Japan at the Summit by Shiro Saito

Author:Shiro Saito [Saito, Shiro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138553934
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Japan and the West in Asian Pacific Affairs

Chapter eight

The Rise of a New Power Centre

Historically, the earliest encounters between Westerners and Japanese were not on Japanese soil but far to the south in the Straits of Malacca. More than thirty years before the first Western (Portuguese) contact with a Japanese island (Tanegashima) in 1542, junks from Okinawa with Japanese aboard met Portuguese traders at Malacca in 1511. Moreover, from 1513 onward the Portuguese intermittently frequented the China coast between the Yangtze estuary and the Pearl river, and throughout those years the Wako (Japanese pirates) were plundering and trading in this same area.1 Four and a half centuries later, it is relevant to examine the context of Japanese-Western interactions in the Asian Pacific region, an area of enduring contact and mutual interest. Economically, over the centuries Japan’s merchant trade towards the Asian rim of the Pacific has developed through coastal entrepôt networks inseparably linked with the Euro-Atlantic trading system. Politically, particularly since the inter-war period, the Pacific has become ‘the centre of international affairs in several important respects’.2

A Pacific triangle – old and new

From a study of the Western maritime merchant expansion towards East Asia since the early sixteenth century, when Portuguese adventurers, Japanese corsairs, and Fukienese smugglers all combined to trade in the South Seas (a Chinese geographical term), different international trading patterns can be distinguished according to which mercantile power was dominant. In the early sixteenth century, when European imperial powers penetrated into Asia, they merely took over part of the existing trading networks from the unchallenged influence of the Chinese dynasties. Both larger companies and individual traders came into competition with the existing Chinese and indigenous merchants, and their trading outposts existed merely by permission of local rulers.3

A drastic change in the trading pattern came in the latter part of the eighteenth and, especially, in the nineteenth centuries, when the imperial powers contemplated not only taking control of the existing system but also introducing a new system of trade based on large-scale production of various industrial crops. With the establishment of political control by the imperial powers, the structural pattern of trade was transformed from mercantile (commercial) business in the earlier days to manufacturing (industrial) enterprise in the later period. It is important to distinguish between the European impact before and after the second half of the eighteenth century.4 In time the Portuguese and Spanish role as leading nations was taken over by the Dutch, British, Germans, and French as well as, eventually, the Americans.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the United States began to expand its territorial commitments into the western Pacific, by the acquisition of the Spanish Philippine islands and Guam. On the other hand, imperial Japan emerged as a strong new power in East Asia, symbolized in the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Then, while the European powers were preoccupied with World War I, Japan and the United States consolidated their interests and expanded their trade towards South-east Asia. It was after World War I that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.