Nov. 25, 2022: Conference “Mapping Asia,” University of Erfurt, Gotha Campus (Germany).

Panel chaired by Claudia Brunner and Iris Schröder.

Paper Title: “Nan’yō, or: The Invention of Japan’s Pacific.”

Despite being an archipelago, early modern Japan is not commonly understood as immersed in a Pacific context. The ocean, however, played a prominent role in discourses that, since the late eighteenth century, emancipated Japan cartographically from the continent. This reorientation brought about original concepts such as Nan’yō or Japan’s “South Sea,” a concept that evolved in conversation with political developments in the Pacific World.

This contribution examines the global historical context of Japan’s diverging and sometimes conflicting versions of “the Pacific” that emerged over the nineteenth century. I argue that unlike Europe’s rim-centric view of the ocean – transported from the Atlantic and essentially coined by the act of crossing – Japan’s island-centered views of the Pacific reflected the archipelago’s envisioned primacy in a maritime realm off the Asian continent. Over the early nineteenth century, theses like Honda Toshiaki’s and Satō Nobuhiro’s pictured Japan as the metropole of an archipelagic empire – a line of thought that culminated with Japan’s southward expansionism in the twentieth century.

The impact of Japan’s geopolitical reorientation also affected the way Pacific geography was understood in the West, as the global careers of Hayashi Shihei’s 1785 map of archipelagic Japan, or the concept of a “Kuroshio Current,” show. Japan’s ongoing Pacific engagement, reflected in the shogunate’s 1675 exploration of the Bonin Islands, or in the political responses to the advent of commercial whalers in the early nineteenth century, undermine the idea of insular seclusion. Instead, they reveal Japan as an active participant in a globalizing geographical discourse.