Through The Mirror: Conceptualising the Self and Other in Nineteenth-Century British Ideas of Japan

Abstract

The nineteenth century marked a pivotal period of transition: British preconceptions of Japan — shaped in the absence of any direct experience — were both challenged and reinforced by the arrival of British travellers from the late 1850s onward. By engaging with a rich and diverse body of early nineteenth-century British sources, this thesis examines the crucial role of periods of physical disconnection, during which ideas about Japan were simultaneously entrenched and reimagined by successive generations of writers. The central question driving this thesis is how prior experiences and ideas of both Britain and the familiar ‘Other’ of China influenced British conceptions of Japan during the nineteenth century.

By extending the focus to the early nineteenth century — well before the Meiji era that dominates existing scholarship — this thesis highlights the powerful, often overlooked influence of those formative ideas. Employing a mixed quantitative–qualitative approach to analyse a digitised corpus of eighty books and over 880 journal, newspaper and magazine articles, I trace the transformation of British conceptions of Japan across the century’s first eight decades. In particular, I demonstrate how China functioned in British discourse as the archetypal ‘stagnant’ Asian civilisation, while Britain was celebrated as Europe’s most dynamic society — an attribute later projected onto Japan’s own position within Asia.

This thesis argues that many of these nineteenth-century British ideas of Japan and China were invented by writers across the nineteenth century who sought to understand and explain the unknown in a world becoming increasingly ‘known’. In exposing these invented origins, I delineate the stereotypes of Japan and China from feudal pasts to the idea of Japanese isolation.