Shortly after arriving in Japan in 1823, Philipp Franz von Siebold wrote to a relative back in Holland, "I do not intend to leave Japan until I have described it in detail and until I have collected enough material for a Japanese museum . . ."
Collecting was an 18th-century passion. Ethnology was a completely new field, and no methodology other than collecting had been created for it. As for museology, it could begin only when more museums were established. Cabinets of curiosities, those first table-top museums, were to be found all over Europe, and Siebold -- a doctor and hence of a scientific turn of mind -- was to bring together one of the largest. It is now, in fact, a full-fledged museum.
It would, say the authors of this account of Siebold and his life, "take months, if not years, to view all the material that he collected . . ." That included anything he could lay his hands on -- books, maps, plants, animals, art, handicrafts -- and enlarging and classifying the collection were, along with his medical duties, his major occupation in Japan.