Japan Archives - Not Even Past

Review of Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (2022) by Jennie N. Shinozuka

Jeannie Shinozuka’s new book, Biotic Borders, is not only a “history of bugs and other bothers,” [209] but also a demonstration of how ecological actors played a fundamental role in shaping sociopolitical responses to Japanese immigration to the US from 1890-1950. The book shows how racialized invasive species furthered American nationalism in the name of biological security. The othering of invasive species along racial lines and legitimate alarm over environmental destruction contributed to the consolidation of American biotic borders. This review of Biotic Borders highlights how ecological fears were deeply intertwined with racial politics of the era.

Frequently, these invisible eco-invaders—mostly agrarian insect pests—were used by American citizens and government agencies as an excuse to take action against an equally invisible ‘yellow peril’—the increasing number of Asian migrants—through discriminatory agriculture policies, scientific racism, accusations of treachery, medical discrimination, and the consolidation of borders. Indeed, Shinozuka argues that the erection of “‘artificial barriers,’ such as plant quarantines and other regulations ‘redrew’ imaginary lines determined by national boundaries.” [55] In this way, the transpacific ecological borderland enshrined at the end of a romanticized Western American frontier contributed to nationalist notions of a biologically native American utopia, and ultimately, an emergent American empire.

Drawings of frogs, snails, and insects from Japan, early nineteenth century.
Source: Library of Congress.

Throughout the book, Shinozuka uses ‘immigrant’ in reference to human migrants and the non-human plants and animals that crossed the Pacific during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The human immigrants were the large numbers of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who struggled against pervasive anti-Asian hostility in the United States. The non-human immigrants consisted of the hundreds of Asiatic plant species, and the insects that lived within their fibers, that were shipped and sold in the US to meet a growing demand for Japanese-style gardens and “Asian exotics.” [9] As these two types of ‘immigrant’ became entangled in the American imagination, so too did American hostility towards all foreign species, human or not. However, the word ‘immigrant’ is not the only parallel Shinozuka draws between these two subjects of her book. Biotic Borders is a compelling attempt to connect these two histories, which Shinozuka argues are inextricably bound together.

As agriculture in the US became professionalized and monoculture became standardized, the fear of invasive species, imported via increasingly globalized transportation networks, exploded. Entomologists empowered by newly-established government agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Plant Industry sought to uncover the origin of invasive insects. Yet by searching for their non-native origins, these scientists racialized the insects, giving them names such as the Japanese Beetle or the Oriental Scale and facilitating two-way comparisons between humans and insects: the personification of insects and the dehumanization of humans. In turn, these racialized species provoked widespread biological xenophobia, spurred on by the real fear of economic destruction in the agrarian sector, and by a growing desire for environmental border control to protect an illusory vision of American biological nativism. The fear of racialized insects shaped hostility towards similarly racialized human immigrants.

Dr. Wm. A. Taylor, Chief Bureau of Plant Industry, Dept. Agrl, circa 1920.
Source: Library of Congress.

Each of the eight chapters of Biotic Borders is loosely centered around a particular cross-border ecological crisis or invasive species. Chapter 1 focuses on the San José Scale (Quadraspidiotus perniciosus), Chapter 2 on the Chestnut Blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), Chapter 3 on insects at the US-Mexico border, and so on. However, the predominant thread of the book is dedicated to the experience of Japanese immigrants during the growing, racist, anti-immigrant hysteria prevalent at the time. In Chapter 4, Shinozuka explains how Japanese Americans were classified as “unhygienic,” [103] were accused of price fixing and unfair business practices, and were accused of bearing responsibility for hookworm and foodborne illnesses.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to Hawai’i. As a gateway between the US and Asia, Hawai’i became a central focus in securing ecological borders. Shinozuka uses the chapter to demonstrate how scientific authority was deployed as a tool of empire. The remaining chapters cover a growing anti-Japanese paranoia during WWII, including a discussion that joins the incarceration of the Japanese American population and the widespread use of chemical pesticides to combat Japanese Beetle infestations.

Biotic Borders is a thoroughly researched book. Shinozuka uses a variety of sources, including oral histories, to weave together human and non-human narratives. However, occasionally the exact relationship between the human and insect migration is obscured. Whether nativism was a driving force in the creation of ecological borders or whether the creation of ecological borders contributed to growing nativism is unclear in her telling. Similarly, the causal relationship between alarm over Japanese immigration and alarm over plant and insect immigration is sometimes confused. This said, what is clear from Shinozuka’s book is that these processes mirrored each other, and that through one, we gain a better understanding of the other.

By the end of the book, Shinozuka weaves the historical questions of globalization and racism with contemporary challenges. Citing the recent example of COVID-19, she demonstrates how politicians fixated on the Chinese origins of the virus, compared the pandemic to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and—just like at the end of the nineteenth century—racialized a biotic invader. The book concludes with a direct disagreement with environmental historian Peter Coates who once argued that the brand of “botanical xenophobia” and “eco-racism” [217] presented by Shinozuka had largely dissolved by the late twentieth century. To Shinozuka, as globalization accelerated, science played an increasing role in “the transnational flow of bodies, agricultural products and livestock, and pollution” [219]. She argues that this role is too often obscured when immigration is discussed in a vacuum. Despite its somber content, the book ends with a hopeful note that Biotic Borders could serve as an example for an interdisciplinary, open-ended dialogue about questions of science, racism, nationalism, and ethics.

William Dinneen is a pre-doc research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s PDRI-DevLab. He graduated with a bachelor’s in history from Emory University where he wrote a thesis about the environmental restoration of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of The Floating World: Masterpieces of Edo Japan at The Blanton Museum of Art

The Floating World: Masterpieces of Edo Japan from the Worcester Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin,

Over one hundred ink-and-paper survivors from “the floating world” of Edo-period Japan are on display at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. This diverse collection of woodblock prints, many of them strikingly colorful despite the passage of two centuries or more, debuted on February 11, 2024, and will close on June 30, 2024. Like spring’s short-lived cherry blossoms, these ukiyo-e masterpieces will not appear in public again for a long while and never in quite the same splendid arrangement. On the drizzly April day, I viewed them, the exhibit space was especially crowded, as eclipse-watchers who’d traveled to Austin for the celestial event rounded out their trips with a weatherproof indoor spectacle. A woodblock print exhibit may not be quite as rare as a Texas eclipse, but it’s rare enough that you don’t want to miss it.

Katsushika Hokusai, Fuji at Gotenyama, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, 1830–32, color woodblock print, 17 1/8 x 23 1/8 x 1 in., Worcester Art Museum, John Chandler Bancroft Collection, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

The Japanese phrase ukiyo-e translates to “pictures of the floating world,” a reference to the almost otherworldly pleasures of Edo (now Tokyo) during the relatively peaceful, prosperous, and cosmopolitan 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. It was peaceful because the Tokugawa clan, the last shogunal dynasty, had emerged victorious in the great battles for supremacy that took place at the end of the sixteenth century. It was prosperous because the shogun required Japan’s many regional lords to make biannual pilgrimages to Edo, ensuring steady business for the city’s merchants. It was cosmopolitan because, despite severe restrictions on foreign trade, ideas from the other side of the world trickled through to the capital and influenced its now-iconic artwork in ways this exhibit makes clear. Most suggestively, Edo “floated” through its golden age because of its courtesans, actors, athletes, festivals, fireworks, gardens, bridges, temples, and breathtaking vistas, both natural and man-made, all of which remain alive for us thanks to the detailed, dreamlike output of the era’s woodblock print masters.

The Blanton’s well-annotated trip through the floating world plays out in five thematic sections, though there is some inevitable overlap between them. The first and smallest, Origins, introduces the time, place, and, critically, the technique of woodblock printing. A final ukiyo-e print was the work of about four people: a designer, a carver, a printer, and a publisher. To illustrate their craftsmanship, Texas artist Daryl Howard offers an introductory display – a work of art in its own right – that breaks down the process. First, each layer of the image is carved into a wood block (backward from how it will appear on paper). Next, colorful ink is brushed onto the wood blocks. The paper is then pressed onto the blocks, one after another, resulting in a layered, multicolored final image.

*The Floating World: Masterpieces of Edo Japan from the Worcester Art Museum*, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, February 11–June 30, 2024, *courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art*

Over time, ukiyo-e artists increased the number of layers and colors. The colors themselves changed over time, as when a new and longer-lasting chemical formula for “Prussian blue” arrived in Japan via Dutch sailors. Some woodblock artists were keen to experiment with foreign techniques like one-point perspective. As the Edo era approached its violent end, prints sometimes depicted foreign gunboats flying foreign flags with foreign crews. Yet, for the most part, both the style and the content of ukiyo-e prints remained decidedly local.

The second part of the exhibit, Entertainment, shows the many ways the people of Edo amused themselves. Prints depict frolics under spring cherry blossoms, summer fireworks, autumn foliage, and winter snow. In one large triptych, people go pleasure boating under a landmark Edo footbridge. It also seems strikingly familiar. As curator Holly Borham points out, scenes like this happen almost daily a few blocks south of the Blanton on Austin’s Ladybird Lake. There are also prints detailing the military prowess of the samurai caste, but with the absence of battles under Tokugawa rule, martial pomp takes on a playful quality. Warriors throw themselves into a fray against a wild boar, they practice archery for sport, and children reenact military parades. Right alongside elite samurai, and seemingly even more celebrated and coveted, are prints of famous kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers. “Candid” illustrations of entertainers’ private lives, as they relax at home with family, seem to prefigure a later century’s magazine spreads.

*Katsushika Hokusai, A Hawk in Flight, circa 1840, color woodblock print, 17 1/8 x 23 1/8 x 1 in., Worcester Art Museum, Gift from the estate of John Chandler Bancroft*, *courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art*

Part three of the exhibit, Poetic Pictures, shows one of the social functions of ukiyo-e as a platform for celebrating ideas. While woodblock prints were first and foremost decorative objects, some of them contain substantial text. Poetry clubs and other groups of literati could commission prints to commemorate their contests and events. Occasionally, the Japanese language’s complex kanji characters are accompanied by furigana, simpler characters to aid pronunciation, but the majority of prints assume a high degree of literacy on the part of their audience. This fact alone speaks volumes about the social world of Edo, as peace and prosperity facilitated education for men and women alike. Don’t worry if your archaic Japanese is rusty – the exhibit’s explanatory panels are generous and in plain English.

As the first three parts of the exhibit show, contemporary earthly pleasure is a far more common subject in ukiyo-e than religion, history, or myth, but the Blanton also spotlights some of the movement’s most interesting counter-programming. The famous artist Utamaro found himself in prison after violating the shogun’s prohibition against depicting the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had a complex relationship with the Tokugawa family that deposed his son. Gods, monsters, demon-slayers, and ghosts also appear occasionally, though in keeping with the recreational spirit of the era, several of these are actually depictions of stage plays about the supernatural. Playful monkeys, brash roosters, and fearsome dragons also rear their heads, sometimes in reference to the zodiac but often as supporting players in anthropocentric scenes.

The fourth section, Landscapes and the Natural World, contains some of the best-loved examples of the ukiyo-e art form. Here you can soak in several large, vivid pieces from two legendary printmakers whose work has inspired generations of designers, travelers, and Japan lovers: Hokusai, creator of the 36 Views of Mt. Fuji series, and Hiroshige, the artist behind the 100 Famous Views of Edo series. The Blanton exhibit boasts examples from each series, and all on their own, they justify fighting Austin traffic.

Utagawa Kunisada I, Woman Holding a Paper Lantern, 1844, color woodblock print, 38 5/8 x 19 5/8 x 1 1/4 in., Worcester Art Museum, John Chandler Bancroft Collection, Courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

The final part of the exhibit, Bijin-ga, shifts the focus to Edo’s “fashionable beauties.” Geisha, bathers, and hostesses don their makeup or remove their robes, chat with each other or gaze into mirrors, and relax outside their workplaces or take seaside strolls. A close look at their kimono reveals stunningly intricate patterns. Their possessions and surroundings hint at Edo’s vast marketplaces and vibrant consumer culture, and at the goods and services that were coveted and accessible in Japan’s booming capital. One of my favorite surprises was a rare print by Hokusai in the shape of a folding fan. Since it was meant to attach to a fan and would have become heavily creased through regular use, few examples survive.

This temporary exhibit has drawn admirers from across the UT community, including art students, textile makers, and students of Japanese language and history. This is the Blanton’s first Japan-focused exhibit in many years, and when it finishes its run, the prints will return to their permanent home at the Worcester Museum in Massachusetts. To preserve their color, the prints can only go on display for a few months at a stretch and only three times in a 10-year period. To see so many in one place and so well-arranged and annotated is a singular experience. Look in on the floating world while it lasts.

David A. Conrad received his Ph.D. from UT Austin in 2016 and published his first book, Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan, in 2022. He is currently working on a second book, which will also focus on postwar Japan. David lived in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture for three years and can’t wait to go back to his home away from home.

Notes from the Field

Notes from the Field is a series with a long history at NEP. In this latest iteration, the series has three broad areas of focus. First, Notes from the Field is designed to take readers into unexpected corners of the world’s great archives and to explore the experience of working there. We aim to describe some of the spaces and places in which historians work every day. Second, we’re interested in fascinating stories that might not become the central focus of a book or an article but which nonetheless reveal intriguing corners of the past. And third the series discusses the often unexpected experiences of doing fieldwork in which each day can bring new challenges, joys or discoveries. Together these stories form our new Notes from the Field. Below we collect some of the wonderful early iterations of this series, seven pieces that illuminate different archives and the experience of working as historians. Together these stories create a tapestry of historical practice.

banner image for notes from the field: Bulgaria's Tolstoyan vegetarians

Mary Neuburger writes about her research on Tolstoyan-inspired vegetarianism in Bulgaria:

“By 1907, Bulgarian Tolstoyans had broken ground on their own agricultural commune in Yasna Polyana…The ties to Tolstoy were so strong that many claim that he was headed to Bulgaria in his final days—when he famously left his family estate and headed south. Alas, he died along the way. But if anything, the Tolstoyan movement gained in strength after his death, especially in the aftermath of World War I. The massive human casualties of the war brought an even greater urgency to the Bulgarian (and global) Tolstoyan project… I was most interested in the vegetarian strand of the commune’s intellectual and organizational work… This story is best told in a global context, and meat was one of the most hotly debated food sources in history—in the past as today. Is eating meat a human instinct or a learned behavior? Is it the gold standard of fortification, or will it kill us? Even if it is good for the human body, what about the ethics of killing animals, the implications of modern methods, or the environmental impacts of meat-eating?”

Read the full piece here.

banner image for notes from the field: from feasts to feats (or feet) on the coals

Mary Neuburger writes about recovering Bulgarian food history through travelers’ accounts:

“The veritable sea of travelers’ accounts are among the sources that inform my current book project, a cultural history of food and drink in the Eastern Balkans, with a focus on Bulgaria from the 1860s -1989. Bulgarian foodways were clearly imprinted by the Empires that ruled or influenced the region, from the Ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, to the Soviet. Some of these travelers were Bulgarians, mapping their own homeland and defining their own nation as they went, with the culture of food and drink as important components. But many more were foreigners who consumed and assessed food and drink as sources of pleasure and anxiety. They mapped patterns of restraint and gluttony, as well as the connections of food with identity, healing, and magic. They often used practices of food and drink—production, preparation, and etiquette—as a way of forming or confirming their own opinions about locals as savage and barbaric or alternatively as vigorous and sensible. Such accounts include mouth-watering descriptions of home-cooked meals and local inn or restaurant fare from the days of treks on oxen-drawn carts.”

Read the full piece here.

banner image for notes from the field: retracing sixteenth-century steps in Seville

Mark Sheaves writes about research, travel, and research-through-traveling in Seville, Spain:

“It was a boiling hot day and I decided to take a break from my work. Offering a lazy “ciao” to the security guard on the way out, I walked into the wall of heat that surrounded this beautiful Andalus city in the summer. Strolling around the magnificent cathedral that integrates Moorish and Catholic elements, scurrying between the shadows provided by palm trees, I headed up one of the gaudy shopping streets that act as tributaries from the city’s historic center. Undistracted by the pulsating music and new flowery patterned shirts on display, my mind remained fixed on the sixteenth-century English merchant and botanist John Frampton, who had lived in the city nearly five centuries previously and was the subject of my research.”

Read the full piece here.

banner image for notes from the field: the murder of Boris Nemtsov

Andrew Straw writes about his reaction to the assassination of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov in 2015:

“When I came upon the news of Nemtsov’s murder two Friday nights ago, I immediately handed the iPad to my wife, and her jaw dropped. That Saturday morning, there was a pervasive shock — on Russian social media and in the state-run and independent media — because everyone knew Nemtsov. His political career in the 1990s included a post as Deputy Prime Minister in 1998 under Boris Yeltsin, and, before that, as Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod where he led agricultural and economic reforms. However, his liberalism often clashed with the former communist party members who made up much of the Russian government. More importantly, as corruption blossomed in the new Russian economy, he relentlessly attacked the perpetrators. His political career imploded because his idealism and activism had no place in the status quo Vladimir Putin created between society, the oligarchs and the state after 2000.”

Read to full piece here.

banner image for notes from the field: Northern Japan after the Tsunami

David Conrad writes about visiting the port city of Kesennuma, in northeastern Japan after it was hit by a deadly tsunami:

“Nothing I had heard could have prepared me for what I saw there. While many buildings I recognized were still standing, and some had already been rebuilt, large swaths of the town were simply gone. One of Kesennuma’s two rail stations had been destroyed, and I did not have a car, so I traveled there by bus. It dropped off in the middle of several cracked foundations. Only by memory could I tell that I was a stone’s throw from the site of a restaurant I used to frequent. A friend picked me up at the bus stop, and on our way to his home in my old neighborhood we passed a fishing vessel tipped on its side. The ocean was several meters away on the righthand side of the road, and the ship was on the left.”

Read the full piece here.

banner image for notes from the field: Trinity college, Cambridge, and the accidents of research

Joan Neuberger writes about a dinner at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, that shaped her research on Russian filmmaking:

“And yes, the Trinity dining hall looks just like the one at Hogwarts, with long tables and benches for students running the length of the hall and a more formal High Table along the width. It does, however, have only an ordinary, though impossibly high, ceiling made of wooden beams rather than one that reflects the weather, and while there are plenty of candles, they don’t float in the air. And then there’s Henry VIII. A large copy of Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry, who founded Trinity, watches over diners, as imperious as ever, from above High Table at the end of the hall. What’s the connection between the accidents of research, a Soviet film about a bloody tyrant of the past –- a film that was commissioned by Joseph Stalin, bloody tyrant of the then-present — and Trinity High Table?”

Read the full piece here.

banner image for notes from the field: the pope in Manila

Kristie Flannery writes about how her archival research in Manila was interrupted by Pope Francis’ visit to the Philippines:

“It is not surprising that the government of the third largest Catholic country in the world would declare the days of the Pope’s visit “Special non-working days” in the national capital. All non-essential government activities (including the national archives) are closed, all school and university classes have been canceled, and many businesses will not open their doors. The enforced holiday is supposed to clear usually congested roads of cars and jeepneys so the Pope and pilgrims move more easily from A to B.”

Read the full piece here.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Notes from the Field: The Strange Case of Thome Corea

From the editors: Notes from the Field is a series with a long history at NEP. In this latest iteration, the series has three broad areas of focus. First, Notes from the Field is designed to take readers into unexpected corners of the world’s great archives and to explore the experience of working there. We aim to describe some of the spaces and places in which historians work every day. Second, we’re interested in fascinating stories that might not become the central focus of a book or an article but which nonetheless reveal intriguing corners of the past. And third the series discusses the often unexpected experiences of doing fieldwork where each day can bring new challenges, joys or discoveries. Together these stories form our new Notes from the Field.

I’m a historian of early modern East and Southeast Asia, so I’m fortunate to work in some of the most interesting archives in the world. I spend a lot of time at the National Archives in The Hague, a city in the Netherlands with a long history. This archive stores hundreds of thousands of documents connected with the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), which carved out a commercial empire in Asia in the seventeenth century.

I’ve used archives across four continents. The National Archives is undoubtedly the most accessible and user-friendly archives I’ve ever worked in. You can travel there by train, registration is simple, and it’s easy to get access to original documents rather than poor microfilmed copies. It’s a wonderful place to work.

But it can also be a little overwhelming. Within an hour after arriving, you can find yourself confronting huge piles of documents, invariably written in the dense and idiosyncratic script of VOC employees. That script, especially as used in earlier documents, can takes dozens of hours per source to decipher.

The challenges involved in doing research at the National Archives are daunting, but this also makes working there exceptionally exciting, as historians frequently come across documents that no one has seen in hundreds of years. One of my favorite documents is just one page long. It’s a confession signed by Thome Corea, a ‘Japanese’ mercenary who was stationed on a remote island in Southeast Asia in 1623.

The document is connected with the Amboina conspiracy case, the subject of my recent book. The case started with one of Thome Corea’s fellow soldiers. On February 23rd, 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the remote island of Amboina in modern-day Indonesia.

a photo the of document that talks about Thome Corea's cse

When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was subjected to the “torture of water”: a cloth was “put before his face and fastened behind his head, hanging upon under his chinne, [and] after this the water was poured upon his head.” The result of this process, which we would call waterboarding today, was a confession claiming that Shichizō had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants. The merchants allegedly hoped to seize control of the VOC fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich island from the company’s grasp.

Armed with this information, the VOC governor proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and torture the remaining ten Japanese mercenaries in the garrison, all of whom (including Thome Corea) admitted to signing onto the plot in return for a substantial reward. A few days later, attention turned to the English, who also confessed–again, under torture–to a role in a conspiracy aimed at the “taking of the castle, and the murdering of the Netherlanders.” On March 9th, an improvised tribunal of VOC employees with the governor at its head convened to render judgment on the conspirators. The result was an emphatic guilty verdict, and shortly thereafter, ten English merchants and ten Japanese mercenaries were executed in the public square outside the fortress.

*Imagined depiction of torture RP-P-OB-68.279, Rijksmuseum*

The case became enormously controversial in Europe. When news of what had happened reached London in 1624, it sparked an immediate outage. English officials denounced the flawed nature of the judicial procedures while ridiculing the notion that a conspiracy had existed in the first place. As news of the trial spread, propelled by the publication of cheap broadsheet ballads and incendiary pamphlets, everyone seemed to be talking about Japanese soldiers and their particular capabilities.

For Dutch writers determined to emphasize the potential strength of the Amboina plotters, the Japanese were fearsome warriors capable of swaying the outcome of any conflict. A “small number of Japonians were not slightly to be regarded,” exclaimed one writer, as the “valour & prowess of that Nation” made them far more potent than an equivalent contingent of European soldiers. Not so, scoffed their English opponents, who claimed that the Japanese were no military “Gyants” and that the wondrous feats ascribed to them nothing more than “Apochriphal Legends” with no basis in fact.

*Column of Japanese Soldiers, Anonymous, 1600 (RP-P-OB-75.407, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)*

One of the ‘Japanese; soldiers caught up in the Amboina case was Thome Corea. He was tortured and waterboarded by Dutch officials and rapidly confessed. But as he was illiterate, he could not sign his name. Instead, he made a rough mark.

Close-up of Thome Corea's confession — *Close-up of Thome Corea’s confession*

Although he represented himself as a ferocious Japanese soldier, Thome Corea was not actually Japanese. In fact he was Korean. And he had a remarkable life. We know from the records associated with the trial that Corea was aged fifty in 1623, meaning that he was born around 1573. He was thus likely brought to Japan in the turbulent aftermath of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s massive invasion of Korea in 1592.

He probably came to Japan as a young captive along with tens of thousands of Korean children, women and men who were enslaved by the returning armies. Keinen, a Buddhist monk who traveled to Korea as part of the invading forces, observed the mass transport of children: “They are carrying off Korean children and killing their parents. Never shall they see each other again. Their mutual cries—surely this is like the torture meted out by the ﬁends of hell.” (1) Thome Corea may have been one of these children.

At some point, he secured his freedom but was unable to return to Korea. Instead, like so many of his countrymen he was drawn to western Japan’s bustling cosmopolitan ports like Nagasaki or Hirado. There he seems to have eked out a living until the Dutch East India Company came recruiting. It offered three year contracts, dangerous work, and poor conditions–but also the promise of a steady wage.

Corea’s unlikely career suggests that the Company’s attempts to recruit legion of Japanese soldiers to fight on its behalf opened up an unexpected space for reinvention, one in which a Korean captives could morph, in search of a stable wage, into a fearsome Japanese soldier. If so, Corea was not alone in making this change. VOC records include multiple references to “Japanese” soldiers with names that suggest links to places like Macao, China or Korea but who were able to take advantage of new opportunities afforded by the Company’s martial visions.

Thome Corea generated just a few lines in the sources and one hastily scrawled cross to mark his confession. He was part of important events in global history but he did not drive them. But his story is important. Like so many historians, I love working in the archives because I’m able to uncover evidence of hidden lives. Thome Corea is an example of such a life.

(1) Wm. Theodore de Bary, Donald Keene, George Tanabe, and Paul Varley, ed. Sources of Japanese Tradition : Volume 1: From Earliest Times to 1600 (Columbia University Press, New York, 2010: 467-72

Two Bombings, Two Movies: From Hiroshima to Grave of the Fireflies

An orphaned boy and girl wander helplessly through a destroyed Japanese city toward the end of World War II. The boy, older but not old enough, has frustrating interactions with the adults they meet, most of whom are preoccupied with their own struggles to survive. Despite his earnest efforts, he cannot keep his little sister safe. He finally wanders alone into a train station full of other displaced people. The station is a literal junction but also a metaphorical one: the boy’s world ends here, but beyond it a new Japan will rise from the ashes.

The plot briefly described above comes from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima, a 1953 docudrama that used real survivors of the atomic bombs to bring the city’s darkest days to the big screen. From 1945 to 1952, Japanese movie studios followed the dictates of media censors in American occupation headquarters by avoiding discussion of wartime bombings, depictions of American occupation troops, and a host of other topics that Americans found uncomfortable. With the end of the occupation came a rush of bomb-themed movies, from Kaneto Shindо̄’s Children of Hiroshima (1952) to Ishirо̄ Honda’s Godzilla (1954) to Akira Kurosawa’s Record of Living Things (1955). Sekigawa’s Hiroshima, perhaps the most literal of the bunch, had little box office impact but exerted significant influence on cinema’s international New Wave movement that lay just around the corner.

The aftermath of Hiroshima. Source: Wikimedia Commons

It also foreshadowed a movie that the first paragraph of this piece describes equally well: 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies. When it came out 35 years after the release of Hiroshima, Grave of the Fireflies was largely forgotten outside of the cinephile community. But in the intervening years, its audience has only grown. Its Blu-Ray and streaming releases have allowed it to impact – one might say traumatize – new viewers around the world.

Fireflies is set in Kobe, not Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the even more heavily-bombed Tokyo, but it is grim enough all the same; the brother dies in a train station not long after the sister succumbs to illness. In Hiroshima, which has less finality but more overt messages for the present, the brother does not die in the station but leaves to find work in a factory until, seven years later, it begins to produce artillery for American soldiers in Korea. Unwilling to contribute to more war deaths, the young man quits and disappears into the drop-out world of pachinko gambling. He never discovers what became of his sister after they lost each other in the ruins of their childhood city, and that uncertainty underlines the movie’s message that Hiroshima’s agony is not over. As long as war goes on, nobody is safe from Hiroshima’s fate.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) has its messages, too, though they can be harder to detect beneath the intense tragedy of its protagonists. More than the story of doomed siblings, the movie is an uncompromising critique of Japanese society in the waning months of World War II. It is also a milestone in the development of Studio Ghibli’s Japan-centric but universalist storytelling.

*Grave of the Fireflies poster: Image: https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/2jwQhzuP1RefkUI4PCaEgioCHrv.jpg*

1988 was a year of firsts for the young Studio Ghibli. The studio’s creative frontman Hayao Miyazaki directed My Neighbor Totoro, his first film set in historical Japan rather than in a fantasy world. The studio did not expect Totoro to be a financial success, so it decided to package it with an adaptation of a wartime melodramatic novel titled Hotaru no Haka, or Grave of the Fireflies. Fireflies was Ghibli’s first film neither written nor directed by Miyazaki. Instead, it was helmed by longtime animator Isao Takahata, who would go on to direct other adult-oriented features like Only Yesterday (1991), My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999), and The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013).

The studio’s calculation was correct in the short term, but when Totoro aired on television – paired with the release of an adorable plushy – it found massive success. It soon became an international hit too, and Totoro’s title character is now Ghibli’s mascot and studio logo. Fireflies’ success has been quieter but also impressive. Disney, which for many years owned the foreign distribution rights to Totoro and most other Ghibli films, didn’t touch Fireflies, but the movie has received English dubs and frequent home media releases nonetheless. It appears on numerous Best Films lists and is many people’s go-to answer to the question: “What’s the saddest movie you’ve ever seen?”

Yet in many ways it cuts against the studio’s grain. Miyazaki’s renowned fantasies, Takahata’s later stories, and other Ghibli directors’ efforts are almost always characterized by capable people working toward clear-cut, laudable objectives. Not so much with Fireflies. Its protagonists, a boy named Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, think irrationally, make bad decisions, and don’t ever seem to know what they should do next. They are, in the most difficult ways, children, and they are caught up in terrible events.

This is particularly true of Seita. As the older sibling, he is responsible for the care of his sister when their mother dies in a bombing raid that destroys their house and their father is killed in battle. At first he does well enough. He finds lodging for himself and Setsuko in the home of a woman who provides them with food in exchange for their mother’s clothes. This woman embodies the attitude that, in wartime, everyone must make sacrifices for the good of the nation. The most poignant touches of visual detail in the movie come as she scrapes burnt leavings from the bottom of a cooking vessel, and when her young lodgers eat every grain of rationed rice and each infinitesimally-small crumb of candy in front of them.

Isao Takahata. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Seita begins to go astray, though, both from his familial duties as a caregiver and his social duties as a Japanese citizen. He quarrels with the woman sheltering them and leaves the comparative comfort of her house. At 14 he is old enough to work, to “contribute to the war effort” as the woman commands him to do, but he opts not to seek employment at a munitions factory or other work detail. He never articulates his reasons, but it is not anti-war sentiment; Seita is as emotionally invested in the success of Japan’s imperial mission as are all of the adults he knows. Rather, he seems to be motivated by a vainglorious search for individual autonomy.

Seita takes Setsuko to an abandoned bomb shelter near a small lake outside of town. In his mind, and at first glance, this appears to be an idyllic retreat from the horrors of the war. They spend their first night there catching fireflies, delicate creatures that live a lifespan of mere days before winking out of existence. The symbolism is obvious, and it leads to the movie’s most haunting images.

It is not long, though, before it becomes clear that Seita is not equipped to handle life in exile. Setsuko develops a rash that grows increasingly painful, and she begins to exhibit the disturbing physical symptoms of malnourishment. Though Seita has some money in a bank account, he turns to stealing food, a serious and increasingly common crime during the American naval blockade of Japan. Perhaps unconsciously, in his orphanhood Seita becomes obsessed with living outside the strictures of society. The death of the four-year-old Setsuko is a consequence of that determination, and Seita himself dies homeless and starving in a dilapidated train station.

The movie is a cautionary tale about young people who recklessly buck social mores, but Seita is not portrayed as solely responsible for his and Setsuko’s deaths. In fact, he hardly seems to realize what he is doing or what is happening to them. He is a child, well-intentioned but confused and psychologically shattered. The movie reserves its moral censure for the adult characters. Director Takahata, who also wrote the screenplay, shows adults to be willfully apathetic about the children’s desperate plight. The woman who takes them in and takes their mother’s possessions as payment also drives them out with harsh criticism and justifies it as an act of patriotism. A doctor diagnoses Setsuko with malnutrition, but he refuses to give her medicine and sends the brother and sister away with no food. The worker who discovers Seita’s body in the movie’s flash-forward prologue seems unmoved, poking his and other corpses and searching their possessions before casting them aside. During the course of the movie only a police officer shows Seita some kindness when he declines to press charges for theft, but in Seita’s case it might have been a greater kindness to take him into custody. Takahata has said that Fireflies is not an anti-war film, as many of Miyazaki’s movies quite clearly are, but it is certainly a bleak portrayal of the material and social conditions that Japan faced at the end of its last great war.

Yokohama residents, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Like its predecessor Hiroshima, Fireflies is tightly rooted in place and time, so why does it continue to resonate with global audiences? Hiroshima’s artistic influence, for example, on French filmmaker Alain Resnais, whose film Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) stars one of the lead actors from Sekigawa’s film, is thanks in part to the unique nature of the atomic bombings. That film’s comparative scarcity for many years also made it especially alluring for those who knew about it. Released at the other end of three decades of miraculous economic growth, Fireflies has always been readily available, and it has become something of a rite of passage for anime fans. Starting with an anonymous bombing, one of thousands of similar aerial attacks, it follows marginal lives that leave no historical record. That has increased its universal appeal. People born long after the war and on the opposite side of the globe can see themselves in Seita and Setsuko. They might have been them, if they’d been born at the wrong time and place. If all-ages Ghibli fantasies like Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and Spirited Away (2001) work because of universalist “hero’s journey” elements, Fireflies speaks to people because its arcs are so pathetically pedestrian. Its lives, like the titular insects, are brief and leave no trace on a world that moves quickly on.

As a work of art and a piece of historical fiction set during an especially difficult era, Grave of the Fireflies is a valuable achievement. Embracing Defeat, John Dower’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning nonfiction book about early postwar Japan, would make an excellent non-fiction pairing with Fireflies. The movie is also an unconventional herald of Studio Ghibli’s turn-of-the-millennium dominance in sophisticated animated entertainment. If the recent success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is any indication, movies that touch on Japan’s unique wartime experience – whether through well-known stories like Hiroshima’s or obscurer ones like Fireflies’ – will continue to fascinate international audiences for a long time to come.

Review of Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan (2022) by David Conrad

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) must be one of the most written-about directors in film history. There are over 20 books in English exclusively devoted to Kurosawa. These include Donald Richie’s The Films of Kurosawa (1965), David Desser’s The Sa murai Films of Akira Kurosawa, (1983), Stephen Prince’s The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosaw a (1991), Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro’s Kurosawa:
Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (2000), just to name a few—not to mention studies in which Kurosawa serves as a crucial point of reference.

As the first Japanese director to win at an international film festival and the most well-known outside of Japan, Kurosawa has attracted prolonged interest and extensive studies not only because of his idiosyncratic style but also to the shifting cultural and historical contexts under which his films were conceived and produced. The director remained active throughout his career of over 50 years from the mid 1940s to the 1990s and made 30 films in total.

While many existing studies strive to articulate the enticing form and aesthetics of this film master, historian David Conrad’s Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan (2022) contributes to the large body of Kurosawa scholarship by putting the turmoil and transformation of Japanese society in the latter half of the 20^th century under the spotlight when reading Kurosawa’s films.

Unlike many previous studies, which tend to focus on a small body of Kurosawa’s films (such as his samurai films, for example) or on a single film at length, Conrad pays equal attention to all Kurosawa’s films. The plot, narrative, film technique and style of the film play only a partial role in Conrad’s appreciation of Kurosawa, and he seamlessly interweaves biographical information, anecdotes, and sociopolitical context into his readings. Each one of Kurosawa’s films, in their own way, provides a window into a specific moment of Japan’s modern history and captures the zeitgeist of that moment. In this way, Conrad sees even the “historical dramas” (jidaigeki) of the director as “contemporary drama” (gendaigeki), and as he aptly puts it, all of Kurosawa’s films could be treated as “products of the jidai (meaning “period” or “era” in Japanese) that make up Japan’s dramatic, painful, inspirational, contradictory 20^th century” (1).

The author often opens a new chapter by laying out the social backdrop and historical events around the year when the film was released, before diving into the film. Kurosawa’s career spanned the Shōwa era (1926-1989), the reign of emperor Hirohito, to the Heisei era (1989-2019), with the accession of his son Akihito. Conrad divided the director’s oeuvre into four periods: “The War Years” includes 3 films from Sanshirō Sugata (1943)to Sanshirō Sugata Part II (1945), “The Occupation Years” with 10 films from The Men who Treaded on the Tiger’s Tail (1945) to Ikiru (1952), “The Miracle Years” includes 10 films from Seven Samurai (1954) to Redbeard (1965), and “The Global Years” with 7 films from Dodesukaden (1970) to Mādadayo (1993). This reminds us that this study is as much about Kurosawa the auteur as it is about modern Japan.

Each chapter deals with one film, and the author reads the scenes, images and dialogues closely to excavate details in which history seeps through. Several recurring motifs come to the fore in Conrad’s study of the correlation between Kurosawa and modern Japan. First is the U.S.–Japan relationship. The role played by the U.S. in shaping Japan’s postwar domestic and foreign policies cannot be overemphasized, and Conrad maps out a well-rounded picture of the changing power dynamic between the two nations through Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), The Bad Sleeps Well (1960), Yojimbo (1961), and Kagemusha (1980), among others.

The second key issue is censorship, from the wartime military government (1940-1945) to the Occupation forces (1945-1952) and the post-occupation Japanese government. Referencing both the production records and interviews with the director, Conrad identifies the varying nature and logic of these different censorship regimes and the ways that Kurosawa navigated multiple transitions from one phase to another or within one dominant regime. For example, Conrad points out that despite the fact that “feudal themes” were prohibited after the beginning of the Occupation, Rashōmon (1950), a film set in premodern Japan and containing obvious “feudalistic” content, was produced and made its way onto the big screen only because the start of the Korean War (1950-1953) had rendered it imperative for American censors to loosen control in order to show “democracy” in action. Kurosawa seized the opportunity and exploited the fertile ground of Japan’s past for storytelling.

The third topic central to Conrad’s reading of Kurosawa is the shifting gender politics of modern Japan. From Taishō women’s rights movements in the 1920s to women working in the military factories during wartime, from the pan-pan phenomenon (i.e., street prostitutes who served mainly the GIs) during the Occupation to the emerging feminist activists since the 1960s, Conrad shows how Kurosawa engages through his films with matters of women’s rights and status in modern Japan.

One of the merits of Conrad’s approach is the ways in which he reads the social dynamics and history of 20^th-century Japan out of Kurosawa’s jidaigeki (films situated in premodern Japan before the mid-19^th century). He argues persuasively that “jidaigeki imitate the past but tell us about their present.” (101) For example, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) takes place in 1586 Sengoku Japan and tells a story focused on seven masterless samurai helping farmers repel a group of bandits who harass the village and loot their crops. Despite the temporal distance between the story’s setting (1586) and the time when the film was made (1954), Conrad thoughtfully demonstrates how the 16^th-century peasants’ conundrum in the film mirrors that of Japanese farmers working under American’s land reform policies after 1947. Moreover, the feudal caste structure between peasant and samurai in the film sheds light on the enduring social inequalities and fixed class hierarchy in post-Occupation Japan when the nation as a whole got wealthier. The elaborate village defense plan and the ad hoc soldiers in the film offer a political parallel to Japan’s de facto army, the Self Defense Force, established with the help of the U.S. in 1950 as a reaction to Korean War.

Historical drama meets modern Japan: three male actors--all dressed incongruously in period clothing, two of whom are holding wooden spears--pose for a photo in alongside an American-made Jeep during the filming of a Kurosawa movie in 1945. — *Three actors in period clothing pose for a photo in front of an American-made Jeep during the filming of Kurosawa’s historical drama* The Men Who Treaded on the Tiger’s Tail (1945). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This kind of analysis is what makes this book distinct from both the conventional historical textbooks and even film studies. It focuses on the contextual dimension of an auteur’s oeuvre without ever losing sight of the films themselves. It uses film as a portal leading its readers to an understanding of the entangled and layered nature of wartime and postwar Japanese history. Readers learn both political and historical “hard facts” but also aspects of Japanese culture including traditional wedding attire, garbage disposal regulations, folk monsters, evolving beauty standards, and even the Japanese obsession with cats.

Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan is a historically- and culturally-grounded study of the director. It is both an informative and enjoyable read for anyone who finds the director’s works appealing and wish to know more about the historical and social condition that made them possible.

Yunfei Shang is a PhD student in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on East Asian cinema, film and media theory, digital cinema and media revolution. Her dissertation project deals with the popularity and influence of Japan’s media products especially film, TV documentary and drama in mainland China since the late 1970s.

Kusumoto Ine: A Remarkable Woman in Meiji Restoration Japan

On September 23, 1873, Japan’s young emperor Meiji received tragic news. His consort, Hamuro Mitsuko, had died, five days after delivering a stillborn boy. Sadly, such deaths were not uncommon. The imperial house suffered from high rates of maternal and infant mortality, probably due to some combination of inbreeding and poor diet. Ironically, their elite diet of white rice, unlike the humble Japanese diet of brown rice and millet, led to vitamin B deficiencies and related health problems. One detail of Mitsuko’s labor and delivery warrants special attention, even almost 150 years later. Mitsuko was attended by Kusumoto Ine (1827-1903), Japan’s first female physician.

Kusumoto was an unlikely candidate to serve the imperial house. She was the daughter of a Nagasaki courtesan named Taki, rather than an elite family. Her father was not Japanese, but rather a German physician, Franz von Siebold, who had worked for the Dutch East India Company. Siebold was banished from Japan when Ine was only two. He had exchanged maps with Japanese scholars and physicians, and the shogunate concluded that he was a foreign spy.

*Nagasaki Harbour, Kawahara Keiga (workshop of), c. 1833 – c. 1836, RIjkmuseum, NG-1190*

By almost every measure, she was an outsider: the mixed-race, illegitimate daughter of a courtesan and a foreigner. Ine’s rise from humble origins to the highest circles of Japanese society was part of the revolutionary potential of Japan in the 1860s and 1870s. For bold and ambitious people like Ine, the window between the collapse of the old order, the Tokugawa shogunate, and the consolidation of the new Meiji state, was a period of possibility. For a relatively brief historical moment, Ine’s intelligence and skill mattered more than her birth status or gender. Ine was “born at the right time.”

*Kusumoto Ine, photographer unknown (via Wikipedia and original post)*

In an earlier generation, Ine’s career would have been thwarted by conventional Japanese restrictions on women in the public sphere, as well as the traditional status system. While many Japanese women acquired basic literacy, and some became accomplished poets, women rarely learned classical Chinese, which was central to higher learning. Nor would Ine have been able to transcend her low status. Access to the emperor was so restricted that when the Emperor Nakamikado wished to view an elephant in 1729, the animal first had to be given imperial court rank. And in the early 1800s, the imperial court would not have been interested in a doctor trained in Western medicine.

In a later generation, Ine would have faced different challenges. Beginning in 1868, the new Meiji government instituted “westernizing” and “modernizing” reforms, including new western-style universities. That interest in western knowledge helped advance Ine’s career, since she had learned western-style medicine from her father’s circle of students. But the Meiji government’s westernizing reforms included western-style restrictions on women. Following western models, Japan began to regulate medicine, requiring licensing exams and formal training at recognized schools. But those schools, also following western models, were almost exclusively male. Ine rose to prominence before those restrictions, and she was allowed to continue practicing medicine under a “grandfather clause,” but only as an “old-style midwife” rather than a physician. Thus, the new Meiji government did not liberate women so much as change how it would deny them positions in public life. Viewed from the perspective of Ine’s life, the samurai who “modernized” Japan merely introduced Victorian patriarchal norms to replace Neo-Confucian restrictions.

*Ships in Nagasaki harbor, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-1956-461*

Much of Ine’s life seems remarkably “modern.” She was an accomplished professional woman who moved in the highest circles of Japanese society. In the 1860s, before serving the imperial house, Ine worked as house physician to the lord of Uwajima. Seeing her treated with respect by the nobility, foreign observers assumed she was of samurai status.

Ine’s family was global and sprawling. She reconnected with her father in the 1860s, after he was allowed to return to Japan, and established a relationship with her half-brothers Alexander and Heinrich, Siebold’s sons by his German wife. Ine chose to raise her daughter, Tada, as a single mother. Tada’s father was Ishii Sōken (1796–1861), one of Siebold’s students and Ine’s teachers. Ine accepted Sōken’s instruction and professional support, but refused to marry him. Her decision likely had a #metoo component: after her mother’s death, Tada reported that Sōken had raped Ine. Ine navigated that fraught relationship with determination, rejecting Sōken’s marriage proposals but accepting his career help.

*Ine’s daughter, Kusumoto Takako (right) and her husband Mise Shūzō (Wikipedia).*

But Ine’s story also shows the “lumpiness” of history — there is rarely a straight path from “then” to “now.” Rather we find moments in the past that seem more “modern” than recent events. Ine’s story leaps out to us as an example of events from 150 years ago that seem immediate and directly connected to our present moment.

For more on the “lumpy” history of modern Japan, see:

Mark Ravina, Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (2017)

Marius B. Jansen, Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration (1961). A classic study of a charismatic rebel leader of the 1860s.

Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Task and the Meiji Restoration (1998). A thoughtful feminist intervention: the Meiji Restoration as seen through the life of a politically engaged woman poet.

Mark Ravina. The Last Samurai: the Life and Battle of Saigō Takamori (2004). My biography of the most controversial figure in the early Meiji government

Top image credit: Kawahara Keiga, Arrival of a Dutch Ship, depicting Ine, Taki, and Siebold at Dejima (Wikipedia).

Nanban Art: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 2)

(via Wikimedia Commons)

This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

John Monsour’s exhibit on Nanban screenfolds exemplify the deep connections of the colonial Americas to early-modern Japan. Portuguese Jesuits and merchants arrived in southern Japan in the mid-sixteenth century with commodities from India, Europe, and the Americas and with hundreds of Luso-Africans. The foreigners were called “Nanban” (barbarians from the south). The Jesuits gained a foothold with Japanese lords that led to the massive conversions of commoners and nobles. Jesuits and Japanese artisan established workshops that produced many Nanban objects, including screenfolds documenting new European cosmographies. The maps also document the introduction of Chinese-Korean maps. Monsour’s exhibit shows the maps on Edo workshops led by Jesuit and the new cosmographies they engendered.

More from the Colonial Latin America Through Objects series:

Of Merchants and Nature by Diana Heredia López

Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific

By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45.

by Jonathan R. Hunt
University of Southhampton

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017).

Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbours and to the east and west by fish.” Thanks to this geographic grace, George Washington could call for freedom from “entangling alliances” in his farewell address. This distance has also bred a strong undercurrent of parochialism and chauvinism in American culture. From these two impulses has emerged the conceptual DNA of American foreign relations in the form of two dichotomies—exemplarism versus interventionism; cosmopolitanism versus exceptionalism—lending form and structure to debates about how a democratic people should manage their affairs in an often unkind, even hostile, world.

In his sweeping and authoritative account of United States grand strategy in the Asia Pacific, Michael J. Green reminds us that Americans have long regarded this maritime expanse – from the Aleutians to Cape Horn in the Western Hemisphere across to Australasia and Sakhalin in the Eastern — as integral to defending their ‘empire of liberty’. Nineteenth-century policymakers from Thomas Jefferson and Matthew C. Perry to Henry Seward and John Hay sought to pry open these watery frontiers to American influence (and conquest) so as to stave off any threats that might overleap the Pacific Ocean. Their twentieth-century successors, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt, George Marshall and Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, George Shultz and Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have fought to keep the Pacific an American lake – for now.

Green brings scholarly and policymaking credentials to this tour d’horizon. Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor at Georgetown University (not to mention the Asia hand in George W. Bush’s White House), he is supremely qualified to narrate and appraise more than two centuries of decisions, processes, and events. On a hemispheric tableau teeming with squadrons, legations, missionaries, gunboats, marines, emissaries, island chains, and good intentions, he paints a United States government in pursuit of a “distinct strategic approach” that would guarantee “that the Pacific Ocean remain[ed] a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.” (5)

The Alaska Purchase, 1867. Left to Right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State (USA); William H. Seward; William Hunter; Mr. Bodisco, Russian Ambassador; Baron de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner; Fredrick W. Seward (via Wikimedia Commons)

Green charts this strategic disposition from the Articles of Confederation to Obama’s pivot to Asia, dividing the chronology into four eras when a rising power—the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China—convulsed the region’s politics. American assertiveness waxed as European empires toggled from New World outposts to Asian colonialism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. In short order, Jefferson’s greater Louisiana brought on James Monroe’s enunciation of an American protectorate in its hemisphere, John Tyler’s extension of that Monroe Doctrine to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i to natives Polynesians), and William Seward’s purchase of Alaska (dubbed his ‘ice box’), before the Civil War cut short the Pacific ambitions of Lincoln’s secretary of state.

This section is rich in geography and personality, acquainting readers with a century-long campaign to seize “stepping stones,” most pivotally Hawai’i, in the Pacific, introducing swashbucklers like Captain David Porter, whose piratical voyage to the Pacific in the War of 1812 foreshadowed the fusion of mercenary and military aims that would become the country’s modus operandi, and keeping a running tally of plenipotentiaries (of uneven quality) who served in an ever more prostrate Qing China. Green’s treatment of dusty concordats such as the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, in which the United States pledged its “good offices” to Beijing in dealings with rapacious British, French, and Russians after the second Opium War, and the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which recognized Chinese eminent domain over its whole territory, is welcome. He is sharp on the strategic contours of these many-sided rivalries; yet, while alive to the noxious influence of Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth-century American culture, his tendency to treat republican virtues as more significant in U.S. foreign policy than Manifest Destiny chauvinism yields a handful of errors and omissions.

Green’s heroes are, above all, republican realists, high priests at the altar of the balance of power who still find ways to promote democracy, the rule of law, and free trade in the wider world. Thus, his hinge is fin-de-siècle power couple are Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan—the quintessential man of action married to the man of ideas. The latter expounded a strategic theory based on naval bases, sea lanes, and deep-water armadas; the former built a Great White Fleet to enforce it. The tendency to view America’s holdings in the Pacific, mostly insular takings such as Guam, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, as incidental rather than intrinsic to American power leads Green to paint the Bull Moose in overly Mahanian hues, emphasizing his naval leadership and power-balancing after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war while downplaying his protectionism and colonialism. What passed for strategic élan in Washington, after all, in Manila simply looked like another instance of imperialism. He is on firmer grounds in his treatment of John Hay’s push for trade reciprocity in China, contesting Wisconsin School members who deem the Open Notes clear evidence that the United States was (and remains) a capitalist octopus in ravenous search of pliant markets.

“AND, AFTER ALL, THE PHILIPPINES ARE ONLY THE STEPPING-STONE TO CHINA” – cartoon from Judge Magazine showing Uncle Sam with the “tools of modern civilization” using the Philippines as a stepping stone to China, ca. early 1900s (via Wikimedia Commons)

His appraisal of Asia policy from Teddy Roosevelt to cousin Franklin is scathing, and for good reason. Wilson sold out Korea and China’s Shangdong province to Japan for his League of Nations, before Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover retracted U.S. power after Teddy’s ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, nixed an American role in the league. Green includes a revealing vignette about American interwar finance, as William Straight and J. P. Morgan sought Chinese debt before the crash of October 24, 1929, put paid to their schemes. For Green, the Department of State’s willingness to accommodate Japan, whose militaristic expansions would upset the (perhaps excessively) elegant Washington Treaty, violated Mahan’s signature insight—playing sides against one another to avert a peer regional competitor from arising. Although the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere bore this warning out, he dismisses too perfunctorily the alternatives that Franklin Roosevelt’s Asianists—Lawrence A. Lowell, Joseph Grew, Stanley Hornbeck, and John Von Antwerp MacMurray—put forth. After all, MacMurray’s call to retrench at the Second Island Chain prefigured modern realists like Barry Posen, whose 2014 Restraint contends that the United States would best observe Mahan’s dictum by re-drawing its defense lines further west while retaining command of the commons. (To be fair, assured nuclear retaliation has now nullified whatever existential threats had existed.)

What happened after the United States sanctioned Japan for yet another massacre in China in 1940, after seven years of turning a blind eye (par for the course in the Guernica decade), was the country’s first fair fight in the Pacific. Green is too credulous that Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa shows that the Soviet declaration of war was equally if not more decisive), but his verdict that Roosevelt and Truman failed to leverage Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur’s military triumphs on behalf of a grand strategy that would deliver post-war security is devastating. When the Soviet Union switched from wartime ally to geo-ideological adversary, U.S. officials overlooked the Kuomingtang’s weakness and Mao Tse-Tung’s zeal; as a result, they held out on China serving as a fourth United Nations policeman. This even as Chiang Kai-Shek’s battle lines crumbled, in part for lack of American support (apart from a woefully inadequate 900 military advisors), leading to the loss of China and setting in train a series of events that would culminate in the militarization of containment in Korea and the Americanization of the war for peace in Vietnam.

The Cold War tested American grand strategy in ways new and old, first with proxy wars fused to anticolonial struggles, and then the Soviet Union’s massive naval build-up in the 1980s. Next to old chestnuts such as the extent of continuity in personnel and policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is the conspicuous omission of the former’s obsession with China’s nuclear-weapons program (its first nuclear test was on October 16, 1964); even though it was nearly a decade before Beijing fielded a survivable arsenal, the first Asian nuclear-weapon state was a game-changer, catalysing the Vietnam War, severely constraining U.S. military options once there, and helping usher the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Likewise, there is a clear and disturbing hierarchy of liberal values for Green, with genocide ranking far lower than free trade. When he supports the contention that “noble cause” advocates make that the war helped cauterize communist insurgencies in Indochina, Malaysia, and Thailand, for instance, he glosses over the 500,000 Indonesians estimated dead in the mass killings that shepherded the Suharto dictatorship into power in Jakarta.

Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. It was the first trip made by an American president to the nation, 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Nixon earns plaudits as an unsentimental president who ended twenty-five years of non-recognition between the most powerful and most populous nations on Earth; but Reagan, who convinced Japan to serve as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” (405) invested massively in the U.S. Navy, and midwifed democracy movements in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, receives the lion’s share of praise. In Green’s telling, his emphasis on security and stability afforded strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos and Park Chung-hee the leeway to sanction free elections. Reagan’s application of military, ministerial, and moral instruments to a coherent strategy in the region affords a case study for wedding power to principle effectively. Green also holds it to offer lessons for the newest and most challenging contender for regional pre-eminence: The People’s Republic China.

The final section dovetails with a set of vigorous debates now gripping Washington and Asian capitals. Can the United States and China resolve differences without military recourse as Beijing stakes its position in the South China Sea and Senkaku islands? Will America’s hubs-and-spoke network of alliances survive as China’s wealth and power cast a spell over neutrals and allies alike? Can Washington nudge the alphabet soup of multilateral institutions toward trans-oceanic rather than intra-regional orientations, especially now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is comatose? Will the U.S. join the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or acquiesce to the PRC’s “One Belt One Road” initiative of ports, highways, railways, and pipelines? Will Washington and its partners succeed in embedding Beijing as a stakeholder in the global rules-based order or will it shear off its sphere of influence from the norms and institutions that expedited its return to greatness?

Bill Clinton garners high marks for his strategy of engaging and balancing China, a two-pronged approach that George W. Bush and Barack Obama would adopt. And while Donald Trump’s beleaguered and inept administration has so far proven less unorthodox than anticipated on trade, Green’s emphasis on island chains, aircrafts carriers, and strategic sea-lift when compared to human rights, labour, immigration, and cultural dialogue yields a deafening silence on the centrifugal forces now eviscerating what once passed as bipartisan consensus on the importance of engagement in the Asia-Pacific for the security and prosperity of the United States.

Also by Jonathan Hunt on Not Even Past:

1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA
Review: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia.

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state. Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s. It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media. Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity. Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947. Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

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