Abstract

What Castaways Tell Us about Nineteenth-Century Japan in Global History
I will tell stories of people carried on the sea to Japan or away from it before the opening of formal relations of trade and diplomacy in the late 1850s. I will begin with folkloric tales of princesses and other figures who came ashore in “hollow boats” (utsurobune) before moving on to accounts of actual people, such as crewmen from American whaling vessels who landed in Hokkaido, and Japanese sailors who drifted across the Pacific to North America. My goal throughout the presentation is to think about ways to place Japan within global history beyond the usual frameworks of international relations and long-distance commerce. Some of the castaways I will discuss went on to participate in the opening of Japan, but most remained all but unknown. Whatever the impact of their individual experiences, together they give us an opportunity to think about early modern Japan’s place in the Pacific and Asia beyond the realm of formal state-to-state relations.

Bio note

David L. Howell is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History and Professor of History at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Howell is the author of Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995) and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2005), as well as numerous articles. He is editor of The New Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 2, Early Modern Japan in Asia and the World, c. 1580–1877 (2024). Howell’s research focuses on the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. He is particularly interested in the ways changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century.