The Kuroshio Frontier
Empire and Environment in the Making of Japan's Pacific
Published on 23. October 2025
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-1-009-53457-4 (ISBN)
Description
This big-picture narrative of modern Japan embeds the archipelago's history in its maritime context. Foregrounding the Kuroshio Current in the Pacific, Jonas Rueegg demonstrates how currents, winds, and animals created a dynamic context to economic, intellectual, and geopolitical reinventions of Japan over the past four centuries. He draws up a novel geography of conflicts and competitions in the making of 'modern' Japan, one that underlines little known actors, sites, and events which have previously been treated as peripheral. This book offers a framework that transcends conventional spatial and temporal categorizations of early modern and modern, shogunal and imperial, insular and global. Guiding the reader from seventeenth-century Pacific explorations to the "opening" of Japan by whalers, coolies, and castaways, and on to the competition over remote islands, Rueegg offers a greater perspective on the role of oceans in the Anthropocene. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Reviews / Votes
'The Kuroshio Frontier boldly traverses established geographic, intellectual, and historiographical categories and conventions about early modern and modern Japan. Adroitly interweaving individual, local, and national narratives - while simultaneously expounding on relevant global economic and environmental trends - Rueegg convincingly shows the importance of viewing the Japanese past through not only an oceanic gaze but also as part of larger currents of Pacific history.' Robert Hellyer, Wake Forest University 'The Kuroshio Frontier is a wonderful addition to the growing body of research which reconsiders Japanese history from an oceanic perspective. Meticulously researched and full of fascinating insights, this book sheds important new light on the ways in which the fluid ocean frontier shaped the emergence of modern Japan.' Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Professor Emerita, Australian National University 'By immersing nineteenth-century Japan within Pacific Ocean history, Rueegg reveals the currents connecting subaltern actors on watery frontiers. His innovative approach blurs the divide between the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, combines political and ecological history, and provides a refreshing way of seeing Japan as a part of global history.' Julia Adeney Thomas, author of Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right 'With The Kuroshio Frontier, Rueegg brilliantly recasts Japan's expansion as a story of oceanic entanglements, resource frontiers, and transregional actors too often left out of conventional narratives. This book exemplifies the best of recent Anglophone scholarship that situates Japan, and its archipelago, firmly within the Pacific World.' Jun Uchida, author of Provincializing Empire: Omi Merchants in the Japanese Transpacific DiasporaMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
616 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-53457-4 (9781009534574)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Content
Preface and acknowledgement; Introduction: Japan, the Kuroshio, and the creation of a Pacific world; 1. The geophysics of Japan's terraqueous metabolism; 2. Maritime practice and virtual geography; 3. The Invention of Japan's Pacific; 4. Harbingers of empire; 5. Naval technology and the geopolitics of the Kuroshio Highway; 6. Tokugawa colonialism and the symbolism of modern statehood; 7. Science, state, and piracy in the making of an imperial frontier; 8. South Sea romanticism and the emergence of frontier tycoons; Epilogue: the unending Kuroshio frontier; Appendix I.