundredth tradition is as easy to interrogate as the first. One contract governs the volume, printed in its introduction: this is a book of culture and history only. It asserts the efficacy of nothing, gives no medical advice and prints no dosage; traditions are reported as traditions, and every entry closes by pointing to the official source — and every question of the body to the physician and the licensed pharmacist. The plants at the table belong to the flavour volumes; this is the book of the pharmacy's world.