Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2021 J. R. Seeley and Japan’s pacific expansion Dusinberre, Martin Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, as Japanese scholars, traders, and labourers began to cross the Pacific Ocean in ever greater numbers, Tokyo-based intellectuals started to think about the significance of the ocean for the upcoming century. One prominent articulation of this ‘Pacific age’ was the result of an intellectual dialogue between a young Japanese student, Inagaki Manjirō (1861–1908), and his Cambridge professor, John Robert Seeley (1834–95). Traditionally framed as a relationship of ‘influence’ from teacher to pupil, and thus from West to East, the emergence of the ‘Pacific age’ was in fact the result of a sophisticated modulation of ideas from Seeley’s The expansion of England (1883) into the rapidly changing politics of early 1890s Japan. This article traces that modulation in Inagaki’s published works between 1890, when he graduated from Cambridge, and 1895, when Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War. It argues that Seeley’s analyses, in Inagaki’s hands, gave a significant impetus to existing expansionist visions in Japan, and thus constitute one example of late nineteenth-century history being written in the discursive space between Europe and East Asia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X19000591 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-203831 Journal Article Published Version The following work is licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License. Originally published at: Dusinberre, Martin (2021). J. R. Seeley and Japan’s pacific expansion. Historical Journal, 64(1):70-97. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X19000591 The Historical Journal, , (), pp. – © Cambridge University Press . This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐ NonCommercial‐NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‐nc‐nd/.), which permits non‐commercial re‐use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article. doi:./SX J. R. SEELEY AND JAPAN’ S PACIFIC EXPANSION* MARTIN DUSINBERRE University of Zurich ABSTRACT. In the late nineteenth century, as Japanese scholars, traders, and labourers began to cross the Pacific Ocean in ever greater numbers, Tokyo-based intellectuals started to think about the significance of the ocean for the upcoming century. One prominent articulation of this ‘Pacific age’ was the result of an intellectual dialogue between a young Japanese student, Inagaki Manjirō (–), and his Cambridge professor, John Robert Seeley (–). Traditionally framed as a relationship of ‘influence’ from teacher to pupil, and thus from West to East, the emergence of the ‘Pacific age’ was in fact the result of a sophisticated modulation of ideas from Seeley’s The expansion of England () into the rapidly changing politics of early s Japan. This article traces that modulation in Inagaki’s published works between , when he graduated from Cambridge, and , when Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War. It argues that Seeley’s analyses, in Inagaki’s hands, gave a significant impetus to existing expansionist visions in Japan, and thus constitute one example of late nineteenth-century history being written in the discursive space between Europe and East Asia. I If history-writing is an act of translation, of rendering a foreign country intelli- gible to the reader or seminar student, then simply for the thrills and spills I Historisches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Karl Schmid-Strasse , Zürich, Switzerland martin. [email protected] *I would particularly like to thank Gonzalo San Emeterio Cabañes, Lina Zbinden, and Tamara Ann Tinner for research assistance during the writing of this article in and . Joan Judge, Leigh Jenco, Birgit Tremml-Werner, Helena Jaskov, David Möller, Bill Tsutsui, Nadin Hée, and two anonymous reviewers of the Historical Journal kindly commented on earlier drafts, as did other colleagues and invitees of the HERA project ‘East Asian uses of the European past’ (–). That project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. , and I extend thanks also to the Swiss National Science Foundation. I am grateful to the BA students of my autumn colloquium at the University of Zurich for allowing me to refine these ideas in teaching. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich, on 07 Jun 2021 at 15:38:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X19000591 SEELEY AND JAPAN’ S PACIFIC EXPANSION would seek out a land far removed from my daily pastures – distant from my childhood memories of Cambridge, England, from my working life in Switzerland, and from a community of scholars also interested in Japanese his- toriography. Ideally, I would be able to write about Japan’s late nineteenth- century expansion through the biography of a man such as Sanuki Jūkichi. Born in into a farming household, Sanuki grew up in a small town to the south-west of Hiroshima, close to the Inland Sea coast. In May ,he was declared of sound mind and body by an older relative; a few weeks later, he boarded the Yamashiro-maru and crossed the Pacific Ocean to begin a new life as a sugar plantation labourer in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. For the next five years, Sanuki worked at the Hakalau plantation on Hawaiʻi Island itself. On April , he then boarded a barque called the Enoch Talbot, bound for Adelaide, where he landed two months later; but in Australia he disappears from the historical record. Despite these all too brief details, Sanuki’s life would be worthy of translation because his migrations from Japan to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, and then on to the Australian colonies, embodied what contemporary Japanese scholars came to call the ‘Pacific age’. As we shall see, this term was the outcome of intellectual fermentations that occurred roughly between and – that is, in the same years as Sanuki’s transpacific crossings. In an ideal world, therefore, Sanuki would be studied as a co-producer of the ‘Pacific age’ discourse, in that his migrations, and those of thousands of other Japanese men and women like him, gave material reality to otherwise abstract ideas about Japan’s past and future place in world history. Thus, we would write a history which drew as equally on the experiences of the labourers as on those of the lit- erati – while also not ignoring the animal actors, whose own migrations were so central to what scholars call the ‘co-crafting’ of the Pacific world. But the arch- ival world is not ideal: Sanuki’s voice does not speak as loudly as those of the scholars, essayists, lecturers, and journalists whose written records comprise my sources in the following pages; as a consequence, the protagonists of this piece are far closer to the habitus of home and work than I would like. Hiroshima Prefecture 広島県編, ed., Hiroshima-ken ijūshi: shiryohen̄ 広島県移住史：資料編 (The migration history of Hiroshima prefecture: primary sources) (Tokyo, ), pp. –. See also Martin Dusinberre, ‘Writing the on-board: Meiji Japan in transit and transition’, Journal of Global History, (), pp. –. My brief biography of Sanuki Jūkichi 讃岐十吉 (alternatively 重吉) comes from the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DAMFA), Japan, ‘Dekaseginin meibo no bu’ 出稼人名簿之部 (‘Names of out-migration labourers’) folder, ...–, and ‘Hawai imin’ 布哇移民 (Hawaiʻi emigration) folder, unnumbered, vol. I; The Daily Bulletin (Honolulu), April (accessed through https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov); and The Advertiser (Adelaide), June (accessed through https://trove.nla.gov.au). On the ‘co-crafting’ or ‘co-construction’ of the Pacific world between humans and animals, see, respectively, Ryan Tucker Jones, ‘Running into whales: the history of the north Pacific from below the waves’, American Historical Review, (), pp. –; and Gregory Rosenthal, Beyond Hawaiʻi: native labor in the Pacific world (Berkeley, CA, ), p. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich, on 07 Jun 2021 at 15:38:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X19000591 MARTIN DUSINBERRE That said, the reason why historians should care about articulations of the ‘Pacificage’ as rhetorical framings for the world in which Sanuki moved is that they constituted something new in the global outlook of many Japanese people in the late nineteenth century. Sanuki’s crossing to Hawaiʻi, as part of a second shipment of Japanese labourers (the first had left in January ), was the first time in more than years that the central state had permitted the mass migration of Japanese subjects overseas. Meanwhile, the intellectual struggle to formulate a coherent set of ideas about Japan’s relationship to the Pacific Ocean grew out of the fact that, until the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s largest maritime space had only minimally figured in Japanese thinking. As Marcia Yonemoto has shown, to Edo period (–) scholars the Pacific was a site of fear and ambivalence, its status encapsulated in Nagakubo Sekisui’s 長久保赤水 (–) ‘Annotated map of the mountains and seas of all the world’s countries’ (c. ). This map split the Pacific into two bodies of water, the ‘Small Eastern Sea’ (close to Japan) and the ‘Large Eastern Sea’ (far away towards North America), and thereby ‘cut the vast Pacific down to size’. Maps, according to Yonemoto, were ‘the coded and con- textual language used to craft the notion of the Small Eastern Sea as a regional ocean basin, reinforcing Japan’s sense of attachment to northeast Asia while div- iding it from the “new” world, about which the Japanese knew little’.