How did you come to work on Japan?
I grew up in the Midwest, in Ohio, so it was certainly not an automatic thing. No one in my environment knew much about East Asia, or went to East Asia. But my father was a physicist and when I was thirteen, he got an invitation to spend half a year in Japan, and decided that we were going. So he took his wife and three daughters and spent six months on the outskirts of Kobe. My sisters and I went to a Canadian school where we studied Japanese, and that was the beginning of my introduction to Japan. I turned fourteen the day we arrived. It was so romantic in my mind – some strange Japanese man walked up to me in the train station and handed me a flower. Somehow Japan just resonated with me. You two will know what I mean – we have all chosen places to study through various processes. It is still somewhat mysterious to me how that happens exactly. I think that in my case, the sober, melancholy aesthetic of Japan is what pulled me in. It is a very quiet, reflective mood that is celebrated and condoned, and which has matured within Japanese poetry, arts, tea ceremony, gardens and so on. I think that Americans generally do appreciate these things in middle age, but in the teenage American culture of the 1970s there was no space for that. It was brash and loud: we were supposed to wear smiley faces and fluorescent colors. So it was a revelation that there was a place in the world where you can be quiet and even sad, and that this mood was considered to be the wellspring of Japanese poetry.
How did this move beyond your teenage years?
I started studying Japanese seriously, and it never really let go of me. I went back to Japan in my senior year of high school. I was only sixteen – I lived with a Japanese family and went to a Japanese high school. I was quite in over my head, but the one subject for which I needed credits in order to graduate from my high school in time back home, aside from PE, was history! So that became the subject I studied, even though I did not particularly care about history at the time. I loved math, I loved chemistry, and I loved music. I had never paid any attention to social studies at all. But I took this class with a very gifted young teacher. He was from a particular generation of pacifist social activists, and he instilled an appreciation of the hardships of the Japanese peasantry. He made history come alive for me.
How was history taught in Japan at the time?
They had just started on the Tokugawa period when I got there. I had no idea what ‘Tokugawa’ meant – I didn’t know the Japanese equivalent of George Washington. I sat in the heat of July in Osaka, poring over dictionaries, trying to make sense of the first pages of the textbook that we were to start reading in school that fall. In hindsight, it would have been smarter to ask for a children’s history book with glosses and pictures and simple stories. My fellow students had of course had years with such books before they hit the one we were using. But it just didn’t occur to me, or to my host family, that it might have been helpful. So it took me a long time to get oriented, but there was something about that experience of slow reading that… who knows?
Is that the adventurous approach to history that you took back with you to the US?
I came back to the States, and became an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. I majored in Japanese, but soon discovered that Japanese language becomes Japanese literature at some point, after you have taken a number of years of instruction in it. But literature never felt quite right to me, so I kept veering towards history classes. And then, towards the end of my undergraduate years, I discovered geography. Michigan was one of those universities that still had a vibrant geography department at the time. It closed a few years later.
What did a geography perspective contribute to your training?
We were shown – and I will never forget this – an aerial photograph of a suburban cul-de-sac. It was presented to us as an analogy to the capillaries in the human body. The cul-de-sac was the endpoint of the circulatory system: it was where the oxygen was being delivered. The heart was driving and bringing people their supplies. On the map, it was all laid out - this is where people rest, this is where they eat, and this is where the trash comes out. It was an aerial view of how our society is put together. I found it so compelling at the time. Without even really knowing it, you are following a muse, seeing pieces of a puzzle that is not yet put together. This was one of those pieces. So I graduated from college with a degree in Japanese language and literature, an advanced understanding of Japanese, a beginning exposure to geography, a real interest in history, and no idea what to do.
So what was the next step?
I worked in the original Borders Bookstore before it franchised. I saved up just enough money to go hitchhiking in Japan the following summer. I had received a small translation prize for my honors thesis, which was a translation of a Japanese novella. The prize was a thousand dollars, and I basically lived off that for a whole summer. It was embarrassing, really. I mooched shamelessly, slept on people’s floors, hitched rides, and rode night trains. But I had a great time. I worked at an organic dairy farm, and I talked to all kinds of activists trying to figure out the biggest question I had at the time: if you are a moral person in this polluted capitalist-industrialist environment, what can you do? How do you contribute? What could an outsider, an American, possibly do? But by the end of the summer this question had shifted. It had turned into: where can I go to really, fully master Japanese and learn something useful? Otherwise, it just didn’t make any sense to me to try and plug into the Japanese world. I knew I had to be able to read and understand more than I did. So I started looking for graduate schools. I came back from Japan somehow convinced that this was the next step.
And you ended up applying to geography programs.
I liked geography because it was earthy in the most literal way. I had taken a course in economics as an undergraduate. I don’t know if either of you ever did that, but I found it an eye-opening experience, although perhaps not in the way you would expect. I walked up to the professor about halfway through the course, because I was concerned about the energy crisis. I mean, just imagine the Detroit environment of the late 1970s. There had been oil shocks, serious competition from Japan, and the auto industry was starting to collapse. So I asked him how one deals with the energy shortage, as an economist. And he looked at me with great surprise and said, well, as long as the supply curve and the demand curve are allowed to meet at the natural price, there is no shortage. I more or less just turned around and walked away, and decided that economics had nothing to offer me. I thought, if that is the limit of our horizon and vision - the price as it is today - you take the future out of the equation. Burn it up, burn through it, it doesn’t matter. Geography, by contrast, was a very different world. It tackled similar questions but approached them differently, and approached them in a way I had not encountered elsewhere. And the people were fascinating – telling stories of walking through the jungle on fieldwork, of learning new languages, but mostly of having a holistic view of how the world is put together.
Is there perhaps also something about the perspective of geography that allows for a ‘larger’, or at least a transnational, approach to history? You were given different tools than most. Did it help you to develop a perspective that was not confined to particular areas or timeframes?
That is a really good question, and one I have not thought about in quite those terms. The one thing that was consistent for me through my very eclectic training was Japanese – all the way from the age of thirteen, all the way through college, and into graduate school. It stayed with me through shifts from literature into geography, and eventually into history. Japanese was my language. But I do think you are onto something. Historians are anchored by their archives. And archives, for better or worse, are often national. They were created by states, and are preserved by states. They are traditional institutions. But the geographers I trained with at Berkeley included men like Jim Parsons, the last of an earlier generation with an old-school field orientation. In their view, your working materials include not only texts and interviews, but everything you can see with your eyes. Parsons, the senior professor who taught the field methodology course, had a background in journalism. He and his friends occasionally challenged each other: to pick a spot on the map, fly there for one weekend, and come home with a story, with material for an article. We used to jokingly call it ‘lunch-stop geography’. But there was something to it. They pressed us to realize how much we could learn by being really attuned to the environment around us, by asking sharp questions about the economy, and by being fearless about driving down dirt paths if that is where we needed to go … it was really quite an experience. Mr. Parson’s philosophy was, go in with your camera, smile at whoever you see, and retreat if you are unwelcome. There was a sense that the archive extends outdoors, that it includes material artifacts, living plants, built environments, and patterns that you can study at many different scales. You can walk through them, drive through them, study them on aerial photos and maps, or talk to the people living in them. As long as you have one key: the relevant language. As long as you have the right language for where you are going, the field geographer’s archive is open and public in the most fundamental sense.
That must have helped to move your scholarship in a broader, more encompassing direction.
In that sense you are right – I could not have skipped that formative period. And my timing was very fortunate. I had a historian of the first order on my PhD committee at Berkeley, Thomas Smith, who had written a brilliant book on the agrarian origins of modern Japan.Footnote 1 He was of the generation who had been trained to work in Japan during the Allied Occupation. Having someone like that vouch for me when I entered the job market was invaluable. But also, I finished my dissertation in 1990 right as Japan was peaking. The Japanese real estate bubble had actually burst in 1989, but I don’t think people knew that when they were funding academic positions. Interest in Japan was at an all-time high in the United States – it was probably similar to being a Russian historian entering the field in the 1950s, with the Cold War just starting, leading to a voracious academic interest in this powerful and potentially dangerous country. I still have notes in a folder somewhere of my first lecture in modern Japanese history. It includes a graph showing that if the Japanese economy would continue growing at its current rate, it would surpass the United States in another ten years or so. That is what it looked like at the time. What really happened, of course, was that Japan plunged into a recession that it still has not come out of.
But meanwhile, you had a job. What was Duke University like at that time?
The timing was fortuitous in more ways than one. Around the time I started at Duke, the spatial turn was taking hold. I was a young professional in the first years of my career, and Duke was a hotbed of social theory and cultural studies. It exposed me in a very bracing way to a lot of new questions about epistemology. Critiquing metageography was a project that was conceived there for good reason, because people were very boldly tackling other big received notions – they were confronting orientalism, ‘mediterraneanising’ the academy by connecting disciplines and areas… it generally was a time of excitedly unpacking inherited wisdom in a cultural and spatial vein. Spatial thinking started to be appealing to a lot of people – and I had just come out of a geography department! So really, I had been reading spatial theory just a few years ahead of other people. I was in a perfect position to jump on that train.
Was this the start of the Myth of Continents?Footnote 2
That is hard to say, but it was certainly a great environment in which to continue the conversation about metageography. Right after we published the Myth of Continents, there was a call issued by the Ford Foundation for innovative proposals to ‘revitalize area studies.’ The Ford Foundation, analysts now say, was suffering from donor fatigue after funding foreign languages and regional concentrations for many years through the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was less compelling to channel grants toward centers designed to teach about world regions that had been constructed along Cold War lines. Area studies centers had turned into impressive institutions of higher learning that had an amazing ability to produce scholars who knew a great deal about some place in the world, but they were very expensive to run. All that language training is resource-intensive, and the Ford Foundation in particular had provided a lot of funding to make it happen. So under the rhetorical umbrella of looking for new ideas and innovative approaches for redesigning area studies, they put out a call for proposals.Footnote 3 Only one proposal was allowed to go forward from each campus, so there had to be a campus selection committee. All campuses in the United States could apply, and they were going to fund around thirty proposals for two years, and that pool could reapply for an additional three years. Martin [Lewis] and I submitted a proposal at Duke that managed to survive through all those hoops. Our idea was simple: oceans connect. As I metaphorically put it, area studies is like a dinner party, and most of us we have been sitting at the same table for decades, talking to other people over our shared interest in some continentally based region. But what if we all turned our chairs the other way? What if, for instance, a Japan scholar like me started talking to the Latin Americanists, who know something about the Pacific? Like them, I also knew something about the Pacific. There was this large body of water between us, but what if we rearranged the map so we could talk across that ocean? It did not take massive new resources to start those conversations – all we needed in the short run, really, was what our administrators liked to call ‘tea and cookies’ money, enough to pay for some dinners and speakers. It worked; people did come together around novel zones like the Mediterranean, the Pacific basin, or the inland seas of Eurasia. In the latter case, we had a group of politically minded people interested in questions around the Aral and Caspian seas. We also had a very vibrant group working on the Atlantic. This was a fascinating experience and interesting training ground for me in a lot of ways.
Is this project that made you into a world historian?
Over the course of this five-year project, I learned that who shows up when you offer tea and cookies, as well as who among the faculty are on board with the initiative, determines what kind of conversation you have. For the Atlantic, there were a lot of anthropologists and people from the English department who were interested in circum-Atlantic performance, the black Atlantic, and the history of slavery. That monstrous event, the slave trade, set in motion a massive migration across the Atlantic that truly tied all the continents together. The forced movement of Africans out of their homeland, and their subsequent contributions to music and food and art and the economy, had reverberations all the way around the region. The legacy of their presence is as vast as the crimes committed against them. This has left incredibly rich material for the anthropologist, the student of literature, and the historian, so what happened in the Atlantic group was really interesting to me. Their cultural history approach was very substantive. The Mediterranean group brought together a subtly different group, including classicists and literary people with a strong postmodern bent. They read poetry and critical theory, and talked about mediterraneanising knowledge, so that group kind of spun out in a different direction. The Pacific, interestingly, was in some ways the hardest group to keep together. And it was only then that I realized that while we may work on countries around the Pacific Rim, few of us at that time really faced outward across the Pacific in our thinking or our research. And it is not easy to do so, either.
You said in your Reischauer lectures that the Pacific is still in the process of being discovered.
Yes! One of the things I suggested that the Pacific group read in the first year was a then new historical atlas of the Pacific by Colin McEvedy.Footnote 4 Do you know his atlases? They are a little dated now, but there is nothing like them. McEvedy traced the migrations of peoples and the rise and fall of states in very clear, simple color schemes. He made four atlases for Europe and the Mediterranean region, focusing on ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern history, all in great detail and very fine time slices. After finishing this series centered on the Mediterranean, he decided to try his hand at a historical atlas centered on the Pacific. It was one of the few works out there at the time. But some of the people in the group rightly pointed out that nobody who lived there in the 1500s or 1600s had that Pacific orientation. To them, the Pacific did not exist except as an imposed framework. They considered it imperial knowledge construction, an imposed history. And I thought, yes, you are right—but we also need to try on that framework, as historians, if we want to know what was going on! We do need to plot the migration of peoples from East Asia. If you look at McEvedy’s population distribution map for 1500, on the eve of the Pacific region being knitted together, ninety percent of the people are on the Asian side. The imbalance is so dramatic. That side has peopled the Pacific Rim. So reading McEvedy and others exposed me to empirical material I had never been exposed to. But learning the reactions of this critical group of scholars, hearing why they thought that was an inadequate framework, was likewise unforgettable. And I think all of that represented a kind of working-out of some of the ideas we had posed in the Myth of Continents.
Did you write the book in order to get more regional specialists to ‘turn their chairs’?
Part of what we were saying with the book, was: ‘Look, let’s treat geographical constructs as critically as anything else. As academics, we have all been trained to subject our texts to critical analysis. Interrogating social concepts has become ingrained in the DNA of the social sciences. In history, we teach students to think critically about the veracity, the truth-claims, and the different interests behind our documents. We know how to do these kinds of operations. Now we need to do that with our mental maps as well.’ Maps are the tools with which we think about the world, but we do not often focus on their categories. They are so readily at hand that we simply do not turn that lens onto them. I think Martin was really writing a manifesto in the first chapter when he said that big geography is not taken seriously as a scholarly endeavor. On many campuses, the teaching of world geography is an assignment nobody wants – it is generally the course given to the most junior faculty member, because ‘Geography 101’ is considered rudimentary. But if you interrogate the canon as you teach it, really pertinent questions arise: why do we teach the world in these regional categories? Do they cohere? How did these regions (the areas of area studies) come into being? Basically, we wanted to open a new terrain for this kind of critical project—one that was already familiar to people in history, among other fields. Interestingly, the response to the book has been warmer from historians than it was from geographers. It still gets assigned a lot – people use chapters from the book in their history courses because it still strikes a chord, creates a teaching moment.
What about the reception from critical geographers, or historical geographers? One would imagine that they would be more comfortable with this sort of critique.
I imagine so, and they may well have been. But Martin and I were institutionally separated from geography by then. Partly for social and institutional reasons, and partly for intellectual reasons, The Myth of Continents primarily opened doors to further conversations with historians. I was invited to participate in Jerry Bentley’s and Renate Bridenthal’s AHA Conference, ‘Interactions: Regional Studies, Global Processes, and Historical Analysis’, held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in March 2001, which in turn opened the door to a subsequent workshop on Seascapes.Footnote 5 And then they asked me to co-edit the volume that came out of the Seascapes project, which I felt was an amazing opportunity.Footnote 6 All those things were a direct result of writing The Myth of Continents.
Is this also how the AHR Forum Oceans of History came into being?
Well, when I served on the editorial board of the American Historical Review, the editor encouraged all of us to brainstorm for issues the AHR could run a forum on. And I offered that oceans were emerging as an interesting new locus for history, and that we should do a forum on ocean history. It took a few years to pull it together, but we ended up with ambitious essays surveying and commenting on quite different developments in the fields of Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific history, as well as a thoughtful response.Footnote 7 I am still very proud of that issue, and it came at a great time.
We find that young scholars in the humanities are often warned against doing collaborative work as something that can hurt one’s career track. Your experience seems to have been quite different.
For me it has been very valuable. Martin had built up an empirical understanding of world history that is somewhat unusual in the American academy. As scholars, we are usually not generalists – we are trained to specialize, and we are rewarded for specializing. But Martin wanted to do something different. He came to me one day and said: ‘Let’s write this book. Let’s be daring enough to do a critique of metageography.’ My initial reaction was: you must be kidding – you want to write a history of the universe? I mean, how much bigger can you get? And I was a geographer of Japan who had recently started teaching at a history department and had a new baby. But we were operating in a larger environment of postmodernism, which may have emboldened us. I had area knowledge and an interest in maps, and Martin had world history knowledge and vision. And had we not worked together on this, a lot of other things might not have happened. I have since done a fair amount of collaborative work with other people and I really value it. You learn so much. In conversation, but also in writing together – you have to grapple with other people’s epistemologies, training, and style. It really is demanding, and for the same reasons it can be deeply rewarding intellectually. But you are right that the profession (at least in the humanities) does not reward collaborative work in the same way that it does single-author scholarship. I am well aware that encouraging young people who do not have tenure yet to do collaborative work is risky, because we do not yet have the metrics and mechanisms for recognizing it. But as more and more young scholars do fascinating collaborative work, even more conservative institutions will have to acknowledge this at some point, or they are going to lose a lot of dynamism. It is true that many universities will not promote you on the basis of a co-authored book. But you know what? The Myth of Continents has had ten times the readership and twenty times the impact of anything else I have done.
Could you tell us a little more about your last book, A Malleable Map?
The subtitle is ‘Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912’.Footnote 8 It explores some of the ways in which all kinds of people across Japan, first under the Tokugawa and then during the Meiji period, began to restore the provinces as meaningful units of local identity and, ultimately, of top-down administration. The provinces were created in the seventh century as part of a central government that Japan tried to build on the model of the Chinese state – which was at that point already a massive and long-lived imperium. They had tried to import that blueprint and overlay it on what was basically a clan-driven society, and it never really quite took hold. Different warrior clans colonized the remains of this central government for centuries in shifting configurations. But the idea of a unified state—and the map of its sixty provinces—persisted. Beginning with the unifiers of the early modern era, and accelerating in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, rural thinkers and policy makers turned back that old model. The term ‘restoration’ has gone out of favor, but I try to rehabilitate it because it captures an important dimension of people’s thinking at the time. Not everyone, but some really looked back to the Tang dynasty ideal. They even restored Chinese titles and wore Chinese robes for a brief period in early Meiji. As the new regime progressed, much of this was discarded pretty quickly, but just as European empires styled themselves after the Roman Empire, so the Japanese at the dawn of the Meiji era styled themselves after the classic empires of East Asia. In that connection, I have become curious about the reception of European classics in Asia, wondering whether an awareness of the extent to which Americans and Europeans modeled themselves after the Roman Empire in the nineteenth century played any role in Meiji Japan. I mean, look at the neo-classical revival in architecture, in fashionable clothing, in statuary … Europeans and Americans alike took their classical models pretty seriously. There is a wonderful book called Imperial San Francisco, which chronicles how the founding families of San Francisco imagined their city as the new Rome.Footnote 9 Rome had silver mines, they had gold mines. Rome had aqueducts, they had aqueducts. Rome had the Mediterranean, they had the Pacific. This was deeply ingrained in their world-view, and it shaped their actions on the world stage. I guess I saw traces of a similar spirit in Japan, so The Malleable Map tackles a long history of rehabilitating an ancient map for modern purposes.
And what about the forthcoming project, Cartographic Japan?Footnote 10
I’m so glad you asked. This is a co-edited collection, modeled on a wonderful recent book entitled Mapping Latin America.Footnote 11Mapping Latin America is a collection of short essays aimed at students and the general public. Each essay, basically, is a close reading of one map. The editors had the idea of reproducing the chosen maps at a pretty big scale – it is an eight by eleven inch book– and then calling upon a variety of experts from all kinds of fields who have an interest in maps. The essays are great. They make old maps, which may be beautiful but puzzling, accessible and legible. As soon as I saw it, I thought: the Japan field needs this. But the challenge for making Japanese maps legible is very high. First of all, we cannot expect to have a readership that reads Japanese, whereas with Spanish you can expect at least some. But we have a treasure trove of material. And there are a lot of talented scholars who write about maps for specialized journals. We wanted to bring these people together and ask them each to explain one favorite map. These turned out to run the gamut from the 1580s all the way to the recent tsunami of 2011 – there is a lot of interest in disaster mapping. We have fifty contributors and fifty-eight maps. Maybe I am overly enthusiastic about this project – we will see what the reception is next year – but I am very excited about this book. Many people my age, at this stage of their careers, are writing textbooks, so there are great textbooks out there. I thought it would be good to have a map reader to go with them. Teachers in the field know that there are many digital maps available, but they don’t always know what to do with them. It takes concerted effort to puzzle out these images. So the short essays in Cartographic Japan may be quick to read, but they were not simple to write – people have really taken time to figure out the back-story of a particular map, and it has been great to harvest that effort. Our Japanese co-editor, Fumiko Sugimoto, is a spectacular and learned reader of maps and was able to bring her network of Japanese scholars into the project. They make up about a third of the book. Then there is myself, based on the West Coast, with a Tokugawa-centered history network. The third co-editor, Cary Karacas, is a young geographer based on the East Coast who works on wartime mapping. And the fourth member of the team was our research assistant, Sayoko Sakakibara, a recent PhD whose deep knowledge, technical wizardry, and fluency in English and Japanese was critical to making this kind of transnational project possible. Not a few of the insights I have shared in the Reischauer lectures over the last few days have come out of this project.
We can imagine that a work like that would be useful regardless of national or regional focus, because it can be hard to fully read a map. Many historians lack a cartographical lexicon. You have to know what to look for, and it is hard to do that responsibly. To have a volume of fifty scholars, with fifty different voices explaining their way of reading maps, their visual and spatial analysis, would be interesting on that level alone.
Part of reading maps is learning how to put them into context. And because we are historians, we bring knowledge to a map and have an idea of which questions to ask. We have an idea of what a map might have meant to the people who made it, and the people who read it. But I think in metaphors, so I will leave you with one. There are people whose job it is to detect ingredients in liqueurs and perfumes, whose job it is to figure out what particular blend it is, what secret ingredients make up a particular taste or smell – professional sniffers. They say they do this by having a checklist in their mind of things to smell for. You go through once, looking for clove. And then you clear your nose and go through another time, looking for nutmeg, or something else. Something analogous to that is a good basic strategy for reading maps. It wasn’t until I started creating a checklist of things to look for that it occurred to me that not all map-makers put labels on the oceans. That is where a large part of my ‘Picturing the Pacific’ lecture came from in the Reischauer series – the different ways in which mapmakers in East Asia configured sea-space. I tried something similar to figure out how different map-making traditions grappled with the European continental scheme, and the most challenging one of all has been to come up with a list of things to ‘sniff’ for with historical cartography. In all these projects, as well as in teaching, it turns out you can discover fresh things in familiar maps, just by approaching them with new questions in mind. I don’t know about you, but I find it irresistible. I hope I can keep doing this for a long, long time.
