Reclaiming Ground: Japan’s Great Convergence

Abstract

Japan scholars relegated to the shadows, haunting the debate like hungry ghosts with no ground to stand on. Not only intellectually but also institutionally, The Great Divergence unintentionally helped obscure Japan from view because it appeared in 2001 just as the juggernaut of Chinese economic dominance rose above the horizon. University administrators, history departments, and global historians writing, as most do, from that perspective of Europe seemed to have found an ‘Asia’ sufficient to their wants, and many desired no other. Even though Japan remained the second and then the third largest economy in the world during the first decade of the twenty-first century, its historical and theoretical importance ebbed. In considering the rise of modern prosperity, it no longer seemed essential to think about Japan. At times Japan even appeared to be written out of world history and global consciousness. In these embattled circumstances, when Ian J. Miller organized a panel exploring Japan’s Great Convergence for the March 2013 Association of Asian Studies meeting, the room was packed. The papers given that day showcased the work of the three contributors to this forum. Inquiring into Japan’s development over three centuries and in three different ways, Federico Marcon, Ian J. Miller, and Robert Stolz in conversation with Brett Walker and myself laid the grounds for a new history of Japan’s convergence as opposed to China’s divergence. The idea was not entirely novel. For instance, Patrick K. O’Brien, analyzing Pomeranz’s achievement in 2010, briefly acknowledges ‘the convergence of Japan’ as opposed to China, India, and Southeast Asia. 4 Brett Walker had written of ijin naru shuren (the great convergence) 1 See, for instance, Manning, ‘AHR Forum’, and O’Brien, ‘Metanarratives in Global Histories of