Frontier Contact between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan, and: To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions (review)

Transgressing traditional specialties of period and place, increasing numbers of social and cultural historians are pursuing research in intercultural contact zones. Such projects place a heavy burden on the scholar, who must master multiple histories and often work in multiple languages. But the rewards can be impressive, as evidenced in new books by James Lewis and Bruce Batten.

Both Lewis and Batten start from a fascination with the fluid world of premodern East Asia. Although evidently unaware of each other's work, both have been engaged in ground-breaking research on the southwestern frontiers of Japan for over a decade. Both also share a social-scientific bent, assaying forms of model-building explanation rarely seen in the monographic literature on Japan since the 1980s. Yet these similarities of theme and approach throw into stark relief what is distinctive about their respective books: notably, their scale and scope. While one study focuses tightly on a single maritime outpost during one historical era, the other offers a sweeping overview of war, trade, and cultural exchange across all the archipelago's major borders for over a millennium. Naturally, such discrepancies of coverage dictate corresponding differences of method.

James Lewis is a resolute localist, albeit one whose locality happens to be a transnational region. Working from Japanese and Korean archives, the author has painstakingly amassed a detailed picture of the early modern Tsushima-Pusan frontier, encompassing Kyongsang Province, Tsushima Island, and the waters in between. As he asserts early on, this constellation of Japanese and Korean territories is "best thought of as a single region that straddled numerous boundaries [yet] possessed a single economy and an interactive political culture" (p.45). Before turning to examine in detail the complex geography and impact of Tsushima's Korean outpost, the waegwan or Japan House in Pusan, Frontier Contact appropriately opens with a brief exploration of Tsushima's own ambivalent early modern identity.

The Japanese and Korean rulers nursed sharply contrasting perspectives on Tsushima. From the viewpoint of the shoguns, the island was subordinate yet privileged, an indispensable intermediary in one of Japan's most crucial trade relationships. From Hansong, by contrast, Tsushima was viewed as an integral Korean territory temporarily occupied by barbarous foreigners with a penchant for piracy. Given the island's proximity to the peninsula, its severe agricultural limitations (Tokugawa-era Tsushima depended on Korea for two-thirds of its grain), and its people's long history of seafaring, it is not surprising to discover a host of Korean-influenced cultural practices in the island. Lewis sketches the evidence for cultural hybridity in Tsushima proper before offering a physical and administrative description of Pusan's Japan House, an "extension of Tsushima onto Korean soil" (p.34). Serving as the official point of contact between Japanese and Koreans from the end of the ill-fated Hideyoshi invasions to the early nineteenth century, the Japan House emerges as the focus of the remaining chapters of the book.

Fully half of Frontier Contact is devoted to depicting "the structures that resulted from the presence of Japanese in post-1600 Korea" (p.13). In successive chapters, Lewis assesses these structures systematically in political, demographic, and economic terms. This entails not only mapping the geography of Japan House and its hinterland in detail, but subjecting the region's rich quantitative data to an elaborate set of manipulations, intended to measure the significance of the Tsushima trade for Korean demography, economy, and politics in turn. In chapter three, a dozen computer-generated maps and tables are marshaled to illustrate the high concentration of population—and particularly of men—in the coastal province that housed the waegwan. (Lewis also chooses to relate here a complex and inconclusive debate over the profitability of the private trade...