Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan

by Noell Wilson

Overview

Defensive Positions focuses on the role of regional domains in early modern Japan’s coastal defense, shedding new light on this system’s development. This examination, in turn, has significant long-term political implications for the involvement of those domains in Tokugawa state formation. Noell Wilson argues that domainal autonomy in executing maritime defense slowly escalated over the course of the Tokugawa period to the point where the daimyo ultimately challenged Tokugawa authorities as the primary military interface with the outside world. By first exploring localized maritime defense at Nagasaki and then comparing its organization with those of the Yokohama and Hakodate harbors during the treaty port era, Wilson identifies new, core systemic sources for the collapse of the shogunate’s control of the monopoly on violence. Her insightful analysis reveals how the previously unexamined system of domain-managed coastal defense comprised a critical third element—in addition to trade and diplomacy—of Tokugawa external relations. Domainal control of coastal defense exacerbated the shogunate’s inability to respond to important military and political challenges as Japan transitioned from an early modern system of parcelized, local maritime defense to one of centralized, national security as embraced by world powers in the nineteenth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674504349
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	07/13/2015
Series:	Harvard East Asian Monographs , #381
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Noell Wilson is Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Mississippi.

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Note to the Reader xiv

Introduction 1

Part I The Evolution of the Nagasaki System

1 Localizing National Defense to Nagasaki 19

2 Smuggling and the Chinese Interim of Coastal Defense 56

3 Defending Dejima 94

Part II Applying the Nagasaki System to the Realm

4 Pan-Daimyo Collaboration and the Fortification of Edo Bay 135

5 Reconfiguring Coastal Defense at the Treaty Ports 171

Conclusion 213

Bibliography 221

Index 231