Talk title: “The Boreal Pacific in the Making of Japanese Science”
Abstract
Japan is an archipelago in the Pacific, though its history remains scarcely linked to the Pacific world. This talk foregrounds locations in the Sea of Okhotsk to discuss how a new set of questions arises once historians turn their attention to the material and ecological properties of the ocean and to the metabolic and intellectual processes formed in Japan’s oceanic frontiers. How did currents, winds and migrating animals shape human interaction in the northwestern Pacific? When and where did Japan become an empire? Who were the all but invisible actors at the forefront of this process, and where are their archives? I argue that engaging with the oceanic context of nineteenth-century Japan prompts a reevaluation of its archives, under questions that are otherwise asked pertaining to colonial and post-colonial places of Oceania.
