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

From White to Yellow is a big book in every way. The product of immense research, it is an exceptionally ambitious work that makes a string of innovative and far-reaching arguments. Even more strikingly, it is simply the first of a planned two-volume series that, once completed, will span over six hundred years of European interactions with Japan. Volume 1, which is reviewed here, covers the period from 1300 to 1735, while volume 2 will take the analysis to 1905. In service of this project, Rotem Kowner has surveyed a vast array of material in twelve languages, resulting in a comprehensive bibliography running to over a hundred pages. The scale of the task and the depth of the research invite a comparison to Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, a groundbreaking series that can best be described as an almost supernatural feat of scholarship.¹

Kowner, a prolific scholar who is perhaps most associated with a series of important studies of the Russo-Japanese War, sets himself a huge task for this book: to chart the evolution of racial discourse in premodern and early modern Europe.² In the process, he puts forward a four-stage model for the development of “pre-Enlightenment racial discourse,” which is further subdivided into twelve steps beginning with “perceiving similarities and differences” and culminating in “devising an explicit universal taxonomy” (p. 10). The chosen case study is East Asia and more specifically Japan, although he includes a significant discussion of China. In selecting Japan, Kowner aims to expand the parameters of the discussion over the development of racial thinking beyond Africa, especially the Atlantic slave trade, and the Americas, where much of the scholarship has concentrated. He seeks also to open up the temporal range—to push back against the conventional focus on the eighteenth century as the starting point for the discourse on race in favor of a much broader examination of its gradual evolution from the fourteenth century onwards. The book does not attempt to locate modern conceptions of race in this earlier period, but rather to trace what Kowner variously describes as “building blocks,” “markers,” or, most commonly, “racial rudiments” (p. 8).

At the same time, Japan is not simply a case study. Kowner makes an argument for Japan’s pivotal importance in global developments by suggesting that the European encounter with the archipelago had a substantive impact on racial discourse. First, and most obviously, it fed into the evolution of racial discourse and became, he suggests, a significant contributor to modern notions of race. Second, Kowner puts forward the far more ambitious proposition that the encounter with Japan and subsequent discussion over the place of the Japanese “delayed the construction of a hierarchical racial world view in which Europeans stood at the apex” (p. 26). In other words, the power of the Japanese state and the wealth and sophistication of Japanese society, all of which compared favorably with their European counterparts, curbed European confidence, effectively pushing back the development of an “explicit racial hierarchy” that might otherwise have been formed much earlier (p. 325).

To prove these arguments, Kowner marshals a staggering array of sources, so that From White to Yellow has tremendous value even simply as a survey of European writings about Japan. It is not merely an intellectual history, moreover, but—and this is another strength of the book—dives into actual interactions. Chapter 5, “Concrete Mirrors of a New Human Order,” is for example particularly interesting, focusing on such diverse topics as the role of Japanese slaves and mercenaries, the question of sex and marriage, and the controversy over Japanese admission into the Jesuit order.

Overall the work is a significant achievement that should be read by anyone working in the field. It moves Japan from the margins to the very center of discussions over the development of early modern racial...