Early Modern Japan

62 foreign contact wiped clean from the deck (although, as the case of Kaempfer shows, certain important issues clearly have yet to be swept away), Japan specialists have started to navigate entirely new waters. For this reason, some of the most interesting work in early modern Japanese studies relates to the subfield of foreign affairs and frontiers. At the same time, however, so much still could be done: multiethnic communities in Nagasaki, Japanese-trading stations in Korea, foreign trade and environmental degradation in Japan, early-seventeenth-century Japanese trading communities in Southeast Asia and their environmental impact, and many other topics cry out for investigation by talented scholars. Second, an interpretative gulf exists among scholars of early modern Japan. Those who study domestic-centered topics, ranging from literary studies to domainal politics and economics, often sound like they are talking about a different country than those writing on foreign affairs and frontiers. Increasingly, historians such as Philip Brown, Luke Roberts, and Mark Ravina paint a picture of an early modern polity where local domains remained the most pervasive manifestation of the political and economic country. However, in the realm of foreign affairs, few would dispute the idea that the Edo shogunate maintained tight control over contact with the outside world, a concrete manifestation of a state in the process of centering power. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive, but Japan specialists have yet to integrate them into one convincing narrative of Japan's early modern experience. To date, in the collective scholarship of Japan specialists, two political countries coincide and sometimes collide in one temporal and spatial frame. One aim of future research should be to reconcile some of these differences. Third, the new writings on early modern foreign affairs and frontiers have failed to convince historians of the modern period of the complexity of Japan's pre-Meiji relations with the outside world. Many modernists still slavishly use the "closed country" (sakoku) and "open country" (kaikoku) dichotomy to explain Japan's plunge into the modern age. It is still common to talk of the "opening of the country" with Matthew C. Perry, and how in the 1850s Japan was forced to confront for the first time the practice of international diplomacy. This is, of course, highly misleading, but it does make the task of writing about the Meiji years easier. With sakoku, we can be told that only in the Meiji period did Japan master diplomacy, conduct foreign trade, conquer foreign lands, and develop collective philosophies similar to what might be described as a "national" identity. The next step, it seems to me, is to have a broader penetration of the complexity of early modern foreign affairs and frontiers into the other sub-fields of Japanese studies. This would require the onerous process of rethinking topics such as modern Japan expansionism, but it would surely enrich our understanding of Japan's past and present.