Paper short abstract:

On the material of the first comprehensive summary of European history produced in Japanese, this paper considers the process of encounter of two historiographies with their underlying interpretive schemes and conceptual vocabularies. It is an enquiry into the uses of the European past in East Asia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers a case study into the nature of adaptations and uses of the European past in East Asia at a time when the search for the knowledge of the West was not yet motivated primarily by any sense of its civilizational, moral, or technological superiority.

In the course of the later eighteenth century, as the Dutch philological expertise gradually became another available tool - alongside the long-established Sinological erudition - for generating knowledge about the world, commentators around the Japanese archipelago began to turn not only to medical or astronomical manuals of the Occidentals but also to their histories.

The translation-cum-commentary Seiyō zakki (Miscellanea from the Western Seas) by Yamamura Saisuke, dated 1801, is a case in point. The text became effectively a crossroads of two philological and historiographical bodies of knowledge that intersected in unexpected ways as European past was subjected to a reinterpretation in terms of the classical Chinese precedent while the product of that reinterpretation informed a different understanding of the recent and contemporary historical trajectory of a Japan exposed now to the dynamics of global European presence.

Retracing the steps of Yamamura as a student of European past requires us to consider how, on the desk of a Japanese low-ranking samurai scholar, Chinese dynastic histories and provincial gazetteers interacted with seventeenth-century commercial production of Dutch printing presses and German Lutheran writers' Biblical schemes of universal history. In Yamamura's summary, the Danielic scheme of Four Empires that served as the standard framework for Protestant universal historiography was subjected to a re-reading through the prism of an equally universalist Chinese historiography which conventionally contrasted periods of imperial stability with the fragmented periods of Warring Kingdoms. Following the defeat of the Qing empire in the Opium War, this interpretation of European past as a drift from ancient imperial unity to modern Warring-Kingdoms fragmentation would provide an explanation for the expansive presence of the Western powers in East Asia.