Gulliver and the Japanese: The Limits of the Postcolonial Past

It is very usual for Civiliz'd and Polite Nations to look upon all others as barbarous. . . . Europe now being the Seat of Learning, and Science, wherein learned Academies are set up for the Discovery of Hidden Secrets in Nature, we take all the Rest of Mankind for meer Barbarians: But Those who have Travel'd into China and Japan, must confess those People far surpass us in the endowments, both of body and mind.

—Jean Crasset, The History of the Church of Japan

Books 2 and 4 of Gulliver's Travels have become key texts for postcolonial critics concerned with Swift's complicated attitudes toward European exploration, and exploitation, in the South Seas.¹ Book 3, in contrast, has received little attention, both because the hero's episodic adventures do not fit the pattern of European encounters with "barbaric" peoples (the Irish, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders) and because Swift's satire is directed exclusively at European institutions (the Royal Society) and vices (luxury, political corruption, and absurd philosophies).² Gulliver's wanderings among the imaginary islands of the western Pacific, however, are bookended by his only encounters with natives of "real" realms: his capture by a Japanese pirate captain and a Dutch pirate at the beginning of book 3, and his audience with the emperor of Japan and subsequent voyage back to Europe with the suspicious crew of a Dutch vessel. In 1722, after Swift had begun writing Gulliver's Travels, he noted that he was reading "many diverting Books of History and Travels," and while scholars have speculated about the possible sources for his depiction of Japan, only Anne Barbeau Gardiner has noted the significance of these Japanese encounters in the context of Swift's vitriolic attacks on the Dutch.³ In this essay I want to examine Gulliver's voyage to Japan in the context of three important bodies of literature widely available in the early eighteenth century: accounts of the short-lived English trading post in Hirado (1613-23), histories of the expulsion of the Jesuits from and the extirpation of Catholicism in Japan, and narratives of the Dutch willingness to perform the ritual of yefumi—literally, trampling on Christian icons—in order to maintain their trading privileges in Japan. Gulliver's encounters with the Japanese suggest not only that Swift knew this literature but that he was well aware of the deeply unsettling implications that Japan posed for Eurocentric visions of trade, history, and theology. His unfinished satire, An Account of the Court and Empire of Japan, uses the Far Eastern nation as a satirical standard to lambaste the corruption of the courts of George I and George II, and in Gulliver's Travels Japan serves as a means to further Swift's critique of empire.⁴ In their combination of fantasy and realism, Gulliver's encounters with the Japanese register profound anxieties about the limitations of English economic power, national identity, and morality in a world that until 1800 was dominated economically by the empires of South Asia and the Far East.⁵

Japan, like China, has been given short shrift in much postcolonial criticism of the early modern era; for many scholars, the relations between these empires and western Europe remain an underresearched area of vague assumptions and misconceptions. While there are obvious differences between traditionalists committed to rehashing narratives of European triumphalism and postcolonial critics who decry a five-hundred-year legacy of imperialist violence and aggrandizement, both camps share, paradoxically, a Eurocentric perception of early modern history: both assume that the overwhelming European technological and military power that conquered the Americas operated in the Far East as well; both maintain that Europeans inevitably saw themselves as superior to all non-Western peoples with whom they came into contact; and both claim or imply that the European domination of the tiny Spice Islands in the Indonesian archipelago somehow can stand...