International Law and its Influence on Diplomacy in the Late Nineteenth Century Japan

Resumen

  In 1853 United States warships led by Commodore Matthew Perry appeared in the waters of Uraga Bay bearing an official letter from President Fillmore demanding commercial intercourse with the Japanese. This thrust late-nineteenth-century Japan into a web of relations with the Western nations, and as a result, the study of European international law became a topic of particularly urgent concern including some normative philosophical questions: What is Civilization? What are the rules in the international relations? What are the differences with the existing order in East Asia?

Under these circumstances, one of the most influential books about international law in Japan as well as in other East Asian countries was the Chinese translation by the American missionary W.A.P. Martin of Elements of International Law by Henry Wheaton (Chinese: Wanguo gongfa, Japanese: Bankoku kōhō 『万国公法』). It was published in 1865 in Beijing.

Yet Japan’s relationship with the Western world actually pre-dates Perry’s arrival by some three hundred years, to the early trade with Portugal and Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century. Moreover, the Tokugawa regime kept a small window to the West open on the island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor, where it continued to have trade and intercourse with the Netherlands, alone among Western nations. Thus, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century a small but significant number of Japanese encountered the texts of Western knowledge, and embarked on Dutch studies, Rangaku.

If we shed light on this tradition of Dutch studies, we cannot overlook the existence of another book which had the same title, Bankoku kōhō, published in 1868: Nishi Amane’s translation of the notes he had taken of Dutch professor Simon Vissering’s lectures on international law during his studies in The Netherlands in the early 1860s. This was a pioneering effort by Japanese to attempt a systematic presentation of international law.

      This article compares these two intellectual origins of international law and delves into the significant debate among Japanese intellectuals such as Nishi Amane, Tsuda Mamichi, Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakamura Masanao. In doing so, it discusses how their knowledge and activities effected Meiji diplomacy in the late nineteenth century, both in relation to Western and East Asian countries.