Exchanging Something Between Europe and Asia: Valuable Gifts or Empty Boxes?

Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds, Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2017; 314 pp., 42 b/w illus., 3 tables; 9781108415507, £78.99; 9781108401500, £22.99 (pbk)

Christopher Craig, Enrico Fongaro and Akihiro Ozaki, eds, Knowledge and Arts on the Move: Transformation of the Self-Aware Image Through East-West Encounters, Mimesis International: Milan, 2018; 156 pp., 3 illus.; 9788869771323, €16.00 (pbk)

Ralf Hertel and Michael Keevak, Early Encounters Between East Asia and Europe: Telling Failures, Routledge: London, 2017; 184 pp.; 9781472481672, £92.00 (hbk); 9780367882006, £29.59 (pbk); 9781315578385, £24.04 (ebook)

David E. Mungello, The Catholic Invasion of China: Remaking Chinese Christianity, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham, MD, 2015; 194 pp., 10 illus., 4 maps; 9781442250482, $88.00 (hbk); 9780810895065, $30.00 (pbk); 9781442250505, $28.50 (ebook)

Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, Robert Savage, trans, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2018; 696 pp.; 9780691172729, $35.00 (hbk); 9780691196473, $24.95 (pbk)

There is a current theoretical trend for extracting terms from their original contexts and turning them into concepts to be used for describing cultural encounters. For example, ‘connectivity’, which a few years ago was employed to refer to broadband, is increasingly used as a critical term thanks to the fact that is vague enough to fit into many theoretical frameworks. The use of such key concepts draws attention to the fashion of substituting historical interpretation with universal models which in turn require the erasure of crucial fragments of history. Instead, in studying the dialogue between early modern Europe and Asia, historians should try to understand what happens when cultures meet, what happened, and continues to happen, after meeting, keeping in mind, of course, that the outcomes of such encounters are still mutating in the present time. In this endeavour, we try to go beyond models in order to find ways to interpret sources that often do not show any evidence of global dialogues, other than those of commercial exchanges or historicized political events. We are also in a time when an increasing amount of evidence can be accessed digitally, disclosing a cultural complexity that deserves to be interpreted. Thus, perhaps, we need to consider abandoning the fetishized object, now nearly capable of speaking for itself, and the sacred archives of stale yet still powerful academic families exuding benevolent colonialism at every step by means of the concept of a ‘global’, that is, interconnected and reciprocal world.

The weight of universal models epitomized by the global turn is felt by Jürgen Osterhammel. In his Unfabling the East, translated by Robert Savage from the German, original, Die Entzauberung Asiens (Munich 2013), he wants to ‘challenge the conventional postcolonial wisdom that sees all attempts to understand “the East,” including those of an era “before empire,” as invariably imperialistic and contaminated by European fantasies of power’ (x). In this book about a very long European century, from 1680 to 1830, the author aims to offer a view of a European Enlightenment that is ‘open-minded and less patronizing to foreign cultures’ (x). In its encyclopaedic scope that represents complex structures in well-conceived sections (intelligently divided between ‘Pathways of Knowledge’ and ‘The Present and the Past’), Osterhammel makes the important distinction between the phase of a European cosmopolitanism, which was replaced by nineteenth-century colonialism, and the subsequent Eurocentrism which is still alive today (although its inheritance is now mostly nurtured on the other side of the Atlantic). However, even if cosmopolitanism and colonialism are indeed different if considered in material terms, they may remain a ‘hall of self-reflecting mirrors’ (10). Can European observers escape from such a trap? The problem of others’ descriptions is perhaps the main philosophical and historiographical issue that every scholar who wants to study more than one culture in dialogue must face. This of course also refers to the complex matter of truth in every textual and oral description, which the author acknowledges (16). The interplay between the possibility and impossibility of real knowledge creates a fracture which represents the very poetics of Unfabling the East. Every subject of study thus should be situated in ‘always-specific contexts of social praxis’ and necessitates a consideration of ‘real-world reference and fictionality, instruction and entertainment’ (16). From this foundation, the long list of subjects in Unfabling the East, from ‘Borders, Hierarchies, Equilibria to Experience of the Printed Text’, and from ‘Apocalyptic Horsemen, Conquerors, Usurpers to Women’, is a manifesto on the impossibility of writing a grand narrative unless the subjects are carefully circumscribed, yet studied through an interdisciplinary practice, as well as on the impossibility of writing a history without that tacit democratic dialogue between the author and the reader, as proposed for example by Marc Bloch. ¹ This means that authors should share their doubts and the mechanisms of their historiography with the reader, who can thereby have an overview of the functioning of the text. Where our narratives intend to make different cultural forms meet on the page, this is indeed an obligatory choice.

What comes out of texts like Unfabling the East is the important role that objects and human praxis have for research in history and art history. We must consider this role in order to avoid writing universal histories. With regard to historical objects, it is striking how often the mere listing of diversity, usually in European collections, allows scholars to imply a cultural exchange, as if the great variety on display directly mirrors global knowledge. This sort of simplistic approach is for example visible as a methodological modus operandi in Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, a collection of essays edited by Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello. This rich and useful volume fails to problematize the complex territory of transcultural dialogues throughout the history of diplomacy. The subject of this collection of essays is the gift, explored through the perspective of diverse diplomatic frameworks. In the preface, a statement condenses the point of view of the editors: ‘Precious objects and valued commodities did not merely “move” from one place to another, they were purposefully exchanged across cultural and political boundaries’ (xv). The weakness of this statement is its claim that the exchange of objects automatically means a cultural exchange. In fact, objects – even luxury ones – often merely moved across lands but not cultures, often became invisible. In the early modern period, which is the focus here, if this type of meaningful cultural exchange had really happened, Europe and Asia would both have very different artistic landscapes, not represented by limited princely collections of curiosities, or displays in colonial hubs. This is especially the case with regard to Europe, where collections became cabinets of curiosities, and national museums were constructed through colonial lootings. Putting objects on a pedestal and viewing them through the prism of global dialogues echoes those Jesuit studies where even the most dull and ordinary letter written by a missionary from Beijing is a sign of an exceptional global exchange. It is perhaps too great a leap from research in economic history, full of price lists and economic values, to declaring that ‘global gifts were an important vehicle for the establishment of shared values and material and visual experiences’ (1). When studying diplomatic encounters, surely one quickly comes to the conclusion that objects were part of a political language rooted in symbologies of wealth and power. This was most likely in the context of magnificent displays, where of course cultural knowledge played an important role, but the idea of shared values requires a solid historiographical interpretation that is not always visible here. How does an object pass from ‘diplomatic’ to ‘global’? If it is all about luxury items with searchable price tags attached to them in diverse contexts, then fine; but doubts arise about culture in a broader sense, and even more about ‘material’ and ‘visual’ experience. These expressions remind the reader of the rhetoric of truisms much in fashion today, where the fact that an object was touched and viewed by a foreigner is presented as a striking historical finding, shedding light on the need for deeper cultural comprehension.

Perhaps global historians already know that classic European diplomatic history, concerned only with diplomatic documents, is already dead (8), and that using all available perspectives for studying a diplomatic event has become compulsory. Material culture, as well underlined by the editors (14), is indeed a key way of finding such perspectives, but stretching from single objects to ‘political and economic motives, including personal acts, institutional ambitions and technological innovations’ all together in a ‘single story’ (14) may be a difficult enterprise. It seems that by globalizing the diplomatic gift, we automatically make global both the life of the gift and its identity (in terms of aesthetics, poetics, and agencies). Here we should perhaps remember the distinction made by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori in their Global Intellectual History (2013): ‘first, the global as a meta-analytical category of the historian; second, the global as a substantive scale of historical process …; and third, the global as a subjective category used by historical agents who are themselves the objects of the historian’s inquiry’. ² Confusing or expanding these three categories is indeed problematic. For instance, the editors suggest that the scroll made in 1757 by Giuseppe Castiglione ‘Kazakhs Offering Horses in Tribute to the Emperor Qianlong’, illustrates how ‘global history … serves to provide a methodological framework’. They consider that the painting ‘provides an exemplary glimpse of a network of relationship within which early modern gifts were exchanged’ (20), and, in particular, that the prostrating in front of Qianlong shows a ‘particular power relationship’ (21). They also state that as a Jesuit, Castiglione ‘had his own perspective’ about this scene, as a member of a ‘religious order that sought to extend the reach of Christianity in the Qing Empire’ (22). The authors rightly point out that such diplomatic exchanges, by increasing the circulation of certain goods, triggered official trading relationships and cultural change (22). The analysis ends with the argument that ‘Global history has, for some of its practitioners, close connections to economic history and the history of material connections between different parts of the world’ (22), adding that ‘the history of diplomatic gifts is in many ways the history of the desire of economic expansion’ (23). The scroll, of course, is not a gift but represents a gift-giving event and a diplomatic act. The prostration of Kazakh envoy Henjighar follows the normal etiquette of every visitor in front of the emperor of China, so it does not highlight a ‘specific’ power relationship. In the rest of the scroll, which Global Gifts does not feature, there are in fact two more Kazakhs who are not kneeling but instead either looking at each other or having a conversation. This does not seem like an image of a ritualized visit of a tributary country. If for this commission the emperor would have liked to increase the distance with the Kazakhs, all of them would be kowtowing. In addition, in keeping with the Qing convention of court portraiture, the emperor is depicted on a larger scale in comparison to the Qing entourage surrounding him. This signals the fact that such a painting is first a portrait of the emperor together with one of his preferred subjects: the beautiful horses he has received as gifts. Two years after the scroll was completed and presented to the throne, the Emperor added to it a poem celebrating the annexing of the Kazakh Khanate. In the poem, Qianlong compares the lands of the Kazakhs to Dayuan, a country in the Fergana valley during the Han dynasty, and the horses to jade and pearls. Another inscription by Qianlong appeared on this painting in 1786, similarly celebrating the alliance with the Kazakhs. This image speaks of the Qing expansion in central Asia, and maybe of Qianlong’s cosmopolitanism, but even if made by an Italian, it does not shed light on missionary strategies in Asia: Castiglione as a court painter had to follow imperial orders precisely, with regards to the picture’s subject matter. On the basis of the Kazakhs’ gift alone, it would be difficult to extrapolate globally from the mere diplomatic relationship, or even from the single event depicted. The scroll does not bear evidence of a global dimension; it is silent on the ways in which the Qing empire managed its gigantic territory: for example, by using non-Chinese languages for corresponding with its central Asian subjects (the Qing documents about the Kazakhs are in fact in Oyirad and Turkic), and by deploying the Bureau of Colonial Dependencies for diplomatic receptions of central-Asian countries (including Russia) in Beijing, whereas for other Western countries this task was in the hands of the Board of Rites. Finally, the image is silent about imagined global Jesuit or European projections over China. Although the scroll is ascribed to Castiglione, he painted only the visages of the characters and the horses; the rest was done by a Chinese master to prove, through such collaboration, that this was a Qing official scroll made for the emperor, and not an object to be shared by a cosmopolitan community. In fact, the painting’s surface lacks the mark of a diplomatic exchange between Chinese and Italian painting culture. Finally, from this scroll it is impossible to start a journey that ends up finding ‘desires of economic expansion’. Those desires are of course there (who wants economic recessions and poverty?): eighteenth-century Qing China witnessed important economic expansion but this was mainly not under European gazes amplified by diplomatic gifts, and is perhaps to be found in non-European historiographical pathways.

Global Gifts also contains studies which go beyond the easy equation that links gifts to the spectrum of prefabricated global subjects we might like to see. For example, ‘The Diplomatic Agency of Art between Goa and Persia’ by Carla Alfares Pinto is worth reading, as is ‘Coercion and the Gift’ by Natasha Eaton, who in her well-conceived study of British diplomacy in colonial India, is able to situate the gift in a more fluid and fertile territory of inquiry, where one can move from Eurocentric perspectives towards further questions. Her exploration of cultural differences, for example through the British and Indian ideas of inalienability and obligation, successfully challenges the canonic literature on the gift by proposing a more changeable and complex framework (285–6).

As mentioned above, there is also the issue of finding and discussing human praxis in histories of cultural dialogues. Praxis, generally conceived as a practical as opposed to theoretical activity, is a subtle but useful philosophical concept as it liberates historians from the frustration of not being able to find evidence of what really happened through the interpretation of texts. Without needing to adopt completely the Marxist view of praxis as producer of history, we may look at cultural encounters, for example, by acknowledging forms of praxis in our textual or material evidence and then interpret how praxis influenced actions in specific social frameworks. From this angle, we may say that praxis is about processes themselves, and not what these processes did or did not produce. What type of praxis is involved in a translation, in a work of art adopting elements from a foreign culture, in building scientific ideas, or in organizing a diplomatic reception? We do not need interpretation to say that praxis comes into action, but we may want to explore how processes were carried out, particularly with regard to individual actions in relation to communal frameworks. There are also ways of doing things which are performed for their own sake and structured around cultural knowledge in such a way as to make them unfit for a new task: the monolithic ‘here we do things in this way’ has a conceptual depth worth investigating when looking at cultural encounters. The collection of essays by Ralf Hertel and Michael Keevak, Early Encounters between East Asia and Europe: Telling Failures does not mention human praxis but represents a convenient entry point to it.

Here the keyword is ‘failure’, unfortunately only explored through a very empirical approach adopted in almost all of the very interesting essays here. They are divided between the sections ‘Trade’, ‘Embassies’, ‘Religion’ and ‘Knowledge’ and cover the early modern and modern periods. From European encounters with ‘Far Eastern’ slavery (13–30) to the Amherst embassy to China of 1816 (67–84), almost all the case studies present encounters of a diplomatic nature. These case studies produce evidence attesting to failures in understanding the cultural language of the other: incorrect linguistic translations, misunderstandings over customs, productions of fake representations of the unfamiliar culture. It is indeed a much-needed perspective.

The editors placed the most theoretical essay at the end of the volume: ‘Lessons of Failure: Toward an Ethics of Cross-Cultural Understanding’ by Q. S. Tong. Interestingly, Tong explores Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (published in series in The Public Ledger from 1760 to 1761), in which the main character, the ‘mandarin’ traveller and cosmopolitan other Lien Chi Altangi, becomes the vehicle for criticizing Europe with uncorrupted eyes. Although this tale is imbued with scientific positivism, Tong underscores ‘Altangi’s understanding that knowledge of a cultural other must be improved through experience’ (163), and that his ‘account offers a vivid depiction of the epistemological process for the production of a cross-cultural knowledge, a process in which one’s knowledge of a cultural other is developed, modified, and constituted in accordance with the “reasoning principle”’ (163). ‘Experience’ following a ‘reasoning principle’ is praxis allowing one to obtain knowledge, make objects, or communicate. The concept of the reasoning principle is taken from Goldsmith’s cultural perspective and may be linked to cultural processes triggered when there is a pressing need to act. Such a course, and its praxis, also comprehends failure that is in fact ‘a necessary, innate, internal, and, for that matter, positive condition of cross-cultural knowledge’ (164), what ‘Jacques Derrida has called … a “structural possibility” for knowing and understanding’ (164). Such an experience and its potential outcomes provide hints as to what ‘dialogue’ means, especially with regard to the Greek dia, related to ‘duo’ (two), and legein, ‘speak’: two diverse entities that can establish a conversation because they are different. So, failure is ‘achieved’ thanks to human praxis that allows one to establish that the encounter of diversities will never mutate into a (global) unity. In order to be fertile, failure requires dialogues not meaningless idealized exchanges. Often such dialogues were in fact necessary in order to survive, to adapt, and to transform, and this happened whatever was consumed, be it fashion, food, philosophy, or art.

Religion is also an important part of cultural encounters, one of the most complex lenses for looking into transcultural dialogues, and certainly not detached from human praxis, objects, and commercial and intellectual encounters. David E. Mungello, with The Catholic Invasion of China: Remaking Chinese Christianity, offers an interesting study of Christianity in modern and contemporary China from 1834 to 2000. The use of the term ‘invasion’ is evidence of the author’s view, divided between irony and a consciousness of the political weight of this subject. Mungello indeed moves into delicate territory, observing that ‘in the 1960s historians viewed it [the history of Catholicism in China] negatively and as an appendage of Western imperialism’ (1). His main argument is that ‘viewed from a short-term historical perspective, the Catholic invasion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century China was a very negative experience – a debacle – but viewed from a long-term perspective, the invasion contributed to the transformation of a mission church into an indigenous religion’ (1). Mungello offers many complex themes and points of view for engaging with such a topic: ‘imperialism in terms of Western feelings of superiority …, spiritual domination …, European resistance to the emergence of an indigenous Catholic Church …, the love and hysteria associated with the Catholic orphanages …, and the sexual domination of female parishioners by Catholic priests’ (2). Mungello wants to correct the ‘widespread misreading of the Christian mission of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (2): it was not a failure but a ‘movement with positive and negative consequences in the development of Christianity in China’ (2). Through descriptions of important cases from the second half of the nineteenth century, such as the Open Letters (Zhaoran Gonglun: complaints against the European priests by the Christians of Jiangnan), and of the complex relations between all the different Western actors (Italian Franciscans from Propaganda Fide, Portuguese Lazarists, the Foreign Missionary Society of Paris, Spanish Dominicans from the Philippines, French Jesuits, and English and American protestant missionaries), the author succeeds in providing an accurate list of evidence for studying this topic. Among the many issues Mungello touches, one worth examining is the ‘Communist campaign against Catholic orphanages’ (87–92) in the 1950s and 1960s, in which political cartoons represent an important addition for understanding how anti-Christian sentiments developed within the Communist government’s perspective, linking the Catholic Church with imperialism. The author concludes with an investigation of the 120 Christian martyrs canonized by John Paul II in 2000, and the subsequent Chinese accusations against them. Some of the martyrs were in fact presented as criminals, with, in some cases, specific allegations of sexual abuse against Chinese female parishioners. In treating this topic, Mungello provides different points of view, but at times these are framed by elusive statements. The author explains the Chinese accusations as both based on real crimes but also as coming from a culture that responded to the ‘Catholic invasion’ with ‘bizarre rumors … a blend of fantasy and reality engendered by fear and the vulnerability of Chinese females’ (93), adding after a few paragraphs that ‘while some reports [on priests having sexual relationships with parishioners] were obviously exaggerated’, others ‘were true’ (94). Introducing the Vatican canonizations into such a discussion confuses some important terms of the debate on Christianity and European colonialism. Within this framework, the issue is not about how many sexual crimes were committed within the European Christian missions in China, but about the colonial character of these crimes. In this context, the number of these crimes would not change the colonial nature of the relationship between European priests and the Chinese population. In other words, descriptions of cultural responses to foreign missionaries such as the ‘bizarre rumors’ that would be interesting in other case studies here assume the role of absolving devices. In fact, even if it is about ‘rumors’ only, these are still important indicators of a necessary response to a foreign culture perceived as invasive, violent, and offensive. Such an equivocal position almost says to the reader: crimes occur in any human community, and the offenders indeed should have been punished, but keep reading, here we are talking about martyrs and Chinese propaganda.

Beyond this case study, this rhetorical device takes us to fundamental issues inherent in the field of study called ‘history of Christianity in China’, that mostly originated within the Jesuit intellectual milieu. This is closely related to missionary studies which from the 1960s on have been developing along two main theoretical frameworks. As described by Thoralf Klein, one framework was advanced by non-European anticolonial currents that saw Christian missionary activity as an active part of imperialism, while the other more recent framework, later embraced by Jesuit sinologists, sees the missions as positive entities counterbalancing the effects of imperialism. ³ In studying the history of modern China, these two views are of course valuable only if considered together. ⁴ This allows for a consideration of the anti-imperial attitudes of Christian missionaries (for example in relation to the support for a local clergy, a move that at the beginning of the twentieth century was supported by the Vatican), while at the same time describing imperialistic cultures typical of the missionary world, broadly represented by the blind belief that evangelization is a good human action that every culture should receive. In the historiographical discourse advanced by Mungello, the issues related to the imperialistic culture of the missionaries are often avoided in preference for a positive discussion of the measurable outcomes of the missionary work, in the name of a global conciliation based on shared values. Evidence of such an approach is for example visible in Mungello’s focus on the binary of debacle/success, taking for granted that a European missionary success is automatically a Chinese accomplishment in the name of a universal Church: ‘the Catholic invasion has enriched Chinese culture, and Chinese Catholicism has, in turn, enriched Catholicism and made it more universal’ (116). The same method was deployed by John Paul II. On 24 October 2001, one year after the canonization of the Chinese martyrs, the Pope delivered a message for the opening of a conference on Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the Father who at the end of sixteenth century founded the Chinese Jesuit Mission. John Paul II celebrated ‘inculturation’, and mentioned that ‘the work of members of the Church in China was not always without error’. ⁵ From the perspective of modern missionary efforts aimed at winning the goodwill of the Chinese, Ricci becomes central, especially through his first work written in Chinese, the treatise on friendship (Jiaoyou lun, De Amicizia, 1595). According to John Paul II, this treatise brings to ‘late sixteenth-century Chinese culture and civilization the heritage of classical Greco-Roman and Christian reflection on friendship’. ⁶ However, what if these new friends do not want to be subjected to the Gospel, to an inculturation that with all its benevolence remains exclusive, and in the end will not accept any other form of religiosity other than the one proposed from Europe with a demeaning smile? What Mungello’s text reminds us is that historiography, whatever is its cultural identity, cannot celebrate cultural dialogues while proposing dogmatic views, be they religious truths or intellectual devotions. Finally, in such a dogmatic turn, ruling academic families can easily create a sort of concealed censorship comprised of derisions towards other theoretical positions, historical omission, and all exclusionary praxis, in order to defend very little patches of land believed to be vast territories of exchange.

In order to conclude this bird’s-eye view, travelling through historiographical languages and methods, it is worth looking at another edited volume, Knowledge and Arts on the Move, edited by Christopher Craig, Enrico Fongaro and Akihiro Ozaki. This book puts together a group of papers presented at the symposium of the same title held at Tohoku University in 2017. Although the main thread of argument, encapsulated in the subtitle Transformation of the Self-Aware Image through East-West Encounters, does not keep all the essays together, and the volume is not well articulated, its lack of rhetorical harmonization represents its best feature (as so often happens with conference proceedings). The book is divided into three parts: ‘East in West’, ‘West in East’, and ‘The Great Tohoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster’. In the first part, there are studies on seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Italian understandings of Japan (Rolando Minuti) and on the influence exerted by Japanese theatre over the modern French avant-garde (Estelle Doudet), ending with a description of Chinese culture from the point of view of early modern Dutch collections (Willemijn van Noord). In the second section, the authors focus respectively on: the creator of modern jūdō, Jigorō Kanō (Andreas Niehaus), the Japanese educator Ōgai Mori (Matilde Mastrangelo), the conflict around the American military outposts in Okinawa (Glenn Hook), and the concept of good fortune with regard to gender in the Tale of Genji (Ikuko Sagiyama). The last section is about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011, covered by Hiroo Satō, Akihiro Ozaki, and Hiroshi Kabashima, focusing on different aspects of this tragic event, from its links to contemporary global issues to the question of legal responsibility. Can readers make use of these thematic jumps? Yes, and we ought to. First, we should do so because in recent decades the increasing tagging of specializations and sub-specializations has put young students in the position of not having the tools to achieve a solid historiographical language for discussing global topics. This in turn has now created the opposite rhetoric of stating at every step the merit of interdisciplinarity. So here is the interdisciplinary test: forcing the reader to find meaningful discourses and relationships between concepts – not in order to acquire the knowledge of something but to expand a familiarity, for example with Japan, or Italy, and for creating a wider historiographical vocabulary not ruled by chronologies. For example one can start from the important remark by Minuti signalling how difficult it is to produce a consistent definition of a given culture (in this case Italian), pointing out that the culture of a nation is often grounded in the cultural history of other ‘nations’ by means of a flowing of ‘translation, adaptations, compilations, journalism …’, along a journey which represents the norm (15). And, as stated by Doudet in the framework of Japanese theatre in modern France, in that case such a journey became an encounter ‘both lasting and changing’ (37). There are entanglements that cannot be explored if we do not abandon all the East-West dichotomies of exchanges. It is for example impossible to employ these simple schemata to see through Japanese Neo-Confucian ethics, European utilitarianism and the Olympic movement as factors in the creation of modern jūdō (63). In many encounters, more or less violent, we have to face such a complexity: are the concepts of ‘equality’ (byōdō), ‘democracy’ (minshūshugi), and ‘people’s will’ (min’i), enough to solve Okinawa’s struggle against the double colonization of the American military apparatus and the Abe administration? (99–100). These are scholarly challenges that would be visible in other historical territories, characterized by similar issues present in many histories of colonialism in Asia. With regard to the last part of the book, on Japanese natural disasters, history, and culture, it is now high time that we look at such destructions as part of that continuous historiographical flow of encounters. Fukushima’s disaster is symbolic of that ‘mythology of technology’, as beautifully put by Julia Watson in the framework of studying indigenous technologies, ⁷ that we should take as an emblematic example in order to challenge other mythologies, equally dangerous, supporting a global history that does not belong to the cultural histories of the globe.