Understanding the 'Opening of Japan' in Japanese and Global History

What is it about?

This chapter discusses the need for a reconsideration of the significance of the ‘Opening of Japan,’ a historical moment brimming with untold stories of human connection that have the potential to alter Japan’s place in the history of the world. We draw attention to the historiographical underrepresentation of non-state historical actors and non-imperial encounters in flows of cultural and intellectual life within and beyond Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The chapter provides an overview of twelve new pieces of scholarship that focus on subjects like the worldwide nineteenth century trade in mummified mermaids, a globetrotting Japanese scientist’s study of sexual desire in slime moulds, and the Japanese-Russian intellectual links underpinning threads of anarchism in the work of Akira Kurosawa. These historical studies also revisit many of the broader topics that those learning about Japanese history for the first time will come into contact with, from ideas of revolution, progress, and civilisation, to sizeable shifts in medicine, the arts, politics, religion, industry, and conceptions of nature and humanity. Instead of searching for a specifically “Japanese” experience of these developments, they look at the fundamentally transnational character of the experiences of pearl divers, sex workers, African American writers, radical doctors, craftsmen, cartoonists, and many more – people whose parts in the ‘Opening of Japan’ have been rendered unfamiliar because they sit awkwardly within established interpretations of why, how, when, and where Japan first became ‘modern.’

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Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The story of Commodore Matthew Perry’s dramatic arrival in Edo Bay and the ‘Opening of Japan’ is one of the most well-known in modern Asian history. These events and their meanings have long been foundational for Japan’s national narrative, structuring accounts of how it became a modern, industrialised nation-state in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and how that shift related to larger historical processes of globalisation. However, another set of stories that do not fit very well within this modernizing metanarrative have escaped historians’ attention. This chapter discusses how this oversight has limited our understanding of Japan’s historical place in the world. ‘A pioneering critique of the historiography of “the opening.” The book is a major contribution to the field, re-thinking approaches to global as well as national history.’ – M. William Steele, Professor Emeritus, International Christian University