Late summer 2024 I squeezed in a whirlwind research trip to Japan. My original plan was to see things in Tokyo and Nagasaki, and also to visit the island of Tsushima that has been a primary historical site of trade and military encounters between peoples of the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago. A tropical storm canceled my flight to Tsushima, unfortunately, so that visit had to be deferred, but my first experience of Nagasaki left a strong impression as did my first explorations of places of Tokyo I had never previously been motivated to see.

Some representative images from Nagasaki:

Perhaps the most important experience from Nagasaki was visiting Dejima, the small artificial island that served historically as a special “trade zone” for material and cultural exchanges with Europe and the Chinese mainland. Seeing exhibits there really amplified my interest in the conditions and driving forces of Japan’s gradual opening over the course of the long Edo Period. Some of this material made its way into a talk I gave at Washington & Lee University on the historical entanglements of porcelain.

From Tokyo:

It was really eye-opening to visit the Yasukuni Jinja and museum, and to revisit Tokyo’s many art museums with more focused attention on Japanese imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries–how it was viewed by the people of occupied states, how modern Japanese people look back on this period, and how statesmen of the time tried to justify their aims and actions.