Chapter 4 focuses on Chinese coercion in the East China Sea, where China has maritime territorial and jurisdictional disputes with Japan. I explain the trend of Chinese coercion in the East China Sea while conducting two in-depth case studies: the Sino-Japan boat clash incident of 2010 and the incident of Senkaku nationalization in 2012. As the cost-balancing theory argues, the costs and benefits of coercion explain when and how China coerces. In the pre-2005 period, the need to establish resolve was generally low, whereas the economic cost was high. China, therefore, refrained from coercion. The need to establish resolve was briefly higher in 1996 and 1997, but China did not utilize coercion in these cases because of its equally high need for resolve and high economic costs. Because the East China Sea is not China’s core interest, its issue importance is not sufficiently high to justify the use of coercion. When the need to establish a reputation for resolve is high and the economic cost low, China used coercion, as seen in the post-2005 trend and, in particular, the 2010 and 2012 cases. It refrained using from military coercion for fear of potential geopolitical backlash.

This chapter explores the aesthetic, narrative and ideological stakes of the balcony scene in Candy Candy. Oscillating between an eminently traditional representation and a questioning of social and aesthetic conventions, the scene punctuates the narrative progression and is the object of a double repetition: whilst several episodes show the actors’ auditions and then their preparation before the premiere, the characters of Terry and Candy ceaselessly replay the balcony scene, which constitutes a structuring motif of the anime. It also becomes the locus where gender identities are shaped and troubled, but also where theatre and life unfold in a game of mirrors. Candy and Terry’s love story actually never goes beyond the phase of the balcony scene, a sequence that they keep repeating in endless variations that call for decoding.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s engagement with Japan. French artists’ fascination with Japan has a long history, dating back at least to the Paris World Exposition of 1867, and in return many Japanese artists – including composers – have discovered a reciprocal affinity with aspects of French aesthetic sensibility. It was therefore entirely to be expected that Messiaen, as a French composer with a long-standing interest in Eastern cultures, would succumb to this same fascination after his visit to Japan in 1962, which resulted in the composition of his Sept Haïkaï – and that his work would also exert a profound influence on several Japanese composers of the postwar generation, above all Toru Takemitsu.

Fundamentals of our National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), where these quotations are from, was published by Japan’s education ministry in March 1937, months before the nation plunged into war against China and, subsequently, the Second World War.1 A portable canon of imperial ideology, the Fundamentals attacked the alien ideas that had become too prominent in Japanese society, particularly “individualism, which is the root of modern Occidental ideologies.”2 Yet the booklet contained more than simple propaganda; by instructing the imperial subjects to reaffirm their loyalty to the emperor and the nation, it reflected the Japanese state’s attempt to enlist citizens in its revolt against the West. As such, the pamphlet provides a useful historic vantage point. It illuminates, retrospectively, what had gone wrong in Japan’s quest for modernity over the preceding eight decades, which ended in an all-out confrontation with the Allied powers.

In 1882, the eldest sons of the Prince of Wales visited Palestine and Syria as they neared the end of a voyage around the globe. This chapter uses the written record of their journey on board HMS Bacchante to argue that it signalled important changes in the religious profile of the British monarchy. John Neale Dalton, the tutor to the princes, misrepresented his unintellectual pupils as keen students of the religions of the world in his voluminous two-volume journal of their tour. As British monarchs now headed an empire which its admirers argued was unprecedented in its extent, they prepared to rule it by travelling to encounter the many religions of their future subjects. Dalton’s princes journeyed through time as well as space, capitalising on British power and their royal standing to meet philologists and archaeologists who explained to them the ancient faiths of Japan, China and Egypt. In this global context, their visit to the Holy Land was no longer just a pilgrimage to the origins of Christianity and of elite culture, but a journey of discovery which connected the biblical to other, hitherto alien pasts.

In this chapter, the effects of the clergy’s movement along the Asia-bound religious itinerary on disputes over royal patronage in New Spain are examined. The chapter first explores how the route between Spain and Southeast Asia turned into a standardized itinerary. Attention is then shifted to disputes caused by the clergy’s movements along this route and the meaning the category of criollo acquired in them. Delving further into the uses of the logic of assessment, the chapter explores how the qualities of New Spain and its creole inhabitants were celebrated by clergymen with varying agendas. The chapter argues that the positive assessment of both from someone like the Spanish Augustinian Rodrigo Aganduru Moriz were the result of his efforts to defend the role of creole friars during the evangelization in Asia. Although Moriz’s celebrations mirrored those of creole clergymen, his aim of attracting friars to Asia actually collided with the interests of a considerable segment of the local clergy. Finally, the chapter uses the celebrations of Felipe de Jesús, one of the Nagasaki martyrs, to reconsider how the criollo identity was operationalized in struggles over the distribution of privileges and honors.

In several jurisdictions, antitrust or competition laws are deemed as having a political content, at least from a historical perspective. A link is further made between antitrust and democracy. The focus is put on separation of powers-type arguments explaining and supporting the adoption of antitrust or competition laws in the United States, in Germany, in Japan, and in the European Union.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which archival categorization frames the voices of the actors in a historian’s documents. It does so by reconstructing the journey of a young woman from Nagasaki to Thursday Island via Shanghai and Hong Kong, based both on the first-person testimony she gave soon after arriving in Australia and on similar testimonies from many other migrating women. But although the woman, Hashimoto Usa, speaks in the first person, her ‘I’ is also layered with the world views of her British interlocutor and his educated Japanese translators. These bind Hashimoto into a set of discursive assumptions – about labour, gender and ‘civilization’ – that will affect where and how her story is archivally preserved, both in Brisbane and in Tokyo. In a similar way, the author’s own first-person description of ‘finding’ her testimony bleeds into Hashimoto’s voice, once again shaping her storytelling strategies and those of every other man present in her narrative. In short, the question of how we read such archival traces depends very much on who ‘we’ are in the story.

This chapter explores how voices outside the archive might shape a historian’s readings in the archive. Provoked by an experience in the grounds of the Hawai‘i State Archives, the author uses the canefield songs (holehole bushi) of Japanese labourers on Hawaiian sugar plantations in order to explore the migrants’ imaginations of their own transpacific lives. Focusing in particular on the language of ‘circulation’, and on the life history of one Yamashiro-maru migrant, the chapter reframes a historiographical debate about Japan’s industrialization in light of the canefield labourers, and a debate about Asian settler colonialism in Hawai‘i in light of the labourers’ remittances back to Japan. At the chapter’s heart – in the opening courtroom testimony and in the final schoolyard song – is the problem of translation and commensurability, both in the language of the actors and in the ways historians might transplant historiographical concepts from one local context to another.

This chapter introduces Mooring the Global Archive’s main themes and questions, and positions the book’s historiographical interventions within a wider literature on archives, global history and modern Japanese history. Reflecting first on the problem of when and where the history of the Yamashiro-maru steamship might really begin, it identifies three so-called ‘archival traps’: that is, three potential archival starting points – in the ship’s British birthplace, on the internet, and in the Hawai‘i State Archives – which would unwittingly reinforce a Eurocentric narrative of late nineteenth century Japanese catch-up with the West. As an alternative, the chapter tells of the author’s chance encounter with a migrant gravestone in Kaua‘i Island as an entry-point into ways of binding non-linear temporalities, non-paper sources and especially non-elite voices into global history. The gravestone and the story it reveals serve to frame the notion of ‘authorial metadata’, which will be present throughout the book.

This chapter focuses on the archival challenge of how to frame the time and space of transit – in this case, the two-week journey from Yokohama to Honolulu as Japanese migrant labourers began their new lives in mid 1885. Considering transit as a fundamental ‘in-between’ space in global history, the chapter takes as its empirical starting point a large oil painting by the American painter Joseph Dwight Strong (1853–99). Strong’s painting purports to depict a Japanese family on the Spreckelsville plantation in Maui – the plantation on which the labourer whose gravestone is discussed in Chapter 1 once worked. To contextualize the transit features of Strong’s work, the chapter discusses the wider dynamics of post-1868 economic disruption in Japan on the one hand and, on the other, the post-US Civil War expansion of the sugar industry in the Hawaiian Kingdom. In this way, the chapter unpacks the painting’s wider claims about Japan and Hawai‘i’s respective positions in the changing Pacific world, including a fundamental fiction at the image’s core. It thereby makes the case both for Native Hawaiian voices and for Japanese migrant-labourer voices to be brought to global history’s archival foreground.

This chapter addresses the relationship between knowledge claims and cartography. It begins by interpreting a world map published by the Nippon Yūsen Kaisha (NYK) company in the mid 1920s, a map which, among other things, depicts the new shipping line established by the NYK between Yokohama and Melbourne in 1896. The chapter traces the Yamashiro-maru’s journeys on this line in order to question the map’s carefully curated claims of peaceful commercial exchange between Japan and Australia. Yet even as the author critiques the map, his own archival itineraries in Australia serve to reinforce its basic worldview. Reflecting on this problem of ‘archival directionality’, the chapter closes by trying to imagine Australia’s historical relationship with Asia through a very different representational form, namely a bark painting from Yolŋu country. As with the NYK map, the chapter examines the cartographic claims made in the bark painting, and the archival basis of those claims, before reflecting on how such sources might reframe a historian’s understanding of the ‘global’ archive.

This chapter takes the earth to be its archive. It imagines the journey of a piece of coal from the mines of the Karatsu coalfield, in north-western Kyushu, to the Yamashiro-maru’s furnace. It asks how such a history brings into play new timelines, new spatial frameworks and above all new actors in nineteenth-century Japan’s engagement with the outside world. Narrating a range of timescales, from millions of years to the daily diary of a Yamashiro-maru passenger in March 1900, the chapter juxtaposes maps, memoirs, paintings, photographs, geological reports, diplomatic missives and a crew list partly to offer a new reading of the ‘opening’ of Japan in the 1850s. This account emphasizes as much the ‘geo-’ as the ‘-politics’ of Japan’s international relations, thereby reimagining Japanese agency in matters of coal – both in the Tokugawa shogunate’s mid-century encounter with Commodore Perry and in the Meiji state’s late-century relations with East Asia.