This talk provides an examination of how intellectuals in Japan understood the magic lantern as a technology. It starts in the 1770s, when the instrument was first recorded in the country, and focuses on a group of scholars seeking to understand the complex mechanism of the human eye. Until the mid-1770s, this organ had been mostly understood to be a flat, two-dimensional disc. These scholars’ novel idea that the magic lantern represents a basic mechanical model of workings of the…