Senzaimaru's maiden voyage to Shanghai in 1862 : brush conversation between Japanese travelers and people they encountered in Qing China

Abstract

The year 1862 marked the maiden voyage by 51 Japanese passengers to Shanghai after Chinese-Japanese official contact was suspended for over 220 years. After that two-month visit, some of the samurais wrote up their insightful observations and detailed recollections in the form of travelogues or diary accounts. A total of 17 texts were produced. Among the rich details gauged through their lens was a rich variety of anecdotes involving brush-talking – using brush, ink, and paper – when they were engaged in communication with Chinese street vendors and shopkeepers, but also acquaintances and friends they made. Verbatim records supplemented with recollection of the words improvised during brushed encounters afford us a glimpse into patterned writing-mediated communication between Chinese and Japanese people interactively face-to-face, despite the absence of a shared spoken language. This seems unparalleled in other ancient cultures, thanks to the phonetic intersubjectivity of written Chinese, a morphographic, non-alphabetic script. Meaning is conveyed morphographically without either side having to know or ask: ‘How do you say this in your language?’ The Senzaimaru travelers’ collective experiences suggest that brush-talk was a viable modality of transcultural, cross-border communication between Chinese and Japanese literati of Classical Chinese (wenyan 文言) or Literary Sinitic in early modern East Asia.