I chose the intertwined memory-building initiatives of 1928–9 and 2009–14 to kick off my study of multilayered diplomatic history because each is a manifestation of the intimate relationship between academic history and politically motivated uses of the past. In this book I aim to highlight the ways in which historical sources, materiality, and narrative tropes work together to construct what is understood as Japanese early modern foreign relations. A study of Murakami Naojirō’s archival diplomacy provides the framework for the overarching argument of Translating Negotiations, which is that a multitude of factors and actors shape historiography and the way the past is represented in the intertwined environments of history and memory.
The primary argument of this book concerns how academic historians translated and constructed early modern Japan’s progressive foreign relations. Knowledge of early modern relations was neither simply transmitted in words, meanings, and discourses, translated from one context to another, nor transferred from the archival material to the textbook. Plural actors ranging from seventeenth-century authors to twentieth-century translators coproduced ideas about Japanese foreign relations beginning in the pivotal decades of the late sixteenth century, when maritime trade with Ming China expanded and contacts with other Asian powers and European stakeholders multiplied. As a certain type of Japanese interaction with the outside world – such as the abovementioned transpacific contact – was a recurring topic of Murakami’s work, his extensive scholarship requires being contextualized by his understanding of and involvement in the diplomacy and geopolitics of his time. I do so by examining the document-based empiricism of Murakami and his colleagues and by looking beyond their scholarly productions.
The secondary argument is that the selective highlighting of early modern primary sources led to the foregrounding of maritime expansion, foreign commerce, and diplomacy. The tangible archive (by which I mean collections, images, and material objects including architecture and monuments as opposed to unrecorded practices and oral traditions), which created and continues to create biases and epistemic ignorance, was key in this process. Taking a closer look at the polyvocal archive of foreign relations, I explore how multiple actors from different time periods coconstructed historiographical knowledge about early modern Japanese foreign relations and maritime expansion. After the implementation of the empirical method in Japan in the 1880s, such knowledge constructions based on archival research data gradually came to justify Japanese hegemony in Asia by purposefully accentuating select aspects of the past and silencing others. The tangible archive lay the foundation for a narrative of foreign relations that privileged the state and ‘great’ men while excluding other actors from accessible knowledge repositories and source editions. As a result, this process of negotiating the tangible archives of imperialism perpetuated unequal power relations and contributed to archival practices that silenced the large majority of historical actors.Footnote 1
It is my specific aim to recover pasts overwritten, silenced, and lost by global intellectual trajectories and the unequal power relations intrinsic to any scientific knowledge production.Footnote 2 This is also my way of contributing to a global history of ideas that neither negates nor downplays power relations, gender, or Indigenous questions.Footnote 3 Over recent decades, postcolonial theoreticians, decolonial thinkers, gender scholars, and global intellectual historians, among others, have improved our understanding of what has become known as epistemic violence within the broader realm of scientific colonialism.Footnote 4 I suggest adding the notion of historiographical violence, which has cast a long shadow on research in the humanities in East and Southeast Asia.Footnote 5 By historiographical violence I mean the narratives that position Europeans and Japanese as the far more important or even sole makers of history while simultaneously ignoring Indigenous actors’ voices and regional practices of engaging with the past. This process happened in parallel with discipline specialization in history, geography, Sinology, and anthropology, to name just a few, and lent authority to the various academic and political agendas.Footnote 6 Modern historical science served to elevate the nation state and its elite members.Footnote 7 Nation states that aspired to modernization crafted national histories in a process that made heavy use of both mythmaking and the silencing of subaltern pasts.Footnote 8
An extensive body of scholarship has explored the complicit role of historical studies and its spatiotemporal subdisciplines in Meiji Japan’s imperial projects. Margaret Mehl and Lisa Yoshikawa have traced how state-sponsored academic historians aimed to make the Japanese public aware of the nation’s history while fostering patriotism.Footnote 9 Joshua Fogel’s keen focus on exploring Sino-Japanese interactions has demonstrated how books, translations, objects, and individuals (be they travelers, scholars, businessmen, or artists) forged ties between Japan and China and subsequently shaped the thinking about the two historical entities.Footnote 10 Several others, including David Mervart and Michael Facius, have noted the ontological importance of Chinese Studies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan, respectively, and highlighted the intrinsic connections between the traditional training in classical China, modern historical science, and foreign relations.Footnote 11 Satō Yūki has drawn attention to the importance of historical sources (komonjo) and their systematic collection, as well as how Meiji-period debates about a ‘real (or true) history’ (seishi) determined what was considered relevant and hence worthy of the attention of academic historians.Footnote 12 The works of Yijang Zhong and Seiji Shirane point to how history was one of the many disciplines complicit with national and emerging colonial objectives at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 13 What I want to add to existing scholarship is how the early modern past was narrated by Japanese scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My focus lies on the Japanese historiography of foreign and diplomatic relations (gaikō or the taigai kankei) with Europeans during the Edo period (1600–1868).Footnote 14
Foreign relations enjoyed popularity as a field of study since academic history was first established in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. A major shift in its historiography occurred in the 1970s, when studies on topics including tributary missions to Edo, the pitfalls of the closed country (sakoku) narrative, and nineteenth-century treaty negotiations surged. Since then, a wealth of research has underlined the special nature of the Tokugawa bakufu’s geopolitics in Asia and explored how Japanese stakeholders managed complex foreign politics and international trade.Footnote 15 While scholars are right to emphasize the importance of neighboring Asian territories such as Chosŏn Korea and the Ryūkyū Kingdom for strengthening the authority of the Tokugawa as overlords during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I argue that early seventeenth-century contacts with European trading nations were of unparalleled historiographical and epistemological significance. Historians like Murakami molded history through deliberate linguistic, temporal, and spatial translations. For a better understanding of how scholars tied hegemonic knowledge to historiographical processes, it will be imperative to investigate the unjust technologies they applied.Footnote 16
Asymmetrical narratives are not always the result of interpretations derived from explicit power differentials. In many cases, practices that highlight and obscure are unconscious processes that play out over longer periods of time. Tackling such historiographical practices in global intellectual history requires acknowledgment of the close relationship between selectiveness, translation, and meta-narratives. For the historiography of Japanese early modern foreign relations, this means disentangling gaikō narratives based on modernization discourses from the Sinocentric frame of formal tributary relations. While Murakami’s contribution to the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century foreign relations primarily featured interactions with Europe and Europeans in Southeast Asia, the impact and afterlife of his scholarship only can be fully grasped in the context of a centuries-long tradition of perceiving the cultural and political histories of East Asia through the lens of a China-centered universe of shared classical texts and practices, sometimes referred to as the Sinosphere.Footnote 17 In English-language scholarship, the overemphasis on China-centrism in foreign relations and civilization discourse was shaped by the work of John K. Fairbank in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 18 Yet, while Fairbank stressed the importance of using diplomatic documents, the very Chinese sources on which he based his research were selected for him by others.Footnote 19 This resulted in misinterpretation and in an oversimplification of China’s claims to universal rule that paid hardly any attention to the contradictions and complexities that came, for instance, with Manchu rule and their creative adaption as foreign rulers to the existing Han protocol. Hence, there are obvious, although contingent, parallels when it comes to notions of hierarchy in foreign relations. Both in the case of Cold War area studies a la Fairbank and Murakami’s prewar historiography of early modern foreign relations, biases derive from source selection and translatory choices. While Murakami’s scholarship led to an overemphasis on the position of Europe within early modern Japanese political developments, Fairbank’s work essentialized the role of tributary relations and Chinese protocol in the East Asian world order prior to the twentieth century. To complicate things even further, it must also be firmly stated that while these foreign relations myths are still apparent in English-language scholarship, they gained no ground in Japanese scholarship. Japanese scholars could turn to a vast archive of engaging with and gazing at China to forge their own narratives.
A Note on Terminology and Concepts
A few years ago, I posed what I thought was the provocative question of whether Murakami was a “global historian avant la lettre.”Footnote 20 In retrospect, suggesting that Murakami was ahead of his time does seem more naïve than provocative.Footnote 21 It would, of course, be an anachronism to dub Murakami a global historian, by which I mean someone who looked at comparisons and connections beyond the nation, and positioned his empirical research productively to advance and nuance historical thinking. While Murakami shared most of the methods and views of his colleagues in Japanese history, I felt the need to emphasize that he had a different research focus. In a period when Historical Studies was compartmentalized by nations and eras, Murakami’s research crossed thematic, disciplinary, and chronological boundaries. The fact that Murakami acquired expertise in various fields including foreign languages and translation, while remaining relatively unknown outside the realm of early modern history, provides an interesting insight into his scholarly career. For instance, while he is today best known for his pioneering efforts to further the study of Christianity in Japan, contemporaries referred to Murakami as a scholar of kōryūshi (history of foreign interactions) or kōtsūshi (history of communication or trade).Footnote 22 And while the differences between Murakami and the recent cohort of global historians are blatant when it comes to ethnocentric biases or questions of positionality, there can be no doubt that he internationalized Japanese history. His commitment to the empiricist tradition added important details to the knowledge of past global connections and ultimately made historical processes in East Asia comparable to that of other world regions.
Engaging with questions of connections and comparability throughout this book, I use global history instead of related labels such as world history to describe my work. To be sure, depending on the context and nature of the scholarship, world history and global history have overlapping meanings, with both fields exploring the interactions between peoples in large-scale historical processes.Footnote 23 Although the meanings of the terms are fluid, an ever-increasing wealth of literature has discussed their different parameters since the 1990s. In the interest of space, I would like to limit myself to stressing that key differences in the two approaches lie in perspective and methodology, with recent global historians using multilingual sources to promote a bottom-up understanding of history and explanations that favor institutions other than the state and powerful stakeholders. These developments have led to a shift in questions regarding which processes and whose past we study, and how we engage with those who have been traditionally left out.Footnote 24 In Japanese, sekaishi is almost interchangeably used with the twenty-first-century neologism gurobaru historii.Footnote 25 Certainly Murakami did not see himself as a practitioner of sekaishi, nor did he understand the world as completely interconnected through globalization.Footnote 26 Still, his work influenced later research in global intellectual history and studies of seventeenth-century encounters and enabled conceptual contributions to research in global diplomacy. In short, Murakami’s work laid the foundation for securing Japan a fixed place and consistent presence in recent scholarship in global early modernity.
Early modern is yet another term that appears frequently in this book. While aware of the problem of teleology and even embedded paradoxes in the vocabulary of early modernity that synthesizes the past and stands for a limited set of ideas,Footnote 27 most scholars acknowledge its utility for a polycentric period of profound transformations.Footnote 28 As a temporal marker, it is largely accepted with flexible start and end dates. For Europe and the Atlantic world, early modern refers to the period after 1492 to the late eighteenth century; for Southeast Asia, it is, with some exceptions, more or less equivalent to the period of colonial expansion; for Chinese history, it competes with other labels such as late imperial;Footnote 29 and for Japan, it denotes the period between the unification process that was concluded with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603 and the Meiji Restoration. The term ‘early modernity’ itself is a product of the early twentieth century and the global spread of ideas about what constituted the period that was distinct from the archaic or feudal era, including the Middle Ages, and preceded the contemporary world. In Japan, the term kinsei (近世) for the period between 1570 and 1868 was already firmly established in late nineteenth-century scholarly discourse, while its equivalent ‘early modern’ was rarely in use in other historiography until decades later.Footnote 30 Conceptually, kinsei for ‘early modern’ is a coproduced temporal label based on Sino-Japanese and European understandings of time. The way I use early modern in this book reflects an understanding of the intensified connectivity of the period and a recognition of the effects of long-distance commerce and great empire-building.
Spatial categories, too, necessitate a discussion of how they are used. In general, I avoid contested concepts such as West/Western or East/Eastern except in cases when they were used by Murakami or in the primary sources. The most frequently appearing spatial category in this book is the Japanese term nan’yō (‘southern sea’). I will discuss its etymology and its implications for Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean in detail in Chapter 5. Here it should be underlined that the idea of the nan’yō was more than a geographical category describing the maritime region south of China and Japan. Within the history of Japanese imperialism, nan’yō was intrinsically linked to the trope of expansion. Jeremy Yellen summarizes the importance of the geopolitical concept as ‘imagining centrality’ and underlines that ideas of territorial expansion were important long before the articulation of the doctrine of Japan as a ‘liberator’ in a Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere.Footnote 31 In a quest to find a way to expand southwards, as expressed in the propaganda of what the historian Yano Tōru called nanshinron, the Japanese Empire combined efforts to challenge the physical and intellectual domination of the West. From the 1880s onwards, the southern sea (nan’yō) was thus systematically exploited for Japanese military and civil economic needs. Historians like Murakami helped to frame the imagined geography of the nan’yō as a region for broader Japanese engagement (as described for the Sinosphere by David Ambaras in terms of spatiality, social construction of space, and contesting and promoting of borders and boundaries).Footnote 32 Murakami did so by making knowledge accessible about former colonial powers that Japanese leaders sought to replace.
Finally, some technical notes are due. Direct quotations from the source material are indicated with double quotation marks. For clarity, Japanese characters are provided for names and key terms at first mention or when necessary to avoid confusion. All titles of publications in East Asian languages will be provided in their original script, followed by a transcription to the Latin alphabet and a translation to English at first mention in the footnotes. The only exception to this format is Murakami’s publications that are listed with complete bilingual bibliographical data in Table 1.1 and are thus always abbreviated in the footnotes. For Chinese titles I use pinyin without the tone markers. All translations are mine except where otherwise stated.
List of Murakami’s publications.
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1896 | 往時の西洋書中にある日本人名地名の読方 Ōji no seiyōsho chū ni aru nihon jinmei chimei no yomikata [How to read Japanese names and place names in historical western sources] in 史学雑誌 (hereafter: Shigaku zasshi) 7/6, 67-71 |
| 1896 | 古書古文書に見ゆる欧語の出処 Kosho komonjo ni miyuru ōgo no shussho [The origin of European terms as seen in historical manuscripts] in Shigaku zasshi 7/6, 72-79 |
| 1897 | 台湾新港社文書 Taiwan shinkōsha monjo [The manuscripts of the Shinkan people of Taiwan] Shigaku zasshi 8/7, 64-73 |
| 1899 | The Diary of Richard Cocks. Cape Merchant in the English Factory in Japan, 1615-1622 with correspondence. Japanese edition with additional notes, 2 vols. (Tokyo) |
| 1900 | Letters written by the English residents in Japan, 1611-1623, with other documents on the English trading settlement in Japan in the seventeenth century (edited with Murakawa Kengo) (Tokyo) |
| 1901 | 大友・大村・有馬三家使節の感謝状 Ōtomo, Ōmura, Arima sanke shisetsu no kanshajō [A letter of gratitude from the embassies of Ōtomo, Ōmura and Arima] in Shigaku zasshi 12/4, 72-80 |
| 1902 | シマンカス文書 Shimankasu monjo [The Simancas sources] in Shigaku zasshi 13/9, 67-70 |
| 1903 | 大友・大村・有馬三侯の西伊遣使に関する新史料 Ōtomo, Ōmura, Arima sankō no seii kenshi ni kansuru shin shiryō in Shigaku zasshi 14/3-4 |
| 1903 | ロンドンの古文書 Murakami Noajirō, ‘Rondon no Komonjokan [Archival sources in London] in Shigaku zasshi 14/9, tsuiroku |
| 1903 | 往時の西洋交通が国語に及ぼしたる影響 Ōji no seiyō kōtsū ga kokugo ni oyoboshitaru eikyō [The influence of past exchange with the West on the Japanese language] in Shigaku zasshi 14/10, 1-33 |
| 1904 | 往時の平戸港 Ōji no Hiradokō [The port of Hirado in the past] in 歴史と地理 (hereafter; Rekishi to chiri) 6/1-2 |
| 1904 | 外交史料採訪録 一ー六 Gaikō shiryō saihō roku 1-6 [Research records about diplomatic sources 1-6] in Rekishi to chiri 6/10-12 |
| 1905 | 外交史料採訪録七 Gaikō shiryō saihō roku 7 [Research records about diplomatic sources 7] in Rekishi to chiri 7/1 |
| 1906 | 外交史料採訪録八 Gaikō shiryō saihō roku 8 [Research records about diplomatic sources 8] in Rekishi to chiri 8/12 |
| 1906 | The influence of the early Intercourse with Europe on the Japanese Language (Tokyo: Sanshūsha)* |
| 1908 | 伴天連の話 Bateren no hanashi [The missionaries’s story] in 東亜之光 (Tōa no hikari) 3/7 |
| 1911 | 異国日記抄校註 Ikoku Nikki Shō kōchū [Extracts from the Diary of Foreign Countries and Collection of the Correspondence with Foreign Lands, with notes and supplements] (Tokyo: Sanshūsha) |
| 1911 | 信長と耶蘇教 Nobunaga to yasokyō [Nobunaga and Christianity) in Ogawa Taichirō and Murata Kyūkō, eds., 織田信長 Oda Nobunaga (Tokyo: Ryūbunkan) |
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1914 | 安土桃山時代の基督教 Azuchi momoyama jidai no kirisutokyō [Christianity during the Azuchi Momyama period] in Nihon rekishi chiri gakkai ed., 安土桃山時代論 Azuchi momoyama jidairon (Tokyo: Jinyūsha) |
| 1914 | 日蘭三百年の親交 Nichiran 300nen no shinkō [Three hundred years of friendly relations between Japan and Holland] in 日蘭協会 ed. (hereafter: Nichiran kyōkai ), 日本と和蘭 Nihon to Oranda |
| 1915 | 日蘭三百年の親交 (訂正再版) Nichiran 300nen no shinkō teisei saihan [Three hundred years of friendly relations between Japan and Holland, corrected republication] (Tokyo: Fuzanbō)* |
| 1916 | 三百年前の日米関係 Sanbyaku nen mae no nichibei kankei [Japanese-American relations three hundred years ago] in 明治聖徳記念学会紀要 (Meiji seitoku kinengakkai) 6 |
| 1917 | 貿易史上の平戸 Bōekishijō no Hirado [The Commercial History of Hirado] (Tokyo: Nihon gakujutsu fukyūkan)* |
| 1917 | Japan’s Early Attempts to Establish Commercial Relations with Mexico in. H. Morse Stephens and Herbert E. Bolton. ed., The pacific ocean in history; papers and addresses presented at the Panama-Pacific historical congress (New York: The Macmillan Company) |
| 1922 | 300年前前の日英両国の関係 Sanbyaku nen mae no nichiei ryōkoku no kankei [The relations between Japan and England three hundred years ago] in Osaka Asahi shinbun |
| 1922 | 我国に於ける西洋語学の研究 Waga kuni ni okeru seiyō gogaku no kenkyū [Research about the study of western languages in Japan] in 教授在職二十五年記念文集 Kyōju zaishoku nijugo shūnen kinen bunshū |
| 1923 | Ranald MacDonald: The Narrative of His Early Life on the Columbia under the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Regime; of His Experiences in the Pacific Whale Fishery; and of His Great Adventure to Japan; with a Sketch of His Later Life on the Western Frontier, 1824-1894 , edited together with Lewis Williams (Washington: Spokane) |
| 1924 | シーボルト先生渡来の目的と日本に於ける交友 Shiiboruto sensei torai no mokuteki to nihon ni okeru kōyū [The aim of Dr. Siebold’s visit and his friendship in Japan] in シーボルト先生渡来百年記念論文集 Shiiboruto sensei torai hyakunen kinen ronbunshū |
| 1925 | 呂宋の入貢を促したる秀吉の書簡について Ruson no nyūkō wo unagashitaru Hideyoshi no shokan ni tsuite [About a letter in which Hideyoshi demands tribute from Luzon]’, Shigaku zasshi 36/5 |
| 1925 | モンタヌスの日本誌を読む: 和田博士訳書読後の感 Montanusu no nihonshi wo yomu. Wada hakase yakusho dokugo no kan [Reading Montanus’s Memories of Japan (= Atlas Japannensis) Impressions after reading the translation by Dr. Wada] in 東京日日新聞 (Tokyo nichinichi shinbun) undated |
| 1925 | 新村出博士著「南蛮広記」Shinmura Izuru hakasecho ’Nanban kōki’ [Dr. Shinmura Izuru’s ’Nanban kōki’) in 時事新報 (Jiji shinpō) undated |
| 1926 | 南蛮貿易と切支丹宗門 Nanban bōeki to kirishitan shūmon [Nanban trade and Christianity] in 新小説 (Shinshōsetsu) 31/7 |
| 1926 | 耶蘇会年報第一巻 Yasokai nenpō [The Annual Letters of the Jesuits] (Nagasaki: Nagasaki shiyakushokan) |
| 1926 | 日本耶蘇会刊行書物解題 Nihon yasokai kankō shomotsu kaidai [Introduction to the books from the Jesuit Mission Press in Japan] in 反響 (Hankyō) 1/4 added to the reprint of Satow, The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, 1591-1610. |
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1926 | 竜江院のカテキ様 Ryūkōin no kateki sama [The statue of Erasmus at the Ryūkō temple] in Shigaku zasshi 37/7 |
| 1926 | 竜江院の貨狄様に就いて Ryūkōin no kateki sama ni tsuite [About the statue of Erasmus at the Ryūkō temple] 考古学雑誌 (Kōkogaku zasshi) 16/7 |
| 1926 | 大日本貿易史上に特筆大書すべき上総国岩和田港 ’Nihon bōekishi jō ni tokuhitsu taisho subeki Kazusa no kuni Iwadakō’ [The port of Iwada in Kazawa as particularly noteworthy in the great history of Japanese trade)’ in 日西交通発祥記念碑建立趣意書 Nissei kōtsū hasshō kinenhi konryū shuisho |
| 1927 | 耶蘇会士日本通信京畿編下巻 Yaso kaishi nihon tsūshin keikihen gekan [Jesuit correspondence from Japan] (stand-alone source translation) vol. 1 (Tokyo: Sunnansha) |
| 1927 | 再び竜江院の貨狄様に就いて Futatabi Ryūkōin no kateki sama ni tsuite |Yet again about the statue of Erasmus at the Ryūkō temple] in Shigaku zasshi 38/9, 93-96 |
| 1927 | 再び竜江院の貨狄様に就いて Futatabi Ryūkōin no kateki sama ni tsuite [Yet again about the statue of Erasmus at the Ryūkō temple] in Kōkogaku zasshi 17/10 |
| 1927 | Education in Japan,’ in First Pan Pacific Conference on Education, Rehabilitation, Reclamation and Recreation: called by the President of the United States of America in conformity with a joint resolution of the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States and held under the auspices of the Department of the Interior at Honolulu, Hawaii, April 11 to 16, 1927: report of the proceedings, 33-34. |
| 1928 | 耶蘇会士日本通信京畿編下巻 Yaso kaishi nihon tsūshin keikihen gekan [Japanese correspondence of the Jesuits] (stand-alone source translation), vol. 2 (Tokyo: Sunnansha) |
| 1929 | ドン・ロドリゴ日本見聞録 ビスカイノ金銀島探検報告 Don Rodorigo nihon kenbunroku; Visukaino kingintō tanken hōkoku [Don Rodrigo’s Relación del Japón, Vizcaíno’s reports from the expeditions to the gold and silver isles] (Tokyo: Sunnansha) (stand-alone source translation) (Tokyo: Sunnansha) |
| 1929 | 寛永鎖国前に於る日本人の南洋発展 Kan’ei sakoku mae ni okeru nihonjin no nan’yō hatten [The progress of the Japanese in Southeast Asia prior to the closing of the country in the Kan’ei era] in 台湾日日新報 Taiwan nichinichi shinpō, June |
| 1929 | 異国往復書翰集・ 増訂異國日記抄 Ikoku Ōfuku shokanshū, zōtei ikoku nikki shō (Collection of the correspondence with foreign countries and The Diary of Foreign Countries with Annotations) (Tokyo: Sunnansha) |
| 1930 | ゼーランヂャ城築史話 Zeeranja chikujō shiwa [Historical account of Fort Zeelandia] in 台湾文化史説 Taiwan bunka shisetsu [The history of Taiwanese culture] (hereafter:Taiwan bunka shisetsu) |
| 1930 | 蘭人の蕃社教化 Ranjin no bansha kyōka [Dutch education of the indigenous people] in Taiwan bunka shisetsu |
| 1930 | 台湾蕃語文書 Taiwan bango monjo [Indigenous Taiwanese manuscripts] in Taiwan bunka shisetsu |
| 1930 | 台湾文化三百年記念会に就いて Taiwan bunka sanbyakunen kinenkai ni tsuite [Notes on the three hundredth anniversary of Taiwanese culture] in 台湾時報 (herafter: Taiwan jihō) 132 |
| 1930 | The Bilingual Formosan Manuscripts (Taipei) |
| 1931 | 台湾蕃語文書の研究 Taiwan bango monjo no kenkyū [Research about Taiwanese indigenous manuscripts] in Taiwan kyōiku 343 |
| 1931 | ‘Jilong de hongmao cheng zhi 基隆的紅毛城址 [The Site of the Dutch Castle at Keelung],’ tr. Hsu Hsien-yao 許賢瑤, Taipei Historical Documents Committee 117 (1996 [1931]), 127–38. |
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1931 | 基隆の紅毛城址 Kiirun no kōmō jōshi [The ruins of the Dutch castle in Keelung] in Taiwan jihō 144 |
| 1932 | 蘭人台湾占拠の目的 Ranjin Taiwan senkyo no mokuteki [The aim of the Dutch occupation of Taiwan] in 全国中等学校地理歴史科教員第九回協議会及台湾南支旅行報告 Zenkoku chūtō gakkō chiri rekishika kyōin dai kyūkai kyōgikai oyobi taiwan nanshi ryokō hōkoku |
| 1933 | 澎湖島に於けるオランダ人 Hōkotō ni okeru orandajin [The Dutch on Penghu Island/Pescadores] in Taiwan jihō 158 |
| 1933 | 台湾屈指の史跡「基隆の今昔」について Taiwan kusshi no shiseki "Kiirun no konjaku" ni tsuite [Significant historical sites of Taiwan, about the past and present of Jilong] in 台湾日日新報 (hereafter: Taiwan nichinichi shinbun), 1933/07/07 |
| 1933 | ジャガタラの長崎人 Jakatara no Nagasakijin [People from Nagasaki in Jakarta] in 長崎談叢第十三輯 Nagasaki dansō 13 |
| 1933 | Sinkan Manuscripts 新港文書, Memoirs of the Faculty of Literature and Politics (Taipei: Taihoku Imperial University), Vol. 2, No. 1 |
| 1934 | 総督府博物館の女人木像に就いて Sōtokufu hakubutsukan no nyonin mokuzō ni tsuite [About the wooden female stature in the Museum of the Government General] in 科学の台湾 (Kagaku no Taiwan) 2/1 |
| 1934 | ジャカタラの日本人 Jakatara no nihonjin [The Japanese of Jakarta] in 台北帝国大学史学科研究年報 (herafter: Taihoku teikoku daigaku shigakuka kenkyū nenpō) 1 |
| 1934 | オランダ史料に現はれたる山田長政 Oranda shiryō ni arawareru Yamada Nagamasa [Yamada Nagasaki appearing in Dutch sources] 台北帝国大学記念講演集第三輯 Taihoku teikoku daigaku kinen kōenshū 3 |
| 1934 | イスパニアの台湾占拠 Isupania no Taiwan senkyo [Spain’s occupation of Taiwan] 科学の台湾 (Kagaku no Taiwan) 2/5-6 |
| 1935 | 長崎市史 Nagasaki shishi [Urban history of Nagasaki] in 通交貿易編西洋諸国部 Tsūkō bōeki hen seiyō shokokubu [Foreign trade volume, western countries] (Nagasaki: Nagasaki shiyakusho) |
| 1935 | 吉利支丹宗門の興廢 Kirishitan shūmon no kōhai [The rise and fall of Christianity] in 国史研究会篇「日本歴史」 Nihon Rekishi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten) |
| 1935 | 南洋の日本町 Nan’yō no nihonmachi [Japanese towns in Southeast Asia] in 歴史教育 (herafter: Rekishi kyōiku) 10/2 |
| 1935 | ジャカタラの日本人補遺 Jakatara ni nihonjin hoi [Supplement to The Japanese of Jakarta] in Taihoku teikoku daigaku shigakuka kenkyū nenpō 2 |
| 1935 | 鄭氏以前の台湾 Teishi izen no Taiwan [Taiwan before the Zheng] 東洋 (hereafter: Tōyō), special editon on Taiwan |
| 1936 | 耶蘇会士日本通信 豊後篇上巻 Yaso kaishi nihon tsūshin Bungo hen jōkan [Jesuit Letters from Japan. Bungo edition 1] (Tokyo: Teikoku kyōikukai shuppanbu) |
| 1936 | 近代文化と大友宗麟 Kindai bunka to Ōtomo Sōrin [Early modern culture and Ōtomo Sōrin] in 大分教育 (Oita kyōiku) 608 |
| 1936 | 大友宗麟と耶蘇会の社会事業 Ōtomo Sōrin to yaso kaishi no shakai jigyō [Otomo Sōrin and the Jesuit charity work] in 国史教育 (Kokushi kyōiku) 2/4 |
| 1936 | 耶蘇会士日本通信豊後篇下巻 Yaso kaishi nihon tsūshin Bungo hen gekan [Jesuit Letters from Japan. Bungo edition 2] (Tokyo: Teikoku kyōikukai shuppanbu) |
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1936 | 海外の日本史料 Kaigai no nihon shiryō [Foreign sources on Japan] in Rekishi kyōiku 11/7 |
| 1937 | 抄訳バタビア城日誌上巻 Shōyaku Batabiajō nisshi, jōkan [Abbriviated translation of the Diary of Batavia Castle, vol. 1] (Tokyo: Nichiran kōtsū shiryō kenkyūkai) |
| 1937 | 我が南洋発展の今昔 Waga nan’yō hatten no konjaku [The past and present of our expansion in Southeast Asia] in 文明協会ニューズ (Bunmei kyōkai nyūzu) 126 |
| 1937 | 抄訳バタビア城日誌中巻 Shōyaku Batabiajō nisshi, chūkan [Abbreviated translation of the Diary of Batavia Castle, vol. 2] (Tokyo: Nichiran kōtsū shiryō kenkyūkai) |
| 1938 | 出島蘭館日誌 Dejima rankan nisshi [Daily records of the Dutch factory on Deshima], 3 vols (Tokyo: Bunmei kyōkai hakkō) |
| 1939 | 昔の澳門 Mukashi no Macao [Macao in the past] in 東洋 Tōyō 42/1 |
| 1939 | ポルトガル交通が我国に及ぼしたる影響 Porutogaru kōtsū ga waga kuni ni oyoboshitaru eikyō [The influence of communication with Portugal on our country] in東西交渉史論 Tōzai kōshō shiron, jōkan, vol. 1. |
| 1939 | ジャカタラの日本町 Jakatara no nihonmachi [The Japanese town in Jakarta] in 国史回顧会紀要 (Kokushi kaikokai kiyō) 39 |
| 1939 | 呂宋大守・ロドリゴと日比、日墨関係 Ruson taishu Don Rodorigo to nippi, nichiboku kankei [The relations between Japan and the Philippines and Japan and Mexico during the reign of Luzon Governor Don Rodrigo] in 南洋 Nan’yō 25/6 |
| 1939 | 耶蘇会の日本年報 Yasokai no nihon nenpō [Jesuit annual reports from Japan] in カトリック研究 Katorikku kenkyū published as monograph in 1943 |
| 1939 | 蘭船エラスムス Ransen Erasumusu [The Dutch vessel Erasmus] in 日蘭協会会報 Nichiran kyōkai kaihō 1 |
| 1939 | The Japanese at Batavia in the 17th Century in Monumenta Nipponica 2/2 |
| 1940 | 伊東マンショ Itō Mansho [Itō Mancio] in 冨山房国史辞典 Fuzanbō kokushi jiten vol. 1 |
| 1940 | セスタ講とサンタマリヤの御組とについて Sesutakō to Santa Maria no onkumi to ni tsuite [About the religious community of Sexta and Santa Maria ] in キリシタン文化研究第二回例会講演速記録 Kirishitan bunka kenkyūjo dai ni kai reikai kōen sokkiroku |
| 1940 | 竜光院の貨狄像 Ryūkōin no katekizō [The statue of Erasmus in Ryūkōin temple] in 伝説 (Densetsu) 1/7 |
| 1940 | 蘭商館出島移転の前後 Ranshōkan dejima iten no zengo [Before and after the translocation of the Dutch factory to Deshima] in Nichiran kyōkai kaihō 2 |
| 1940 | 切支丹屋敷 Kirishitan yashiki [Christian residences] in カトリック大辞典 (herafter: Katorikku daijiten) 1 |
| 1940 | 教皇庁に派遣された日本使節 Kyōkōchō ni haken sareta nihon shisetsu [The delegation sent to the papal palace] in Katorikku daijiten 1 |
| 1940 | 伊達政宗の南欧遣使 Date Masamune no nan’ō kenshi [Date Masamune’s embassy to southern Europe] Katorikku daijiten 1 |
| 1940 | 切支丹学校 Kirishitan gakkō [Christian schools] in Katorikku daijiten 1 |
| 1940 | イエズス会の日本通信 Iezusukai no nihon tsūshin [Jesuit letters from Japan] in Katorikku daijiten 1 |
| 1940 | 対外交易の史的回顧 Taigai kōeki no shiteki kaikō [Historical reflections on the Overseas trade] published as 啓明会第百回講演集 (100th lecture collection of the Keimei teacher’s association)* |
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1940 | 海外の日本史料 Kaigai no nihon shiryō [Japanese sources abroad] in Tokyo Asahi shinbun 1940/12/21 |
| 1940 | Portugal e o Japão (Tokyo: Kokusai bunka shinkōkai)* |
| 1941 | 和蘭人の伝へた山田長政の事蹟 Orandajin no tsutaeta Yamada Nagamasa no jiseki [Evidence about Yamada Nagamasa provided by the Dutch] in Nichiran kyōkai kaihō 3 |
| 1941 | 日本南洋移民史の一齣 Nihon nan’yō imin no hitokoma [A Site of Japanese emigration to Southeast Asia) in 大南洋 (Tai nan’yō) ed. Taiheiyō kyōkai |
| 1941 | ドン・ロドリゴ日本見聞録 ; ビスカイノ金銀島探検報告 Don Rodorigo nihon kenbunroku; Visukaino kingintō tanken hōkoku (Tokyo: Okugawa shoten) |
| 1941 | 日本科学史の研究史料について Nihon kagakushi no kenkyū shiryō ni tsuite [About research sources in Japanese history of science] in 科学史研究 (Kagakushi kenkyū) 1 |
| 1942 | 蘭領印度史エイクマン・スターペル原書 Ranryō indoshi eikuman, staaperu gensho [The manuscript of the history of the Dutch Indies by Eijkman and Stapel], translation together with Hara Tetsurou 原徹郎 (Tokyo: Tōa kenkyūsho) |
| 1942 | 吉利支丹伝道 Kirishitan dendō [The Christian mission] in Fuzanbō kokushi jiten 3 |
| 1942 | 切支丹屋敷 Kirishitan yashiki [Christian residences] in Fuzanbō kokushi jiten 3 |
| 1942 | 耶蘇会の日本年報 Yasokai no nihon nenpō [Jesuits’ annual reports from Japan] in Katorikku kenkyū 2 / 1-5 |
| 1942 | イタリヤの古文書館を訪ねてItaria no komonjokan wo tazunete [Visiting the Italian Archives] in 日伊文化研究 (Nichii bunka kenkyū) 5 |
| 1942 | 日本と葡萄牙 Nihon to porutogaru (Japan and Portugal) (Tokyo: Nippo kyōkai) |
| 1942 | 六昆王山田長政 Rokkonō Yamada Nagamasa (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha)* |
| 1942 | Portugal e o Japão (Tokyo: Nippo kyōkai) |
| 1942 | Kirishitan kenkyū no kaikō キリシタン研究の 回顧 [Reflections on Research on Christianity] キリシタン研究 (Kirishitan kenkyū) vol. 1 |
| 1942 | 南蛮医学の伝来について Nanban igaku no denrai ni tsuite [The arrival of European medical science] in 日本医学史雑誌 (Nihon Igakushi zasshi) 1306 |
| 1942 | An Old Church Calender in Japanese in Monumenta Nipponica 5/1 |
| 1943 | 耶蘇会の日本年報第 一輯 Yasokai no nihon nenpō, vol. 1 [Jesuit annual reports from Japan] (Tokyo: Takubundō) |
| 1943 | オランダの東印度征略史 Oranda no higashi indo seiryakushi [A history of conquest of the Dutch East Indies] in 西南太平洋 (Seinan taiheiyō) ed. Mainichi Shimbunsha |
| 1943 | エボラの大司教と金屏風 Ebora daishikyō to kinbyōbu [The golden folding screen of the archbishop of Evora] in 日葡交通論叢 (Nippo kōtsu ronsō) ed. Nippo kyōkai |
| 1943 | 西欧諸国東洋侵略の起源 Seiōshokoku tōyō shinryaku no kigen [The beginning of European conquest in the East] in 南方文化講座 (Nanpō bunka kōza) (Tokyo: Sanseidō) |
| 1943 | 日比交渉の史的考察 Nippi kōshō no shiteki kōsatsu [Historical explorations about Japanese-Philippine negotiations] in 国際文化 (Kokusai bunka) 28 |
| 1943 | ジャカタラ文 Jakatara fumi [Letters from Jakarta] in Fuzanbō kokushi jiten 4 |
| Year | Title |
|---|---|
| 1943 | The Jesuit Seminary of Azuchi in Monumenta Nipponica 6/1,2 |
| 1944 | 耶蘇会の日本年報 Yasokai no nihon nenpō [Jesuit annual reports from Japan] vol. 2 (Tokyo: Takubundō 拓文堂) |
| 1944 | ドミニカの説教について Dominika no sekkyō [The Dominicans’ sermon] in Kirishitan kenkyū 2 |
| 1945 | 日本と比律賓 Nihon to firipin (Japan and the Philippines) (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha)* |
| 1948 | ラウレス博士の新著高山右近の生涯 Rauresu hakase no shincho Takayama Ukon no shōgai [The life of Takayama Ukon by Dr. Laures] in 望楼 (Bōrō) 3/3 |
| 1949 | アンジロウの書翰 Anjirou no shokan (honyaku) [Anjiro’s letter (translation) = first Japanese Christian] (Tokyo: Shinkeisha) |
| 1950 | 教皇シスト五世より高山右近宛の書簡 Kyōkō Shisuto gosei yori Takayama Ukon ate no shokan [A Letter by Pope Sixtus V. to Takayama Ukon] in Shigaku zasshi 59/5, 50-51 |
| 1955 | 海外の日本史料研究の促進を望む Kaigai no nihon shiryō kenkyū no sokushin wo nozomu [Hoping for progress in the research in foreign sources about Japan] in 西洋史通信 (Seiyōshi tsūshin) 2 |
| 1956 | 長崎オランダ商館の日記第 一輯 Nagasaki oranda shōkan no nikki, dai isshū [The diaryof the Dutch factory in Nagasaki, vol. 1) (Tokyo: Iwanami) |
| 1957 | 長崎オランダ商館の日記 第二輯 Nagasaki oranda shōkan no nikki, dai nisshū [The diary of the Dutch factory in Nagasaki, vol. 2) (Tokyo: Iwanami) |
| 1958 | 長崎オランダ商館の日記第 三輯 Nagasaki oranda shōkan no nikki, dai sanshū [The diaryof the Dutch factory in Nagasaki, vol. 3) (Tokyo: Iwanami) |
| 1966 | Republication of The Jesuit Correspondence of Japan 1-2, Don Rodorigo nihon kenbunroku; Visukaino kingintō tanken hōkoku, and Ikoku Ōfuku Shokan, zōtei ikoku nikki shō in the Ikoku sōsho series 異国叢書再刊 (Tokyo: Yūshōdō) |
| 1967 | 外交史料採訪録 Gaikō shiryō saihō roku [A record on the collection of foreign relations manuscripts] in Kirishitan Kenkyū 12 (1967): 45–101. |
This list is largely based on the biography provided in Kirishitan Bunka Kenkyūkai Kaihō キリシタン文化研究会会報 9, no. 4 (1967): 44–8. It does not include contributions to extensive source collections such as the Dai nihon shiryō or Taiwan zongdufu gongwen lei zuan 臺灣總督府公文類纂. See https://tais.ith.sinica.edu.tw.
Why Murakami Naojirō?
Murakami Naojirō has shaped the field of early modern Japanese foreign relations like no one before or after him. His multiple foreign-language skills would become his main asset and support his extensive publishing efforts. Largely focusing on European Japanese contacts, Murakami’s lifelong gathering of records of foreign relations, most of them neither available in Japan nor written in Japanese, made archival material in multiple languages accessible to scholars and students, as well as to the political elite and the public.Footnote 33 Editions and books in his name added to his lasting reputation as an expert who covered the entire history of early modern Japanese foreign relations, while his compilations of translated historical sources provided research possibilities and offered interpretations to future generations.
Murakami Naojirō was a historian of the second generation of professionally trained Japanese academic historians.Footnote 34 He had left his samurai family home in Kyushu at a young age to study in Kyoto and Tokyo. In 1892 he was admitted to Tokyo Imperial University (hereafter University of Tokyo or Tōdai), where he was educated in literature and letters (bungaku).Footnote 35 In the mid-Meiji-period atmosphere of progress and change, he developed a keen interest in the history of Japanese exchange processes with Europeans. Soon after his graduation, he became involved in large-scale government-sponsored historiographical projects. In 1896, he was sent on a source-gathering mission to Taiwan at a time when the island had just been occupied by the victorious Meiji Empire the previous year. Three years later, he began a three-year-long systematic search for sources in libraries and archives in Europe.
The results of Murakami’s extensive archival research overseas laid the foundation for the Department for Foreign Manuscripts Related to Japan (now Overseas Materials Section) at the Historiographical Institute (Shiryō hensanjo) of the University of Tokyo.Footnote 36 The preservation of primary sources as close as possible to their original form and the constant act of translating have been the key tasks of the department’s staff ever since the establishment of the institute.Footnote 37 During the first decade of the twentieth century, Murakami spent several years as historiographical officer at the Historiographical Institute. In his day and age, newly discovered material was converted into research sources. Murakami’s source translations from Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Dutch, English, and classical Chinese to Japanese left a lasting terminological imprint on the way seventeenth-century Japanese encounters with Europe and Southeast Asia have been narrated and retranslated. Given that straightforward European biases, such as Murakami’s repeated claim that Spain and Portugal introduced civilization to the East, have been blissfully ignored by later generations, it remains crucial to question how linguistic translation and related processes played out in the aftermath of his data collection and to critically examine knowledge production from the perspective of politically motivated, imperial agendas.Footnote 38
Murakami studied and worked in an environment where sources concerning the state, including foreign and diplomatic history, were prioritized.Footnote 39 The methods of verifiable empiricism increased the historian’s authority. His understanding of the past was informed by the necessity of repositioning Japan with the help of the Western teleological history-writing that had replaced the cyclical model of Chinese dynastic chronicles that were prevalent in Japan until the mid-nineteenth history.Footnote 40 Japanese historians invented their own ‘regimes of historicity,’ to paraphrase François Hartog, whose analysis primarily focuses on teleological narratives that emphasize progress and linear development and the past’s connection to the present and future.Footnote 41 Reluctant to accept European universal history as a model for the history of the Japanese state and society, Japanese historians created a unique methodology that was nonetheless profoundly shaped by the spirit of historicism. Historicism refers to the scientific study of historical sources and is usually associated with nineteenth-century German historians such as Leopold von Ranke and his disciples. In addition to holding a strong belief that a thorough study of archival sources would succeed in establishing historical facts, representatives of historicism defined the past in terms of progress. Yet, it is important to note that academic history in Japan was also influenced by Chinese, French, British, and American traditions.Footnote 42 Murakami followed traditional text criticism in his source compilations through the empirical method and the principles of kōshōgaku (考証学, evidentiary learning, based on a neo-Confucian model) applied to the study of ancient texts in classical Chinese. What the two approaches have in common is their exclusive focus on the written word.Footnote 43 The positivist nature of Murakami’s work contributed to his image as an objective scholar whose selective strategies and heavy European bias were never openly discussed.Footnote 44
Murakami’s professional career developed toward the end of the Meiji period when history was becoming increasingly politicized in Japan’s rise as an empire. When leaving the dark and dusty stacks of Tōdai’s Historiographical Institute in 1908 for a position as professor and director of the Tokyo Foreign Language Academy (today known as Tokyo Gaidai), Murakami turned from a historian translating sources about past diplomatic negotiation processes into a public figure negotiating Japan’s imperial presence in Asia. Ever after, Murakami deliberately highlighted his connections to the world outside Japan and his profound knowledge about it to frame both his career and identity. Later posts in university leadership, as dean at the newly founded Imperial University in Taipei (Taihoku in Japanese) (1929–35) and as the fourth president of Tokyo’s Sophia University, which he undertook in his eighties (1946–53), added to his international profile. His versatile involvement in historiographical, archival, and curricular tasks within both Historical Studies and foreign-language education and his conversion to Catholicism evoke an image of a complex person with multiple ties to the government and imperial institutions.
An appropriate designation that both addresses Murakami’s empirical achievements for the history of foreign relations and his involvement in diplomatic circles, while at the same time neatly framing his pragmatic character, is ‘scholar diplomat.’Footnote 45 During large parts of his career, Murakami worked across the three pillars of diplomacy – negotiation, representation, and intelligence gathering – and served his country both at home and abroad. In the late 1890s, the Japanese Imperial Regime assigned him to collect material to write early modern Japan into the history of international relations. Government institutions such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Taiwan Government-General enlisted him in archival diplomacy and commissioned and financed clearly defined knowledge-gathering far into the 1930s.
One aspect that needs to be addressed in the process of offering new, nuanced insights into the epistemes’ structuring power and knowledge about past relations is Murakami’s closeness to imperial institutions involved in Japan’s colonial expansion in Asia. It is impossible to describe his role in a few sentences. As a prolific writer and representative of elite educational institutions, Murakami does not fit into any of the prominent groups involved in the overseas expansion of the Japanese Empire. He was neither among the politicians, journalists, and scientists who openly promoted military and economic expansion and intellectual leadership in Asia, nor did he belong to the larger, often voiceless group of Japanese emigrants who built, expanded, and maintained the empire.Footnote 46 As a translator and educator, he entertained close ties to government offices including the Foreign Ministry and the Taiwanese Governor-General. Intentionality aside, the following chapters will provide evidence to say that he was an imperialist. He benefited from his state-assigned positions, was on the state’s pay roll, collaborated with institutions complicit in imperial expansion, and created narratives that at the very least could be appropriated by the expansionist Japanese Empire. Murakami’s biography shows how boundaries between intellectual curiosity and active involvement in the construction of history are blurred. His translations of Western European blueprints contributed to the way we see Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a strong Asian nation that owes its glory to great men and merchants. His publications left no doubt about which country was historically legitimized to dominate the southern seas beyond Japan. Essential to this epistemological process is the implicit link between political views of expansion and the scholarly conceptualizations of nan’yō (here Southeast Asia and the Pacific) and gaikō (here diplomatic relations).Footnote 47
When assessing Murakami’s relationship with the state, it is important to remember that his freedom of thought was constrained by concrete work tasks that he received from superiors at the Historiographical Institute and government institutions. There can be no doubt, however, that he had agency in shaping narratives through both thematic and terminological choices as well as his positioning of archival material. Alessandro Stanziani’s study of the role of archives in modern state-building and his contention that many pre–Second World War national histories were written to justify the expansionist reality of empire are also crucially relevant for the Japanese Empire.Footnote 48 Taking history-making from the late Meiji period to the early post–Second World War era as its point of departure, Negotiating Imperialism aims to challenge some of the biases and concepts that still dominate global histories of early modern diplomacy.Footnote 49
Beyond a Scholar’s Biography: Translation and the Archive
This book is neither a conventional biography of a Japanese historian nor a survey of his impressive oeuvre that comprised over twenty volumes of source editions, six research monographs, and close to one hundred articles and book chapters. Although such a study of Murakami’s life would be valuable for filling knowledge gaps and shedding light on underrepresented aspects of Japanese historiography, I feared that my attempt would easily be misread, either as hagiography or undue criticism. As someone who first engaged with Murakami in Osaka as a history undergraduate in 2006, I am biased. Murakami’s critical edition of the Ikoku nikki shō kōchū (Extracts from the diary of foreign countries and collection of the correspondence with foreign lands, with notes and supplements) was my initial contact with Japanese primary sources. Before long, owing to my research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japanese trade and diplomacy in Southeast Asia, Murakami’s compilations and translations evolved into my personal canon. At the same time, I became increasingly puzzled by the challenge to identify which parts of his editions were translations and which were not. Having developed a keen interest in the question of how translations generate new knowledge, I decided to opt for an entangled biography. I believe that my identity and training – a non-Japanese, female historian specializing in early modern Asian and diplomatic relations with a profound engagement with Murakami and the institutions he helped build up – qualify me to turn this endeavor into a survey of coproduced knowledge, with a specific focus on the historian as translator.Footnote 50
I have chosen the method of entangled biography for my analysis of multifaceted connections among scholars, sources, and narratives of foreign relations and overseas expansion.Footnote 51 While conventional biographies of scholars portray the life stages and professional achievements of one scholar, this entangled biography provides a more inclusive picture of whom Murakami interacted with and how his multiple roles shaped his thinking. Murakami is the glue of the manuscript but not of the narrative. Murakami may be the protagonist, but he is not the only one. Entangled throughout his biography – in multiple ways – are people of a variety of backgrounds, including scholars he actually met as well as the historical heroes and villains of his books, and the authors of the archival sources he engaged with.Footnote 52 The latter point resonates with the awareness – informed by Dominick LaCapra’s concept of ‘transference’ – that historians “adopt patterns and ideas from the people [of the past] they are writing about.”Footnote 53 Exploring knowledge over space and time, the book contextualizes a large body of scholarly work within relevant discourses, trends, and environments and offers opportunities for novel understandings. However, as Murakami’s scholarship remains the center of attention, so does the risk of creating new biases. As the voices of Murakami and his peers will be amplified, the thoughts and actions of many silenced actors will inevitably be eclipsed. However, what I can avoid is an essentialization of Murakami as a Japanese scholar of a different time. I will do so by extending the focus upon two defining elements of his work: translation and the archive. Combining the agency of translations with archival positions forces me to work reflexively when interpreting the multilingual data. Both the politics of doing and publishing research and the social practices embodied by the researcher are dominant factors in knowledge production.Footnote 54 The proposed entangled biography approach is thus not just an appropriate method to highlight (dis)connections but also an effective way of reflecting on the sociolinguistic dynamics behind subject and object positions.
Translation has emerged as a vibrant field for historians of ideas. Over the past decade, global intellectual historians have addressed the need to pay closer attention to the specifics of translation in premodern knowledge transfer.Footnote 55 Scholars of Japanese history have examined the cross-linguistic complexities to which translators, interpreters, and intermediaries were exposed between the fifteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries.Footnote 56 The shared insights of scholars of both Japanese and intellectual history are relevant for a better understanding of the nexus between translations and narratives of later centuries. Translation processes not only went far beyond the literary ‘translatio’ of written texts but also changed dynamically over the centuries, decades, or even years. In the history of early modern foreign relations, translations are the product of a combination of factors including disparities between different scripts, previous translation processes, changes in linguistic conventions, and pressures from multiple audiences of different backgrounds to name but four. Yet, when Murakami translated a seventeenth-century letter originally written in Spanish (Castilian), which survived as part of moralistic travel writings in Italian, to Japanese, to name just one random example, he did not comment on any of these issues. He never mentioned that a certain term may have had different connotations or noted that its meaning may have changed, let alone considered the possibility that it may have been untranslatable.Footnote 57 Finding a quasi-equivalent was the accepted practice of twentieth-century Japanese scholars committed to contributing to an internationally comprehensive lexicon.Footnote 58 This book wants to achieve greater awareness of such multilayered complexities.
Archival moments constitute another important aspect of Murakami’s biography. The search for and unearthing of historical documents from archives and libraries around the world formed his entire career. He believed in the historian’s duty to invest in the process of recovering the past. The historical philosopher Herman Paul speaks of a time and place-specific meso level “characterized by [the historian’s] specific habits, virtues, skills and competencies” as an intermediate position between the scholar’s self-fashioning and the macro approach focusing on context.Footnote 59 Passionate commitment to often painstaking archival hunts could easily turn into an obsession as most historians would confirm. To be sure, I share Murakami’s excitement for working with archival manuscripts in their original form, a feeling I am reminded of every time I am referring to microfilms or digitized resources. The multisensual experience of working with physical archives that hold unpublished documents and rare books was a key part of my training as an early modern historian. My own archival moment is intrinsically linked to the smell and dust of the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo (Shiryō hensanjo), Murakami’s home institution in the early 1900s. Spending many quiet hours hiding among rare prints and shashinshū (hardback facsimiles of handwritten manuscripts) in library stacks, I had two essential insights: first, that all historians create their own archive; and second, that all historians make implicit comparisons.Footnote 60 As trivial as these insights may seem, they are valuable when trying to understand how historians use the past and provide a way to bridge the gap between different generations of historians and historical actors.
In my early attempts at decoding Japanese paleography at the Historiographical Institute as a PhD student, I noticed the different recording and archiving practices of East Asia as opposed to Europe, between cyclic dynastic genealogies, on the one hand, and linear teleological chronicles, on the other. My initial challenges in researching Japanese maritime trade in the sixteenth century, due to a lack of commensurable source material, miraculously solved themselves once I turned to the realm of diplomacy. Suddenly I found all those diplomatic letters, ceremonial manuals, and official reports that allowed sophisticated comparisons with material I had previously found in colonial archives in Europe. Or so I thought. It turned out that large parts of what appeared to be original Japanese primary sources were in fact translations of European accounts.
Murakami’s scholarship authorized the primacy of foreign relations, represented through primary sources, and underscored the agency of great men, rulers, intellectuals, and the commercial and maritime elite in significant world historical processes. For these purposes, he applied implicit comparisons, for instance, between the Japanese seagoing merchant Yamada Nagamasa and Christopher Columbus. These comparisons were a way of embellishing certain characteristics while remaining true to historical sources and the historian’s craft. Implicit comparisons are key to understanding how Murakami engaged with Western scholarship when interpreting his source material. I coined the term ‘implicit comparisons’ for his strategy of converging Japanese and Western premodern pasts to create the narrative that early modern Japan was on a par with expanding European empires. This historiographical dynamic of overemphasizing a small group of elite actors was part of the narrative strategy for telling the history of early modern Japanese foreign relations.Footnote 61
More recently, my take on the role of the archive in creating asymmetrical versions of the past has been stimulated by decolonial scholarship questioning the traditional archive.Footnote 62 With hindsight, I realize that the Japanese archive made sense to me because it used a familiar language and the historiographical referents I had been looking for. Japan’s official early modern encounters with the outside world were modeled on European empires’ experiences of maritime expansion, merchant capitalism, individual agency, and emerging sovereign foreign relations. In addition to providing implicit comparisons of narrative tropes, European ways of ‘doing history’ also served as a methodological blueprint: publication genres, editorial tools such as annotations, appendices, and the choice of terminology lent more authority to Japanese history as it followed the professional standards of its German, British, and Spanish role models. Printed editions of primary sources, either in their original wording and spelling with annotations, or as modern transcriptions, helped academic historians in document-based societies to establish new corpora of knowledge. These editions emerged as auxiliary tools to support the search for the true nature of historical events while often striving to be all-encompassing. In Japan, large volumes of classical Japanese and Chinese-language material were collected in the repositories of temples and the libraries of local elites. In addition, non-Sinic sources were translated or at least annotated in Japanese.
The story of hegemonic knowledge is old. The attention to the violent technology of document-based, state-, male-, and literate-centric history-writing of European and Japanese imperialisms is not entirely new either. What is novel is the question of how the historical profession as was practiced in Murakami’s era and is practiced today created hierarchies in how history ought to be studied. Although most of today’s historians are less focused on the state or males, they continue to practice writing of the past mainly by relying on written sources, and thereby neglect oral traditions and kinetic practices – both of which are more difficult to capture in the rapidly growing global digital archive. The critique of methodological nationalism must thus be extended to the choice of sources, archives, research frames, and the questions asked. Martin Dusinberre’s Mooring the Global Archive discusses the historians’ relationship with the archive and transparency and identifies archival traps that pose greater risk to historians active in the era of digitization and artificial intelligence.Footnote 63 This book will engage in particular the issue of historians’ fixation on the written word most directly in Chapter 6 and the Epilogue.
Writing between Times: Notes on Temporalities and Analytical Frames
In addition to archival considerations and a critical eye on translations, the topic of this book requires moving between different periods with an experimental take on temporality.Footnote 64 By this I neither mean to question the value of chronology, nor to suggest a confrontation between circular and linear time. Addressing the cultural and linguistic dimensions of early modern records of cross-cultural negotiations, I study different concepts of temporality in the translations of later centuries. Perceptions of temporality are directly linked to translation and have always framed how people make sense of the past. In the early twentieth century, Murakami, his colleagues, and his students provided the conceptual and empirical framework for understanding early modern Japanese foreign relations, including the role of Japanese towns (nihonmachi) in Southeast Asian port cities, and generated myriad studies on the European–Japanese encounter. In the Japanese historiography of foreign relations, the struggle with key historical terms is also one of accommodating temporal layers resulting from multidirectional and multilingual translation processes between the late sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries.Footnote 65 My job in the 2020s is to connect the dots between the historical stages, the archive, the classroom, and the memorial plaques at tourist sites.
Clarity and context are key for a smooth engagement with the storyline of the book, which constantly shifts between three periods. In the following chapters, I will indicate the shifts from one period to another whenever possible. Here, I will introduce the three periods to prepare the reader for a journey traversing different timeframes. The first period covers the six decades between roughly 1580 and 1640 and serves as the thematic context for historiographical publications on Japanese foreign exchange under Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the early Tokugawa shogunate.Footnote 66 This period is often referred to with ambiguous labels, including Japan’s ‘Christian century’ (studied under the label of kirishitan history in Japan)Footnote 67 or the ‘namban (“southern barbarian”) era,’ thereby expressing a view of an emblematic period of change and foreign influence.Footnote 68 In Japanese periodization, the time between 1570 and 1600 has sometimes been called the Momoyama period, while for the time after 1600, historians speak of the Edo or Tokugawa period, which has been described as the beginning of the ‘early modern’ period in Japan. The emblematic episodes and key historical actors that shape the tropes of the historical imagination and historiography of later centuries that I address in my study derive from this period.
Murakami’s active years as a historian, translator, and diplomatic agent, beginning in the mid-Meiji period of the late 1890s and continuing until the Shōwa years of the 1950s, constitute the second period. This period coincides with the time of the Japanese Empire, a heterogeneous historical period that covers the end of the Meiji-era emperor system, the Russo-Japanese War, and the liberal spirit of the Taishō democracy (1912–26) that brought about societal change, most prominently in the political system. It also covers the increasing aggressions of the jingoistic imperialism of the early Shōwa era (1926–89) that saw the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which culminated in the Asia-Pacific War with widespread operations by the Japanese military stretching from Thailand to Hawai’i (nan’yō), and finally the early postwar rebuilding phase. During the entire period, academic history contributed to the formation of nationalist and imperialist ideologies.Footnote 69 For my study, this period is the most prominent stage of the narration.
The third period relevant for the argument of this book encompasses the first two decades of the twenty-first century. From a purely historiographical vantage point, this can be described as the period in which the historical scholarship of Murakami’s generation was revisited, in the sense that it was consulted in a search for answers to questions raised by a new type of integrated global history-writing. I suggest the term ‘age of reflexive global history’ for the period, to denote when a nuanced take on connections and frictions developed alongside an increased output of innovative studies and a truly global dialogue about the content and form of history-writing among scholars engaging in this type of scholarship. Results are manifold yet prominently represented by global intellectual history inspired by gender studies and decolonizing approaches. For the history of foreign relations, pleas to nuance and democratize materialized in polyvocal, multi-archival, and plurilingual research projects and with an increasing focus on global diplomacy. Since the early 2000s, diplomatic history has become more inclusive. Diplomacy is no longer exclusively understood as official negotiation or formal exchange of envoys and letters. The highly symbolic ceremonial and ad hoc actions by nonestablished parties often inherent in asymmetrical foreign relations are now regarded as equally important aspects of global diplomacy.Footnote 70 This third period also covers the time of my active years as an academic, first as a student and later as a scholar of history and Japanese Studies. The trends described above left institutional and epistemic imprints on the way I do and write history. I explicitly include this period to stress how my own institutional entanglements had an impact on how I came to tell stories about global historical and historiographical connections.
In addition to crossing time periods and using the key concepts defined further above, I apply three different analytical frames in this book. The first one is that of entangled biography, which has already been introduced. It operates on the assumption that the personal connections among scholars as well as the transferential connections with historical actors are of ontological importance and engender ideas and interpretations. The links between scholars and historical actors are multidirectional and based on both physical and metaphysical encounters, creating connections among scholars, sources, and narratives that form the basis for an entangled biography.
The second concept is empirical imperialism. Closely related to what has been identified as ‘scholarly’ or ‘scientific colonialism,’Footnote 71 which emerged in Japan during the interwar period, empirical imperialism points to more subtle forms of knowledge creation. It moreover encompasses circulation practices that were supported by asymmetrical power relations in which imperial institutions conquered various forms of data and knowledge and controlled the dissemination and spread of information. Such practices have been interpreted in recent scholarship of the Japanese Empire as either mimicking other imperial powers or educational avant-gardism.Footnote 72 The spirit of empirical imperialism encouraged the creation of valuable knowledge and resulted in internationally acknowledged theoretical and intellectual contributions across the humanities; hence it has had a lasting impact on existing narratives. The legacy of empirical imperialism is closely intertwined with language and the question of how narratives operate in institutional environments.
The third analytical concept is implicit comparison. As noted above, historical-writing rarely happens without comparative thinking. Implicit comparisons are less outspoken than explicit comparisons that strive to explain cultural differences. Many of the early modern writers Murakami engaged with – the most famous example being Luis Frois – employed comparison as cognitive processes either to make sense of the complex and unfamiliar circumstances or to translate their observations and findings for distant, often European, readers.Footnote 73 Although Murakami’s comparative thinking was not as clearly articulated as Frois’s juxtapositions, it does not mean that his references to historical actors and events from European history were unintended. A mix of examples introduced in this book will demonstrate how implicit comparisons were one of Murakami’s key methodologies. Featuring in his work in multiple ways, including how material was chosen and how information was placed, implicit comparisons had a lasting effect on the sociology of knowledge.Footnote 74
Overview of Murakami’s Publication
Many of the manuscripts that Murakami collected and copied in Europe between 1899 and 1902 would be edited for the Dai nihon shiryō (Japanese historical documentsFootnote 75) at the Historiographical Institute. While these large-scale editions provided encyclopedic knowledge for Japanese audiences, Murakami’s English-language stand-alone editions made important inroads into Japanese Studies. In 1899, he contributed to an all-English edition of the diary of Richard Cocks, the English merchant resident in the Japanese port of Hirado during the 1610s and 1620s. In 1923, he coedited a volume on the memories of the US-American whaler Ranald Macdonald, who spent several years in late Tokugawa Japan after drifting onto the coast outside Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) in 1848 and was later sent to Nagasaki by Japanese officials, where he served as one of the first teachers of English. After 1940, Murakami’s contributions to the newly founded Monumenta Nipponica, the official journal of the Christian history study group at Sophia University in Tokyo, reached an ever-increasing number of students in Japanese Studies.
Overview of Chapters
This book is organized into five empirical chapters plus a prologue, a theoretical introduction, and an epilogue. Together these eight sections document how the history of early modern foreign and diplomatic relations is shaped by multiple and multistaged translations. The monograph encourages the rethinking of Asian connections beyond regional boundaries, national history-writing, and temporal labels. Chapter 2 lays out Murakami Naojirō’s curriculum vitae as a ‘translator historian’ and a ‘scholar diplomat.’ Largely chronologically organized, the chapter follows a thematic approach that emphasizes the entangled nature of his life and work. Introducing noteworthy episodes from his academic and personal life, it addresses the question of what implications his multiple agendas, tasks, and ambitions had for historical scholarship and for the legacy of the study of Japanese foreign relations. For this purpose, I assembled elements from Murakami’s scholarship, university administration records, newspaper articles, and the memories of colleagues and family members. While the absence of substantial auto-testimonies poses certain problems, the richness of the available sources helps to nuance the picture.
Chapter 3 scrutinizes the theme of formal diplomatic relations by reflecting on the untranslatability of the Japanese concept of gaikō, which left a firm imprint on general narratives despite its semiotic ambiguity. The chapter considers translation processes and linguistic aspects such as etymology. It demonstrates that the history of early modern Japan’s engagement with the outside world was shaped by a collaborative relationship between foreign politics, imperial repertoires, and education. This point is substantiated by a cross-reading of a wide variety of multi-archival and multilingual source materials ranging from sixteenth-century diplomatic letters, colonial reports, notes from the Ministry of Foreign Relations, and interwar imperial scholarship, to mass media articles and popular history books.
Chapter 4 approaches Murakami’s scholarship through entangled biographies in order to investigate the imperialist dynamics behind historical writing. The chapter focuses on the intertwined nature of history and diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century when historical research and publication practices were firmly established. Murakami’s habitus as scholar diplomat was influenced by a variety of people and institutions from different countries, time periods, and linguistic backgrounds, all connected through the (meta-)physical space of the traveling archive of foreign relations.
Chapters 5 and 6 explain how the silencing of Taiwan and Indigenous Taiwanese pasts was engineered and reflect on Murakami’s priorities and methodologies (molding through translation, reliance on European archival sources, overemphasis on the written archive, and a constant focus on expansion). Chapter 5 follows Murakami to Taiwan and traces the genealogy of the southern seas by looking at the establishment of the nan’yō history department at the Imperial University in Taipei. As its first professor, Murakami made significant contributions to the curriculum and the conceptual history of the subject. The outsider perspective that he incorporated into the nan’yō history narrative curriculum would eventually translate into the history of Southeast Asia; it would survive as a scientific legacy of Japanese imperial empiricism and as an ahistorical overemphasis on the colonial period and colonial archives in the history of the entire region until the present day. I discuss, among other things, the limited attention given to Taiwan as part of the larger narrative of maritime relations in the nan’yō, and I consider what conclusions can be drawn from this almost-absence of discourse.
Chapter 6 remains in Taiwan and addresses the moral dilemmas of Murakami’s ignorance of the island’s Aboriginal past. Elaborating on Murakami’s disinterest in the historiography of the Other, the chapter gathers evidence for refuting the notion of benevolent Japanese colonialism and proposes ways of nuancing global history by contextualizing and materializing silences. The chapter zooms in on the narration of an incident of early modern foreign relations and examines how Murakami and other historians exaggerated the significance of the incident for the sake of underlining the narrative of Japanese imperial expansion. It also discusses how the pasts and voices of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples can be traced within one-sided hegemonic narratives that overemphasized outside influences. This chapter took much inspiration from the rich body of recent work on the Japanese Empire’s engagement with colonial subjects. Together, the two final chapters make two important interventions. First, they add to the discussion of how colonial and even archival violence can be tackled when writing nonsovereign people into global intellectual history. Second, by locating the island as a bridge between the Sinosphere and Southeast Asia in imperial Japanese historiography, they provide the needed background for deconstructing the notion of a unique East Asian maritime past within early modern global history.
The Epilogue reevaluates the legacy of Murakami’s scholarship to initiate further discussions about comparison as method, on the one hand, and academic history that continues to overemphasize the written archive partially because its practitioners fail to deliver on the promise of transparency, on the other.
Open access