Japan and the Pacific, 1540–1920

Threat and Opportunity

Matsuda Koichiro, Mark Caprio, Mark Caprio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351925549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume seeks to capture the rich array of images that define Japan's encounters with the Pacific Ocean. Contemporary Japanese most readily associate 'Pacific' with the devastating war that their country fought over a half century ago. The ensuing occupation realized a situation that this people had striven to avoid ever since the Portuguese first arrived in 1543 - their subjugation by a foreign power. But the Pacific Ocean also extended Japan's overseas contacts. From antiquity Japanese and their neighbours crossed it to trade ideas and products. From the mid-16th century it carried people from more distant lands, Europe and America, and thus expanded and diversified Japan's cultural and economic exchange networks. From the late 19th century it provided the highway to transport Japanese imperial expansion in Northeast Asia and later to encourage overseas migration into the Pacific and the Americas. The studies selected for inclusion in this volume, along with the introduction, explain how the Pacific Ocean thus nurtured images of both threat and opportunity to the island nation that it surrounds.

Part I

Japanese Views of the Pacific

1

Maps and Metaphors of the ‘Small Eastern Sea’ in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868)

Marcia Yonemoto

ABSTRACT. This article examines the ways in which oceans were depicted in Japanese geographical writings and maps from the Tokugawa period. It uses these texts to understand how early modern Japanese visions of the Pacific and of maritime Asian waters constructed epistemological frameworks through which the Japanese saw their place in an increasingly complex web of regional and global connections. In the absence of actual adventure on the “high seas,” Japanese writers, artists, and mapmakers used the inventive power of the imagination to fill in the cognitive blank of ocean space. I argue that the definition of early modern oceanic space was profoundly ambiguous, a legacy that, it can be argued, left its mark on Japan’s modern relationship with the Asian Pacific region. Keywords: Japan, maps, Pacific Ocean, Tokugawa period.

Whether an ocean people or a single man

Everyone longs for

The warm currents of the Pacific

Along with those waters rise our spirits

The day for us to go forth has come!

Our blood boils over with joy

Now toward the mainland, heroically

We establish bright peace as we

Cross the Pacific

Our ambition is infinite

We will show the world the resolve

Of our ocean people

Looking up at the battleship flag

We humbly take in the sight

Of the chrysanthemum against the ship’s bow

The Pacific, our ocean

The wind sparkling on this very morning

Let’s extend our imperial homeland’s lifeline!

Fuse Hajime, “Taiheiyō kōshinkyoku”
(The Pacific March), 1939

By the spring of 1942, barely five months into the Pacific War, Japan controlled a vast oceanic empire more than thirteen times the land area of its home islands. Popular songs from the early war years, like “The Pacific March,” were uplifting narratives predicting limitless progress for Japan, whose “ocean people” would “extend [the] imperial homeland’s lifeline” all the way from Asia to the mainland of North America. But as some Japanese military leaders predicted even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s dominance in the Pacific theater would be short-lived. Ultimately, the outcome of the war made it painfully clear that even at the peak of imperial rule, the Pacific was never Japan’s ocean.

Memories of the wartime empire, together with the conventions of modern geography and the recent discourse on the “Pacific Rim,” conspire to convince us that Japan’s links to the Pacific are inherent and indissoluble (Cumings 1998; Dirlik 1998). But this assumption masks the ambivalent and, in historical terms, very recent nature of this relationship. Japan’s systematic knowledge of and engagement with the whole of the Pacific Ocean as we now conceive of it was a relatively late development, a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century at the earliest. Before that time, the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) had rigorously regulated its relations with foreign countries.¹ A few decades after assuming power, it expelled Christian missionaries, forbade the building of ocean-going ships, and barred Japanese from traveling abroad. Pioneering historical research published in the last two decades by Ronald P. Toby, Marius Jansen, and Jurgis Elisonas, writing in English, and Tashiro Kazui, Arano Yasunori, and many other scholars, writing mainly in Japanese, has firmly refuted the notion that early modern Japan was a “closed country” (Katō 1981; Tashiro 1982; Toby 1984, 1985; Elisonas 1991; Jansen 1992; Arano, Ishii, and Murai 1992–1993). Although I do not seek to contest this now widely accepted thesis, I shift the focus from diplomacy and international relations—geopolitics—to what I would call the “geocultural” imaginary, as it was expressed in maps and geographical writings of the early modern period in Japan. Unlike the European powers during the Age of Discovery, Japanese domestic politics strengthened a general disinclination to traverse, explore, or incorporate oceans into Japan’s territory. This contributed to the development of profoundly ambivalent representations of ocean space, in which the friendly and sustaining seas bordering the archipelago stood in constant opposition to the distant and threatening oceans, untamed and unknown.

In this article I trace the ambiguity of early modern oceanic space by examining the ways in which oceans were depicted in Japanese geographical writings and maps. I do so in order to understand how early modern Japanese visions of the Pacific and of maritime Asian waters constructed pervasive epistemological and cultural frameworks through which the Japanese saw their place in an increasingly complex web of regional and global connections. I argue that their reticence to undertake overseas exploration did not mean that the Japanese lacked curiosity about or knowledge of the outside world. In the absence of actual adventure on the “high seas,” Japanese writers, artists, and mapmakers used the inventive power of the imagination to fill in the cognitive blank of ocean space, cartographically dividing and conquering the threat of the seas and populating oceans with exotic lands and peoples. The construction of ocean fears and fantasies allowed the Japanese to engage the idea of an overseas “elsewhere” while maintaining only limited contact with (and evading threats from) non-Japanese peoples and cultures. Early modern oceanic space itself was thus profoundly ambiguous, a legacy that, it can be argued, left its mark on Japan’s modern relationship to the Asian Pacific region.

OCEAN FEARS

To say that early modern Japanese attitudes toward the sea were ambiguous is not to say that the Japanese were alienated from the ocean waters that surround them, for the inhabitants of the archipelago have been deeply attached to and dependent upon the seas since ancient times. Although heated debate among archaeologists and anthropologists continues over the origins of the Japanese people, it is clear that the Japanese have essentially Asian continental origins. However, it also seems clear that certain early forms of language, agricultural technology, customs, and ritual were transmitted by seafaring migrants following the Japan (or Black) Current from the southwestern Pacific islands through the Ryūkyū Island chain into Kyushu and parts of Honshu. Once settled on the main islands of the archipelago, the early Japanese saw the sea as both a source of foodstuffs and an object of ritual worship (Miyata 1993). The historian Amino Yoshihiko has argued strongly that Japan’s ocean-centered culture of fishing, along with hunting and gathering, should be recognized as a crucial aspect of its civilizational development, one that was as important as the practice of wet-rice agriculture to subsequent Japanese lifeways (Amino 1992).²

At the same time, however, the unpredictability of the ocean engendered a deep-rooted fear of the sea. Similar sentiments had permeated Western cultures before the advent of modern shipbuilding technology (Corbin 1995). In the Meiji period (1868 –1912), Western-educated Japanese thinkers, including the political economist Inagaki Manjirō (1861–1908), saw the opportunity for Japan to join the ranks of the great European imperialist powers by developing an “oceanic civilization.” Inspired by the ideas of Carl Ritter, which he had imbibed through his Cambridge mentor John Robert Seeley, Inagaki predicted in 1892 that the twentieth century would be the “Pacific age” (cited in Korhonen 1998, 92). It would be many decades before his words rang true, however, which led to considerable impatience on the part of advocates of more rapid and aggressive expansion. As the scholar Takekoshi Yosaburō put it in 1913, “Nurtured by history and limited in vision, the [Japanese] people have lacked the intellectual heritage of a maritime country, the ideal of national expansion” (quoted in Duus 1995, 1). Statements such as these were intended to spur the Japanese to overcome oceanic obstacles in order to pursue colonial territory. But even in 1913 this was more easily said than done, for the Japanese had long regarded the distant Pacific—and even the nearer waters of maritime Asia—at best warily, at worst fearfully, and, in any case, preferably from the safety of land. In the late eighteenth century Honda Toshiaki (1744–1821), the prominent advocate of Dutch, or Western, studies, made the following assessment of Japanese navigation of the typhoon-plagued waters surrounding the archipelago:

Even when the weather improves, the crew are at a loss to tell in which direction to head, and the ship floats about helplessly. As a last resort they cut off their hair and make vows to Buddha and the gods. Then they take out pieces of paper on which have been written the names of the twelve directions, roll them up into balls, and put them into a basket with a hole in its lid…. The captain and crew, in tears, fervently call on Buddha and the gods of heaven and earth to indicate the direction. They grasp the basket in their hands and strike the lid. Then, when one of the pellets jumps out, they pick it up, their eyes blinded by tears of joy, and cry that it is the direction vouchsafed by Buddha and the gods. They then set their course by it, and go completely astray. (Quoted in Keene 1969, 46–47)

The tragicomic aspect of this account belies the very real fear and ambivalence felt by early modern Japanese seafarers as a result of their incompetence and vulnerability on the open ocean. Never known as accomplished navigators, Japanese travelers throughout the classical and early medieval periods were highly dependent on Chinese and Korean pilots to make the journey to and from the continent. Even after shipbuilding technology was improved following the attempted invasion of...