Masculinism, Colonialism, and the Late Edo Castaway Narrative:
Japanese Accounts of Port Brothels in the Pacific
Michael S. Wood
mswood@darkwing.uoregon.edu
University of Oregon
Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures
Terms such as ‘travel,’are translations, built from imperfect equivalences.
-- James Clifford, Routes[1]
In one of the many accounts relating the shipwreck and eventual repatriation of Nakahama (Jon) Manjirô—Japan’s most famous Edo period castaway—we find a record of his first impressions of Oahu Island. After making a passing comparison to the river entrance leading to the markets of Osaka, his description continues: “At this international commercial center, there are many wholesalers from various countries, as well as tea houses and brothels” 
. [2] While his account succinctly draws our attention to the close ties between prostitution and transnational colonial commerce in early 19th century Pacific ports, it is by no means the only reference to the space of the brothel or the figure of the prostitute in Edo period castaway accounts. These brothels that Manjirô witnessed, like others established throughout the Pacific Rim, served as sites of diversion for fisherman, whalers, and trans-oceanic traders that comprised the male-dominated maritime populations and communities. While this development may reflect a certain characteristic masculinism historically endemic to systems of commercial and colonial expansion, the encounters between foreign women and Japanese castaways come to be narrated in a formalized, if not literary manner that borrows extensively from a tradition of domestic travel literature. Taking the colonial port brothel to be what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “contact zone,” we can see just how Japanese castaway accounts come to translate their experiences in such international spaces into more familiar lexicons and codes of humor.[3] Considering accounts of seduction at sea, this paper will begin to trace the shifting relations between gender, national identity, and colonial formations in the Pacific over the course of the 19th century. Not simply historical records, depictions of these encounters between foreign women and Japanese castaways also demonstrate a certain literary crossover as the fears, desires, and humor relating gender difference and sexuality come to be imbued with the stylistic and narratival qualities of a domestic urban fiction (gesaku). Gesturing toward the dizzying interplay among local, national, and global-colonial spheres of gendered relations, we may begin to see the 19th century Pacific not as a space over-determined by a hegemonic “world system” or singular “masculinism,” but instead as an emerging and negotiated space mediated through translations, “built from imperfect equivalences.”
Early modern scholars of European travel writing have addressed the notion of masculinism in the context of travel. Ludmilla Kostova invokes this term in the context of food and sex for 19th century British travel writers venturing to the Balkans. She concisely concludes, “[m]erging with the other culture is permissible only under special circumstances and seems to be a prerogative of adventurous men above all.”[4] Placing the Robinson Crusoe story within the context of the Enlightenment and one of its most dominant literary forms—the adventure-survival narrative—Martin Green argues that Daniel Defoe and his many imitators offer us nothing less than a, “proclamation of progressive values.”[4] In his first chapter on Rousseau’s interpretation of the Crusoe story in Emile, he also elaborates on a notion of “masculinism,” as one important facet of these “progressive values.” He continues,
This new masculinism was not the result of indifference to women. Nor was it a calculated exploitation. It seems to be simply the dark or shadow side of a gender myth—the founding myth of both adventure and the Enlightenment, which summoned men to stand together against all their enemies—feudal tyrants, false priests, tax farmers—and spoke of lordship over women and children as their natural reward. Men were to be the sturdy yeoman class of the human race, each with his little kingdom of a home behind him, including his consort and his subjects.[5]
Green’s research on castaway narratives is limited to American and European texts and as such, tends to articulate this notion of “masculinism” in terms of an Enlightenment that reflects certain universalized values.
However, at roughly the same time Defoe was “discovering” one set of literary and ideological possibilities of the castaway narrative, similar forms of travel writing that shared as their subject the adventures of distressed and shipwrecked sailors also began to proliferate independently in Japan and other areas of Asia. The invention of a specific Japanese textual category of castaway account or hyôryûki 
in the early 17th century has been considered in terms of diplomatic repercussions that transpire in East Asia with the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.[6] Thus it would be false to suggest a common origin for the invention of the Japanese and European forms of the castaway account. However by the late 18th century we begin to see increased contact between Europeans and Japanese castaways and with it, the emergence of eyewitness accounts of Western colonial spaces in the Pacific by repatriated castaways. Their stories served to establish a literary space from which to represent “self” and “other” in very new political, geographical, scientific, diplomatic, and cultural terms. While Japanese castaways increasingly returned with stories of drift and subsequent repatriation via colonial ports around the Pacific, there texts came to be inflected by an historical process of global expansion and the forms of knowledge, technology, and industry that accompanied it. Immanuel Wallerstein and others have discussed these increasingly globalized conditions under the rubric of “the modern world-system.”[7] In these terms, the production and dissemination of castaway stories in different parts of the world represent what we might call a transnational literary form, albeit one that related sometimes strikingly different responses to globalized colonial conditions.
With the return of Daikokuya Kôdayû and Isokichi from Russia in 1792, we see a dramatic shift from earlier forms of hyôryûki to texts that clearly document the rapidly changing terrain of the Pacific brought about by Western colonial expansion. Recently Yamashita Tsuneohas published a large four-volume set of documents related to Kôdayû and his crew aboard the Shinshô maru 
.[8] However among this plethora of documentation, it is the monumental Hokusa bunryaku 
that stands as the most thorough account and the one that had arguably the most significant influence on subsequent Japanese castaway accounts.[9] This influence is seen in the formation of an overall encyclopedic structure, a tendency toward hyper-realism, as well as the codification of particular themesthat begin to reappear in later accounts.[10] In particular, references to prostitution abroad by Japanese castaways are in effect nonexistent before Katsuragawa Hoshû devoted a substantial section of the Hokusa bunraku to the topic of Kôdayû’s encounters with prostitutes in Russia. The seventh volume of this text relates Kôdayû’s experiences during his visit to the metropolitan center of St. Petersburg, where he eventually received an audience with Ekaterina Alexeyevna or Catherine the Great and permission to return home with the aid of Adam Laxman. Comprised of ten separate subsections, this volume documents various social institutions found in Russia, including schools, apothecaries, hospitals, orphanages, banks, and theaters.[11] The final and most substantial section is simply titled Jôroya 
or “Brothels.”[12] Setting the tone for numerous later accounts of foreign brothels by Japanese castaways, Kôdayû’s sexual prowess is unabashedly emphasized as his detailed description of the brothel moves us through the waiting room into a large dancing room and onto the multi-roomed bed-chambers of the prostitutes. It becomes apparent that his knowledge of the brothel is based on something more than a cursory tour by a lower ranking maid (koshimoto), as his eye turns to the gold threads decorating the bed linens, the embroidery of the bed covers, and the number of pillows on the bed. His description of the contents of this room abruptly ends as he comes to the lower ranking maid’s bed and concludes by letting the reader know that, “the fee is five silver pieces with food and drink costing extra.”[13] It also becomes clear that this is not his last visit to this bordello. We read:
Afterwards, when returning from the palace, Kôdayû happened to pass in front of this house when suddenly the young maid (koshimoto) saw him. While saying, “please, please come join us,” the other prostitutes (yûjodomo) inside also came out and he was entertained by them in various ways (samazama ni motenashi). They then asked him to spend the evening and they recommended drink and food. When it came time to find a companion, five high ranking ladies were chosen (sate aite wo sadamubeshi tote nataka kyûjo gonin wo erami dasu). Being such a rare customer (mezurashiki marôdo nareba), the women began to fight among themselves over the chance to sleep with him and it was decided to settle the matter by drawing lots (darekare to aite wo arasohishi yue kuji ni shite). A prostitute called Elizavetta chose the lucky straw, however, in the end all five of the prostitutes crowded around him throughout the night.[14]
From the inviting calls of the young woman he met on his first visit, to the fight that ensues among the higher ranking prostitutes, an interesting inversion takes place in which Kôdayû himself becomes the object of desire. Implicit in this passage is the Japanese male’s superiority over his Russian counterparts (after all he is such a “rare customer”), and his ability to occupy the attention, if not the beds, of five different women. The account concludes by mentioning that Kôdayû received numerous expensive presents from Elizavetta before his departure to Japan, suggesting that he was one customer whom she could not forget.
Due to the fact that hyôryûki by definition involve the adventures of Japanese men beyond the boundaries of Japan, it is understandable that most male-female encounters in these texts focus on the Japanese male castaway and foreign women.[15] Furthermore, it is this “inversion of desire” that is also common in other accounts, sometimes being carried to the extreme as will be demonstrated shortly. Among the hundreds of Japanese castaway narratives that remain today from the Edo period (1603-1868), there are few in which the main protagonist is female.[16] However, this is not to say that the female body remains completely absent from what is otherwise, the story of men. When women do appear in these narratives, they are frequently contextualized in terms of a certain homo-sociality characteristic of this male-oriented world and reflect a collective erotic imagination circulating among men. These playful moments stand out in stark contrast to the otherwise grim travails of distressed sailors, but even more so, these passages are foregrounded by the relative infrequency with which the female body otherwise does reveal itself within the male-oriented space of the ship. Sometimes in dreams or as spirits, at other times taking a more corporeal form as colonial governess, missionary wife, or port prostitute, when the female body is mentioned, it is oftentimes done so in a sexualized manner. These representations frequently break from a mode of narration that is matter-of-fact in its presentation and shifts to a significantly more literary mode of articulation.
Indicative of this general scarcity of women, it is sometimes the case that women are purposefully written into the narrative despite their absence. Such is the case with the Funaosa nikki 
of 1822.[17] Claiming to faithfully record the testimony of the sailor Jûkichi based on his years of drift throughout the Pacific, the author Ikeda Hirochika at one point seems to betray his sense of editorial transparency by arbitrarily writing a woman into the text. Early in the narrative Jûkichi begins to describe dreams of two priest-like figures (not “women”) that repeatedly board the distressed Tokujô maru. Their presence on the ship is described mysteriously, and as they claim to have brought a boat to rescue the castaway crew, Jûkichi is no longer able to distinguish between dream and reality 
. This literary trope of confusing dream with reality is not unique in castaway narratives and can be found in other Japanese literary traditions such as waka poetry.[18] However unlike other literary forms that adopt this trope, in this case the dreaminess and doubt in the narrator’s voice threatens to disrupt the veracity of Jûkichi’s story, and forces our translator/scribe (Ikeda) to intervene with the hope of recouping some semblance of believability.Ikeda’s intervention and digression from Jûkichi’s story appears clearly marked off with “two spaced” indentations or niji sage.[19] Suddenly taking an even more fantastic turn, Ikeda delves into a fairly long metaphysical exegesis on the spirit of Japanese ships 
. [20] He then suggests that the apparitions that Jûkichi sees are perhaps the ship’s spirit leaving the ship. As proof, he cites the interesting (yet, completely unrelated) case of an earlier distressed ship—the Jizai maru tsûkichi sen of Owari.[21] Ikeda’s editorial commentary continues:
On its way back from Toba, having gone fairly far out to sea from the harbor, a woman appeared from below deck. She was one of those prostitutes
known as a hashirigane who must have come aboard when the ship was in Toba, and having fallen asleep was apt to forget about the departure time. To continue on like this would have become an unusual problem
. The whole crew appeared to have acted appropriately (
) and thought it was suspicious that not one among them had seen her [beforehand]. They decided that this woman should be properly returned to Toba, and as they were setting their course they were approached by a single fishing boat. Requesting that fisherman’s assistance, they lowered the woman into the boat and immediately this fishing boat disappeared. While thinking that this situation was becoming more and more strange they continued to sail on and after making some progress, a breeze suddenly picked up. Turning into a dangerous gale, the ship was in the end destroyed. This story too, is certainly a case in which the ship’s spirit transformed itself into a woman and escaped. Considering this case, Jûkichi’s dream can be though to be [a manifestation] of the ship’s spirit.[22]
Ikeda’s comment, “to continue on like this,” that is, with a hashirigane on board, “would have become an unusual problem,” reveals the unusual nature of women aboard ships. Furthermore, because none of the crewmembers are responsible for her appearance and their actions are said to have otherwise been “appropriate,” we might also assume the ethical ramifications for bringing prostitutes on board. Represented as both a manifestation of the funa dama embodied in rituals of ship construction,[23] as well as simply a local prostitute, the female body here takes on a doubled (and contradictory) role as both object of sexual desire to be controlled and as a divine body whose absence leads to the destruction of the ship.
In another case taking place nearly a half a century later, we again see the mention of a prostitute, although this time it is no mere ghost story and the encounter takes place on land. Having arrived in the busy waters just off Shanghai aboard the Ôgi maru, the castaway Mameda Sambei awoke one day in a particularly adventurous mood. In his personal travel account titled Shanghai kôki 
(1869), we read of how he spent the sunny morning discussing among his fellow samurai the best way to spend the day of Chôyô 
in the first year of Meiji (1868).[24]
Today being a holiday, I prepared to go ashore in the company of three Karatsu men (Amemori, Yamaguchi, and Furukawa). We walked around enjoying this and that and, if only for having a tale to tell upon our return to Japan, we went to a brothel [girô,
] to get a look. Unlike the brothels of our country, there are ten people per house. It is said that in fact there are more than 10,000 prostitutes [gijo,
] in Shanghai, with the more expensive ones costing seventy dollars [
] and the cheaper ones costing two dollars.[25]
As with Kôdayû’s description of the St. Petersburg brothel, Sambei’s narrative also brings us into one of these houses. He provides a brief description of how to select a woman, before leading us into one the smaller rooms used for sex. Shifting to more personal details concerning his choice for the day—a sixteen-year old beauty by the name of Ashun—we sense the seductive nature of Sambei’s prose intensify as this young woman teasingly laughs at the vitality of our aged narrator. His sexual conquest finally concludes with a moment of post-coital gloating among his castaway friends, before a more literary, if not homo-social, climax is attained through the exchange of humorous poetry riddled with wordplay and sexual innuendo.
When departing, most Chinese people say “chin chin” and this is fairly standard. When leaving that brothel of the Eastern Clouds, they all accompanied us to the gated exit and I found the perfect words for the moment:
Beyond sixty and still bedding the women in China,
At my morning departure, we say “chin chin.”
Since the Karatsu samurai were an interesting bunch, upon hearing this they replied,
These women working a high class joint—
Whether they turn it on or not in the evening,
It must be painful for this old man’s lantern.
This caused great laughter
, and we returned to the ship together as a group.[25]
The remarkably vulgar content of these poems aside,[26] they stand as brilliant examples of otherwise good poetic form, structure, and metaphoric imagery. The ease with which he marks his departure with a poem betrays the desperate conditions of a castaway and recalls a characteristic pose more familiar to readers of popular Edo fiction (gesaku). But perhaps even more closely related to the literary tradition of gesaku is the invocation of “great laughter” incited among Sambei and his friends, and we might assume, among readers to whom it is directed. For having read the comic poetic exchange in its entirety, are we not also invited to participate in this “great laughter?” This use of ôwarai or “great laughter” is in no way singular. In fact, it echoes throughout not only the pages of this early Meiji text, but also numerous other castaway accounts from the late Edo period.[27]
Returning again to the Hokusa bunryaku that was previously cited, we see even in this earliest account of a foreign brothel, an invocation of laughter throughout. Immediately preceding the description of the Russian brothel, our castaway—Kôdayû— is first asked by a woman in the service of Catherine the Great whether he had been to a Russian brothel. Upon replying that he had not, we are told that she then “whispered something to her husband (otto ni nan yaran sasayaki)[28] before Kôdayû is quickly taken away to a mysterious building. Asking what sort of place he has been brought to, he receives no clear answer, only laughter (waratte kotaezu). After musical performances and the pairing of men and women for dancing, he again asks where he might be, only to again be confronted with laughter before confirming that in fact it was a brothel.[29] Here the whispering and laughter work to construct a sense of mystery for the readers which produces a certain seductive quality that will be seen in other castaway accounts dealing with the space of the brothel.
As with the later Shanghai kôki, these moments of “great laughter” in earlier hyôryûki are also frequently contextualized in conjunction with narratives of the ribald. In Jirokichi hyôryûjin monogatari written in 1848, we find examples of this laughter invoked when the castaway Jirôkichi describes sneaking into the woman’s steam bath in Kamchatka.[30] Or again, in Sitka where, introduced to the sport of snow skiing, Jirôkichi comments on the less talented novices saying, “but those who were bad would run off course and the women would flash us their asses, and even reveal their privates, which they couldn’t cover it up! This was a great laugh
.[31]
However, it is Jirôkichi’s detailed description of a visit to a brothel (jorôya or merôya) in Hawai’i that titillates the reader with exaggerated danger and suspense, even if the brothel visit itself is too horrific an experience for Jirôkichi to enjoy.[32] On the trip to this brothel, Jirôkichi and his companion Kinzô are first confronted with a road full of lizards which they are expected to crush with their feet. There response to this experience is “
and it foreshadows the even more hellish scene that awaits them (and readers) upon the arrival at their destination.
With their hair let down they covered themselves with their hands. There were twenty women crawling out of the river naked and rinsing off with muddy water. I asked who these women were and they told us they were the whores
[we had come to see.] When taking a good look, [I noticed] they were black and they were missing there bottom two front teeth. Asking about why they don’t have front teeth, we were told that since they steal sugar from the master’s fields to eat, when they are born, the master has their bottom two teeth removed.[33]
Like a group of grotesque mermaids, they emerge from the river, their bodies racially coded and their dental mutilations explained in terms of a system of colonial control on the plantation.[34] Upon entering the “house of pleasure,” Jirôkichi describes a room full of foreign men and native women picking at the cooked flesh of beasts that they proceed to consume with their fingers, but which he cannot bring himself to try.[35] Over the course of this passage, we begin to sense Jirôkichi’s growing sense of alarm and discomfort. But even as this passage directly elucidates the asymmetric racial and gender relations within a particularly colonial space, the story concludes with a return to the playfulness of exaggerated danger and we again see the emergence of laughter as Jirôkichi secretly hatches his plot to escape:
Looking at the figures of these whores, it was very difficult to sit in that seat. By pretending to take a piss, I would escape that hell
only to forget the road home. I ended up wandering on a mountain road and was just hoping to make it to the sea. It was very difficult going, when at last I made it to the Cantonese House. The Cantonese, who are called bake, served me watermelons with sugar. Heishirô was there and he asked me why I came back so quickly. I explained to them my travails and even the Cantonese were laughing
. The next day the rest of the sailors returned and everyone was asking how I managed to escape. We all celebrated our safe return with drinking.[36]
The account from Funaosa nikki to the hashirigane remains an example of a specific and quite localized type of prostitution (limited to the port of Toba) and the citation from Hokusa bunryaku describes prostitution as it takes place in St. Petersburg, far away from any pacific port. On the other hand, Manjirô’s Hyôryûki,Shanghai kôki, and Jirôkichi hyôryûjin monogatari, provide concise descriptions of prostitution as it was taking place within the colonized space of ports that catered to the sexual desire of globe-trotting merchants. As such, they reflect the more abstract relations of gender, race, and national identity that circulated throughout the 19th century Pacific. It is important to note that while these overtly sexualized spaces may have revealed significant differences to more localized practice within Japan, the language and the form used to describe it is remarkably familiar, insofar that it borrows directly from a more domesticated literary tradition of brothel travel within Japan. The formalized use of laughter and narrative suspense, particularly in conjunction with descriptions of sexual encounters at the brothel, is the very foundation of more familiar gesaku and even the earliest chônin (urban) literature such as Ikku Jippensha’s Hizakurige
(begun in 1802)[37] or Ihara Saikaku’s Kôshoku ichidai otoko
(first published in 1682).[38] The laughter that reverberates throughout these texts may be considered part of what H.D. Harootunian has referred to as the “culture of play” in late Edo literary and graphic culture.[39] Citing Amino Yoshihiko, he claims that the importance of play or asobi in late Edo culture, was nothing less than an expression of freedom from the more rigid social systems that kept people in their place. Referring specifically to “excursion narratives and tales of travel,” Harootunian also suggests a more figurative reading when he writes, “Yet the reference to movement evinced still another meaning associated with asobi, which was to authorize crossing established geographical and social boundaries.”[40] In this light, he reads the laughter in both Jippensha and Shikitei Samba as the, “recognition of the familiar made to appear strange and even alien.”[41] In the case of late Edo hyôryûki we might conclude that it is just the opposite, that is, laughter in these texts seems to mark the recognition of the strange and alien made to appear familiar.
Scholars of prostitution in Japan frequently point towards the transition from medieval (chûsei) to early modern (kinsei) periods in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as a move characterized by a system of greater control and regulation (shûshô seido, 
) over brothels.[42] Most scholars of gender history seem to consider this transition strictly within the context of a hermetically sealed country defined by feudal practice and insulated by sakoku (“closed country”) policy.[43] On the other hand, Watanabe Kenji has suggested the development of Japanese seaport brothels in terms of an economic development theory much more in line with the early stages of capitalism and the modern world system.[44] For at least one Edo period writer these ostensibly irreconcilable positions were of little concern. Writing in his Keizai yôroku (
),[45] we find the early nationalist thinker and Dutch-studies scholar, Satô Nobuhiro, proposing a unique solution to the countries domestic market woes:
If there is shoreline in the vicinity of one’s domain, the land should be well surveyed and a port should be opened. If in fact, there is already an older port that exists, it should be improved so as to make it convenient for large ships to enter and leave. Those houses of pleasure
should be made ostentatious and the number of prostitutes
should certainly not be restricted, so as to encourage commerce among sea-bound ships from countries far and wide.
However when the brothels are rundown and there are no prostitutes, that port will naturally fail to prosper. When the port is no longer a booming market,
there is no reason why it might serve the national interests
.[46]
While the development of regulated, licensed, and taxed brothels in Japanese port towns does seem to reflect a more common trend over the Edo period, Satô did not live long enough to see his suggestion implemented and foreign clientele overrunning his native brothels.[47] However, similar to Manjirô’s description upon witnessing his first foreign city that began this essay, this statement by Satô also recognizes the nature of more international, if not outright colonial controlled space abroad.[48] A connection between domestic prostitution and the rapidly transforming ports throughout the Pacific does not only exist in the mind of this slightly eccentric economist however. Early Meiji intellectual elites such as Fukuzawa Yûkichi and Futabatei Shimei also argued for the development of international prostitution in the name of national prosperity.[49] But returning to the late Edo period and the work of Watanabe Kenji we see that, along with the tightening of control over prostitution, there was also the establishment of a literary tradition of male domestic travel narratives represented by texts such as Shokudô Ôkagami 
, Nihon yûkaku sômoku 
, and Shokoku irozato annai 
.[50]
A strong connection between this tradition of domestic brothel writing and the references to colonial brothels in castaway accounts is best demonstrated by the Shanghai kôki cited earlier. A considerable portion of the text focuses not only on Sambei’s sexual escapades abroad, but also his conquests at home. The fact that his account includes encounters with prostitutes both at home and abroad produces a sense of consistency in the male gaze, despite whether it takes as its object of desire the foreign or Japanese female body. Before his departure for China, the account begins with detailed descriptions of several trips to a teahouse in the “Pine Fields of the Rainbow” (niji no matsubara) in the Japanese port town of Karatsu.
I also heard that there happened to be a princess of sorts. An appropriate comical verse,
Five ryô fare to enjoy the sites of Tsushima.
Two for the rainbow of Matsubara.
Taking our time, we followed the road to a “tea house” called Nigen jaya in the middle of the pine grove. We took our rest with a young woman of 16 years. Seeing her bring out the tea, we were surprised to find such a rare beauty in the countryside. With her sash of pleasing purple chijimen, tucked into her obi, and there were no words to describe her exquisite white face and the attractive way she held back her overflowing locks with one hand. For a moment speechless and gazing, I [eventually] asked,
Could this be the Virgin of Amatsu,
So far away from her home of Miho?
In time, she gestured to speak and with a slightly blushing face she recited,
I am a child of a fisherwoman
Who lives in the rainbow of the pine grove.
She said this as she came running to serve us.[51]
The “fare” mentioned in his poem can also be read as a direct reference to the price of a woman (not included in the translation above), and may recall the vulgarity with which he describes the women in China. Furthermore, the verbal interaction between our aged Casanova and his “Princess” 
take on a seductive quality that is perhaps not as evident when Sambei is limited to rudimentary “brush talk” and more physical commingling. Certainly, the “black” prostitutes that Jirôkichi describes contrast strongly with the much more inviting figure of this “white” faced beauty, and perhaps “unlike Japan,” there are ten women to a room. But for all these differences, it is the remarkable similarity of Sambei’s two descriptions, both at home and in Shanghai, that suggest the adaptation of a masculine discourse of leisure to a new sphere of gendered relations within a trans-Pacific space. This is not only accomplished through the transposition of terms such as gijo, girô, merô, and jorôya (common domestic terms for “prostitute” and “brothel”), but also by successfully employing the narrative strategies of seduction commonly found in popular fiction.
Returning to Funaosa nikki, we find yet another example of how the rare appearance of a woman again comes to be transformed into a sexualized and vaguely threatening encounter that demonstrates both the inversion of desire and the triangulated relationship between two men and women.[52] This time the encounter between castaway (Jûkichi) and prostitute is arranged by a man named Baranov, the governor and Russia-America Fur Company official.
Baranov seated Jûkichi at a table. Facing him were six incredibly attractive women (fujin). Baranov, having said something, caused one of these women to at last come and stand before Jûkichi. After touching her forehead, both shoulders, and chest with her hand as a form of veneration, She took Jûkichi’s cheeks in both hands and proceeded to lick his mouth (kuchi wo namete yukitari). Then the next woman came and did the same thing until all six had done it and returned to their original seats at the table. When this was finished, Baranov went into the inner room and in his wake, left Jûkichi alone facing these six women. Sweetened ice tea and other things were served while the women looked at Jûkichi and laughed. Jûkichi had no idea what was happening 
. The sky turned a threatening blue. . . as night fell, everyone returned to the ships beginning with Captain Pigot.[53]
Marked by ominous references to threatening weather, while also presenting the opportunity for sexual encounter, the story continues with Baranov explaining to Jûkichi that the captain has no intention of actually returning him to Japan. Baranov then suggests that, if Jûkichi truly wishes to return home someday, he should instead choose to remain in Sitka in the service of Baranov. At this point, a clearly troubled Jûkichi is torn. Weighing the benefits and problems of Baranov’s offer “nervously in his head” (kokoro moto naku omofu naraha), the narrative draws itself out in indecision.[54] He goes back and forth on whether to sleep with the women, prays reverently to the god Kompira to protect him, before again contemplating his preferences for both the second and third women. Realizing the late hour, he resigns himself to having to be with these women throughout the night, only to remind himself that “making excuses usually leads to trouble” (iiwake wo suru ni hotonto komaritari).[55] Even after escaping to Captain Pigot’s ship, he again recalls that third woman who offered herself to him as a far safer option than his other option of once again crossing the seas that killed his crewmates.
In many ways similar to Kôdayû’s, Jirôkichi’s and even Sambei’s accounts, this moment is also interesting in that it reveals the many levels on which seduction works within the narrative. For one, Baranov provides the women as a temptation to lure the Japanese sailor away from his rescuer (Captain Pigot) and thus keep him in Sitka for his own purposes. Associating Jûkichi’s ultimate decision to either stay or leave Sitka with his decision to sleep with one of the women that night, we as readers are momentarily also lulled into wondering if Jûkichi will ever return home. This readerly seduction, like the “great laughter” we have already addressed, suggests that the very manner in which the story is told, with all its stops and starts—its suspense—is yet another literary technique of drawing the reader into the narrative.
It is important to mention that we have looked at only a handful of references to women in castaway accounts. For the purposes of demonstrating a strong connection between these texts and the diction and form of more domestic literary traditions, we focused here on admittedly more fanciful, if not vulgar passages. There is one other account that, while equally fanciful, appears to be exceptional in an overtly moral take on prostitution abroad. Providing us with a distinctly different portrait of prostitution in the mid 19th century United States, Hikozô (also known by his adopted name of Joseph Heco) writes on the subject at various points in his Hyôryûki of 1863:
When adultery is discovered [in America], the entire fortune of the paramour is confiscated and is given to the lawful husband; the paramour is evicted from the residence, the woman severs her ties with the relatives and leaves home; she is thus forbidden to marry again; she makes her living for the rest of her life by selling her charms. The prostitutes of the west are all made up of groups of women who have had illicit sexual intercourse, and who themselves sell their charms. I have not heard of a case where parents have sold their children.[56]
Or again later, we read in Heco’s account,
In America the custom is one man to one woman, and when a man takes a wife, he is prohibited from either buying a prostitute or, it goes without saying, from keeping a mistress. If he transgresses, he is put in prison and undergoes punishment. Moreover, though men of means go into liquor establishments and make merry, there is no such thing as shaku-tori or geisha.[57]
This somewhat exceptional account aside, we see that the ways of writing about women were not simply the result of an over-determined movement toward a singular and globalized masculinization of the sea-space. Instead we can begin to see how abstract notions of race and gender, methodologies of science and global trade, came to be translated into a hybrid language, that is never simply the castaway’s alone. Despite the claim of our transparent scribe (Ikeda Hirochika) or the hollow excuse of our “Dull Translator” (Don Tsûshi), the voices that emerge from these texts reflect the appropriation of a localized gesaku literary culture, as much as they reflect the influence of a more formal textual category of hyôryûki as scholarly or investigative practice. This is part of a larger project that attempts to engage the cultural specificity of Japanese castaway narratives, while locating them in a larger space of emerging colonial conditions made possible by exploration, trans-oceanic trade, and whaling in the Pacific. However, if we are to invoke the term modernity to describe Wallerstein’s “world system,” we cannot simply see it as a model imposed from the outside, but instead as an emergent series of translations, “built on imperfect equivelancies.” In the case of gender, we may in fact be dealing with several modernities simultaneously. In the case of domestic prostitution, there is a historical movement toward tighter control and centralized rule under Tokugawa hegemony and the formation of urban society (Wakita, Watanabe). At the same time, a significant setting for late Edo castaway narratives, the Pacific, becomes the site for a different form of prostitution informed by notions of empire and colony, race and class, and other terms (Wallerstein, Green) that require translation and a hybridization of language. When these two worlds come into contact in the castaway narrative, we begin to see the interrelations among the local, national, and global emerge. Perhaps a critical sensitivity to a plurality of modernities in circulation during the Edo or kinsei (“early modern”) period is what is called for, as we begin to unravel the translation and adaptation of concepts such as race, ethnicity, and nationality.
Page from the woodblock printed Hyôryûki relating Nakahama Manjirô’s first glimpse of Oahu Island and its brothels. The author goes by the penname Don (or perhaps, Nibui) Tsûshi and most likely published the text in 1853. I am grateful to the library staff at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa who allowed me to reproduce this text in its entirety. Due to a devastating flood that took place in the Hamilton Library at the University of Hawai’i in October of 2004, the status of this text is in question.
Page from the manuscript copy of Funaosa nikki detailing the nature of ship sppirits (funadama). Notice the use of “two-spaced” indentation (niji sage) to mark off the commentary of the writer Ikeda Hirochika from the ostensible testimony of the castaway Jûkichi. I am grateful to Mrs. Kobayashi of the Meiji Central Library, Tokyo for letting me examine and reproduce this text.
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(zenyonkan). Tokyo: Nihon Hyôronsha, 2003. Kokusho sômokuroku, vol. 3. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965.
James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 11.
This citation is taken from a relatively popular and well-circulated text probably published in 1853 by the Edo publisher Sôrôken. The author goes by the penname of Nibui Tsûshi or perhaps Don Tsûshi (
, “The Dull Translator”) and while the gedai or cover title is Manjirô hyôryûki 
the cover page title (mikaeshi) is simply Hyôryûki. Unlike most Edo period castaway accounts, which were handwritten documents, this text was mass produced in woodblock print form. Although several copies of this text can still be found in Japanese archives and private collections, my research is based upon the copy that was, until recently, in the possession of University of Hawai’i Library’s Hawaiian Collection. At present, it is unclear whether this document has survived a devastating flood that inundated the first floor of the Hamilton Library on October 30, 2004. I am grateful for having the opportunity to make a copy of this text before the flood and have included a facsimile of the page in question as an appendix to this paper.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1-11.
Ludmilla Kostova, “Meals in Foreign Parts: Food in Writing by Nineteenth-Century British Travelers to the Balkans,” in Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing4:1, 30.
Martin Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 197.
See in particular the fourth chapter of Arano Yasunori’s Kinsei Nihon to higashi Ajia (Tokyo: Tôkyô Daigaku Shuppankai, 1998),117-157.
Attempting to place castaway narratives in a historical context other than the oftentimes hermetically sealed national literary or historical models, we have few options other than considering the global or Pacific spaces which they represent and from which they are born. While Euro-centric in perspective, Wallerstein’s notion of a modern world-system is helpful and appears to have exerted some influence on more directly relevant research such as Martin Green’s work on castaways and more recent attempts to write global environmental histories of the early modern world. See, John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Wallerstein’s macro-historical project is best represented by a three volume series simply titled, The Modern World System. Unfortunately his understanding of Japan’s role in this “modern world-system” is never articulated, or only tangentially articulated as a victim of Dutch hegemony over Indo-Sino-Japanese trade networks. See, Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 107. One significant problem with Wallerstein’s approach is that it seems to strip away any possibility for agency, instead falling back upon the supremacy of economic forces. For example, he writes, “Incorporation into the capitalist world-economy was never at the initiative of those being incorporated. The process derived rather from the need of the world-economy to expand its boundaries, a need which was itself the outcome of pressures internal to the world-economy.” See, The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), 129. In doing so, change on a localized level appears as something simply imposed from the outside, and not something negotiated through appropriation, invention, and resistance—a position taken in this paper.
The collection edited by Yamashita Tsuneo, Edo hyôryûki sôshû bekkan Daikokuya Kôdayû shiryô shû (four volumes) (Tokyo: Nihon Hyôronsha, 2003) is an invaluable source for documents related to the Shinshô maru. In this paper however, all references to Hokusa bunryaku are from the text as it appears inNihon shomin seikatsu shiryô shûsei, dai gokan, (Tanigawa Kenichi, et.al., eds.) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobô, 1985), 721-858. Hereafter, all references to Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryô shûsei, dai gokan will be abbreviated as, “NSSSS-5.”
Both the Hokusa bunryaku by Katsuragawa Hoshû and a slightly later Kankai ibun by Ôtsuki Gentaku (1804) which documents the experiences of the castaway Tsudayû are watershed texts for the production of later hyôryûki and are often directly cited by later writers. For Kankai ibun see, Sugimoto Tsutomu, et al. (ed.), Kankai ibun—honbun to kenkyû (Tokyo: Yasaka Shobô, 1986).
While length constraints prevent me from addressing here the formal and thematic shifts in castaway accounts after 1792, it is the subject of an earlier dissertation chapter of which this paper is a part.
The seventh volume (kan no nana) of the Hokusa bunryaku is found on pages 775-783 (NSSSS-5).
Ibid, 782-783. Ayuzawa Shintarô also briefly mentions this passage on Kôdayû’s visit to the brothels of St. Petersburg in his, Hyôryû: Sakoku jidai no kaigai hatten (Tokyo: Geibundô, 1956), 186-192.
Annual oaths taken by sailors at coastal shrines frequently forbade, among other things, sleeping with prostitutes and bringing women on board ships. Furthermore, while women obviously did go on boats, taboos regarding women on the sea are quite common even in the earliest written records. See for example, Tosa nikki in Nihon koten bungaku zenshû: Tosa nikki, Kagero nikki, (Matsumura Seiichi, et al., eds.) (Tokyo: Shôgakkan, 1973), 29-68. For a study of women at sea in a Western context see, David Cordingly, Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women: An Untold Maritime History (New York: Random House, 2001). For a more literary expression of this male dominated world of the ship, particularly in the context of the American whaling industry, see the 94th chapter of Moby Dick (“A Squeeze of the Hand”) in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Charles Feildelson, ed.) (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co.,1964), 532-533.
Kobayashi Shigefumi briefly mentions a few examples of women involved in castaway accounts in his Nipponjin ikoku hyôryûki (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 2000), 50-51. These include Takadaya Kahei’s mistress who was unfortunate enough to be caught on board the Kanze maru when it was taken by Russians in revenge for Golovin’s capture in 1812 and an account in the Taishû hyôkyaku kiji 
of 1613 where we read about a woman on board a ship that drifted to Taiwan 
. Under the Kijitsu hen section of the Kôshinroku 
one Itô Tôgai comments that this woman was sacrificed to the gods as the boat approached Taiwan. See also, Ishi
i Kendô korekushon Edo hyôryûki sôshû, dai ikkan (Tokyo: Nihon Hyôronsha, 1992), 91-92. Also see pages 504 to 527 in this same volume for letters written by Japanese women abroad that Kobayashi does not mention. Kobayashi does cite two other cases briefly mentioned in Nakahama Akira, Nakahama Manjirô no shôgai (Tokyo: Fujiibô, 1971), 10. The first is to a geisha named Osome from Yanagibashi, Edo who, in 1859, was rescued by American sailors and brought to Hawai’i, educated and eventually employed as a teacher in San Francisco. The second is a daughter of a Kagoshima fisherman named Oharu, who apparently married an American and took American citizenship, before returning to Japan to work as a translator for the minister of foreign affairs (Oguri Kôzuke no suke Tadamasa) in 1860. Finally, Kimura Ki mentions several accounts of Japanese women abroad before the Meiji period in the first two chapters of his Kaigai ni katsuyaku shita Meiji no josei (Tokyo: Shibundô, 1963), 1-51.
“Funaosa nikki,” in Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryô shûsei, dai gokan, (Tanigawa Kenichi, et.al., eds.) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobô, 1985), 503-550. Hereafter, referred to as Funaosa nikki. I am grateful to the help of Stephen Kohl and Madoka Kusakabe who have both patiently gone over the translations in this paper with me. In particular, the translations of Funaosa nikki could not have been done without the aid of Stephen Kohl’s unpublished translation of the text. Needless to say I take fully responsibility for all references to castaway accounts that appear in this paper.
This is an allusion to a famous poetic exchange between the classical Japanese male lover, Ariwara no Narihira and the Ise Priestess from Ise monogatari. I have addressed numerous citations of this trope of confusion between dream and reality as they appear in castaway accounts. For the purpose of this paper, I may add that the poetic allusion is a highly sexualized exchange between lovers who meet only once.
Kimi ya koshi/ ware ya yukikemu/ omoboezu/ yume ka utsutsu ka/ nete ka samete ka (Did you come to me/ or did I go to you?/ I cannot remember./ Dream or reality?/ Sleeping or awake?) See, Nihon koten bungaku zenshû: Taketori monogatari, Ise monogatari, Yamato monogatari, Heichû monogatari (Katagiri Yôichi, et al., eds.) (Tokyo: Shôgakkan, 1972), 192.
While Funaosa nikki was first produced in hand-written or shahon form, this practice of indentation remains remarkably consistent in the various manuscripts I have seen. The illustration used here is from a manuscript housed in the Meiji University library in Tokyo, Japan. I refer to this as the “Motoori Ôhira Text,” since he has included at the beginning, his personal impressions after reading it. The Hashigaki (Preface) is written by Ikeda Hirochika and is dated the 11th month of Bunsei 5 (~1822). Yoshida Nakayama Biseki has written the Batsu (Afterward) and dated it the 17th day of the 4th month, Bunsei 6. The editors of the katsuji version of this text in Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryô shûsei includes Motoori’s comments at the end of the text (after the Batsu) which suggests the editors may have been working with a slightly later copy of this text. Nonetheless, considering the dates of the Preface by Hirochika (identical to the Motoori Text), either an Edo period scribe or the editors of the katsuji version must have mistakenly read the date on the Batsu to be 17th day of the 4th month, Bunka 6 (1809!). This is four years before Jûkichi’s departure. See page 548.
Also written 
, funadama are considered the spirit of the ship. For a detailed description see, Sudô Toshiichi, ed., Fune (Tokyo: Hôsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1975), 317-347.
I have not yet found any documents other than Funaosa nikki that relate the events that took place on this ‘haunted’ ship. My point here though has nothing to do with the accuracy of Ikeda’s story, but more his rationalization as editor and scribe of Funaosa nikki.
Rituals of ship construction are never completely standardized or codified throughout the archipelago during the Edo period, however according to Sakurada Katsutoku; they serve as a ritualized sacrifice to the sea in exchange for safe and profitable travels. Frequently they involve the placement of sacred gendered objects (including a lock of female hair and female dolls) in a small compartment at the base of the mast. These are meant to embody the ship’s spirit (funa dama). See Fune, 330- 347. In a similar vein we see in Jirôkichi hyôryûjin monogatari, another reference to a shrine virgin or miko san that comes aboard the Chôja maru in 1839 [see, “Hyôryûjin Jirôkichi monogatari,” in Takase Shigeo, Kitamae bune Chôja maru no hyôryû (Tokyo: Seisui Shoin, 1974), 218]. In this text too, the female body is explicitly described in terms of both their potent spiritual power, and their more earthly libidinal powers.
Chôyô falls on the 9th day of the 9th month and is one of the five sekku holidays in the Chinese and old Japanese lunar calendars.
My reading and translations of Shanghai kôki are based on the text as it appears in Kinsei hyôryûki shû, (Arakawa Hidetoshi, ed.) (Tokyo: Hôsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1969), 437-468. The entry for 9/9 begins on page 451. For references to the history of prostitution in Shanghai see, Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849-1949 (Nöel Castelino, trans.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
The first poem plays on the homophonic relation between the Chinese expression of farewell (chin chin) and a fairly vulgar Japanese expression for “penis” (chin chin). Furthermore, the poetics of the poem is also enhanced through the use of shin shin (“to sleep,” or “to bed,” but also an onomatopoeic term to express the act of urination) and chin chin. The second poem suggests a metaphorical relationship between the paper lanterns or chôchin that the women must decide to light or not, and the old man’s scrotal sac.
For a reading of late Edo laughter see, H.D. Harootunian’s “Late Tokugawa Culture and Thought,” in The Emergence of Meiji Japan (Marius B. Jansen, ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60.
The passage reads, “We crawled into the woman’s bath [where we found] a steam bath six feet by six feet, inside of which was a lower level and an upper level, then a third level and even a fourth level, but above this, nothing steamier. The entrance was a double layered door which came together as tight as an inryô purse, like a warehouse door. The women on the top level actually beat the women on the lower level. Putting hot water into something like a two-handled basin, they dipped a bundle of 10 bird feathers in it and while whacking their bodies, they gazed at us and broke out into great laughter, pointing their fingers 
. After having a few words with the women, there was more great laughter and no letting up with the finger pointing. We also thought it was hilarious 
.” See, Kitamae bune Chôja maru no hyôryû, 232.
Takayama Jun has a chapter on the sexual hospitality (seiteki kantai) of native Hawaiian women in his book-length study of Japanese castaways who returned from Hawai’i in 1807. While this chapter does not go into much detail concerning the castaways experiences with prostitutes, it does trace the sexualization of native Hawaiian women by early Western explorers to the islands. See Takayama Jun, Edo jidai Hawai hyôryûki: “Iban hyôryû kikoku roku” no kenshô (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobô, 1997), 145-150.
SeeKitamae bune Chôja maru no hyôryû, 227.
Citing Edouard A. Stackpole, Katherine Plummer has suggested that the reference to the “black” women might refer to, “an area of the island that was inhabited exclusively by blacks, called ‘New Guinea.’” However, it should be noted that the use of “black” (kuroi) to refer to skin color does not necessarily indicate someone of African origins. This term was also frequently used to describe non Africans as well. See Katherine Plummer, A Japanese Glimpse at the Outside World 1839-1843 (Fairbanks, AL: The Limestone Press, 1991), 141.
The description of this brothel in Jirôkichi hyôryûjin monogatari is significantly from the description we read in Bandan and Tokei monogatari. See, Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryô shûsei, dai gokan, (Tanigawa Kenichi, et.al., eds.) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobô, 1985).
SeeKitamae bune Chôja maru no hyôryû, 228. As for the term musan 
, I take it to be a reference to the Buddhist concept of 
. In short, this is the first of the 48 promises of Amidha boddhisatva to sentient beings. The promise states that in the Pure Land one will not find the three bad levels of existence; hell, hungry ghosts, and beasts. I have found that this term, translated here as “hell,” appears in other comical texts for certain ironic or exaggerated effect. For example, see episode 32 in “Kinofu ha kefu no monogatari,” in Nihon koten bungaku taikei 100: Edo waraibanashi shû (Odaka Toshio, ed.) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), 60-61.
These are just two of the more obvious examples of vulgar and libidinous fiction popular in the Edo period. The similarity to the castaway accounts might be best demonstrated with a reminder of one of Kitahachi’s many “sexploits.” In the second part of the fourth book of Hizakurige, one of the heroes, under the pretense of going to urinate, manages to find a young woman more than willing to provide him with a sexual escape. Upon being discovered in the middle of things by an even younger neighbor boy, he realizes that this woman is completely crazy. Like our castaway Jirôkichi, he attempts to escape, only to be discovered by this woman’s father. It is not until Kita’s traveling partner and comic sidekick, Yajirôbei, intervenes to save him. Of course, this example too, ends with “great laughter.” See Hizakurige or Shanks’ Mare (Thomas Satchell, trans.) (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1963), 151-153. Also see, Nihon meicho zenshû 22 kan—Hizakurige sonota, jô (Tokyo: Nihon Meicho Zenshû Kankôkai, 1927), 188-189.
Nihon koten bungaku taikei, 47: Saikaku shû, jô (Tsutsumi Seiji, et al., eds.) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), 37-215.
Harootunian, challenging the common assumption that culture simply reflects the political, social, and material realities, instead suggests that gesaku fiction was able to project a particular form that existed on the horizon of thought and which preceded the full integration of consumer and commodification. For example he writes, “Urban expansion and cultural participation required new definitions. New forms of cultural production accompanying the expansion of cities collectively signified what we may call, from playful literature (gesaku), the ‘culture of play.’ By the end of the 18th century this had exceeded the limits of its own formal constraints to reveal in vague outline the possibility of constructing a social imagination vastly different from the one authorized by the Tokugawa…The social identity of the ruled was fixed in a closed, hierarchic chain, resembling elements in a stable structure that reflected the order found in nature. Yet the material expansion of Edo as the hub of a world not yet imagined made it possible to challenge these fixed identities through the proliferation of different subject positions.” See, “Late Tokugawa Culture and Thought,” in The Emergence of Meiji Japan (Marius Jansen, ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 56-57.
See Watanabe Kenji, Edo yûri jôsuiki (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1994), 15.
Nihon josei shi, (Wakita Haruko, Hayashi Reiko, Nagahara Kazuko, eds.) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kôbunkan, 1987), 128-135.
According to the Kokusho sômokuroku, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965), 17, the Keizai yôroku was first produced in manuscript form (shahon) in 1827, and still today there are several handwritten copies from the Edo period stored in various libraries throughout Japan. This would indicate that it was circulated, copied, and read for over thirty years before being mass-produced in woodblock print form in 1859. See also, Nihon shisô taikei (vol. 45) Andô Shôeki Satô Nobuhiro hen (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1977), 359-570.
Satô Nobuhiro’s use of the word koku/kuni here refers to “country,” and not “domain” or “province” as it can sometimes be translated. This translation is based on Watanabe Kenji’s citation of the text in Edo yûri jôsuiki (Tokyo: Kôdansha, 1994), 44. See also, Satô Nobuhiro shû of Kinsei shakai keizai gakusetsu taikei (Ôgawa Shûmei, ed.) (Tokyo: Seibundô Shinkôsha, 1935), 21-60.
While being exiled from Edo between 1832 and 1843, Satô appears to have regained his credibility later in life as one of the most important (and favored) consultants to Rôjû Mizuno Tadakuni. See, Harold Blitho, “The Tempô Crisis,” in The Emergence of Meiji Japan (Marius Jansen, ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40-43.
This is not surprising, considering his remarkable understanding of Russian and English expansion through global trade. See his, “Keizai yôryaku” in Nihon shisô taikei (vol. 45) Andô Shôeki Satô Nobuhiro hen (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1977), 522-570.
According to Yoshiyuki Nakai, Futabatei “argued that if Japan sent prostitutes to Siberia, their ensuing friendship with the Russians would cause the Russians to become friendlier toward Japan and to know more about the Japanese people, thus helping to avert the prospect of war between the two peoples.” See Yoshiyuki Nakai, “Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909),” in Papers on Japan (Vol. 4) (Cambridge: East Asian Research Center Harvard University, 1967), 32.
The work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) has been helpful in negotiating the formulation of homosocial relations in these castaway accounts.
This passage can be found in Honkoku Hyôryûki (reprint of Bunmei genryû sôsho daisankan 151-179) (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankôkai, 1915), 174. The translation here is Tosh Motofuji’s found in, Floating on the Pacific Ocean (Los Angeles: Glen Dawson, 1955), 72.
Ibid. 176. Translation is Tosh Motofuji’s, ibid. 77-78.