Legislating Global Mobility in Japan: Opening the Pacific, Treaty Ports, and Asian Exclusion
Abstract
Centering discussion on the 1874 trans-Pacific voyage of the steamship Colima and its passengers, this chapter examines Japanese legislation of inclusion and exclusion in the global context during the second half of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that the legislation of treaty port Japan was not only integrally connected to the “opening” of the Pacific in the age of steam, it was also part of the “whitening” of the Pacific, which took shape along racial, national, and class lines and influenced the relationship between the Chinese and the Japanese. The laws, decisions, and practices that went into Japanese efforts to manage the foreign presence at home, both on land and in its harbors, as well as efforts to revise the unequal treaties, cannot be removed from the questions of who did and did not belong was increasingly seen to be a paramount concern in the Pacific world.
Publication Title
New Directions in East Asian History
Recommended Citation
Phipps, C. (2022). Legislating Global Mobility in Japan: Opening the Pacific, Treaty Ports, and Asian Exclusion. New Directions in East Asian History, 29-67. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6391-8_2
