Since the publication of Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean, Footnote ¹ many scholars have shifted their attention from lands to the seas, preferring to write “water histories” that show how river ways, oceans, and harbors were linked through complex networks of trade and human interaction.Footnote ² Practitioners of such histories craft narratives from the perspective of the waterline, and hence eschew an approach that focuses on landed authority, institutions, or sources, which they describe as being “terracentric” (Wilson, pp. 7, 54) or exhibiting “terricentrism” (Shapinsky, pp. 36–37, 67, 118).

Each of these four works reflects that maritime perspective, portraying Japan less as a landed entity than an archipelago, bound to the surrounding seas, which served more as a conduit than as a barrier. In his Lords of the Sea, Peter Shapinsky, following the lead of the noted Japanese scholar Amino Yoshihiko, explores “sea lords” who plied the waters between Japan's larger islands and gained influence by controlling strategic shipping lanes. Shapinsky brings to life a maritime facet of Japanese history that has been largely absent from English-language scholarship. He also reveals the centrality of the seas and seafarers to state and society in Japan from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Noell Wilson, in her Defensive Positions, takes issue with the common perception of Japan as being unable to defend its boundaries in the Tokugawa era (1600–1868), and explains how the Tokugawa shogunate dynamically organized coastal defenses and claimed authority over Japan's harbors and surrounding seas. Wilson novelly suggests that the ability to mobilize regional defense efforts allowed regional lords to forge alliances, which ultimately eroded Tokugawa hegemony. In Maiden Voyage, Joshua Fogel illuminates a hitherto little-known exchange between the Tokugawa and the Qing, the first official encounter between Japan and China after a hiatus of nearly three centuries. His history of the 1862 voyage of the Senzaimaru, a former English vessel staffed with a multinational crew and flying the Rising Sun (hinomaru) flag, which designated Tokugawa, rather than Japanese ships per se, clarifies the nature of Japanese and Chinese diplomacy and cultural interactions during a complex time when both regimes were under siege by adversaries from within and abroad. Finally, Catherine Phipps's Empires on the Waterfront provides refreshing insight into Japan's treaty ports. Phipps argues that the establishment of a network of formal and informal treaty ports throughout Japan created an infrastructure linking hinterlands to ports, which facilitated Japan's export of varied commodities. Not only did this allow Japan to benefit from international trade, but also these ports ultimately enabled Japan's imperial expansion at the turn of the twentieth century.

None of these four works focus on the longue durée to the extent of Braudel. Shapinsky covers the longest temporal span of three centuries (1300–1600), followed by Wilson's two and a half centuries (1603–1868), Phipps's half-century (1858–99), and Fogel's single year (1862). Nevertheless, when taken together, these four volumes span 600 years and allow for new understandings of Japanese history, albeit not invariably the ones that the authors intended.

Shapinsky eschews a specific geographic approach, and although he mostly explores the waters between the main Japanese islands, he argues that peoples of the sea “integrated Japan into global shipping networks” (p. 7). Fogel reveals how a British ship was bought by Japanese Tokugawa authorities, aided by Dutch middlemen, and set out to attempt to trade with Chinese Qing authorities in Shanghai. Wilson focuses on Nagasaki's defenses and its surrounding seas and explains how this model was applied to other ports. Phipps, by contrast, explains how the informal opening of dozens of ports allowed for an alliance of local actors and government officials to link these ports to the hinterlands and develop an infrastructure that promoted international trade. She focuses most closely on the port of Moji, located on the straits of Shimonoseki, but examines other, generally less successful, harbors as well.

These works indirectly reveal the protean nature of Japan's surrounding seas, as they are differently named and interpreted. Fogel never names or directly mentions any seas, while Shapinsky explains that the seas separating the main Japanese islands never had a name during the period of his study (p. 1), but nevertheless uses the moniker of the Inland Sea to describe the core geographic region of his study. Wilson and Phipps also refer to the Inland Sea, although they diverge on naming the seas off the coast of Japan, which Wilson calls the Genkai Sea (p. 64) while Phipps refers to the same area as the Korea Strait (p. 42). Mirroring these differences, Shapinsky sees the Inland Sea as being the playground of non-state actors, and Phipps portrays the waters around the straits of Shimonoseki as being “liminal zones of contact” (p. 177). Phipps nevertheless recounts debates in 1892 as to whether the Inland Sea belonged to Japan or was part of international waterways (pp. 180–85), while Wilson sees the Inland Sea as firmly being part of Japan's control (pp. 77–79) during the period of her study.

The straits of Shimonoseki loom large, for here, at the western reaches of the Inland Sea, at their narrowest a mere 600 meters of surging, swirling seas separate the main Japanese islands of Honshu and Kyushu. Here, two ports, Shimonoseki and Moji, face each other, separated by a nautical mile, the former on Honshu and the latter, Kyushu. This vital chokepoint is recognized explicitly as such by some authors (Shapinsky, pp. 116, 161; Phipps, p. 161). It also concurrently separated the Inland Sea from the outer oceans (Wilson, pp. 64, 77–79; Phipps, p. 42). Surprisingly, Shimonoseki is not well depicted in the maps of these volumes, appearing at the edge of Shapinsky's map of the Inland Sea (p. 3), and, most inexcusably, at the very corner of Phipps's poorly conceived map (p. 118), which is hard to read and shows too much of central Kyushu, but barely the straits at all. Only Wilson presents a clear map of Shimonoseki and its surrounding seas (p. 78).

The turbulent straits of Shimonoseki are central to Shapinsky's book and reveal at the same time its greatest shortcoming, because Shapinsky does not adequately explain who controlled this chokepoint during the centuries of his study. Focusing on the Noshima Murakami, a seafaring family, Shapinsky argues that they were non-state actors who exercised great autonomy through their control of crucial chokepoints (pp. 18, 22) in the Inland Sea, which presumably included Shimonoseki. The Murakami and their cohorts were, however, stigmatized with the term “pirate” (kaizoku) by “terracentric” or “land-based” elites who relied on these figures to “incorporate the sea and to harness its bounty,” and, at the same time, feared them for this very control (pp. 9, 61, 67). Shapinsky devotes one chapter (“Putting the Japanese into Japanese Pirates”) to how pirates became a discursive category in Korea, China, and Japan, which incidentally is the only time that his work extensively covers the area outside of the Inland Sea. His perspective has proven influential, and is shared by Wilson, who describes piracy as a “discursive manipulation” that “turned the illicit Chinese trader into a pirate” in the seventeenth century (p. 71).

Characterizing the Murakami as “sea lords,” Shapinsky explains their vital role in trade and shipping, as well as the “military revolution” of the sixteenth century as their “dreadnaughts” (atakebune), boats capable of carrying a thousand bales (koku) of rice, helped blockade crucial ports. He concludes his analysis by showing how these “sea lords,” characterized in his final chapter as a “Leviathan,” were constrained, immobilized, and tamed by landed lords.

In fact, the dichotomy between landed and sea lords proved facile, as the Ōuchi and other so-called “landed lords” were integrally linked to the seas. They did not depend on the “sea lords”, but rather commanded them. Shapinsky vastly overestimates the autonomy of these “sea lords,” and his suggestion that they were distinct from terracentric lords is easily disproven when examining the straits of Shimonoseki, for they were controlled by the Ōuchi, one of the powerful “landed elites.” The Ōuchi dominated these straits from 1362, when they captured a castle overlooking Moji, until 1551, when a coup brought them low. Shapinsky ignores the long years of Ōuchi control, and only brings the straits into his narrative after their 1551 collapse (pp. 116, 174).

This lacuna is difficult to explain, for Shapinsky is aware of and cites the “Hyōgo Northern Toll Barrier Shipping Register.” This source reveals that an Ōuchi junk capable of carrying 2,500 koku of grain, hailing from the deep anchorage of Moji, arrived at Hyōgo on April 13, 1445, thereby amply revealing Ōuchi authority over Shimonoseki. The Moji boat of 1445 possessed barrier immunities, meaning that the Ōuchi had the same shipping privileges as the Murakami (p. 99) and were exempt from tolls. This prerogative is unacknowledged by Shapinsky, who implies that they were monopolized by “sea lords” such as the Murakami.

Furthermore, sources from 1447 reveal that the largest Ōuchi craft could carry 3,000 koku, Footnote ³ making their boats triple the size of the largest Murakami craft, which he sees as being the greatest of their day (p. 133; see also p. 210). Not only did the Ōuchi possess the largest ships, but their armada dwarfed that of the Murakami, for when Ōuchi Yoshioki dispatched 660 boats, the vast majority were under his command, although affiliated kaizoku “pirates” possessed the remaining 200.Footnote ⁴

The aforementioned diary reveals that kaizoku were incorporated into the Ōuchi organization, a facet that is recognized by Shapinsky, who notes that “pirate admirals” such as the Obatake fought with the Ōuchi (pp. 204–5). Likewise, the Innoshima branch of the Murakami can be documented as “protecting” (keigo) Ōuchi ships at the turn of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵ The Noshima Murakami, too, followed the Ōuchi, for they signed off on laws pertaining to Ōuchi ships departing for China in 1546,Footnote ⁶ and were praised by Ōuchi Yoshioki for fighting on his behalf in 1527.Footnote ⁷ Although this 1527 document has hitherto been underappreciated, recent Japanese scholarship argues that the Noshima Murakami gained only a modicum of autonomy after the Ōuchi collapse.Footnote ⁸ The period after the fall of the Ōuchi coincides with the great upswing in international piracy by the so-called wakō (K. waegu, C. wokou) (p. 206).

Rather than being “sea lords” or “pirates,” the Murakami are best conceived of as being privateers who served the Ōuchi and plundered the ships of hostile or nonaffiliated individuals. Shapinsky uses the term “privateer” in a European context (pp. 146, 229), but he ignores the possibility of using such a term for Japan. It does, however, accurately describe the relationship of the Murakami with powerful daimyo, and explain the seeming “paradox” of these magnates relying on privateers—their pirates—while at the same time prohibiting piracy in general (p. 61). And in cases where their privateers mistakenly plundered a ship that they were not supposed to, their lords, most often the Ōuchi, apologized for their deeds. This is most evident when the Murakami mistakenly stole goods and documents from a Korean ambassador (pp. 196–97).

Shapinsky's reliance on Korean sources is a strength of this work, but these Chosŏn records need to be better contextualized. For example, when the ambassador Song Hǔigyŏng visited the Inland Sea in 1440, he stated that the writ of the Ashikaga shoguns did not apply there (pp. 2, 197). This did not mean that the Inland Sea was a non-state area, as Shapinsky implies, but rather that it constituted an Ōuchi ocean. As early as 1429, Chosŏn officials realized that the Ōuchi could prevent pirates from “coming and going” through undoubtedly the straits of Shimonoseki (p. 201). As a symbol of the importance that the Chosŏn ascribed to the Ōuchi, they granted Ōuchi Norihiro Korean split tallies (K. t'ongshin-pu, J. tsūshinpu 通信符), which survive to this day, and which allowed Norihiro to directly and officially trade with them in 1453. Sea lords, if they existed, were not the Murakami but rather the Ōuchi.

Shapinsky seems to assume that lateral bonds, a kind of seafarer camaraderie, caused the various lines of the Murakami to band together, when in fact the Murakami divided their allegiances among competing powers to assert their autonomy from each other. The Noshima served the Ōuchi, and later the Mōri (pp. 117–19), while one member of the Kurushima branch of the Murakami was adopted by the Kōno, thereby becoming their heir. Once the Kōno collapsed, the Kurushima later intermarried with the Mōri and grudgingly served them (p. 114), but lost some islands to the Noshima Murakami in 1582 (p. 121). The Murakami were fundamentally connected to these competing daimyo lords, but were not their patrons, as Shapinsky suggests. Indeed, Shapinsky contorts his narrative to maintain the fiction that they were non-state actors by discounting Kōno and Murakami genealogies as a “commemorative fallacy” whereby “the Kurushima amputated their entire history as an autonomous sea-lord house and instead attached—prosthesis-like—the lineage of the Kōno family, who had been warrior provincial governors” (pp. 260, 259). The distortion here is not the genealogy, but rather the notions that the Kōno, or for that matter the Ōuchi, were terracentric lords, and the Murakami were non-state actors.

Shapinsky ends his account by revealing how the Tokugawa, in establishing their hegemony, prohibited the Japanese from sailing abroad or owning ships larger than 500 koku in 1635 (p. 263), and his Murakami survived by becoming linked to daimyo, moving inland, and becoming “land based.” Although the Murakami lost their ties to the sea, the port of Shiwaku, (p. 110) continued to harbor ship masters (p. 117) and shippers (p. 114), who plied the Inland Sea. Some even served as the crew for the Kenjunmaru when it sailed to China in 1864 (Fogel, p. 145), showing that some peoples of the sea remained, although their opportunities for sailing and shipping had long been constrained.

For all of its strength in illuminating the history of the Murakami, Shapinsky's thalocentric overcorrection to terracentrism diminishes this book. His “terracentric” lords were anything but that, as they, and not the Murakami, controlled the most important chokepoints in the Inland Sea. If a “Leviathan” existed, it was not the Murakami, but rather lords such as the Ōuchi, who controlled the Inland Sea and bent the Murakami and others to their will.

Wilson's Defensive Positions reveals a profoundly different Japan, as members of the newly established Tokugawa regime (bakufu) (1603–1867) strove to monopolize trade to prevent seafarers from abroad from illicitly arriving and trading, and Japanese mariners from traveling abroad. This policy, established in the early decades of the seventeenth century, lasted until 1862. Wilson examines how the Tokugawa regime established military control over Japan's coasts and harbors in the early seventeenth century, thereby extending their authority to Japan's surrounding seas. She first focuses on defensive practices and policies for the port of Nagasaki, and then shows how this “Nagasaki system” became the template for defending other ports, including the treaty ports that were established in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Wilson provides a good history of the rise of the port of Nagasaki, but, in the spirit of Braudel, her initial chapters would be stronger if she had shown how political circumstances determined the rise and fall of comparable ports such as Moji, Hyōgo, and Sakai.

Wilson explains how this control of harbors and seas constituted an extension of the territorial consolidation of authority of the Tokugawa regime, and suggests that this policy did not arise in response to Western imperialism, although the concurrent Spanish colonization and fortification of the Philippines most likely did influence these policies (pp. 5, 28–29). The Tokugawa desired to limit the ability of daimyo to sail abroad, destroying any ships that could carry more than 500 koku in 1609, and censuring even close allies for building ships too large in 1625 (pp. 39, 31). They were capable of mobilizing large forces to intimidate two Portuguese ships, dispatching 55,528 troops to defend Nagasaki harbor in 1647 (p. 41).

Nevertheless, Wilson is correct in that the Tokugawa fear of foreign ships has been overdrawn, as her narrative provides powerful evidence that the Tokugawa strove to prevent daimyo attempts to purchase ships and weapons and so undermine Tokugawa dominance. Hence, they went to great lengths to ensure that illicit arms purchases did not occur, going so far as to establish twenty-one stations in Kagoshima in the 1640s (p. 6), ostensibly to guard against foreign ships, but also to prevent the Shimazu daimyo from purchasing European cannons, which they had done earlier in the seventeenth century. Tellingly, as soon as these prohibitions ended in the nineteenth century, agents of these daimyo purchased weapons and ships with alacrity, a process shown clearly in Fogel's account, as agents from the Chōshū and Satsuma domains bought ships and weapons in 1862 (Fogel, pp. 49, 54, 93). These domains outpaced purchases by the Tokugawa regime, so that by 1868, the various domains owned ninety-four ships, while the Tokugawa only possessed forty-four vessels (Phipps, p. 153). The prohibition of shipping in 1635 froze a Tokugawa military superiority that could not be sustained with the loosening of trade restrictions, a valuable insight, but not one expressed by Wilson as forcibly as it should have been.

Wilson's perspective is not, however, one of the Tokugawa freezing military superiority by limiting the ability of daimyo to sail and communicate abroad. To the contrary, she portrays the Tokugawa as possessing a “dynamic” and “malleable” maritime defense culture (p. 5). As the defense of ports and harbors was delegated from the Tokugawa to their domains, these domains improved their military organization, established informal networks, and developed new military capabilities that ultimately allowed them to overthrow the Tokugawa.

Wilson idiosyncratically uses some commonly used terms and concepts, such as Weber's “monopoly of violence,” in a manner that strays far from a Weberian understanding of the term. She correctly argues that samurai possessed a collective monopoly of violence (pp. 8, 188), but she more often uses the term as a synonym for Tokugawa military hegemony (pp. 114, 135, 213, 216). At one point, she suggests that it is diffused to peasants and extended to domains (p. 188), but what was meant by this monopoly being attenuated (p. 3), diffused (p. 213), extended (p. 3), delegated (p. 20), or devolved (p. 173) to domains, allowing them to “execute … a monopoly on violence” (p. 95) was not fathomable to this reviewer.

Wilson frequently refers to the term “sovereignty,” which in her usage generally refers to unitary state control over territory. She is most interested in the question of control over the surrounding seas of Japan, which she describes as maritime sovereignty (pp. 14, 91). Still, vagueness abounds, for one can find references to “domainal” sovereignty (p. 54), economic sovereignty (p. 122n67), and Tokugawa sovereignty (p. 55), as well as otherwise unspecified Japanese sovereignty (pp. 173, 215). Surprisingly, the term is absent from the index.

In her studies of port defenses, Wilson alludes to the importance of artillery and their production. Eschewing a narrative that focuses too much on “technological innovation” (p. 5) in favor of institutional improvements and social networks (pp. 94–95, 135), she nevertheless highlights the importance of the creation of a reverbatory furnace, a remarkable development that was first mentioned by Thomas Smith in 1948 but has not garnered the attention that it deserves.Footnote ⁹ The ability of Saga authorities to recognize the importance of these new cannons and to build reverbatory furnaces, and to disseminate this technology, albeit not always successfully, reveals in stark detail a fundamental, if often overlooked truth—that Tokugawa control did not mean isolation, particularly in terms of the dissemination of knowledge, of military matters.

The story, which can be pieced together from Wilson's account, is a remarkable one. The Dutch king's flagship Palembang, a “state of the art ship” (pp. 122–23), arrived in Nagasaki harbor in 1844. It possessed Paixhans guns with exploding shells (p. 152). Nabeshima Naomasa, the head of the Saga domain, managed to board the ship and inspect these guns, an exemplary military service that earned him praise and a release from sankin kōtai travel to Edo (pp. 122, 130). Thereupon, Naomasa desired to build a reverbatory furnace and gained a copy of and translated Ulrich Huguenin's text on the construction of one such furnace at Liege (pp. 131, 149, 156). With Dutch aid, Naomasa managed to not only build such a furnace, but also manufacture new cannons by 1852, and by the late 1850s he had successfully manufactured fifteen to seventeen of these guns, which were used for coastal defenses (pp. 158, 164).

Wilson does not, however, clearly tell of this remarkable transformation because she mistakenly attributes revolutionary changes in artillery to the Napoleonic era (p. 114) and otherwise fails to understand the significance of advances in artillery in the nineteenth century that were instantly grasped by contemporaries. She belittles the newly developed Paixhans guns as being “a recent development” that allowed guns to “sustain strength during repeated firing,” but “alone may not have seemed overpowering” (pp. 123, 150, 160, 127). In fact, Paixhans guns fired shells at a greater velocity, leading to a flatter trajectory, and their conical explosive shells could easily destroy a wooden vessel; they thus revolutionized navies and entailed a transformation in coastal defenses. They were adopted first by the French, but in the 1840s, the Dutch and the US navies used them as well.

These smooth-bore guns were, however, fabulously expensive,Footnote ¹⁰ a fact lost on Wilson, who assumes that European countries were able to cheaply manufacture these weapons due to the economies of scale and mass production (pp. 157, 160, 162–63). The new Saga foundry was not designed to “become self-sufficient in mass-producing cannon” (p. 143), and indeed, Paixhans guns were never produced cheaply, nor in great numbers. Still worse, Wilson chides the Japanese for struggling with these new methods and suggests that they should have built more bronze cannon (p. 160), not knowing that they had become obsolescent, a fact memorably described in an 1860 military magazine as: “The furnaces are cold; there is a dead calm on the bronze ocean.”Footnote ¹¹

Finally, Wilson's statement that Japanese guns “were already a generation behind the rifled bores of Western firearms even before leaving their site of production” (p. 169) is untrue, as the most important breech-loading, rifled Armstrong cannon was only adopted by the British in 1859, even though they were quite expensive to manufacture, and by 1860, the British had 1,000 of these cannon.Footnote ¹² The Chōshū samurai Takasaki Shinsaku, who traveled to China on the Senzaimaru, first observed, inspected, and sketched these cannons in Shanghai in 1862, and an illustration of this appears on page 84 of Fogel's book. Saga was able to cast Armstrong cannon, and they were used in the Battle of Ueno in 1868 to defeat Tokugawa forces (p. 169). Here, vital evidence for the dissemination of the Armstrong cannon comes from Fogel's remarkable work. Wilson does not analyze this cannon, and while Fogel does not comment on it in much detail, when taken together, both works reveal the significance of these weapons and the profound interest they elicited.

Fogel's Maiden Voyage best provides a sense of life on the waterfront, and also recounts the resumption of Sino-Japanese unofficial relations in 1862. Fogel explains how Dutch agents facilitated the Tokugawa purchase of an English ship 111 feet in length, and displacing 358 tons (p. 12), which was, for the time, relatively antiquated. Relying on a wealth of Chinese, Japanese, and European records, Fogel masterfully charts the earlier history of this ship and its links to a Dutch official, T. Kores, of a Shanghai trading company, who served as a crucial interlocutor.

Fogel characterizes the Senzaimaru as the “first embassy sent from Japan to China in nearly three centuries,” with the last one being Ōuchi boats sent in the 1540s, and again the goals were the promotion of trade (pp. 188, 121). The trade agreements proved minimal, but Fogel argues that cultural exchanges, through “brush writing,” were greater than one might think. He argues that the institution of the kiheitai, an irregular force of Chōshū militia, was drawn from Manchu military organization (pp. 109, 117), a provocative argument worthy of more study. A reproduction of Takasaki Shinsaku's sketch of an Armstrong cannon (p. 84) represents one of the most important pieces of evidence regarding their rapid dissemination to Japan.

Likewise, anyone interested in Japanese and Chinese diplomacy, or cultural perceptions, is well advised to read Fogel's book. He not only shows how durable the old trope or notion of wakō, or Japanese pirates (Ch. wokou) was, but also reveals the ad hoc nature of negotiations, and how effectively the Japanese crew of the Senzaimaru was able to change Japan's diplomatic status from being a non-treaty non-trading country to a non-treaty trading country (pp. 126, 131). The treaties would come later, but Fogel provides much information on the nature of these interactions. Likewise, he ably shows how many thought in terms of domains rather than Japan as a whole (p. 169).

One can quibble with some generalizations, such as the “ferocious xenophobia” (p. 159) regarding Chōshū, when in fact they were working on, ultimately unsuccessfully, a reverbatory furnace, but overall he reconstructs the age and provides an excellent view of the teeming port of Shanghai, including its filth, opium, and cholera. Fogel aptly conveys the arrogance of the Euromericans, the indolence of most Qing officials, and the international nature of the Taiping rebellion. Here Fogel's book not only provides great insight into Sino-Japanese relations and the intertwined connections between the Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese, but also resonates well with studies such as Stephen Platt's Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom.Footnote ¹³

Finally, although Fogel mentions limited and aborted missions to Russia (pp. 32–34, 142–43), more analysis of the mission of Takeda Ayasaburō could round out this narrative, for Vladivostok, a city of only 4,500, contrasted remarkably with the teeming Shanghai.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, the role of Russia deserves more attention in studies of the 1850s and 1860s, as Russian ships figure repeatedly in Phipps's monograph as well, but are little commented upon, although they did anchor off Nagasaki in 1855, and they loaded up coal at the port of Shimonoseki in 1861 (p. 94), precisely the time that Japan was sending missions to Russia. This interaction seems more germane, and worthy of further coverage, than the final chapter of Fogel's book, an analysis of a 1940s wartime film on the Senzaimaru, which is interesting, but better spun off as an independent article, for the connection to the 1860s is at best tenuous. Rather than focusing on this film, a more in-depth contextualization of Sino-Japanese embassies and trade—with more focus on sixteenth-century interactions, when great ships by the Ōuchi arrived in Ningbo—would add more depth to this otherwise excellent study of the Senzaimaru.

Phipps picks up where Fogel and Wilson leave off. Her book explores Japanese history during the half-century when Japan possessed divided, or layered, sovereignty, which entailed a lack of full control over its ports, and is indebted to the scholarship of Lauren Benton.Footnote ¹⁵ Phipps argues that the five treaty ports, where Western nations negotiated privileges, were less important than twenty-eight separate trading ports, opened up by the Meiji government, which served to link the Japanese locality and hinterland to the international trading order. Japan managed to minimize its vulnerabilities and maximize opportunities for trade, and by “tapping into the larger matrix of informal empire, these sites developed and extended their own tendrils of capitalist enterprise and imperialistic advance into other parts of Asia” (p. 10). This served to check encroachment from imperial powers (p. 8) while at the same time allowing the Japanese to decide which additional ports should be opened to trade in “transmarine East Asia” and on what terms, so that by the time that Japan regained full sovereignty over its ports, it was fully integrated into the global economy.

Phipps describes the opening of Japanese ports as a story in five acts, first “Reconfiguring the Tokugawa Gates, 1858–1879,” where she explores developments as far afield as Satsuma, the Ryūkyūs, and Hakodate; then “The Korean Interim, 1876–1889,” where trade focused more on Korea, with Shimonoseki playing a crucial role; then “The Push to Export, 1889–1894,” where she looks at how these ports were linked to particular export products, and how a variety of ports were developed, albeit with varying success; and finally “Regional Power Shifts, 1893–1899” and “The Open Ports, Post-1899.” Phipps focuses on the actions of central governments and local boosters to develop the harbors and hinterlands, and explains how these harbors were created most successfully when domestic patterns of transportation and production were fused with international trade (p. 15). She effectively shows how these ports expanded with changing Japanese objectives and provides an excellent sense of how their fostering allowed for coal mines, in particular, to be linked to the international export market.

Nineteenth-century Meiji officials promoted the creation of ports and the establishment of a surrounding infrastructure. Some focused on trade with particular regions, while others focused on particular commodities, such as coal. Some ports were built up in different regions according to different political exigencies. Some were successful, while others failed, such as the ill-fated attempt to build the new port of Nobiru with the advice of Dutch engineers (p. 81).

Phipps's third chapter focuses on the creation of Moji, which is both the focus of the work and a missed opportunity. The drawback to this study of Moji is, quite simply, that Phipps does not adequately explore the port of Moji itself. She discounts the earlier history of Moji as a vibrant port because that earlier history “left barely a trace” (p. 115), but, in the tradition of Braudel, it would have been helpful to explain the significance of this heavily fortified chokepoint and strategic port. She emphasizes how Moji locals strove to “put this port on the map,” which required “dogged efforts,” and emblematic of this, she emphasizes local agency and discounts the very real advantages of geography, save for mentioning that Moji had deep water anchorages (pp. 114, 175). This narrative is overly framed solely in terms of discourse, governmental policy, and local actions, most notably the editorials of the local Moji newspaper, but does not adequately explore the geography of Moji and the Shimonoseki straits.

Although Phipps reveals much about the Moji methods of unloading coal on ships, she treats Shimonoseki, located on Honshu, as a completely different port, when it is separated only by a single nautical mile. Hence Shimonoseki's early prosperity in exporting rice in the Korea trade (pp. 40–41) is directly relevant to Moji but unmentioned, and statements that Moji did not export rice until 1895 (p. 86) mislead because it inevitably was involved in this early rice trade, even though ships “officially” departed from Shimonoseki. Phipps admits that 150,000 steamship passengers traveled from Moji to Shimonoseki in 1896, as the two harbors were separated by a nautical mile (p. 151). She could better explore the geography of these ports, focusing on the close connection of Moji and Shimonoseki, and the treacherous shoals and tides of the region, as she asserts that congestion, rather than the difficulty of the straits, might cause collisions (p. 180). She sees the linking of both ports as a discursive process (pp. 204, 235), but these deep and real geographic ties could better be emphasized. Such an approach would better explain why certain harbors that were relatively unprotected from storms, such as Nobiru and to a lesser sense Ishinomaki (p. 81), were supplanted by more convenient and protected harbors, such as Shiogama in the case of northern Japan.

These issues notwithstanding, Phipps ably reveals how, in a paradox of informal imperialism, the treaty port system allowed the Japanese to improve the infrastructure of key ports, promote increased exports, and, in the end, expand Japanese interests during the period of her study. After helping Japan achieve a victory in the Sino-Japanese War, these ports became crucial sites for the expansion of a new empire. Japan's disadvantages under “informal imperialism” actually gave it advantages in improving its infrastructure and linking into this colonial system, so that when legal inequalities were removed, Japan could expand from these same ports.

To conclude, these studies of the sea reveal the advantages of a maritime approach, but of the four books, in spite of claims to explore Japan “from the waterline” (Shapinsky, p. 7), the only one that gives a real sense of what it was like on the seas is Fogel's Maiden Voyage. All of these works lack a certain expansiveness and awareness of the connections fostered on these waterways and with their constituent trade. Shapinsky arbitrarily distinguishes between “sea lords” and landed daimyo and overemphasizes their autonomy. Wilson emphasizes social networks of these daimyo, but fails to understand that these networks arose because of the need to respond to the devastatingly powerful new Paixhans cannons. Fogel recounts a single year, but could better set up the complex tale of Sino-Japanese relations and trade. Finally, Phipps privileges port ties to the hinterland, and the significance of local and political actors and discursive practices at the expense of understanding the physical nature of these ports themselves. Unlike the wide and expansive seas that they study, each of these works tends to adopt a too narrow and limiting explanation for far more complex phenomena.

After reading these monographs, the wisdom of Braudel becomes apparent, for the longue durée works best for water histories. Polities rose and fell, but so too did ports and harbors. Geographically advantageous areas could be eclipsed by political changes. Only in the longue durée does the interaction of politics and geography become clear. Nagasaki is a case in point, as Wilson shows how it expanded from 1,500 in 1571 to 25,000 in 1614, and 40,000 by 1659, and 64,000 by 1700, making it the sixth-largest city in Japan (pp. 21–22). This port arose because of changes in shipping, shipping routes, and Japanese politics, but these longer transformations are lost on many, who assume that such ports were timeless, such as when Fogel assumes that Nagasaki existed in the thirteenth century (p. 18). Others fail to realize that ports could be eclipsed. Shapinsky, when discussing the port of Hyōgo in 1478 (p. 102), asserts that its decline stemmed from a discursive change in reporting taxes, and is seemingly unaware that the harbor was destroyed during the Ōnin War (1467–77) precisely because of its strategic location. Finally, Phipps fails to explain the remarkable geography of Moji and the straits. Her portrayal of Moji as a village of fewer than 500 and her statement that its “active trade network premodern era left barely a trace” distort because they overemphasize the “making” of what had long been a major port with a deep anchorage (pp. 111, 115, 175).

To do a maritime history right, one must go back to the approach of Braudel and understand better the place, its geographic contours, and varying fortunes. Instead of focusing on “contours of the special trading ports … still visible” (Phipps, p. 255) in the twenty-first century, it is better to include the subtle traces of a not-so-visible and indeed largely unimaginable past. To cite one example, as the documents of 1445 amply reveal, large numbers of people, loading and sailing on great ships, lived and worked in a prosperous Moji that was of a far greater size and scale than the mere 500 of the mid-nineteenth century. People were not first drawn to Moji in the 1880s, as Phipps suggests (p. 258), but had long been there since the fifteenth century. These traces, in the form of Moji's castle, in fact remain visible, and in studying this and other maritime regions, one must simply look more carefully and better strive to avert the perils and biases of the present, whose waves and foam prove less enduring than the changing tides of centuries of change.