Murakami’s habitus as a scholar diplomat and translator historian was influenced by a variety of people, institutions, and nonhuman actants, such as archives. Originating from different countries, living in different time periods, and coming from various linguistic backgrounds, the protagonists of this chapter were connected through the (meta-)physical space of the traveling archive.Footnote ¹ On the following pages I will employ an entangled biography approach to approximate early modern Japanese relations.Footnote ² An entangled biography does not resemble a ‘who’s who’ in gaikō or namban (‘southern barbarian’) or kirishitan (‘Christian’) history. It can rather be described as a portrayal of the multifaceted connections that influenced narratives of early modern foreign relations, expansion, and Japanese–European encounters. The importance and frequency of appearance of both new and already introduced actors will vary. Regardless of whether they are peers, students, government agencies, or even historical figures, all of them are crucial in telling the story behind Murakami’s archival diplomacy, both as actual practice and in its more abstract meaning.

As personal connections mattered for the historiography of foreign relations, I will address records of professional encounters, scholarly notes, and private correspondence. This approach will allow me to provide insights into a web of cross-references, citational choices, symbols, and narrative tropes. Translatory processes and dynamics between text and images are thus not only fundamental to understanding the notion of early modern gaikō, as discussed in Chapter 3; they also had an impact on the multilayered communication between the agents who produced and spread relevant knowledge, which in turn shaped historical awareness. Such processes are elusive and difficult to trace, but I believe that a selection of key sites, including written archives, material objects, memory, and the interactions between ‘great men’ can provide new insights into who shaped foreign relations narratives. While the importance of archives in this process is self-evident, I hasten to add that foreigners had limited access to national archives until the later decades of the twentieth century, and even today, restrictions remain in place in many regimes. In Murakami’s time, permission to view and allocate historical documents located abroad was in many cases the privilege of the foreign diplomatic core. These conditions are an essential aspect of the workings of archival diplomacy, and it will be crucial to know how travel, mobility, and personal connections with diplomatic and archival circles shaped the history of foreign relations.

This chapter traces how Murakami made certain men matter. It explores how Murakami’s archival diplomacy produced material that served to single out particular episodes in the history of the Japanese Empire and contributed to myth-making and cultural diplomacy between Japan and Southeast Asian nations. Two epic seventeenth-century figures in the history of expansionist early modern Japanese foreign relations, Takayama Ukon and Yamada Nagamasa, are key to these processes. I will take the issue of monuments honoring colonialists as a point of departure. After a close-up study of Takayama and Yamada, I will explore how Murakami engaged with their written legacies, and I will finally analyze the leverage Murakami gained from access to European archives and how his expert knowledge stimulated future research on early modern Japanese engagement with the outside world.

Murakami’s Entangled Biography

Seemingly timeless monuments have a key function in the creation of knowledge and are effective tools for myth-building. Since the nineteenth century, statues have been erected for public consumption and are oftentimes one-sided myth-building tools to commemorate selective aspects of the past or, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, dangerous single stories.Footnote ³ Statues rarely provide opportunities for critical engagement with overlapping narratives. Pierre Nora, who explored the dynamics behind the creation of historical sites and myth-making processes, famously postulated that collective memory is not timeless.Footnote ⁴ The problems of colonial memory gained global attention in recent years after angry protesters destroyed statues of colonialists – men whose legacy had been honored despite their contributions to slavery, exploitation of native labor and natural resources, and environmental destruction. The removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town in 2015 and the toppling of Edward Colston’s in Bristol in 2020 by student activists have led to debates about decolonizing memory and university curricula in recent years. These events have triggered interest in the legacy of expansionists and colonists outside the former British Empire, including cases in East and Southeast Asia, such as Stamford Raffles in Singapore, and Zheng Chenggong in Xiamen. Debates surrounding inappropriate historical commemorations triggered overdue discussions about the need to revise the glorifying practices of state-led history and to reconsider how educators tell the histories of past events. Any further analysis thus must ask when and how these statues came into being. Such demystifying exercise will reveal the major differences between the historical figures themselves and their politically motivated appropriation as statesmen or heroes by later generations.

Ahistorical imaginaries are usually affected by the significant time gap between the era in which a historical person lived and the era in which his (women have rarely received such questionable honor) life history became useful for building and maintaining national identity.Footnote ⁵ Various groups are involved in memory-building and myth-making. While state institutions represent and popularize historical objects and sites, a broader public consumes them; together they attribute new meaning to historical actors and memorable events. These dynamics can be observed with the iconic figures of Tokugawa foreign relations such as Yamada Nagamasa and Takayama Ukon. Creating something new and quite different from their original referents, statues and monuments like plaques would also influence the historiography of early modern gaikō and of related subjects such as overseas expansion and foreign encounters to which Murakami contributed so extensively.

The example of Christopher Columbus provides particularly nourishing ground for reflecting on the transferential potential of honoring historical actors, both because of Columbus’s discursive importance to the theme of this book and because of the numerical dominance and global dispersion of statues honoring Columbus. The well-orchestrated memorials of Columbus have less to do with what he did during his lifetime (1451–1506) than with what he came to represent over the following centuries. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Genoese seafarer was no longer just a symbol for Spanish oceanic expansion or the dramatic consequences of his conquest of the Taínos in Kiskeya (Hispañola). Columbus had also begun to serve an important function as an advocate of scientific liberalism in US-American empire-building. Columbus’s new world alter ego originated largely from the iconographic translation of his school textbook depiction, that is to say the visual image of a “hero who transcends old world nativism and is free of bad characters associated with Spain of his time.”Footnote ⁶ Competing narratives and images of Columbus as a ruthless ‘Spanish’ conqueror versus Columbus as a humanist visionary gradually went global.

In Spain, Cristóbal Colón became ingrained in the nation’s historical memory with a royal decree of 1892, which turned October 12 into the national holiday (Día de la Hispanidad), commemorating Columbus’s disembarking on Guanahani (an event that became written into history as taking possession of the new territory for the Catholic monarchs). Hence, when Murakami visited Spain in 1901, he experienced the country-wide Columbus fever and encountered impressive statues of Columbus. The historicization of Columbus is inseparably linked with the Spanish historian and Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas de Castillo (1827–1897). Cánovas, who fiercely rejected any historical criticism of Columbus and his accomplishments, promoted the achievements of monarchs and other great men in Spanish national history. Notably, he choreographed the commemoration events honoring the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s ‘descubrimiento’ (discovery) of America.Footnote ⁷ Unable to face the decline of the Spanish Empire, Cánovas spared no expense to turn the fourth Centenario into a large, multistaged, and multidisciplinary project. His efforts had an unprecedented impact on how the Genoese seafarer’s achievements shaped the ‘glorious past’ of the Spanish nation and raised public interest in the country’s imperial legacy.Footnote ⁸ Summarizing such orchestrated ‘heroization’ of past actors as ‘history in action,’ Lisa Yoshikawa describes similar processes for Japan. Visionary political thinkers supported national heritage campaigns, history-writing, and the promotion of historical sites. During the 1920s and 1930s, they singled out historical figures and made them into subjects that should matter to the entire nation.Footnote ⁹ It was in this spirit of strong metaphors that Murakami, forty years after his first visit to Spain, would coin the phrase ‘Columbus of Japan’ in 1942.Footnote ¹⁰

Who was this ‘Columbus of Japan’? Murakami attached the label to the abovementioned Yamada Nagamasa, a Japanese merchant, who had lived in the Thai capital of Ayutthaya during the 1610s and 1620s, where he acted as the headman of the Japanese overseas community in Ayutthaya and, moreover, served the Siamese king in various military campaigns. In 1935, the until-then-fragmented historical memory of Yamada became a matter of diplomatic interest as the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Relations commissioned the ambassador in Siam (Thailand) to erect a memorial of Yamada Nagamasa in Ayutthaya. Internally labeled Nagamasa Jinja (jinja meaning shrine in Japanese), the objective of this cultural diplomatic initiative was to express the ‘Japanese soul’ and ‘Japanese art.’Footnote ¹¹ Being initiated two years before the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese-Siamese Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1887), the timing for this collective memory project mattered. The Thai side signed on by providing the land of the previous Japanese quarter. To determine its exact location, historians scrutinized seventeenth-century Dutch East India Company (VOC) records. Yet, cultural diplomacy did not end there, nor was it limited to Thailand, where today’s visitors of Ayutthaya are greeted by a statue of Yamada Nagamasa at the entrance of the historical site of Ban Yipun (nihonmachi, ‘Japanese village’) along the Chao Phraya River.Footnote ¹² A few years after the inauguration of the first memorial in Thailand, an image of Yamada Nagamasa, which was originally painted on the wall of Ayutthaya’s Wat Yom temple, was donated to the Sengen temple in Shizuoka.Footnote ¹³ Yamada was believed to have visited the Sengen temple during his stay in Sunpu in 1626 and to have made a ritual donation.Footnote ¹⁴ One of the earliest monuments built to commemorate Nagamasa was a statue in a Shizuoka shrine that claimed to be the site of his birth.Footnote ¹⁵ Such memory-making episodes are examples of how uses of the past contributed to the creation of new historical legacy: The Japanese town in Ayutthaya has since become a popular tourist spot for Japanese visitors, while the image hosted in the Sengen temple and a related statue of Yamada are intrinsic icons of Shizuoka’s historical map.

Yamada became for the bilateral histories of Thailand and Japan what Takayama Ukon – who has already briefly been introduced at the end of Chapter 2 – was for those of Japan and the Philippines.Footnote ¹⁶ Both men came to “enjoy extraordinary name recognition” to borrow a phrase from a historian who studied a similar phenomenon involving Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro.Footnote ¹⁷ Three hundred years after their deaths, ‘great men’ turned into symbols of Japanese overseas expansion. The former samurai Takayama Ukon left Japan following the prohibition of practicing the Christian faith. Exiled to Manila in 1614, he served as the head of the Japanese community in the suburb Dilao, which comprised several hundred Japanese unwelcome to return by the Tokugawa regime. Although Takayama’s presence in seventeenth-century Manila was brief as he died from an illness less than two months after his arrival, his legacy has lived on for more than four hundred years. Public interest in his complex life as a military strategist, warrior, aesthete, and defender of Christianity increased with the independence of the Philippines. Bilateral initiatives were indebted to Johannes Laures’s study of the historical documents related to Takayama Ukon.Footnote ¹⁸ The Jesuit scholar Laures, a close colleague of Murakami at Sophia University, laid the ground for acts of cultural public diplomacy, such as the establishment of a sister city agreement between Manila and Takayama Ukon’s hometown Takatsuki in 1979 and, most recently, the diplomatically insightful beatification of the ‘Blessed Takayama Ukon’ in Osaka in 2017.Footnote ¹⁹

Figure 4.1

Statue of Takayama Ukon ‘Don Justo Takayama’ in the Japan-Philippines Friendship Park in Manila. The statue was erected in 1979.

Source: Private photo by Lauren Solomon.

Both Takayama and Yamada stand for the past grandeur of early modern Japanese individuals while also symbolizing a new era in bilateral relations with an overproportioned historical agency on the part of Japan. Despite the asymmetry, Thai and Filipino parties actively promoted the memories of Yamada and Takayama, respectively. Takayama Ukon’s beatification, for instance, was an achievement of the Filipino Catholic Church.Footnote ²⁰ Yet, such public history efforts were guided by solid scholarship on Japanese Christians. In the aftermath of the Pacific War, Murakami stressed the exemplary devoutness of early Japanese Catholic converts, introducing them as benevolent protagonists of the Japanese community in Southeast Asia.Footnote ²¹ The change of focus in the narrative from southern expansion to kirishitan history can be interpreted as a replacement of the pioneers of territorial and maritime expansion with less oppressive actors.

As I have shown at the very beginning of this book, public history projects on a local level are common forms of identity-building. More recent implementations of public history are the result of tourism-oriented place branding with a transnational history awareness. Yet, encountering Yamada both in Shizuoka and Ayutthaya, Takayama Ukon in Osaka and Manila, or Hasekura in Rome and Sendai underscores the importance of approaching memory-building initiatives through entangled biographies of the protagonists who shaped early modern Japanese expansion and a globally connected Tokugawa Japan. Both archival records and historical tropes shaped notions of historicity.

Figure 4.2

Copper statue of Yamada Nagamasa (山田長政像) at Sengen dōri in Shizuoka. The statue was erected in 2000. The modest copper statue on the way to the Sengen temple has an underlying narrative. In 1932, a giant concrete elephant monument, donated to Shizuoka by the Thailand-based Japanese Association, had become a symbol for Japan’s southward expansion policies and was thus removed as a precautionary measure to signal goodwill after the war.

Source: Private photo by the author. See www.sengendori.com/nagamasa/nagamasaohama.html (accessed September 3, 2024).

The Yamada statue at the popular tourist site in Ayutthaya represents Okya Senaphimuk – as how Yamada Nagamasa is known in Thai sources – wearing his Siamese military uniform.Footnote ²² When the centennial of Thai–Japanese foreign relations in 1987 (commemorating the treaty of 1887) coincided with the sixtieth birthday of the monarch, King Bhumibol (Rama IX), the Japanese government subsidized the reconstruction of the Japanese village. This new stage in Thai–Japanese collective memory is closely linked to both the increased presence of financially strong Japanese companies in Thailand since the 1980s and the close ties between the imperial family of Japan and the royal family of Thailand. In 2015, the Thai–Japanese Association opened a museum at the venue, which hosts a permanent exhibition of two representatives of early modern relations between Siam and Japan – Yamada Nagamasa and Maria Guyomar de Pinha (Thao Thong Kib Ma; 1664–1728). Maria Guyomar de Pinha deserves to be introduced briefly, even if she plays no role in Murakami’s plot. Born in Ayutthaya to a Japanese mother – Ursala Yamada, whose family fled flaring Christian persecution in Japan – and a Bengali father, Maria Guyomar de Pinha is another example of the multiethnic cosmopolitanism of Southeast Asian port towns and an icon of kirishitan history.Footnote ²³ She was the wife of the Greek adventurer Constantine Phaulkon (1647–1688), who came to Siam as a merchant working for the Dutch East India Company in 1675, before becoming a favorite of King Narai and an important player in Thai–French diplomatic exchange.Footnote ²⁴ Upon her husband’s execution during the 1688 Siamese revolt, Maria ended up enslaved and came to serve in the kitchen of the new ruler, Phetracha (r. 1688–1703). That Maria Guyomar de Pinha has received but a trickle of the historical attention of the men introduced above has partly to do with Murakami’s history of foreign relations.

Gender, as Joan Scott famously established, is a relational category meaning that male or female (nonbinary, etc.) needs to be understood as a social relation and a cultural construction of what it means to belong to either category or not. Scott, moreover, argued that these cultural processes of differentiating between male/masculine and female/feminine predetermine any information about men and women.Footnote ²⁵ Many scholars before me have underlined how the male domain of history supports a complicit relationship between practitioners and the subjects of their studies.Footnote ²⁶ With regard to gender another remarkable – albeit not surprising – aspect concerning Murakami is his entirely male-centered network of political and intellectual elites in imperial metropoles. Murakami’s male history networks developed across various spaces in the classroom, archives, and hotel lobbies. Studying abroad, participating in conferences, and meeting like-minded scholars to build up Japanese history institutions were assets reserved for male Japanese historians. Notions of masculinity and power were unquestioned elements of Murakami’s history of great men based on references provided by influential male scholars.Footnote ²⁷

For Murakami, the history of Japanese foreign relations was based on the achievements of a few iconic men.Footnote ²⁸ Hasekura Tsunenaga was one of them. As editor of the Japanese history source compendium Dai nihon shiryō, Murakami became deeply involved in the representation of Hasekura as head of a diplomatic mission to Europe (1613–20).Footnote ²⁹ In the process of promoting this extraordinary episode in early modern Japanese foreign relations, Murakami pieced together Hasekura’s journey using the records of European contemporaries, once passionately read by the educated public from Lisbon to London.Footnote ³⁰ While having been forgotten in Japan for two centuries, the archival documents were linked in Europe to Pope Paul V’s aspiration of achieving diplomatic recognition through ‘performing’ international relations.Footnote ³¹ Collecting, organizing, editing, and partially translating the swath of records enlightened Murakami about various details of Hasekura’s time in Europe, including the reservations and obstacles Hasekura’s mission met in Spain. A thorough scholar like Murakami was unlikely to have missed the records by English and Dutch merchants referring to Hasekura’s mission as a failure, long before that notion spread in the history of foreign relations.Footnote ³² And yet, he chose to emphasize Hasekura’s legacy as a nobleman with negotiating power and symbolic credentials.Footnote ³³

Figure 4.3

A fresco depicting the embassy of Hasekura Tsunenaga in the Sala Regia in the Quirinal Palace in Rome. It is part of a circle of images of ambassadors from outside Europe, including Japan, Kongo, and Persia, to Pope Paul V and shows Hasekura Tsunenaga accompanied by four other Japanese delegates in conversation with a Franciscan monk.

Source: Wikimedia Creative Commons, CC BY-SA.

The dynamics that shaped the historical memory of Hasekura Tsunenaga’s diplomatic career reveal the agency of the historical archive. Hence, I suggest exploring archives from the vantage point of Bruno Latour’s concept of an actant with the capacity to modify a state of affairs. The term actant includes both humans and nonhumans, while actantiality provides actors with subjectivity, intentionality, and morality. Without entirely subscribing to the actor–network theory, I argue that two of its key principles provide useful hints for understanding the archive.Footnote ³⁴ First, the sociability of an object and, second, the semiotic construction that connects agency to meaning.Footnote ³⁵ While the first aspect points to both the corpus of material providing documentary evidence and the physical archive within which it is normally stored, the second must be associated with the knowledge generated through engagement with the archive in its various functions. Specifically, in the archive of foreign relations, scholar diplomats uncovered the past from remote places with restricted access. Their activities are a reminder that archives have always been more dynamic than their reputation, something only recognized in the critical (sometimes polemic) debates about the colonial archive.Footnote ³⁶ Scholar diplomats – prominent subjects of entangled biographies – played a key role in shaping the archive of foreign relations. Access was ultimately provided by language skills. Commanding several European languages would become Murakami’s trademark and legacy. His superior foreign-language skills were indeed his entry pass into professional diplomatic and academic circles. Murakami’s generation of historians had a particularly narrow understanding of the archive and the historical material that would qualify for telling the past. In the following section, I will explore Murakami as part of a web of diplomat scholars who were directly involved with the writing and dissemination of Japanese history. Applying the entangled biography approach helps, on the one hand, to demonstrate the complex connections in the history of foreign relations and, on the other, to deepen our understanding for multilayered translation even further.

Diplomat Scholars

On arriving in Tokyo at age seventeen, Murakami was greeted by an Occidentalist atmosphere that encouraged intellectuals to study European languages and immerse in Western cultures and practices. Prominent role models, who combined linguistic work with promoting the history of pre-Meiji Japan, helped develop his profile as a polyglot. Foreign residents were sought after as language teachers, such as James Murdoch, the English tutor of the up-and-coming author Natsume Sōseki.Footnote ³⁷ A Scottish orientalist and language expert, Murdoch (1856–1921) was one of several cosmopolitan individuals who personified the intimate relationship between diplomacy and historical linguistic scholarship. In 1889, he came to Japan as a foreign advisor. He taught at the First Higher School in Tokyo, the same elite institution where Murakami studied. His 1903 monograph, A History of Japan during the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse (1542–1651), was for many decades a standard reference work outside Japan. For the book, he relied on the empirical contributions of two Japanese research assistants.Footnote ³⁸ One of them was Tōdai-graduate Murakawa Kengo, who coedited Letters Written by the English Merchants in Japan with Murakami Naojirō in 1900.Footnote ³⁹

High-ranking foreign diplomats with impressive accomplishments as both historians and linguists featured prominently in Meiji-period Japan’s intellectual landscape. Among their ranks were G.B. Samson (1883–1965), who lived in Japan for thirty-five years, and Ernest Mason Satow (1843–1929).Footnote ⁴⁰ The latter came to Japan in 1862 as a young interpreter for the British consular service, launching a career that included positions as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary.Footnote ⁴¹ As one of the founding members of the Asiatic Society of Japan in Yokohama in 1872, Satow initiated the scholar’s outside gaze on Japan and established cross-cultural exchange as a key subject of Japanology of the early decades.Footnote ⁴² In his famous memoir A Diplomat in Japan, which he started writing in 1885, Satow arrogantly commented that “the history of Japan has still to be written. Native chronicles of the Mikados and annals of leading families exist in abundance, but the Japanese mind is only just now beginning to emancipate itself from the thraldom of Chinese literary forms, while no European has yet attempted a task which requires a training different from that of most men who pursue an Eastern career.”Footnote ⁴³ While it is impossible to know how Japanese historians would have felt about Satow’s disqualifying statement, his portrayal of bakumatsu and early Meiji Japan did more than shape European views of the Japanese and their historicity. It also convinced historians in Japan that the way the past was studied and interpreted had to change radically. Murakami saw in Satow a source of inspiration due to the latter’s careful consultation of archival material, but even more for his achievements as a linguist.Footnote ⁴⁴

Murakami’s esteem for Satow invites us to look into the latter’s reputation as an exemplary diplomat scholar. Prolific and proficient, he was a well-connected careerist and advocate of professional diplomacy.Footnote ⁴⁵ One of his collaborators was Ishibashi Masakata (1840–1916), a former Dutch interpreter (tsūji) who served as interpreter and translator of English in the final days of the Tokugawa regime before being appointed first-rank translator of foreign affairs of the Meiji government. In 1876, Ishibashi Masakata and Satow coedited An English-Japanese Dictionary of the Spoken Language.Footnote ⁴⁶ More than a language aid, this dictionary influenced the nomenclature of Japanese diplomatic history by defining a diplomat’s function by his skill level.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the extended 1904 edition, ‘diplomat’ is translated as either ‘kōsaikan’ or ‘gwaikōkan’ (外交官). It, moreover, includes a translation for ‘diplomatic note’ as ‘gwaikō bunsho’ (外交文書), hence offering a different pronunciation for the combination of characters known as gaikō monjo.Footnote ⁴⁸ These neologisms coincided with Satow’s debut in 1896 as a historian of early modern Japanese foreign exchange when he presented a historical account of none other than Yamada Nagamasa.Footnote ⁴⁹ Four years later, he would publish an anthology of letters of the voyage of the English merchant captain John Saris to Japan in 1613.Footnote ⁵⁰ Obviously, Satow and Murakami were interested in the same historical actors and processes.

Satow’s academic interventions were instrumental in the creation of tropes for narrating the presence of Europeans in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan that have ever since defined namban and kirishitan history-writing. In a short compilation entitled The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, he introduced the Jesuit printing presses in Shimabara, Amakusa, and Nagasaki as emblems of knowledge transfer from Europe to Japan and examples of the sophisticated nature of Jesuit–Japanese collaboration.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet, rather than exploring the joint Jesuit - Japanese linguistic and technological efforts, he offered extracts of the works printed by the Jesuits in Japan. Satow provided English translations of text extracts alongside the original prints. Some of the fourteen titles included were originally published in Japanese, such as the Heike Monogatari (The tale of the Heike); others appeared as Japanese compilations of European-language originals, such as Sanctos no Gosagueo (Extracts from the acts of saints), which introduced the biographies of Catholic saints.Footnote ⁵² When Satow’s The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan was republished in 1926, Murakami wrote the preface.Footnote ⁵³ In this way, Murakami not only became closely associated with the work of Satow but also started to rival with the Japanese historian Shinmura Izuru (1876–1967), as I shall discuss later. All three had an interest in linking the histories of gaikō and early Christianity in Japan, although they were not in full agreement as to how such history ought to be written.Footnote ⁵⁴

Beginning in the 1930s, the topics that Murakami and his peers studied would be spread more globally by the colossal work of British historian Charles R. Boxer, an authority on early modern European expansion and contacts with Japan. Like Satow, he started his career for the British foreign service, serving in an exchange program in Japan and later as a high-ranking navy official and translator in Hong Kong.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the second half of the twentieth century, Boxer’s extensive body of work in English and Portuguese shaped the global understanding of Japanese–Iberian relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like Murakami, he trusted primary sources and promoted studying encounters in China and Japan using records of Iberian and Dutch colonial actors. In 1953, when already appointed professor of the history of the Far East at the University of London, he published a source collection on South China in a fashion reminiscent of Murakami’s early editing work that resulted in annotated translations of early modern European writers.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, both Murakami and Boxer singled out certain written accounts and their early modern authors as authoritative voices on early modern cross-cultural exchange. There is yet another reason why I bring up Charles Boxer: Given the close connections to Japanese academia during Murakami’s active years, it is reasonable to ask whether the two namban scholars had personal ties. As it turns out, they did not. While Boxer mentioned several ‘Japanese friends’ in his Embaixada de Macau ao Japão em 1640 (1933), Murakami’s name does not even appear in the citations.Footnote ⁵⁸

While confirming Boxer’s silencing of Murakami admittedly would deserve a broader survey of his opus, it can nevertheless be seen as a potential obstacle to Murakami’s international standing. It remains difficult to evaluate the impact of Murakami’s scholarship – in particular his work in Japanese – on the outside world. In conducting a survey of non-Japanese publications on maritime Southeast Asia or Taiwan, I found that Murakami’s name was mentioned only sporadically in authoritative publications.Footnote ⁵⁹ In fact, Murakami’s international recognition would only increase after 1940 when he became a professor at the Jesuit-run Sophia University. Integrated into a small circle of Japan-based male international scholars, he would dedicate himself to disseminating the history of the European influence on Japan during the ‘Christian century,’ a term that was ironically coined by Charles Boxer.Footnote ⁶⁰

International (Archival) Travel and Its Imperial Protocol

The examples and episodes above are indicators that a particular dialectic notion came to intersect history and foreign relations in Japan as early as the 1890s. The mobility of diplomats facilitated their access to historical material, while learned societies such as ‘The Asiatic Society of Japan’ provided a platform for amateur scholars who were often only modestly talented historians. The society published, for instance, two lengthy accounts – the ‘Life of Date Masamune’ (1893) and ‘Embassy to Rome’/‘Date and Europe’ (1892) by foreign advisor to the Meiji government Colyer Meriwether (1858–1920).Footnote ⁶¹ Stationed in Sendai (Hasekura’s birthplace and the capital of Date Masamune’s regional domain) from 1889 to 1892,Footnote ⁶² Meriwether’s diplomatic history was characterized by populism and sloppiness. A quick glance at the explicit language of the text disseminated in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society highlights his many biases, as the following quote illustrates:

Meriwether’s chauvinistic, anti-Catholic accounts of sixteenth-century Japanese society as uncivilized and in need of foreign knowledge were diametrically opposite to Murakami’s empiricist approach.Footnote ⁶⁴ As archival envoy to Europe, Murakami was driven by a desire to counteract the type of history-writing based on inaccuracies and orientalist myth-building produced by the likes of Meriwether, who, like amateur historians, did not consult archival sources. However, in order to write empirically sound academic history, Murakami depended on the dialectic conditions that linked history to foreign relations. In other words, both access to foreign sources and the frame of his research were linked to the diplomatic institutions related to the Japanese Empire, both at home and abroad.

Murakami’s historiography of foreign relations became shaped by domestic and overseas travel itineraries.Footnote ⁶⁵ On the one hand, Murakami’s source collection tour through fin-de-siècle Europe evokes Leopold von Ranke’s similar journey through Germany, Austria, and Italy. Searching for primary sources, Ranke developed a “new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge,” as one historian of ideas has aptly phrased it.Footnote ⁶⁶ On the other, it was the extension of Japanese authoritative imperial history projects in which dutiful, ascetic collectors who – loyal to the sources (‘quellentreu’ in the language of Rankeans) – scrutinized archives and temples. In his role as an agent of foreign relations, Murakami’s search for gaikō monjo added him to the long list of university-trained ‘manuscript hunters’ from Africa, Asia, and North and South America who were driven to find objective information about their countries in European archives.Footnote ⁶⁷

Access to state archives has never been unrestricted. Searching historical accounts required official permission. Both Ranke’s research based on the reports of diplomats at European courts, and Murakami’s work with manuscripts produced in relation to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century embassies relied on the “diplomatic game.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In Ranke’s case, the Viennese Habsburg Court had to grant him permission to access the Venetian archive in 1829.Footnote ⁶⁹ A century later, Murakami’s access to European archives depended on the efforts of the Japanese diplomatic corps abroad. The officials at the Algemeen Rijksarchief communicated with Murakami via the imperial Japanese legation in the Netherlands. The sending of archival material such as dagregisters (here, the diaries of the Dutch East India Company in Dejima) was negotiated between the different parties and meticulously recorded.Footnote ⁷⁰ Hence it was not only through the sources but also through the protocol of accessing the archive that Murakami learned how to conduct himself as a diplomat. In short, archival diplomacy played an essential role in crafting a foreign relations narrative, as the following remark by a German journalist in 1841 demonstrates. Ranke, he wrote, “had so much commerce with diplomats that he himself completely has become a diplomat and sees everything through the eyes of a diplomat.”Footnote ⁷¹ The wry quote is a telling indication of the impact of what Pierre Bourdieu called the social field and its logic of interaction.Footnote ⁷² The researcher’s contacts and lived experience affected the type of archival knowledge that historians unearthed and disseminated. This dynamic resonates well with Ranke’s view of diplomatic history (one that was concerned with the international politics of the state) as the ‘noblest branch of history,’ as well as with the transformation of the Venetian archive (Archivio di Stato di Venezia) into the archetype of a diplomatic archive.Footnote ⁷³

In the prefaces to his works, Murakami would often point out that he traveled, studied, and collected material abroad in his role as a delegate of the Japanese government. It was important to him to write his own achievements as a polyglot intellectual into the historiography of Japanese foreign relations.Footnote ⁷⁴ Detailed remarks on the original manuscripts and their locations in European archives are to be found in all his publications and reveal Murakami’s fascination with language and foreign relations. Guiding his readers through the archive, Murakami turned the archive into a semi-transparent site of knowledge production. When completing his work on the Dai nihon shiryō in 1908, Murakami’s findings from European sources, such as Date Masamune’s delegation to Rome, were not only recognized by academic historians but also regularly advertised in the country’s leading newspapers. That same year, Murakami was appointed president of the Tokyo Foreign Language School, while his work for the Historiographical Institute was honored at the graduation ceremony of Tokyo Imperial University in the presence of the Meiji Tennō.Footnote ⁷⁵

Murakami’s vocation as archival diplomat followed him through his entire life. In 1956, aged eighty-eight, he oversaw the publication of the Records of the Dutch Factory in Nagasaki. After its publication, he informed then president of Sophia University, Yamanabe, that samples were sent to following institutions and persons: two to the Dutch Embassy of Japan, one to the director of the Den Haag Archive, one the Sophia Library, one to the reading room of the History Department, one to a certain Sophia Rogendorf, one to the Historiographical Institute at Tōdai, and twelve samples to the Nihon gakushi-in (Japan Academy) from where they were most likely distributed to other scholarly institutions.Footnote ⁷⁶

Figure 4.4

A document issued by the Japanese government confirming a business trip of Murakami Naojirō (Tokyo Music Academy) to the United States in 1927. This document demonstrates how credentials mattered for status. Murakami is referred to by his official job description as principal of the Music Academy. The purpose of his travel was to represent Japan at the First Pan-Pacific Conference on Education, Rehabilitation, and Recreation. See www.digital.archives.go.jp/DAS/meta/listPhoto?LANG=eng&BID=F0000000000001001346&ID=M0000000000003068928&NO=&TYPE=PDF&DL_TYPE=pdf (accessed August 14, 2021).

Archival diplomacy was by no means Murakami’s only avenue into foreign relations and recognition. His scholarly career was intertwined with representative tasks that were financed by the Japanese government that in turn provided him with vital credentials on the international stage. Two important missions took him to the United States, in 1915 to San Francisco and in 1927 to Honolulu, when he was chosen as chairman of the Japanese delegation to the First Pan-Pacific Conference on Education, Rehabilitation, and Recreation.Footnote ⁷⁷ As part of the small Japanese delegation, Murakami, who also wrote the final report, was committed to the aim of cultivating “closer friendship and more intimate intellectual alliance of the Pacific people for the enhancement of the prosperity and enlightened progress of their respective nature.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Contributing a general overview of the educational situation in Japan from elementary to higher education, he was well prepared with historical and statistical facts and added specific commentary on foreign language and foreign knowledge training. The conference proceedings provide insightful details about Murakami’s international profile. In this highly authoritative setting, he was treated as a knowledgeable expert and received significant attention as the official voice of the Japanese government. A delegate from Mexico singled Murakami out in his final comments:

Overt flattery aside, the proceedings helped me appreciate Murakami’s multiple interventions as a diplomat and his motivations as an educator.

First, Murakami advocated language training in Japanese elementary education as beneficial to pan-Pacific development. His insistence on compulsory second foreign-language training reflected his own polyglot identity and the role of language training in the Liberal Arts more generally. He framed languages as a geopolitical necessity when contending that “a review of the rapid growth of International Relations made clear that it was necessary for educated citizens to have a knowledge of at least one foreign language.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Second, Murakami’s speech patronized female students. While boasting about the rapid increase in the number of girls receiving higher education, he did not consider it problematic that they were treated unequally in “special institutions for the higher education of girls.”Footnote ⁸¹ His discussion of how a nation would benefit from sending students to study abroad focused exclusively on men. Education and scholarship as forms of foreign exchange are clearly male business for Murakami as he, yet again, implicitly advocated patriarchy. An exception that confirmed the rule was his personal endorsement of the first female student at Taihoku Imperial University in 1931, Omori Masaju.Footnote ⁸² Third, his speech had epistemological implications for the territories included in the Japanese Empire. Murakami’s overview of education in Japan made no reference to Taiwan or Korea.Footnote ⁸³ This absence of Taiwan both as an object of study and as a point of reference is symptomatic of empirical imperialism, as I will discuss later in this book. The complete omission of Taiwan is particularly problematic considering Murakami’s own career. A year later he would become head of a university department in Taipei.

Concluding my explorations into how Murakami used international contacts and archival travel to establish a history of early modern Japanese foreign relations based on the achievements of great men, I will introduce his monograph Nihon to firipin (Japan and the Philippines).Footnote ⁸⁴ Despite the generic title, the book is set in the early modern period and starts with the sixteenth-century arrival of the Europeans in Asia. What followed was a detailed discussion of the shortage of sources on Japanese–Philippine relations (日比交渉 nippi kōshō) and the subsequent knowledge loss: Murakami elaborated that Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s advance toward Luzon in the 1590s was barely recorded in Japanese chronicles and – worse – that Hasekura Tsunenaga’s embassy to Europe, which returned via Manila to Japan, had entirely been forgotten in Japan. Hence it was only due to his own archival discoveries that the impact of Japanese actors on early modern Southeast Asian pasts could be reevaluated: for instance, thanks to a letter from Toyotomi Hideyoshi to the Philippines, which was stored among the ‘Christian manuscripts’ in the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III in Naples.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moving on to diplomatic relations of the Tokugawa, Murakami praised Tokugawa Ieyasu for his “perfectionating of international relations” (国際関係を円満, kokusai kankei wo enman).Footnote ⁸⁶ His remark is reminiscent of Ranke’s emphasis on the strategic and diplomatic genius of men such as the Duke of Lerma.Footnote ⁸⁷ Published in 1940, Nihon to Firipin overtly advocates a narrative of Japan’s exceptionalism in early modern foreign relations and the active part Japan played in shaping the history of the nan’yō since the end of the sixteenth century. Addressing historians abroad, Murakami even claimed that Japan was the first Asian power to establish transpacific trade and official relations with Mexico due to the “diplomatic talent of great men.”Footnote ⁸⁸

The Making of Seventeenth-Century Diplomats

Murakami’s research was deeply intertwined with his intimate engagement with the lives and written legacies of ‘great men,’ above all, Tokugawa Ieyasu. In a recent study, Morgan Pitelka has described how Ieyasu, as one of the three unifiers and as founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, became “associated with a larger-than-life era of Great Men, individuals who transformed the Japanese past through the strength of their own will.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Similar characteristics may have appeared to Murakami when engaging with less-known early modern diplomats such as Yamada Nagamasa or Sebastián Vizcaíno. To demonstrate how Murakami’s way of thinking was influenced by the experiences of early modern practitioners of foreign relations, I will introduce two examples in more detail.

Sebastián Vizcaíno was a naval explorer who served as official ambassador of the viceroy of Mexico to Japan from 1611 to 1613. Vizcaíno’s accounts, which are kept in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, had first been published in Spain in 1867. Three decades later, Murakami laid his eyes on the original in Madrid. During his 1901 stay in Spain, he drafted a complete translation that would inform much of his later scholarship.Footnote ⁹⁰ Vizcaíno’s accounts were employed in significant quantity in several of Murakami’s editions, including the twelfth volume of the Dai nihon shiryō that focused on European reports on Hasekura’s mission to Spain and Italy. In his doctoral dissertation (which he submitted to the University of Tokyo in 1921) Murakami reconstructed narratives about Tokugawa Japan’s transpacific relations and seventeenth-century efforts to open trade with Mexico.Footnote ⁹¹ Vizcaíno’s visions and negotiations during his stay in Japan played a significant part in Murakami’s story.

It is difficult to assess Vizcaíno’s role in Japanese–Spanish relations amidst the background of myths, polemics, and self-aggrandizement that surround his life story. Tackling the legend of Vizcaíno underscores the power of language and concepts for historical imagination. It clearly makes a difference whether I refer to him as a Spanish or Mexican diplomat, a navigator, an adventurer, or a colonial official. Likewise, his story differs whether I tell it from a Hispanic, Japanese, or third-party perspective. Setting aside biased accounts that either glorified his deeds or lessened his capacities, what can be stated for certain is that Vizcaíno enjoyed a long and imposing colonial career in the overseas Spanish Empire. As a Castilian soldier and merchant, he became a leading figure in naval explorations along the present-day California coast. From 1583 until his death in 1619, he held high-ranking colonial posts in Mexico. His search for the legendary gold and silver islands (Islas Rica de Oro y Rica de Plata) as part of his journey to and around Japan (1611–13) has been widely discussed in colonial history-writing and overshadowed his political communication with various Japanese stakeholders.Footnote ⁹² It will thus not come as a surprise that his encounters with the Japanese ruling elite, in particular his meetings with Tokugawa Hidetada, who disapproved of both his agenda and his attitude, have generally been oversimplified as a failed diplomatic mission.Footnote ⁹³ Yet, when trying to paint an accurate picture of this Spanish colonial figure and his foreign relations portfolio, neither the original records of Vizcaíno’s journey nor the translations of later centuries are particularly helpful.

Vizcaíno’s journal of his travels to, in, and around Japan, although composed as a personal diary but actually penned by the ship’s clerk, Alonso Gascon de Cardona, included information about Vizcaíno’s role as a diplomat. In his translation of Vizcaíno’s Relación (Kingintō tansen hōkoku), Murakami followed the original organization in twelve chapters beginning with the crossing from Acapulco to Uraga, a port in present-day Yokosuka, Kanagawa prefecture, at the time the designated anchoring port for Spanish merchant vessels. The journal included remarks on his correspondence with the bakufu officials, his reception at the courts of Tokugawa Ieyasu and Tokugawa Hidetada, and conveyed details of Japanese court protocol and Vizcaíno’s ceremonial entry into Edo. As such it became a useful source for Murakami when highlighting the sophisticated nature and international compatibility of early modern Japanese foreign relations. The sections describing the honorable treatment that Vizcaíno received from high-ranking officials who fed and accommodated him provided an opportunity to underline the shogunate’s sophisticated diplomatic protocol.

In his portrayal of Vizcaíno as a foreign relations agent, Murakami adopted Vizcaíno’s self-introduction as general (ぜねらる, a phonetic transcription) and envoy, which he translated as shisha (使者).Footnote ⁹⁴ As indicated above, shisha in Japanese usually referred to a low-ranking actor. Yet, contemporary Spanish accounts called him Capitán General y Embajador. Spanish sources on these episodes differed from contemporary Japanese records both in terminological framing and in content: Spanish eyewitness accounts described Vizcaíno’s diplomatic embassy in detail and elaborated on his negotiating qualities and official credentials and the reception of his mission at Tokugawa Hidetada’s court in Edo.Footnote ⁹⁵ These episodes are not mentioned at all in classical Japanese sources.Footnote ⁹⁶ Rather than elaborating on ambassadorial duties, Murakami stressed Vizcaíno’s achievements as an intelligence agent.Footnote ⁹⁷ In other words, he highlighted information-gathering as the prime task of a diplomat, a method that Murakami himself adhered to throughout his professional career.Footnote ⁹⁸

It is, moreover, illuminating to compare how Murakami used Vizcaíno’s account across different publications, such as the Dai nihon shiryō (vol. 12, parts 5, 6, and 12) in which he included two selected chapters of the original journal in Spanish. In addition to the chapters incorporated into the Dai nihon shiryō and the Ikoku ōfuku, Murakami published in 1929 his translation of Vizcaíno’s diary in a combined volume that also included the Relaciones by Vivero y Velasco, another early modern Spanish diplomat in Japan. This was not long after Murakami took up his new position at the Imperial University in Taipei. Under these circumstances the symbolism of this recycled publication is telling: the newly appointed professor of nan’yō history appeared as editor of a book with clear implications for the interpretation of Japan’s past intervention in the Pacific. Murakami elaborated on Vizcaíno’s career, emphasizing his personality as a calculating discoverer while painting a picture of a stubborn antihero of a failed exploration of the gold and silver islands.Footnote ⁹⁹ Murakami described how, when Vizcaíno’s severely weather-damaged ship returned to the Japanese coast, the proud Spanish envoy was forced to ask Japanese authorities for help and material support. His request was eventually granted by Date Masamune, the lord of Sendai domain, who provided a vessel for the Pacific passage back to Mexico. Date’s support of the Spanish crew culminated in another chapter of Japanese engagement with the Pacific, as Date’s ship became the ambassadorial vessel for Hasekura Tsunenaga, who left Japan together with Vizcaíno in late October 1613.

Yamada Nagamasa, whose transformation into an iconic figure of the maritime expansion in the early Tokugawa period has already been recounted, also played a part in Murakami’s history of diplomacy. Although Yamada left no evidence for having been appointed as formal envoy, nor exists any personal correspondence to substantiate official diplomatic tasks, the merchant adventurer from Sunpu became celebrated as a significant player in Siamese–Japanese relations. Once called the most famous Japanese of the seventeenth century, the tension between his reputation and the absence of verifiable historical accounts has important implications for his historicity.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ There is no doubt of his existence, his involvement in overseas trade, or his presence at the Siamese court. Yet, the biographical accounts that circulated during the downright Yamada Nagamasa boom of the 1930s, with more than a dozen books on Yamada being published in Japan, disseminated wild speculations lacking any reflection.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Such propaganda histories had long bothered Murakami, who in 1942 decided to correct them with a monograph based on verifiable historical records. To approximate the life of Yamada Nagamasa, Murakami applied komonjogaku. In so doing he benefited from a strong primary source that Iwao Seiichi had discovered in the archive in The Hague. The original Flemish diary of the Ayutthaya-based merchant Jeremias van Vliet (1602–1663) included stories he had heard about the Japanese merchant and royal guard Okya (Phraya) Senaphimuk.Footnote ¹⁰² The conclusion that Okya Senaphimuk referred to Yamada Nagamasa had already been drawn by Ernest Satow in 1885.Footnote ¹⁰³ Murakami argued that van Vliet’s observations provided new insights when combined with Japanese material in which Yamada appeared as the recipient of a red seal trading license (shuinjō) of the Tokugawa bakufu in 1612 for a passage from Nagasaki to Taiwan.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Shuinjō are indeed critical komonjo for the study of Tokugawa foreign relations. Between 1604 and 1635, the bakufu issued over 350 shuinjō to loyal captains and merchants headed for destinations in Southeast Asia. Recipients often belonged to wealthy mercantile clans from Nagasaki, Sakai, or Sunpu. The licenses helped the regime in Edo to control and ultimately monopolize foreign maritime trade in Japanese silver, Chinese silk, and other commodities such as deerskin. Until 1616, when the first Thai embassy reached Japan, up to four such licenses were distributed annually to merchants operating between Japan, Ayutthaya, and the Sultanate Patani.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ According to bakufu records, Nagamasa received another shuinjō for a trip from Nagasaki to Ayutthaya to accompany a delegation from the Siamese king to Sunpu and Edo.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

A thorough reading of Murakami’s biography of Yamada Nagamasa shows that Murakami’s depiction differed considerably from other accounts at that time. In the 1930s, Nagamasa was commonly styled as a generous leader of the Japanese settlement in Ayutthaya, where he controlled incoming Japanese trade and governed the five hundred residents. Popular history books depicted him as an ideal colonialist and exemplary pioneer of (Pan-)Asianism in the sense of progress through Japanese leadership. Murakami refrained from stressing Yamada’s dedication to Japanese expansionism. Nor did Murakami use Yamada’s robust career at the Ayutthaya court, where he was elevated from the low rank of khun to ok-ya Senaphimuk by King Songtham, who employed him in various military campaigns, including a strike against Spanish galleons from Manila, to praise Yamada’s loyalty or military talent.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ What mattered to Murakami was underscoring Nagamasa’s role as envoy as it helped to support his broader argument about Japanese diplomatic relations in the early Tokugawa period. Although primarily a merchant, Nagamasa was involved in the interrelated games of diplomacy and trade, negotiating special trading arrangements between Siam and Japan, and providing the bakufu with geopolitical information on European privateering activities in coastal Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Murakami’s biography of Yamada transformed the latter into a qualified diplomatic actor on the same level as Vizcaíno. By outlining how in 1621 rōjū (the Tokugawa regime’s elders) prepared a delegation to the Siamese court and entrusted Yamada with delivering the letter, he synchronized European and Japanese practices of diplomatic exchange. In Siam, Yamada would later be chosen to send a letter to Honda Masazumi, a high-ranking Japanese official, which firmly established Yamada as a diplomatic agent.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Literacy played a particular role here: Murakami described not only Yamada Nagamasa’s official correspondence with overseas merchants and Japanese officials but also his frequent letter exchange with other merchants in Southeast Asia. Murakami stressed three key elements in Yamada’s diplomatic profile: first, Yamada’s official rank as court nobleman as part of the delegation from Ayutthaya to Sunpu in 1626, which was indicated in a letter from the king of Siam, which Murakami called a gaikō shokan (外交書簡, ‘diplomatic letter’); second, the diplomatic gifts sent by Hidetada to the king of Siam, which Murakami described in detail as three golden folding screens, three suits of armor, two katanas, and three horses; and third, the credentials from his role as licensed shuinjō merchant of the bakufu.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the process of standardizing foreign correspondence, Murakami rendered shuinjō developed a specific diplomatic documents. These accredited licenses, the result of internal and external negotiations, were a symbol of trust.Footnote ¹¹¹ In addition, they were printed on ōtaka danshi, the high-quality paper used for state documents and introduced in Chapter 3.Footnote ¹¹² This material aspect had an additional comparative value in light of symbolic diplomatic communication across Eurasia.Footnote ¹¹³ By implicitly stressing Yamada’s qualities as a diplomatic actor, Murakami embedded him in the history of early modern gaikō.

Murakami was not the only one to recognize the narrative potential of Yamada as a diplomat. In 1913, King Vajira (Rama VI) of Thailand requested that the Japanese ambassador to Siam, Tokichi Masao (1871–1921), to look for materials concerning Siamese–Japanese relations. Tokichi, who in hagiographical comparative fashion was posthumously honored as ‘second Yamada Nagamasa’ for his work as legal advisor to the Thai court, in turn contracted Mikami Sanji, a renowned Japanese history professor at Tōdai and member of the Imperial Academy, where he would collaborate with Murakami.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Two decades later, in 1936, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Thai ambassador to Japan provided on-screen introductions to a film production about Nagamasa to celebrate the friendly relations (shinzen) between Siam and Japan. The project was initiated by the Siam Association, whose members promoted the film as the “greatest gift for the friendly relations between the two countries.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Unsurprisingly, the soft power initiative exaggerated the size and importance of the Japanese community in Ayutthaya with claims of several thousand Japanese living in the ‘Japanese village’ around 1630, which were clearly nothing that Murakami cared for. Still, while hyperbolic narratives were not part of Murakami’s repertoire, it was he who drew a parallel between the shuinsen merchant Yamada Nagamasa and “Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of the New World.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ This implicit comparison of two adventurers can be seen as an act of synchronization of biographical narratives in which individual agency played a key role.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Murakami thus joined in the efforts by educators, diplomats, and missionaries, who, consciously or not, cultivated an image of Yamada as a bilaterally minded statesman rather than an opportunistic merchant.

Archives, Gifts, and Knowledge

While there is no indication that Murakami was a Hispanophile, professional and personal connections to Spain – through his teaching duties and contacts with the Spanish Embassy in Tokyo – shaped Murakami’s career and thinking as a historian. Fernando de Carranza, a member of the embassy in Tokyo in the late 1920s, possessed one of the rare copies of Vivero’s Relación del Reino de Japón, the seventeenth-century diary written for the Spanish king.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Murakami borrowed the old manuscript when finishing the combined volume of Vivero’s and Vizcaíno’s accounts of Japan.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Mesmerized by Murakami’s efforts in illustrating the historical relations between Japan, Spain, and Mexico, Caranza would eventually give his rare book to Murakami as a present.Footnote ¹²⁰ With this act, the writing of diplomatic history itself was legitimized by an exchange of gifts, where the gift functioned according to the logic of reciprocity: Murakami received an object precious to him, and Carranza obtained confirmation for the exceptional Spanish involvement in Japanese foreign relations in return.Footnote ¹²¹ In the long run, his dissemination efforts on behalf of Spanish history gained Murakami something much dearer: recognition as an expert (‘le savant historien’) in Spanish history.Footnote ¹²²

Murakami’s Spanish connection dated back to the early stage of his career. He was the first Japanese historian to work in the Spanish archives.Footnote ¹²³ During his visits at the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) and the Archivo General de Simancas (AGS), he did not fail to notice the symbolic power inherent in places like the castle in Simancas (which hosted the AGS) and the picturesque Casa Lonja de Mercaderes (est. 1584–98). Both buildings were carefully chosen by the Spanish imperial state to showcase its historical and bureaucratic power. The AGI hosted in Casa Lonja in Seville underlined the importance of the American colonies for Spanish imperial history.Footnote ¹²⁴ Together with the Real Academia de la Historia (founded in 1775), these institutions bore witness to Spain’s strong sense of preserving and making use of the past. The Real Academia and the Indias archive were far more than repositories of administrative records of the past. Like the historians frequenting them, they were powerful actants in the process of disseminating and hiding knowledge.Footnote ¹²⁵

Both the buildings and the institutionalized authority of Spanish archives feature in Murakami’s Japanese scholarship. Murakami regularly included photographs of the Spanish archives in his publications. He was drawn in by Spanish archivists’ dedication to the study of the past and impressed by explicitly labeled institutions such as the AGI. As a well-organized storehouse of files and documents produced by the overseas Spanish bureaucracy, it represented a pivotal modern archive that helped to preserve the country’s imperial pasts. As such, imperial archives had an important representative function and drove Murakami’s thinking and analyses: as recognizable sites of historical knowledge production for komonjogaku, they epitomized true historical craft.

Murakami gradually turned European archives into transnational spaces for writing diplomatic history. One institution that played a significant role in this process is the Archivio di Stato in Venice. This is where Leopold von Ranke worked in the 1830s and where, in 1873, a Japanese delegation touring Europe was presented with letters from Christian converts visiting Europe in 1587. Prior to his own visit to this archive, Murakami had seen the handwritten copies of the letters drafted in 1873 by Kume Kunitake, the chronicler of what became known as the Iwakura Mission (1871–3). These letters came to play a fundamental role in the process of creating and defining gaikō monjo. Their unexpected finding motivated a quest for gaikō monjo and fueled historians’ desire to discover something completely forgotten in hidden archives and temples. Ranke himself had identified his dream of becoming the “Columbus of Venetian history.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The performative act of the archival historian as a discoverer or even conqueror (to paraphrase Bonnie Smith) was particularly common among historians dealing with early modern foreign relations in Japanese history, as the unknown loomed large.Footnote ¹²⁷

The material that Murakami gathered in European archives provided the foundations for the foreign manuscript department of the Historiographical Institute. Known as nihon kankei kaigai shiryō (the institute’s department for foreign manuscripts related to Japan), the department remains an unchallenged authority when it comes to the accessibility of translated manuscripts. Archival capital (both in knowledge and material) was also instrumental in building a loyal network of disciples over the decades. One of Murakami’s protégés was Iwao Seiichi, who started to work closely with Murakami in Taipei. Yet, while Iwao inherited many of Murakami’s research areas, ideologically he was heavily influenced by his first teacher Kuroita Katsumi.Footnote ¹²⁸ Kuroita, whose career as a historian began parallel to Murakami’s at Tōdai in the 1890s, adhered to an explicitly nationalist agenda based on the grand narrative of Japanese superiority. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the cosmopolitan nature of Kuroita’s multipurpose scholarship included doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia, attending international conferences in archaeology and Esperanto, as well as making academic social calls to Ludwig Riess, Oskar Nachod, and even Ernest Satow during a trip to Europe in 1928.Footnote ¹²⁹ Iwao’s own scholarship developed in European archives in the late 1920s. As a graduate student he picked up on bilateral histories still uncovered by Murakami: first, a study on Portuguese–Japanese relations and the final years of Japanese–English exchange, followed by an in-depth study of Japanese–Dutch relations.Footnote ¹³⁰ While his name is intrinsically linked to the scholarship on Japanese and Chinese presence in seventeenth-century Southeast Asia, a topic discussed in Chapter 5, his achievements as an archival agent for Japan-related sources stored in The Hague are noteworthy. As his discoveries of and lively engagement with Dutch primary sources inspired generations of history students in and outside Japan, an entangled biography approach to Iwao’s life could inform a better understanding of the special focus that early modern East Asian trade and diplomacy has received in more recent global history.Footnote ¹³¹

Alongside Iwao Seiichi, Matsuda Kiichi (1921–1997) followed in Murakami’s footsteps as an archival discoverer. Remembered by students as an enthusiastic Spanish teacher who used to bring sixteenth-century Spanish sources to basic language courses, Matsuda received his degree from Sophia University (1941–7) during Murakami’s professorship.Footnote ¹³² He began researching the Japanese ‘Christian century’ at the Archivo Romanum Societatis Iesu in Rome, which ever since has functioned as a repository for new knowledge of the Japanese encounter with the Catholic faith. In 1964, Matsuda compiled an updated inventory of historical documents in archives and libraries in Italy, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Macau.Footnote ¹³³ By this time, his focus had shifted toward foreign exchange. His book Nippo kōshōshi (History of Japanese–Portuguese relations), published in 1963, in which he framed the diplomatic exchange and negotiation practices between the Europeans and Japan as gaikō, significantly overlapped with Iwao’s and Murakami’s research in content and methodology.Footnote ¹³⁴ Catchy titles such as Taikō to gaikō. Hideyoshi bannen no fūbō (which I have loosely translated as “The general and of diplomatic relations: Hideyoshi’s personality at the end of his life”) conveyed the familiar view of ‘great men’ controlling early modern Japanese foreign relations.Footnote ¹³⁵ Promoting proactive Japanese overseas delegations, Matsuda wrote about diplomatic milestones such as the Tenshō mission in the 1580s, the 1596 San Felipe incident in Tosa, and the Japanese delegation under Hasekura Tsunenaga to Europe.Footnote ¹³⁶ While Murakami’s selective source compilations shaped a general understanding of classic diplomatic relations documents (gaikō monjo), Matsuda focused on promoting the discovery of namban manuscripts (namban shiryō no hakken). Matsuda’s work thus became foundational for the growing mainstream interest in namban history.

Male actors, albeit not great men by definition or label, as the only protagonists of Japanese foreign relations continued to hold center-stage in the late twentieth-century work of Nagazumi Yōko, the first female humanities professor at Tokyo University. As a student of Iwao Seiichi, her academic worldview was shaped in the foreign manuscripts department at the Historiographical Institute. Nagazumi methodologically and thematically adopted the approach of previous generations of male historians. Both her dissertation (‘Early Modern Foreign Relations’ – Kinsei shoki no gaikō, submitted at Tōdai in 1990) and her book-length study of shuinsen – Tokugawa Japanese merchant vessels equipped with shuinjō – played a pivotal role in reviving interest in historical foreign relations. Her work is conspicuously silent on women as historical actors.Footnote ¹³⁷ Excluding women from namban history and Japanese early modern expansion happened in an environment where asymmetrical gender relations were neither discussed nor problematized. The patriarchal perspective within the realm of academic history and topic choices survived into the twenty-first century.Footnote ¹³⁸ Suffice it to say that over the past two decades, the number of female Japanese researchers working on the history of gaikō has grown significantly, while women and gender questions have received increasing attention.Footnote ¹³⁹

Expansion is without doubt one of those topics that have prompted an overemphasis on male actors. The maritime expansion framework thus partially explains the massive gender gap in the existing scholarship. One could even argue with Hannah Arendt that within the domain of male chauvinism expansion “was accepted as an instrument of national politics.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Officers, career diplomats, scholars, settlers, and businessmen saw the solution to various challenges in expansion. When Japan joined the imperial powers’ club in the late nineteenth century, expansion (bōchō) – which was often linked to mercantile spirit and pioneering (kaitoku) – was the buzzword for many state agents with obvious imperialist motivations. Within historical and ethnographic scholarship, countless studies on the theme of expansion spread the trope of bold men involved in building Japanese institutions and infrastructure overseas. These studies claimed that their actions fostered lasting relations based on ideology, strategy, coercion, or commercial calculus. Chapter 5 will shed further light on how expansion became an intrinsic element in Japanese history texts concerned with namban and kirishitan shi as integral parts of the historical subdiscipline of nan’yōshi, the history of Japanese relations with Southeast Asia, which emerged as the flagship of scholarly colonialism in the interwar period.

Concluding Remarks

After Murakami passed away at his home close to Kamakura in September 1966 at the age of ninety-eight, the Japan Academy held an extraordinary summit dedicated to his memory. About two dozen speakers delivered eulogies for the most senior Japanese historian and pioneer in Japanese Christian history.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Participants included his two daughters, colleagues, and students such as Matsuda Kiichi and Yanai Kenji.Footnote ¹⁴² Iwao Seiichi did not read his own tribute but was involved in the event’s organization as an academy member.Footnote ¹⁴³ A commemorating ceremony at Sophia University’s Saint Ignacio Church and his tomb’s location at the prestigious Kamakura Rei-en – a cemetery in the historical town of Kamakura with a view of Mount Fuji – are tokens of appreciation, albeit – I feel – comparatively modest ones. The recollections of a diverse range of people of their specific relationships with Murakami are useful sources for the entangled biography approach while, moreover, providing missing details about Murakami’s private, personal, public, and professional lives.

The eulogies were published by the Association for Christian Culture (kirishitan bunka kenkyūkai), a learned society linked to Sophia University, Murakami’s last intellectual home. While such accounts are by nature selective and partial, most contributions proved to be less hagiographic than expected. When reading them, I learned about Murakami the loving father who indulged in Anglo-Saxon cultural imports, the Murakami who donated his Portuguese grammar books and dictionaries to a distant acquaintance, and the Murakami who displayed his vitality at the age of seventy-two when taking over as dean (later president) at Sophia University. Other accounts ask to be read against the grain. For instance, Kobayashi Yoshio (1902–1980), a Christian studies scholar and professor at Sophia University, hinted at the rivalry in namban scholarship in eastern and western Japan in which Murakami and Shinmura Izuru – the author of the Records of the Southern Barbarians (first published as Namban kōki in 1925 and later in 1943 as Namban ki) – appeared as early opponents.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Murakami and Shinmura were linked by the same double biases of being emotionally attached to what Shinmura once called ‘Christian languages’ and being convinced of the importance of written primary manuscripts. Their editorial and linguistic work defined the concept of ‘namban’ as label and periodization for the Japanese–European encounter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and moreover underscored the diplomatic dimension of these relations.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Shinmura was indeed driven by rivalry when it came to the discovery of original manuscripts in European archives, as a snappish comment indicates about Murakami having missed an important document in the archive in Evora.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Kobayashi detected yet another bone of contention: Shinmura’s aesthetic prose differed markedly from Murakami’s monotone style that relied heavily on classical Japanese (bungo).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Kobayashi’s eulogy resonates with other obituaries revealing that Murakami’s overemphasis on mere translations was not without critics in Japan.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Yet, there were occasions when Murakami could not resist the temptation of a good story. During his time at Taihoku Imperial University (1929–35), Murakami was actively involved in imperialist projects and guided by the self-interest of the regime that employed him. A telling example is his involvement with the Association Commemorating Three Hundred Years of Taiwanese Culture (台湾文化三百年記念会, Taiwan bunka sanbyakunen kinenkai). Its aim was to celebrate the Dutch colonizers as bearers of civilization. In various publications and events, members of this association emphasized the civilizational achievements of the foreigners while obscuring the violence they perpetrated and the losses suffered by the Indigenous population.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Although Murakami objected to explicit imperialist language and propagandistic scholarship, there were also many occasions on which he, consciously or not, contributed to the meta-narrative of early modern Japanese superiority. The remaining part of this book will show that there are many more indications of complicit imperialist tendencies. Murakami was capable of epistemic and historiographical violence through selective representations of certain actors and events and purposeful omissions of others.