How Colonial-Era Scholars Shaped Japan's Imperial Identity
A new study reveals how early 20th-century Japanese historians selectively rewrote early modern history to support imperial ambitions, creating a false narrative of Japanese superiority. The research exposes how scholars weaponized historical research and foreign archives—a cautionary tale for understanding how institutional knowledge production can legitimize power grabs.
Originaltitel: Entangled Biographies and the Imperialist Creation of Historical Knowledge
<p>This chapter portrays the multifaceted connections that shaped narratives of early modern Japanese–European encounters and colonial expansion in Southeast Asia. It achieves this by applying an entangled biography approach to Murakami’s knowledge networks, which integrated contemporary Japanese academia, foreign archives, and historical actors. An in-depth study of two ‘great men’ of the seventeenth century, Yamada Nagamasa and Sebastián Vizcaíno, illustrates the material and historiographical dimensions of myth-making and cultural diplomacy in the early twentieth century. The chapter finally evaluates the extent to which Murakami’s scholarship and his exposure to colonial sources contributed to the meta-narrative of early modern Japanese superiority.</p>