On the Genealogy of Kokujin: Critical Thinking about the Formation of Bankoku and Modern Japanese Perceptions of Blackness

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Japanese perceptions of blackness and modern knowledge about bankoku (myriad lands) were formed in early modern Japan. From about the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals absorbed the Western sciences, technology, and medicine through contact with the Dutch in Nagasaki. This field of study is called rangaku (Dutch studies). In this context, the Japanese intellectuals expanded their knowledge about the world – specifically, geographical spaces and numerous races. During this process, they shaped their ethnic and racial stereotypes, including racist ones about black Africans. The idea of black inferiority became deeply embedded into Japanese geographical and anthropological knowledge. I use Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘genealogy’ as an analytical framework for a diagnosis of the current condition. My genealogical investigation of the concept of kokujin (blacks) reveals the historical processes in which Japan’s indigenous, pre-contact sangoku (three-land) cosmology became invalidated and marginalized from modernist discourses on bankoku. This approach enables a critique of modernity itself, which has been associated for centuries with global distributions of various forms of Western knowledge and power – those upon which our present-day practices and discourses still depend.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tim Rommen, Carol Muller, and Jim Sykes for their comments on early versions of this article. I am also grateful to anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on the manuscript.

Notes

¹ When Japanese names appear in this text, the surname comes before the given name per standard usage in Japan, except for those of authors of scholarly articles or books originally written in English. All translations from Japanese are my own, with the exception of those already available in English.

² For example, see Davis, Inhuman Bondage; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Thornton, Africa and Africans.

³ I consider servants and slaves together throughout the article, as both were undoubtedly laborers in bondage. In practice, Portuguese and Spanish traders and Jesuits bought, traded, and exploited those black Africans called ‘Kaffirs’, ‘Caffres’, or ‘Ethiopians’, who were considered geboku or genin (low-rank persons) in early modern Japan.

⁴ As of September 2017, the number of people in Japan (including resident foreigners) was approximately 126.67 million, while that of resident aliens in Japan was approximately two million. See Statistics Bureau of Japan, ‘Jinkō suikei’.

⁵ For ongoing debate about the issue of blackface in contemporary Japanese popular culture, see Fellezs, ‘This Is Who I Am’, 345–47.

⁶ See Aoki, Nihonjin no Afurika ‘hakken’; Fujita, Afurika ‘hakken’; Furukawa, ‘Nihon-Afurika kōshōshi’; Leupp, ‘Images of Black People’; Masuda, ‘Nihon-Afurika kōryūshi’; Miyoshi, As We Saw Them; Rubin, Black Nanban; Russell, Nihonjin no kokujin-kan; ‘Excluded Presence’; ‘The Other Other’.

⁷ Sterling, Babylon East, 5.

⁸ Ibid., 29.

⁹ The journal of Nihon Afurika Gakkai (Japan Association for African Studies, established in 1964). See volume 72.

¹⁰ See Masuda, ‘Nihon-Afurika kōryūshi’.

¹¹ Ibid., 53.

¹² For example, Aoki, Nihonjin no Afurika ‘hakken’; Fujita, ‘Edo jidai ni okeru Nihonjin no Afurika-kan’; Afurika ‘hakken’; Morikawa, Minami Afurika to Nihon; Japan and Africa; Okakura and Kitagawa, Nihon-Afurika kōryūshi.

¹³ Furukawa, ‘Nihon-Afurika kōshōshi’, 79.

¹⁴ Garland, ‘What Is a “History of the Present”?’, 367.

¹⁵ Foucault, ‘The Concern for Truth’, 262.

¹⁶ Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 119.

¹⁷ Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 83.

¹⁸ Garland, ‘What Is a “History of the Present”?’, 372.

¹⁹ Olson and Shadle, Historical Dictionary of the British Empire, 615.

²⁰ See Kawamura, Kinsei Nihon no sekaizō, 19.

²¹ Cited in Cooper, They Came to Japan, 66.

²² Foreign boats had been known in Japan as Tōsen (‘Tang boats’) for hundreds of years, even after the end of the Tang dynasty (618–907). See Howe, The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy, 3.

²³ For more on the speculation about an African presence in Japan before 1546, see Furukawa, ‘Nihon-Afurika kōshōshi’, 78; Russell ‘The Other Other’, 86.

²⁴ Fujita, Afurika ‘hakken’,2.

²⁵ Cited in Fujita, Afurika ‘hakken’2.

²⁶ Fujita, Afurika ‘hakken’, 2.

²⁷ Ōta, Shinchō kōki, ge, 167.

²⁸ For the study of Alessandro Valignano, see Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits.

²⁹ Nelson, ‘Slavery in Medieval Japan’, 467.

³⁰ Nelson, ‘Slavery in Medieval Japan’, 468.

³¹ Leupp, ‘Images of Black People’, 3.

³² Nelson, ‘Slavery in Medieval Japan’, 463.

³³ The senior Jesuits held a meeting in Nagasaki in September 1598. In this meeting, they discussed the issue of slavery in Japan.

³⁴ Cited in Nelson, ‘Slavery in Medieval Japan’, 469.

³⁵ Clemons, ‘The History of Blacks in Japan’, 33–34.

³⁶ Russell, ‘Excluded Presence’, 40.

³⁷ Wagatsuma and Yoneyama, Henken no kōzō, 97. See also Russell, ‘Excluded Presence’, 40.

³⁸ Wagatsuma and Yoneyama, Henken no kōzō, 93.

³⁹ Russell, ‘The Other Other’, 87.

⁴⁰ Leupp, ‘Images of Black People’, 3.

⁴¹ Russell, ‘The Other Other’, 86.

⁴² Leupp, ‘Images of Black People’, 1; Toby, ‘Three Realms/Myriad Countries’, 18.

⁴³ Cited in Ōta, Shinchō kōki, ge, 141.

⁴⁴ See Toby, ‘Three Realms/Myriad Countries’, 20–21. The term refers to the Iberian presence in Japan during the sixteenth century.

⁴⁵ Toby, ‘Three Realms/Myriad Countries’, 19–20.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 25.

⁴⁷ Cited in Leupp, ‘Images of Black People’, 4.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 3.

⁵⁰ See Fujita, ‘Edo jidai ni okeru Nihonjin no Afurika-kan’, 249; Afurika ‘hakken’, 46–49.

⁵¹ Hirokawa, Nagasaki bunkenroku.

⁵² Powell and Anesaki, Health Care in Japan, 21.

⁵³ Hirokawa, Nagasaki bunkenroku.

⁵⁴ For a detailed list of the Dutch and Japanese who could enter Dejima, see Shiraishi, Nagasaki dejima no yūjo, 58–59.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 76.

⁵⁶ Nagasaki Shidankai, Nagasaki meishō zue, 582.

⁵⁷ Kawamura, Kinsei Nihon no sekaizō, 84.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 91.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 88.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 95.

⁶¹ For multidisciplinary studies of the European perceptions of the concept of Terra Australis, see Scott et al., European Perceptions of Terra Australis. This concept was widespread in European geography from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

⁶² Cited in Fujita, Afurika ‘hakken’, 64–65.

⁶³ See Nishikawa, Yonjūnikoku jinbutsu zusetsu.

⁶⁴ Kjørholt, ‘Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market’.

⁶⁵ See Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents.

⁶⁶ See Morishima, Kōmōzatsuwa, 20.

⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁸ Leupp, ‘Images of Black People’, 6.

⁶⁹ Gordon, A Modern History of Japan, 50–51; Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 274–79.

⁷⁰ Cited in Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, 61.

⁷¹ Cited in Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, 61.

⁷² See Kume, Tokumei zenken taishi, 213–17.

⁷³ Fukuzawa, ‘Shōchū bankoku ichiran’, 462–63.

⁷⁴ See Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate nativa liber.

⁷⁵ For the study of the usage of ‘race’ in educational practice in the early Meiji period, see Takezawa, ‘Translating and Transforming “Race”’.

⁷⁶ Fukuzawa, Bunmeiron no gairyaku, 25–26.

⁷⁷ Cited in Leupp, ‘Images of Black People’, 9.

⁷⁸ See Russell, ‘The Other Other’, 95.

⁷⁹ See Yamashita, Spencer to Nihon kindai.

⁸⁰ Russell, ‘The Other Other’, 96.

⁸¹ Banzai, Kindai Nihon ni okeru jinshu, minzoku sutereotaipu, 92.

⁸² James, The Black Jacobins, 17.

⁸³ Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 3.

⁸⁴ Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, 81.

⁸⁵ Nippon TV, Zettai ni waratte wa ikenai.

⁸⁶ See, e.g., Amamiya, ‘Nihon niwa Nihon no kachikan’.

⁸⁷ See Masuda, ‘Nihon-Afurika kōryūshi’, 53.

⁸⁸ Aoki, Nihonjin no Afurika ‘hakken’, 264.