Mutual Interests: Pacific Expansionism and the Reception History of Townsend Harris in Japan and America, 1856–1959

This chapter analyzes the reception history of Townsend Harris, the first American consul in Japan, in the context of Pacific expansionism by America and Japan. It focuses on the journal Harris wrote in Shimoda in the 1850s, and its publication on both sides of the Pacific from the 1890s to the postwar, as well as a selection of fictional texts about the encounter. A common thread is the comparison of America and Japan as similar Pacific powers with mutual interests in the region. This is read as a form of interimperial cooperation that obviates the need to attend to other sovereign claims and occludes the ongoing violence, or violent legacies, of respective (neo-)colonial empires.