[Series] Japan Unbolted

Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch had regularly traded with Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, persistent attempts to convert the Japanese to Catholicism and their tendency to engage in unfair trading practices (reminiscent of Melville's criticisms of South Seas missionaries) lead Japan to expel most foreigners.

In the 19th century, the increased presence of whalers near Japan sometimes brought shipwrecked foreign sailors to its shores, resulting in their imprisonment or execution. Thus, throughout Moby-Dick (1851), Japan is described as inhospitality "locked," "double-bolted," and "impenetrable," and the area is made symbolic of the remotest, most forbidden, and wildest waters of the world, near where the White Whale himself is found.

But Japan's policy of isolation ("sakoku," literally, "chained country") was increasingly under challenge. International attempts to open Japan--totaling some eighteen expeditions--were failures, until a breakthrough finally came in 1853 with Commodore Matthew Perry.

The opening of Japan began an era of tumultuous change and friendly exchange, in which diverse cultures grappled to interpret each other's mutual mysteries. Melville himself is an important ambassador of this work continuing in the present day: according to Japanese scholar Kimura Ki, Moby-Dick is the first major work of American literature to mention Japan. And reciprocally, "Japan is by far the country with the longest tradition in Melville translations and Melville studies."

This series serves not only as a primer to the historical background of Moby-Dick, but also as a case study in cultural contact, as told through dramatic first-person accounts of religious persecution, imprisonment, shipwreck, and the threat of war.

"So, hurrah for the coast of Japan! Thither the ship was bound." (Omoo, 82)

NOTE: To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar. This page will be updated regularly to reflect changes to the schedule. This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup.

Series schedule:

• Letters on Japan: Saint Francis Xavier - 5/15
• Narrative of a Captivity in Japan: Golovnin - 5/22, 5/29
• Drifting Toward the Southeast: John Manjirō - 6/5
• Narrative: Ranald MacDonald - 6/12
• U.S. Expedition to Japan: Commodore Perry and John Sewall - 6/19
• The Book of Tea: Okakura Kakuzō - 6/26
• Temple of the Golden Pavilion: Yukio Mishima - 7/10
• Billy Budd - 7/17
• Billy Budd, movie - 7/24
• Violence and the Sacred: Girard - 7/31
• Zen and the White Whale: Daniel Herman - 8/7, 8/14
• Kwaidan: Lafcadio Hearn - 8/21

For further exploration:

• The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan: Christopher E. G. Benfey