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Summary

Chapter 3 argues that Tokugawa Japan exerted an important influence on the way global geographers mapped and conceptualized what is known today as “the Pacific.” It shows how the ocean has been the object of diverging metageographical categorizations in different cultural and political contexts in Japan, Asia, and Oceania. Over the Tokugawa period, its meanings changed radically in Japan. In fact, even decades after the issue of maritime prohibitions, in 1675, the Tokugawa shogunate successfully explored and mapped the then-uninhabited Bonin Islands. For Japanese intellectuals, the subsequent “discovery” of the Pacific coincided with an intellectual emancipation from the continent, as Hayashi Shihei’s late-eighteenth century works illustrate. Concepts and geographical data created in the process were highly classified, yet they were among the first Japanese texts to be translated in Europe in the early nineteenth century, where they entered globalizing geographical discourses. Like the malleable category of Nan’yō or “the South Sea,” some metageographical categories remained politically distinct until the twentieth century.

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3 - The Invention of Japan’s Pacific

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3 - The Invention of Japan’s Pacific

Summary