薬草の博物誌 -森野旧薬園と江戸の植物図譜-展
Museum of Medicinal Herbs

薬草を主とした本草学が中国から渡来し盛んになった江戸時代。それは近代に向かって博物学へと発展していきました。本展では、江戸時代から続く森野旧薬園と当時描かれた薬草を中心とした植物図譜を通して、幅広い本草の世界へとその魅力を紹介します。

Museum of Medicinal Herbs：
Morino-Kyuyakuen Garden and Illustrated Plants in the Edo Period

Osaka: 4 December,2015-16 February,2016
Tokyo: 3 March-21 May,2016

Kampo (herbal medicine) is a familiar part of everyday life in Japan. Its roots are found in the honzo-gaku (herbology) that developed in the Edo period (1603-1868). In late Edo, herbs used in medicines became so precious that the Shogunate adopted a policy of domestic cultivation. As evidenced by the many herbals and illustrated plants published at the time, interest among people in medicinal herbs was strong. It was also in this period that research expanded from medicinal herbs to plants in general and that public interest in plants grew.
Around this time, a man deeply knowledgeable about medicinal herbs appeared—the Morino family’s first generation Tosuke, Tosuke Michisada (pseudonym: Saikaku). Saikaku, who also worked on behalf of the Shogunate’s domestic cultivation policy, opened Japan’s oldest extant private herbal garden, “Morino-Kyuyakuen Garden” (Uda, Nara prefecture). In his late years, he completed the Matsuyama-honzo (“Matsuyama Herbal”) containing some 1,000 brightly colored illustrations of plants depicted with a botanist’s eye for detail. Saikaku’s wisdom of learning from the past to build for the future still lives today in this herbal garden.
This exhibition, while keeping a focus on “medicinal herbs,” looks at Morino-Kyuyakuen Garden which faithfully carries on Saikaku’s thinking. Displayed, along with photographs and film, are about 90 important botanical illustrations created in the Edo period and in the subsequent era when herbology was reborn as modern botany. We hope that, through these items, viewers will feel the passionate interest that people long ago held in plants and medicinal herbs.

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