Japanese New Worlds: Intersecting Imaginaries of the Nanban Period (c. 1543–1641)
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
East Asian Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
Kamens, Edward
Abstract
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, innovations in maritime technology brought previously disconnected peoples into contact, resulting in a multi-directional exchange of knowledge regimes. The conventional rhetoric used to describe this so-called “Age of Exploration” often establishes or reinforces certain myths that the world as we understand it today was shaped by European-initiated “voyages of discovery” and subsequent colonial endeavors, which not only led to the genocide of indigenous peoples but also to the “epistemicide” of their ways of knowing about the world. But this narrative overwrites the contributions of non-European and indigenous knowledges. When Portuguese merchants landed in southern Japan in the 1540s, Japanese trade networks became interconnected with those of Europe and the Americas. The Portuguese, and later the Spanish, were known in Japan as "nanban-jin" (“Southern Barbarians”). This term, "nanban 南蛮", meaning “Southern Barbary,” referred to the homelands of the Portuguese and Spanish and their overseas colonies. The term was originally derived from the Chinese name for Southeast Asia as part of the tribute networks of Imperial China. But because the Iberians were an unknown “Other” and came from the south, the Sinitic imaginary of “Nanban” was re-territorialized and re-purposed. Therefore, the period spanning from the first Iberian landings in Kagoshima in 1542 or 1543 to their final expulsion from the country in the early 1640s is referred to as the “Nanban Period.” The cultural production of the Nanban Period (c. 1543–1641) in Japan involved the mutual juxtaposition of multiple knowledge regimes, through which ensued new orderings of the world. The dissertation explores the construct of "Nanban" as the geographical imaginary through which Japanese artists, cosmographers, and popular writers mediated the encounter with the Iberian-influenced trade realms of the Transpacific "Indies," from Macau to Goa, from the Philippines to New Spain. Just as the Japanese archipelago was incorporated into emergent “New World” discourses, so too were the “Indies” constructed as “Southern Barbary.” By reorienting early modern globalization from the perspective of Japanese transcultural exchanges with the Iberian maritime empires and the Americas, the dissertation decolonizes prevailing historiography. Specifically, the dissertation studies Japanese contributions to the emergent knowledge regimes of cartography, encyclopedism, natural history, and lexicography. By presenting these fields as case studies, the dissertation demonstrates how the "discovery of the world" was a multi-directional process of exchange, generating a mosaic of different epistemologies rather than one stemming solely from European thought.
Recommended Citation
Misra, Drisana, "Japanese New Worlds: Intersecting Imaginaries of the Nanban Period (c. 1543–1641)" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1037.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1037
