The Ming-Qing transition (1618-1683) was a military upheaval that not only consumed much of Ming China, but also saw two Manchu invasions of Joseon Korea in 1627 and 1636, and an influx of refugees into Tokugawa Japan. Accounts of the transition written by Ming and early Qing subjects made their way by land and sea to Korea and Japan, where more accounts were produced and circulated by private individuals. At the same time, facillitated by socio-economic developments in print and literacy, there emerged an intellectual shift in East Asia towards contemporaneity, or an awareness amongst educated individuals across territorial borders that they inhabited a shared world.

Narratives of early modern intellectual history in Tokugawa Japan, specifically in the wake of the Ming-Qing transition, centres on a backward and inward shift, towards the ancient past the one hand, and proto-nationalism on the other. While my presentation challenges neither the importance of intellectual trends such as kōgaku and kokugaku, nor the significance of post-Ming arguments for Japan’s cultural centrality, it seeks to draw attention to the concurrent existence of a culture of contemporaneity. Producers and consumers of knowledge not only possessed an interest in the distant past or in the notion of ‘Japan’ as a polity, but also in recent developments in polities other than their own.

In this presentation, I will begin with a sketch of the seventeenth-century context in which privately-compiled histories of the recent past were produced and circulated in East Asia about the Ming-Qing transition. Following this, I will examine a number of seventeenth-century texts produced in Tokugawa Japan that conveyed information about the transition, with the aim of illustrating how individual literati organised time and space in order to situate ‘China’ within a regional ‘present’.