“The centrality of race in the power relations between the West and Japan during the first half of the twentieth century is far from accidental. It was preceded by five decades of rigorous observations and ... studies of Japanese origins and racial affinity” (xxiv). Thus theorizes Rotem Kowner in his latest work on the evolution of race and racism in European views of Japan. Focusing on the five centuries between Marco Polo’s first report of a mysterious island called Cipangu and Linnaeus’s categorization of the Japanese as a “yellow” race in 1735, Kowner builds a compelling argument that traces the development of racism from Europeans’ earliest imaginings of the Japanese people to the heart of Enlightenment thought.

Kowner’s book comes at a time when a growing number of scholars are focusing on race as a lens through which to observe Japan’s development into a modern nation. Some of these view race as the motor driving internal change, as, for example, in the construction of homogeneity as national identity. Others examine race as an external force that has historically moulded Japan’s relations with foreign, and especially Western, countries, including phenomena such as “Japan-bashing” and anti-Japanese immigration policies. More recently, Japan has emerged as a litmus test for the West’s contradictory views of race, in which Japan’s variable status as a “white” or “coloured” nation points up the utter confusion that results from attempts to make consistent and enforceable racial policies.

From White to Yellow falls within the last line of inquiry; Kowner is primarily concerned with what the change in Europeans’ views of the Japanese shows about the development of modern racism. Kowner argues that the shift in the perception of Japanese from fair-skinned, civilised people to a “yellow” people ranked below Europeans illustrates how the criteria for being considered “civilised” gradually changed from one based largely on customs and manners to a greater emphasis on physical features and traits believed to be immutable. Too, the shift illustrates the develop of a consensus on what physical features constituted a “race” (e.g., eye size, nose shape and skin colour). Scholars interested in elaborating on the concept of race beyond black and white will find much food for thought, as Kowner explores the complex signifiers that contributed to the production of racial hierarchies in Europe, Japan and elsewhere.

Kowner’s work is unique in that, unlike the majority of studies that focus on race in East Asia, it aims to elucidate the emergence of these distinctions at a much earlier point in Euro-Japanese relations—in fact, from their origin, if such can be found. Suffice to begin at 1300—the point, roughly, when Marco Polo first puts Japan, or at least Cipangu, a place believed to have been Japan, quite literally on Europe’s map (readers will recall that Fra Mauro’s influential mappa mundi, which first marked “Japan” on European maps, was based partly on Polo’s work). From Yellow to White is also notable for the breadth of its source materials, which, despite spanning several languages and centuries, are housed within a sound and well-organized theoretical framework; I can think of many other works that attempt to do the same but lack the clarity found here. The discussion of Japanese slavery, which tends to be a less-discussed topic in Japanese historiography, as well as of the cultural similarities between Japanese and their European observers (which may have helped to elevate them in European eyes), receive remarkably nuanced treatments as points of comparison between Japan and other countries within Europe’s purview. This work is therefore both timely and adds something new to the contemporary debate on the birth of race in Western thought.

One problematic topic for readers will likely be the author’s premise that race existed, albeit inchoately, as a concept in medieval and early modern Europe. Kowner acknowledges “the vagueness, and ... even the absence” of the word “race” in his sources and, indeed, of its use in this particular era (8). Moreover, as the evidence here is limited largely to the views of literate Western Europeans (a group constituting about 5-10% of European men), it is impossible to determine how Europeans as a whole would have understood the concept. Finally, by prioritizing race as a determinant of how Europeans came to perceive the Japanese, Kowner gives less attention to other, perhaps more fruitful, areas of analysis. Religion, for example, which receives a nice treatment with regards to the development of the idea of “blood” purity and lineage in Spain and Germany (103-5), is largely subsumed under the category of ethnography in the case of Japan—here, as a constituent of race, or as one that quickly loses steam (10, 76 and 112). If, as Kowner suggests, “within a few decades from the onset of European expansion, religion was to lose its distinctive power as a cue for civility”, it would be interesting to explore why this was less compelling for European observers of Japan than, say, for Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas, where the Inquisition continued to try religious deviants into the nineteenth century (76).

Another problem is Kowner’s attempt to develop a theory of race or, indeed, of Japan itself out of scarce early source materials. These inevitably contain inconsistencies and, in some cases, come from notoriously unreliable narrators such as Polo and Christopher Columbus. Kowner is on more solid ground in addressing European views of non-Europeans post-1500, where Europeans’ exposure to many more people and cultures led them to begin cataloguing differences, including physical ones. Kowner makes effective use of both Japanese and European records, especially those of Jesuit observers, as well as of material culture such as maps, paintings and sketches to chart the shifts in Europeans’ understanding of Japan. One may go further than Kowner does in viewing these images as, not merely recording Europeans’ perspectives, but reproducing them for an audience that would have extended beyond literate men, including potentially upper-class women and wealthy urban commoners.

At a stately seven hundred and twelve pages, this work is certainly not light reading; nor does Kowner view it as a finished work, but as the first in a series that will continue to the present. There are a few minor typos in the text (e.g., the phrase “there was still a virtual consensus existed” slipped in unedited [21]). Yet, the text is eminently readable and thorough given the complexity of the subject matter, the extensive time frame, and the range of materials included in it.

Overall, Kowner builds a convincing argument as to why Europeans’ early observations of the Japanese are evidence of the emergence of a kind of “proto-racism”—that is, the beginnings of a trajectory that would lead to increasingly sophisticated and rigid conceptions of race, in East Asia and beyond.