Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899 by Catherine L. Phipps (review)

This book tells the important story of Moji, a relatively anonymous port city that disappeared from the map in 1963 when it merged with four other municipalities to form the southwestern metropolis of Kitakyūshū. Unlike the five treaty ports of Japan, which were opened by Western gunboats in the 1850s, the economically and strategically located port of Moji was opened voluntarily by the Meiji government as a “special trading port” in 1889 along with eight other cities. The number of special trading ports subsequently grew to twenty-eight in Japan proper, with an additional thirteen in the newly acquired territories of Taiwan and the Pescadores. Their establishment was part of a policy by the Japanese government to forestall the opening of new treaty ports while creating venues for foreign trade outside the limitations of the treaty port system.

Noting that “a framework that relies on the treaty ports alone misses the much more complex system of maritime relations that developed in East Asia during this pivotal era” (p. 4), the author sets out to fill a gap in the historiography by exploring the special trading port of Moji in a study that, she contends, “forces us to rethink Japan’s speedy path from semicolony to empire” (p. 5). Catherine Phipps marshals a wide array of evidence, such as English- and Japanese-language newspapers, archival materials, and published primary and secondary sources. In particular, she makes expert use of the local newspaper Moji shinpō, one of the most important documentary records on Moji to have survived the destructive effects of the twentieth century, to give the book narrative coherence and add lively details on everyday life in this southwestern port city.

The book is divided into three parts of two chapters each. Part 1 deals with the global and national context in which both the treaty ports and special trading ports were opened for international trade in Japan and East Asia. In the first chapter, “A Story in Five Acts,” the author adroitly narrates Japan’s decision to open ports in terms of five stages, each dictated by a different motive and impulse: the desire to change the framework of the first treaty ports (1858–1879), expand into Korea (1876–1889), promote exports (1889–1894), respond to shifts in the regional power balance (1893–1899), and replace the treaty port system with “open ports” (1899–). The following chapter gives a detailed account of the late-eighteenth-century Japanese exportation of coal and rice, two commodities that played significant roles in integrating the country into expanding world markets.

Part 2, entitled “Ports of the Nation,” turns to the domestic economy, exploring Moji’s role in the Meiji-era creation of an economically integrated Japan (chapter 3) and the position of the city within the context of Japan’s emergence as an informal empire in Asia (chapter 4). In the latter chapter, Phipps identifies what she sees as the “paradox of informal imperialism”: while on the one hand Japan was forced to operate under the constraints on its sovereignty imposed by the commercial treaties, on the other hand it benefited from the presence of the treaty powers, which allowed it to utilize “the networks that enabled it to engage in commercial and military endeavors that it was not otherwise prepared to undertake” (p. 153).

The third and final part of the book, “Moji in the Empire,” skillfully weaves the history of Moji into the story of the Japanese empire. Chapter 5, on the Sino-Japanese War, shows Moji to have been an important node in the war against the Qing empire. Residents of the city were made to feel that they were stakeholders in the war effort, a perception strengthened all the more by the fact that the city’s geographic location enabled journalists from Moji shinpō to act as embedded reporters (jūgun kisha), giving them considerable advantages over the...