塩田三郎とその旧蔵洋書をめぐって

抄録

This paper is concerned with Saburo Shioda (1843-1889), an experienced diplomat died in Peking, where he served as a Japanese Minister to China, and his vast collection of foreign books, more than half of which are now possessed by National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan.
The author happened to find a way to access to those books included in the Library : The books bearing a call number beginning with an alphabet from G to K, such as G-62, H-70, I-60, J-18, K-48, that are found in the Catalogue of the Imperial Library, 1898-1903, were identified as such. Those books, amounting to more than 700 in number, are of various fields; namely, philosophy, history, geography, social science, politics, law, education, art, language, literature, science, medicine, engineering, and others, published in 1716-1890. Among the collection there are three authored by Shioda himself. These three as well as the other large number of books in English tell us that the language which he first learned from a Japanese teacher, Gohachiro Namura, in Hakodate in 1856 when he was 13 years old, became a second language to him, helping towards enriching his knowledge on men and things and making him a person whose death was lamented by the people of both Japan and other countries.
The records now available indicate that Shioda had willed his private library for public use, that his 454 French books were donated to Futsugakukai, Socété de Langue francaise (the core of Hosei University), by his son in 1890, and that Mrs. Shioda donated the remaining 748 English books and 7 sheets (maps and documents) to Tokyo Library (present National Diet Library) in 1892. There is a possibility of finding the French books in Hosei University. In the history of French studies in Japan, Shioda is well-known as one of the first two Japanese that really acquired internationally recoginized skill in French.
Shioda was elected to membership in the Peking Oriental Society in 1886 and to be the president of it in 1888. Some information obtained on the Society and its journal is also given in this paper.