In part one of this second installment of our series on China as a silk road great power in pre-modern Japanese literature, we read Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet play “The Battles of Coxinga,” about the half-Japanese, half-Chinese hero Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong) who fought the Manchu Qing dynasty in an attempt to restore the Ming dynasty. Chikamatsu’s most successful play in his lifetime, it is striking today for its geopolitical perspective: although ambitions of Japanese conquest and aggrandizement are present, China is looked up to as the indisputably superior center of civilization where we plucky Japanese are happy to be of service, and even if we lack intelligence and refinement, we have a grit and gristle and spirit (and the protection of the Japanese gods) that makes us uniquely able to save the day against the savage and treacherous Manchus of the Qing dynasty, who are depicted in a proto-racist way that we do sometimes see in Early Modern Eurasia, even in the East. Notice how this is the precise opposite worldview of imperial Japan, where the old nothern “barbarian” Altaic peoples were seen as Japan’s natural allies according to modern genetic theories, and everything Han Chinese became primitive or degenerate, and Anglo-American whiteness became the new object of an increasingly violent inferiority complex.
","author_name":"Fergal Schmudlach"}