Paper short abstract:

The Ming-Qing dynastic transition in China captured the imagination of literati in East Asia. This paper will explore the changing landscape of historiography in Japan through an examination of how early Edo literati received, adapted, and wrote new histories of the dynastic conflict.

Paper long abstract:

The Ming-Qing transition (1618-1683), a dynastic upheaval that not only consumed much of China, but also saw the Qing invasion of Joseon Korea and an influx of refugees into Tokugawa Japan, was memorialised by writers across the region. Unofficial histories written by Ming subjects made their way to Korea and to Japan, and were either adapted for domestic audiences (a process known as kunten kundoku in Japan), or were used as the basis for new unofficial histories of the dynastic transition. Scholars have examined how news and information travelled about the struggle between the Ming and Qing dynasties to East Asia, and the impact of the eventual Qing conquest on Japanese and Korean conceptions of a Sinocentric world order. Recent work has even examined the role of late Ming historical writing in these changing worldviews.

In this paper, I will build upon preceding scholarship and my own analysis of the circulation, adaptation, and writing of unofficial history in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Japan in order to argue that there was a shift in historiographical thinking in the early Edo period. Imported histories about the Ming-Qing transition, as well as histories of the dynastic upheaval written by Japanese literati for a domestic audience, show that there was a greater interest in contemporaneity in historical writing, such that news or information about recent affairs began to be disseminated widely in an historical mode. In this way, contemporary events were considered within the larger temporal framework of history and memory, and in the case of the Ming-Qing transition, a larger geographical framework that considered the history of the mainland within the context of Japan’s own recent and distant past. At a time when Tokugawa intellectuals were beginning to delve into kōgaku or the examination of classical texts, and Tokugawa society was starting to be inundated by diverse new modes of knowledge production including maps, travel writing, and instruction manuals for everyday life, an exploration of historical writing about the Ming-Qing transition will provide insight into the transnational context of news, history, and memory in early modern Japan.