Ethnography of the ‘Southern islands’: Arai Hakuseki, Ryukyuan diplomacy, and the making of ethnological knowledge in early modern Japan

This study reexamines Arai Hakuseki’s Nantōshi ( Records of the Southern Islands , 1719) as more than a geographical description of the Ryukyuan Kingdom. It argues that Hakuseki’s text constitutes an early form of ethnographic knowledge production within the moral and bureaucratic order of Tokugawa Japan. By situating Nantōshi at the intersection of anthropology and the history of knowledge, the article explores how Edo-period intellectuals transformed diplomatic encounters—especially the Edo nobori (Ryukyuan embassies to Edo)—into instruments of cultural governance and epistemic subordination. Through a close reading of Hakuseki’s specific textual mechanics, including his taxonomic segregation of customs and etymological translation moves, the study demonstrates how the Tokugawa conception of a “Japan-centered world order” ( Nihon-gata ka’i chitsujo ) shaped representations of the other. Nantōshi emerges not merely as a descriptive record, but as a foundational, though inherently coercive, form of premodern ethnography, revealing how knowledge, power, and writing intersected to construct Japan’s moral geography. The paper further considers the afterlife of Hakuseki’s ethnographic imagination in modern Ryukyuan studies and its critical implications for contemporary archive critique and a polycentric history of anthropology.