Terms of Government: Early Modern Japanese Concepts of Rulership and Political Geography in Translation

This article uses the relationship between the central Tokugawa government and its vassal domain of Satsuma as a window into changing notions of government and political geography in the context of early modern Japanese diplomacy. The article argues that a wide range of translation processes that occurred from around 1800—the coinage of new political terms in Japanese, cultural translation from Chinese Confucian classics, and the demands of Euro-American international law—both reflected changing circumstances of governance and foreign policy and contributed to a shift of the intellectual and institutional boundaries between the two.