Currents and Oceanic Geographies of Japan’s Unending Frontier JONAS RÜEGG ABSTRACT Pacific islands such as Japan are often unduly represented as isolated places. Land-centric biases in fact obscure the ocean’s significance as an ecological connector and a catalyst of historical change. With prolific upwellings, seasonal winds, and fluctuating fishing grounds, the ocean consists of places and depths that attracted human interest at different times. An archipelago awash in nutrient-rich currents, Japan found itself amidst a contested frontier when international whalers in the 1820s ushered in competition over resources, islands, and dominion. To understand technology-driven expansion in its ecological dimension, historians need to adopt a volumetric understanding of the ocean. Analysing this process based on currents, migration routes and catchment areas brings transformations to the fore that are otherwise left out of context. It also helps dissect the economic and ideological structures that keep expanding resource frontiers vertically in the 21st century, towards ever-deeper deposits of fossil fuels and rare earth minerals. Key words: Environmental history, oceanic history, spatial history, frontier studies, pelagic empire, whaling A booming groan ran through the schooner Kimizawa Number One when a violent gust tore down its second mast, almost inclining the vessel to the point of capsizing. On that spring day of 1859, the crew of the first Western-style schooner of Japanese making escaped death by a hair’s breadth. Nakahama Manjiro ¯, captain at the order of the Tokugawa shogunate (1600–1868), 1 and his crew of coastal fishermen © 2021 The Journal of Pacific History, Inc. Jonas Rüegg – Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, Cambridge, ¶ MA, USA. Email: jonasruegg@g.harvard.edu Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the journal’s editors and the seven anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable feedback. I am grateful for the generous support this project received from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) as well as Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (2019–20 Graduate Research Grants). 1 Until the founding of a unitary state in the Meiji reform of 1868, Japan represented a patchwork of hereditary clan lands with the shogun or ‘generalissimo’ of the house Tokugawa in Edo (Tokyo) at the The Journal of Pacific History, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2021.1945918 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45