History, distance and text: narratives of the 1853–1854 Perry expedition to Japan

Abstract In both the US and Japan, popular narratives recounting the story of Commodore Perry's 1853–1854 US naval expedition to Japan have played a key role in the textual negotiation of commonsense understandings of space, place, history, and geopolitics. We use the textual analysis of a range of US and Japanese popular narratives of Perry/‘black ships’ stories to read this negotiation in terms of concepts of proximity and distance. Discussing different ways in which the vastness of the Pacific Ocean has been dealt with textually, we comment on the ways in which narrative histories of these events relate to differing understandings of national identity and US–Japan relations. We argue that the history of US popular narratives displays a steady reduction of transpacific distance, with the story's focus shifting away from details of the ocean voyage and towards the creation of a metaphorical setting for US–Japan relations, a setting identified with a Japanese location but framed within a US point of view. Japanese narratives, meanwhile, have displayed two contrasting trends, both of which could be read as forms of resistance to US rhetorical appropriations of Japanese national space and history. On the one hand, narratives dealing with Japanese history in the context of a US–Japan rivalry have tended to remove the ocean and shorten transpacific distance, thereby reducing the significance of the Perry initiative; on the other hand, narratives setting Japanese history on the broader global stage have tended to highlight the ocean as a vast space of distances and opportunities.