John P. LeDonne
(Harvard University, USA, Foreign Visiting Fellow, SRC, 1992-93)
When I went to Japan in l992, I told myself I was going on a
pilgrimage to visit the Tokugawa Japan I had learned to love when I was
a graduate student at Columbia University. I did all I could to find
vestiges of it everywhere, and I found many, to my great satisfaction
and pleasure. I attended the Kabuki, No, and puppet theaters, was
overwhelmed by the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, found them as they all
were in the days of the shoguns.
But I also went to work. I found the conditions ideal to write a
manuscript: relative isolation, no telephone ringing. The Japanese
scholars did their utmost to make our life as pleasant as possible, the
staff, especially the librarian, was very helpful. The other two
foreign scholars were a delight, and Myroslava and I have remained in
close touch with one of them and his family.
I was writing a manuscript on Russian foreign policy during the
imperial period, and it included a section on Russia's relations with
Japan. Hokkaido was the right place to reconstruct the vision the
Russians might have had of northern Japan. We traveled to Aomori on the
main island and on the way back, on the hydrofoil, had a chance to
admire the famous bay of Hakodate, where the Russians appointed their
first consul. We went to Wakkanai and saw the tip of Sakhalin Island,
and tested the rough seas between Hokkaido and Rishiri Island. We
visited the Abashiri museum, and admired a map showing how far into the
sea the Amur River sends its waters, saw Kunashiri Island from the bus,
and drove through Akksehi, where the Russians landed in the 1770s.
Seven years later, in my office at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, where I am writing another manuscript, these are the images
that often come back. They have informed my research. I saw with my own
eyes a world I had read about in books; this has made a great
difference in my perception of the world, at least of northern Asia.
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