Of all the ‘Western things’ Japan imported over the decades following the arrival of the Black Ships, race has to be the most complicated. The very nature of the concept itself, its function as a pillar for the structure of White supremacy, as well as its intrinsically exclusive nature should have been enough to persuade the Japanese to ignore it. Moreover, we have seen in the previous chapter that Japan already had patterns of exclusion which were in their function similar to race. Thinking in the framework of domestic intellectual thought, then, the introduction of the concept does not make much sense, and even appears to be rather counterproductive. Following up on what was argued in the previous chapter, the early history of race in Japan cannot be separated from coeval developments in the West, as the country became part of an international struggle in which race played a pivotal role. Retracing parts of that history is the aim of the present chapter.

Introducing modernity: the translation of race in the early Meiji period

On 6 April 1868, the Charter Oath was read aloud before the Emperor in the Kyoto Imperial Palace. Comprising five articles, the Oath was designed to set the future course of Japan and to usher the country into a new era of Western-inspired modernity. The last article famously required that ‘Knowledge shall be thought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule’. This rapidly became a priority, for the opening of treaty ports and the unequal treaties imposed on Japan made the acquisition of information about the Western nations not only unavoidable but also of paramount importance: only by having a substantial knowledge of these nations could Japan hope to escape the fate of its neighbour China after the Opium Wars (1839−42 and 1856–60). Knowledge came either from the Western people themselves in the form of foreign consultants and teachers (o-yatoi gaikokujin), or was acquired by Japanese going abroad as emissaries or exchange students. It also came to Japan through the translation of Western works. Translation, therefore, became a means to understand the West, its institutions, history, geography and arts. Most of the geography works translated in the early Meiji period contained a section about race, a fact that made the importance of the concept palpable to the translators.