Background
Joken Nishikawa was born in 1648. His family were local officials in Nagasaki, one of their duties being to oversee the importation of raw silk from China.
西川 如見
Joken Nishikawa was born in 1648. His family were local officials in Nagasaki, one of their duties being to oversee the importation of raw silk from China.
Sometime after the age of twenty he turned his attention to scholarship, studying Confucianism under Nambu Soju, a Kyoto scholar; he also acquired a knowledge of astronomy, though from whom or by what process it is not known.
In 1697 he retired from his official post, but continued to pursue his astronomical studies with even greater energy than before.
In 1719 he was invited to come to Edo and discuss matters pertaining to astronomy with Shogun Yoshimune.
He was a man of wide interests, and in addition to works on astronomy he also wrote on the subjects of land utilization popular education, and trade; two works on the last subject, the Kai tsushoko, (“Study of the China Trade”) and the Nagasaki yawagusa (“Nagasaki Notes”) are of particular importance in the study of overseas trade in the Edo period.