This chapter traces the genealogy of early modern gaikō and explores how the paradigms of Japan’s engagement with the outside world have been crucial to the establishment of the academic field of history in Japan. Today the Japanese term gaikō is conventionally translated as either ‘diplomacy’ or ‘foreign relations,’ creating a false notion of semantic equivalence. Over the first half of the twentieth century, ideas about expansionism came to inform how politicians and historians framed the history of Japanese contacts with other nations, while ideological changes in Japanese foreign relations occurred without talking of gaikō.Footnote ¹ Pinpointing the origins of gaikō, a concept that was neither a source term nor explicitly articulated in the historiography, requires disentangling colligatory concepts from the meaning-making exercises of those who wrote Japanese history.

I argue that the protagonist of this book, Murakami Naojirō, played an essential role in shaping the notion of gaikō after his return from the European archives in the early 1900s. Although Murakami explicitly used the term gaikō only on rare occasions, his translations determined how discourses and meanings overlapped semantically and cross-fertilized conceptually.Footnote ² His historicist quellentreue (literally, to be faithful to the archival sources) determined which historical events and actors were to be remembered. Unlike Japanese Marxist historians who established a new tradition of studying presentist diplomatic history (gaikōshi) in the 1950s,Footnote ³ Murakami did not engage with grand theory. His contribution to world and diplomatic history built upon archival diplomacy that integrated multilingual archives with modern foreign relations. His work presents significant evidence that purposeful linguistic, cultural, and temporal translation obfuscated or privileged certain elements in the process of historiographical knowledge production. Working with what I call narrations of gaikō, this chapter deploys a comparative reading of Murakami’s work to focus on how meaning is constructed by words and images. Murakami’s oeuvre as a scholar diplomat and translator historian provides the context through which his publications shaped the idea of Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the seventeenth century and left their imprint on the historiography of early modern East and Southeast Asia.

Murakami’s scholarship shaped the perception of early modern Japanese foreign relations, today known as gaikō, but not in a straightforward way. International relations scholars have recently argued that for modern Japanese history, gaikō can be translated neither as diplomacy nor as foreign relations.Footnote ⁴ In previous centuries conceptual discussions were less explicit. In the late nineteenth century, Inagaki Manjirō, one of the first Meiji intellectuals who studied in the UK, mused about the functions of gaikō and gaisei, the latter usually translated as geopolitics.Footnote ⁵ Taking the British Empire as a reference point, his observations were strongly influenced by the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/5 and Japan’s occupation of Taiwan.Footnote ⁶ Prior to 1873, gaikō in Japanese was understood as a term referring to the tasks and skills of an envoy (使節, shisetsu), while its classical Chinese equivalent stood for interactions between countries.Footnote ⁷ The term gaikō first appeared in a Japanese dictionary in 1888, but the etymological process behind its emergence differed from how Japanese neologisms would normally be formed from Chinese morphemes.Footnote ⁸ Gaikō as a truncated form of the phrase gaikoku kōsai (外国交際) emerged from a translation process linking the English term ‘diplomacy’ with notions of ‘envoy’ and ‘relations.’Footnote ⁹ In the 1880s and 1890s, Japanese politicians renegotiated the unequal terms of the Treaties of Amity and Commerce concluded in the 1850s, adopting a constitution alongside a new criminal and civil jurisdiction.Footnote ¹⁰ In addition to developing a social and economic reform program following the Meiji Revolution of 1868, Japan applied gunboat diplomacy to exert pressure on Chosŏn Korea, imposing unequal terms of trade and extraterritorial rights for the Japanese in Korean ports in 1876. Yet, it would take until the 1900s before the term would begin to appear more regularly in treatises and international law. Japanese scholars would then engage more systematically with the history of gaikō, however, only in the context of modern international relations practices based on a European blueprint.Footnote ¹¹ Only after Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, when Japanese primary foreign representatives were “upgraded to ambassador,” to use Douglas Howland’s phrase, did the term enter common parlance.Footnote ¹²

My qualitative analysis of Murakami’s narrations of early modern gaikō charts how semantics can shape epistemologies and explores how positionality, images, and the politics of referencing determine what meanings are associated with certain concepts and terms.Footnote ¹³ In many of the sources of my analysis, early modern gaikō had an implicit character, which could refer to various practices including formal diplomatic relations, imply Japanese superiority over neighboring countries, or simply denote foreign trade and migration. As a consequence, multiple, sometimes contradictory, layers of meaning resulting from fragmented knowledge and interpretations that were informed by asymmetrical power relations contribute to the notion of untranslatability. By focusing on untranslatability, I want to stress translation as a cultural exchange and subscribe to the fluidity and improvisation in translation processes acknowledged in communication studies and various other disciplines in the humanities and cultural studies.Footnote ¹⁴ With the concept of untranslatability I, moreover, want to stress fluid temporalities. On the one hand, the linguistic and translatory endeavors of seventeenth-century actors had a direct bearing on translations crafted by Murakami and his colleagues in the early twentieth century. On the other, Murakami’s source translations, annotations, and publications related to past events were influenced by the contemporary diplomatic correspondence he engaged in as the official translator of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hence, when exploring the early twentieth-century language used to translate past foreign relations and the genealogy of gaikō, it will again be necessary to move between different layers of time. In this spirit I will start with flipping the chronology by first reviewing how narrations of early modern gaikō have been shaped by more recent scholarship followed by a terminological survey of previous centuries. In the core of the chapter, I provide examples that underline how Murakami and his peers made gaikō matter with the help of ‘foreign relations manuscript’ (gaikō monjo), the selection of emblematic historical episodes, and a strategic placement of images and objects.

Early Modern Gaikō in Recent Historiography

The foreign relations relevant to Murakami’s research, and thus by extension to this book, are characterized by two major transformations: increased outward-looking diplomatic exchange in the period between 1580 and 1620, and the subsequent restriction of foreign contact from the 1630s onwards, which has been conventionally summarized with the misleading concept of sakoku (‘closed country’) politics. From the 1580s onwards, a new form of flexible relations with Asian and European actors replaced regulated diplomatic exchange with China and Korea within the norms of a Sino-centric world order. Contacts with the outside world increased when local lords in Kyushu sponsored activities that boosted maritime trade, including delegations and trade missions to potentates in Asia and Europe. In the following decades, the unifying warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa Shoguns Ieyasu and Hidetada adopted proactive foreign relation practices that, in addition to sending out envoys and diplomatic letters to rulers from England to Cambodia, included regular receptions at their courts of high-ranking representatives from Ming China, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Holland, England, Siam, and Tonkin. Following the release of the anti-Christian edicts of 1614 and the so-called sakoku-edicts of 1635, the Tokugawa regime slowly withdrew from experimenting with hybrid diplomatic practices before restricting official contact in the 1670s to the kings of Chosŏn Korea, Ryūkyū, and official representatives from Holland.Footnote ¹⁵ While scholars have persuasively challenged the holistic notion of the seventeen directives known as ‘sakoku-edicts,’ which only restricted but never prohibited interaction with the outside world, one way or another the ‘seclusion’ or ‘closed country’ paradigm continues to shape the understanding of early modern Japan’s foreign politics in broad-stroke historical studies.Footnote ¹⁶

The more nuanced debates of the past decades have led historians inside and outside Japan to acknowledge that both the norms and practices of early modern Japanese foreign relations were heterogeneous as a consequence of different systems existing in parallel.Footnote ¹⁷ It is important to recognize that, as Mark Ravina, among others, has argued, Tokugawa foreign policy simultaneously integrated the Chinese diplomatic order and the European Westphalian order for the sake of controlling maritime commerce.Footnote ¹⁸ The question of whether – and which of – these patterns of interaction and exchange should be labeled as gaikō has fueled scholarly controversy and attests to the persistence of methodological nationalism in debates within the historiographies of early modern foreign relations.Footnote ¹⁹ Over the past decades, gaikō as a label has been applied more flexibly. Historians have tested the concept by studying the tension between local and central interests with reference to the gaikō of daimyō (Japanese local lords) domains during the Warring States period (c.1467–1568). Marushima Kazuhiro has analyzed the seemingly anachronistic issue of Japanese local stakeholders’ diplomatic aspirations, arguing that daimyō understood their realm as a ‘state’ with the right to enter diplomatic relations. He also maintains that the Portuguese and Spanish commitment to acknowledging the sovereign rights of the daimyō by calling them king (‘rei’ or ‘rey’) would justify this perception that local realms were states.Footnote ²⁰ All examples show that gaikō as a form of official foreign relations had various nuances.

With increased interest in questions of the nature of early modern Japanese foreign relations, new historiographical concepts and debates emerged. Japanese historians have recognized the centrality of specially trained monks (a.k.a. gaikō sō) to the practices of formal foreign relations. The label gaikō sō refers to members of the Gozan sect who were essential for preparing the formal documents (gaikō monjo) and observing the rigid protocol of state letter exchange and neo-Confucian ceremonies. In the mid-seventeenth century, foreign relations came to center on the shogunal overlord (taikun, 大君, a term invented by the regime’s diplomatic advisors to avoid being addressed as kokuō, meaning king ) and his orchestrated engagement with Korean and Ryūkyūan embassies, which has aptly been termed overlord diplomacy (‘taikun gaikō taisei’).Footnote ²¹ It is now even widely accepted that maritime domains such as Satsuma and Tsushima played an essential role in transforming Tokugawa Japan’s foreign trade and maritime defense.Footnote ²² Such new interpretations are in line with Ronald Toby’s critique of the historical perception of the ‘closed country’ policies, entitled Sakoku to iu gaikō (Foreign relations called Sakoku). Toby addressed gaikō via chōsen tsūshin, a source term referring to the diplomatic missions from the king of Korea (Chosŏn) to the Tokugawa shogun (taikun). For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Luke Roberts and Ronald Toby emphasized the role of performativity in foreign encounters at both the court and the local level.Footnote ²³ Toby’s survey of the role of Chosŏn diplomatic missions to Edo highlights the importance of the kokusho (state letter), which suggests that tsūshin missions were part of gaikō.Footnote ²⁴ Gaikō’s semantic sibling kokkō (国交) – state-to-state relations between the Korean king (kokuō) and the Japanese shogun since the time of Ieyasu – was based on the exchange of friendly letters signed by a ruler (親書, shinsho).Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, if we accept that the exchange of kokusho (state letters) was the defining element for gaikō, then all other forms of foreign exchange and negotiations were by default taigai kankei.

Both Japanese terms gaikō and taigai kankei are conventionally translated as diplomacy or foreign relations in English. Semantic variations in classifying norms and practices of early modern foreign relations have stimulated historiographical debates in a number of linguistic traditions.Footnote ²⁶ The Japanese case, which is most relevant here, has a clear hierarchical aspect. The younger term taigai kankei was coined by Murakami’s protegee Iwao Seiichi as colligation for various practices of foreign exchange, including semi-private maritime trade and overseas migration in the seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁷ Taigai kankei came to denote a multitude of episodes of negotiations with foreigners that fell outside the rigid protocol of court diplomacy, in particular Japanese interactions with Southeast Asian polities. Such semi-private initiatives were seen as informal and mostly economically motivated and allowed for an implicit interpretation of early modern Japanese expansionism in Southeast Asia. The conceptual relationship between imperial expansion and diplomacy necessitates a study of terminological choices and their epistemological implications.Footnote ²⁸ For an in-depth analysis of narrations of gaikō, it is thus useful to take the proto-historiographical interest in past foreign relations as a point of departure.

A Proto-Historiography of Early Modern Gaikō

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, it was Japanese imperialists with capitalist agendas not historians who identified Tokugawa Japan’s contacts with Southeast Asia as important precedents for imperial expansion. Journalists and public intellectuals openly stressed the connection between early modern Japanese enterprises in Southeast Asia and contemporary imperial and commercial interests. Discourses about a Japan-led southern expansion from Taiwan via the Philippines all the way to Australia, which became known as the nanshin doctrine, were instrumental in the Meiji regime’s myth-building of Japan as a regional power from the 1880s.Footnote ²⁹ In this way, examples from previous centuries became a backbone of expansionist propaganda, while the idea of early modern maritime expansion beyond the shores of the archipelago gradually came to link different epistemologies over time and space.Footnote ³⁰ As a result, Japanese historians’ terminological choices implicitly shaped narratives of Tokugawa foreign relations and influenced worldviews beyond their exclusive intellectual circles. While European diplomacy had become a blueprint for the historiographical conceptualization of modern (read: late Meiji and Taishō period) gaikō, the trope of imperialist expansion indirectly shaped ideas about Tokugawa foreign relations. Yet it is important to note that the imperial historiography of past relations employed expansion mostly implicitly; equivalent Japanese terms such as bōchō rarely appeared in scholarly publications.Footnote ³¹

In light of the dearth of a taxonomy for describing early modern foreign relations, what kind of vocabulary was in use when writing about interactions with the outside world? An insightful reference in this regard is Hayashi Akira (1800–1859), director of the academy of Chinese/Confucian learning, the Yūseido, in Tokyo. As a chief diplomatic advisor of the late Tokugawa regime, Hayashi Akira played a vital role in the negotiations with the United States under Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854.Footnote ³² Hayashi was both a practitioner (High Commissioner Hayashi) and scholar of diplomacy. Following the onset of US-American gunboat diplomacy – a form of foreign aggression forced upon Japan since the 1850s – and the incursion into Japanese sovereign territory in 1852, Hayashi was instructed by the bakufu to collect historical documents describing previous episodes of contact (referred to as ‘maritime political issues’ 海政事項) with neighboring countries in surrounding waters and ‘documents exchanged with foreign countries’ (外国往来の文書, gaikoku ōrai no monjo).Footnote ³³ He fulfilled this task by delivering a country-by-country chronological survey of the period between 1566 and 1825, including Annan, Ryūkyū, Chosŏn, China (tōkoku), the namban countries (Luzon, Macau, Goa, Spain, and Portugal), Holland, England, Siam, Cambodia, Russia, and the United States. Published in eight volumes as Tsūkō ichiran in 1853, it provides an overview of Tokugawa Japan’s bilateral relations, including a detailed report of a Ryūkyū mission to the Qing court in Beijing, based on letters and documents gatheredFootnote ³⁴ The material that Murakami compiled foregrounded the narrative of official foreign relations, while the very selection process was doubtlessly part of a diplomat scholar’s practice.Footnote ³⁵ In 1911, the year Murakami published the Ikoku nikki shō, the eight volumes of the Tsūkō ichiran appeared in a new edition.

The Tsūkō ichiran is a rich source for studying the semantic complexity of translation choices in early modern foreign relations. The terminology of symbolic practices originated in the Sino-centric diplomatic protocol and was articulated by Chinese characters following a specific calligraphic style and placement of text. With the arrival of new actors, both epistolary standards of distant diplomatic cultures and the translation of titles posed major linguistic and ideological challenges to all parties involved. One illustrative example is a formal letter sent from the Portuguese viceroy of Goa to Japan in 1612. The letter addressed the Tokugawa shogun as Dai-nihon kokuō heika (literally, “To his Majesty, the King of Great Japan”).Footnote ³⁶ This translation of a Portuguese original is insightful in two respects: First, heika (陛下, bixia in Chinese) as a form of address is usually reserved for the Japanese tennō or the Chinese emperor, and thus never formally used for the shogun. Second, the title kokuō (‘king’) for Tokugawa rulers was frowned upon by bakufu officials for its connotation of inferiority toward the Chinese emperor as the overlord.Footnote ³⁷ Such translation issues illustrate the friction between the urge to emphasize continuity with the known world, on the one hand, and to adapt to international standards, on the other. Hayashi and Murakami faced them when preparing such documents for new audiences.

Reading the Tsūkō ichiran alongside Murakami’s work reveals many parallels in translation choices regarding official titles, the nature of foreign relations, and wording that would underline Japan’s superiority or at least equality vis-à-vis its diplomatic counterparts. As diplomat scholars, both Hayashi and Murakami provided theoretical, empirical, and ideological contexts for the narrative of changing international relations and Japan’s shift toward becoming an expansionist power on the same level as the European seafaring nations.Footnote ³⁸ Although they shaped narrations of gaikō conceptually rather than terminologically, their work helped to define the morphology of foreign relations history. Hayashi Akira’s source compilation of 1856 clearly reflects bakumatsu’s disregard for Europeans as active diplomatic players in Tokugawa Japan. Hence, the Tsūkō ichiran is reminiscent of Tokugawa leaders’ and early Meiji politicians’ view of Europeans as inferior tributaries who played a marginal role in the Tokugawa world. In fact, seventeenth-century Spaniards and other Europeans were commercially interesting, but otherwise far below Japan’s East Asian neighbors or ambassadors from Ayutthaya sent by the king of Siam, a view to which even Murakami would subscribe.

Ultimately, Hayashi’s source compilation conveys a nuanced understanding of the genealogy of gaikō informed by the need for legitimization through bureaucratization and education. Directly translated, Tsūkō ichiran means ‘Overview of Navigation’; tsūkō (navigation) was the most appropriate term to describe maritime interactions beyond the Confucian foreign exchange at the end of the Tokugawa period. Drafted as a policy survey based on textual criticism and empiricism (kōshōgaku of the Hayashi School of Confucianism whose members had served the shogunate as advisors for generations), the Tsūkō ichiran is a testament to knowledge production specific to the trying situation of the 1850s. The structure of Hayashi’s Tsūkō is revealing when it comes to the role of expansion as a defining characteristic of foreign relations. Expansionist claims happen most often implicitly, for instance, in reproducing the copious correspondence with and about the Kingdom of Ryūkyū (a vassal state under the Satsuma domain since 1609) or in emphasizing the importance of official letter exchange for maritime relations. While the term gaikō is unsurprisingly absent in the Tsūkō ichiran, the processes laid out in the collection are unmistakably perceptible as defining episodes of foreign relations.

The publications, annotations, and translations that would come to determine the notion of early modern gaikō were inspired by the work of the first generation of academic historians in Japan. Trained at Tokyo Imperial University, they worked rigorously to establish a modern historiography of Japan, and they outlined the narratives about Japan’s modernization and position in the world that have endured, as Margaret Mehl, Lisa Yoshikawa, and, most recently Satō Yūki have discussed.Footnote ³⁹ The academic professionalization of history (akademizumu) was closely linked to the editorial and historiographical practices of the Shiryō hensenjo (Historiographical Institute, supported by the Ministry of Education’s policy for publicizing history) and debates about the utility and function of history that followed the Institute’s establishment in 1877. From the 1880s onwards, scholars began to debate whether history should provide evidence (実証, jisshō, as in the positivist tradition) or stories (物語, monogatari).Footnote ⁴⁰ In the 1910s, the historiographical controversies had reached their peak and divided practitioners into supporters of the historiographical (shiryō hensan) tradition around Tsuji Zennosuke (1877–1955), and the kokushi (national history) faction around Kuroita Katsumi.Footnote ⁴¹ Debates about function and content, with one party emphasizing the importance of historiographical accuracy and the craft of editions, and the other the need to make history understood by (and serve) the Japanese people, continued until the 1930s. One aspect of the controversies surrounding the correct practices of history in Japan concerned the role of ‘official history’ (正史, seishi).Footnote ⁴² Seishi stands for historical publications commissioned by the ruling regime and has a long tradition in East Asia in the form of official dynastic history. A classic example is the Nihon Shoki of the eighth century, but even the Tokugawa jikki – ordered by the shogunate in 1799 and concluded in 1844, which portrays the history of the Tokugawa bakufu from Ieyasu to the tenth shogun Ieharu – falls into that category. While many would argue that the government-sponsored Dai nihon shiryō (the first volumes of which were published by the Shiryō hensenjo in 1901) is a classic example of imperial Japanese seishi, contemporaries involved in the project saw the large-scale source compilation as an answer to the critics of official history writing.Footnote ⁴³ Either way, this large-scale editorial work cemented views and interpretations of early modern Japanese foreign relations.

In the early 1900s, large-scale projects at the Historiographical Institute promoted the search for historical truth. The craft of locating, transcribing, and editing primary sources was key to the archival method (古文書学, komonjogaku) and appeared across genres, including state-sponsored editions. Such intellectual exercises, whose primary purpose was to reinterpret a state’s past world-historical significance, originated in European countries in the mid-nineteenth century. They were ideological editing projects that simultaneously served emerging nation states as foreign relations tools.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, the influential source compilation Dai nihon komonjo, initiated and printed along with the Dai nihon shiryō in 1901, included source material for the end of the Tokugawa period Mid-nineteenth-century foreign relations were explicitly labeled gaikō, while representative examples had a modern connotation of bilateral relations. This rigid preconception based on the Westphalian idea of sovereign states as sole diplomatic actors led to the disintegrated scholarship on foreign relations.

One the one hand, European models gave rise to the work of legal scholars such as Hayashi Kiroku (1875–1950), who explicitly studied gaikō while focusing on the nineteenth century. A graduate of Keio University, the oldest institute of Western higher education in Japan, Hayashi traveled to Europe in 1901 to study the history of constitutions and diplomacy. In 1903, he accepted a post teaching Japanese at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris. After returning to Japan in 1908, he became a leading historian of ‘European diplomatic relations’ (ōshū gaikō) and began to publish widely in the field.Footnote ⁴⁵ His monograph Ōshū kinsei gaikō (The history of early modern European foreign relations) betrayed multiple biases in his understanding of diplomacy, particularly his use of Europe as a point of departure for the spread of ‘modern’ foreign relations based on treaty-making, statecraft, and warcraft. Yet, in his study of gaikō in the tradition of Western-centric international relations, he paid no attention to the contours of actual Japanese–European encounters in previous centuries.

On the other hand, there were Murakami’s historiographical contributions to the Dai nihon shiryō. His reproduction of hundreds of pages of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents in Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and English implicitly delineated documentary gaikōshi in an authoritative outlet.Footnote ⁴⁶ While it is important to note that foreign-language manuscripts are the exception in the Dai nihon shiryō, the integration of foreign-language documents would naturally add novel perspectives. Murakami’s annotations and translations set the tone for history textbooks, popular science programs, and high school curricula. The untranslated documents built a complementary relationship with Murakami’s voluminous translations of European archival material published in the Ikoku nikki shō, where he failed to indicate clearly which parts were translations and which were originals. In this way, Murakami placed the responsibility for distinguishing on his readers. These two different sides of untranslatability – the integration of foreign language documents in their original language to the Japanese historiographical reference Dai nihon shiryō, and the obscuring of what was a translation and what an original in the Ikoku nikki shō – left a largely unexplored imprint on global historiographies of early modern foreign relations.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ultimately, both ambitious encyclopedic source compilations created the illusion of presenting relevant historical data in its entirety. As a consequence, even today, scholars tend to look for missing minor details instead of challenging the meta-narrative based on great men and key events. The focus on great men representing a strong state with expansionist claims is part of the problematic legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiographical outlets that academic historians established.

How Murakami Made Gaikō Monjo Matter

Although gaikō was not a source term, it came to play an essential role in the historiography of pre-nineteenth-century foreign contacts once bureaucrats began to single out gaikō monjo as an independent source genre in the mid-Meiji period. The composite term translates as ‘document of foreign relations’ or ‘diplomatic manuscript.’ In foreign politics, gaikō monjo came to classify all diplomatic records concerning matters of state interest collected by the Diplomatic Record Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.Footnote ⁴⁸ Gaikō monjo soon came to classify historical sources, for instance, when historians used it to refer to the Confucian protocol of ritualized tribute relations since the Song period (960–1279). In the context of the Sinosphere, the term was applied to written communication in classical Chinese (kanji bunka-nō/ken) on ōtaka danshi (大高檀紙), a high-quality paper used for state documents.Footnote ⁴⁹ Gaikō monjo thus referred to a large tangible written source corpus of epistolary diplomacy. Like formal documents in other political or geographical contexts, these state letters were legitimized with a seal but not immune to forgery and manipulation. While gaikō monjo represented a type of foreign relations defined by China’s centrality, they also resonated with Japan’s self-image of being a literary and superior agent of the Sinosphere.Footnote ⁵⁰ Conceptually, gaikō monjo would gradually come to include state letters exchanged in the name of two rulers and thus represented East Asia’s relations with European powers in historiography more broadly.Footnote ⁵¹ Gaikō monjo was an important means to explain the Tokugawa regime’s gradual emancipation from the Ming protocol of foreign relations, a trend to which both Hayashi and Murakami contributed.Footnote ⁵² As the category of gaikō monjo became more inclusive, other factors such as state control, gender bias, and formality came to determine what was considered worth including.

The documents collected, drafted, and recorded by the Zen Buddhist priest Ishin Sūden in the Ikoku nikki in the early seventeenth century illustrate the conceptual expansion of the genre. In 1612, Sūden copied notes previously drafted by fellow Gozan monks and published them in two volumes.Footnote ⁵³ He did so after inheriting the office of diplomatic advisor to the Tokugawa court from Saishō Seishō (1548–1608), who was one of the foreign relations monks in charge of written diplomatic correspondence with China mentioned above. Three hundred years later, Murakami was the first modern historian to edit the Ikoku nikki. When disseminating the Ikoku nikki, Murakami disproportionally overemphasized the entries on European–Japanese relations and the diplomatic receptions of Asian envoys in Japan. He claimed that Sūden’s work was worth reading because his records included the letters exchanged with foreign nations and moreover illustrated how diplomatic delegations from Asia (Chosŏn, Siam, Annan) delivered gifts during audiences with the Shogun.Footnote ⁵⁴

By stressing the importance of written records in multiple foreign languages, Murakami introduced a new type of gaikō monjo. Documents written in other languages than classical Chinese would challenge traditional views of official East Asian diplomatic relations based on the model of universal sovereignty, tribute-giving, and investiture-receiving. This process of refashioning was closely linked to Murakami’s work with European manuscripts and his calling as a historian and teacher.Footnote ⁵⁵ When working at the Historiographical Institute in the early 1900s, he classified documents collected in European archives and libraries as gaikō monjo and stressed the primacy of foreign relations. In his university teaching, for instance, in the history lecture at Tōdai in 1903 and 1904, he familiarized students with a new type of primary sources.Footnote ⁵⁶

Murakami was not the only historian to promote gaikō monjo manuscripts that emphasized early seventeenth-century foreign relations. Tsuji Zennosuke, mostly known today for his contributions to cultural history and the history of Buddhism in Japan, became involved with the Historiographical Institute in 1902 while still a graduate student. That same year, Murakami returned from Europe, and over the following years, the two would roam in similar circles. Tsuji was appointed historiographical officer in 1905 and became the general editor of volume 12 of Dai nihon shiryō, which covered the period between 1603 and 1623. While the Dai nihon shiryō focused primarily on domestic matters, Tsuji underscored the importance of past foreign relations. In a separate monograph entitled Kaigai kōtsū shiwa (海外交通史話, 1917) he offered a detailed survey of foreign relations, from the earliest official exchange with Ming China (1368–1644) to the ‘opening of the country’ (kaikoku) in the 1850s.Footnote ⁵⁷ The book raised a number of interpretative issues regarding gaikō as a concept and an analytical term. Tsuji postulated that kaigai kōtsū was instrumental in the development of Japanese ‘civilization’ (bunmei) since the Jōmon period, which refers to Japan’s Neolithic period up to 300 bce. Tsuji moreover claimed that the recording activity of Buddhist temples had comparable effects to the publishing revolution in Europe. He also discussed the impact of law and writing systems on developing foreign relations. Within Tsuji’s longue durée narrative, one aspect is particularly striking: The entire second half of the book deals with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and thus highlights certain events such as daimyō maritime trade, Hideyoshi’s ambition to conquer China via Korea, and Ieyasu’s strategic interest in Taiwan.Footnote ⁵⁸

During the interwar period, Tsuji followed Murakami in cementing the authority of the Ikoku nikki as a key historical document. He did so with the help of a new outlet for scientific history in Japan, the Shien (史苑), established in 1928 by the Historical Society of Rikkyō University, a private Christian university in Tokyo. Tsuji Zennoske published his transcriptions of the Ikoku nikki between 1929 and 1936 as part of a teaching material series.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Shien’s Ikoku nikki series is but one example of the synergies between the canonization of source material and teaching. Murakami and Tsuji were two leading actors in this process that singled out gaikō monjo as key historical sources and thereby established foreign relations as a defining theme in Japanese history.

When Murakami and his colleagues started to investigate the foreign relations of Tokugawa Japan, their biggest obstacle was to get the approval of peer scholars. Making Tokugawa foreign relations matter required a flexible repertoire of which translation of foreign language documents was but one strategy. Other strategies included expanding vocabulary, addressing international audiences, and making use of the power of images. In 1900, Murakami and Murakawa Kengo (born in 1875 in Kumamoto) coedited the letters of English merchants in Japan. The two young Japanese historians thus tried to convey their discoveries to an international audience through their Japan-based anglophone network.Footnote ⁶⁰ The volume emphasized that business communication regularly employed formal greetings and courtesy phrases similar to those used in official foreign communication. Thematically the compilation was a first step toward demonstrating that foreign merchants actively engaged in formal letter exchange as a practice of foreign relations.Footnote ⁶¹ For Murakami’s scholarly profile, both the use of English and an applied document-based epistemology (the method of letting sources speak for themselves) remained important vehicles for authentication and inspired future generations to adapt his narrative framing.

In contrast to Murakami, Tsuji published exclusively in Japanese. Instead of promoting foreign-language sources, he corroborated his writing with the transcription of Japanese primary sources and by including manifold visual images. In this way he literally determined how readers should picture gaikō monjo, a point to which I will return below. While the contents of both Tsuji’s and Murakami’s publications are undisputedly based on historical realities established through their thorough source criticism, the stories they tell have a number of biases, including source selection bias, topic arrangement bias, periodization bias, and terminology bias. In Murakami’s work on past foreign relations, these four biases are intrinsically linked to the already-mentioned overemphasis on European relations within Japanese history. To underline the impact of his topic arrangement on the history of early modern Japan’s engagement with the outside world, I will use Murakami’s engagement with two examples of Japanese delegations sent to Europe between 1582 and 1614, known respectively as the Tenshō embassy and the Keichō embassy.Footnote ⁶² Murakami’s historiographical work on both episodes influenced diverse fields of knowledge production, from nationalist interpretations of advocates of the Japanese Empire to twenty-first-century narratives by art and global historians.

The Tenshō embassy (1582–90) was sent by the three Kyushu daimyō of Ōtomo, Ōmura, and Arima, and arranged by the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, who first visited Japan from Macau in 1579–82.Footnote ⁶³ Four boys from noble families traveled from Nagasaki via Goa to Lisbon where they arrived in the summer of 1584. Accompanied by their tutor and interpreter, the Japan-based Jesuit Diego Mesquita, they used the many months on the ship to study Latin and to become well versed in Catholic practices and cultural manners. In Europe, they were received by King Philip II in Madrid and met the grand duke of Tuscany Francesco I de’ Medici, the doge in Venice, and two popes, Gregory XIII (r. 1572–85) and Pius V (r. 1585–90) in Rome. After spending several years in Europe, they returned home in 1590 via Macau, where the Portuguese educator and rector of the Jesuit college, Duarte de Sande, compiled the notes the four young ambassadors had collected during their trip, thus creating a valuable archive.Footnote ⁶⁴ This is a very brief summary of a significant historical event that Murakami tried to make sense of after more than three centuries during which no one in Japan cared about it. This situation would soon change diametrically as publications and interpretations expanded quickly after Murakami’s encounter with the Tenshō mission records.

Even today, the story of these four Japanese boy envoys (shōnen shisetsu) traveling the world dressed in European fashion continues to amaze many.Footnote ⁶⁵ The quattro ragazzi became the poster boys of mutually nourishing late sixteenth-century cultural exchange, demonstrating that globalization began long before the invention of the steamship.Footnote ⁶⁶ While doubtlessly a major attraction in Renaissance Europe, their journey was not exoticized to the same extent as that of many other non-European diplomatic travelers of the time, such as the Tlaxcala envoys from Mexico to Madrid in 1525, or Tupi ambassadors from Brazil to France in 1613, to name just two comparable diplomatic episodes at Western European courts.Footnote ⁶⁷ This can partly be explained by the Japanese boy ambassadors’ carefully practiced European demeanor and their staging as members of the educated, Catholic community.

Murakami’s historiographical work on the Tenshō delegation began with a research note published in the Shigaku zasshi, the official journal of the Historical Society of Japan. It included what he would label a ‘letter of gratitude’ delivered by the Japanese embassy in 1585 to the government of Venice.Footnote ⁶⁸ He discovered this unknown source during his research in Venice in 1899. Murakami began the research note with a positivist analysis of the original text, combining komonjogaku and translation.Footnote ⁶⁹ His transcription of the bilingual Japanese–Italian letter describing the arrival of the Japanese in Venice included the holograph signatures of the four ambassadors (shaped as seals in the style of Japanese calligraphy) and the transliteration of their names in the Latin alphabet as Ito Mancio, Cingina Michaele, Arima Julian, and Hara Martin.Footnote ⁷⁰ Murakami’s reproduction received backing by the journal editor of the Shigaku zasshi, Tsuboi Kumezō. In the accompanying text, Tsuboi explained that Murakami had copied this source by hand in the Venice archive, emphasizing both the need for such work and the risk of mistranslation.Footnote ⁷¹ Tsuboi’s afterword ended with a remark about the letter not being dated vertically, which was the standard for Japanese documents. This, he concluded, made the manuscript a rare example of a Japanese primary source in the ‘Western’ (European) style (西洋式日本古文書, seiyōshiki nihon komonjo).Footnote ⁷² While Murakami’s research note is an illuminating example of the impact of multilayered translations and vocabulary choices that came to determine images of early modern foreign interactions, Tsuboi’s comments are a telling example of the conservatism and dedication to formalities of Japanese archival history of the time.Footnote ⁷³ Together they reflect the different strategies involved in determining the role of archival sources in shaping the narrative of active Japanese participation in early modern foreign relations.

Four decades later, Murakami’s archival discoveries would inform an attempt to rewrite the story of the Tenshō embassy as an act of bilateral relations. In 1939/40, Japanese nationalistic forces exploited this exceptional chapter in Jesuit and local Kyushu history for their geopolitical agenda, as can be seen in an article published in the national newspaper Asahi Shinbun in which the four young noblemen from the Tenshō mission are celebrated as “our scientific patrons” (waga kagaku no onjin).Footnote ⁷⁴ The same newspaper article informed its considerable number of readers that art and religion were brought to Japan in the 1580s from Italy while boldly reinterpreting rangaku (literally ‘Dutch learning,’ a term that summarized the efforts by Tokugawa scholars to understand developments in Europe) as “German knowledge.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This is an extreme case of interpreting historical facts out of context to emphasize the longevity of alliances between the three sovereign states – Japan, the Third Reich, and Italy, allies in a global conflict at the time.Footnote ⁷⁶ It is crucial to emphasize that Murakami disseminated insights from archival sources in the spirit of the komonjo; yet while his own biases shaped the narrative of early modern foreign relations, he was never actively involved in overt myth-building so utterly detached from the language of the sources.

Now to the second example of a large-scale early modern Japanese diplomatic mission to Europe that illustrates how Murakami made gaikō monjo matter. In 1902, Murakami reported ‘live’ from Simancas in Spain about his latest archival discovery, which had been sent to Japan with the permission of Professor Tsuboi.Footnote ⁷⁷ Murakami added a translation – as an appetizer – of a diplomatic letter from a Japanese delegation to Spain and Italy during the Keichō period (1596–1615). Murakami’s report included transcriptions of two versions of a short letter signed by the Japanese ambassador Hasekura Tsunenaga. The letter was addressed to the duke of Lerma (the first minister of King Philip III) and announced the arrival of the embassy from Date Masamune. Date Masamune (1567–1636) was a powerful daimyō in northeastern Japan, interested in bringing foreign trade to his domain. A shrewd strategist, he not only tolerated Christian missionaries in his realm, but also sponsored the delegation to Europe.Footnote ⁷⁸ While Murakami analyzed the komonjo’s external features, such as its dimensions in centimeters, Tsuboi explained the date of the letters and why two versions existed.Footnote ⁷⁹ Tsuboi concluded that, thanks to Murakami’s discovery, Japanese historical scholarship could prove that Hasekura Tsunenaga was experienced in gaikō. This time the term gaikō was explicitly attributed to this diplomatic episode.Footnote ⁸⁰

Tsuboi’s final remark reveals that in the early 1900s, historians had a clear interest in demonstrating the parallels between Japan and European imperial powers, not just in the present but also in the past. This must be understood in the context of making a new type of foreign relations – one that did not perceive foreign relations with European trading powers as inferior to diplomatic exchange with imperial China – matter. After the 1630s, the topic of Japanese early modern relations with Europe received little attention for almost two-and-a-half centuries, resulting in a profound knowledge loss.Footnote ⁸¹ Murakami would frequently tell the story of the Iwakura Mission visiting the Biblioteca del Reale Archivo del Stato in Venice in 1873 where they were shown a letter. As the letter was written in Latin, they could not read it. What was more, they were unable to place the letter – which was dated 1616 and signed by Hasekura Tsunenaga – in its historical context as none of them had ever heard of Hasekura and his mission to Europe.Footnote ⁸² As this was equally true for the Tenshō mission, both diplomatic events had been wiped out of Japanese historical memory by the time of Japan’s international diplomatic debut in the 1870s.

The lacuna of knowledge about Hasekura’s diplomatic mission was gradually filled up after the return of the Iwakura mission to Japan. In 1876, Hasekura’s delegation was presented in an exhibition held in his hometown Sendai, where visitors, including the Meiji Tennō, were shown Date Masamune’s letter to the pope in Latin together with historical objects from Date’s reign. A few years later, Japanese diplomats in Europe helped introduce a Venice-based source signed by ‘Ambassador Hasekura’ (支倉大使, Hasekura taishi) to Japanese readers.Footnote ⁸³ The Japanese minister in Paris, Ida Yuzuru, played a key role in repatriating diplomatic records from the seventeenth century to Japan. In 1882, he sent Date’s letter addressed to the viceroy in Mexico – which had been kept in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville – to the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. In 1888 (Meiji 22), Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary in Rome, Tokugawa Atsuyoshi, acquired Date’s letter to Pope Paulo V. This letter, which had been kept in the Vatican Library, was donated to the Imperial Museum (today’s Tokyo National Museum) and speaks to the impressive cultural diplomacy of the Meiji state. A piece of trivia is that Atsuyoshi was a nephew of the last Tokugawa shogun. These examples of continuity in diplomatic practices demonstrate that Murakami was not the first to apply explicit foreign relations vocabulary to the schemes of Catholic missionaries and local Japanese elites or to link events from the 1600s to contemporary foreign relations.

During 1902 and 1909, Murakami would extend the archive of European records on the two early modern Japanese embassies described above. As part of his editorial work for the Dai nihon shiryō, Murakami also transformed a small number of actors – primarily the two Spaniards Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco and Sebastián Vizcaíno in addition to Hasekura Tsunenaga – into overused stock references. They were essential to manifesting Tokugawa Japan’s image as an expanding maritime nation with commercial aspirations and international involvement.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet Murakami’s contributions to large-scale source editions contributed to one-sided narratives that were uncritical of power differentials and encouraged historiographical work that was ignorant of the complexities of empire.

Despite the biases resulting from source selection, topic arrangement, terminological choices, and periodization, there can be no doubt that Murakami stayed true to empiricist method and the carefully orchestrated authentication of primary sources. Yet it is also true that translation helped both to classify the source material as essential for the state and to forge an image of Tokugawa Japan’s integration into early modern diplomacy. When translating the account of the audience of the Spanish nobleman Don Vivero with Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1609, Murakami quoted Ieyasu on concluding ‘friendship’ with the king of Spain.Footnote ⁸⁵ This reference was obviously based on the seventeenth-century records of Vivero, in which the Spanish aristocrat employed the rhetoric of friendship (amistad). Murakami created the Sinophone neologism yūkō (友交), a combination of ‘friend’ and ‘communication.’Footnote ⁸⁶ A more traditional form of writing yūkō is 友好 (combining the characters ‘friend’ and ‘being fond of’). As the second character in Murakami’s rendering equates with the second one in gaikō (外交), Murakami subtly integrated this episode of Spanish–Japanese encounter into the larger history of early modern foreign relations among equals.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, his translation scheme did not end there. Murakami also referred to Vivero’s account as monogatari, a traditional Japanese literary genre and a bone of contention in the academic history debates of Murakami’s teachers and senior colleagues at Tōdai. This word choice can be seen as the legacy of Meiji-period historicism, when history and literature were strictly separated.Footnote ⁸⁸

Forging Gaikō Narratives

Intangible semantic and epistemic processes were at play in the in-between spaces of historiography and everyday foreign relations bureaucracy, forging narratives of early modern gaikō between the conscious and subconscious. Murakami’s translation tasks for the Japanese government show the reciprocal nature of his scholarship and nonacademic work. His translations of diplomatic paper trails reveal the complex nature of his historical thinking that was informed by examples ranging from the Japanese transpacific emigration in the early twentieth century to the hereditary post of the Nagasaki-based interpreters in the eighteenth century. I will show these entangled processes and their implications for Murakami’s positionality as both historian and translator with an example of his work for the Gaimushō (Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The Japanese ministry commissioned Murakami as Spanish educator at the Foreign Language Academy and connoisseur of the Spanish archives to translate a letter that had reached Tokyo from the Republic of Bolivia in 1909. On August 12, 1909, the day of his instalment in office, the Bolivian president Eliodoro Villazón (1848–1939) set out to formalize Bolivia’s official relations with Japan. President Villazón communicated his good intentions in a state letter addressed to His Majesty Emperor Mutsuhito. In a formal greeting, Villazón informed the emperor about the beginning of his constitutional period of rule and the special efforts he would make to expand the existing good relations between Bolivia and Japan. He signed it “Vuestro leal y buen amigo” (Your true and good friend).Footnote ⁸⁹ Being a friend in this case meant that he welcomed the fast-growing Japanese labor emigration that had led to anti-Japanese sentiments elsewhere in the Americas.Footnote ⁹⁰ From around the turn of the century, ethnic Japanese emigrants (nikkei) began to move to South American countries, including Peru and Brazil, which would become the host country for the largest Nikkei community after the Second World War.Footnote ⁹¹ Yet, the history of the Nikkei in Bolivia dated to the rubber boom at the end of the nineteenth century, with a small number of Japanese immigrants attempting to have their share in the profits.Footnote ⁹² In 1899, the Japanese vessel Sakura Maru brought the first group of Japanese contract workers to Peru; from there, about ninety of them continued to the Mapiri river region in La Paz in Bolivia, where they found employment in the rubber plantations and railroad construction.Footnote ⁹³

Assigned with the translation of Villazón’s letter and a communiqué by his Minister of Foreign Affairs Daniel Bustamente, Murakami encountered familiar diplomatic rhetoric from the seventeenth-century archive.Footnote ⁹⁴ For instance, he identified parallels with a letter from the Spanish governor general of the Philippines who wrote to the bakufu in 1614 that “from now on, friendship, trade and commerce between our two countries will perpetuate through the annual coming and going of ships” (De aqui adelante se proseguiera la amistad, trato y comercio hecho entre los reynos yendo y viniendo las naos cada año).Footnote ⁹⁵ Having access to official diplomatic correspondence and being able to compare it with historical accounts, Murakami not only saw the Japan he lived in recognized internationally but also discovered synergies in the diplomatic communication between the Hispanic world and Japan in the seventeenth century. Hence, the translation episode reveals how diplomatic history shaped contemporary diplomatic relations and vice versa.

Murakami’s translatory choices are to be found both in his use of explicit vocabulary of modern diplomacy and in semantic fields. Conceptual historians in Germany have shown how entire semantic fields provide clues about historical change and the mindsets of past actors.Footnote ⁹⁶ Such a comprehensive model can be adapted to the historiography of Japanese foreign relations, as I shall illustrate with two examples from Murakami’s publications. The first example is the term shisen (使船), which translates as ‘ambassadorial ship’ in English. Murakami used shisen when referring to the vessels that carried envoys from the Philippines to Japan.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, this is not a literal translation of a Spanish source term. Europeans in Asia did not have vessels reserved specifically for envoys or officials. Regardless of the purpose of the journey, envoys traveled on the available merchant ships. Murakami’s use of shisen in this context is reminiscent of the Sinitic concept of ambassadorial ships known as kenminsen (遣明船). Between 1404 and 1547, kenminsen were sent back and forth between Ming China and Japan.Footnote ⁹⁸ Shisen thus is one of many examples of how Murakami’s translations and terminological choices implicitly shaped narratives regarding early modern diplomatic practices.

The second example is the term taishi (大使), which Murakami used strategically, for instance, for the Spanish Dominican friar Juan Cobo. Juan Cobo was one of the linguistically gifted Catholic missionaries based in Manila, who served the Spanish colonial government in establishing relations with Asian communities. In 1592, the colonial government in Manila commissioned him to travel to Japan to deliver a reply to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had the previous year threatened the Spaniards that he would invade Luzon.Footnote ⁹⁹ After meeting the Japanese general at the newly erected military camp in Hizen Nagoya and intimidated by the preparations for the invasion of Korea, a frightened Cobo left Japan in a rush only to allegedly capsize on the shores of eastern Taiwan, where the entire crew disappeared. The rest is not history but historiography. By labeling Juan Cobo a taishi, Murakami recognized the zealous missionary as a diplomatic actor of the likes of Hasekura Tsunenaga. Yet, taishi was not a source term taken from records of the 1600s to describe Cobo or Hasekura. It first appeared in Japanese as the official title used for Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83), who headed the Iwakura delegation (1871–3) across the US, European, and Asian colonial sites as the representative of a modernizing Meiji state. Taishi was a terminological delimitation in relation to the Japanese term shisha (使者). Shisha, which either translates as ‘envoy’ or ‘messenger,’ indicated a low-ranking post without credentials to negotiate. We know that Murakami used the term shisha when describing ordinary messengers, for instance, when a Japanese messenger delivered a note from Tokugawa Hidetada to Rodrigo de Vivero in the port of Iwada in Onjuku in 1609.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In calling the ad-hoc envoy Juan Cobo a taishi, Murakami upgraded certain episodes of Japanese–European foreign relations with the help of modern diplomatic jargon.

In addition to contemporary diplomatic concepts, more than three centuries of linguistic exchange and translation practice influenced Murakami’s language choices. As translator and editor of historical sources, Murakami had access to a knowledge corpus created by a heterogeneous group of linguist intermediaries ranging from sixteenth-century linguist missionaries and their often unacknowledged Japanese collaborators to licensed Japanese interpreters (tsūji, 通詞) of later centuries who communicated across languages since the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This system of knowledge management had a significant impact on the nature of foreign language learning and empowered a small group of people within the limits of bureaucratic control. At the turn of the twentieth century, both foreign language policies and the means for interpretation had changed significantly in Japan. And yet, during the time the Bureau of Translation of the Foreign Ministry commissioned Murakami to translate diplomatic documents in 1909, when Murakami was asked to find the right diplomatic language for translating the correspondence with Bolivia, his situation resembled that of the Oranda tsūji of the Tokugawa period.Footnote ¹⁰² Officials valued his service for more than his foreign-language skills; the regime trusted him to translate into comprehensive Japanese and expressed no doubt about his accurate use of political, legal, and economic language.Footnote ¹⁰³

Another example is the term nyūkō (入貢), which implies a demand for tribute-bearing.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Murakami used it when writing about Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s advances toward Luzon in 1591/2.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Nyūkō derived from the same Sinitic semantic field as chōkō (朝貢), meaning ‘offering tribute to the court.’ This term had been used in correspondence between China and its neighbors for centuries, appearing as early as in the Shoku Nihongi (続日本紀 [Continuation of Japan’s Annals], first published in 797), a historical chronicle of the Heian period (794–1185) at the peak of imperial court culture in Kyoto.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As such, the term conveys the temporality of an ancient, well-established practice. Nyūkō as an older diplomatic practice thus stood in contrast to a new age of foreign relations based on parity during Ieyasu’s reign.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It also conveys Murakami’s understanding of the hierarchy in Japanese foreign relations, where the Japanese rulers looked down on the Europeans, a logic that was only reversed by nineteenth-century gun boat diplomacy. Yet, his ideas were also informed by a discontent with the late nineteenth-century Orientalist outlook on Tokugawa diplomatic activism. Murakami’s diverse translatory choices are thus important layers in the historiography of early modern gaikō and paved the way for repositioning Japan in formal international relations.

Indeed, the archival sources that Murakami worked with are translatory products on their own. His contributions to the lexicon of early modern gaikō are shaped by the historical context of mediation and translation. Two key terms of the diplomatic correspondence between Spain and Japan of the early modern period, ‘peace’ and ‘friendship,’ illustrate the complexity of the matter. In light of a challenging geopolitical setting in Asia vis-à-vis more powerful polities, the Spanish crown and its colonial institutions regularly communicated their desire for ‘paz y amistad’ in their correspondence with foreign rulers. When those terms were introduced to Japan in the 1590s, the original Spanish meaning got lost in the processes of translation and source preparation. The Spaniards presented their king’s written wishes to the bakufu’s political advisors, who would arrange for a translation of the foreign-language letter into Japanese. However, in several cases the translation from Spanish to Japanese was provided by randomly available Spanish speakers such as missionaries or merchants and thus served only as a draft for the clean copy in literary Chinese. Japanese Buddhist scribes trained in the Chinese classics were in charge of the documents, which would eventually be delivered to the ruler. Given the intermediary nature of Japanese diplomatic relations that required a clean copy of the translation of the foreign letter when presented to the shogun, there was ample room for reshaping different notions of friendly relations. While all parties arguably shared an understanding of peace, perspectives of what constituted political friendship differed fundamentally.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These multilayered translation processes, moreover, included engaging with the past by consulting ancient concepts of rule and precedents of previous arrangements. The linguistic and cultural mediation of these processes would ultimately determine how centuries later university-trained historians such as Murakami interpreted and retranslated early Tokugawa foreign relations.

The meaning-making processes described here demonstrate the necessity of looking both forward and backward in time when contextualizing the narrative frame of early modern gaikō. Table 3.1 illustrates the genealogy of key historiographical terms. While it is not always possible to resolve how specific terms came into use and how and under which conditions their meaning shifted over time, the list makes it possible to see synergies between scholarship, politics, and translation. The semantic field of gaikō is composed of a variety of allegedly neutral terms, each of which has its own multilayered history with source terms originating in classical Chinese or Latin, respectively. New vocabulary could be interpreted in different ways or established as powerful colligatory frames integrating different elements of information. The table is a selection of often-used Japanese translations (‘term’) used for primary sources in the Spanish ‘original.’ Layers 1–3 illustrate how, once translated, such terms were then retranslated to either new or existing concepts in Japanese and enriched the semantics of the field with different registers.

In the process of meaning-making, allegedly neutral terms convey clear political messages. Qualitative analyses of ideas and ideology have shown how terms could guide political decisions and public opinion. Historical scholarship produced during the age of imperialism is a particularly vibrant field in which to study such tendencies. Translations frequently included derogatory views and subtle downplaying of past historical actors. The Japanese language with its composite writing system, moreover, allowed expression of imperialistic symbolism and emphasis on power differentials through script. When it comes to text production and translation in Japanese, the use of kanji (logographic Chinese characters) and/or kana (Japanese syllabaries) was not innocent. A conscious choice to use kanji or kana could also be politically motivated. The hierarchy between the writing systems shaped ideas about formality. Some historians of early modern Asian–European relations have argued that the use of informal speech and simplified script (i.e., kana) in interpolity correspondence was a way to convey a sense of superiority or feelings of disapproval.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ But such tactics are not limited to the scribes, secretaries, and other diplomatic actors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In many cases, it was the historian of later centuries who translated a certain title or place name in a way that suggested a sense of superiority. Take, for instance, the derogatory label ‘shina’ for China. Toward the end of the Meiji period, the pejorative term shina had largely replaced the long-term practice of referring to the country by using the name of a ruling dynasty such as Tang or Ming or the honorific chūgoku as a literal metaphor for its superiority.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In his editions of the Ikoku nikki, Murakami uses shina, which was considered insulting in China at that time, in the annotations, whereas his original source references speak of tōjin (唐人, literally Tang people), the Great Ming (大明, Dai Min), or the Qing country (清国, Shinkoku).Footnote ¹¹¹

In addition to translatory and conceptual choices, the genres in which Murakami disseminated his work shaped the narrations of early modern gaikō. Source compilations such as the Ikoku nikki shō and his first monograph entitled Nichiran 300nen no shinkō (Three hundred years of friendly relations between Japan and Holland) added to the master narrative of seventeenth-century foreign relations as modern interstate relations resting on the achievements of charismatic men.Footnote ¹¹² Murakami idealized early modern foreign relations by stressing the existence of protocol, a set of diplomatic practices such as audiences at court and letter exchange, and the qualifying function of a limited group of actors of distinguished status.Footnote ¹¹³ Murakami’s implicit focus on the modern state necessitates a conceptual reflection, in line with Quentin Skinner’s reminder that there has never been any “agreed concept to which the word state has answered” (my emphasis).Footnote ¹¹⁴ Indeed, similar conclusions could be reached for the term gaikō. However, while Skinner consequently focused on the context in which the idea that interested him figured in debates, such an approach has its obvious limitations for a concept like early modern gaikō, which was rarely used explicitly in historiographical works. It will be more useful to focus on implicit narratives and the relationship between historical imagination and tropes, as Hayden White proposed. White famously argued that language and linguistic structure predetermine the writing of history.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Elsewhere he criticized how historians subdued by narratives privilege implicit arguments over explicit ones and thus contribute to the image of a semi-scientific discipline.Footnote ¹¹⁶ White’s criticism of implicit narratives directly relates to the issue of untranslatability and is fundamental to addressing the relationship between language and narratives and the question of which tropes were translated and in what way.

Translating and Imagining Objects and Materiality

Meaning-making in academic history was not limited to the positioning, interpretation, and translation of primary sources. While printed books shifted ideas and concepts from one linguistic context to another, the availability of cheaper photo reproduction technology rendered objects into images of early modern foreign relations. Tsuji’s monograph, for instance, featured close to one hundred photocopies, including reproductions of primary sources such as official documents of Japanese exchange with the Ming emperors; Hideyoshi’s letters to Goa, Taiwan, and Manila; and the original sketch of Hasekura Tsunenaga’s ship.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Murakami, too, bought into the logic of seeing is believing and complemented many of his publications with images.Footnote ¹¹⁸ One representative example is Bōekishijō no Hirado, a monograph he published in 1917. The 170-page-long book was a chronological survey in which he explored the history of the foreign trade of the small island of Hirado and ultimately linked it to the Japanese presence in Southeast Asia with concrete examples from the Japanese community in Batavia. The narrative of the book evolves alongside empirical data from Japanese, Portuguese, and Dutch primary sources, which are given ample space in the appendix. In addition, a total of twenty-two images underlined the relevance and dynamism of Euro-Japanese maritime expansion in the seventeenth century.

Influential publications in Japanese foreign relations history would often feature images of ships in a way that integrated the trope of expansion with the concept of foreign relations.Footnote ¹¹⁹ When recreating the historical realities of Tokugawa Japan’s commercial overseas ventures, Tsuji made use of the power of images in shaping narratives. When opening the chapter on the Japanese settlements in Southeast Asia (nan’yō nihonjinmachi), he started with the fate of Japanese merchant Yamada Nagamasa in the old Thai capital of Ayutthaya. To underscore both the significance and frequency of Japanese exchange with Southeast Asian polities, Tsuji would then reproduce an emaki (a painted handscroll with a short text) preserved at Jōmyōji temple (情妙寺).Footnote ¹²⁰ The handscroll shows a ship of the Chaya family of Nagoya, whose members possessed a license for overseas trade (shuinjō) and sailed frequently to Hoi An (Kōchin in Japanese sources).Footnote ¹²¹ As overseas merchants they were thus occasionally bestowed with the typical political duties. In 1612, Chaya Shinrokurō delivered gifts to the king of Kōchin, Nguyễn Hoàng (1525–1613), while the family also controlled the local Japanese community at its alleged location along the Thu Bon River in Hoi An.Footnote ¹²² The 1941 publication Nanshin senkushatachi (The pioneers of the southern expansion) featured an image of a shuinsen, a licensed Japanese merchant vessel (most likely a ship known as the Aragi-sen 荒木船) on the title page.Footnote ¹²³ Since the Taishō period, the image of the shuinsen could be seen in various contexts, for instance, on a poster of the Osaka steamboat lines.Footnote ¹²⁴ Translated across genres, the shuinsen came to represent the mercantile spirit of Japanese men and their movement across time and space. That said, images of ships may have evoked namban nationalism even before they were openly used as propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ¹²⁵

Murakami, too, used ocean-going ships and naval symbolism to emphasize Japan’s maritime connections.Footnote ¹²⁶ One peculiar example was a statue of Erasmus of Rotterdam from 1598. Murakami identified this wooden statue as the figurehead of the Liefde, the first Dutch vessel to reach Murakami’s native province of Bungo, in 1600. Proving his resourcefulness as a researcher, Murakami was able to correct a previous misinterpretation of the statue that became known as kateki sama in Japanese. Initially believed to be an early example of a Japanese depiction of Christ, which would receive major international attention in the Vatican’s exhibition of world religions in 1924, Murakami could show that the statue was in fact of the Dutch humanist Erasmus. In 1926, he published the results of his research in both the Japanese Journal for Archeology and the Shigaku zasshi emphasizing the statue’s meaning for historical relations between Japan and the Netherlands.Footnote ¹²⁷ While this piece of work has been ignored by historians of Japan, his meticulous efforts gained Murakami recognition among archeologists and art historians.Footnote ¹²⁸

The visual repertoire of Murakami’s entire body of scholarship can be divided into two categories. Category 1 includes the visual representation of historical actors, objects, and events he describes. Murakami’s edition of Vizcaíno and Vivero’s records of Japan, for instance, included a reprint of the response of the Spanish Council of the Indies, a letter to the king of Spain, an image of Philip III, one of Tokugawa Hidetada, a photo of a statue of Date Masamune, and a photo of a statue of Hasekura Tsunenaga.Footnote ¹²⁹ His monograph on Philippine–Japanese relations included a portrait of Hasekura held at the library in Rome and a photo of the building of the Archivo General de Indias.Footnote ¹³⁰ Category 2 relates to reprinted historical evidence as provided by the written archive. Visual evidence of archival sources added to the professional capital of the historian as an author. Murakami’s monograph on Japanese–Dutch relations published in 1915, for instance, featured an image of a manuscript written in an Indigenous Taiwanese language.Footnote ¹³¹ At first glance, the reproduced document described as a ‘Sinkan manuscript’ appears randomly included as it had little bearing on the Japanese–Dutch rivalry over Taiwan in the 1620s. Yet, Murakami included the Taiwanese document – on which I will elaborate in Chapter 6 – in the spirit of komonjo and the ultimate authenticity of the early modern diplomatic archive. It is also representative for the way he presented images: Murakami rarely commented on what the images of objects, sources, or paintings portrayed, nor did he provide details on their provenance, let alone on the historicity of the material.

Images of archival sources, ocean-going ships, and lavish gifts complemented the textual archive and contributed to shaping what Japanese readers came to see as integral parts of diplomatic history. Selected objects helped to emphasize the importance of certain actors and events in the processes that shaped foreign relations and maritime expansion.Footnote ¹³² That way, certain material components of the early modern diplomatic protocol, such as seals, paper, and rare gifts, fulfilled their purpose of building trust twice: first during the actual diplomatic encounter and later as part of historiographical scholarship in source compilations such as the Ikoku nikki shō, which included inventories of diplomatic gifts.Footnote ¹³³ Such was also the case with Vizcaíno’s embassy in 1611–13. While the Spanish imperial bureaucracy recorded gift exchange for accounting purposes, Japanese clerks elaborated on the quantity and quality of gifts in their ceremonial documentation.Footnote ¹³⁴ Murakami studied both sources and reproduced an inventory of gifts bestowed on Ieyasu and Hidetada by Vizcaíno, including Spanish woolen textiles, drinking goblets made of Venetian glass, a portrait of Philip III, wine from Spain, two falconry sets, saddles, and a table clock.Footnote ¹³⁵

Each item on the list was of both monetary and symbolic value at the time, yet only the table clock’s biography stretches into the twenty-first century. It is a fascinating example of an object that helped to make Tokugawa foreign relations history matter across the centuries and as such deserves to be studied closely. Known today as ‘Ieyasu’s Spanish clock,’ the object enjoyed a life beyond the paper trail of diplomatic rituals and has become a token of multilayered historiography of early modern Japanese foreign relations. King Philip III and his councilors chose the clock, a rare masterpiece of the Madrid-based Flemish clockmaker Hans de Valx from 1581, to express their gratitude for the bakufu’s support for the survivors of a capsized Spanish trading galleon. The ‘San Francisco’ was stranded in Onjuku in 1609. In contrast to what happened with earlier Spanish shipwrecks in Japan, the freight remained untouched and the crew, including Vivero, was treated hospitably.Footnote ¹³⁶ When Vizcaíno delivered the gifts at Ieyasu’s court in Sunpu in 1611, Japanese scribes recorded the reception of the clock with the deferential characters “ken zuru” (献ずる) and “tatematsuru” (奉る).Footnote ¹³⁷ Those Japanese terms frame the Spanish delegation as an inferior party offering tribute to a superior power in reverence, resembling the practices of Korean and Ryūkyūan delegations to Japan during the seventeenth century.

After Ieyasu’s death in 1616, the clock, which was never used for its intended purpose of measuring time,Footnote ¹³⁸ was taken to the Kunōzan Tōshō-gū, a Shintō shrine in Sunpu. The shrine was specifically built for worshiping the departed first Tokugawa shogun before his grave was relocated to a more splendid Tōshō-gū in Nikkō, which would turn into the shogunate’s most important pilgrimage site.Footnote ¹³⁹ Stored away at the original Tōshō-gū in present-day Shizuoka, the gift from Spain was soon neglected and forgotten until the early 1900s, when the young historian Igi Hisaichi (1883–1970) encountered the clock while researching the history of the shrine. One of the things that puzzled Igi was the inscription in Roman letters.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ After copying the text, he consulted Murakami Naojirō, who translated the inscription as ‘Hans de Evalo me fecit en Madrid.’ Murakami understood immediately that this was the clock mentioned in the Spanish sources he had worked with. Thanks to Igi’s discovery, Murakami was now able to integrate the object into the historiographical Japanese corpus of the Dai nihon shiryō.Footnote ¹⁴¹

After having been added to the authoritative Dai nihon shiryō, the clock gradually became interpreted as evidence for peaceful diplomatic exchange between Spain and Japan in the early 1600s.Footnote ¹⁴² Portraying the clock as a gift delivered by an envoy (大使の進物, taishi no shinmotsu),Footnote ¹⁴³ Murakami overwrote its possible rendering as a tribute. In contrast to seventeenth-century records’ language of vertical foreign relations, Murakami’s scholarship promoted an image of friendly relations between two rulers recognizing each other as equals. This alternative interpretation was a welcome point of departure for cultural events, including high-ranking Japanese and Spanish representatives in the 1950s supported by the Japanese National Broadcasting (NHK) before the clock’s classification as a Japanese cultural heritage object (国宝, kokuhō) in 1979. Being one of only two surviving mechanical wind-up clocks that once belonged to King Philip II, ‘Ieyasu’s clock’ gradually became proof of early Tokugawa Japan’s cosmopolitanism. Between 2009 and 2014, the clock fulfilled a crucial symbolic function as testimonial for 400 years of friendly relations between Spain and Japan, while the Tōshō-gū museum’s current website sees the clock as a proof for Ieyasu’s “peaceful foreign relations” (heiwa gaikō).Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Being written into different versions of diplomatic history, the clock represents the dynamic nature of narratives surrounding objects and historical memory.

Concluding Remarks

This chapter aimed to lay out narratives of early modern gaikō as the product of complex translations and renderings. Focusing on knowledge production processes during the defining years of the Japanese Empire, I have sketched Murakami’s engagement in academic history, politics, and education. I have furthermore demonstrated how source compilations actively constructed tropes through the translated archive of foreign relations. Translation processes across time shaped the notion of an outward-looking Tokugawa regime engaging in dynamic exchange with the European powers and with polities in Southeast Asia. The identification of gaikō monjo as authoritative historical sources played an essential role in this process. Murakami and his colleagues instituted this historiographical genre in response to European scientific source criticism, the legacy of neo-Confucian traditions of deep reading, and an increasing political demand for reliable references. Yet the scholarly legacy of gaikō monjo is twofold: an undoubtedly important historiographical achievement on the one hand, it served a gatekeeping function in the study of history, on the other. Gaikō monjo thus stands for a recurring trend of exclusiveness – by no means an isolated phenomenon in the history of foreign relations or the periods studied in this book – that gave professional historians, and in particular Tōdai historians among them, better access to what were considered relevant sources.

The notion of untranslatability had three different functions in this chapter. First, it has demonstrated the constant linguistic challenges faced by historians working with multilingual sources. I have shown that the translation of gaikō to foreign relations or diplomacy is insufficient and at times even misleading; the risk for misconceptions increases once we enter the even-more-contested territory of the ‘early modern,’ itself a term with a debated translatory history. Second, untranslatability helped to make sense of the tension between the impact of gaikō as a theme of universal importance and the vagueness of the empirical data upon which meta-narratives are built. Third, it has illustrated the limits of interpreting certain aspects of knowledge production and the entangled thought processes behind translatory actions. Yet, this untranslatability does not render reflexive efforts worthless as they are an important reminder of the need to decolonize and open both the physical and the digital archive. One concrete way of doing so is providing transparency in each step of the research process. For historians this requires broadening their awareness of what archives are and which institutions and processes shaped them. The archive as agent in the various processes that shaped the knowledge of early modern diplomacy will be at the center of Chapter 4.