For several decades now, Joshua Fogel has taught us in the China field what it needs to know about Sino-Japanese cultural relations in well-researched, well-written accounts that sparkle with clear translations of primary sources. Maiden Voyage: The Senzaimaru and the Creation of Modern Sino-Japanese Relations is no exception. It is the compelling story of how in 1862 the Japanese of the late Tokugawa period bought a western ship, hired a crew to sail them to Shanghai, spent two months observing the port, then sailed home to process the information. The book also deals briefly with two subsequent Japanese voyages, and with modern Japanese cinematic treatments of the first voyage. The story is very well told, with all the loving touches of a fine historian absorbed in his craft. We read of the Lloyd's of London Registry records of the ship before it was sold to the Japanese, and the genealogy of the Dutch consular official who served as the unofficial port agent for the ship. But what is most interesting about the book is not the quality of its narrative—which is very high—but the fascinating moment it highlights, a moment when the early modern met the modern, and the Japanese met the nineteenth century.
Fogel is careful to point out that the origins of the mission lay not in the energies of modernizing post-Meiji Japan, but in the older world of the Tokugawa. The organizer of the mission was the Nagasaki magistrate, the senior participants were samurai, the names of the merchants involved all ended in “ya,” a remnant of the Tokugawa caste system. This was an age when the Japanese who went to sea did so on fishing boats, not vessels meant for international voyages, and samurai needed the services of an experienced foreign crew to get them to Shanghai. The interactions Japanese had with the Chinese they met were through traditional “brush conversations,” where each side wrote in the characters common to their languages. Fogel is scrupulous in his account to avoid modernist overtones.
Yet the Japanese identified China on their first sighting as the land where the Opium war was fought, the opening moment of China's modern history. One voyager described his first view of China, along one bank of the Yangzi:
There is a row of cannon emplacements on the southern bank, emerging in an uneven form; at strategic points, one can see that they have been effectively fortified, but there are no cannons in them. The captain said that twenty years ago, not only was this area outfitted with cannon, but the houses were crammed together like sardines. At that time the British wanted to enter the port of Shanghai; because it was being defended, they could not do so. So the British set fire and burned down people's homes and the cannons were snatched up. Now only the emplacements remain. (62)
Normally, contemplating the early modern period is like peering through a dense fog—not unlike the one the Senzaimaru encountered on its first day out of Nagasaki—searching for the outlines of something recognizably modern. Here, the situation is reversed: we are seeing post–Opium War modern China, through early modern Japanese eyes.
It is important to keep the chronologies of the story straight because, as Fogel argues in the last chapter of the book, twentieth-century treatments of the event have not always done so. The best example here is the case of the Taiping. As military men, the samurai on the Senzaimaru mission were interested in warfare going on just outside Shanghai at the time of their visit, battles between the Taiping general Li Xiucheng 李秀成, and the western-led Ever Victorious Army. A bit more might have been said about the battles, as the history of the Ever Victorious Army is fairly well known. But this is not crucial, for as the historical record and Fogel make very clear, the men of the Senzaimaru never saw a battle, or met with either Taiping or Ever Victorious Army leaders. This did not prevent a movie made during World War II from depicting a meeting between the leader of the Senzaimaru group, Takasugi Shinsaku, and a leader of the Taiping. In the movie an alliance is formed between the samurai and the Taiping leader, an opponent of a corrupt and decadent Qing dynasty barely propped up by foreign powers. In the last scene, both Takasugi and his erstwhile Taiping friend deliver a statement in their native tongue, as the other murmurs “I understand.” Fogel comments tartly: “The thrust of this comment is exactly the opposite, as if to say ‘I actually don't understand a word of what you have just uttered, but what I now understand to be truly important is that Asians band together against the Western invader’” (182). That such a bizarre meeting occurred could only be believed in a movie shaped by wartime propaganda.
As Fogel argues, the Japanese on the Senzaimaru wanted to learn about China and the west. But actually, what they encountered in Shanghai was neither Chinese nor western, but a hybrid more characteristic of the period than of either country. The growth of large port cities, sustained by seaborne trade (whether propelled by wind or steam), with resident diplomatic representatives was characteristic not just of the China coast, or of Asia, but of the entire world in the nineteenth century, as Jurgen Osterhammel has argued in his The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. The nineteenth century had arguably not yet come to Japan, but was very much in evidence in Shanghai, and Japanese reactions suggested patterns of what was to come. The Japanese were amazed at the “forest of masts” they encountered in Shanghai harbor; they were sympathetic, if a bit disdainful, of the humiliation the the Chinese suffered at the hands of the west. They observed western arrogance, but found the western diplomatic system useful and found themselves admiring the cleanliness and order of the western concessions. It was through the assistance of western diplomats that they obtained an interview with the Shanghai Daotai. Like time-travellers from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the Japanese on the Senzaimaru had a vision of what was to come.
All in all, the Japanese did pretty well in Shanghai. They did not sell all the goods they had brought with them, but they learned much of what there was to know about Shanghai. And through meticulous research and careful presentation, we learn what there is to know about the trip in Maiden Voyage.
