Kaibara Ekken

Kaibara Ekken was a Japanese Neo-Confucianist philosopher and botanist, born in 1630 into a family of advisors to the daimyō of Fukuoka Domain. He studied Western science in Nagasaki and Neo-Confucianism in Kyoto, and his two most significant contributions to Japanese culture were a study of nature that blended Western natural science with Neo-Confucianism and the translation of the complex writings of Neo-Confucianism into vernacular Japanese. He turned the Confucian ethical system of Zhu Xi into easy manuals of behaviour such as Precepts for Children, and Greater Learning for Women is associated with his name. His Yamato honzō of 1709 was a seminal study of the plants of Japan, and Philipp Franz von Siebold called him the Aristotle of Japan.