Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan, 1600-1900

Whales are an enigma. It is difficult to pin them down because they straddle categories. Whales were difficult not just because of their extraordinary size, but rather because they were peculiar sorts of fish, with meat more like wild boar than tuna. In the same way that they existed at the intersection of classifications, with features of land and sea creatures, whales also were a nexus in a web of linkages between the ocean and the shore. By focusing on whales and the boundaries they straddle, this dissertation highlights the often surprising interconnections between coastal activities and inland life in early modern Japan (1600-1900).;Hunting whales required complex coordination and intensive capital investment. Early modern whaling was thus a substantial enterprise employing sometimes thousands of people, and contributing significantly to the economy (Chapter 1). Many everyday objects not obviously from marine sources - pesticides used on rice, flexible springs driving the action of theater puppets and clockwork dolls - were made from whale parts. Chapter 2 looks at this material connection between whale products and terrestrial life. Whaling and whale products then had a strong intangible impact on the imagination, most visible in the fact that whales were the only nonhuman animals for which there are detailed anatomical diagrams in this period of Japan's history. Chapter 3 examines the ways whales drew scientific and popular curiosity all over Japan. There were even, as discussed in Chapter 4, religious ceremonies for dead whales closely resembling those for deceased humans. With whale graves, memorial services and death registers, whales were metaphysically treated like humans. The boundaries between humans and other inhabitants of the natural world were thus not as simple as people on one side, animals on the other. Finally, the last chapter considers how this network of influences was particular to the early modern period. The late nineteenth-century move to modern, pelagic whaling altered the role of whales dramatically as whalers moved into new environments away from the Japanese coast.;Historians of early modern Japan have tended to focus on inland life, neglecting the relationship between landlocked and coastal areas. My study of whales illuminates the richly textured diversity of the connections between the sea and the land in the Japanese archipelago.