Founded by the Japanese Taiwan Government-General in 1928, Taihoku Imperial University, also known as Taihoku Teikoku University (hereafter TIU), was an institutional hallmark of Japanese empirical imperialism. As the first professor of Nan’yōshi (The history of the southern seas), Murakami helped define Japan’s historical ties with Southeast Asia while, at the same time, contributing to Taiwan’s exclusion from a broader history of Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹ The latter process had to do with both practical regional subdivisions and conscious thematic choices. Being at the forefront of editing projects for early modern Taiwanese history, his work provided future Taiwanese historians with reference works on their past. One of them was the prominent Taiwanese historian Ts’ao Yung-ho (曹永和, 1920–2014) who regularly acknowledged his intellectual indebtedness to Japanese scholarship.Footnote ² When tirelessly promoting the study of the history of Taiwan as ‘island history’ (臺灣島史観, Taiwan dao shi guan), in order to break away from the constraints of the patronizing Han Chinese development aid narrative, Ts’ao placed strong emphasis on Japanese scholarship.Footnote ³ The tendency remains strong even today given that researchers and students in Taiwan often use Murakami’s translations instead of originals.Footnote ⁴ Ann Heylen has long highlighted the colonial legacy of the study of Taiwanese pasts, arguing that historians draw too heavily on materials accumulated and left behind by the Japanese colonial regime.Footnote ⁵

Like the previous chapters, this chapter deals with a concrete aspect of knowledge creation, more precisely, the coloniality of historiographical knowledge. Murakami’s contributions to Taiwanese and Southeast Asian history are classic examples of colonial knowledge in need of reassessment. A necessary first step in this process is to map out Japanese and European empirical imperialism in the historiography of early modern Taiwan. The subsequent critical analysis of colonial knowledge and other hegemonic orientations in Taiwanese history will scrutinize the methods, silences, concepts, and language of knowledge creation by Murakami from a decolonial perspective.Footnote ⁶ The results will ideally assist in the process of creating autonomous knowledge as a next step (which lamentably lies beyond my own competencies and is thus beyond the scope of this book), as demanded by decoloniality scholars such as Syed Farid Alatas.Footnote ⁷

Speaking of ‘Taiwanese history’ necessitates acknowledging that the term itself – its meaning and the issue of who claimed sovereignty over narratives – has long been contested. As is the case with any postcolonial setting, numerous unresolved controversies complicate the historiography of Taiwan.Footnote ⁸ The concept of a ‘history of Taiwan’ is loaded because of the disagreement about whether Taiwan should or can be studied as an independent entity or as part of ‘Greater China.’ Related questions concern the agency of Taiwanese Chinese (huaren, 華人) and Taiwan Indigenous (yuanzhumin, 原住民) within the island’s history, with both heterogenous groups negotiating the politics of their history among themselves and with others. As successor of a Japanese Imperial University, as such inheriting some of its educational agendas, the role of history curricula at the National Taiwan University remains contested. When I speak of Taiwan’s past or Taiwanese history in this book, I aim to be reasonably inclusive and aware of the context of power imbalances and ulterior motives of the parties who wrote the region’s history.

It could be argued that the frameworks of decolonization and decoloniality have been criticized for replicating the Eurocentric gaze because of their emphasis on violence and inclusion/exclusion.Footnote ⁹ As a European scholar with an educational background in Japan, I am admittedly not immune to such allegations. However, I feel that historians with a solid training in contextualized source criticism have to contribute to debates that have been dominated by social scientists and philosophers, including those about how to incorporate Indigenous voices with oral traditions into historical narratives. My background in critical global history enables me to scrutinize the available historiography and theoretical knowledge and to complement findings with close readings of voluminous and sometimes fragmentary written sources in multiple languages. In the remaining two chapters I will thus offer suggestions as to how we can include Indigenous voices and agencies using conventional historical methodologies, when feasible, and how we should attempt to incorporate other practices without obfuscating hegemonic frames or other inequities.

Zeroing in on Murakami’s role in inaugurating the southern seas history department (Nan’yōshi) and his tenure as dean at the Faculty of Letters at Taihoku Imperial University, this chapter combines comparative and genealogical approaches to the epistemological foundation of the Eurocentric discourse of progress and development about seventeenth-century Taiwan and Southeast Asia. I argue that conspicuous absences in the historical record are key to recognizing how specific research traditions and their primary archives reveal the lasting effects of empirical imperialism. The dominant historical perception of a passive Taiwan – albeit situated at the crossroads between East and Southeast Asia – that was never regionally integrated and always internationally irrelevant has its discursive origins in early twentieth-century scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰ Japanese colonial historians could not recognize that the island had an autonomous past because they applied a conventional narrative of linear progress.Footnote ¹¹ The epistemic asymmetries they created unjustifiably hampered Taiwan’s integration into the story of early modern colonialism. Hence, Taiwan’s silenced pasts remain to this day a challenge to global history’s operating principles of comparison and connection.Footnote ¹² Murakami’s research and his later position as first chair in southern seas history at the Imperial University in Taipei led to the creation of an extensive written archive that was silent about those who were believed to have no history.Footnote ¹³ Murakami’s educational methodology favored linguistic research and paleography.Footnote ¹⁴ His emphasis on primary sources and his categorization of ‘barbarian languages’ (bango) displayed his disinterest in the history of Indigenous communities and their cultural techniques. While Chapter 6 will address silenced and forgotten pasts more closely, the current chapter zooms in on the development of the institutionalized history of nan’yō by providing empirical examples that will shed further light on larger questions of empirical imperialism. The examples include trends in the historiography of Zheng Chenggong, the geography and invented etymology of the nan’yō, and the educational capital of the nan’yō history program.

Taiwan between Colonial and Global History

Most global history narratives of Taiwan focus on global trade and warfare. They commonly paint a picture of alternating connections and ruptures and are practically silent about Indigenous agency. As generations of scholars regarded the colonial encounter in Taiwan, a mountainous island situated 200 km southeast of the Chinese coastal province of Fujian – as less formative for the history of Southeast Asia – has made it difficult to map Taiwan’s role in the history of expansion in the macro region.Footnote ¹⁵ By that I do not mean that the island is missing on maps by European or Asian cartographers and maritime explorers. Instead I aim to explore why the early modern history of the island has traditionally had a one-sided focus.

In 1897, Murakami’s mentor, Ludwig Riess, published a long essay entitled ‘History of Formosa’ in a journal distributed by the German Association for East Asian Natural History and Ethnology. Being an organization founded in 1873 by German merchants, diplomats, and o-yatoi gaikokujin (foreign experts invited by the Meiji government) based in Japan, the venue is not without expansionist implications.Footnote ¹⁶ Riess concluded his account with a reference to Japanese historian Inagaki Manjirō, a student and admirer of British imperial historian John Robert Seeley, author of the Expansion of England (1883). Riess urged Japan to take the initiative to write the history of Taiwan at a time when scholars focused on the idea of expansion and were driven by the desire to establish Japan’s historical roots in maritime Asia. Their mindset reflected the late nineteenth-century doctrine of Japan’s southern expansion known as nanshin (南進).Footnote ¹⁷ The nanshin perceptions were rooted in late 1880s popular novels promoting Japanese intervention to rescue the Filipino population from Spanish oppression.Footnote ¹⁸

From my viewpoint as a global historian, the historical imagination of Taiwan and the surrounding Southeast Asian seascape seems full of contradictions and thus requires more context and reflection. Historical geographers and anthropologists, with their respective political agendas, are still debating whether the aboriginal Austronesian population either lost or never possessed seafaring skills.Footnote ¹⁹ Disagreement on when (sometime between 15,000 and 5,500 years ago) and from where the Austronesian population arrived has led to different theories about the origins of the Aboriginal Taiwanese. While archeological and genetic findings suggest migratory waves from China, oral accounts of the Taiwan Aboriginals (hereafter IndigenesFootnote ²⁰) refer to the south as the place of their ancestors’ origin.Footnote ²¹ Another topic of debate is the time and intensity of the Indigenous population’s contact with the continent. Chinese historical records suggest that fishermen from China arrived via Penghu archipelago (澎湖群島, Pescadores in European sources) in southwest Taiwan following the seasonal mullet migration along the Eastern Ocean Route via Luzon to the Moluccas no earlier than the thirteenth century ce. However, prior to the late sixteenth century, contacts remained sporadic. It was not until the seventeenth century that the Han Chinese population of Taiwan increased with commercial expansion. This was also the time when increasing Indigenous participation in maritime trade attracted Japanese, Spanish, and Dutch seafarers to the island.

Merchants of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a trading outpost in 1624 in the sandy area around present-day Anping. With the help of Fujianese settlers, the Dutch turned the area surrounding Taoyouan into a transit point in the intra-Asian trade between China, Japan, and insular Southeast Asia.Footnote ²² This would become the first large territorial entity in Asia over which the Dutch claimed sovereignty. Before long, Japanese and Spanish merchants and officials began to contest Dutch operations. Spaniards from the Philippines set up their own fort in Tamsui (near present-day Taipei) in 1626, while Japanese seafaring merchants, supported by Kyushu officials, resisted Dutch attempts to control all Taiwan-based trade. From the mid-1620s to the mid-1640s, Taiwan regularly witnessed armed conflicts between foreign competitors, as well as between foreigners and Indigenous groups. By 1650, after Japanese and Spanish rival foreign powers had withdrawn, the island was populated with roughly 100,000 multiethnic Indigenes and 15,000 Chinese settlers. The Dutch hoped for a peaceful collaboration with all the residents to counter threats of intervention from Fujian in southern China, where the Zheng clan – known for controlling tens of thousands of seafarers and pirates and the major sea routes in the China Seas – repeatedly voiced their territorial interest in Taiwan.

In 1661, Zheng Chenggong, under pressure from the advancing Manchu troops in southern China, led his troops to Taiwan where he eventually defeated the Dutch in early 1662 with the help of both Chinese and Indigenous populations. This was the beginning of Zheng rule, also known as the Kingdom of Tungning (1661–83), which was located in the western part of the island. After his death in 1662, his son Zheng Jing succeeded him as the king of Tungning and continued to consolidate Taiwan as the last Han Chinese stronghold against the Qing, whose force eventually conquered Taiwan in 1683.Footnote ²³ The two decades became known as Zheng rule over Taiwan (1662–83) and are considered by Han Chinese nationalist historians as a short break from colonial rule.Footnote ²⁴

Murakami’s legacy within Japanese colonial source-gathering and editing efforts lives on in two areas: the Sinkan Manuscripts and the main body of Taiwan Historic Materials.Footnote ²⁵ The Sinkan Manuscripts refer to documents written in Latin script in a largely extinct Indigenous language. Sinkan was the name of a village of Siraya Indigenes who inhabited villages in the southern plains. Murakami discovered some of these manuscripts that had been composed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during his first visit to the island in 1896/7 and built upon this collection during his tenure at TIU. These distinct manuscripts and Murakami’s role in their dissemination will be the topic of Chapter 6.Footnote ²⁶ As far as other historical manuscripts are concerned, Murakami gained a reputation for meticulously collecting and translating Dutch records produced at Fort of Zeelandia, from where the Dutch governor general ruled the southern part of the island between 1624 and 1662.Footnote ²⁷ Both the primary sources themselves and the way Murakami framed and interpreted them are of invaluable importance for my project of understanding the processes of writing, translating, and reconceptualizing the history of Taiwan. The overarching aim of the chapter is to understand how Murakami shaped the study of Taiwan’s premodern history – actively and passively, directly and indirectly, implicitly and explicitly. The two subordinated aims are to examine why Taiwan is underrepresented in the global history of Southeast Asian maritime connections and to foster an awareness of processes of inclusion and exclusion.Footnote ²⁸

(De)colonizing Taiwanese History

Over the past decade, scholars have made attempts to decolonize Taiwan’s history by stressing Indigenous perspectives and experiences.Footnote ²⁹ In showing how Indigenous peoples resisted the extension of the modern state under global capitalism, prominently represented by Japanese colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century in the case of Taiwan, they have contributed to the discussion of creating epistemic justice.Footnote ³⁰ Their accounts emphasize the multilayered nature of Taiwanese history by boosting Indigenous voices that were often silenced in the Dutch and Japanese colonial archives.Footnote ³¹ Kirsten Ziomek employed oral history and material objects to complement historiographical knowledge of marginalized Indigenous communities, capturing forgotten realities of people under imperial Japanese rule.Footnote ³² Her work is an overdue corrective to earlier historiography that excluded the island’s Indigenous past from larger-than-local narratives.Footnote ³³

Murakami’s ‘achievements’ in Taiwanese history must always be seen in the light of his colonial and Eurocentric approach to interpreting the island’s past and both temporal and institutional situatedness of his work.Footnote ³⁴ Hence, while acknowledging that Murakami colonized Taiwanese history, I do not intend to negate Murakami’s intellectual contributions nor judge them by current academic ethics. I also acknowledge the limitations he faced due to the rigid disciplinary boundaries between history and anthropology that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century. The former was mostly concerned with the rise of nations, while the latter traced the evolutionary trajectory of mankind. Hence, Murakami’s focus on colonial powers in Taiwan reflected his view that political processes leading to protostate formation were important. What is more, a major part of his lasting contributions (including the production, collection, placing, and publication of data) were the result of a scholarship funded by an imperial regime. Hence, Murakami’s contract work for the Taiwan Government-General by definition cannot be separated from power relations.Footnote ³⁵

In the 1890s, two diseases afflicted Japan and its fledgling empire: One, the nanshin netsu (southern advance fever), was characterized by growing interest in the nan’yō and a potential southward expansion. The other, milder rekishi netsu (history fever), motivated journalists and scholars to emphasize precedents of a strong and expanding Japanese Empire. Stories of the past were linked to contemporary indirect leadership claims and were ideological harbingers for Pan-Asian aspirations. In this spirit, the Government-General’s Office for Historiographical Source Collection of Taiwan (台湾史編纂事務) commissioned Murakami to collect sources on Taiwanese history in Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou, and Hong Kong in autumn 1896.Footnote ³⁶ Murakami, equipped with the state of the art in reading historical sources, was assigned a temporary position as historiographical officer for Taiwanese history. His task was to unearth scientifically valuable material that would demonstrate Japan’s seventeenth-century presence in the southern seas. In so doing, Murakami helped conquer knowledge and control its dissemination.Footnote ³⁷ Seiji Shirane’s recent work, Imperial Gateway, is rich in such examples demonstrating the links between knowledge creation and geopolitics with Taiwan as the base for continued southward imperial expansion until the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945.Footnote ³⁸ In this spirit, and inspired by the example of European colonialism in Asia, Murakami coordinated empirical imperialism from Taipei and thereby shaped an image of early modern Japan’s superior role in Asia, which could be used to legitimize the actions of the new colonial power.Footnote ³⁹ Both implicit comparison and empirical imperialism let him to position Taiwan in the narrative of early modern encounters not as an active agent of foreign relations but rather as a passive object.

The Great Men of Taiwan’s Trade and Foreign Relations

In two authoritative source canons of diplomatic history edited by Murakami, the Ikoku nikki shō (1911) and the Ikoku ōfuku shokanshū (1929), Taiwan was close to absent. Now, while Japanese interventions abroad – no matter how clumsy or improvised – were interpreted as acts of foreign relations of an early modern polity, Taiwanese interventions abroad – as when Suetsugu Heizō took a delegation of Taiwanese Indigenes to Edo in 1627 – were not perceived as anything near that.Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed, the Indigenous population of Taiwan had no centralized political power, and their trips abroad happened more seldomly. Yet, are these reasons enough to deny them diplomatic agency? On the rare occasions when Murakami referred to Taiwan in the compilations, he approached the history of the island through the territorial concept of Takasago-koku (高砂国).Footnote ⁴¹ Takasago-koku had been used for the island by some Japanese seafarers and rulers since the thirteenth century and throughout the Edo period, while some seventeenth-century sources also speak of Takayama.Footnote ⁴² While the colonial administration did not use Takayama or Takasago for contemporary affairs, other institutions continued to use it.Footnote ⁴³ The fact that Japanese anthropologists employed the term Takasago-zoku (高砂族) for the Indigenous populations as late as the 1930s underlines a clear temporal dimension that highlighted a premodern, pre-Japanese past.Footnote ⁴⁴

Indeed, premodern Taiwan played an ambiguous role for imperial Japan’s self-perception, as the master narrative of outward-looking early modern foreign relations showed. This narrative, which also became popular in global history, positions Japanese historical actors, often with a progressive maritime background, as people with clear political and economic agendas both abroad and at home. Arima Harunobu (有馬晴信, 1567–1612), the lord of Shimabara, who traveled to Taiwan in 1609 (Keichō 14), was one of them. Harunobu was a Catholic convert, one of the sponsors of the Tenshō mission to Europe (1582–90), and part of a group whose members have frequently been labeled ‘Christian daimyō’.Footnote ⁴⁵ He fought in Hideyoshi’s campaigns in Kyushu and Korea and traveled on behalf of the Tokugawa bakufu to Takasago to investigate future trade opportunities in a period when the island emerged as a popular location for Sino-Japanese trade.Footnote ⁴⁶ Arriving in Taiwan with a letter (書状, shojō) for a local authority by Tokugawa Ieyasu, Harunobu sought to levy tribute from the locals. When the Indigenous population refused and attacked, the Japanese delegation rapidly returned to Japan. Back home, Harunobu’s opaque business deals with Portuguese merchants from Macau and internal competition with bakufu officials effectively led to his death sentence in 1612.Footnote ⁴⁷ Nevertheless, history remembers him along with the likes of Yamada Nagamasa as an agent of change through commercial relations with the outside world. Yamada Nagamasa, by the way, arrived in Taiwan on the vessel of merchants from Sunpu equipped with a shuinjō trading license from the Tokugawa bakufu in the year of Arima’s death and thus several years before his adventures in Siam began.Footnote ⁴⁸

In 1616, Nagasaki governor (長崎代官, Nagasaki daikan) Murayama Tōan (村山等安, ?–1619), another ‘Christian daimyō,’ set out for Taiwan with thirteen vessels.Footnote ⁴⁹ He was equipped with a shuinjō issued for ‘Takasagun.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Richard Wickham – an English resident of Hirado whose letters and records served Murakami and others as a valuable source for studying economic developments of Tokugawa foreign trade – interpreted Japanese intervention in Taiwan as part of Tokugawa foreign relations and even claimed that Tōan had actually received orders to conquer Taiwan the previous year.Footnote ⁵¹ However, the relatively large number of vessels is the only indicator for Wickham’s claim. In any case, several ships ran into trouble on the way to Taiwan and only Tōan’s small vessel reached its destination. Once ashore, the crew of Tōan’s ship ran immediately into new troubles. According to Chinese and Spanish accounts, the surviving Japanese were soon forced to flee after fierce attacks by Indigenous people.Footnote ⁵²

Richard Cocks (1566–1624), who was, like Wickham, an eloquent Japan-based English merchant who gathered information for English readers, associated Japanese engagement in Taiwan with the arrival of a Ming Chinese envoy in Nagasaki, one year after Murayama Tōan’s failed Taiwan expedition. Cocks, who included many episodes of commercial competition between Japanese, Dutch, and Chinese merchants in Taiwan in his diary, even emphasized the island’s potential as a stage for commercial exchange without state interference.Footnote ⁵³ His views influenced Murakami, who engaged closely with Cocks’s diary when editing it in 1899.Footnote ⁵⁴ Murakami framed the history of seventeenth-century Taiwan as one determined by Dutch–Japanese rivalry over trade in Chinese products in Taiwan.Footnote ⁵⁵ The idea of Taiwan as stage for competition and rivalry between Dutch and Japanese merchants stood at the beginning of the Taiwan-centric narrative of trade rivalries by external forces that would also include the Zheng trading empire. It began with Japanese exports of deerskin from Taiwan at the end of the sixteenth century. It has been said that this trade was originally in the hands of Fujianese (Minnan and Hakka) traders who bought from the Aborigines and sold to the Japanese.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such narratives have since overwritten trajectories of the historical development of the island and hampered narrations from the Indigenous vantage point, ultimately cementing a wrongful perception of Taiwan as a place that became globally integrated only through foreign agency and outside intervention by male individuals.Footnote ⁵⁷

The case of Hamada Yahyōe (浜田弥兵衛), a Japanese merchant and ship captain who visited Taiwan several times, illustrates the larger point I want to make about the entangled historiography of empire. Although his life is relatively well documented, he has not made it to the forefront of popular accounts of a Japanese southward expansion. Hamada Yahyōe piloted a shuinsen (licensed trading vessel) owned by Suetsugu Heizō to Taiwan in 1626. As the Dutch were just asserting sovereignty over the island and striving to control all transactions, the terms of trade had changed. Anchoring in the Bay of Taoyouan, near present-day Tainan City, Hamada was forced to unload the newly purchased cargo after refusing to pay customs for the Chinese commodities. His request to sail directly to Fujian to trade with the Chinese was denied, and he had to leave the island with an empty hold. Unwilling to accept his loss, he returned a few months later with his brothers. The Japanese men forced their way into Fort Zeelandia, where the Dutch governor Pieter Nuyts (r. 1627–9) resided. The angry mob took him hostage and tortured him for several days.Footnote ⁵⁸ Upon his return to Japan, Hamada was punished by the Tokugawa authorities for abusing his position as an official shuinjō merchant and jailed in Ōmura together with his crew.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet the story did not end there. Hamada’s image as a traitor and troublemaker was refuted three hundred centuries later – not by historians but by the emperor. The Taishō Tennō (1912–26) personally worked toward positively transforming the collective memory of Hamada by deploying previous historical investigations and the preparation of records and sources as empirical backing.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Japanese colonial regime eventually erected a monument for Hamada in Tainan in 1941.Footnote ⁶¹

Another central figure in Taiwan–Japanese foreign relations is Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In 1593, he sent an envoy with a kokusho (state letter) to ‘Takayama’ – an act that could be molded into different narratives, for instance, as part of Hideyoshi’s macro-regional strategy of challenging Ming supremacy alongside his attempted conquest of Chosŏn Korea (also known as the Imjin War, 1592–8).Footnote ⁶² In addition to the timing of the Taiwan episode, the epistemological impact of the term kokusho shaped its legacy as official foreign relations. As it showed parallels with Hideyoshi’s diplomatic advances toward Luzon (1592–3), it fit neatly with the overall pattern of early modern foreign relations based on envoys and letters. However, while Hideyoshi’s kokusho initiative resulted in a lively diplomatic communication between the Spaniards in Manila and Japanese officials, it did not trigger any reciprocal reaction in Taiwan. This was due to the island’s political organization. The Japanese envoy Harada Kiemon returned without having found an adequate central authority among the Indigenous population of Taiwan that could receive the kokusho. As the mission was subsequently deemed unsuccessful, the Japanese kokusho was stored and eventually buried in oblivion.

In 1882 (Meiji 15) a heavily damaged identical copy was discovered in the holdings of Marquis Maeda. The Maeda, a daimyō family from Owari on the Tōkaido (present-day Nagoya), had one daughter adopted by Hideyoshi, which may explain the location of the letter.Footnote ⁶³ Incidentally, Murakami decided to add the letters to the foreign relations canon. He included it in the Ikoku ōfuku compilation with appropriate framing, emphasizing its diplomatic implications. Labeling the transcription of the letter as “Hideyoshi demands tribute from Taiwan in year 2 of Bunroku,” Murakami combined past and present terms and concepts of foreign relations.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Sinitic phrase for tribute-bearing (入貢, nyūkō) is absent in the original letter, but has become a standard term used by Japanese scholars to describe Hideyoshi’s intentions.Footnote ⁶⁵ Murakami’s editorial work thus combined old and new ideas of foreign relations practices.

Examining the Chinese-style kokusho of 1593 reveals that Hideyoshi was indeed very explicit in his demands from the people of Takayama. It also shows that the author of the letter, a Buddhist monk known as Saishō, wildly exaggerated the power of the Japanese warlord Hideyoshi. The overt threats to conquer Takayama, Chosŏn, and Dai Min were unparalleled in Sinosphere diplomatic correspondence. Hideyoshi claimed that 10,000 warriors would be available after the successful conquest of Chosŏn and urged his imagined counterpart in Takayama to “send tribute and participate in communication.” He, moreover, made clear that his envoy Harada had received an order to communicate to the authorities that if no ships came from Takayama, Hideyoshi would set out to retaliate.Footnote ⁶⁶ That Saishō applied a hybrid vocabulary of foreign relations, including elements of classical Confucian foreign interaction and neologisms necessary to accommodate Hideyoshi’s expansive plans in East Asia, got lost in translation before the message reached its potential addressees.Footnote ⁶⁷

Japanese historians are inconclusive when it comes to Hideyoshi’s engagement with Taiwan, which gives room to speculations about whether the letter was a forgery. While Iwao Seiichi put forward the thesis that the letter was never sent,Footnote ⁶⁸ Shimizu Yūko has argued that the letter returned to Japan after the envoy could not determine to whom to deliver it. Shimizu links the episode to a larger history of Hideyoshi’s efforts of sending state letters similar in tone and content to nanban (‘Southern barbarian’) rulers, including the viceroy of India, the governor general of the Philippines, and Takayama-koku without truly understanding the nature of their positions. In the cases of Taiwan and the Philippines, tributary demands were followed by threats of conquest. Shimizu’s diligent research also revealed that while the letter addressed to Takayama-koku is dated Bunroku 2 month 11 day 5, a kokusho was drafted three days earlier for Little Ryūkyū (i.e., Luzon).Footnote ⁶⁹ While the letter addressed to the rulers in Luzon made a serious impression on the Spaniards in Manila, who immediately started building stronger fortifications to fend off a potential Japanese attack from Taiwan, the letter to Takayama did not have its intended impact on Taiwan.Footnote ⁷⁰ While fear lingered among the Spaniards in the Philippines far into the seventeenth century, neither Chinese settlers nor Indigenous people on Taiwan were bothered by Japanese assaults. In the early twentieth century the rediscovered letter would provide just enough circumstantial evidence to speculate about Japan’s territorial interest in Southeast Asia, speculation that would bolster a narrative of Japanese early modern protoimperial spirit.

Before Southern Seas History: Writing about Taiwanese and Formosan (Colonial) Pasts

Leaving behind the question of narratives, the chapter now moves on to evaluate Murakami’s scholarship against the background of the emerging historiography of Taiwan. Prior to his move to Taipei in 1929, he had published but one short research note (Taiwan sinkansha monjo, on the historical sources of the Siraya people) with Taiwan in the title.Footnote ⁷¹ However, he had long been engaging with those who had taken on the task of writing Japan into the history of Taiwan. One of them was James Wheeler Davidson, a former war correspondent and US consular agent who published the magnum opus The Island of Formosa, Past and Present in 1903.Footnote ⁷² Davidson’s work was the first historical monograph to tell the story of the island. It was the result of the diplomat’s eight years of thorough research on Taiwanese history. In 1895, he debuted as a historian of Taiwan with an article programmatically entitled ‘Koxinga, the First King of Formosa.’Footnote ⁷³ His monograph of 1903 placed Taiwan in a larger historical context of foreign relations and reached many readers in the United States. Davidson organized the monograph chronologically, with the second half dealing with developments during the Japanese occupation. The book follows the island’s integration into macro processes and maritime expansion from the sixteenth century onwards, with chapter headings such as ‘Formosa’s First Known Visitors’ betraying Davidson’s belief that change came only with foreigners. In the preface he called Riess’s essay on Formosa “perhaps the most scholarly essay yet published on the history of the island.”Footnote ⁷⁴ When Murakami visited Taiwan as a postgraduate between 1896 and 1898, he became acquainted with Davidson as the only other person on the island committed to researching the history of Zheng Chenggong.

While Davidson and Riess were among the first to write about Taiwan in the style that was considered bona-fide academic history at the time, the assumption that no one else had engaged with the island’s past betrays the arrogant ignorance that guided hegemonic knowledge creation in the late nineteenth century. In 1828, the Japanese Mito clan (a branch of the Tokugawa family – well known for its commitment to recording historical developments –that authored the Dai nihon shi, literally History of Great Japan, modeled after Chinese dynastic histories) encouraged Kawaguchi Chōju to publish the three-volume Taiwan Teishi kiji (Chronicle of the Zheng family of Taiwan).Footnote ⁷⁵ It began with a description of the island before recounting an audience of Zheng Zhilong, the father of Zheng Chenggong, with Tokugawa Ieyasu in Sunpu in 1612 (Keicho 17 and Wanli 40 in Japanese and Ming Chinese periodization, respectively). While Kawaguchi did not mention any Chinese sources, he presented coherent accounts about Zheng’s rule over Taiwan. Murakami closely studied the volume prior to his trip. Murakami’s explicit focus on Zheng Chenggong’s links to Japan was guided by his early interest in tracing Japanese agency in the China Seas, as he regarded Chenggong as a Japanese maritime hero.Footnote ⁷⁶ Born to a Japanese mother on the Japanese island of Hirado, Zheng Chenggong’s Japanese ancestry remains an important feature in historical memory into the twenty-first century.

When Murakami received his research assignment, Chenggong was already a popular historical figure in Japan. On his way to Taiwan in 1896, Murakami stopped in Kyushu to search domains such as Kumamoto, Hirado, Nagasaki, and Ōmura with historical ties to maritime China and ikoku (‘foreign country’) Takasago.Footnote ⁷⁷ Chenggong’s dramatic biography and ancestral connections with Hirado had enjoyed popular attention in Japan since the mid-Tokugawa period, when his reputation was built through, among other things, the puppet play (Kokusen ‘ya kassen, The battles of Koxinga) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724).Footnote ⁷⁸ David Mervart has traced how a Chinese source, the Zheng Chenggong zhuan (鄭成功傳, The tale of Zheng Chenggong), reached Nagasaki on a Dutch commercial ship via Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in the middle of the eighteenth century and thereafter became a common reference.Footnote ⁷⁹ As Masuda Wataru aptly phrased it, Chenggong’s “unyielding spirit of resistance” was what made him a popular literary subject during the Tokugawa period and a popular historical subject in the Meiji period.Footnote ⁸⁰ Zheng Chenggong controlled what happened in the South China Sea trade beginning in the 1650s. As a military commander, Chenggong assembled and controlled thousands of ships. As a statesman, he proved himself skillful in diplomatic negotiations with the Manchu (the rulers of the Qing Dynasty), the Spanish, the Dutch, and Tokugawa rulers. Both his leadership qualities and advanced maritime strategies turned him into a perfect subject to emphasize Japan’s early modern maritime engagement. To the advocates of strengthening Meiji Japan’s Asian orientation, Chenggong was clearly an agent of multiethnic maritime networks (i.e., wakō) who connected the worlds of East and Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁸¹ This portrayal reflects the broader shift in the study of the past from a literary interpretation of texts to historical research based on scientific methods, as discussed in Chapter 4.Footnote ⁸²

The first modern Japanese intellectual to write about Taiwanese history was Takekoshi Yosaburō.Footnote ⁸³ Takekoshi was a member of the Japanese Diet with an educational agenda that he expressed with a “slightly patronizing tone.”Footnote ⁸⁴ What is more, Takekoshi was famous for his ardent support of Meiji Japanese expansionism in the southern seas and proud of Japan’s civilizational mission.Footnote ⁸⁵ The first thing that stands out about his 1907 monograph, Japanese Rule in Formosa, is the fact that it was published in English by a British publisher. The book describes a Japanese colonial success story that plays on the narrative of the rise and fall of empires and the stereotypes that accompanied it. Takekoshi boldly claimed that while Spain decadently exploited the resources of its colonies, England and Japan poured money into them for further development.Footnote ⁸⁶ In addition to writing a gushing account of the first ten years of Japanese rule in Taiwan, he provided an extensive chapter (‘Formosa in the Past’) on the island’s history since the Sui period. The chapter has been dubbed ‘Formosa under the Pirates.’ The text is a mishmash of source-based accounts,Footnote ⁸⁷ blunt inaccuracies,Footnote ⁸⁸ examples of his inability to historicize concepts,Footnote ⁸⁹ wild speculations,Footnote ⁹⁰ and fake facts.Footnote ⁹¹ In short, he acted contrary to the spirit of his promise to “limit [himself] to the account of the island’s past as it is found in the historical sources.”Footnote ⁹²

In 1920, Tainan-born Han Chinese author Lian Heng (連横, 1878–1936) made an important contribution to written Taiwanese history in Chinese. He published Taiwan tong shi 臺灣通史 (General history of Taiwan) in three volumes under a Japanese pseudonym; the publication immediately turned into a reference in Chinese.Footnote ⁹³ Motivated by the Japanese occupation, Lian had begun a thorough ten-year-long research project in 1908. His aim was to record 1,300 years of the history of the island from the mainland Chinese Sui Dynasty to the short-lived Republic of Taiwan of 1895. The outcome was a biographical historiography in the style of the great Sima Qian’s (145–90 bce) Shiji (史記). Each volume dealt with a different topic, ranging from economy, industry, and agriculture to language, religion, and education. The section on gaikō prominently featured Zheng Chenggong, with many examples of his diplomatic achievements and reference to his advance toward Luzon in 1662. It was followed by a section on relations with the English under Qing rule and interactions with American ships and the French military.Footnote ⁹⁴ Beginning with the island’s populations’ encounter with the outside world and its integration into the Sinosphere, the book focused on connections with Ming China, Japan, and the Nanyang (the Chinese reading for nan’yō). In so doing, Lian’s work included notorious actors such as Suetsugu Heizō and Hamada Yahyōe. Lian’s overt agenda was to write the island into the history of Greater China, which he achieved by focusing entirely on outside agency, albeit paying scant attention to the short-lived Dutch and Spanish occupations.Footnote ⁹⁵ In this latter regard, Taiwan tong shi differed from Japanese and English publications.

A comparison of Takekoshi and Murakami’s writings shows there was even great variety among Japanese writings. While the former aimed at moving the masses, the latter valued diligence. When it came to active Japanese participation in commercial developments in the southern seas, Takekoshi’s narrative centered on those he called ‘pirates.’ Unsurprisingly, he chose to prioritize prose over source-based accuracy, for instance, when arguing that “pirates were really the pioneers of foreign trade. Their ships visited Borneo, Malacca, Annan, Siam, Tonkin, Saigon, Cambodia, and the Philippines, venturing at times even as far as Mexico, and carrying the treasures of the southern and eastern oceans backwards and forwards.”Footnote ⁹⁶ This stark exaggeration was from the prelude to the piece he is most remembered for – the Wakō ki (Records of the Wakō) released in 1939. This work, in which he transformed the ‘pirates’ (bahan or kaizoku in the Japanese original) into private maritime merchants who began to settle in nan’yō ports (in the Philippines, Java, Siam, and Cambodia) as early modernizers, was his response to imperial economic historiographies of the time. Using European pasts as a mirror, he concluded that while the Normans raided the British Isles with the goal of claiming territory, the wakō from Kyushu and Shikoku attacked Chinese and Korean coasts in search of material riches.Footnote ⁹⁷ A diligent, thirty-page-long chronological list of Ming Chinese references to wakō raids contrasts starkly with scarce copyright references and the complete absence of any references to Japanese scholarship.Footnote ⁹⁸ This absence deserves special mention as it coincided with increased Japanese-language output on the subject of wakō in the 1930s by people trained and mentored by Murakami at Taihoku Imperial University, as I will discuss below.

While different in style and genre, Murakami’s and Takekoshi’s publications had several characteristics in common. Both implied that the island’s Indigenous population was unfit for – and therefore unable to conduct – communications with foreign countries. Methodologically both disintegrated and largely silenced Indigenous pasts in a way that rendered the island’s history into a history of foreign visitors rather than of the native population.Footnote ⁹⁹ This tendency was ultimately reflected in Taiwan’s ambivalent position within nan’yō shi in which the island plays but a marginal role.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Today both the National University of Taiwan and the Institute of Taiwan History at Academia Sinica (中央研究院, Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan) claim to have inherited both material and ideas from Murakami’s Taiwan-related scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Taiwan history source compilation is certainly Murakami’s most enduring (albeit least glamourous) contribution to Taiwanese history. Between 1929 to 1933, Murakami headed the commission for the compilation of historical sources for the Government General and was responsible for the documents produced during Dutch and Spanish rule. He successfully ended the source compilation with translations of Taiwan-related contents from the VOC’s daily records from Batavia,Footnote ¹⁰² Dutch commander Cornelis Reijersen’s journal (1622–3),Footnote ¹⁰³ and several historical sources about Taiwan under Dutch and Spanish rule entitled Collection of Sources in Taiwan History.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His translation of the Zeelandia dagregisters first appeared in 1937. The 1970 Chinese translation of Murakami’s compilation of the Batavia records remained the sole published reference in Taiwan for the study of seventeenth-century Taiwanese history until the end of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Translating and Defining ‘South’ and ‘Sea’ in Nan’yō History

In his inaugural lecture as first nan’yō shi professor at Taihoku Imperial University in 1929, Murakami offered a definition of what constituted the nan’yō as a historical space and historical period. Focusing on the China Seas as a space for Japanese expansion, he tied past Japanese overseas commercial activities to the age of European exploration. This comparison worked first and foremost on a terminological level. Instead of Chinese equivalents such as the Sinophone nanhai (nankai in Japanese),Footnote ¹⁰⁶ a term that literally meant ‘southern sea’ used for the waters south of China and surrounding present-day Indonesia and the Philippines since the time of the Sui Dynasty, he spoke of the ‘southern seas’ (nan’yō).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This was by no means a slip of the tongue but rather a bold hegemonic claim. He categorically avoided referencing Chinese geography or the seafaring experience of Japan’s Western neighbor. Instead, he elaborated on how Spanish navigator Vasco Nuñez de Balboa (1475–1519) called the ocean beyond the Isthmus of Panama Southern Sea (mar del sur). This was, he went on, before Ferdinand Magellan coined the term Pacific Ocean.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Murakami called Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific the “beginning of European early modern era (欧州近世紀の初め, ōshū kinseiki no hajime),” which he implicitly deemed momentous for Japan’s own southward expansion.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The inaugural lecture at TIU was published in instalments in the Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō, the main Japanese newspaper in the colony, with the headline ‘Japanese Expansion before the Tokugawa Closed Country.’Footnote ¹¹⁰

While nan’yō was not a neologism, Murakami’s definition of the term emphasized significant semantic shifts in the early twentieth century. The strategy of eschewing categorizations originating from a Sinitic cultural geography, driven by the aforementioned European bias, had a clear geopolitical dimension that empowered Japanese colonialists to extend their claims from the South China Sea to the Pacific. The notion of the Japanese nan’yō as inseparably linked to Balboa’s southern sea (i.e., the Pacific, Dai nan’yō, which became widely used to denote the Pacific around the Marianas and the Carolinas [modern-day Micronesia] in Japanese scholarship and political correspondence), in combination with the language of ‘pioneering,’ followed Murakami since he himself first crossed the Pacific to participate in the Panama Pacific conference in 1915. In San Francisco, Murakami was welcomed by scholars such as Herbert E. Bolton who, at the forefront of oceanic history research, set out to historicize the Pacific Ocean.Footnote ¹¹¹ In front of an international audience, Murakami lectured about Japanese active participation in the Pacific’s global integration.

Murakami opened his talk with a remark that it was “only ten years since the steamers of the Tōyō Kisen Kwaisha began to run between the ports of Japan and Mexico but attempts to open the same route were made more than three hundred years ago by one of the greatest statesmen of Japan.”Footnote ¹¹² Here, he referred to Tokugawa Ieyasu’s aspiration to collaborate with Spanish overseas agents in transpacific trade in the early years of the seventeenth century. Murakami’s outspoken admiration for Ieyasu’s global aspiration has been overlooked by both critics and supporters. The format and timing of the congress may explain Murakami’s boastful approach. He adopted the jargon of the organizers who, in the opening address to the congress, labeled the only two participating countries outside the Americas, Spain and Japan, as “old” and “new” powers “interested in the things of the Pacific Ocean.”Footnote ¹¹³ The fledgling US–Japanese rivalry over dominion of the Pacific echoed in Murakami’s public lectures.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Murakami’s application of analogies from European maritime exploration and conquest and his framing of the nan’yō must be read against the background of contemporary geopolitical interests of the Japanese Empire and the extension of the nanshin doctrine from the South China Sea all over the Pacific.

The Pacific Ocean is rich in typology and toponyms; Mar del Sur/South Sea is just one category of many.Footnote ¹¹⁵ David Armitage and Alison Bashford discuss how historians far into the twentieth century struggled to understand the chronologies of the people inhabiting the Pacific Ocean and to do equal justice to oral hunter-gatherer cultures, agricultural communities, and industrialized societies.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Murakami, however, never had this struggle. Neither the Indigenous population of Taiwan nor oceanic history mattered much to his perception and contextualization of nan’yōshi. Conceptually speaking, he limited the discipline’s regional framework to what we today refer to as maritime Southeast Asia, the region from Melaka to Manila, Batavia, and Singapore. The area had historically been influenced by foreign groups, all above – the nan’yō kakyō (南洋華僑).Footnote ¹¹⁷ Nan’yō kakyō (nanhai huaqiao in Chinese) captures the important role of Southeast Asian ports and seascapes in the large-scale diaspora from mainland China since the Ming period.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The term itself originated in the late nineteenth century. Ironically, the Taipei-based nan’yōshi of the 1930s paid little to no attention to the role of overseas/Nanyang Chinese in the nan’yō.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Their absence is part of the constructed, multilayered historiography characterized by silences, exaggerations, and purposeful ambivalences.

Another absence concerns Taiwan itself. When laying the ground for the nan’yōshi program, the island’s past was of no concern to Murakami. It was only toward the end of his term in Taipei that Murakami more explicitly began to focus on Taiwan in teaching the general nan’yō history course. In the 1930s he would also include Taiwan in his publications on early modern expansion. Relying largely on Dutch sources, he began to stage the island as the historical space for European–Japanese–Chinese collaborations. A coedited volume entitled Taiwan bunka shisetsu (Cultural history of Taiwan) aimed to narrate the history of Taiwan from the perspective of Japanese national history (kokushi) starting with Hirado as Zheng Chenggong’s birthplace.Footnote ¹²⁰ Murakami’s contribution included three chapters, one on Fort Zeelandia, one on the Dutch efforts to educate the local (‘barbarian’) population, and one on the Sinkan manuscripts.Footnote ¹²¹ What is more, the compilation shares many linguistic and narrative parallels with a popular history book on Japanese people’s advance into the southern seas (Nanpō hattenshi) published in the early 1940s by Taipei-based high school teacher Yamamoto Ren’ichi.Footnote ¹²² Such simplified publications demonstrate that the boundaries between the study of southern seas history and Japanese history had long been blurring. This was true in terms of themes and space, but even more so when it came to the inseparability of educational propaganda and scientific research. In the early 1940s, Murakami even contributed an article on the Japanese migration to Southeast Asia to an edited volume that can best be described as a ‘colonial manual.’Footnote ¹²³ Using seventeenth-century source material, he advocated the thesis that a strong Japanese presence in Asia was based on collaboration and confrontation. Such implicit claims about Japan’s position in the region, above all in relation to China, always had geopolitical implications in prewar Asia.

Research in global intellectual history has stressed the importance of China as a reference point for both intellectuals in Meiji Japan and scholars working on the interwar period with both groups stressing imperial China’s ‘decadence’ in a narrative of decline.Footnote ¹²⁴ Murakami, who lived through both periods, was not part of either of these trends. By the time he designed the nan’yō program, he was occupied with the idea of foregrounding Japanese agency in the nan’yō. Wielding his authority as the first person ever to hold a chair in southern seas history, Murakami stressed Tokugawa Japan’s collaboration with the Europeans (nambanjin). Public outreach activities and student supervision in the early 1930s allowed him to flesh out the expansion narrative he presented in his inaugural lecture. To prove his findings about the importance of Japanese towns, he relied on quantifiable data such as the exact numbers of Japanese passengers disembarking in Batavia, another important node in the network of overseas Japanese merchants. Statements such as that an “expansion into Siam” (Shamuru hatten) had been cut short show how his language became gradually more explicit and even propagandistic.Footnote ¹²⁵ In a 1937 newsletter of the Bunmei kyōkai (a learned society with the befitting English title ‘Association of Civilization’), he bluntly summarized the achievements of Tokugawa Japanese actors in Southeast Asia on the same level as European seafarers, describing them as “our contribution to the development of the Southern Seas.”Footnote ¹²⁶ A carefully prepared narrative placed Japanese actors into the center of early modern Southeast Asia and simultaneously synchronized the Japanese past with the European one.Footnote ¹²⁷

Nan’yōshi: Synchronizing Japanese and European Expansionism in the South China Sea

To further explain what I mean with synchronization through discourse and translation processes, it will be useful to explore the development of the nan’yōshi syllabus. After 1919, all imperial universities followed the example set by Tokyo Imperial University (Tōdai), where autonomous departments of Japanese history (kokushi), Western history (seiyōshi), and Eastern/Chinese history (tōyōshi) were established by 1904, while southern seas history (nan’yōshi) was considered a branch of the last.Footnote ¹²⁸ Yet, when the Taihoku Imperial University was founded in 1928, nan’yō shi became a separate department. Thus, history students in Taipei could choose courses from kokushi, tōyōshi, and nan’yōshi, as well as courses provided from a combined program in historiography (shigaku shi), seiyōshi (Western history), and geography.Footnote ¹²⁹

In political circles in the Japanese Empire, debates about north-, east-, and southward expansion had gathered steam in the 1920s.Footnote ¹³⁰ Taiwan had officially been announced as the base for nanshin, that is to say Japan’s infamous southern advancement policy.Footnote ¹³¹ Expansionist developments were hampered as the Taiwan Government General faced political tensions arising from assimilation policies (同化, dōka) in the name of the expansion of the homeland policy (内地延長主義, naichi enchōshugi) and from the Han Taiwanese elite’s unfulfilled demands for self-representation.Footnote ¹³² In the 1930s, nan’yō maps featured Taiwan as the central point of the southern seas under Japanese influence.Footnote ¹³³ These maps were used in international propaganda and became integral to popular history publications.Footnote ¹³⁴ Taiwan was presented as the bridge between the Sinosphere and the southern seas. The decision to establish nan’yōshi as an autonomous university chair and to include it in the university’s history curriculum within the fledgling academic environment of Taipei has to be seen in the context of such frictions.Footnote ¹³⁵

In a 1996 article in the National Taiwan University newsletter, the Taiwanese historian Chen Wei-zhi was the first to draw attention to the impact of TIU’s history curriculum.Footnote ¹³⁶ He elaborated on how each track of studies was based on a combination of an in-depth study of the home department’s discipline with an introduction to the other historical subfields, as well as courses in anthropology and Western historical geography.Footnote ¹³⁷ A student majoring in Japanese history (kokushi gaku; with positions held by Nakamura Kiyozō [中村喜代三] and Kyoto Imperial University graduate Kobata Atsushi [小葉田淳], who later became an internationally renowned economic historian), for instance, was required to take courses in Chinese history and several electives from the Faculty of Letters. Murakami taught a general introduction to historiography (史学概論, shigaku gairon) based on Ranke’s objective history for five consecutive years.Footnote ¹³⁸

The compulsory classes in anthropology certainly added to the program’s internationalization. Utsurikawa Nenozō (移川子之藏), who was trained at the Universities of Chicago and Harvard and traveled to Europe as a visiting scholar, became the first professor at TIU’s Institute for Ethnology. This chair was the only one in anthropology/ethnology in the entire Japanese Empire and turned into an important institution for university-sponsored research into Taiwan’s Native Formosans.Footnote ¹³⁹ This distinctive shift in anthropological research recalls the overall change from informal imperialism during the Meiji period toward formal colonialism in the interwar period, when cultural distinctions were made more prominent.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In a manner reminiscent of Murakami and other historians, Utsurikawa went to the Netherlands to photograph a large number of Dutch colonial documents from Taiwan in 1937. His contribution to the study of Indigenous peoples – their language, culture, and customs, including publications on the genealogies of ‘Formosan native tribes’ – remains highly acclaimed and influential.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Yet, they are not without their limitations.

Like Taiwan-based anthropological research, the intellectual productions emerging from Murakami’s nan’yōshi chair had major empirical and epistemological implications for the study of multilayered foreign relations. As an academic institution, the nan’yōshi program was the first of its kind in the world. It would take another thirty years and the shift to decolonization (supported by Indigenous perspectives) for the launch of the world’s first department in Pacific history at the Australian National University.Footnote ¹⁴² Yet, Taipei’s nan’yōshi program did not advocate a history studied from a regional or Indigenous vantage point. On the contrary, the faculty members in Taipei were committed to a European-oriented southern seas history as a subfield of Japanese history and, as such, to providing space and resources to southern sea history that showed broader Japanese maritime expansion. The program’s orientation is thus part of the legacy of TIU’s history curriculum, a legacy which continues to complicate historical thinking in and about Taiwan and Japan. Thanks to the program’s unique character, all parties involved enjoyed significant freedom of scope until late 1945, when Taihoku Imperial University, alongside reforms of higher education, turned into National Taiwan University, and Japanese professors were gradually replaced by Chinese professors.Footnote ¹⁴³

At the time of its foundation in 1928, Taihoku Imperial University was divided into two faculties: the Faculty of Literature and Politics, and the Faculty of Science and Agriculture. History was one of the four disciplines taught alongside philosophy, literary studies, and political science at the Literature and Politics Faculty. When building up nan’yōshi, Murakami designed the compulsory lectures for the study of the southern seas and the Pacific in a way that allowed him to further his own studies and make immediate use of material he found during his overseas research.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Furthermore, institutional funds enabled him to send young scholars – committed and equipped with what was considered command of the right foreign languages – abroad to collect source material and to expand the network of archives and scholars around the world. One of them was Iwao Seiichi (1900–1988), who was appointed assistant professor in 1929 and inherited Murakami’s position in 1935. Despite providing lectures, regular reading groups, and research seminars, the history department in Taipei was not a place for mass education. It was a small-scale enterprise with only a total of sixty-two male students enrolled over its fifteen years of activity. They came from virtually all prefectures in Japan, including Okinawa.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In contrast, only two local Han Chinese students, Ke She-jie and Zhang Liang-biao, then known as ‘islanders’ (本島人, hontōjin), finished their history studies in Taipei.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ While both teachers and graduate students contributed to historical knowledge and narratives of Southeast Asia, Iwao Seiichi, first as assistant professor and later as Murakami’s successor, shaped the idea of the nan’yō, as we know it, as a mere crossroads for foreign intervention.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ He was committed to promoting seventeenth-century Japanese claims over the island and far more outspoken than Murakami in favor of the imperial cause. His prewar publications on Japanese foreign relations helped shape the image of Japanese military presence and domination of Southeast Asian seascapes based on violence and superior military power.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In his study of ‘Japan towns’ in Asia, he underlined how the increase in Taiwan–Japan trade in the 1620s occurred in parallel with the construction by the Dutch of Fort Zeelandia in the Bay of Taoyouan near present-day Tainan City, where Japanese traders also founded a settlement.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

For better contextualization, it is prudent to take Iwao’s own intellectual journey into account. As a student at Tokyo University in the 1920s, he was encouraged by Kuroita Katsumi and Tsuji Zennosuke to study Japanese–Dutch relations. The two eminent professors were looking for evidence of early modern precedents to Japan’s involvement in Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In 1926, when Kuroita set out on his tour around the world in search of documents to uncover more about Japan’s maritime past, he took Iwao along to help with languages. They started in the nan’yō, visiting Macau, Hoi An, Batavia, Bangkok, Khmer Angkor-wat, and finally Taipei, where Iwao was recruited by Kuroita’s university friend of the 1890s, Murakami Naojirō.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Immediately after having been appointed assistant professor at nan’yōshi in 1929, Iwao followed Kuroita to Europe, where he would conduct archival research until 1932.Footnote ¹⁵² Embedded in a larger narrative of private maritime enterprises and mercantilist spirit as the driving forces in the establishment of trading outposts and colonies far away from Japan, Iwao collected evidence of Japanese settlements in Macau, Ayutthaya, and Hoi An (Faifo) in Annan.Footnote ¹⁵³ The material he gathered was a welcome addition to the imperialists’ story of expansionist considerations. Of particular importance was the ‘Japanese bridge’ (Chua Cau, Viet.) at Faifo, a monument built by the Japanese traders in the seventeenth century and maintained over the centuries.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This bridge illustrated the presence of Japanese capital and knowledge creation about Southeast Asia between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Clearly, knowledge creation of what mattered for nan’yōshi took place on uneven ground.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The history students in Taipei were taught subjects closely linked to the faculty members’ research agendas. Murakami’s teaching assignments between 1929 and 1935 included an overview lecture on Southeast Asian history (南洋史概説), a course in the Dutch language, a lecture on the historical relations between Japan and Southeast Asia (nan’yō), and a lecture course on the arrival of the Europeans in Southeast Asia (only taught in 1933). Until 1933, these courses, which focused almost exclusively on the early modern period, made up the entire syllabus of nan’yōshi. In 1935, Murakami’s special lecture on nan’yō history focused on the history of Taiwan.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Murakami’s lectures provided students with a solid training in the colonial history of Southeast Asia. Japan was presented as one of several historical powers in the region, which, thanks to its integration into the Sinosphere, had the best grip on the political and cultural context of Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ When Iwao started teaching after his research trip to Europe, the program’s focus on the Japanese presence in the region increased even further. Under his tutelage, the nihon machi studies became a more elaborate and sophisticated form of narrating the wakō and other maritime adventures.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The nan’yō shi program was in many ways a manifestation of the Eurocentric bias in Japan’s imperial ideological orientation. This became apparent in the compulsory language training in Dutch and Spanish, which was after komonjo gaku the key pillar of the program. Dutch was promoted for several reasons, including the extent of the Dutch Empire and its colonial administration and the country’s close foreign trade relations with Tokugawa Japan. Spanish was essential for studying colonial enterprises in the Philippines and even the short-lived colonial presence on Taiwan around present-day Tamsui (1626–42).Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Ironically, neither historically important linguae francae such as Mandarin, Malay, or Arabic, nor popular languages spoken by significant numbers of people, such as Tagalog or Nanyang Chinese vernaculars (many Nanyang people settled in Taiwan and ports in Southeast Asia from the seventeenth century onward), appeared in the program. Nor was there any room for Indigenous languages either. Indeed, European languages mattered most to Murakami, who had little appreciation for anthropological approaches, as an anecdote of his student Nakamura Takashi (中村孝志, 1910–94) underlines. Accordingly, Murakami did not approve of his history students attending a debating club (‘salon’) launched by anthropologist Utsurikawa. Murakami argued that serious nan’yō shi students would have no spare time for such activities. To him they would be better off diligently spending that time on source and language studies.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ It goes without saying that mastering two or more new foreign languages on a level to undertake independent source transcription and interpretation in only a year or two was a challenging task. This is why language tutoring regularly took place during lunchtime. Yet it is difficult not to wonder what the stimulating effects of interdisciplinary debates between students in anthropology and nan’yōshi could have meant for the historiography of Japan. Although Nakamura recalled the rigid environment where the word minzoku was taboo,Footnote ¹⁶¹ other examples hint at the comparatively liberal spirit of education and access to knowledge.Footnote ¹⁶²

In 1935, when Iwao succeeded Murakami as full professor, Yanai Kenji (箭内健司, 1910–2006) joined as assistant professor and received research funding to visit the archives in the Philippines. He became one of the translator-editors of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (Events in the Philippine Islands), first published in 1609.Footnote ¹⁶³ The book’s genealogy is indicative of the concurrent relationship between the history of knowledge and the geopolitics of imperial power. The genealogy can be briefly summarized like this: The book’s author, Morga, a polarizing Spanish lawyer and colonial official, published the records he collected during his stay in the Philippines (1595–1603) after his return from Manila to Mexico. A first English translation was printed in London in 1868, and it was this translation that was famously annotated by Filipino intellectual and national hero Jose Rizal in 1890 during the latter’s stay in Europe.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In the early 1900s, a team of American scholars (some of whom Murakami met in San Francisco in 1915) added parts of Morga’s account to their source compilation on the Spanish Philippines.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Indeed, Morga’s chronicle is full of references to Japanese residents in the Philippines and also describes the arrival of the envoys sent by Hideyoshi in the early 1590s. While Takekoshi used an English translation of Morga when writing the Wakō ki, demands for a Japanese edition were finally met by Yanai’s 1966 Japanese translation, released in the year of Murakami’s death and two decades after the dissolution of the nan’yō shi program.

Over the years, Murakami and his colleagues in Taipei shared material freshly located in the archives and collaborated in highlighting the historical Japanese presence in Asia to their Japanese students (naichijin 内地人). Several of these students would go on to write graduation theses on related topics.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Murakami’s and Iwao’s students helped with the exploration of the Japanese presence within Eurasian connections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and with tracing the history of nihon machi (Japanese towns) and red seal ships (the shuinsen mentioned earlier). Research-led teaching was also an opportunity to introduce the records of these red seal shipping licenses as valuable historical records similar in status to European archival sources.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Graduate training had another important knock-on effect: When some of the graduates became high school teachers, they helped spread the narrative beyond academia.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ After Murakami’s departure from Taiwan in 1935, Kobata Atsushi, the professor of Japanese history, took charge of the continuous cross-disciplinary fertilization of historical studies at TIU. Focusing on Ashikaga and Tokugawa foreign relations from the perspective of trade, Kobata introduced the newly discovered Ryukyuan Rekidai Hōan (歴代宝案) to students and scholars. Kobata transcribed the Rekidai in 1935 in Taipei, which then became classified as gaikō monjo of the Kingdom of Ryukyu, a compilation of diplomatic documents and records for ten foreign countries and ports frequented by Ryukyuan merchants between 1424 and 1867. Kobata’s edition helped, among other things, to reconstruct Ryūkyū’s medieval connections with Thailand and Malacca.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Kobata introduced further source-based empirical material to stress Japan’s central role in nan’yō in a work called Nihon to kingintō (Japan and the gold and silver islands) – challenging accounts of an early modern European expansion in East Asia.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ He first engaged with the historiographical narratives surrounding the mythical islands and their hypothetical location north of Japan at TIU’s southern seas ethnology research seminar (南方土俗研究会, Nanpō dozoku kenkyūkai) in 1933.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Hence, the narrative of commercial expansion with Japan at the center potentially integrated the different research traditions of history and anthropology in Taipei.

Graduation theses and future occupations of Murakami’s and Iwao’s students provide further hints on the nature of the program and its impact. Examining the material left behind in the university archive, Chen Wei-zhi found that several students of the southern seas history program remained in the field of research, and others dedicated themselves to educational work in the colonies.Footnote ¹⁷² From Chen’s survey I can extract certain thematic tendencies: Nine theses dealt with historical relations between European and Japanese in the nan’yō, but only three with the history of Taiwan, of which two focused on Zheng Chenggong’s conquest of the island.Footnote ¹⁷³ Shōnago Masayoshi (少名子正義, like Murakami a native of Ōita), who would later become the librarian of Tenri University in Nara, graduated with a thesis on the proselytizing efforts of the Philippine governor generals.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Zhang Liang-biao, one of the only two Taiwanese students in the program, graduated with a thesis on the relations between China and the nan’yō during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Nakamura Takashi, who would later become a professor at Tenri Language College in Nara, developed a strong connection to Taiwan and contributed significantly to postwar Taiwanese history after his repatriation to Japan. In the 1970s he edited Murakami’s three-volume translation of the Diary of the Batavia Castle posthumously.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Even if the narrative of an early modern Japanese presence in the nan’yō as a product of empirical imperialism was not the most evident or violent hegemonic intervention of Japanese imperialism, empirically it had a lasting impact on local and Indigenous stories.

Concluding Remarks

To end this chapter, I will briefly reflect on the legacies of the narrative elements of the nan’yō as a discursive space. While wakō as maritime adventurers had been prominent figureheads of southward expansion propaganda since the late Meiji period, nan’yō no nihon machi gradually replaced the trope of vicious sea-raiders with one of peaceful trading communities. The focus on Japanese towns and trading settlements in Southeast Asia gained momentum with the publication of Iwao Seiichi’s 1937 book. The concept circulated already in a 1935 article exploring the Japanese presence in Macau and Batavia published in the Rekishi kyōiku (History Education) journal.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Today, given the vast historical evidence, no one would doubt the existence of nihon machi in Southeast Asian ports. Yet, the way this evidence was placed and exploited in the scholarship exaggerated their impact and created a story of Japanese exceptionalism. Japanese merchants and mercenaries in Manila, Ayutthaya, Batavia, or Phnom Penh were but one set of many actors involved in the cosmopolitan environments with their diverse local contexts. Murakami, Iwao, and others provided rich archival material with names and considerable biographical details of overseas Japanese settlements. However, they paid little attention to the fact that the nihon machi were a byproduct of the much larger network of kakyō/huaqiao – overseas Chinese settlements that emerged along profitable trading routes. Although burgeoning twenty-first-century research on overseas Chinese networks has revealed many new aspects of collaboration and conflict, there is a general lack of sources that would allow revealing the voices of the vast majority of lower-ranking Chinese merchants and Indigenous people of previous centuries. This is why the lives of huaqiao, Europeans, and Indigenous residents in early modern port cities can often only be approximated through consulting the material edited and provided by Murakami and his colleagues – the same material that overemphasizes the Japanese presence. That said, an increased awareness of the dynamic processes (including attempts to synchronize Japanese with European pasts) behind historical knowledge production is key in nuancing the existing narratives.

This chapter has, moreover, argued for approaching nan’yō as a discursive space. A publication by Murakami in the monthly periodical Nan’yō, the official journal of Nan’yō kyōkai published between 1937 and 1944, is telling for its colonial educational agenda, addressing first and foremost Japanese readers based in the metropole (naichi). In 1939, Murakami contributed an article on Japanese–Philippine relations in the time of interim Governor General Don Rodrigo de Vivero.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ While Murakami’s meticulously edited translation of Vivero’s diary (Relación del Japón) of 1929 served as a basis for the article, ten years later Murakami chose a very different approach. Terminological slippages – namely Murakami’s repeated use of national units such as Japanese–Philippine and Japanese–Mexican relations – suggest that he reinterpreted the historical references in the Nan’yō article in a way that would serve the propaganda requirements of the Pacific war and the empire’s concurrent southward expansion.

In 1941, the Biographical Academic Association (Denki gakkai), in collaboration with the Rokkō Shobō, a publisher active in distributing books on the Japanese overseas empire, published a book entitled Nanshin nihon no senkusha (Pioneers of the southern expansion) based on the latest academic research.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In eleven chapters, it introduced what the editors considered to be the chief protagonists of the Japanese southward advance of previous centuries, including Itō Mancio, the leader of the Tenshō mission sent via Goa to Europe in the 1580s; Yamada Nagamasa; Hasekura Tsunenaga; and Suganuma Teifū (1865–1889), a Hirado-born intellectual and author of the nanshinron who died during a visit to Spanish-ruled Manila.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The final chapter was dedicated to the Japanese towns in the southern sea (nan’yō no nihonmachi), converting the many unnamed migrants from Japan into expansionists in their own rights. What is most interesting is that the book followed Murakami’s lead in linking Japanese presence (even that of individual merchants and seafarers) in the nan’yō as closely as possible to official foreign relations. Yet, surprisingly, Murakami’s scholarship is not given credit.Footnote ¹⁸¹ The only articulated references to Murakami are to a Dutch manuscript that mentions Yamada Nagamasa, and to his two monographs, Bōekishijō no Hirado and Nichiran no 300nen.Footnote ¹⁸² I will refrain from speculating about the reasons why Murakami did not receive the credit he was due, and instead remind readers that the written archive is only one of several sources of information. Murakami would also leave his mark on other forms of applied scholarly colonialism, a claim that I will expand upon in Chapter 6.

The narrative of foreign relations was implicitly shaped by the activities of Japanese scholarship in colonial Taiwan. Even if it only played a silent role, for furthering a global history of diplomacy, the inclusion of Indigenous communities remains an important task. Negotiations and power bargaining had not only determined the relations between the Indigenous communities on the island for centuries, but Indigenous diplomatic practices were also integrated into Japanese colonial politics at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸³ It is important to understand that it is not the state and academic institutions alone that make history matter; the narratives, discourses, and memories of nonstate actors are crucial, even if they are unacknowledged or downscaled. To underline this point, I will end this chapter with an example that highlights the dynamics behind memory, knowledge, and silences. In 1979, a group of Indigenous women from Taiwan traveled to Tokyo in 1979. The group met with Japanese government officials to negotiate the release of the souls of their family members who died in combat for the Japanese army and, like all war victims, were enshrined in Yasukuni Shrine. In renarrating the story of this Indigenous Taiwanese delegation, historian Leo Ching introduced an important episode that intersects cultural diplomacy and activism.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Those women came to Japan to represent the wishes of their husbands and fathers who supported the Japanese Imperial Army as Takasago Volunteers in the 1940s albeit being denied their rights as equal citizens. About four decades later, injustice based on ethnicity and national frameworks repeated itself when Japanese bureaucrats denied the request of the Indigenous Taiwanese delegation. While working on this book, I often reflected on the episode as a powerful illustration of the interplay of historical tropes and the lack of recognition of the spiritual and military dimensions of encounter narratives. Identifying themselves as Takasago people stressed the Taiwanese delegation’s shared history with the Japanese Empire that dated back to the sixteenth century, when Takasago-koku became a synonym for armed Indigenous resistance against Japanese advances. The episode clearly demonstrates the need to nuance the narratives of global diplomacy and knowledge production by integrating plural temporalities, memory, gender, and agency.