Kipling in Nagasaki: ‘Put the Whole Empire in a Glass Case’

Abstract

In one of the thirteen letters Rudyard Kipling sent from his 1889 trip to Japan, he recounts the words of his traveling companion who muses that “It would pay us to establish an international suzerainty over Japan […and] to put the whole Empire in a glass case and mark it, Hors Concours, Exhibit A” (56). This comment and Kipling’s own expressed wish to “tear up the railway and pull down the telegraph poles” in Japan attest to the belated travelers’ desire to arrest the wind of modernity that was changing the Japanese modes of life as Victorians had come to know and appreciate (105). Most Kipling scholars have regarded Kipling’s travel letters as a “minor footnote in a long literary biography” (Scholtz 199). The handful of studies on Kipling’s Japan have shed light on the complicated reaction Kipling showed toward the modernizing country in the “Far East.” However, there remains much to be said about the rhetorical strategies Kipling employs in his Japanese letters as he tries to reconcile the fantasy of elegiac Japan with the not-quite-aesthetic elements of Meiji Japan. My essay responds to this gap by examining Kipling’s letter from Nagasaki, a city that had seen the foreign influences of the Portuguese and Dutch from the sixteenth-century and continued to function as an international crossroad as it remained a major entry point for Meiji Japan’s visitors. During his stay in Nagasaki, Kipling was made aware of its historico-political significance as well as some of the political implications of his own interactions with the Japanese, but the locals failed to convince Kipling to regard Japan as a political subject. In fact, as my essay argues, Kipling’s letter shows how his self-professed identity as a globetrotting sahib—with rights to practice the “prophylactic ignorance” of the colonial self—permits him to suppress the Japanese counter-gazes that undermine the validity of his romantic visions about Japan along with the authority of his imperial gaze.