Kaibara Ekken

Kaibara Ekken, also read Ekiken and known as Atsunobu, was a Japanese Neo-Confucianist philosopher and botanist, born on 17 December 1630 and dying on 5 October 1714. He was born into a family of advisors to the daimyo of Fukuoka Domain in Chikuzen Province, accompanied his father to Edo in 1648, was sent to Nagasaki in 1649 to study Western science, continued his studies there as a ronin from 1650 to 1656, then re-entered service to the Kuroda and studied in Kyoto, returning to Fukuoka after his father died in 1665. His two most significant contributions to Japanese culture were the study of nature based on a blend of Western natural science and Neo-Confucianism, and the translation of the complex writings of Neo-Confucianism into vernacular Japanese. His science was confined to botany and materia medica, and he advanced botany in Japan with Yamato honzo of 1709, a seminal study of Japanese plants that led Philipp Franz von Siebold to call him the Aristotle of Japan. He was also known for his manuals of behavior, such as Precepts for Children and Greater Learning for Women, though modern scholarship argues that the latter was prepared by other hands.