MJHW (Online) on Defining Territorial Waters in Turn-of-the-Century Japan

Please join the Modern Japan History Association for the next meeting of the Modern Japan History Workshop on Thursday, January 18th at 19:00 JST.  Our presenter this month will be Jiaying Shen (University of Toronto), who will present her work on defining territorial waters in turn-of-the-century Japan (details below).

This month’s session will be held online through Zoom, and can be accessed using the following sign-in information:

Meeting link: https://rikkyo-ac-jp.zoom.us/j/89320574028

The password for the meeting will be posted at the top of the MJHW website from January 15th onwards.

The workshop is open to all, and no prior registration is required.

Please direct any questions to Joelle Nazzicone at joelle.nazzicone@gmail.com.  We hope to see you there!

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Defining Territorial Waters: Japan’s Evolving Practice of the Three-mile Principle

Jiaying Shen (University of Toronto)

As a non-Western empire, Japan was in an awkward position for many legal historians. On the one hand, it was a great power showing expertise in turning international law to its advantage. On the other hand, it hardly joined the “civilized” Western community in crafting the fundamental principles of the international law system. This article places rare inquiries into Japan’s unique position in the international law system by focusing on its evolving practices of the three-mile principle. Defining the extent of a nation’s territorial waters as three nautical miles, the three-mile principle remained prevalent until World War II. Though cursory, this study marks the first systematic scholarly attempt to explore how the Japanese government’s perceptions of the three-mile principle responded to and contributed to the changing conditions of nations and empires. The first section builds on the seminal works of the historian Takeyama Masayuki to examine the Meiji government’s strategic application of the three-mile rule in the 1870s, excavating how its officials took advantage of the differences in national distance units to extend Japanese maritime reach cunningly. The article then analyzes the Japanese government’s deliberate equivocal stance on the width of territorial waters at the turn of the twentieth century, which enabled greater discretion in its maritime policies. The final part moves to the efforts made by the Japanese Foreign Ministry and its legal advisors to depict Japan as an arbiter of mare liberum that had practiced and advocated a narrow territorial sea limit since the nineteenth century.

In doing so, this article argues that despite their shifting policies towards territorial waters from the 1870s to the 1930s, the Japanese authorities always sought to represent their practices – or ostensible practices – of the three-mile principle as a demonstration of Japan’s “civilized” status, sometimes even at the price of their national interests. While this “civilized” status first referred to the recognition from Euro-American powers as a sovereign state, it later signified the commitment to the principle of navigational freedom, which fell in line with the requirements of the growing Japanese fishing industry during the early twentieth century. The evolving perspectives of the Japanese authorities on the three-mile rule were a manifestation of their changing self-positioning within the global legal order: from a pragmatic adherent striving to exploit the existing system to an ambitious lawmaker endeavoring to construct a new system aligned with its interests.