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China in the Tokugawa World (The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, 4) Hardcover – February 5, 1992

by Marius B. Jansen (Author)

4.4 5 ratings

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This engaging book challenges the traditional notion that Japan was an isolated nation cut off from the outside world in the modern era. This familiar story of seclusion, argues master historian Marius B. Jansen, results from viewing the period soley in terms of Japan's ties with the West, at the expense of its relationship with closer Asian neighbors. Taking as his focus the port of Nagasaki and its thriving trade with China in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, Jansen not only corrects this misperception but offers an important analysis of the impact of the China trade on Japan's cultural, economic, and political life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a fascinating and informative study full of delightful vignettes that provide us with a highly textured profile of Tokugawa Japan...[It] is filled with important insights, good humor, and good sense.

Jansen, a leading authority in the field, skillfully offers a concise overview of Japan as an integral part of the cultural milieu of Chinese civilization. His masterly prose style adds to the enjoyment of the work.

[China in the Tokugawa World] constitutes the only specific survey in English of the Japanese contacts with, and images of, China from the late 16th to the late 19th century and is written by a scholar who here, not for the first time, proves that he possesses a rare ability to present in a highly accessible style and within a broad historical framework the most interesting findings of recent Japanese and Western research.

Review

This is a fascinating and informative study full of delightful vignettes that provide us with a highly textured profile of Tokugawa Japan...[It] is filled with important insights, good humor, and good sense.

Jansen, a leading authority in the field, skillfully offers a concise overview of Japan as an integral part of the cultural milieu of Chinese civilization. His masterly prose style adds to the enjoyment of the work.

[China in the Tokugawa World] constitutes the only specific survey in English of the Japanese contacts with, and images of, China from the late 16th to the late 19th century and is written by a scholar who here, not for the first time, proves that he possesses a rare ability to present in a highly accessible style and within a broad historical framework the most interesting findings of recent Japanese and Western research.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press; Reprint 2014 edition (February 5, 1992)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 148 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674184750
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674184756
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.14 x 0.44 x 9.21 inches

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Cally Kari Shokka

Incredibly informative, terrible for assignments

Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2018

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Great book and super informative and has a whole lot of really interesting insight to how China (and to a lesser extent, Korea) played in Japan during the 'period of isolation'.

However, if you need this book to write a report or any kind of assignment, keep in mind that this guy uses NO primary sources. EVERYTHING is secondary sources. Every. Thing.

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Etienne RP

In Memory of Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2010

Marius B. Jansen is a distinguished scholar who wrote his PhD thesis on The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen and then dedicated a book to Japan and China: From War to Peace, 1894-1972 . In China in the Tokugawa World, he builds on other people's scholarship, both from Japan and from the West (though not from mainland China or from Taiwan) to survey three interrelated themes: the contacts between Japan and the Chinese world in the Tokugawa period; the images projected by the Chinese civilization upon Japanese leaders and intellectuals; and Japan's shift to a bellicose attitude in the early Meiji period.

This book stems from the spirit that animates the Edwin O. Reischauer lectures series at Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research: the ambition "to restore the sense of an East Asian civilization that once pervaded all our work but has been greatly weakened by the more recent specialization on single-country histories." Indeed, the tendency to see neighboring countries through Japan's lenses--a tendency no doubt pioneered and encouraged by the author--has been the hallmark of recent scholarship focused on reassessing the role of Japan in the international order. Firmly anchored in the study of national archives, but breaking the conventions that separate East Asian and national history in Japanese universities, this strand of research often requires the mastery of a second Asian language, putting additional strains on the already demanding requirements put upon Western scholars specializing in Japanese history. But it has the effect of recentering Japan in its regional environment and, by doing so, of putting an end to the exclusive focus on relations with the West that has characterized previous scholarship on the isolation and opening of Japan.

Viewed from an Asian perspective, Japan's seclusion during the Tokugawa period was less absolute and more adaptative than previously assumed. Scholars have pointed out that the forms of seclusion changed over time and did not in fact become pillars of Tokugawa ideology until the nineteenth century, when bakufu authorities began to refer to isolation as a cardinal aspect of the legacy of Ieyasu's rule. Ronald P. Toby was early to point out that the term sakoku (closed country) first appeared in a translation of Engelbert Kaempfer's History of Japan, and that it has a meaning chiefly with respect to Japan's relations with the West and not to those with its neighbors in East Asia. It can also be argued that China was no less "closed", and Korea more so, than Japan; each country tolerated trade only through highly structured institutional forms, and certainly neither China nor Korea experienced anything like the intellectual stimulus that Japanese scholars derived from outside, especially Western, learning.

The course of events that ended with the restraints on travel and trade on the Edo years stemmed from two rival forces: strong but limited demand for a limited set of goods, and the desire on the part of the bakufu government to maintain and monopolize profits. Japan was a strong producer and exporter of minerals: according to Japanese historians, Japan may have accounted for as much as one third of the world's silver output at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century. Subsequently, Japan was also the world's largest copper-producing country. The foreign trade that resulted was dominated by the exchange of Japanese bullion for the Chinese silk that adorned the merchant capitals and castle towns of Tokugawa Japan. Restraints measures were linked with the progressive depletion of silver and then of copper resources, as well as the sumptuary laws that limited the use of silk through Japanese society.

Nagasaki, where foreign trade was concentrated, was in the seventeenth century the most cosmopolitan city in Japan, and the Chinese presence, first spread in all parts of the city until the special Chinese quarter was built in 1689, far exceeded the Dutch trade community in Dejima. As the author writes, "Dutch trade at Nagasaki was always smaller in amounts than the Chinese trade, and it is in good part the ethnocentricism of the West that has led to our obsession with seclusion when the Nagasaki door was always ajar and sometimes wide open." Much of the activities that took place along the chain of Chinese trading posts throughout Southeast Asia, which encompassed Dutch and Portuguese trade, can be understood as the securing and maintaining of access routes for the transport of Japanese and New World silver to China and Chinese silks to Japan.

The China trade financed much of the resistance of Taiwan and south China to the Manchu takeover. Trade restrictions through the regulations of 1685 and 1715 encouraged a program of import substitution, with the domestic production of such import items as silk, sugar, and ginseng. Enjoying a climatic monopoly on sugar production, Satsuma found a secure source of income that helped to finance the political and military structure so important in the Meiji Restoration. When the ports opened to foreign trade in 1859, Japan's silk exports quickly became a powerful source of profit, strengthening the economy in general but weakening the bakufu's ability to monopolize profits from the exchange. Thus foreign trade's ebbs and flows were an important factor in the political and economy trajectory followed by Japan in the modern era.

The image of an isolated Japan whose inhabitants were cut off from the outside world also conflicts with a second factor highlighted by recent scholarship: Tokugawa Japan formed a civilization that was oriented more than ever before toward the language and classical culture of continental China. Literacy and education for the elite were thought of in terms of the mastery of Chinese, and a disproportionate amount of time was spent teaching students to read and compose texts in classical Chinese. Here the author pays tribute to the work of Ôba Osamu, who pioneered the history of cultural interchange between Japan and China, and also refers positively to the research of Kate Wildman Nakai, who showed that Confucianist scholars such as Ogyû Sorai compensated for their relative lack of status in Japanese society with the apology of the Confucian order, in which the scholar-official was the ideal-type. The essay also documents the rise of anti-Chinese feelings, which help to account for the alacrity in which Meiji Japan was prepared to "part with Asia," in Yukichi Fukuzawa's words, and join the circle of imperialist powers.

Although China in the Tokugawa World is a synthesis that surveys the period with broad strokes, it also features individual vignettes and historical anecdotes that give depth and perspective to the picture. Each story could form the setting of a fiction novel or a historical narrative. In order to satisfy the curiosity of the reigning emperor without breaching the protocol, an albino elephant from Siam was given an honorary court rank and granted an imperial audience in Kyoto. Zheng Chenggong, known as Koxinga in Europe and Watônai in the Japanese puppet play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, is still revered as a national hero in Japan, Taiwan and mainland China. Chinese junks arriving at Nagasaki received formal warnings by Japanese officials about Christianity, and the crews were required to tread on sacred images in a fumie ritual; discoveries of translations of Jesuit tracts resulted in the burning of the offending books, seizure of the rest of the cargo, and exclusion of the shipowner from further trade at Nagasaki. The book concludes with a fascinating dialogue between imperial commissioner Li Hongzhang and young Japanese envoy Mori Arinori, who justified the abandonment of national dress and adoption of Western mores including respect for women's rights. The spirit originating with Harvard scholars Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank is very much kept alive in these lectures.

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