When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as...
moreWhen Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. Accounting for this dramatic transformation, From White to Yellow is a pioneering study of the evolution of European interpretations of the Japanese and the emergence of discourses about race in early modern Europe. Transcending the conventional focus on Africans and Jews within the rise of modern racism, Rotem Kowner demonstrates that the invention of race did not emerge in a vacuum in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather was a direct product of earlier discourses of the "Other." This compelling study indicates that the racial discourse on the Japanese, alongside the Chinese, played a major role in the rise of the modern concept of race. While challenging Europe's self-possession and sense of centrality, the discourse delayed the eventual consolidation of a hierarchical worldview in which Europeans stood immutably at the apex. Drawing from a vast array of primary sources, From White to Yellow traces the racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.
ENDORSEMENTS
“This magisterial work by Rotem Kowner fills an important gap in contemporary scholarship about racial history and European perceptions of the Japanese during the age of maritime explorations, beginning with the voyages of Marco Polo. The author approaches a delicate and complex topic with a breadth of knowledge and erudition based on the careful analysis of primary documents from a wide variety of both printed and manuscript sources in numerous languages.”
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. Director of the Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco
“Rotem Kowner has written an extraordinary book which will be must-reading for anyone interested in Western perceptions of the Japanese from the beginning (Marco Polo’s account) to the 18th century, and to anyone interested in the history of the very concept of ‘race.’"
Gary Leupp, Department of History, Tufts University
“Erudite, comprehensive, and clearly-written, From White to Yellow offers the reader a panorama of the Euro-Japanese encounter in the pre-modern period that is unsurpassed in previous scholarship.”
Ronnie Hsia, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University
REVIEWS
“This is a path-breaking book, rich in insights and extraordinary well researched. ... This is a dense book, exhaustive in its treatment of European writings on Japan and duly aware of the need to keep in mind how Europeans wrote about Others. There are fascinating explorations of topics such as slavery, miscegenation, and George Psalmanazar, the self-styled Japanese. … [T]he text of this volume covers only slightly more than half of the pages and most of the rest is taken up by endnotes, many of them as long as a paragraph and some filling half a page, together with a huge bibliography covering works in twelve languages. Not only do the notes testify to the prodigious labor that has gone into this book, but they also show how meticulously Kowner has explored the ramifications and details of encounters between Europeans and the various Others they encountered. … This book is, though, unsurpassed in its careful examination of European writings on Japan, and the efficient index makes Kowner’s analyses and coverage of the literature easily accessible”
Peter Kornicki, Journal of World History 27 (2016): 347–350
“From White to Yellow is a big book in every way. The product of immense research, it is an exceptionally ambitious work that makes a string of innovative and far-reaching arguments. Even more strikingly, it is simply the first of a planned two-volume series that, once completed, will span over six hundred years of European interactions with Japan. ... The scale of the task and the depth of the research invite a comparison to Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, a groundbreaking series that can best be described as an almost supernatural feat of scholarship. … Overall the work is a significant achievement that should be read by anyone working in the field. It moves Japan from the margins to the very center of discussions over the development of early modern racial discourse, making a powerful case for the importance of the European encounter with Japan. Japan represented a problem for Europeans, and Kowner brilliantly dissects the varied ways in which they struggled to deal with it in the early modern period.”
Adam Clulow, Monumenta Nipponica 71 (2016): 140–143
“The book is a remarkable scholarly achievement and in some ways almost too detailed in its exposition. It throws valuable light on evolving European attitudes to race and to racial hierarchies and demonstrates how they were filtered through different social mechanisms – religion, trade, power – and how despite empirical evidence, few Europeans could actually ‘see’ racial differences in the case of the Japanese, even depicting their clothing in a quasi-European style in paintings and engravings. … Kowner’s book is the outcome of years of scholarly investigation in many languages including Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Latin, Spanish, German, English and yet others and is exhaustively documented with fully half of its almost 700 pages being devoted to sources, notes and bibliography. Its essential theme is the tracing of the transformation and images that slowly moved the Japanese from being seen as ‘white race’ to re-classification as a ‘yellow’ one, along it may be said with the Chinese and the Koreans, whose racial history in relation to the West is inevitably part of the larger story of the transformation of perceptions as they applied to East Asia as a whole, and the light that this sheds on the roots of racial and racialist thought in the West. ….”
John Clammer, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (2016): 1500–1502
“In this erudite, complex, and ambitious work, Rotem Kowner examines how Europeans came to see the Japanese nation as “yellow” and inferior, after initially perceiving them as “white” equals. ... Kowner’s work complicates the history of the construction and development of the idea of race by examining the European encounter with the Japanese, whom Europeans initially found different but not culturally or materially inferior ... A short review cannot do justice to Kowner’s rich, multilayered work. The concluding chapter offers a prologue for the forthcoming second volume, which will examine how the Japanese were relegated to inferiority in the eighteenth century, and how a virulently racial discourse ensued.”
Robert Entenmann, Journal of Jesuit Studies (2016): 132–134.
"It is an unsurpassable analysis redolent of superb scholarship. In the end, Kowner makes a strong case that, from 1300 to 1735, Europeans slowly arrived at a system that enabled them to present a universal hierarchical taxonomy of humankind--based on rudimentary notions of race--with themselves at its apex. ... From White to Yellow does help us to understand ''the mechanisms that govern[ed] the rise and evolution of the concept of race in early modern times.'' In doing so, it richly expands our perspective on the origins of race and racism." Nam-lin Hur, University of Toronto Quarterly 85:3 (2016): 533-534.
“Kowner’s work is unique in that, unlike the majority of studies that focus on race in East Asia, it aims to elucidate the emergence of these distinctions at a much earlier point in Euro-Japanese relations—in fact, from their origin, if such can be found. … Focusing on the five centuries between Marco Polo’s first report of a mysterious island called Cipangu and Linnaeus’s categorization of the Japanese as a “yellow” race in 1735, Kowner builds a compelling argument that traces the development of racism from Europeans’ earliest imaginings of the Japanese people to the heart of Enlightenment thought. ... From Yellow to White is also notable for the breadth of its source materials, which, despite spanning several languages and centuries, are housed within a sound and well-organized theoretical framework; I can think of many other works that attempt to do the same but lack the clarity found here. The discussion of Japanese slavery, which tends to be a less-discussed topic in Japanese historiography, as well as of the cultural similarities between Japanese and their European observers, receive remarkably nuanced treatments as points of comparison between Japan and other countries within Europe’s purview. This work is therefore both timely and adds something new to the contemporary debate on the birth of race in Western thought.”
Christina Ghanbarpour, Itinerario 40 (2016): 318–320
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Figures xi
Note on Translations and Conventions xv
Acknowledgments xix
Preface xxiii
Introduction 3
PHASE ONE SPECULATION: Pre-Encounter Knowledge of the Japanese (1300-1543) 33
1 The Emergence of “Cipangu” and Its Precursory Ethnography 35
2 The “Cipanguese” at the Opening of the Age of Discovery 50
PHASE TWO OBSERVATION: A Burgeoning Discourse of Initial Encounters (1543-1640) 65
3 Initial Observations of the Japanese 67
4 The Japanese Position in Contemporary Hierarchies 101
5 Concrete Mirrors of a New Human Order 143
6 “Race” and Its Cognitive Limits during the Phase of Observation 181
PHASE THREE RECONSIDERATION: Antecedents of a Mature Discourse (1640-1735) 201
7 Dutch Reappraisal of the Japanese Body and Origins 209
8 Power, Status, and the Japanese Position in the Global Order 224
9 In Search of a New Taxonomy: Botany, Medicine, and the Japanese 251
10 “Race” and Its Perceptual Limits during the Phase of Reconsideration 283
Conclusion: The Discourse of Race in Early Modern Europe and the Japanese Case 309
Notes 345
Bibliography 511
Index 617
