Talk at the Library: How an Oceanic Current shaped Modern Japan

Japan is often viewed through a land-based lens. Yet as an archipelago in the northwestern Pacific, its history has long been shaped by the sea. In The Kuroshio Frontier, historian and Gen A Alumnus Jonas Rüegg shifts our perspective offshore and places the Kuroshio Current at the centre of Japan’s modern history.

The Kuroshio is a warm, powerful ocean current that flows northward along Japan’s southern and eastern coasts, linking Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the wider Pacific. For centuries, it has carried people, goods, ideas, and animals across vast distances. In this Talk at the Library, Jonas Rüegg explores how this oceanic current created dynamic conditions for economic, intellectual, and geopolitical change over the past four centuries.

Join us to follow the Kuroshio through early Pacific exploration, the “opening” of Japan by whalers and castaways, and later struggles over remote islands. Along the way, the talk brings into view lesser-known actors, encounters, and conflicts that played a key role in the making of modern Japan.

What happens when we take the ocean seriously as a historical force? And how does this change the way we think about Japan’s place in the world? This evening invites conversation around these questions, as well as broader reflections on oceans, connectivity, and environmental history.

The Kuroshio Frontier: Empire and Environment in the Making of Japan’s Pacific is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This event is exclusively for members of Asia Society Switzerland. If you would like to attend it, you can easily buy a membership while registering for the event.

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Jonas Rüegg is a historian and Asia 21 fellow at the Asia Society; as well as a Gen A Alumnus. He teaches Japanese, Pacific and Global Environmental History at the University of Zurich. Jonas’ research investigates Japan’s role in the making of the modern Pacific, and the role of oceanic resources and marine technologies in the making of modern Japan. He has previously published on the history of science, knowledge and technology since the nineteenth century. Jonas has conducted extensive research at Tokyo University’s Historiographical Institute and holds a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University.

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About Talk at the Library

Talk at the Library is a members-only series where we invite an expert to our office library for a conversation on specific niche topics on a variety of countries and regions of Asia. The program consists of a moderated discussion and subsequent audience Q&A. Participants have the opportunity interact with the experts, asking questions. The talks are recorded and made available to the public on our YouTube channel.