This chapter introduces Mooring the Global Archive’s main themes and questions, and positions the book’s historiographical interventions within a wider literature on archives, global history and modern Japanese history. Reflecting first on the problem of when and where the history of the Yamashiro-maru steamship might really begin, it identifies three so-called ‘archival traps’: that is, three potential archival starting points – in the ship’s British birthplace, on the internet, and in the Hawai‘i State Archives – which would unwittingly reinforce a Eurocentric narrative of late nineteenth century Japanese catch-up with the West. As an alternative, the chapter tells of the author’s chance encounter with a migrant gravestone in Kaua‘i Island as an entry-point into ways of binding non-linear temporalities, non-paper sources and especially non-elite voices into global history. The gravestone and the story it reveals serve to frame the notion of ‘authorial metadata’, which will be present throughout the book.

Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan would have profound consequences for Japanese and world history. Ultimately it would impress Japanese officials on the need to reorient their nation’s geography to modern advantage. At the time of Perry’s arrival, for nearly two centuries Japanese leaders had attempted to isolate Japanese from the rest of the world, using the country’s island nature to keep the outside world at bay and Japanese at home. Important exceptions notwithstanding: Japanese were allowed to leave Japan; return meant their execution.

The Meiji era (1868-1912) dramatically transformed Japan from a feudal nation into a great power in little more than three decades. This chapter analyzes the Meiji Constitution as an instance of authoritarian legality. It begins by describing the intellectual and historical origins of the Meiji Constitution, originating as a reaction to the threat of Western colonialism. It then goes on to explain the institutional choices that established the bureaucratic-authoritarianism that has come to dominate modern Japan. The formal rules of the Meiji Constitution, complemented by a set of informal rules that channeled the actual exercise of power, were critical underpinnings for modern Japanese political and economic development.

Discussions of the Emperor Meiji are typically absent from histories of modern Japan’s interstate relations; modern Japanese diplomacy does not feature in the many extant studies of the emperor. I propose that these are shortcomings that need addressing. In this chapter, I argue that the Meiji emperor played a critical role in the development of modern Japan’s interstate relations, and that he did so by deploying what I call “ornamental diplomacy.” “Ornamental diplomacy” refers to the emperor’s engagement with foreign sovereigns through the exchange of collars, cordons, medals and ribbons, those material objects that constitute all modern honors systems. I explore the fashioning of the modern Japanese honors system in the early Meiji period, and its deployment by the emperor in rituals of diplomacy within the imperial palace. I highlight the strategic, contested nature of this sovereign-centered diplomacy by making special reference to the ornamental dimension to Japan’s relationship to China and to Britain. The time frame for this discussion is 1868 to 1894.