This big-picture narrative of modern Japan embeds the archipelago's history in its maritime context.Foregrounding the Kuroshio Current in the Pacific, Jonas Rüegg demonstrates how currents, winds, and animals created a dynamic context to economic, intellectual, and geopolitical reinventions of Japan over the past four centuries.He draws up a novel geography of conflicts and competitions in the making of 'modern' Japan, one that underlines little known actors, sites, and events which have previously been treated as peripheral.This book offers a framework that transcends conventional spatial and temporal categorizations of early modern and modern, shogunal and imperial, insular and global.Guiding the reader from seventeenth-century Pacific explorations to the “opening” of Japan by whalers, coolies, and castaways, and on to the competition over remote islands, Rüegg offers a greater perspective on the role of oceans in the Anthropocene.This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.