In: ‘Asiatische Studien / Etudes Asiatiques’ 1/2015, p. 47–71.
Although it had no military presence in East Asia, Switzerland was the first landlocked European country to conclude an unequal treaty with the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan in 1864. Aimé Humbert, initiator and leader of the Swiss delegation, spent 10 months in Japan waiting for the conclusion of the treaty. He is recognized not only for the significance of his mission regarding the economic relations between Switzerland and Japan, but also for his unique documentation of bakumatsu Japan’s popular culture in his travel account Le Japon Illustré (1870). This paper discusses Humbert’s perception of Japanese society and politics, and analyzes his correspondence from Japan. His observations must be seen in context with the orientalist discourse in Europe and Swiss domestic politics in the 19th century. I argue that Humbert projected his value concepts as a Swiss bourgeois, liberalist and Protestant into Japan. For example, there is a parallelism between Humbert’s criticism of the Buddhist clergy and the liberalist’s anti-Catholicism. Humbert’s praising Japan’s culture and its commercial potential, once liberated from despotism, was implicit in his strategic situation: even though he profited from the West’s gunboat diplomacy, Humbert did not need to justify formal colonial ambitions of his government, but instead propagated ideas about a “democratization” of trade with East Asia.
