I

Knowledge about seventeenth-century foreign exchange played an instrumental role in the making of the Japanese past. This article explores how academic historians shaped the genealogy of Japanese engagement with the outside world during the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialist intervention in the South China Seas and the Pacific. It is hoped that the current study will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of change within imperial knowledge circulation of what we call early modern Japanese foreign relations, commonly referred to as gaikō 外交 (Chinese waijiao) in the Sinosphere.Footnote ¹ The indigenous term gaikō aims to emphasize the various levels of the co-production of knowledge involving Chinese, Japanese, and European practices of interpreting and writing about the past. The article will approach early modern foreign relations through the life and work of the imperial historian Murakami Naojirō 村上直次郎 (1868–1966) and make use of the case study of Yamada Nagamasa 山田長政 (1590–1630) to unpack the empirical, institutional, and translational choices behind a narrative of early modern expansion.

While the importance of Murakami's scholarly output, including source compilations and translations (among them the instrumental government-sponsored Dai Nihon shiryō), is widely acknowledged in Japan, this article seeks to trace his scholarly choices and investigates potential hidden agendas in his allegedly neutral scholarship. Looking specifically at what nowadays would be referred to as the connected histories of the China seas, it analyses how Murakami framed historical sources. Introducing a close reading of concrete examples of his work, the survey explores his specific use of the past and how implicit comparisons served him to construct both geographical and empirical connections between East Asia and Europe. Maritime expansion as the practice of foreign relations became a key element of this story. While these claims are often only indirectly articulated, Murakami's publications are full of references to individual decision-making as a driving force behind these developments.Footnote ² As a result, the narrative of synchronized pre-modern Japanese and European advances into South-east Asia had a chance to become deeply rooted in the collective memory of Japanese history.Footnote ³

In recent years, scholarship in global conceptual history has discovered Reinhart Koselleck's theory of how any past is reproduced linguistically for a better understanding of political and historical processes beyond national boundaries and essentialist explanations.Footnote ⁴ The example of Yamada Nagamasa will show that it was not the historian or translator of later periods alone who determined these epistemological processes. In fact, co-production could occur at any moment of social interaction.Footnote ⁵ New encounters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resulted in a shared understanding of the worlds in which people interacted, but also in unconscious co-production of concepts.Footnote ⁶

Murakami Naojirō and Yamada Nagamasa lived three hundred years apart, yet they had more in common than their Japanese origin. Both were mobile imperial agents in their own rights. They benefited personally from their accesses to different worlds: living abroad and frequenting institutions such as ruling courts, multi-ethnic networks (Yamada Nagamasa was integrated in multinational trading networks including those of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Dutch, and Spanish merchants), and colonial archives respectively allowed them to accumulate knowledge for future interpretation.Footnote ⁷ In examining Yamada Nagamasa's and Murakami's embedded knowledge production, I contend that their works had an impact on the writing and thinking of Japanese foreign relations to the extent of changing the historicity of Japan's early modern global integration.Footnote ⁸ Their awareness of change and changing attitudes towards the times in which they lived contributed to a different understanding of Japan's place in world history.Footnote ⁹

II

The first generation of university-trained historians in Japan is likely to have felt the tensions between experiences and expectations, which, according to Koselleck, generated a new, modern sense of historical time, while in the same process political concepts became more abstract and oriented towards the future.Footnote ¹⁰ This began in the 1890s, when history as an academic discipline as practised at Tokyo Imperial University (Tōkyō teikoku daigaku) came to set the standards for academic research: based on verifiable data, academic historians interpreted primary sources for Japanese nation- and empire-building.Footnote ¹¹ In addition, the aspiring Meiji empire looked for ways to communicate the distinctiveness of the nation's past to a heterogenous audience.Footnote ¹² With a better take on multiple temporalities in the discovery of the past, Japanese scholars set out to tackle the problem of early modernity (kinsei 近世) as related to the Japanese state and society.Footnote ¹³ Newly discovered knowledge about pre-modern Japanese encounters with Europe came to attract both scholarly and public interest. From the moment when the members of the Iwakura mission (1871–3) were presented with letters by Christian converts from Kyushu visiting Europe in 1587 – a forgotten episode in Japanese history – in the Biblioteca del Reale Archivo del Stato in Venice, historians were encouraged to work archivally.Footnote ¹⁴

The source discovery was essential to Japanese history, not only because of its content, but also because of its location. From that point onwards, the physical archive as the place of storage of written documents would provide the authors of national histories with a space for dialogue with forgotten pasts. Murakami's contribution focused largely on Japan's engagement with the outside world. For seven decades, he collected material showing what past foreign relations actually (or essentiallyFootnote ¹⁵) looked like. His understanding of late nineteenth-century diplomatic practices as paramount would ultimately change the way that scholars talked about the period in which Europe encountered Japan and Japan in turn encountered South-east Asia and the Pacific. Hence, the terms he used to describe them often originated from the language of modern diplomatic relations such as shinzen 親善 for friendly relations or kōshō 交渉 for negotiation, and could, in retrospect, be called anachronistic. In his day, however, Murakami helped to redefine Japan's position in the wider world. The way in which he arranged historical sources regarding early modern Japan's encounter with the West constituted discourses of formal, horizontal relations with the outside world. In short, he added another layer of knowledge to the history of Japanese foreign relations, the beginning of a new diplomatic age within and beyond Sino-centred gaikō.

Gaikō, although commonly translated as ‘diplomacy’, is a complex concept with various meanings. For the pre-modern period it is considered as a specifically East Asian type of ritualized exchange.Footnote ¹⁶ For the modern era, the Friendship and Trade treaty between Meiji Japan and Qing China of 1871 introduced a new type of gaikō in the Sinosphere.Footnote ¹⁷ Historians working on this topic have stressed that gaikō and diplomacy in late nineteenth-century foreign relations were not semantic equivalents. In contrast to many other legal terms and concepts which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Sino-Japanese lexicon, gaikō was not a neologism.Footnote ¹⁸ As Morita Yoshihiko's etymological examination has shown, the term gaikō had existed in classical Chinese for centuries, but had always been tied to the notion of an envoy; it only became applied as a general term for diplomacy in the translation of Henry Wheaton's Elements of international law (1836) in 1864, and it first emerged as a direct translation for diplomacy in Japanese in 1888. All other types of bilateral exchange were referred to as tsūshin 通信 or kōeki 交易 in both Japan and China before the 1860s.Footnote ¹⁹ Needless to say, Murakami did not describe the subject of his research as gaikō; what he did, however, was to consistently integrate examples of Japan's bilateral trading relations with the history of the formation of a Japanese nation based on formal negotiations and correspondence.

Murakami's narrative of past foreign relations staged South-east Asia as a space for Tokugawa policy-makers to practise dynamic, multi-directional, and self-determined foreign relations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In hindsight we could interpret this as Murakami's way of stressing that early Tokugawa Japan had stepped onto the path of modernity: in other words, it had become ‘early modern’, despite his consistent avoidance of the term (he used Japanese era names or centuries as time markers). His source compilations show how Tokugawa rulers employed the conventions of official gaikō following Confucian diplomatic protocol based on the ideas of tributary relations within the framework of the tianxia 天下 and the exchange of state letters (kokusho 国書) written by an entitled group of Zen Buddhist monks.Footnote ²⁰ This rigid letter-based diplomatic culture strictly defined what would fall into the category of gaikō as opposed to taigai kankei 対外関係, or ‘foreign relations’.Footnote ²¹ The latter included relations with Tsushima, and with Ryūkyū during the Edo period, as well as all other types of maritime exchange including Japanese pirate (wakō 倭寇) operations in the China seas or red seal ships (shuinsen 朱印船) trade.Footnote ²²

The semantic closeness of Leopold von Ranke's term ‘diplomatics’ to ‘diplomacy’ as official foreign relations based on written documents raises questions about the links between komonjo gaku 古文書学 (or Japanese ‘diplomatics’) and writing about official foreign relations (gaikō).Footnote ²³ Defining official foreign relations documents based on their purpose, material, and formal characteristics (such as a ruler's signature or an official stamp), Murakami created equivalents to the sources used in Rankean European diplomatics.Footnote ²⁴ These documents dealt in one way or another with ‘foreign countries’ (or with the ancient Japanese concept of ikoku 異国).Footnote ²⁵ Within the process of compiling, translating, and annotating, he continued to classify and categorize both documents and events as part of a history of early modern foreign exchange. Murakami, being obsessed with the idea of official documents as proof for state-to-state relations, attempted to create a canon of foreign relations documents which would integrate contact with Europe into the category of gaikō monjo 外交文書, or ‘sources of foreign relations’. In other words, the boundaries between historical sources (komonjo) and foreign relation sources (gaikō monjo) blurred.

In 1911, Murakami prepared the first printed edition of the Ikoku nikki shō.Footnote ²⁶ The original Ikoku nikki (Chronicle of foreign countries) was a source compilation of official correspondence between Japan and rulers in South-east Asia and Europe. It was primarily compiled by the foreign relations monk Ishin Sūden 以心崇伝 (1569–1633) of the Nanzen-ji. The Zen Buddhist monks of the Nanzen temple in Kyoto were thoroughly trained in Chinese classics and the diplomatic and ceremonial practices of the Sinosphere. They drafted official letters, collected information, and edited translations of foreign diplomatic letters to match them with the Sino-Japanese protocol. Eventually they copied these translations into the Ikoku nikki and other chronicles for preservation and future reference. Unlike his contemporary Tsuji Zennosuke (1877–1955), who had worked with the Ikoku nikki for his extensive Kaigai kōtsū shiwa (Historical essay on foreign communication, 1917) and then published its source transcriptions over six years in a historical journal, Murakami transcribed and annotated selected sections and published them in one volume.Footnote ²⁷ The edition was supplemented with the Ikoku go-shuinchō 異国ご朱印帳 (Register of red seal licences to foreign countries), a list of shuinjō 朱印状 passes for the Tokugawa Bakufu's official overseas trade (1604–35). In 1929, Murakami published an extended version under the title Ikoku ōfuku shokanshū (Collection of letter exchange with foreign countries): in addition to the transcript of the Ikoku nikki he included translations of nearly fifty letters exchanged between various Japanese rulers and representatives of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, England, the Netherlands, and the pope between 1570 and 1641, rendering them into gaikō monjo. Footnote ²⁸

It was not only as a translator-historian that Murakami shaped narrative strategies and conceptual co-productions, but also as a second-rank scholar-diplomat.Footnote ²⁹ His work in government-funded historiographical projects meant that he was involved in informing Japanese imperialism on various levels: as one of the few Spanish translators in Meiji Japan, he translated official correspondence with Spanish-speaking head of states for the Japanese foreign ministry.Footnote ³⁰ In the 1920s he worked for the Japan Academy in allocating sources for historical intelligence projects. Not only in von Ranke's time but from the 1890s to the 1940s, the ‘exchange of informations [sic] about historical documents’ remained a diplomatic operation.Footnote ³¹ In the case of Japan and Europe itself, this involved academies, archives, and state embassies, as the records at the Japan Academy show.

When the Taishō (1912–26) government sent Murakami as the official Japanese delegate to the Panama Pacific Historical Congress held in June 1915 – where he lectured about the historically justified interests of the Japanese nation in the Pacific – his function as a second-rank diplomat became particularly apparent. In front of politicians and leading American scholars he connected past relations to Japan's current geopolitical interest in the Pacific, remarking that ‘It is only ten years since the steamers of the Tōyō Kisen Kwaisha began to run between the ports of Japan and Mexico, but attempts to open the same route were made more than three hundred years ago by one of the greatest statesmen of Japan.’Footnote ³² Here, he referred to Tokugawa Ieyasu's (1543–1616) aspiration to send ships directly to New Spain in the early years of the seventeenth century. Murakami's outspoken admiration for Ieyasu's global aspiration was more than geopolitical boasting. It was also an attempt to rehabilitate the Tokugawa regime, which had to take the blame for Japan's ‘backwardness’ in the nineteenth century. In this regard the congress chairman's labelling of the only two participating countries outside the Americas, Spain and Japan, as ‘old’ and ‘new’ powers ‘interested in things of the Pacific Ocean’ must have made the modernizing Taishō state proud.Footnote ³³

The congress in San Francisco was one of the rare examples of Murakami disseminating his research abroad. His usual target audience was domestic and in reaching it he received help from various institutions. For instance, national newspapers mediated and translated his scholarship for public consumption not only by digesting narratives but also by introducing newly published work. The Tokyo Asahi Shimbun 朝日新聞 frequently featured Murakami's editions. A closer look at these book advertisements reveals that these short texts themselves must have been thoroughly planned dissemination exercises, providing the reader with the relevant keywords of past Japanese participation in foreign relations and its strong position in South-east Asia in the early modern period.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, from the 1910s to the 1930s Murakami was actively involved in textbook publications and popular history books.Footnote ³⁵ In an essay in the imperial periodical Taiyō 太陽 (The Sun, 1895–1928) he elaborated on how writing history and editing sources were not the same thing.Footnote ³⁶ He argued that, while there was no objective way to narrate historical events in monographs, in source compilations the historical sources themselves would always effectively determine their own meaning. However, the source compilations that Murakami participated in, from the Historical documents concerning Japan (Dai Nihon shiryō 大日本史料) to the accounts of the Dutch factory in Hirado and the Jesuit annual letters to Rome, suggest otherwise. To evaluate the relationship between publications and lecturing (both inside and outside academia) is a particularly difficult task. Indeed, the above-mentioned source compilations were oriented towards a small group of scientifically minded historians and university students. However, the themes he chose for his public lectures in the 1920s and 1930s followed the same narrative frame as the referential works based on European primary sources. There was always a very close focus on the interactions between the European colonial presence in Asia and the expanding Japanese merchant mercantilism of the early Tokugawa state.Footnote ³⁷ Both in public lectures and in academic publications Murakami used the first-person plural, ‘we’ and ‘us’, when describing past events. The experience of the Japanese individuals active in the Nan'yō 南洋 (Southern Seas) represented wa ga kuni 我国 (‘our country’) without exception.Footnote ³⁸ Murakami's engaging tone created a strong bond between national ancestors and contemporary imperial subjects, between past and future participation in expansionism by individual Japanese then and now, thus hinting at the ever-present potential for active imperial engagement.

III

When media and propaganda scholarship celebrated Yamada Nagamasa as a key actor in reaching out to South-east Asia during the history fever of the 1890s, this clear image stood in stark contrast to what was actually known about him.Footnote ³⁹ No one seriously tried to prove Nagamasa's ambitions as a seagoing merchant committed to increasing the influence of his community in Ayutthaya or even that of Ieyasu beyond the shores of Japan – a fact that bothered the generation of newly graduated historians from Tōdai, including Murakami Naojirō, who were instructed in the techniques and theories of Rankean historicism by the German historian Ludwig Rieß (1861–1928). Early generations of academic historians were educated in a mix of European diplomatics, universal history, and Confucian philology known as kōshōgaku 考証学 (‘evidentiary learning’); with its respect for evidence and facts, this was an important intellectual grid for the first generations of historians.Footnote ⁴⁰

For Murakami, Yamada Nagamasa was one of the many aspects of Japanese participation in early modern maritime exchange in East and South-east Asia that he needed to draw together with the help of foreign records. This agenda led him to travel and engage with foreign-language sources and literature, collecting, compiling, transcribing, editing, and translating sources in various languages. In the year of his graduation from Tokyo Imperial University in 1896, the newly appointed governor general of Taiwan assigned him to search for records showing Japanese involvement with the powerful Zheng empire in Kagoshima, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Xiamen.Footnote ⁴¹ This was when Murakami first came to identify joint Japanese and Chinese operations in the South China Sea, a view that differed profoundly from the popular historical image of Japanese pirates and adventurers.Footnote ⁴² More recent revisionist scholarship has convincingly argued that multi-ethnic communities of wakō, despite their status as outlaws, backed maritime exchange in the China seas between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁴³ Yet, in public discourse in the late Meiji and Taishō periods, propaganda for the southward expansion of Japan developed a purely Japanese version of wakō. Seiji Shirane has elaborated how scholars and politicians in the early twentieth century overemphasized circumstantial evidence of sixteenth-century wakō raids towards the Philippines for the sake of implying a continuity of Japanese presence there.Footnote ⁴⁴ Being purely East Asian, the wakō spirit was a welcome example of an emerging dynamic commercial organization which developed before the arrival of the Europeans and was thus independent of Western influence. In interwar Japan, educational youth literature titles advocated the spirit of a people in motion.Footnote ⁴⁵

Murakami's German mentor, Ludwig Rieß – who, in addition to his work on the ‘History of the English factory at Hirado, 1613–1623’, published an extensive essay on Taiwanese history in 1897 – encouraged his protégé to continue researching the history of the island. Hence, Murakami began to publish on Taiwan's colonial past.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was, in particular, previously discovered rare source material – so-called Sinkan contracts drawn up between the indigenous Sirayans and Dutch merchants – that allowed Murakami to investigate pre-nineteenth-century Taiwanese history.Footnote ⁴⁷

Two years later, Murakami finished his first book-length publication. The two-volume edition of a diary by the head of the English factory in Hirado, Richard Cocks, was a valuable source for tracing seventeenth-century Japanese connections in the China seas.Footnote ⁴⁸ After having read an 1883 edition of the diary by the palaeographer and British Museum librarian Edward Maunde Thompson, Murakami decided to make the source available for Japanese historians. Surprisingly, his ‘Japanese’ edition was a mere reproduction of the English text without any translation. In the preface – likewise written in English – Murakami reveals his intentions:

With regard to his editing efforts he pointed out that

While Murakami is certainly right about the many corrupted Japanese titles, names, and places in the English edition, expressing criticism helped him to place Japanese historians on a par with their Western peers and allowed him to suggest that the former were better qualified when it came to historical sources concerning Japan. By mentioning the dictionary, he accomplished two things: first, he integrated Tokugawa Japanese relations with Europe into the world historical context of English merchant capitalism in Asia; and, second, he subtly hinted at the English editor's omissions.Footnote ⁵¹ The preface is followed by several hundred pages of detailed accounts of the multinational maritime merchant community based on the small island of Hirado, the main trading centre for Dutch, English, and overseas Chinese merchants until 1641.Footnote ⁵² These accounts reveal the rivalries and collaborations of individual members of different backgrounds who all shared the characteristics of pragmatism, an entrepreneurial spirit, and courage.Footnote ⁵³

At the same time, Murakami's discoveries about early modern Japanese crossing the sea to South-east Asian port cities, and their lives and experiences there, were gradually mediated to a broader public. This shared process of knowledge production not only synchronized Japan with Western colonial powers but also provided a chapter on its past role within the Sinosphere: the trope of maritime private agency and entrepreneurial spirit as a signifier of early modernity was a way to stress the equal abilities of Japanese with Chinese maritime merchants and the overseas Chinese network. In this way, the Nan'yō turned into a shared discursive space, combining Murakami's knowledge, language skills, and political functions, and the geopolitical agendas of his employers.

Soon afterwards, Murakami collaborated with Kengo Murakawa (1875–1946), the translator of Leopold von Ranke's world history,Footnote ⁵⁴ in editing letters exchanged by English merchants in Japan. In the preface to the edition, he explains how ‘The history of Japan's early relations with Europe is now interesting many Japanese scholars. The present volume … will supply them with the most important materials for the history of the intercourse with England.’Footnote ⁵⁵ This is again reminiscent of Murakami's life-long desire to shed light on Japan's forgotten engagement with the outside world, encouraged by his mentor's example.Footnote ⁵⁶ During a research leave from Tōdai in 1893, Ludwig Rieß had arranged that transcripts of archival material dealing with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan would be sent to Japan.Footnote ⁵⁷ Murakami understood that there was the promise of many additional documents from these archives. Between the summer of 1899 and 1902 he also carried out archival research in Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.Footnote ⁵⁸ During his stay in Europe, which he described as study abroad for the ‘languages, history and geography of the Nan'yō’,Footnote ⁵⁹ he began to gradually feed his fellow historians (and ultimately a larger public) with brand-new insights from Western source material: for instance, from an inventory of Japanese-language sources in London and the Archivo General de Simancas (Spain), or from vocabulary lists extracted from sixteenth-century linguistic manuals.Footnote ⁶⁰ From 1901 onwards, the Shigaku Zasshi 史学雑誌 (Historical Journal) as the first and main scientific journal for historical studies began to publish Murakami's archival reports.Footnote ⁶¹

In the 1910s, when Murakami was president of the renowned Tokyo School of Foreign Languages (the later Tokyo University of Foreign Languages, 東京外国語大学) ‘history fever’ had long turned into ‘southern advance fever’ (Nanshin netsu 南進熱) in Japan.Footnote ⁶² This was a symptom of the expanding nanshinron 南進論, the idea of the Southern Seas as a new and non-contested frontier for a Japanese territorial expansion and economic intervention. Politicians and intellectuals alike used examples of past relations such as the Japanese presence in South-east Asian ports to justify a maritime expansionist cause into the South China Sea and the Pacific.Footnote ⁶³ As indicated, this public discourse on the Japanese economic and political engagement in the Southern Seas pre-dated academic efforts at writing and teaching about it. However, its common themes, including maritime protagonists such as Yamada Nagamasa, wakō, and Japanese migrants to South-east Asian port cities, served Murakami's own agenda as a point of departure. One example was Luzon in the Philippines, which became a popular destination for Japanese merchant vessels after the colonization by Spain and was where opportunistic Japanese merchants such as two named Harada actively forged bilateral relations between the two islands.Footnote ⁶⁴

Yamada Nagamasa first appeared in official records in 1612 as the recipient of a red seal trading licence (shuinjō) from the Tokugawa Bakufu for a passage from Nagasaki to Taiwan.Footnote ⁶⁵ Since 1604, the Bakufu had issued these licences first to control and ultimately to monopolize foreign maritime trade in Japanese silver, Chinese silk, and other commodities being shipped by European and overseas Chinese merchants. By inviting foreign rulers to participate in the Bakufu's licensed trade, shuinjō trading passes were a significant element in its foreign relations practice. They served the Bakufu as means to reach out to South-east Asian rulers with diplomatic letters. Until 1635, when the system was abolished, the above-mentioned foreign relations monks issued and recorded 180 shuinjō and 60 pass recipients. Between 1604 and 1616, up to four passes were issued annually for Ayutthaya and Patani in the Siamese kingdom. Indeed, Tokugawa Ieyasu sent a first diplomatic letter to the Thai king in July 1606 together with a shuinjō, in which he requested aloe wood and some guns. Honda Masazumi 本多正純 (1566–1637) also sent letters to his ministerial counterpart in Siam.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1616, the first Thai embassy reached Japan.Footnote ⁶⁷

Yamada Nagamasa became a key figure in this inter-related story of diplomacy and trade. In 1626, he led a delegation from the Siamese king to Sunpu and Edo as the envoy of the Siamese king.Footnote ⁶⁸ The embassy was given an audience with the shogun, in which the fine royal letter and gifts were presented.Footnote ⁶⁹ Japanese records thus list Nagamasa as recipient of a shuinjō for the return trip from Nagasaki to Ayutthaya.Footnote ⁷⁰ During that stay in Japan, Yamada Nagamasa sought the patronage of an influential elder (rōjū 老中) of the Bakufu, Sakai Tadayo 酒井忠世 (1572–1636). He negotiated special trading arrangements between Siam and Japan and moreover provided the Bakufu with geopolitical information, including the privateering activities of Europeans.Footnote ⁷¹ This episode would qualify Nagamasa as an important agent of state affairs and point to a link between seagoing merchants and gaikō as important tropes in Murakami's interpretation of early modern connections. The ceremonial coronation of Vajiravudh (Rama VI) as new king in 1911 provided the Japanese media with a welcome opportunity to celebrate former friendly Japanese–Thai relations. Indifferent to dynastic changes over the centuries, newspapers hyped how bilateral relations dated back to a single Japanese individual: Yamada Nagamasa.Footnote ⁷² One editorial labelled Siamese–Japanese relations as the most ancient ones, only surpassed by China and Korea (Shina Chōsen 支那朝鮮).Footnote ⁷³

The most important element in the heroic tale of Yamada Nagamasa was his position as head of a Japanese overseas community in Ayutthaya, Thailand. Such seventeenth-century Japanese settlements (Nihonmachi 日本町 or Nihonjin machi 日本人町) in places such as Manila, Hoi An, and Ayutthaya became another anchor point for academic research on pre-modern southern expansion. In Ayutthaya, Yamada Nagamasa controlled incoming Japanese trade and oversaw the 500 residents of the Japanese settlement. In the 1620s, he would even enjoy a career at the Ayutthaya court, rising from low military rank to become a senior adviser to King Songtham, who employed him in various military campaigns, including a strike against Spanish galleons from Manila.Footnote ⁷⁴ When Yamada Nagamasa became the commander of the Japanese guard in the king's palace in the late 1620s, he was commissioned to put down a rebellion in the south of the country and was poisoned by a rival in 1630.Footnote ⁷⁵ Both Murakami and the tabloids essentialized Nagamasa's Japanese-ness as represented in a blend of military and economic strategies: Yamada Nagamasa was celebrated as eraijin 偉い人 (‘an authority’) who, despite his ventures abroad, did not forget Japan, and his story served educational purposes until the end of the Pacific War.

Murakami eventually published a biography of Yamada Nagamasa in 1942. It showcases his methodology of source criticism and his tendency to overemphasize European-language sources.Footnote ⁷⁶ The quality, style, and agenda differed from anything else published in Japanese. In the preface, we find the manifesto of a historian who collected bits and pieces of information from textual primary sources (komonjo gaku) and corrected previous misinterpretations.Footnote ⁷⁷ His only secondary reference is to Ernest M. Satow, the nineteenth-century British diplomat in Japan (1862–9 and 1895–1900) and Thailand (1884–7) who himself had authored books on early Tokugawa engagement with the outside world.Footnote ⁷⁸ For the rest, he exclusively drew on Dutch and Thai primary sources, and transcripts such as the Tsūkō ichiran 通航一覧 (Survey of navigation). The seven-volume Tsūkō ichiran shows many parallels to the Ikoku nikki in both content and style. Its editor, Hayashi Akira (1800–59), was an offspring of the influential Hayashi clan of Neo-Confucian scholars, of whom Razan 羅山 (1583–1657) was the most prominent representative. Hayashi Akira served Tokugawa Iesada (1824–58), Iemochi (1846–66), and Yoshinobu (1837–1913) as chief diplomatic adviser and thus played a vital role in the treaty port negotiations with Commodore Matthew Perry in the late 1850s.Footnote ⁷⁹ In reaction to Western penetration into Japanese waters, Hayashi Akira collected foreign relations sources from the period 1566–1825, dividing them by country and putting them into chronological order. The collection was first published in 1853.Footnote ⁸⁰

The positivist use of Dutch early modern accounts is another key characteristic of Murakami's biography of Yamada Nagamasa. Thanks to Jeremias van Vliet's detailed manuscript of the Dutch trading factory in Ayutthaya between 1636 and 1640, which Murakami found in The Hague, he was able to fill in many blanks.Footnote ⁸¹ The material served him as ultimate proof for the narrative of Nagamasa as an important figure in the Japanese community in South-east Asia, his connections to the Siamese king, and the significance of trading passes. At no point did Murakami question the accuracy of this primary source.Footnote ⁸²

IV

With the foundation of the Imperial University of Taipei in 1928 came the institutionalization of the history of the Southern Seas. Nan'yō shi was designed as a specific programme, with Murakami Naojirō as its first chair. In organizing the programme, he made immediate use of material he had found during another extended research stay in England, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal.Footnote ⁸³ The university served him as sort of laboratory for testing and further developing how the past should be represented, and he began to research Nihonmachi as Japanese towns in South-east Asian ports. Together with Iwao Seiichi 岩生生一 (1900–88) as assistant professor, Murakami consulted European source material for the history of the first Japanese southern advance based on the expansion of red seal trading ships.Footnote ⁸⁴ Early modern Japanese settlements in the Nan'yō were considered a key element in legitimizing expansionist considerations of both previous and contemporary generations. Conceptually, they were embedded in a larger narrative of private maritime enterprises and of the mercantilist spirit as the driving force in the establishment of trading outposts and colonies far away from the metropolis.Footnote ⁸⁵

The Taipei programme in the history of the Southern Seas is a peculiar example of imperial co-production. It reflects both scientific sophistication and the European bias in Japan's imperial repertoire: classes focused on European expansion and lessons learnt from European colonial experience in South-east Asia during the seventeenth century. Whereas neither Chinese, nor Malay, nor Arabic were included in the programme, classes in the essential source languages, such as Dutch and Spanish, were compulsory.Footnote ⁸⁶ (Note that the Spanish presence on Taiwan was geographically limited to a small area around present-day Taipei and only lasted between 1626 and 1642, generating a relatively small archive.Footnote ⁸⁷) When the department added a course on Japanese relations with the Nan'yō in 1930, students were offered a history of a linear development of foreign relations and the development of trade in South-east Asia, in which Japan was one of several civilizing powers, but the one with the best grip on the political and cultural context thanks to its integration into the Sinosphere.Footnote ⁸⁸

In his inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Japanese development of the Southern Seas before the Tokugawa closed country’, Murakami offered a definition of the historical Nan'yō.Footnote ⁸⁹ He explicitly linked the Japanese epistemology with the terminology of European exploration. Instead of Chinese equivalents such as the Sinophone nanhai or nankai in Japanese – a term that literally meant ‘southern sea’ and had been used for the waters surrounding present-day Indonesia and the Philippines since the Song eraFootnote ⁹⁰ – Murakami described how the Spanish navigator Vasco Nuñez de Balboa (1475–1519) called the ocean beyond the isthmus of Panama the ‘southern sea’ (mar del sur), before Ferdinand Magellan coined the term ‘Pacific’.Footnote ⁹¹ This strategy of introducing analogies from European maritime explorations and conquest recurs in Murakami's work and served as a synchronization of the Japanese experience in the South China Seas with those of the European trading nations. In terms of methodology, he not only explicitly mentioned new source material found in Europe as evidence for the importance of Japantowns, but also presented quantifiable data such as exact numbers of Japanese passengers disembarking in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), another important node in the Nihonmachi network. The key message was that Japanese expansion into and development of the Southern Seas – and particularly of Siam (暹羅発展) – had been cut short.Footnote ⁹²

V

In the opening pages of Murakami's Yamada Nagamasa biography we find a comparison to arguably the best-known European explorer and conquistador, Christopher Columbus.Footnote ⁹³ His choice of drawing a parallel between the discoverer of the New World and the Japanese ‘red seal ships’ merchant must not be dismissed as a mere stylistic device for two reasons. First, the 1890s in Spain, where Murakami spent ten months during the formative years of his scholarship, witnessed a period of extensive publications and commemorative events focusing on the Spanish discovery of the Americas. In particular, the quadricentennial of Columbus's journey was turned into ‘a spectacle to be consumed by Spain and the world’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Second, the narrative of Columbus's personal motivation as a Genoese discoverer, in which his employment by the Spanish monarchs is considered to be secondary, provides an essential framing device for Murakami's writing. It was Columbus's geographical knowledge, nautical skills, and strong will that made him convince Queen Isabella I of Castile, rather than the monarch ordering him to cross the ocean to discover new territory or navigable routes. Indeed, biographies of explorers and adventurers were central to the European narration of the discovery of the New World. Important narrative elements included the individual agency of a heterogenous group of men whose knowledge, courage, and determination led Europe into a new and modern age. Murakami was convinced that Yamada Nagamasa and other Japanese merchants and residents in South-east Asia acted in a similar spirit. By applying European methods of writing history, he mimicked their models of male adventurers going overseas and their politico-economic success stories.

In making a connection to an example from the European past, Murakami was able to synchronize Japan with the early modern period in Europe.Footnote ⁹⁵ He elaborated how, in both cases, numerous cities and regions claimed to be the birthplace of a national hero. In this way, Murakami not only turned Yamada Nagamasa into a highly relevant figure for the modern Japanese nation, but also glossed over the uncertainty regarding Nagamasa's place of birth (a puzzling fact, considering Murakami's urge to provide verifiable sources to dispel doubts). The section containing the Columbus analogy ends with the conclusion that Yamada Nagamasa most likely grew up in Owari near Sunpu.Footnote ⁹⁶ As Sunpu was the court of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Nagamasa's adolescence in close vicinity to the retired shogun and de facto ruler may be an indication that he frequented the castle town or even the castle itself. Nevertheless, Murakami, as a true advocate of komonjo gaku, refrains from such speculation, owing to the absence of source-based evidence.

Just as Christian Europeans attributed the birth of a golden age to Columbus's achievements with regard to interstate relations of maritime empires, early modern Japanese maritime activities became intrinsically linked to the narrative of state-controlled negotiations with the outside world, namely gaikō. Stressing the interface of official diplomatic relations and maritime trade, Murakami placed special emphasis on Nagamasa as a diplomatic envoy to Tokugawa Hidetada in Genna 7 (1621) delivering a letter from the Siamese king. During Yamada's stay in Japan, he exchanged letters with Hidetada's chief counsellor (toshiyori 年寄り), the aforementioned Honda Masazumi, who had already been in diplomatic contact with the Thai elite in 1606, in relation to the embassy and Nagamasa's post in Siam.Footnote ⁹⁷

In the shogunal reply drafted by the foreign relations monk Ishin Sūden 以心崇伝 (1569–1633), Hidetada voiced his delight about the mutually beneficial relations. A very similar line of argument could be found in the twentieth-century mass media. Newspaper articles show that journalists had picked up on the idea of red seal-licensed maritime trade as legitimizing foreign relations. Their headlines cemented the historicity of Tokugawa foreign relations, while Yamada Nagamasa's operations between Japan and Siam become commonly translated as shinzen 親善 (‘good will’ or ‘friendship’).Footnote ⁹⁸ However, strictly speaking it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that the term shinzen was coined as diplomatic jargon for friendly relations between sovereign nations and it was thus a somewhat anachronistic label for seventeenth-century relations between Siam and Japan. Nevertheless, journalists explained how friendly relations dated back to the era of red seal ships passing between the two nations, and also to Taiwan, Tonkin, and the Philippines, where early modern Japanese colonies emerged. In Ayutthaya, so the story went, the majority of an estimated 1,000 Japanese residents engaged in trade, sold weapons, and built small ships. Thereafter the storyline described how the Thai king employed residents from the Japantown in Ayutthaya (Nihonjinmachi, Ban Yipun in Thai sources) and how Nagamasa was ennobled (daijin 大臣) thanks to his military accomplishments in the naval battles. As head of the Japantown, Nagamasa, the pathfinder in a ‘southern advance’ (nanshin 南進), controlled commercial ships from Japan licensed by the third shogun, Iemitsu.Footnote ⁹⁹ What is noteworthy in this one report is the mention of Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 (1537–98). This highlights another paradox when it came to popular uses of national pasts in imperial Japan: the heroization of a warlord who made Japan strong, and who even set it on a par with the Ming dynasty, was so central to the nation-building narrative of liberal Taishō historians that no room was left for the fact that Toyotomi probably did not even know about the existence of the kingdom of Ayutthaya.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In 1941 the Biographical Academic Association (Denki gakkai 伝記学会), in collaboration with the Rokkō Shobō 六甲書房, a publisher active in distributing books on the Japanese overseas empire, published a book entitled Nanshin Nihon no senkusha 南進日本の先駆者 (Pioneers of Japan's southern expansion) based on the latest academic research. Beginning with Itō Manjū, the leader of the Tenshō mission sent via Goa to Europe in the 1580s, followed by Yamada Nagamasa, Hasekura Tsunenaga 支倉常長 (1571–1622), and Suganuma Teifū 菅沼貞風 (1865–89), among others, it introduces in eleven chapters those considered to be the central protagonists of the Japanese southward advance of previous centuries.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The final chapter is dedicated to the Japantowns in the Southern Seas, rendering the many unnamed urban migrants into expansionists in their own right. The book followed Murakami's lead in linking engagement in the Nan'yō as closely as possible with official foreign relations. This is interesting because all the articles in this special issue deal with knowledge co-produced in discursive spaces, be they physical, intellectual, or imagined. The discursive space of the Nan'yō was not only negotiated between academic historians and journalists in imperial Japan but also shaped as a result of transformations inherent in the longue durée of any topic. But after the Second World War, Japanese historians distanced themselves from historical discourses about a necessary economic and territorial southbound expansion.Footnote ¹⁰² As a result, no significant new publications on wakō or Nagamasa appeared between 1945 and 1990. Yet no-one seemed to question the academic ethics of Murakami's work.Footnote ¹⁰³ What is more, Murakami himself has long joined the list of Japanese pioneers heralded by Yamada Nagamasa: he appears, for instance, in a hagiographical compilation with the official English title People who gazed at the world and three wise men of Bungo.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

VI

Right up to the present, historians working on Tokugawa foreign relations have classified the Ikoku nikki as exemplary because of its status as providing official primary sources from the Tokugawa Bakufu. What is usually overlooked (as historians in the twenty-first century remain as fixated on written primary records as their nineteenth-century academic ancestors) is that, when Murakami published the Ikoku nikki shō in 1911, he presented a digest with an overemphasis on relations with Europeans. Within the realm of gaikō, translations of the rediscovered story of Japan's foreign relations posed various challenges for interpreting the past.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The idea of the neutrality of Murakami's source editions and translations, which empowered both contemporaries and future generations of historians to use, abuse, and reinterpret early modern Japanese foreign relations, has been taken for granted.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Yet terminological choices and additional annotations to Murakami's translations indicate how his engagement with European history modified his understanding of traditional and modern patterns of foreign relations and expansion. Under the ideological influence of Western scholarship, with its emphasis on nineteenth-century diplomatic relations, he came to consider modern diplomatic practices as universal and sought to interpret Japanese practices along those lines. Co-produced historical knowledge was multi-layered, based on source compilations and translations which themselves reflected idealized images of past connections.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Careful readers of this entire issue will have noticed Martin Dusinberre's own mention of a familiar name, Suganuma Teifū, and will probably even remember that Suganuma's history of Hirado as foreign port and gateway to the outside world was published posthumously in 1892. Twenty-five years later, Murakami also authored a monograph on the history of the Hirado port, full of references to official state letters. Murakami summarized the positive impact of European residents in Hirado in his last chapter, on the arrival of Western civilization (seiyō bunmei 西洋文明), noting that Hirado was a ‘place where people learnt from the English and the Dutch’ and imported goods and techniques such as ship-building, which improved the lives of its people: ‘It must be said that Hirado contributed significantly to the culture of our country.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While the language Murakami used reminds us of the intellectual world of Suganuma, the book otherwise differed significantly from the kind of history that Suganuma provided. Murakami introduced numerous foreign-language accounts that had been neither available nor comprehensible to Suganuma, whose 135-page appendix, ‘Hirado bōeki-shi’ 平戸貿易史 (‘A history of Hirado trade’), elaborated in twelve chronological chapters the activities of foreign merchants in the port and discussed the long-term impact of foreign engagement in a final one, based on a careful reading only of Japanese records. Nonetheless, Murakami's overall conclusion of Hirado as a symbol for ancient Japanese engagement with the outside world is similar. In their own words, both authors used the analogy of Hirado's bridging functions – between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, and China and Europe – in the making of Japan to underscore the maritime dimension of the Japanese expansionism narrative.

Unlike scholars of Japanese national history, who since the late Meiji period had been busy framing the Tokugawa Bakufu as the negative exception to the country's glory, Murakami's scholarship rehabilitated Tokugawa foreign policies. Maritime technological exchange in the early 1600s was one of the most obvious examples of Western–Japanese co-production, in which hybrid vessels and hybrid nautical knowledge became a symbol for the narrative of Japanese early modern expansion in South-east Asia and even across the Pacific.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In this narrative of maritime expansion, the example of dynamic relations with Western merchants, with the overseas Chinese network, and with European rulers, as well as colonial representatives, held centre stage. Such labels as ‘maritime’, ‘progressive’, ‘monopoly’, and ‘state control’ indicated a new age of foreign relations: early modernity. These claims were fleshed out with examples of commercial exchange, an enlightened understanding of the ‘other’, and ultimately even in territorial terms with references to Japanese settlements in the Philippines or to the powerful settlements in Dutch Batavia and Ayutthaya by Murakami's disciples.Footnote ¹¹⁰ These narratives emphasized the private mercantile initiatives of Japanese travelling overseas and their sponsors at home. Their operations abroad ultimately enabled the Tokugawa regime, as representatives of the state, to formalize and eventually monopolize maritime exchange, thus acting as informed early modern rulers.

Although his work reflects how popular discourse and academic history were connected in the early twentieth-century environment of intellectual imperialism, Murakami was no advocate of a southward expansion, nor would he suggest (nor later justify) the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Unlike his compatriots from Kyushu active during the Meiji period, who blended historical facts and geopolitical dreams in their propagandist imagination of Japanese leadership in Asia and the Pacific,Footnote ¹¹¹ Murakami was driven by a different agenda. He was an advocate of historical truth and the authenticity of documents. In this spirit of proto-revisionism, he integrated heroic propaganda material into an internationally accepted (and easily comparable) storyline. What helped him do so was his physical and intellectual access to archival records. At the same time, he failed to acknowledge that these seventeenth-century accounts were produced for future reference and thus potentially (mis-)guided the interpretation of past events and processes in later centuries.