Since the publication of Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean, 1 many scholars have shifted their attention from lands to the seas, preferring to write “water histories” that show how river ways, oceans, and harbors were linked through complex networks of trade and human interaction.2 Practitioners of such histories craft narratives from the perspective of the waterline, and hence eschew an approach that focuses on landed authority, institutions, or sources, which they describe as being “terracentric” (Wilson, pp. 7, 54) or exhibiting “terricentrism” (Shapinsky, pp. 36–37, 67, 118).
Each of these four works reflects that maritime perspective, portraying Japan less as a landed entity than an archipelago, bound to the surrounding seas, which served more as a conduit than as a barrier. In his Lords of the Sea, Peter Shapinsky, following the lead of the noted Japanese scholar Amino Yoshihiko, explores “sea lords” who plied the waters between Japan's...
