From White to Yellow: The Japanese in European Racial Thought, 1300–1735 by Rotem Kowner (review)

This is a path-breaking book, rich in insights and extraordinarily well researched. There is to be a second volume, covering the years from 1735 to 1905, while this one covers the years from 1300 to 1735. The purpose underlying the two volumes is to enrich the study of race in European thought by turning away from the focus on European encounters with Africans and Amerindians, which has tended to dominate the history of racial thought in Europe, and looking instead at encounters with Japanese. As Kowner points out, Europeans tended from early on to perceive Japanese as civilized, technologically advanced, and militarily powerful, and this contrasts with how they perceived many other peoples elsewhere, with the exception of China. “China did not differ greatly [from Japan] in this respect,” he admits, “but as islanders the Japanese could be more easily perceived as a single entity with clearly marked political and ethnic boundaries” (p. 22). This argument is intended to justify his exclusive focus on Japan but it seems an unconvincing distinction. After all, Japan was definitely not a single political entity for much of the early period, at least up to 1600, and European perceptions of a distinct Japanese ethnicity were slow to develop, as he shows. In fact, Kowner helpfully makes frequent comparative references to perceptions of Chinese.

The endpoint of this volume is the publication of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), which marked a turning point in European biological thought. Kowner divides the centuries up to that point into three discrete periods, the first of which he terms the phase of speculation, covering 1300–1543. During this period, it is possible that Europeans encountered Japanese at Malacca or other ports in Southeast Asia but the evidence is weak, so we are forced to turn to Marco Polo for a dawning awareness of Japan in the European mind. As is well known, Marco Polo’s description of Cipangu, as he termed Japan, referred to the Japanese as “white, civilized, and well-favored,” but what do these terms mean? Kowner notes that Polo, like other travelers at the time, took little interest in the appearance of the peoples he met on his travels and that it was only from the sixteenth century onward that Europeans began to perceive skin color as a sign of ethnicity. It is not clear, therefore, what “white” meant in this context. And we should not forget that Polo did not himself encounter any Japanese, so it is not his perception that this word reflects. Kowner speculates on the possible source of this remark, but possibly attaches too much significance to it: After all, any information acquired by Polo was mediated through languages of which he had an uncertain grasp. We cannot even be sure that Polo ever used the word, let alone that he had sources in East Asia who conveyed such an idea to him. Be that as it may, Polo’s account of Japan was all there was until the sixteenth century. Although Japan began to appear in European maps in the fifteenth century, no Europeans seem to have visited East Asia in that century, so all that Columbus had to go on was some version of Marco Polo’s account. Although the material is so thin that even “speculation” is hard to detect in this phase, Kowner does a valuable service in unravelling the significance of European references to skin color and their changing signification in the context of East Asia. Nevertheless, as he acknowledges (p. 62), there is not really a “discourse” here, and if there is one, it is not about race.

The next phase is that of “observation,” and it covers the years 1543–1640, a period termed the “Christian century” by Charles Boxer, although by no means all the Europeans in Japan were missionaries. All the same, it is certainly significant that Japanese converts were the...