Léon de Rosny and his significance for French Japanology as a specialist of the Japanese language

This contribution assesses the scholarly formation of Léon de Rosny, the first incumbent of a chair of Japanese Studies in France. Although he is mainly known as a Japanologist, this study also stresses his solid grounding in Classical Chinese under the guidance of Stanislas Julien. Unlike for Chinese, he had to rely on self-study for the acquisition of Japanese. While this made him a pioneer in the field, it also brought with it some manifest limitations to his scholarly achievements. For his study of Japanese, he relied primarily on Shogen jikô, a Japanese-Chinese dictionary brought back from Japan to Leiden by von Siebold. Although it liberated him from the earlier missionary lexicography, he did not quite succeed in compiling a more modern dictionary himself. Likewise, in grammar, he was unable to completely outgrow the imprint left by João Rodrigues’s Arte da lingoa de Iapam. His limited proficiency in the vernacular was borne out during his exchanges with the members of the first Tokugawa mission in 1862. His anthology of Japanese poetry, although garnering a wide readership among the general public, was equally limited in scope and philological rigour