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Japanese Studies Spotlight: Exploring Early US-Japan Encounters at the Library of Congress

The NCC is collaborating with institutions and scholars to release a monthly series on our blog entitled Japanese Studies Spotlight. These features showcase exciting online collections available to researchers and students in Japanese Studies, introducing the archive or project, describing their contents, and demonstrating how they can be usefully engaged in research or in the classroom. If you are interested in submitting something to the series, please contact Paula R. Curtis, NCC’s Digital Media Manager, at digitalmediamanager@nccjapan.org.

Cameron Penwell, Japanese Reference Specialist, Asian Division, Library of Congress
 

On March 31, 1854, the signing of the US-Japan Treaty of Peace and Amity marked the beginning of official relations between the United States and Japan. In connection with the 170th anniversary of this historical event, in March 2024 the Library of Congress launched a new digital collection, Pacific Encounters in Nineteenth-Century Japan. The Pacific Encounters collection features rare materials that document early Japanese interactions with the United States and European countries like Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. At release, the collection contained 25 titles in 80 volumes drawn from the Japanese Rare Book Collection in the Asian Division. As conservation work proceeds, additional Japanese rare books will be added, as will contributions of relevant materials from the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division and the Prints and Photographs Division.

The Pacific Encounters collection gathers a wide variety of textual and visual accounts that reflect intercultural encounters from the perspective of many different observers. They come in a number of formats, including scrolls, handwritten manuscripts, and woodblock-printed books. Some of the works, such as Meriken kōkai nikki ryakuzu 米利堅航海日記略圖 (Illustrated Diary of a Journey to America), are unique to the Library of Congress. Others exist in a limited number of library collections and may have few digital surrogates accessible online. One example is Kaibō igi 海防彙議 (Discourses on Coastal Defense), a 38-volume illustrated manuscript that contains a variety of foreign policy opinions compiled over three years preceding the arrival of the Perry Expedition. Still others, such as Kankai ibun 環海異聞 (Strange Reports from Overseas), are well known and have had many copies digitized by libraries in Japan and around the world.

Scholars and students alike benefit greatly from being able to examine multiple editions and copies of these rare materials, each of which may possess unique variations. Much like their handwritten counterparts, woodblock printed materials, too, can come in different editions and possess distinctive marks like ex libris stamps or marginalia that tell us more about a book’s history beyond its content. Regardless of an item’s relative scarcity, collecting these works in one digital space creates new opportunities for these works to be studied from many different perspectives.

Reflecting its importance to the history of US-Japan relations, the Perry Expedition of 1853-54 figures prominently in many of the materials found in Pacific Encounters. Of particular note are three illustrated manuscript scrolls that depict scenes from the Perry Expedition’s arrival in Japan in July 1853 and second visit from February 1854. Scrolls of this type are often referred to as “Black Ship scrolls,” a reference to the term Japanese coined for the dark-colored ships in the US fleet: kurofune 黒船, or “black ships.” Contemporary Japanese spectators took down notes and made sketches of the imposing presence struck by the American ships and gazed with curiosity on the Americans’ meetings and negotiations with Japanese officials.

Drawing on such first-hand observations, Ōtsuki Bankei 大槻磐溪 (1801-1878), a scholar from the Sendai domain, worked with a team of artists in 1854 to produce an illustrated scroll titled Kinkai kikan 金海奇觀 (Strange View Off the Coast of Kanagawa).The scroll depicts Perry’s return trip to Japan beginning in February 1854 and includes both panoramic vistas and close-up portraits of the American crew. The manuscript edition of Kinkai kikan at the Library of Congress comprises a single scroll measuring nearly 39 feet in length. At least two longer editions of the scroll, compiled in two parts, also exist and can be viewed online, one in the collection of Waseda University Library and the other at the Edo-Tokyo Museum.

Two other illustrated scrolls are Perī raikō kankei monjokan ペリ- 來航關係文書卷 (Scroll Documenting Perry's Arrival in Japan) and Kaei kiji emakimono 嘉永記事繪卷物 (An Illustrated Scroll Account from the Kaei Era), which is slated for digitization following completion of preservation work. Perī raikō kankei monjokan, stretching some 30 feet in length, comprises several maps and illustrations alongside extensive Japanese text. Written in a neat hand, with furigana to gloss most of the Chinese characters, this is probably among the most accessible items in the collection for Japanese learners who have some basic familiarity with pre-twentieth century texts.

The Pacific Encounters collection does not only contain Japanese-language resources, but many that will be of interest to those looking for multilingual perspectives on these nineteenth-century interactions. Readers seeking contemporary accounts of the Perry Expedition in English can consult the Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, published in 1855 by the US Government Printing Office as part of the United States Congressional Serial Set, a compilation of journals, reports, and documents from House and Senate proceedings. Compiled by Francis L. Hawks (1798-1866) from the original notes and journals of Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) and his officers, this work would later be republished in multiple editions, like this 1857 version that features additional illustrated plates.

A separate, but closely related, digital collection worth mentioning here is the William Speiden Journals from the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. William Speiden, Jr. (1835-1920) was just 17 years old when he began serving as purser’s clerk aboard the US steam frigate Mississippi during the Perry Expedition. His journals, richly illustrated with his own drawings and those by other shipmates, offer a more personal, behind-the-scenes look at the Expedition. Like the official published narrative described above, it is in English and thus accessible to a wide audience. By browsing the published account and the Speiden Journals in tandem by date, readers can observe how events may be narrated differently. Likewise, illustrations in the Speiden Journals offer an opportunity to compare American portrayals with those by Japanese artists found in the Black Ship scroll genre and other works. These comparisons are made easier through this helpful timeline.

Figure 4. A diagram of the landing at Yokohama (top) and sketch of the conference room at Yokohama (bottom) from the William Speiden Journals: Vol. 1, Mar. 9, 1852-July 2, 1854, Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

By grouping these Library of Congress materials together within a single collection we hope to encourage their use for teaching as well as research. Some existing websites that provide educators with instructive examples for how these types of materials can be used in the classroom include the “Black Ships & Samurai II” unit created in 2010 as a part of the MIT Visualizing Cultures project, which was founded by MIT professors John Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa. Another site that explores pedagogical approaches to Black Ship scrolls and related art is Perry In Japan: A Visual History, created at and hosted by Brown University. Both websites offer ready-to-use ideas for instructional activities that integrate visual materials in the study of this early period of US-Japan relations.

Not limited to works on the arrival of American and European travelers, another interesting aspect of Pacific Encounters is the many accounts by or about Japanese who were among the earliest to ever visit the United States. For example, there are several manuscripts produced in Japan between 1851 and 1856 related to Nakahama "John" Manjirō (1827-1898), who, as a fourteen-year-old in 1841, was shipwrecked with some friends on a small island in the Pacific Ocean. After being rescued by an American whaling ship and brought to Hawaiʻi, Manjirō chose to return with the ship to the United States, where he attended school, gained employment on a whaleship, and eventually returned to Japan in 1851.

A unique item in the collection already mentioned above is a striking visual account of the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the visit the United States in 1860, Meriken kōkai nikki ryakuzu 米利堅航海日記略圖 (Illustrated Diary of a Journey to America). This pictorial travelog traces the mission’s voyage across the Pacific, which included stops in Hawaiʻi, San Francisco and Panama before landing at the Washington Navy Yard on May 14, 1860. Later, they visited Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York before setting off for their return trip across the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The work was featured in a 2016 post on the Library of Congress International Collections blog titled “Who Were the First Japanese to Visit Washington?” with a few accompanying photos. Now, with digitization complete, it can be studied and enjoyed in full.

While the focus so far has been on materials connected to the history of US-Japan relations, Pacific Encounters also contains items related to Japanese interactions with other countries, as well as those that took place earlier in the nineteenth century. One example is the aforementioned Kankai ibun 環海異聞 (Strange Reports from Overseas), written by Ōtsuki Gentaku 大槻玄澤 (1757-1827) and Shimura Hiroyuki 志村弘強 (1769-1845). These two purportedly drafted the book based on interviews with Japanese sailors who returned to Japan in 1804 after an eleven-year ordeal that saw them shipwrecked in the Aleutian Islands in 1793, rescued by a Russian ship, and taken back to St. Petersburg. In the process of returning home, they became the first Japanese to circumnavigate the globe.

The paragraphs above are just a handful of highlights from the rich and growing Pacific Encounters in Nineteenth-Century Japan at the Library of Congress. It is our hope that general readers, educators, and specialists will explore Pacific Encounters in greater detail and find something of interest. The collection has something to offer scholars and students alike, including those who don’t read Japanese but can still analyze and interpret the many visual representations of nineteenth-century intercultural encounters contained within these works. The future additions of more digitized items we have planned will further enrich opportunities for historical research, comparative bibliography, and pedagogical applications. For questions about the collection, please contact Japanese reference staff via the Asian Division’s Ask a Librarian service.