Chapter 2 offers a case study centered on the island of Hachijō, where life with the current gave rise to unique economic practices and social organization. It centers on the seasonal rhythm of castaway arrivals and repatriation that, by the mid-eighteenth century, had become an important branch of the local economy. Numbers of castaways were significant because sailors used winds and the eastward current to propel their voyage, even though their crafts were unfit for offshore sailing. In the peak year of 1850 alone, 300 sailors arrived on twenty-seven vessels from western Japan. Historical arrivals of foreign castaways and flotsam have created a virtual geography and local identity that connected the remote island to India, whence the “river” Kuroshio was believed to flow, and China, whence the current was believed to have brought important cultural achievements.

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.