Currents and Oceanic Geographies of Japan’s Unending Frontier

ABSTRACT

Pacific islands such as Japan are often unduly represented as isolated places. Land-centric biases in fact obscure the ocean’s significance as an ecological connector and a catalyst of historical change. With prolific upwellings, seasonal winds, and fluctuating fishing grounds, the ocean consists of places and depths that attracted human interest at different times. An archipelago awash in nutrient-rich currents, Japan found itself amidst a contested frontier when international whalers in the 1820s ushered in competition over resources, islands, and dominion. To understand technology-driven expansion in its ecological dimension, historians need to adopt a volumetric understanding of the ocean. Analysing this process based on currents, migration routes and catchment areas brings transformations to the fore that are otherwise left out of context. It also helps dissect the economic and ideological structures that keep expanding resource frontiers vertically in the 21st century, towards ever-deeper deposits of fossil fuels and rare earth minerals.

Key words:

• Environmental history
• oceanic history
• spatial history
• frontier studies
• pelagic empire
• whaling

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the journal’s editors and the seven anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable feedback. I am grateful for the generous support this project received from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) as well as Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (2019–20 Graduate Research Grants).

Notes

1 Until the founding of a unitary state in the Meiji reform of 1868, Japan represented a patchwork of hereditary clan lands with the shogun or ‘generalissimo’ of the house Tokugawa in Edo (Tokyo) at the apex, who directly controlled around one-third of the archipelago’s agrarian lands. As is common in the Japanese language, I introduce Japanese actors in the order family name–first name.

2 Ichiban kimisawa-gata o-fune kifu ni tsuki … , manuscript report by Nakahama Manjirō, dated 1859, in Egawa Family Papers, Egawa Mansion, Izunokuni City, acc. no. N101-20, 6, 8.

3 Ibid., 5, 7.

4 As Kären Wigen’s forthcoming piece shows, the appearance of foreign vessels, depicted along with sea lanes and distance indications on Japanese world maps of the 1840s, illustrates a growing unease about foreigners that cruised in Japan’s vicinity. See Kären Wigen, ‘Picturing the Pacific: Seas on Japanese Maps 1600–1900’, in Oceanic Japan, ed. Nadin Heé, Stefan Huebner, Ian Miller, and Bill Tsutsui (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022, forthcoming). (Early citation kindly granted by the author.)

5 Jakobina K. Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 185–6. On whaling attempts in northeastern Japan, see Fynn Holm, ‘Living with the Gods of the Sea: Anti-Whaling Movements in Northeast Japan, 1600–1912’ (PhD diss., University of Zürich, 2020), 109–15.

6 John R. McNeill, ‘Of Rats and Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific’, Journal of World History 5, no. 2 (1994): 321.

7 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Bantam Classic, 2003 [1851]), 125.

8 On whale produce markets and the impact of falling whale catch, see Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore, 59–66, 101–3; Jakobina Arch, ‘Whale Oil Pesticide: Natural History, Animal Resources, and Agriculture in Early Modern Japan’, in New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture, ed. Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland (Cham: Springer, 2015), 104. Arne Kalland’s study of Tokugawa period fishing villages describes the commercial mechanisms that expanded the scope of trade in marine produce far beyond the markets that fishermen could reach directly. See Arne Kalland, Fishing Villages in Tokugawa, Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 198–210. Note that not all marine products are perishable, for example, dried seaweed, fertilizers, or tools produced from whale bones and strings.

9 Kujira ryō goyō todome, in Egawa Family Papers, acc. no. S 続 0008.

10 Catherine Phipps, ‘Sovereignty at Water’s Edge: Japan’s Opening as Coastal Encounter’, in A World at Sea, ed. Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 149.

11 William Tsutsui, ‘The Pelagic Empire: Reconsidering Japanese Expansion’, in Japan at Nature’s Edge, ed. Ian J. Miller, Brett Walker, and Julia Adeney Thomas (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 31.

12 Japan Coast Guard, ‘Nihon no ryōkai nado gainenzu’, Hydrographic and Oceanographic Department, https://www1.kaiho.mlit.go.jp/JODC/ryokai/ryokai_setsuzoku.html (accessed 30 Oct. 2020).

13 Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 153.

14 Attempts to explain the ‘national character’ of the Japanese culminated with Watsuji Tetsurō’s Climate and Culture in the 1930s, but essentialist representations experienced a comeback during the bubble economy of the 1980s. See Watsuji Tetsurō, Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study (New York: Greenwood Press, 1961).

15 The idea of pristine environments or completely sustainable premodern economies has been complicated by environmental historians since William Cronon’s ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–28. Though myths of total isolation and ecological harmony in isolation have been corrected in the aftermath of Ronald Toby’s works, insular views of Japan die hard. See Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). For more recent contributions that reveal the true scale of Tokugawa Japan’s commercial and political entanglement with the Asia-Pacific, see Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640–1868 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Xing Hang, ‘The Shogun’s Chinese Partners: The Alliance between Tokugawa Japan and the Zheng Family in Seventeenth-Century Maritime East Asia’, Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 1 (2016): 111–36. We shall see that in an ecological context, entanglement is not limited to formal commercial or political intercourse.

16 Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore, 78. In fact, as archaeologists point out, even though few extinctions of marine animals have been conclusively related to human impact, fishing and coastal foraging had a demonstrable impact on marine ecosystems for tens of thousands of years. See Torben C. Rick and Jon M. Erlandson, Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems: A Global Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 12–13.

17 Amino Yoshihiko, Amino Yoshihiko chosakushū, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2007), 170.

18 A detailed account of the business’s development in the 17th century can be found in Geishikō, manuscript book by Ōtsuki Heisen, 1808, in National Diet Library, Tokyo, acc. no. 130–72, vol. 4, 25–8.

19 Ibid., vol. 4, 21. Ōtsuki Heisen, a cousin of the renowned physician Ōtsuki Gentaku, and headmaster of a Confucian school sponsored by the daimyo of Sendai, moreover propagated the expansion of whaling to untapped frontiers in the north and east, though with little success. See Terrence Jackson, Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016), 37.

20 Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore, 71–3.

21 ‘Kuroshio Extension’ describes the Kuroshio current after its passage over the Izu ridge in eastern Japan. On the open Pacific, the current’s latitudinal position fluctuates around 35.5° N. See Bo Qiu and Shuiming Chen, ‘Variability of the Kuroshio Extension Jet, Recirculation Gyre, and Mesoscale Eddies on Decadal Time Scales’, Journal of Physical Oceanography 35, no. 11 (2005): 2095. In this ‘mixed water region’, the Oyashio current replenishes nutrients from the north Pacific, creating abundant fish and whale grounds east of Honshu. See Sakurai Yasunori, ‘An Overview of the Oyashio Ecosystem’, Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 54, no. 23 (2007): 2532–8. David Howell has shown that offshore encounters in this convergence zone triggered changes at the highest level to Japan’s maritime policies. See David L. Howell, ‘Foreign Encounters and Informal Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies 40, no. 2 (2014): 298.

22 David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram, for example, speak of one ‘world ocean’ to understand the marine realm as a global commons in a truly trans-regional perspective. See David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds, Oceanic Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 26.

23 Ryan Tucker Jones, ‘Kelp Highways, Siberian Girls in Maui, and Nuclear Walruses: The North Pacific in a Sea of Islands’, Journal of Pacific History 49, no. 4 (2014): 373–95.

24 Haneda Masashi and Oka Mihoko, eds, A Maritime History of East Asia (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2019); François Gipouloux, La Méditerranée asiatique: villes portuaires et réseaux marchands en Chine, au Japon et en Asie du sud-est, XVIe–XXIe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 2009).

25 The ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ describes the phenomenon that each generation takes the contemporary state of marine fauna, or a subtle generational decline, for granted, therefore overlooking the extreme decline over centuries. See Jeffrey W. Bolster, ‘Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 33, 46–7.

26 Ryan Tucker Jones, ‘Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from below the Waves’, American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (2013): 352.

27 Ibid.

28 Agrarian analogies, just as much as the shallow historical focus of policy makers and resource managers – usually a few decades at best – misguide technocratic approaches to the ocean’s crises. See Jennifer Hubbard, ‘Mediating the North Atlantic Environment: Fisheries Biologists, Technology, and Marine Spaces’, Environmental History 18, no. 1 (2013): 88–100; Rick and Erlandson, Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems, 1–14.

29 Bathsheba Demuth, ‘The Walrus and the Bureaucrat: Energy, Ecology, and Making the State in the Russian and American Arctic, 1870–1950’, American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019): 487.

30 Bruno Latour, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 3, 5.

31 Increased temperatures in the upper layers of the ocean cause more intense storms. While the number of tropical cyclones is expected to decrease overall, the particularly violent ones will strike more frequently. See Ove Hoegh-Guldberg et al., ‘Impacts of 1.5°C of Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems’, in Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report … , ed. V. Masson-Delmotte et al. (IPCC, 2018), 178, 203–5, available online at https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/ (accessed 18 Sept. 2020).

32 Donald Worster et al., ‘“The Legacy of Conquest”, by Patricia Nelson Limerick: A Panel of Appraisal’, Western Historical Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1989): 317. For a compendium of frontier applications to the non-Western world, see Bradley J. Parker and Lars Rodseth, eds, Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005).

33 Peter Perdue, ‘From Turfan to Taiwan: Trade and War on Two Chinese Frontiers’, in Untaming the Frontier, ed. Parker and Rodseth, 27–51. Also see Mark Elliott, ‘Frontier Stories: Periphery as Center in Qing History’, Frontiers of History in China 9, no. 3 (2014): 336–60.

34 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 4, 37.

35 John Richards, for example, finds the modern rejection of growth limits rooted in an age of frontier expansion between 1500 and 1800. See John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Jason Moore’s Marxist analysis of the commodity frontier, again, sees the unsustainable shifting from resource to resource in the process of incorporation as formative for capitalism. See Jason W. Moore, ‘Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 23, no. 3 (2000): 409–33.

36 Lars Rodseth and Bradley J. Parker, ‘Introduction: Theoretical Considerations in the Study of Frontiers’, in Untaming the Frontier, ed. Parker and Rodseth, 3.

37 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, ‘From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History’, American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 816.

38 Noticeably, frontier closure has come to mean both depletion of frontier resources, and the solidification of national borders in the context of accentuating competition over those resources, as demonstrated in John G. Butcher, The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine Fisheries of Southeast Asia, c.1850–2000 (Singapore: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2004). See also Carmel Finley, ‘Global Borders and the Fish That Ignore Them: The Cold War Roots of Overfishing’, in Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History, ed. Erika Marie Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark Atwood Lawrence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 62–75.

39 Finley, ‘Global Borders’, 63–4. Kurk Dorsey shows how the regulation of international whaling struggled similarly with the limited reach of international agreements and national control. See Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).

40 Stuart Elden, ‘Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power’, Political Geography 34 (2013): 36–7.

41 The notorious dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea between China, Japan and Taiwan, for instance, started immediately after the discovery of fossil fuel deposits in 1970. See Reinhard Drifte, ‘The Japan–China Confrontation over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands – Between “Shelving” and “Dispute Escalation”’, Asia-Pacific Journal 12, issue 30, no. 3 (2014): 1–61.

42 Lynne D. Talley et al., Descriptive Physical Oceanography: An Introduction, 6th ed. (London: Academic Press, 2011), 304.

43 Oceanographers have shown that the confluence of the deep Ryukyu current east of Okinawa contributes a significant quantity of nitrate to the Kuroshio which, having left the shallow East China Sea, has lost some of its original nutrient content. See X.Y. Guo et al., ‘Spatial Variations in the Kuroshio Nutrient Transport from the East China Sea to South of Japan’, Biogeosciences 10, no. 10 (2013): 6404, 6412.

44 Morioka Yushi, Sergey Varlamov, and Miyazawa Yasumasa, ‘Role of Kuroshio Current in Fish Resource Variability off Southwest Japan’, Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (2019): 17942. On Kuroshio path fluctuations, see Qiu and Chen, ‘Variability of the Kuroshio Extension Jet’, 2096–7.

45 Kaishō ihō, Japanese Imperial Navy document, 1937, cited in Kawai Hideo, Kuroshio sōgū to ninchi no rekishi (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 1997), 298–9.

46 Tokyo Prefecture, ed., Edojidai no Hachijōjima (Tokyo: Tōkyō-to, 1964), 147.

47 Maps designed in Japan’s urban centres underrepresent such practical navigational knowledge, as local documents from Hachijō island suggest. See Kondō Tomizō, Hachijō jikki, ed. Kobayashi Hideo, 8 vols (Tokyo: Ryokuchisha, 1964), vol. 1, 30. On the routes of the Manila galleons, see William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton & Co, 1985), 199.

48 Most significantly so in Hachijō, as well as on the western coast of the Izu peninsula. See Tokyo Prefecture, Edojidai no Hachijōjima, 157–61; Masayuki Nakada, Izu to Kuroshio no michi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2001), 50, 81–3.

49 Amino Yoshihiko, ‘Les Japonais et la mer’, Annales 50, no. 2 (1995): 256–7.

50 Geishikō, vol. 4, 27.

51 Svend Foyn’s famous Norwegian whale gun, first used in 1864, had been predated by more rudimentary British and American prototypes that, by 1862, were in use in the seas around Japan. See J.N. Tønnessen, The History of Modern Whaling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 18–19. On earlier Japanese experiments with whale guns, see Holm, ‘Living with the Gods of the Sea’, 109–15.

52 As Jakobina Arch’s work shows, Japanese whaling enterprises by the 1830s were full-fledged capital enterprises that sold shares on future catch and figured as investment objects embedded in a greater market economy. See Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore, 85–7. On the development of early capitalist practices in New England whaling and its effect on indentured native labour, see Nancy Shoemaker, Living with Whales: Documents and Oral Histories of Native New England Whaling History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

53 Selma Huxley Barkham, ‘The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador 1536–1632 – A Summary’, Arctic 37, no. 4 (1984): 516; Brad Loewen and Vincent Delmas, ‘The Basques in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Adjacent Shores’, Canadian Journal of Archaeology/Journal Canadien d’Archéologie 36, no. 2 (2012): 213–66; Joost C.A. Schokkenbroek, Trying-out: An Anatomy of Dutch Whaling and Sealing in the Nineteenth Century, 1815–1885 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008), 29–36, 45–8.

54 Jeffrey W. Bolster, ‘Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008), 33; Judith H. Lund et al., American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 1667–1927 (New Bedford, MA: Old Dartmouth Historical Society – New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2010), 1.

55 The American Offshore Whaling Logbook database published by the New Bedford Whaling Museum is a dataset of 466,136 digitized logbook entries from between 1784 and 1920. See American Offshore Whaling Logbook database, ed. New Bedford Whaling Museum (2020), https://whalinghistory.org/ (accessed 7 June 2021). In the mid-19th century, American voyages represented around 70 per cent of all international whaling voyages. See Lund et al., American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 2.

56 Howell, ‘Foreign Encounters and Informal Diplomacy’, 298.

57 Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore, 25. The American Offshore Whaling Logbook database shows that the vast majority of whales caught on offshore voyages were sperm whales.

58 Roman and McCarthy find that even after the collapse of whale populations since the nineteenth century, cetaceans account for approximately 77 per cent of nutrients delivered by animals to surface waters of the Gulf of Maine, suggesting a much higher overall productivity in the past. See Joe Roman and James J. McCarthy, ‘The Whale Pump: Marine Mammals Enhance Primary Productivity in a Coastal Basin’, PLoS One 5, no. 10 (2010): e13255, 2–3.

59 Nadin Heé, ‘Negotiating Migratory Tuna: Territorialization of the Oceans, Trans-War Knowledge and Fisheries Diplomacy’, Diplomatic History 44, no. 3 (2020): 418–19. On tuna fisheries in the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, see Hiraoka Akitoshi, Japanese Advance into the Pacific Ocean: The Albatross and the Great Bird Rush (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 32–4.

60 I have elaborated on the scientific momentum gained from this colonial experiment in an earlier publication, Jonas Rüegg, ‘Mapping the Forgotten Colony: The Ogasawara Islands and the Tokugawa Pivot to the Pacific’, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 6, no. 2 (2017): 440–90.

61 Though the original colonization was planned and financed by a small group of European and American entrepreneurs, most of the original settlers in the Bonin Islands were Native Hawaiians. The community fluctuated as settlers joined from various Pacific islands. Many immigrants were retired whalers, a few had been dropped off after falling ill at sea, others had abandoned their ships to evade the harsh conditions of life aboard a whaler. On these Bonin Islanders, see David Chapman, The Bonin Islanders, 1830 to the Present: Narrating Japanese Nationality (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). On expansion and decline in the American whaling industry, see Lund et al., American Offshore Whaling Voyages.

62 Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore, 73–5.

63 Yoshihara Tomokichi, Bōnan Hogei (Ichikawa: Aizawa Bunko, 1982), 61. An eyewitness account of these experiments is given by physician Abe Rekisai in Zusho kōki, National Diet Library of Japan, acc. no. 特 1-2970, 38–48.

64 Geiyu sono hoka torihakaraikata no gi, 05/1863, in Egawa Family Papers, acc. no. S00220.

65 Based on the American Offshore Whaling Logbook database. Some caution is necessary in interpreting these data, as American whaling accounts for most, but not all pelagic whaling in the region. Especially after the mid-century, American vessels active in the Pacific changed their registration to Hawaiʻi, thus falling off the US statistics. See Lund et al., American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 3. In 1862–63, 12 foreign whaling vessels visited the Bonin Islands, of which nine sailed under the American, two under the Hawaiian, and one under the Russian flag. See Ogasawara-tō fūdo ryakki, 58, acc. no. 173-0185, in National Archives of Japan, Tokyo.

66 On the emergence of petroleum, see Brian Black, ‘Oil Creek as Industrial Apparatus: Re-Creating the Industrial Process through the Landscape of Pennsylvania’s Oil Boom’, Environmental History 3, no. 2 (1998): 210.

67 Helen M. Rozwadowski, ‘Arthur C. Clarke and the Limitations of the Ocean as a Frontier’, Environmental History 17, no. 3 (2012): 578–602; Hubbard, ‘Mediating the North Atlantic Environment’, 88–100.

68 Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geography of the Ocean (New York: Harper, 1855), 50. Penelope Hardy has pointed out that Maury’s work, saturated with biblical teleology and relying on non-academic collaborators, was contested in its own time. See Penelope K. Hardy, ‘Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist’, International Journal of Maritime History 28, no. 2 (2016): 407–9.

69 Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 13–17, 25–9, 76–9.

70 Jack Nicholls, ‘The Impact of the Telegraph on Anglo-Japanese Diplomacy during the Nineteenth Century’, New Voices 3 (2009): 1–22.

71 The systematic sounding of Port Lloyd in the Bonin Islands in 1863 was one of the first such projects undertaken by an exclusively Japanese team. See Rüegg, ‘Mapping the Forgotten Colony’, 440–90.

72 Nishimura Saburō, Challenger-gō tanken: kindai kaiyōgaku no makuake (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1992), 137–49; Ōshima Shōichi, ‘Kaitei jigata chōsa no rekishi to genjō’, Chigaku Zasshi 109, no. 3 (2000): 474–82.

73 Yochigaku kyōtei, vol. 1, 38; vol. 2, 13–14, in Waseda University Library, acc. no. ル 02_01012.

74 Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 43–6.

75 Kaitaku Ogasawara no hi, stone stela in Ōgiura hamlet, Ogasawara Village (Bonin Islands).

76 I have previously discussed this stela in Rüegg, ‘Mapping the Forgotten Colony’, 142–4. See also Chapman, The Bonin Islanders, 94–5. The circumstances of the stela’s erection and Obana’s acts are recorded in Ogasawara shima yōroku, vol. 6 (1879–80), 409.

77 Shiga Shigetaka, Nan’yō jiji (1887). On Shiga’s geographical imagination, see Kären Wigen, ‘Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji Mountaineering and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment’, Journal of Japanese Studies 31, no. 1 (2005): 10–15. While the word Tōnan Ajia for ‘Southeast Asia’ has circulated since the 1910s, the term Nan’yō or ‘South Sea’ remained the standard reference for the region until the collapse of the Japanese empire. See Tsuchiya Shinobu, Nan’yō bungaku no seisei: otozureru koto to omou koto (Tokyo: Shintensha, 2013), 9. The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi figured prominently as a cornerstone of Japan’s envisioned Oceanian sphere of influence, especially since King Kalākaua’s visit to Japan in 1881. See Lorenz Gonschor, ‘Ka Hoku o Osiania: Promoting the Hawaiian Kingdom as a Model for Political Transformation in Nineteenth-Century Oceania’, in Agents of Transculturation: Border-Crossers, Mediators, Go-Betweens, ed. Sebastian Jobs and Gesa Mackenthun (Münster and New York: Waxmann, 2013), 163.

78 Enomoto Takeaki propagated South Sea expansionism far beyond the intellectual elite. Hiraoka Akitoshi further points out that many of the novelists that propagated expansionism in their writing were former activists in the so-called popular rights movement of the 1870s. See Hiraoka Akitoshi, Ahōdori o otta Nihonjin: ikkaku senkin no yume to Nan’yō shinshutsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2015), 24–31; Mark R. Peattie, Nan’yō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988), 7.

79 Shiga Shigetaka, Nan’yō Jiji (Tokyo: Maruzen Shōsha, 1887), 11.

80 Paul Kreitman, ‘Feathers, Fertilizers, and States of Nature: Uses of Albatrosses in the U.S.–Japan Borderlands’ (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2015), 56, 146–55; Hiraoka, Ahōdori o otta Nihonjin, 22, 143. On these frontier businesses, also see Hiraoka Akitoshi, Ahōdori to teikoku nihon no kakudai: nan’yō no shimajima e no shinshutsu kara shinryaku e (Tokyo: Akashishoten, 2012); Hiraoka, Japanese Advance into the Pacific Ocean.

81 M.W. Cawthorn, Maori, Whales and “Whaling”: An Ongoing Relationship (Wellington: Department of Conservation, 2000), 1–17.

82 The permanent bird-hunting colony in Torishima met an abrupt end in 1902, when a volcano eruption devastated the island, killing all its inhabitants. See ‘Inhabitants of Island All Killed by Volcano’, New York Times, 19 Aug. 1902, 1.

83 Moore, ‘Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy’, 411, 428–9.

84 Nadin Heé, ‘Tuna as an Economic Resource and Symbolic Capital in Japan’s “Imperialism of the Sea”’, in Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives, ed. Kowner Rotem et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 215–18.

85 Jakobina Arch, ‘Whale Meat in Early Postwar Japan: Natural Resources and Food Culture’, Environmental History 21, no. 3 (2016): 468–70; Finley, ‘Global Borders’, 66–7.

86 Stephen J. Gallagher et al., ‘The Pliocene to Recent History of the Kuroshio and Tsushima Currents: A Multi-Proxy Approach’, Progress in Earth and Planetary Science 2, no. 1 (2015): 18.

87 Tokyo University Ocean Alliance, ed., Umi no daikoku Nippon (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2011), 24.

88 Ibid.

89 UNCLOS III, Part V, Article 57.

90 Drifte, ‘The Japan–China Confrontation’, 29.

91 ‘Erdgasstreit im östlichen Mittelmeer’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 30 May 2021, https://www.nzz.ch/international/tuerkei-griechenland-wettlauf-um-erdgas-im-mittelmeer-ld.1571955 (accessed 17 June 2021).

92 ‘Submissions to the Commission: Submission by Japan’, in United Nations, Oceans & Law of the Sea, https://www.un.org/Depts/los/clcs_new/submissions_files/jpn08/jpn_execsummary.pdf (accessed 28 Aug. 2020); Tokyo University Ocean Alliance, Umi no daikoku Nippon, 28.

93 China controls the vast majority of worldwide rare metal production, and it has a monopoly on separation and purification of rare mineral ores. As of 2018, 58 per cent of Japan’s rare earth imports originated from China. See Andrew DeWit, ‘Decarbonization and Critical Raw Materials: Some Issues for Japan’, Asia-Pacific Journal 3 (2021): 13.

94 METI, Kaiyō enerugyii, kōbutsu shigen kaihatsu keikaku (2019), 17–18, available online at https://www.meti.go.jp/press/2018/02/20190215004/20190215004-2.pdf (accessed 27 Mar. 2020). Noticeably, the quest for rare minerals, driven by conventional resource corporations such as Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC), is inextricably tied to the exploration of subaqueous fossil fuels. See JOGMEC, ‘Corporate Profile’, April 2020, http://www.jogmec.go.jp/content/300196198.pdf (accessed 28 Apr. 2021). Bold estimates expect as much as 126 billion m³ of methane ice and a value of around US$100 billion in rare minerals within Japan’s EEZ. See Yamada Yoshihiko, Kanzen zukai umi kara mita sekai keizai (Tokyo: Daiyamondosha, 2016), 86, 98.

95 Richards, Unending Frontier, 22.

96 Planetary boundaries describe the ‘biophysical constraints to the growth of the economy’, based on the observation that passing certain thresholds of pressure upon the environment can trigger abrupt and chaotic transformations in the earth system. See Johan Rockström et al., ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Nature 461, no. 7263 (2009): 472–5. On ecological issues around deep-sea mining, see Holly J. Niner et al., ‘Deep-Sea Mining with No Net Loss of Biodiversity – An Impossible Aim’, Frontiers in Marine Science 5, no. 53 (2018): 1–10.