Background
Yasusada Miyazaki was born in 1623 in Hiroshima, his common name was Buntayu. He was the second son of Miyazaki Giuemon, a samurai of the domain of Hiroshima in Aki.
宮崎 安貞
Yasusada Miyazaki was born in 1623 in Hiroshima, his common name was Buntayu. He was the second son of Miyazaki Giuemon, a samurai of the domain of Hiroshima in Aki.
In 1647 he entered the service of the domain of Fukuoka in Kyushu with a yearly stipend of two hundred koku of rice. When he had passed the age of thirty, he resigned his post and took up the life of a farmer in the village of Meubara in the Shima district of the Fukuoka domain. He studied Chinese works on agriculture and botany, and at the same time traveled extensively along the Inland Sea and through the Kyoto, Osaka, Ise and Shima Peninsula regions, talking with elderly farmers and questioning them on their experience.
Miyazaki was influenced by Chinese Confucian ideas regarding the nature and importance of agriculture, but he combined these with a practical knowledge of the subject gained from personal experience, creating in the Nogyo zensho a uniquely Japanese exposition of the subject.
The result of his labors was a work in ten chapters entitled Nogyo zensho (“Agricultural Encyclopedia”). A Confucian scholar of the domain of Fukuoka named Kaibara Rakukcn made various changes in the text and added a chapter of his own, and another Confucian scholar, his elder brother, Kaibara Ekiken, contributed a preface. The work was printed in 1697, and Miyazaki died in the tenth month of the same year at the age of seventy-four.
The work deals with the subject of agriculture in general and also includes chapters on grains, vegetables, wild vegetables, fruit trees and other types of useful trees, herbs, and methods of cultivation.
(The result of his labors was a work in ten chapters entit...)