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In the historiography of Japan, the bakumatsu years have been positioned as a period of particular turmoil and unrest that witnessed an explosion in humorous and satirical cultural production. What has been described as an Edo popular culture of play arising from the expansion of urban centers, developed social imaginations and forms of knowledge, which subverted the official Tokugawa order. Japan's mid-nineteenth century opening to the West and the establishment of the new Meiji government, which embarked on a serious mission of modern nation-state building, are said to have extinguished these popular critical energies and closed this cultural space of play. The Meiji state and influential intellectuals rendered humorous cultural production as an evil custom of the past as it elicited a laughter that was out of place with official ideologies of civilization and enlightenment. Shifting the locus of attention to foreground popular sources such as the work of writers of playful literature, artists and cartoonists, satirical newspapers, and an active audience for these cultural productions, this dissertation discloses the surprising abundance of laughter and networks of people who adaptively laughed out of place in the second half of nineteenth century Japan. In particular, I illuminate the emergence of a distinct intellectual and cultural space of a 'laughing counterpublic,' which became a world-articulating project that was in tension with and undermined the Meiji state's national public building and imperial subject formation. Delineating how transnational encounters of satirical cultures on the non-state level reconfigured the laughing counterpublic and forged a practice of laughing at imperializing and hierarchizing discourses of Western civilizational progress across an imagined East-West divide, this thesis contributes to understandings of the meanings of Japan's opening beyond narratives of Western modernity or binary oppositional notions of anti-modernity and nativist reactionism.

This dissertation chronicles the lives of a group of people thus far unknown to History - people for whom the challenges posed by nature formed the principal driver of historical change and whose seaborne ways of life, in turn, challenged the agents of industrial modernity in Japan and the colonies of European empires in the Western Pacific in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These people were 'hyakushō', ordinary seafolk who used their rich local knowledge of the sea to navigate changing social and ecological conditions. Joined by a whole host of vagrant and unruly characters, they left the Japanese archipelago for the bluer waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Here, they created autonomous spaces for themselves and likeminded others in what I call the 'Arafura Zone', a place ruled by ocean currents and monsoonal winds. By examining Japan's historical relationship to the world's oceans through the making of the Arafura Zone, hyakushō emerge as the central actors of a new transnational history of modern Japan. Fundamentally, this dissertation is concerned with the question of how the course of history is shaped by nature - by which I mean not just 'the environment' but also the living systems that are inseparable from it. I look at how hyakushō's local knowledge of nature informed technological change in the early Meiji era and how this knowledge led hyakushō to embrace a life in which the ocean shaped the patterns of everyday life. The movements of hyakushō were underpinned by a sense of time and space that diverged from the temporal and spatial regimes of state actors concerned with the modernization of Japan according to Western models. I argue that this nature-centric historical trajectory forces us to rethink the meaning of the 'Opening of Japan', which has until recently mainly been discussed in terms of Japan's incorporation into global industrial civilization. I also examine the ways in which environmental hardship facilitated the emergence of practices of care across racial boundaries on the industrial seascape (the decks of ships, boomtowns, and courthouses), and how those practices evolved into more expansive forms of mutual aid across a multitude of cultures in the wider Arafura Zone. Hyakushō's relations with a heterogeneous cast of people were based on a nature-centric intellectual common ground that subverted the intrinsically hierarchical and racialized order of the international community of 'civilized' nation states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The story of hyakushō and the making of the Arafura Zone offer interventions in the subfields of transnational history, environmental history, and oceanic history as they relate to the historiography of Japan. By examining non-state actors, processes, events, and ideas that fall outside of state-centric frameworks of historical research, this study shows how transnational approaches constitute a distinctive way of doing history. Transnational history might thereby be differentiated from international or diplomatic history, instead of becoming another way in which nations, states, empires, and their institutions reassert themselves as the central units of historical analysis. As oceanic history, this study consciously avoids retelling the story of 'globalization' from the deck of a factory ship or the administrative centers of port towns and the civilizations to which they belong. Instead, it tells a history 'from below the waves' that is capable of shedding light on actors whose agencies reveal differently envisioned futures and implicit notions of historical progress that evade historians' interpretations 'from above'. This is what makes my study an environmental history as well, in the sense that it focuses on the dreams, desires, motivations, and intellectual worlds of ordinary people as understood through their relationship with nature (thereby offering an alternative to narratives that focus on environmental decline or management). In sum, this dissertation shifts attention away from the land to the ocean to examine the transnationalism of ordinary 'Japanese' seafolk in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - I show how their temporality, spatiality, and cross-cultural practices of mutual aid constituted a type of modernity that undermined Western civilizational discourse.

This thesis examines the development of a hitherto overlooked yet thriving current of thought and culture in modern Japan between the 1860s and the 1920s, which manifested in such diverse realms as religion, gender, race, war, agriculture, and education. An important aspect of this intellectual trend was the rejection of the male God. Instead, God was reconceptualised as multi-gender, challenging the hierarchical ideologies of gender, race, class, and disability that underpinned Western modern civilisational discourse. This project links previously unconnected people, including farmers, thinkers, and educators, for the first time as part of significant cultural-intellectual phenomena in early twentieth-century Japan. A key figure of the phenomena was Arai Ōsui (1846-1922), a samurai-intellectual from Japan's civil-war-defeated North. People of different professions and social strata flocked to study Ōsui's anti-imperial teachings in the very apotheosis of state imperialism. Nevertheless, Ōsui has been forgotten in the historiography, predominantly narrated through the lens of the nation-state led by civil war victors and their views on civilisation and progress. Through the perspectives of Ōsui and his comrades, this thesis offers an alternative view of modern Japanese history outside of the state-centred ideological paradigm of Western modernity. I argue that the cooperative work of Ōsui and his Japanese comrades, along with their Russian, American, British, and Korean allies, led to the emergence of a competing conception of universal human progress. The concept that I term 'symbiotic modernity' encapsulates their efforts to realise a non-hierarchical and inclusive world by replacing the inequality of Western modernity with equality, nationality with transnationality, and the state-centric with people-centric. While the dominant narrative of modern Japanese history, centred on the victorious state side, began with Japan's Opening (Kaikoku) to the West and Western modernity, this thesis presents a different beginning and outcome of the opening, through Ōsui's quest for symbiotic modernity.

The Tōyō Eiwa Jogakkō, Shizuoka Eiwa Jogakkō, and Yamanashi Eiwa Jogakkō girls' mission schools were founded by the Woman's Missionary Society of the Methodist Church of Canada (from 1925 the United Church of Canada) in the 1880s in Tokyo, Shizuoka, and Kōfu, Japan respectively. The students, graduates, missionaries, and Japanese educators of these three institutions were physically and intellectually part of a transnational network of Christian women and organizations in 1920s and 1930s Japan. The community these inter-generational and non-diplomatic Eiwa actors built, the communication and exchange students undertook, and the mobility of graduates transcended state boundaries of Japan, Canada, and beyond. By exploring individuals and activities of these three girls' schools and the network they constructed in the pre-WWII period, this thesis expands our understanding of educational and intellectual life in 1930s Japan. Through network development, physical and intellectual spatial construction, and curriculum and activity design, these historical actors reached outside their institutions to actively connect themselves and their peers with the wider world. In the 1930s, this appears to have been conducted with a sense of urgency. Ultimately, these schools survived a tense and nationalistic period of world history to operate into the present day. By shifting the lens from male educators to little-known women including students, and from missionaries to include Japanese actors, this study shows within these spaces mutual exchange and communication across national borders, international education, and discussions on and activities related to world peace took place throughout the 1930s. These actors envisioned Christianity, women, youth, education, and mutual exchange across state and East-West divides as able to foster understanding between individuals of different nations. This thesis thus looks to Eiwa women and youth in their roles as graduates, educators, and students to demonstrate a dynamic understanding of 1930s Japanese educational and intellectual life.