Professor Murakami Naojirō, the protagonist of this book, is a historian remembered at the high-end cemetery Kamakura Reien. In 2012, the content creators of a Japanese tourist blog added his final resting place to a list of graves of famous people (“grave of celebrity”).Footnote ¹ Kamakura Reien and the searchable internet are two admittedly very different archives that contribute to the commemoration of an exceptional scholar, whose passing transformed him from a teacher (sensei) to a pioneer (senkakusha) of Christian Studies.

A few months after Murakami’s passing in 1967 at the age of ninety-eight, a memorial conference was held at the Christian Studies Association in Tokyo. This event was one of the rare occasions for peeking into Murakami’s private life: His daughters Takeuchi Taeko and Koizumi Ayaka conveyed their memory of a loving father who took his children to the Christmas celebrations at Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, told them stories from Sindbad’s journeys and Arabian Nights, and sang them English lullabies.Footnote ² They also recalled their father’s characteristic ‘foreign’ habits, such as frequently visiting the cinema, and his fomenting of friendly relations with younger scholars and research assistants. Takeuchi revealed that while still prolific at an advanced age, her father used to seek her and her daughter’s help with manuscript typewriting and copyediting. For these tasks he would pay them an appropriate allowance. This small detail is illuminating for two reasons: first, it provides context to the puzzling question as to how he managed to be so prolific in an analog age, and second, it sheds light on Murakami’s silence: He never acknowledged any assistance from subordinates (be they students or family members) in his publications. This omission is also relevant to remember when engaging with Murakami’s translations that lack any mention of the many linguistic experts that assisted him in translating European and Chinese-language documents to Japanese. He consistently silenced them in the process of creating historiographical knowledge.

This chapter will represent Murakami Naojirō’s life in a chronological fashion. However, occasional digressions are necessary to emphasize the entangled nature of his life and work as a translator historian and scholar diplomat. As to my knowledge Murakami left neither a diary nor any personal letters and few personal testimonies or writings, I have turned to a variety of other narratives and memories to develop a comprehensive understanding of the person behind the scholar. Yet, I also want to acknowledge that my portrayal of Murakami is based on a study of his professional not his private life. Murakami’s voice and opinions can be traced in the prologues, comments, and annotations of his publications, and more generally in his actions in the classroom and on public stages.Footnote ³ He left many clues as to how to best reconstruct the persona of an elite Japanese academic historian involved in geopolitics and global knowledge circulation. Hagiographic accounts by former students portray him as an ideal intellectual: approachable, restrained, dedicated, and serious.Footnote ⁴ Takeuchi Taeko and Koizumi Ayaka’s remarks on their father’s frequent struggle with translations paint a different picture, one that seems to contradict the self-confident image readers will glean from Murakami’s writings. Combined with the entangled biography approach and a critical awareness informed by subaltern, decolonial, gender, and Indigenous studies introduced above, this chapter reads all available accounts along and against the grain.

Figure 2.1 Portrayal of Murakami Naojirō as director and professor of Tokyo Gaidai and compiler of the Historiographical Institute.

Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons, CC BY-SA, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murakami_Naojir%C5%8D#/media/Datei:Mr._Naojiro_Murakami,_director_and_professor_of_the_Tokyo_School_of_Foreign_Languages,_and_compiler_of_the_Institute_of_Historical_Compilation.jpg.

Biographical Contingencies and Educational Credentials

Murakami Naojirō was the descendant of a family of domanial military retainers (藩士, hanshi) in Kuzu-gun, Bungo Province (豊後玖珠郡) in present-day Ōita prefecture. He was born in the epoch-making year of 1868, at the tail end of bakumatsu (1853–67, the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate), only a few months before the beginning of the Meiji era and the restoration process under Emperor Mutsuhito, when Japanese people ultimately broke with the older system of bureaucratic bakufu rule based on a neo-Confucian state ideology. Such in-betweenness, with progressiveness on one side and tradition and continuity on the other, would shape Murakami’s life.Footnote ⁵ With his upper-class family heritage came socioeconomic privileges. There was also the geography of Bungo, which had been open to influences from abroad since the sixteenth century, when the presiding Ōtomo clan of Bungo collaborated with Iberian and Chinese merchants and Catholic missionaries.Footnote ⁶ It thus stands to question whether Murakami was intellectually stimulated by the past global connections and polyglot nature of his hometown, including the presence of Jesuits in the second half of the sixteenth century and the comparatively large number of Bungo-born interpreters and intellectuals.Footnote ⁷ Another question of interest concerns his relationship with fellow Kyushu intellectuals who pursued political, academic, and publishing careers in Tokyo around the turn of the nineteenth century.

In 1878 (Meiji 11), Murakami Naojirō entered Dōshisha English School (京都同志社英学校) in Kyoto, a Christian elite private school, only five years after the ban on Christianity had been revoked in 1873. Another future celebrity of Kyushu, the journalist and publisher Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957) from the neighboring Higo Province (today’s Kumamoto prefecture), also studied English at Dōshisha.Footnote ⁸ During his six years at the Puritan-run school, Murakami developed an excellent command of English on which he would base his future international career.Footnote ⁹ He moreover received a solid education in the history, values, and traditions of Anglo-American Protestantism. After graduating from Dōshisha, he moved from western Japan to the rapidly changing capital in the east. In 1887, he entered the newly established First Higher School in Tokyo. The First Higher School was founded for the explicit purpose of building up a modern state, a spirit that unquestionably shaped its graduates who would end up in a wide range of influential posts in the government, the financial sector, and the sciences.Footnote ¹⁰

Figure 2.2 Students of Dōshisha English School (同志社) in Kyoto in 1881 (Meiji 14).

Source: Courtesy of Dōshisha Archive, Dōshisha zai gakusei, Meiji 14. Special thanks to Matsui Hiroe.

Figure 2.3 Graduation certificate of Murakami Naojirō from Imperial University dated Meiji 28 (1895), 10 July.

The certificate shows that Murakami took language classes in English, Portuguese, and German alongside courses in Japanese history, ancient history, sociology, pedagogy, religion and philosophy.

Source: Courtesy of Ōita Prefectural Archives, 96-017-0001 Murakami Naojirō kankei shiryō.

The First Higher School was built at the site of what is today the main campus of Tokyo University, in Hongo district (present-day Bunkyō-ku) in the midst of a rapidly expanding educational landscape. In 1890, Murakami enrolled in the history program at the Faculty of Letters (bungaku-bu, est. 1877) at the neighboring Tokyo Imperial University. History (shigaku) was one of its four founding subjects alongside philosophy, political science, and Japanese literature.Footnote ¹¹ For a decade, Murakami’s life centered in Hongo, where the legacies of the military bakuhan (meaning the Tokugawa regime rooted in shogunal and domanial bureaucracy) as represented by the surviving grand residences of the shogun’s retainers and the modernizing spirit of the Meiji state coexisted. Living in close vicinity to the Old Town (shita machi) of Ueno, he witnessed industrial and commercial development and a rapid population growth. The urban landscape full of electric wires, street cars, humming telegraphs, and proliferating mass culture and entertainment sites must have felt exciting for the students from the countryside but, at the same time, challenging for all senses, undeniably affecting intellectual and personal lives.Footnote ¹² Much of the built environment of Tokyo familiar to the young Murakami would eventually be destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

During the first decade in fin-de-siècle Tokyo, Murakami sought intellectual inspiration from scholars of cosmopolitan backgrounds. All of these intellectuals were male, because they either belonged to the Japanese patriarchal educated elite or the foreign diplomatic corps. In his first year at Tōdai, Murakami studied with Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827–1910) and Hoshino Hisashi (1839–1917), the cofounders of the influential source collection and Japanese historiography project, the Dai nihon shiryō.Footnote ¹³ Shigeno’s biography is closely linked to the history of Japanese foreign relations. Shigeno was born into a samurai family in Satsuma, well versed in Chinese, and had served as an advisor to the Shimazu daimyō (powerful lords during the Tokugawa period). In that role, he facilitated the diplomatic negotiations between the Shimazu and Britain after the bombardment of Kagoshima, otherwise known as the Anglo-Satsuma War (August 15–17, 1863). In 1870, two years after the abolishment of the bakufu, Shigeno made a quintessential contribution to the modernizing Meiji state when he translated an abridged Japanese version of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law (1836), known as bankoku kōhō, however not from the English original but from Chinese.Footnote ¹⁴ The following year he moved to Tokyo, and from 1875 onwards he was affiliated with the Office of Historiography. In 1878, Shigeno reformed the discipline of history by striving to replace Chinese-style history-writing with recent historiographical and philosophical methods from Europe. His translation of George G. Zerffi’s The Science of History (1879) was fundamental in shaping his approach.Footnote ¹⁵

A decade later, when Murakami entered Tōdai in 1890, the study of history had been significantly transformed by Euro-American trends. The main scholar behind the methodological transformation was the German historian Ludwig Riess, who had been recruited by the Meiji government in 1887 to assist in addressing the publicly proclaimed need to study the Japanese past and to write the history of a modern nation.Footnote ¹⁶ As a hired foreign government advisor (o-yatoi gaikokujinFootnote ¹⁷), Riess helped establish the Japanese History Division at Tōdai, which opened on June 27, 1889.Footnote ¹⁸ On November 1, 1889, Shigeno and Riess cofounded the Society of History (Shigakkai), and in 1892 they launched a new academic journal, the Shigaku zasshi (史学雑誌 Historical Journal). Both the department and the journal, which remain influential to this day, soon became essential for academic history. The Shigaku zasshi would become the most important outlet for Murakami’s research. His first out of a total of eleven contributions appeared in 1896, the last in 1950.Footnote ¹⁹

The last decade of the nineteenth century was an eventful one for the discipline of history at Tōdai: In 1892, a renowned historian, who was a member of the Iwakura Mission (1871–3) to the United States, Europe, Singapore, and China, was dismissed from his university post for claiming that the Japanese imperial family was human and had Korean ancestry, rather than an Indigenous background. The incident demonstrated that neither scholarship nor thoughts were free in the authoritarian Meiji regime.Footnote ²⁰ In addition, controversies between academic and public historians who became attracted to the popular Minyūsha movement sparked further tension. The Minyūsha (‘People’s Friend Society’) received their name from the publishing company established by Tokutomi Sohō in 1887, which printed Japan’s first news magazine and other formats that promoted Japan’s path into modernization and cultural renewal for which it commonly found references in Europe and the United States. The Minyūsha promoted democracy and civil participation in political life and influenced the intellectual formation of historians in Japan in the 1890s.

As a student, Murakami followed Riess, who disseminated the teachings of the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). In Riess’s lectures on the methodology of history and in Riess’s hands-on seminar on documents from the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, Murakami developed techniques for decoding and interpreting the past. Drafting very detailed notes on Riess’s teachings in English, Murakami mastered the craft of source criticism.Footnote ²¹ Riess’s unpublished manuscript, ‘Methodology of History,’ marks the beginning of his engagement with a Japanese way of ‘doing’ history, a blend of the evidence-based method imported from Germany and the Sino-Japanese positivistic study of manuscripts, known as kōshōgaku.Footnote ²² Together with fellow students, including Kuroita Katsumi and Tsuji Zennosuke, Murakami experimented with this transnational, cross-disciplinary coproduction, in which scientific history-writing based on the objectivity of sources and the impartiality of historians (as one of the key virtues of a historian according to the Rankean or German model) was informed by modern state archives.Footnote ²³ In Chapter 3 on the relationship between editing practices and foreign relations history, I will discuss the role of the historical archive as both powerful institution and metaphysical sacred space in which to discover original documents for an authentic history of Japanese foreign relations.

Ludwig Riess was particularly instrumental in Murakami’s empirical approach, contributing to his Eurocentric interpretation of world history and fostering his fascination with foreign relations. In contrast to other foreign observers in the 1890s who considered students from Murakami’s native Kyushu with its surviving bushi (warrior or samurai) traditions as particularly conservative,Footnote ²⁴ Riess saw Murakami’s potential for researching new dimensions of the nation’s forgotten pasts. Recognizing their common interest in the relations between Japan and the Europeans in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, he stimulated Murakami’s historiographical curiosity about the topic. He introduced Murakami to handpicked documents from the archives in the Hague, London, and Rome, including material related to Japanese history.Footnote ²⁵ Murakami’s frequent references to Riess suggest that he took Riess’s instructions seriously. Before long, Murakami became a committed writer of what actually happened (i.e., “wie es eigentlich gewesen” in a Rankean sense) in terms of foreign relations during the early Tokugawa period.Footnote ²⁶

Mesmerized by Riess’s source acquisition prowess in Europe, which shed a rather different light on seventeenth-century Japan, while aware of the pitfalls of Riess’s limited command of foreign languages, above all his ignorance of Japanese, Murakami recognized the power of language for the field of history. He took private language lessons in German and Spanish and invested in his reading and translating competence in Chinese, Dutch, French, and Portuguese. In May 1896, the short-lived Colonial Administration Department (拓殖務省, takushoku mushō, 1896–7)Footnote ²⁷ hired Murakami to collect material related to seventeenth-century Hirado-born ‘pirate’ (kaizoku) Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功, Tei Seikō in Japanese, 1624–1662).Footnote ²⁸ Murakami took leave from his studies in 1897 to carry out part-time historiographical work as a traveling graduate student. In April 1898, he joined the teacher education academy in Kanda as a part-time lecturer in European history and German language.Footnote ²⁹ Shortly afterward, an opportunity to invest even further in his profile as a historian with European language expertise arose: He was selected by the Ministry of Education for a three-year grant to study the languages, geography, and history of the South Seas (南洋語, nan’yōgo). In September 1899 he boarded a ship in Yokohama bound for Europe.Footnote ³⁰

In the summer of 1900, two years after the Philippine Revolution and the Spanish–American War, Bungakushi Murakami traveled from the Netherlands to Spain, where he visited the national archive in Simancas (Archivo General de Simancas),Footnote ³¹ the library collections in Madrid, and the archive of the Indies (Archivo General de Indias). The Spanish archives must have made an enormous impression on Murakami: located in a medieval, fortified castle, Simancas had been founded as an official archive in 1540, while the Archivo General de Indias in Seville – a colonial archive par excellence – occupied a renaissance palace (Casa de Lonja de Mercaderes, a former stock exchange). The Spanish government treated the records of its past respectfully, storing them safely in historical buildings that themselves were constant reminders of a ‘glorious’ past.Footnote ³² During his nine months in Spain, Murakami witnessed the countrywide commotion caused by the loss of its last non-African colonies in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War and the ratification of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. During the political and economic crises of the fin de siècle, when Spain’s urban population openly lamented the disaster of 1898, Murakami developed a growing interest in the country’s colonial past and the ‘great men’ behind Spain’s oceanic expansion.

As a Japanese intellectual, Murakami was a rare acquaintance in the European institutions he visited. Mimicking archival research practices while being othered by his surroundings, Murakami spent weeks getting archivists and librarians (Derrida’s archons) to search the remotest corners of their institutions. In Spain, as well as in the National Archives in the Hague, the Barberini Library in Rome, the Vatican Library, and the Biblioteca del Reale Archivo del Stato in Venice, he endlessly untied bundles to scan the content of often illegible manuscripts destroyed by ravenous insects or aggressive ink and to “breathe in their dust.”Footnote ³³ When he found material about Japan’s past, he meticulously copied it. Murakami regularly sent archival reports from Europe to the authoritative Shigaku zasshi, whose editors published short accounts of the manuscripts he discovered in the Hague, Simancas, and Venice.Footnote ³⁴ In this way, he showcased his expertise as a translator historian and an envoy of past Japanese foreign relations. In other words, he positioned himself as a scholar diplomat.

The ‘language studies in Europe’ (留学, ryūgaku), as Murakami referred to his three-year-long research stay, not only defined his career but also shaped him as a historian. The intimate and multisensual experience of decoding the words of the historical actors in the search for the lost international past of Japan meant dealing with the history of loss, to use Antoinette Burton’s term.Footnote ³⁵ Any new discovery, therefore, produced deep satisfaction.Footnote ³⁶ The process was necessitated by the destruction of much of the Japanese source material on Tokugawa Japan’s foreign relations and the limited interest of previous generations in contacts with the outside world. Dealing with loss precipitated an obsessive search for beginnings, described as feverish symptoms by Jacques Derrida. Even more than for origins, Murakami cared for originals. Like many other Japanese historians of his time, Murakami believed that the originality of foreign relations documents proved the official character of diplomatic exchange processes. How such views motivated arguments about the quality of foreign relations will be discussed in Chapter 3.

When Murakami returned to Japan in December 1902, he brought not only historiographical material but also social capital gained at leading European institutions that would set him apart from many of his colleagues at the Historiographical Institute.Footnote ³⁷ While Murakami’s vast contributions to prestigious primary source compilation projects, such as the Dai nihon shiryō and Dai nihon komonjo (Old documents of Japan), are evidence of both his efforts and his success in locating things inside and outside of European archives, one thing got lost in the multi-stage metaphysical process of transcription, translation, and editing: his extraordinary talent for reproducing the handwriting and ornament style of the early modern originals. Transcriptions and files of copies made in Europe are kept at the Historiographical Institute. They illustrate Murakami’s outstanding talent for copying the exact handwriting of seventeenth-century scribes in their offices or ship cabins and demonstrate his passion for peculiar details.Footnote ³⁸ This combination of talent and passion would also shape much of his future career.

Empowered by knowledge about European archival collections and their hidden gems of Japanese history, Murakami began to work as a part-time ‘historiographical officer’ (my translation for shiryō hensankan, sometimes translated as ‘compiler’) at the Historiographical Institute only weeks after his return to Tokyo. He edited manuscripts for the Dai nihon shiryō, a government-sponsored project in the spirit of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (initiated in 1819 and introduced to Japanese students by Riess), which began in 1901 and is currently available in 417 volumes. The Dai nihon shiryō includes written sources from the Heian period (794–1085) in the ninth century until the final years of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868).Footnote ³⁹ The enormous project has been interpreted as closely linked to older practices of source-oriented study of texts such as kōshōgaku.Footnote ⁴⁰ While Murakami never belonged to the influential group of permanently employed historiographical officers (such as his fellow students Kuroita or Tsuji), he would find other platforms to disseminate his source-based knowledge of Japan’s early modern history.

Teacher and Educator

In the years coinciding with the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) and the subsequent changes in Japan’s international standing, Murakami would combine the teaching of early modern Japanese gaikōshi (history of foreign relations) with paleography. At Tōdai he taught the main course in Japanese history (国史第一) and delivered lectures on the history of early modern Japanese foreign relations (近世日本の海外交通史, Kinsei nihon no kaigai kōtsūshi) using materials he had collected and transcribed in various European archives and libraries.Footnote ⁴¹ He did all this without having finished his doctorate. Teaching as an adjunct professor, he advocated the scientific method as the key for objectivity. Applying analytical and critical methods like his contemporaries in the natural sciences, Murakami emphasized that the purpose of history was to construct the spirit of the nation.Footnote ⁴² According to one of his students and later colleagues at the Historiographical Institute, Igi Hisaichi (伊木寿, 1883–1970), one of the primary objectives of Murakami’s course syllabus was reading foreign-language sources.Footnote ⁴³ In the summer of 1906, he went abroad again. This time, a government-sponsored source-collecting mission took Murakami to Macau and the Philippines. For the Philippines he received an additional task from the Ministry of Education, which instructed Murakami to investigate the state of education in Manila. By that time, Murakami had become part of a heterogeneous group of Meiji Japanese intellectuals who would not only travel to collect information useful for modernizing the nation but also had the explicit task to explore possibilities to expand Japan’s influence in Asia.Footnote ⁴⁴ As his overlapping tasks were sponsored by the state, bias was inevitable.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Spanish language and the history of the Spanish colonial presence in Asia and the Pacific were of particular interest to Japanese empire builders. The changing geopolitical situation in the Pacific, where US imperialism gradually replaced the remains of a weakened Spanish Empire, met growing interest in foreign affairs circles in Japan and various stakeholders gazed toward Micronesia while preparing to take over former Spanish possessions.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hence, the knowledge and sources that Murakami gathered were considered useful by imperial strategists. His increasing familiarity with Spanish documents regarding colonial administration and his time in Spain established Murakami as an indispensable expert on all matters concerning Spain and the Spanish language.

Shortly after returning from Manila, he accepted a post as Spanish teacher at the renowned Tokyo Foreign Language Academy (f. in 1873, hereafter TUFS) in 1908. In 1897, TUFS had become the first institution in Japan to launch a Spanish-language program; a degree in Spanish language and history followed in 1902. Murakami had already been offered a post there in 1900, which he had declined in favor of archival work in Europe.Footnote ⁴⁷ Shortly after joining as an instructor for Spanish, he became the president of the Tokyo Foreign Language Academy.Footnote ⁴⁸ This clearly marks a disciplinary shift in Murakami’s career, from history to language education and university politics. It was not his continuous historiographical work but rather his foreign-language skills that gained him a leadership position. Personally, the decision to prioritize language education over historical research may have been economically motivated as Murakami’s family was steadily growing, with the last of his five children being born during this period. While Murakami’s career as an educator, language teacher, and translator is often missing in his scholarly biography, it was what first brought him recognition beyond the small elitist circle of academic historians.Footnote ⁴⁹ His involvement with university politics, moreover, posed a challenge to his high standards of research and teaching. The impact of one decade at TUFS is hard to measure, but one token of appreciation speaks volumes: In 1913, the German Empire honored Murakami together with two other professors of TUFS with an official award.Footnote ⁵⁰

Murakami changed the curriculum for the language training at both the Teacher Education School and the Foreign Language Academy. Under his administration at TUFS, degrees in six ‘Western’ languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian) and six ‘Eastern’ languages (Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, and Thai) were established.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1912, he promoted foreign-language training as key to a successful trade expansion while elaborating on ways to improve language education. To him, foreign languages were necessary to understanding what was happening in the world. Hence, he stressed the communicational value of languages. Yet, foreign-language education was not only about teaching but also had a utilitarian aspect. The Language Academy increasingly took on the task to prepare future Japanese entrepreneurs, capitalists, and colonial administrators for commercial expansion in East and Southeast Asia. Special focus was placed on rubber and hemp, essentially colonial commodities of places like the Philippines, where Japanese entrepreneurs had long been invested. This is where Murakami’s role at TUFS gets complicated: In his role as president of the language academy, he agreed to open two new departments, one for foreign trade and one for colonization. He did so without consulting with the teachers or students, who feared that the academy would be turned into a tool for colonial demands in Asia and the Pacific.Footnote ⁵² As a result, angry protesters objected the proposed renaming of the academy as School for Trade and Colonial Languages (貿易殖民語学校) and soon began to mistrust Murakami.Footnote ⁵³ When a group of professors handed him a request to resign, Murakami refused on grounds of being a state official in the service of the Ministry of Education.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ultimately, the academy did not change its name, but Murakami had lost the trust of both colleagues and students, who continued to protest and repeatedly request Murakami to resign from his role as president in 1918.Footnote ⁵⁵

After the events of 1918, Murakami swopped position with the president of the National Music Academy (Tokyo Music School) in Ueno. This merely symbolic post would give him time to focus on history again. He eventually obtained his doctoral degree in 1921 with a dissertation exploring the Japanese efforts to open trade with Mexico in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁵⁶ He moreover returned to his part-time work as a historiographical officer and taught a class in tōzai kōtsūshi (東西交通史, history of communication between the East and the West). Yoshimura Shigeki, one of the only two students in the class, remembered the enormous effort they put into learning the various languages necessary to read and work with European sources.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is fair to say that Murakami remained a public figure who employed language and education for his agendas as a historian.

The 1920s were also the time when Murakami’s international recognition increased through conference travel and other public appearances in official roles, for instance, as a delegate to the Pan-Pacific Conference on Education in Honolulu. That said, while the years at the Music Academy were prolific ones for Murakami, his leadership was not without friction, and he once again fell in disgrace. By the end of his term in 1927, various newspapers reported that the school board had asked Murakami to resign as principal. The Japanese English newspaper of Hawai’i quoted Murakami as saying that he was not aware of any reason why he should give up his position. The article also claimed that he was unpopular among the students.Footnote ⁵⁸ While it may seem strange that the career of a Japanese scholar would become a news item of interest to the Japanese American diaspora, it shows Murakami’s impact beyond scholarly circles and how closely his career was intertwined with imperial Japanese foreign affairs.

Public Intellectual and Diplomat Historian

Murakami’s public recognition dates to the early 1900s. After his return from Europe in 1902, a tacit collaboration emerged between academic historians like Murakami, national newspapers like the Asahi Shinbun, and the imperial government. As a result, elite scholarship and popular media became reciprocal forces in the production of knowledge for the empire. In 1906, the Asahi Shinbun announced Murakami’s research trip to Macau and Manila and emphasized the role of the Ministry of Education as the sponsor.Footnote ⁵⁹ The newspaper report underscores that the research of academic historians was considered to be of nationwide interest. From the imperial regime’s perspective, Murakami’s task of investigating past relations with the US-occupied Philippines was linked intrinsically to the need to understand the Pan-Asian present and to control its future under Japanese stewardship.Footnote ⁶⁰ That the Ministry of Education ordered information on the educational situation in Manila illustrates the interdependence of scholarship and imperialism. This trend, which has been referred to as scientific colonialism, will be explored throughout this book. For Murakami, who readily accepted the appointment, the task conveyed responsibility and signified official acknowledgment. Being sent as shiryō hensankan (historiographical officerFootnote ⁶¹) meant this appointment was part research task, part short-term diplomatic post. Having credentials in the form of a stamped official letter transformed an archival historian getting by with poorly paid part-time academic jobs into an official representative and diplomatic persona and thus provided him with a different type of cultural capital.

Murakami’s work for state institutions would soon provide him with additional diplomatic tasks.Footnote ⁶² In April 1909, the translation office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruited him as a translator of diplomatic documents.Footnote ⁶³ In July of the same year, he became involved with a diplomatic delegation from Russia in his function as president of the Foreign Languages Academy. He was present at the reception for the Russian visitors with a grandson of the Meiji tennō, later accompanying them on a leisurely walk through Tokyo’s Ueno Park.Footnote ⁶⁴ Attending such bilateral events offered him insights into various diplomatic protocols and the social and cultural dimensions of foreign relations.Footnote ⁶⁵ Murakami’s versatility of skills increased his media credibility, and he would regularly be approached by both journalists and politicians seeking information on Japan’s former relations with the Europeans in Southeast Asia, or advice on questions of diplomatic precedence.

Another indicator of Murakami’s standing as a public intellectual was that large newspapers such as the Asahi Shinbun would market his scholarly work and, at important occasions, even commission him to write for the newspaper. One such incidence was the visit of the British heir of the throne in Japan in 1922.Footnote ⁶⁶ The release in 1911 of what was to become his greatest contribution to diplomatic history, the printed transcription of the Ikoku nikki shō, for example, was duly announced and praised as a reference for those wishing to find out more about past relations with the West. The printers adorned the advertisement with explicit vocabulary used in foreign affairs, such as “foreign merchants visiting Edo and Sunpu” and “attached diplomatic manuscripts (gaikō monjo).”Footnote ⁶⁷ Another example was the publication of his monograph on seventeenth-century international trade in Hirado in 1917.Footnote ⁶⁸ From that point forward, the Japanese media reported on the personal or more trivial aspects of his life, such as his participation in the congress of English teachers, his suffering from a disease in 1921, his 1923 car accident, and his return to the Kyōiku kaigi (Educational Board meeting) straight from Honolulu after attending the Pan-Pacific Conference on Education in 1927.Footnote ⁶⁹ During the 1918 controversy about renaming TUFS, the Asahi Shinbun had turned on him, criticizing his “problematic” behavior.Footnote ⁷⁰

Murakami also appeared in foreign newspapers. As early as in 1901, the London-based Homeward Mail reported that “Dr. Murakami” had been commissioned two years previously by the Japanese government “to search in Europe for evidence of the relations between Japan and the European Powers before the former country was closed to foreigners.”Footnote ⁷¹ This occasional international media coverage left an imprint off the shores of Japan and speaks of his influence and the importance of his tasks. Outside Japan, Murakami mostly received attention through the dissemination of his work, but in some cases also through his personal acquaintances, for instance, with Edward Maude Thompson, the first paleographer, founding member of the New Palaeographical Society in England, and principal librarian of the British Museum from 1888 until 1909.Footnote ⁷² In 1909, the authors of the notoriously biased and mistranslated fifty-five-volume The Philippine Islands, an edited source compilation sponsored by the US government, included Murakami, then affiliated with the Imperial University in Tokyo, in their acknowledgments.Footnote ⁷³ In 1915, he personally met one of the editors, James A. Robertson, at the Panama Pacific Historical Congress in San Francisco. Murakami had been sent by his government as an official Japanese representative and spokesperson.Footnote ⁷⁴ In his speech he stressed the historically justified interests of the Japanese nation in the Pacific. In front of politicians and the leading American scholars of Pacific history, he linked past relations with Japan’s current geopolitical interest in the Pacific. The Congress’s heavily Philippine-oriented keynote addresses on the Chinese in the Philippines, delivered by Robertson and Charles H. Cunningham, point at an underlying imperial agenda behind the entire event. Murakami’s conference lecture in English revealed an eloquent, well-informed scholar, with a well-supported argument based on a strong belief in continuity between the present and the past.

When visiting Europe, Murakami could count on the patronage of the Japanese diplomatic web and on Ludwig Riess’s contacts. In 1928, he would also meet other Japanese historians, such as Kamei Takayoshi (1886–1977), a specialist in European history then based in the Hague.Footnote ⁷⁵ That year Murakami also met the future diplomat Izawa Minoru (1887–1976) in Lisbon. They would conduct research at the Portuguese National Archive of Torre do Tombo during the day, and discuss their archival discoveries over wine in the evenings. Although Murakami was unable to find diplomatic documents in Lisbon,Footnote ⁷⁶ he made the impressive discovery of a golden byōbu, a Japanese-style folding screen from the late sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁷ Such folding screens, also known as namban byōbu, became symbols for the sophisticated international involvement of early modern Japan.Footnote ⁷⁸ Izawa was impressed by Murakami’s paleographic skills and his quickness in making source transcriptions. Murakami planned to recruit Izawa as a teaching assistant for the newly established history program at Taihoku Imperial University. Izawa could cover the histories of the Iberian presence in Manila and Macau and compile all available historical data on the subject. However, Murakami’s plans were undermined by the Gaimushō, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who sent Izawa to Mexico and Panama instead.Footnote ⁷⁹

Imperial Agent?

In the 1920s, Murakami’s work responded to the Taiwan Government-General’s encouragement of Japanese scholars to provide the army and navy in the South China Sea and Southeast Asia with research data, maps, and surveys.Footnote ⁸⁰ Murakami’s scholarship focused on two threads: diplomatic relations and the Japanese presence in Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁸¹ His 1925 essay on the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who threatened the Spaniards in Luzon with an invasion, appeared in the authoritative Shigaku zasshi, setting the tone for the source-critical dissemination of historical Japanese engagement with the nan’yō (Southeast Asia).Footnote ⁸² His detailed descriptions of how Japan was essential for historical connections in Southeast Asia became typical for the history of the southern seas (nan’yōshi). In 1923, the Taiwan Government-General appointed Murakami as a historiographical officer in charge of a source compilation on the history of the island. Murakami remained the principal editor of the Taiwan Sōtokufu shiryō hensankai (台湾総督府史料編纂会, The Historiographical Association of the Taiwan Government-General) until 1933.Footnote ⁸³

Following the end of his term as president of the Music Academy, Murakami was offered a professorship in Taipei in April of Shōwa 3 (1928). He began his new post with an eight-month-long archival research trip to Holland, England, Spain, and Portugal, as well as to Dutch Java. After returning to Tokyo in February of Shōwa 4 (1929), Murakami was officially appointed as Professor of Southern Sea History at Taihoku Imperial University. The post was a crucial asset for his large-scale educational agenda in Taipei: the establishment of a university chair in nan’yōshi or history of the southern seas (also known as Nanyang history). His administrative position at Taipei Imperial University (1928–35) and his membership in the Association for Southern Pacific Education (南太平洋教育会議, Minami taiheiyō kyōiku kaigi) indicate that he was more imperialist than he would have liked to admit.Footnote ⁸⁴

1929 was an eventful year for Murakami. He moved to Taipei from Tokyo – with his eldest daughter Taeko, who managed his household in the absence of her mother, who followed later. That same year, Murakami released two influential source editions: the extended compilation of documents of foreign exchange (Ikoku ōfuku) and the translation of the journals of Rodrigo Vivero y Velasco and Sebastián Vizcaíno, two high-ranking seventeenth-century Spanish visitors to Japan.Footnote ⁸⁵ They were translations published in the Ikoku sōsho (異国叢書, Foreign countries book series).Footnote ⁸⁶ The purpose of the Ikoku sōsho series, which was first published between 1927 and 1931, was to introduce an overview of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century European accounts of Japan to a Japanese audience.Footnote ⁸⁷ Both were the result of the investigations he undertook the previous year and fall into the category of allegedly objective primary source translations.

After moving to Taiwan, he contributed to publications with propagandistic content such as a volume on the nan’shin (southward expansion) and essays in nonacademic journals, university bulletins, and the colonial newspaper Taiwan nichinichi shinpō (Taiwan Daily News).Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet, on a closer inspection, even in public history texts, Murakami remained committed to his methodology of dense, cherry-picked primary source references. Even on occasions that would have called for Pan-Asian propaganda, such as the laudation of the ten-year-anniversary of the High School for Trade and Commerce in Taipei in 1930, Murakami sought an objective tone.Footnote ⁸⁹ A close reading of his contribution entitled ‘Edo jidai shoki no nichihi bōeki’ (Japanese–Philippine trade in the early Edo period) demonstrates how his document-based epistemology worked: He began with a critique of nationalist Filipino historian Antonio Regidor (1845–1910), who once claimed that Japanese merchants had settled in the Philippines and helped to cultivate the island since ‘ancient times.’ Murakami corrected the claim with solid empirical data from Spanish archives, which allowed him to demonstrate that the earliest Japanese settlement in Luzon was recorded in 1586.Footnote ⁹⁰

Another key stage in Murakami’s time in Taiwan, which will receive ample attention in Chapter 5, was his appointment as member for the investigation committee for historical, cultural, and natural monuments and landscapes of Taiwan in 1930. The committee was an outcome of Imperial Japan’s monument preservation initiative dating back to 1919.Footnote ⁹¹ Ever since, qualified members of preservation committees contributed to large-scale legacy-building by selecting, preserving, or creating memorable sites all over Japan, one of them being the obelisk in Onjuku in 1928, which I introduced at the beginning of this book. Murakami was one of the public intellectuals who extended the preservation work to Taiwan, where he saw to the creation of several sights of both Chinese and Indigenous origin, as the preservation committee’s first published report of 1935 shows.Footnote ⁹²

Murakami’s term in Taipei ended similarly to how it began with a research mission sponsored by the Taiwan Government-General. Shortly after concluding the task, which took Murakami to Dutch Java and Portuguese Macau, he handed over the Chair in Southern Sea History to his colleague Iwao Seiichi in 1935. After his return to Japan, he continued to disseminate his findings on the Japanese in the nan’yō, their past relations with the Philippines, and Dutch colonial enterprises in Japan and on Java (including an edition of the Dutch Dejima records) to a broader public.Footnote ⁹³ In 1937, the Ministry of Education employed him as a special librarian and appointed him as member of a textbook investigation committee.Footnote ⁹⁴

Murakami returned to the academy in 1940, with his appointment as a professor at Sophia University. German-speaking Jesuits, who had been stationed in Japan since the 1910s, ran Sophia University as one of many educational institutions in Japan, yet the only one that turned into a full-fledged university under the University Law in 1928.Footnote ⁹⁵ Through their global educational network, Jesuits at Sophia University took a crucial role in fostering patriotism and collecting funds for the upcoming war in an information campaign in 1937.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Kioizaka-based Kirishitan Bunko library, a repository for the history of the Christian mission in Japan, which became Murakami’s new research field, had been founded by his colleague Johannes Laures, S.J., in 1939. That same year, Murakami was part of a group of Jesuits and Japanese intellectuals who founded the Christian Research Institute, which took a leading role in “the study of original materials relating to the contacts between the Japanese and early Christian missionaries.”Footnote ⁹⁷ As full professor (教授, kyōju) in an environment created to investigate Japan’s Christian history and to strengthen research ties between Japanese and European scholars, Murakami would delve further into the past and present of Catholicism in Japan.Footnote ⁹⁸ Murakami’s appointment and indeed his interest in the subject were not random. He had been involved in several volumes of source translations of early modern Jesuit letters from Japan since the mid-1920s.Footnote ⁹⁹ He would become central to the inauguration of Sophia University’s Department of History in the Faculty of Literature in 1942. That same year, Murakami became an elected member of the Imperial Academy of Science (帝国学士院会員, teikoku gakushiin kaiin, now the Japan Academy or Nippon gakushiin). Founded in 1906, the Imperial Academy, which promoted outstanding research and the advance of Japanese science, was the highest-ranking academic institution in Japan and even represented Japanese academia internationally. Its average of sixty faculty members were appointed by the order of the emperor. Honorable recognition of Murakami’s scholarship was announced twice in the newspapers.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

At Sophia University, Murakami focused on the on-the-ground contacts between Japanese Christians, on the one side, and European colonial authorities in Southeast Asia and Catholic missionaries visiting Japan, on the other. He remained true to the positivist research method and his orthodox belief in the objectivity of archival manuscripts, as exemplified in his monograph Japan and the Philippines (Nihon to firipin), which appeared in 1945.Footnote ¹⁰¹ He became one of the many contributors to the Catholic Encyclopedia (Katorikku daijiten), a Jesuit prestige project for the promotion of Catholic thought.Footnote ¹⁰² Other contributors included the Italian philosopher Giovanni Papini of Milan University, who was already then a controversial figure because of his glorification of war and fascism.Footnote ¹⁰³ He also translated letters from the Jesuits of Evora with the express intention of making them accessible to a wider audience. At Sophia, Murakami joined the Christian (kirishitan) Culture Association, which included prominent researchers such as the German Jesuits Johannes Laures and Hubert Cieslik and the British language officer and scholar Charles R. Boxer. Together they launched the Monumenta Nipponica as a Japan-based academic journal for Japanese studies, history, and linguistics. The journal became the channel for multilingual academic conversations (although the languages of publication were limited to English, French, and German) between Japan-based scholars and those researching Japanese history abroad. Murakami was one of the few Japanese scholars to publish in the journal. His contributions included the latest findings on the Japanese settlement in Batavia and a study of the Jesuit Seminary of Azuchi.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His integration into a new international academic network was of utmost importance for his legacy as a historian negotiating historical truths across traditions and languages.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Murakami’s increasing sympathy for Catholic Christianity resulted in his late-life Catholic baptism in 1946.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This step may have been a pragmatic one, as that same year Murakami, aged seventy-eight, was chosen to be the fourth president of Sophia University, the second Japanese and first non-Jesuit person in that role.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ During his tenure as president that lasted until 1953, he would commute to Kioizaka in Yotsuya from his home in the scenic seaside town of Kugenuma (鵠沼) near Kamakura, at the time a more-than-two-hour-long journey. Murakami steered Sophia University throughout its transition into a formal university under postwar education law in April 1948 with two faculties (Humanities and Economics). What seemed like Murakami’s quiet late-career transformation could equally be perceived as a clever final career move toward building his legacy.

Working with Jesuit intellectuals whose research agendas were primarily guided by the moral and epistemic aspects of the Catholic past of Japan doubtlessly helped to rehabilitate Murakami’s reputation after years in which colonial expansion had guided Murakami’s imperialist agenda. As a result, his research publications came to include topics of cultural history and religious diplomacy. In a 1950 contribution to the Shigaku zasshi, Murakami introduced a letter written in 1614 by Pope Sixtus V to Takayama Ukon (1552–1615), the samurai convert who led a group of persecuted Japanese Christians to Manila after the central military government in Japan, the bakufu, had introduced anti-Christian edicts.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These edicts stood at the beginning of the prohibition of Christian teachings in Japan and initiated a nationwide persecution of Japanese converts. Murakami’s article began with a Japanese translation of the letter, followed by its Latin transcript and archival background information in German. With this trilingual piece he once more fashioned himself as a polyglot and accentuated his intimate relationship to the leading Jesuit scholars in Japanese Christian history.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Murakami’s study could be read as complementary to Laures’s publications on Takayama Ukon that appeared in German only. Yet, although foreign languages helped him to lubricate his scholarly rehabilitation through the Jesuit-run institution, where German was an established language of instruction since 1913, it would be misleading to present this as a 180-degree turn in his profile.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For one, the Jesuits in Japan were unable to fully separate themselves from their centuries-long past as agents of colonization and lingering ideas of Western hegemony. For the other, the example of Takayama Ukon, who led a group of converts to Manila, shows how maritime expansion and the Japanese Empire continued to determine Murakami’s ways of thinking.

Translating, Recycling, and Publishing

The remaining part of this chapter will bridge the more descriptive biographical account of Murakami to the critical analysis of his scholarship. Touching on Murakami’s performance as a translator historian, I will provide an overview of his editorial and translation work and assess how his linguistic and empiricist zeal biased the future study of early modern Japanese foreign relations. These considerations will prepare the reader for the in-depth study of the intrinsic relationship between historical actors, materiality, and narrative tropes that saturated archival diplomacy and how they helped Murakami to make narratives of early modern foreign relations matter. The Ikoku nikki, as the work Murakami is best known for, is an appropriate point of departure for this task.

The Ikoku nikki, which has sometimes been translated as ‘Chronicle of Foreign Countries,’ is an early-Tokugawa-period compilation of documents on Japanese foreign exchange of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1911, Murakami prepared the first printed edition of the Ikoku nikki shō, which until then was only available in handwritten copies in its original classical Japanese.Footnote ¹¹¹ What is usually overlooked by later generations of historians is that Murakami presented a digest of documents with an overemphasis on Japanese relations with Europeans while neglecting diplomatic contacts with East Asian neighbors. Moreover, something essential got lost in the multidirectional translations and citations of globally operating historians: the 1911 edition of the Ikoku nikki shō introduced Murakami as the one contributing with kōchū (校註), meaning annotations or explanations, not as passive ‘editor’ to which he became rendered in later decades.

The original Ikoku nikki was primarily compiled by Ishin Sūden (1569–1633), who belonged to the eminent group of so-called foreign relations monks of the Nanzen temple in Kyoto. The Zen Buddhist monks of the Nanzen temple were thoroughly trained in Chinese classics and the Sinosphere’s diplomatic and ceremonial practices. This Sinophone training qualified them to become advisors in foreign affairs where classical Chinese and Chinese literary forms had been used as lingua franca in East Asia. For the Ikoku nikki, they drafted the official letters, collected information, and edited translations of foreign diplomatic letters according to the conventions of classical Chinese. Eventually, they copied these translations into the Ikoku nikki and other chronicles for preservation and future reference.

Murakami transcribed and annotated selected sections of the Ikoku nikki and supplemented it by the Ikoku go-shuinchō (異国ご朱印帳), a catalog of licenses issued for the bakufu’s overseas trade (1604–35).Footnote ¹¹² Murakami would come to classify these so-called shuinjō licenses as gaikō monjo and include them in his edition.Footnote ¹¹³ When Murakami published the Ikoku ōfuku shokanshū (Collection of the correspondence with foreign countries) in 1929, it became even more complicated for outsiders to distinguish seventeenth-century originals from twentieth-century translations. In that volume, he combined the annotated transcript of the Ikoku nikki with his own translations of nearly fifty letters exchanged between various Japanese rulers with representatives of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires, England, Holland, and the Pope between 1570 and 1641.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Hence, the Ikoku volumes can be rendered as the prime example of multilayered historical knowledge.

Much of Murakami’s work with foreign manuscripts depended on archival diplomacy and is thus the product of complex ramifications and multilayered negotiations. Murakami once stated that “exchange of informations [sic] about historical documents” was a diplomatic operation.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Voluminous reproductions of archival sources were a trademark of many of Murakami’s publications. Even the monographs he authored, such as Three Hundred Years of Friendship between Japan and the Netherlands (Nichiran 300nen no yūkō, 1915) or The Commercial History of Hirado (Bōekishijō no Hirado, 1917), were full of page-long translations of European documents.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Their style did not differ much from the Ikoku ōfuku shokanshū or other translated source compilations, such as the Jesuit letters (originals in Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish were translated by Murakami to Japanese) or the records of the Dutch East India Company (originally in Dutch). His Rankean methodology and document-based epistemology added a semblance of objectivity and authority to his work. As Murakami’s publications created the impression of being impartial translations of past realities, they left no room for concerns about losses and inaccuracies caused by translations across languages and time periods.

Readers of his multiple-volume source editions may too easily miss the point that Murakami did not carry the whole weight of translating and copyediting on his own. Subordinates, students, and family members assisted his voluminous oeuvre. Yet, although regularly compensated, they were rarely acknowledged. While it is difficult to assess whether this omission says something about Murakami as a scholar or merely reflects the academic norms of the time in which he worked, both the support he received and the silencing of it are utterly relevant to any form of critical engagement with his work. Yet another aspect of archival diplomacy concerns access and acquisition. During most of his active career, foreign historical documents were hard to come by without the right contacts and often required the intervention of high-ranking Japanese representatives. This process involved universities, national academies, archives, and resident embassies. Murakami’s own efforts and sacrifices as mobile bungakushi (literally Master of Arts/Letters) gradually integrated him into diplomatic circles in Japan and abroad.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Diplomatic records kept at the Japan Academy reveal how formal intervention was necessary to access, for instance, Dutch East India Company records. Although documents preserved at the Rijksarchief (Dutch National Archive) were freely accessible, permission had to be procured through diplomatic correspondence between the Japanese and the Dutch governments.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The Imperial Academy took on a leading role in acquiring valuable material from foreign archives and in systematizing the process of promoting international academic collaboration. Intellectual historian Oki Sayaka speaks of academic diplomacy (she literally uses gaikō) in the context of academic involvement in science administration.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As a member of the International Research Council (IRC), the Imperial Academy presented Japanese research abroad. Domestically, the study of foreign relations played an important role in its educational agenda since the Taishō years and increased after its acceptance into the IRC in 1921.

Murakami’s work for the Japan Academy, which began in the early 1920s and thus decades before he became an elected member, is a reminder of the fact that diplomacy and statecraft rarely begin or end at an ambassador’s reception or minister’s desk. In addition to the procurement of documents through persistent requests following the national and institutional protocol, Murakami shaped diplomatic concepts and understanding of different diplomatic practices through his constant rendering of foreign and past worlds into words. Murakami was what Ernest M. Satow called a “diplomatist.”Footnote ¹²⁰ According to Satow, “diplomatists” referred to all public servants of the diplomatic body, whether serving at home in the Department of Foreign Affairs or abroad at embassies or other diplomatic agencies, including interpreters.Footnote ¹²¹ Supported by influential institutions such as universities or government ministries, archival diplomats of Murakami’s days benefited from patriarchal networks for the dissemination and promotion of their views and thus determined which type of expertise was to be regarded as authoritative. Under the umbrella of archival diplomacy, Murakami was able to strengthen his own international networks, bolster his standing within Japanese academia, and privilege elite men as historical actors of significance.

Concluding Remarks

I began this chapter with speculations about a connection between Murakami’s international profile as a scholar of foreign relations and the Christian past and his hometown in Bungo. I may have been misled by Bungo’s history shaped by regional myth-making initiatives and very recent local heritage projects. One of them honored “ancient sages” from the historical area, above all the versatile educator and founder of Keio University, Fukuzawa Yukichi.Footnote ¹²² In 2011 and 2017, the prefectural local history association in Ōita published two hagiographical collections about their famous sons, with the somewhat confusing English title “People who gazed at the world and three wise men of Bungo.”Footnote ¹²³ Divided into thematic sections, the compendium indirectly linked Christian daimyō such as Ōtomo Sōrin, a notorious promoter of the European-influenced namban culture, with Murakami, introduced in Chapter 5 on medicine, foreign relations, and scholarly disciplines alongside Fukuzawa.Footnote ¹²⁴ In 2019, the Ōita kenritsu sentetsu shiryōkan (大分県立先哲史料館, Ōita Prefecture Ancient Sages Historical Archives) hosted an exhibition on the prefecture’s Christian history. The exhibition pamphlet introduces Murakami Naojirō as a “pioneer” of scholarly research on Japan’s Christian past, yet remains silent about most other aspects of his scholarly career.Footnote ¹²⁵

Murakami Naojirō had many roles, and his impact on Japanese humanities can hardly be overstated. Many chapters of his vita are obscured by the politics of knowledge creation and the circumstances of the time he lived in. It thus takes a critical and comparative reading to get to the complexities of it. This is true for the relationship between geopolitics and colonial attitudes, on the one hand, and foreign language education and history-writing, on the other. Although Murakami never tied his historical findings to contemporary politics, his publications gave expansionists (the jingoist politicians and journalists of the 1930s) the precedents they had been looking for: His work shaped the Japanese Empire’s calling to lead Pan-Asianism in Southeast Asia, not only militarily but also intellectually.Footnote ¹²⁶

In Chapter 3 I will evaluate Murakami’s publications and translations in light of what I see as the untranslatability of the Japanese concept of gaikō. I argue that the history of early modern Japan’s engagement with the outside world was shaped by a collaborative synergy between foreign politics, imperial repertoires, and educational institutions. Hence, a broad variety of multiarchival and multilingual source materials – ranging from sixteenth-century diplomatic letters, colonial reports, and ceremonial instructions to interwar imperial scholarship, to mass media articles, and popular history books and their imaginaries – will help pin down the impact of certain narratives.