page_title: Rangaku
section_title: Electrical sciences
hierarchical_section_title: Rangaku / Types / Electrical sciences
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: 平賀源内のエレキテル（複製）。国立科学博物館の展示。 English: Elekiter by Hiraga Gennai, replica. Exhibit in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, Japan.
context_page_description: Rangaku is a body of knowledge developed by Japan through its contacts with the Dutch enclave of Dejima, which allowed Japan to keep abreast of Western technology and medicine in the period when the country was closed to foreigners, 1641–1853, because of the Tokugawa shogunate's policy of national isolation.
  Through Rangaku, some people in Japan learned many aspects of the scientific and technological revolution occurring in Europe at that time, helping the country build up the beginnings of a theoretical and technological scientific base, which helps to explain Japan's success in its radical and speedy modernization following the forced American opening of the country to foreign trade in 1854.
context_section_description: Electrical experiments were widely popular from around 1770. Following the invention of the Leyden jar in 1745, similar electrostatic generators were obtained for the first time in Japan from the Dutch around 1770 by Hiraga Gennai. Static electricity was produced by the friction of a glass tube with a gold-plated stick, creating electrical effects. The jars were reproduced and adapted by the Japanese, who called it "Elekiteru" (エレキテル, Erekiteru). As in Europe, these generators were used as curiosities, such as making sparks fly from the head of a subject or for supposed pseudoscientific medical advantages. In Sayings of the Dutch, the elekiteru is described as a machine that allows one to take sparks out of the human body, to treat sick parts. Elekiterus were sold widely to the public in curiosity shops. Many electric machines derived from the elekiteru were then invented, particularly by Sakuma Shōzan.
  Japan's first electricity manual, Fundamentals of the elekiteru Mastered by the Dutch (阿蘭陀始制エレキテル究理原, Oranda Shisei Erekiteru Kyūri-Gen) by Hashimoto Soukichi (ja:橋本宗吉), published in 1811, describes electrical phenomena, such as experiments with electric generators, conductivity through the human body, and the 1750 experiments of Benjamin Franklin with lightning.
caption: Japan's first electrostatic generator (1776), called Elekiteru, developed through Rangaku. (National Museum of Nature and Science).
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