 It started welcome to our Japan Research Center seminar and our exciting new 2020 format, which we're all used to now, which is online. So I'm Helen McNaughton. I'm the chair of the Japan Research Center, just for those of you who don't know me. And it's a real pleasure today to welcome our guest speaker who is Martin Duesenberry. He's the professor and chair for global history at the University of Zurich. But it's a particular pleasure to welcome, because he's also a SOAS alumni. So he did his masters in Japanese studies here at SOAS back in 2002. I also did that masters, but I'm not going to tell you what year I did it because it was somewhat before Martin's time, which makes me his senpai. So he has to do everything I tell him to do now. And so he's published widely in terms of Japanese and global history. And his most recent work is the author of Hard Times in the, sorry, he's the author of Hard Times in the hometown, a history of community survival in modern Japan. And his more recent work has also focused on Japan's place in the mid 19th century Pacific world, which is obviously the focus of tonight's seminar. And just as a note, you may have noticed some of you who might have seen his biography in this year in 2020. You also launched a text based computer game called Lives in Transit to teach his BA in MA students about global history methodologies, which he's not going to talk about tonight. But if anyone wants to ask about that at the end of the session, I'd be very interested to know what exactly that is. Because, you know, I'm really not up to speed on computer games. So that would be really interesting and lead us into a nice discussion as well. So the Q&A button down the bottom there is open for the chat. So if you would like to ask questions, we're going to have a Q&A at the end of this session, obviously, you can put your questions into the Q&A. If you can do that rather than into the chat function, that would be good so that we can have all the questions coming through the Q&A function. I'm going to hand over to Martin, who's going to present and then he's going to present for about half an hour, 40 minutes, and then we're going to have a chat, the two of us. And then we'll open it up to the Q&A and I'll collate the questions through the chat. So feel free to type as succinctly as possible to allow me to read and collect the questions. But his topic, the title of his talk today is going to be from Black Ships to Black Smoke. So Karatsu Cole in the history of Trans-Pacific Japan, which I think is a great title. So let's hand over to Martin now. Well, thanks very much, Helen, for that lovely introduction. Let me just start sharing my screen with you now and I hope that you can all see the slides. So many thanks for the invitation to speak here. I am happy to be back at Suas as it were. And of course, in a normal situation, I would be saying it's lovely to see familiar faces. Unfortunately, I can't see any of your faces. But if you know me, do ask a question in the question and answer session. So as Helen said, I did my MA at Suas. I arrived back in the autumn of 2001. In fact, it was just a week after 9-11. And I was fresh from what was and what remains my formative experience of Japan, namely the three years that I spent on the jet program there from 1998 to 2001, living in rural Yamaguchi. And the reason it was formative was because as I lived in the countryside, I began to sense a gap between what I was reading about Japanese history, which I'd never studied before, and what I was actually seeing of Japanese history. And I emphasised the verb seeing here because in the absence of being able to read any Japanese for, well, certainly the first 12 or 18 months of my time there, my exposure to Japanese history was much more tangible. It was about walking and talking and touching and observing. And what all of this led to was a sort of fundamental interest that I began to have in the sites and in the actors of modern Japanese history. Now in my first book, which Helen kindly mentioned, the actors were the small town residents of rural Choshu Domain, or Yamaguchi Prefecture, as it became in 1871. At the site was the town of Kaminoseki itself, but conversely, due to the history of overseas migration from this part of Southwest Japan in the late 19th century, the town also meant that my historical sites had to include Hawaii, Korea, Brazil, Manchuria and southern Sakhalin to just list a few. Now this interest in what we might call expansive Japan was only really two out of 12 chapters of that book, but since I finished that manuscript and especially since I left the UK in 2011, much of my work has tried to think about sites and actors by focusing on what we might call Trans Pacific Japan, and particularly Trans Pacific migration in the late 19th century. Now some of this is a known story, but a story that is nevertheless assigned to the margins of post Meiji history. For example, the fact that tens of thousands of Japanese emigrated to Hawaii after the mid 1880s, which meant that the ethnic population of the Hawaiian islands was nearly 40% Japanese on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack. So we can say that the migration of Japanese was completely transformative for the history of the Hawaiian archipelago. So this is an unknown story, which new scholarship is revealing for the first time and I think it would be remiss here not to mention the work of a cheeto asthma, who's published a sort of completely groundbreaking book, which argues that the history of the Japanese Empire in Asia was fundamentally a Trans Pacific history, in which ideologies and practices and indeed the personnel of Empire in Taiwan or in Korea or in Manchuria. So he was constituted through the Japanese experience in what he calls Japanese America and by Japanese America he means not only North America but also Central America Mexico is an absolutely crucial part of this book, and indeed Latin America, and very broadly he connects Hawaii in this history. I've also put up here Sydney lose new book, which is on Malthusian imaginations of an expansive Japan, and lose. That's very important in a number of different ways but one is that it connects the colonization of Hokkaido in the late 1860s, very much to this story of an expansive Japanese imagination, in which migrants might also move to Hawaii to North America to Latin America and to the South Seas Islands. Now, my own contribution to this has been as part of a research team at Sophia University since 2014 and I have a particular interest in the sugar plantation as a site of modern Japanese history that has been defined, and in this special issue that myself and Michael Ijima brought out last year, which is in English, although it isn't a German language journal. We tried to consider and propose indeed the idea of transplantation as an analytical term and it's worth pointing out here that transplantation is an actually term as well it was used much in the late 19th century. 20th century Ishokamine is transplanted people, transplanted as it were. Now the bigger picture of all of this is that this type of work forces us to engage with the question of the nature of Japan's entanglement with the non Japanese world from the late 19th century onwards. But where should we look for evidence of that entanglement, who were the actors who made it possible. In other words, we're back at that most problematic question, not only of 19th century Japan, but of Japan to the present day, which is namely how do we tell the story of Japan so called opening to the outside world and not put opening in inverted commas here because I think it's a deeply problematic term as as I'll try to come back to. Now the way that we answer that question is important. And of course it's been told in terms of a focus on external forces, the southern arrival of an American naval commander by the name of Matthew Perry in Edelbay in July 1853. But if we continue to focus on these external forces, or on indeed elite actors such as your Bakufu or your Iwakura missions to learn from Europe or North America in the 1860s and 1870s if we continue to focus on all of that. Then we bend the shape of modern Japan towards particular sites and particular actors, namely the West and Tokyo elites. And indeed we, we come closer to falling into the trap of using these metaphors of the closed Japan, and then the opened Japan in which 1853 with the arrival of Perry is a sort of key pivot moment. And this, it seems to me is this disbending of modern Japanese history becomes very problematic. Not only historically but also in terms of the story that contemporary Japanese intellectuals or policymakers tell about Japan's future place in the world as well. Its relationship to the West, for example, vis-à-vis its relationship to China. So today what I want to do is ask that question once again how can we retell the story of Japan's mid-19th century, a re-engagement with the non-Japanese world, focusing on new sites and new actors. And one answer I would propose lies in the print which you see in front of you on screen here of Perry's so-called black ships arriving in Edelbay in 1853 and 1854. Perry's arrival, it has correctly been argued, was a crucial geopolitical event in mid-19th century to Japan. But to date, I would suggest scholars have been more interested in the political of the geopolitical than in the geo. Or to put this in less abstract terms, they have focused both literally and metaphorically more on the black ships than what for me is the more noteworthy aspect of this print, namely the black smoke belching out into the sky. The reason I think that the smoke is noteworthy is because by reverse tracing the story of the smoke back into Perry's ships, back into the corridors of power in early 1850s Washington D.C. And then ultimately back to a U.S. interest in Japanese coal. By doing all of this we can bring new sites and actors of modern Japanese and indeed global history to the fore in ways which I hope you'll find provocative and worthy of discussion. As I've said, among the commentaries, the poems, the letters, the images produced in the aftermath of Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan and among the copious historical analyses written ever since, the geopolitical significance of one detail is largely overlooked. Clouds of black smoke rising into the sky, as particularly depicted in these iconic Japanese prints of Perry's two paddle wheel frigates. Now, in fact, any self respecting naval officer would ideally have desired a fuel which actually produced as little smoke as possible for the element of surprise in any potentially hostile engagement would be lost if your foe could see your plume of smoke before your vessel itself appeared over the horizon. So for this reason we need to think technically for a moment as did the naval planners of the time for as steam power revolutionized the nature of trans oceanic shipping. It wasn't that steamship simply needed coal, but that they needed a particular kind of coal. And you might think that this was simply the coal with highest carbon percentage and therefore what is technically called the highest calorific value, which translates into more miles to the tongue. And that type of coal would be anthracite coal. But the problem was that most anthracite coals also tends to be extremely hard. And this makes for a storage problem in your ships because as the ship rolls in the sea, the likelihood of the coal suddenly shifting, especially hard coal shifting, and then in balancing the ship is much higher. So what you ideally want in the hold of the ship in the bunkers is a softer coal, which won't shift so quickly which will the pieces of coal will hold on to each other a bit more. And this therefore leads us towards the desire for a softer bituminous coal. And in fact, in certain locations around the world, you would find coal that had both of these properties. And in the late 19th century, mid 19th century, in fact, this coal in particular came from South Wales, so best Welsh, it was called. It was suitably soft, but it also had a calorific value which was comparable to anthracite, and it was almost smokeless. And it produced less ash than many bituminous coals, which meant that the ship's firemen had to rake the grates of the engine's furnace less frequently. Now, given the strategic reality, here the technical lesson ends, and please don't ask me too many more questions about these technical elements, but here, given that the strategic reality of steam powered naval vessels was that one should ideally emit as little smoke as possible. We perhaps need to ask ourselves how we should read these Japanese prints, and we might say that they're engaged in a kind of visual hyperbole, or it also may be the case that the US frigates did actually emit as much coal as is depicted in these prints. We can't know because we don't know exactly what kind of coal Paris squadron was burning when it arrived in Edel Bay. We do know that the expedition used a range of coals during its expedition, including anthracite from Pennsylvania, bituminous from Maryland, and also some extra sources from England, plus coal that the expedition purchased at considerable expense while in transit across first the Atlantic and then the Indian oceans, including the purchase of coal at Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Either way, however we read this print, the iconography of billowing smoke inadvertently pointed to one problem which motivated the Perry mission. He, Perry subsequently claimed that the acquisition of California in 1848 had rendered the United States the new Middle Kingdom in terms of its ability to serve as a highway for the world between East Asia and Western Europe. And of course this whole language of the Middle Kingdom is a very pregnant language. But if you take that assumption, then of course, as Perry wrote in his subsequent publication published diaries, then the agency of steam would be needed for US ships to cross the Pacific from the West Coast and for this fuel was indispensable and hence rose inquiries for that great mineral agent of civilization, namely coal. And yet, given the huge price differentials between coal purchased on the West Coast of America and that on the Atlantic seaboard. So this American Trans Pacific dream which you see represented both in Perry's writings but also in this map from 1848. This Trans Pacific dream was all but logistically and economically unviable and indeed that was the very reason that the Perry mission to open the Pacific steam powered trade itself by necessity didn't cross the Pacific but rather went across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, sending its own coal supplies in advance. So that's one imagination of the world that America could become the middle kingdom but in order for that to be the case then it needs to find the great mineral agent of civilization. At the same time, President Fillmore wrote to the Emperor of Japan in the letter that Perry carried that he understood that to be a great abundance of coal and provisions in the Empire of Japan. And if this indeed were true, then the vision of America as the world's new middle kingdom in the age of steam might actually become realizable. And this is because US ships would be able to restock or re-coal using Japanese coal rather than the expensive and restricted stocks which apart from anything else were controlled by the British in Singapore or in Hong Kong. And so in all of these ways as Peter Shulman has argued, the Fillmore administration's primary interest in Japan concern not whaling and not trade as we've traditionally been told but rather coal. And already you can begin to see therefore that this question about Japan's so-called opening is actually turning into a practical question, as Yasuo Endo argued in 2007, a practical question about not the opening of Japan but rather the opening of the Pacific Ocean. Now this is the extent of most secondary accounts, namely that the US knew about Japanese coal deposits and that the Perry mission was tasked, among other things, with making them accessible. But what such accounts do not ask is how Fillmore and Secretary of State Daniel Webster knew about this Japanese alleged abundance. In fact, before departing Norfolk, Virginia, Perry had read Engelbert Kempfer's History of Japan, which was written and published in English first in 1727, in which Kempfer had described seeing evidence of coal mining near Koyanose in north central Kyushu in 1691 in the area that we now know as Chikuhou. Perry also seems to have read, in addition to Kempfer, Philip Franz von Siebold's German language, Nippon. Or rather we might imagine that Perry had the text read to him by his Dresden crew member, the artist Wilhelm Heiner or William Heiner, because we assume that Perry could not read German. I know this because Perry later noted that Dr Siebold also speaks of coal as being in common use throughout the country. And on visiting one of the mines he saw enough to convince him that it was skillfully worked. This reference referred to a passage in Nippon in which the Wurzburg-born Siebold described visiting a coal pit in Wukumoto, Kyushu, in February 1826. And this is what he wrote. He said, the coal was brought to the surface through a shaft which gently slopes downward in 120 deep steps. It was foliated coal, alternating in thin layers with clay shale. Up to about 60 steps down, because our Japanese guys did not permit us to descend any further, the thickness of the coal strata was inconsiderable and a matter of only a few inches. But deeper down, the strata are apparently several feet in size, something that we could also gather from the extracted coal pieces. Now, leaving aside for a moment the local technical knowledge which is implied in Siebold's accounts and indeed the guide's desire to hide aspects of that knowledge from prying foreigners' eyes. Notwithstanding all of this, this so-called Wukumoto passage was much read by US policymakers. In August 1856, for example, Townsend Harris also referenced this passage as he prepared to negotiate the more comprehensive trade treaty with Japan than Perry had managed to sign in 1854. But Harris noted in his diary that Siebold saw enough to convince him that the shaft was well and judiciously worked, unquote. Now, the Siebold's 1826 description was central to an American imagination of Japanese coal abundance, makes it even more regrettable that Wukumoto is a corrupted place name. I have some problems saying it myself. But thanks to local history enthusiasts in Kyushu sharing their knowledge through internet blogs, Siebold's mistake can be identified as the long-closed Wukumoto mine in what is now all match town to the west of Saga city. And this means that Siebold visited the southern end of what would later become known as the Karatsu Coalfield, which was an area which stretched some 30 kilometers north from Fukumoto to the castle town of Karatsu on Kyushu's northwest shore. Now the importance of coal mining to the castle town of Karatsu and more generally to the Karatsu domain at the turn of the 19th century is itself demonstrated by an eight part scroll called the illustrations of products from Hisen province in 1784. But this in context 1784 was when James Watts designed the revolutionary steam engine in Britain. Alongside horse breeding, wailing pictured here, pottery production, deer and wild boar hunting, falconry, cormorant fishing, coastal fishing, papermaking, textile bleaching, blacksmithery and incense production. Mining is presented in these scrolls as a significant proto industry of the domain. And in the third scroll, laborers are depicted both at a surface level, a hewing open call, and also as entering the reinforced entrance to a horizontal mine or what is known in Britain or what was known in Britain as drift mining. So at this point on the verge of us going underground, I want us to pause and consider what it means to have traced visions of the trans Oceanic Middle Kingdom back to Karatsu. And the way I originally had thought about doing this was to explain it in terms of chapters in a book. But when I presented this for an audience several months ago, there were, if not exactly blank faces when I talked about chapters, then at least there wasn't great engagement with the ideas. And so it was suggested to me that I should change the metaphor to episodes in a box set. So imagine that we are trying to pitch for the producers of a modern Japan season one box set, an episode about modern Japan. Now, instead of pitching that episode in a way that begins with Perry's frigates puffing their way over the Pacific horizon. It seems to me that we can now start with a different storyline. Namely, we would start with the proto industrial I the proto industrial coal mining in 18th century Q shoot. And then we would continue through the mediation of cautious hookah more chaperones and their visitor from woods book to the corridors of the White House in the early 1850s. And only then would the episode culminate in the Commodore's mission arriving in Edel Bay. So if the woodblock prints of belching steamships were to be the closing image of such an episode, then the his end scrolls that you see here could be its opening with their coal mining scenes juxtaposed to more traditional images of pre 1853 Japan, boats squirming sea bream and so on. But this reframing of Japan's engagement to begin not with steamships, but rather with what I'm going to call the terraqueous cultures of Karatsu. This reframing only makes historiographical sense. If we shift our focus from the black ships to the black smoke, and thus to the fuel, which powered trans Pacific imaginations so much for the sites and for the beginning of a story, not with the Perry expedition and not even in Washington, but rather in the coal mines of Karatsu. And now I want to turn to the actors. And here I'll start with one of Perry's greatest frustrations during his Japanese sojourn. And given some samples of native coal in Shimoda, American engineers discovered that it was, and here I quote, of a quality so inferior that we were unable to keep up steam with it. Perry himself then later wrote, The Japanese, this is not unlikely, supplied an inferior quality to deceive their visitors or whether from ignorance of the article and want of mining skill they innocently brought that which was inferior cannot be certainly decided. Coal certainly exists in Japan and as the natives not only use it but according to Fonsee Bolt know very well how to mine it, the probabilities are that they purposely furnished the poorest samples. I'm trying to think after a careful examination of the particulars of all the interviews and conferences with them on all topics that on no one subject did they misrepresent more unscrupulously than on that of coal. And this brilliant little rant reminds historians of the critical distance that we must maintain in interpreting the visual and textual rhetoric of the Perry exhibition expedition. I recall, for example, Wilhelm or William Heinz famous lithograph of Japanese officials receiving American gifts, a lithograph which speaks to the wider narrative of the advanced West bestowing knowledge on the curious but technical technologically East, and here the model train in the center of the print is absolutely crucial. And yet, the great mineral agent of civilization in search of which Perry had come to Japan actually lay in native hands at this particular point of the encounter. And when it came to offering that material and that mineral officials deceived misrepresented and behaved unscrupulously. In other words, American access to coal was dependent on the agency of multiple Japanese actors and this in itself calls into question the implied asymmetries of global power that we see in Heinz scene here. So let's think a little bit more about those Japanese actors, leaving aside the officials we know from the his end school about the men and by the late 19th century thousands of women who worked half naked and in appalling conditions to hew and haul the coal. The scroll also depicts laborers sifting and packing the product to be carted off to the Matsuda River boatman then transported it in single man's two or three ton barges north to the collapse of market, whose river iron proximity to the minds made this particular call cheaper and more attractive to the Japanese as the Japanese Imperial Navy in the 1870s and 1880s than higher calorific coal from Chikuhou in northern Kyushu, at least until the Chikuhou railway opened in 1891 and here we have an image by the famous watercolor artists, Yamamoto Sakube, who recalls the profound change in the industry when the railways came and put rivermen out of jobs and his father was a river transporter of coal. And then, once you get the coal to the markets in Karatsu, there was the journey from that seaside depot to the bigger ports where the steamships were waiting for such as moji, and where steams of stevedores again including women would load the coal into the onboard bunkers and my grandmother who was in Japan in 1931 has strong memories of seeing women loading coal in moji when she was there. Now this journey from markets to deep sea port required a large network of sailing ships. And here I want to draw on the memories of the seaman Kato Hisakatsu who began his maritime career in February 1897 as a deckhand on indeed a coal carrying sailing ship the Kotomaru sailing from Yokohama to Karatsu and back. And just as an aside, here's another kind of observation about the way that the modern world works, even many decades after the appearance of the world's first trans-oceanic steamships, the power of coal continued to depend on the power of wind. Now, as I say, Kato started his career in the late 1890s, but it's his later recollections in a published account in 1931 about the final set of actors as it were in our story of shaft to ship, which is the most vivid of all, namely the coal passes and the coal fireman on board. All night and day, he wrote, their bodies discoloured by sweat and sweat and oil until they resemble bronze butters, they run to and fro like squirrels in the coal holes. In the eyes of the ladies and gentlemen strolling with easy sounding footsteps on the upper deck, these are the men, golly, the crew, barely regarded as humans. They work in a world of darkness never visited by the sun, a world, a place where the mouldy black air drifts constantly and thickly, where both clouds of fine coal powder and tepid airs or hot winds begin to blow in all directions after grazing your body. And their work continuing to carry coal with the loyalty of an army of ants, the coal that drives the power, the power that drives the ship, this job is truly the most invaluable on the whole ship. Now, just for a moment of context here, this decade in which Qatar began working, the late 1890s was when the Nippon Yusen Kaishita MYK company began opening new lines to India, to London, to Australia, to Seattle and indeed this picture in the background which I showed you earlier which is showing Japanese migrants arriving in Hawaii. They are disembarking from a ship the Mike Maru which would later open the Yokohama Seattle line in 1896. So Japan is emerging as a modern shipping nation in the 1890s and by the time that Qatar was writing in the 1930s, Japanese steamships were in many ways considered the queens of the Pacific as the NYK Museum in Yokohama. So again, there's maybe a sort of element of hyperbole in this source. I should think it's possible that the engineers or the bridge officers or indeed the cooks and stewards might have had something to say about who had the most invaluable job on the late 19th century, early 20th century steamship, not to speak of the financiers, the shipwrites and the interior designers. But the point is this, the firemen, the passers, the stevedoras, the boatmen, the packers, the sifters, the haulers and the hewers also embodied this trans-Pacific history of Japanese re-engagement with the world. No less than the Euro-American elites whose interest in Karatsu had brought Perry to Japan in the mid-1850s and no less than the trans-Pacific migrants with whom I began this talk. Indeed, we might even go so far as to borrow the language of the go-between in intellectual and cultural history, namely the actor who articulates relationships between disparate worlds or cultures by being able to translate between them. And if we take this idea and then apply it to coal, we might argue that the act of hewing or of firing was also one of translation, but rather between the natural and the human worlds. By this logic then, the men and women squirreling coal from Karatsu to the trans-Oceanic steamships were also crucial go-betweens in the history of Oceanic Japan and therefore key actors in our season one storyline. So let's try and wrap all of this up. In his groundbreaking 1992 essay, Kennecock Journey, The Paths Out of Town, William Cronin examines how an abandoned copper mining town in South Central Alaska became for a few short decades in the early 20th century connected to the rest of the world. What his essay forces us to do, in other words, is to tell a different story of socio-political transformations in the modern world, one that is grounded in local experience, local actors and local sites. Now in haste, I've tried to do something similar today by tracing the paths back to Karatsu and then one that's again out from Karatsu to the story of 19th century Japanese shipping. I've focused on sites and actors that are not usually at the fore of mid 19th century Japanese history, particularly not when it comes to the iconic story of the opening of Japan. So the question is, what does all of this add up to? Well, this paper was written for a book which will be coming out sometime next year. We hope a collection of essays about Oceanic Japan to try and rethink the relationship of Japan to the seas in the Tokugawa and then modern periods. But as I've argued here, that story of Oceanic Japan must be as much a story of the ground as of the sea, because coal power bound ships to the ground in ways that wind power did not. And for this reason, I've used this language of terraqueous, which was coined by Alison Bashford in a 2017 essay. She's interested in thinking about the sort of interface of land and water in the modern world, and particularly on thinking of actors such as merchants, fishers, traders, pilgrims, migrants and so on. So I'm sort of trying to speak to this wider literature of terraqueous history to challenge the idea that we can just think about Oceanic Japan in terms of water and ships. The second thing that I hope I can try and show from the story is that there were obviously global transformations of the local. If you're a minor in 1784 Karate, you have little sense perhaps that within a couple of generations the world will implicitly be looking to you, particularly the American world will be looking to you in order to fulfill an American ambition of being a new middle kingdom. And that story is true, of course, of the ways then regions such as Chikahore were transformed by the need for coal in the Meiji period. But this is not just a one way process of the global to the local. Equally local transformations affected the global. And here we can perhaps as one example bring in the book by Catherine Phipps, which she wrote about the ports of Meiji Japan in particular she focuses on the special trading ports, not the five open ports which are most famous but rather a group of ports particularly located in Kyushu and in Hokkaido which was central to Japan's export of coal to the Asian worlds in the Meiji period and therefore sort of forced us to rethink the story of the unequal treaties of what is an open and what is a closed port and so on. And it's in this space between, as it were, the global and the local that I think we need to try and fit that national unit of Japan. We can't start with the assumption that Japan was closed, and we definitely can't start with the idea that it was open. We have to somehow find a better language, a better analytical language for all of this and better units of analysis than Japan. And I appreciate that this particular point might not go down so well with a Japan research center audience but there we are. And more generally, I think that what I'm trying to do here is to consider other ways that we might think about Japan's engagement with the late 19th century or the mid 19th century. Well, I've already mentioned Yasuo Endo's work on the opening of the Pacific. One might think here about Shoko Nishi's work on trying to retell the opening of Japan by focusing particular on Japanese Russian links from the mid 19th century onwards. And here I also just want to bring attention to the work in intellectual history that is being done and I point you towards a special issue that I helped edit this last few years on the ways in which sort of history is created in the space between East Asia and Europe, both broadly defined. I particularly point you towards the essay by David Mervert, reading European histories, universal histories in Japan from the 1790s to the 1840s, which is already online. And Mervert's essay raises the problem of what exactly the Japanese saw when they encountered Western imperialism in the mid 19th century in the form of the British defeating Qing China in the first opium war or indeed the form of Perry coming to Japan in the 1850s. And he argues that they may not have seen something that we call imperialism but they rather might have seen an idea of decline in which small nation states fragment after the decline of an empire. And therefore the arrival of the British or the French or the Russians is not a sign of Western strength but rather a sign of Western weakness. It's quite a complex argument but the point here is that Japanese intellectuals did not just approach the West as a kind of blank slate that they were always seeing the West through the intellectual lens of China and the Sinosphere. And I think this is totally crucial to the ways in which we think about Japan's relationship to the non Japanese world that we don't just think in terms of the sort of bilateral relationships between Japan and Europe or Japan, North America. But always at the very least it's a kind of triangular relationship in which China is in the background of the intellectuals, the politicians and so on. So we might end with the question, which is what did Japanese intellectuals actually see when they saw the Perry print here. We can't be sure but I hope that I've raised enough other questions now to provoke a lively discussion. Many thanks indeed for listening. Thank you so much Martin that was that was really great and particularly the visuals were really valuable. I just want to make I mean I have lots of questions but I don't want to dominate I want to allow other people to start typing into the chat so feel free to start typing into the Q&A chat and I'll have a look at it in a minute. I just wanted to make one brief sort of comment and then ask one one question so first of all thank you for for reframing this history I think it's absolutely fascinating how you have literally taken it back to full face. And we use that expression in England still about in English, you know, working at the cold face and and you have literally done that and in doing so you have not only reframed that but for me I was struck by the fact that you're re humanizing the story. You're bringing the everyday labor of men and women into the story and without which you know it's inconceivable that the black ships could have sailed in without that that labor there. But it's very much a hidden history that you're uncovering at the same time literally you know an underground history of women and men working underground in the mining industry. And there was no met there was only men in your scroll that you showed but as you pointed out later on there was thousands of women working in this industry, although later in the post for they were banned from underground work and I believe in the 20s when when that industry became a bit more technological women sort of declined but there was a lot of women in that story so I'm struck by your, I'm probably going to say it wrong Tera quiet interface of land and water it seems to me that there's, there's a sort of sort of gendering going on there as well so women integral alongside men in the land and underground in that work but when it comes to going out to see and your lovely depiction of those sooty dehumanized men working that men are the laborers at sea but women are very much on the land alongside men but it's a very hidden history for women we know a lot about textile women in this period but we know I'm far less about the mining women so it's nice that you're uncovering that history for us as well. So that was just a just a comment but the question that I had, and you make the point in reframing this argument that the US didn't just want to open up Japan because of wailing and trading which is the traditional story that we're all being old and aware of but they wanted, they imagined this abundance and they wanted to use Japan as a restocking point you know where they could restock and I like, I like the fact that the Japan Japanese press tried to hide the fact that they had any superior coal which was good. To what extent did this ability to use Japan as a restocking post take place because as we know what happened next was that Japan took on its own massive industrialization it used, you know the big companies Mitsui Mitsubishi Sumitomo they go into coal production. It feels their own you know steamships and trains and textile mills they export coal so to what extent does Japan actually so presumably there is an abundance there. It's not imagined, we know that but to what extent did Japan become that restocking post because I think that's kind of left out of the story when we think you've made Japan taking off next actually so can you give us some insight into that. Yeah that's a good question thanks Helen I mean I think it gets back to the question of what the unit of analysis is I mean we've got to extend that beyond Japan because as you said Japan is exporting a lot of coal. I don't have the exact numbers in front of you but it's pretty astonishing by by the 1880s are really big percentage of the coal that's being sold in Shanghai is Japanese coal and that's a complete transformation of the East Asian world and of course that's going to British ships it's going to American ships and so on so the sort of the restocking in terms of stopping in Japan and then going on to China that exists of course I mean I mentioned my grandmother. That was a ship bound for China which stopped in Japan, although it was actually by that point a diesel ship which is a different part of the story. But yeah so the restocking is definitely part of the story, but it, the whole sort of story of restocking of recalling needs to include also Shanghai and Hong Kong in particular. This is another sort of very interesting aspect of Meiji industrialization is that again it's a story we tend to tell within the unit of the nation state. And I just think that's completely, I mean not only problematic or completely wrong. And if you follow the main fuel you have to take this to be an East Asian story as as indeed Catherine Phipps argues. There are several empires on the waterfront I couldn't remember it when I was talking. And indeed when you follow the people I mean one of the arguments I've made about Hawaiian migrants to Japanese migrants to Hawaii is that the sugar plantation in Hawaii is actually a key site of Japanese industrialization. And that needs to be brought into our stories of Japanese transitions in the Meiji period so the, the sort of, well I was going to say the short answer but actually it's turned into a long answer to your question is that the, the, that is realized that American dream. Perhaps in ways that the Americans couldn't quite imagine that there would be so much of an abundance that it would profoundly change markets in, in East Asia and of course you know, it's, it's, it's an old adage but it's worth saying once again this story that Japan is resource. Is only a story about oil. Like it's not a story about coal. If we think about coal in the 19th century in the world then Japan is a resource rich nation and it's really important to get that into the sort of popular imagination as well. Great, thank you. Right I'm going to start picking up some questions from the chat. And so first question here is from Janet Hunter. She says great paper always knew that you were an economic historian at heart. There you go that that is really a compliment from Janet there. Can you clarify why the Japanese would have wanted to misrepresent the quality of the coal to the Perry expedition. And if this was the case it implies a certain level of knowledge and calculation, presumably she means on the behalf of the Japanese on the Japanese. Good question. Yeah that is a good question. I don't know the precise answer to Janet and thanks for asking it and being here tonight. I don't know the precise answer to it because I don't know what sources exist that might tell the Japanese side of that story and, and actually that's sort of not really my area of expertise but maybe one out there would would find something that would explain it but my guess is the, the, because of the Dutch in Nagasaki and the Europeans in Nagasaki that already by the time that Perry came authorities were aware that there was interest in natural sources in Japan, and that knowledge had to be tightly guarded. You know I mean the talk about a show going across the period of the 17th century onwards is known for sort of wanting to keep things under control right so I suspect that there's an element of, you know, trying not to be exploited there in a increasingly imperial world. And I would say, you know, suggests that there is a more complex story of mid 19th century interactions between Japan and the outside world Dan, you know, Japan as the overwalled recipients of technological expertise from the west, right. I hope that this story adds to that, but I don't actually have any evidence of what might have been going on in the thinking then we, so far as I know we can only read that from Perry's diary. Thanks. I have a question here from Jonas, and he says I'm intrigued by the concept terror, he's making me say it again terror quest to describe coal resources so at the time of Perry's coming there were no steam engines operating in Japan yet. And Western shipping was still mostly carried out with you know say sailing. So what do we do with the fact that coal was obviously used significantly in Japan without mechanical industrialization, but rather for other uses and he gives the example of boiling down in the world. So how does the energy regime change towards fossil fuels without steam engines, undermine both the idea of the terror chaos or a resource and of the Anthropocene as we think of it in the European trajectory. Oh, that's a big question. Have you got that. Thanks. Thanks. You're not as I suspect typing that from somewhere in Switzerland and thank you very much for that. It's not one of your students is it. It's not officially know but he said he's a PhD student. He's testing he he's testing a live part of this oceanic project. So, I suspect what you're wanting me to suggest. The last is that it complicates the story of energy transitions and indeed I know that I mean you're you're more aware of this than I am but the energy historians actually find the top the whole idea of transition very problematic for exactly the types of reasons you're pointing out right there's no straight line between the discovery of high quality coal in Kyushu and of course later in Hokkaido. It's a sort of simple story of Japanese industrialization. There's no steam engines as you say and the use of the coal is mainly domestic and especially for salt production in Southwest Japan and the inland sea. And I hope this sort of complicates the story of the modern world which says that there's a simple shift from organic regimes to fossil regimes, but I mean that in itself is not particularly new. But it undermines the idea of a terracrious resource. I'd rather say that it sort of strengthens the idea of the terracrious framework because you know if we, this sort of traditional way of thinking of it is you know that steamships are to do with the sea. The extent to which we sort of connect them to the land is simply in terms of, you know, regimes of power on the ship and law and the types of people who were being transported and the goods were being transported and so on but it's much cooler in his book. Fish Story was, you know, a very prominent person who made the argument that actually, as I said in the talk, coal and steamship binds ships to the land, much more than wind. I mean, because our ships have to recall and that then, you know, causes the sort of geopolitical transformation of the world in which places like Hawaii which were previously not very important instead of geopolitical discussion suddenly become crucially important because the notion that the American Navy makes in the 1890s is that if Japan were ever to attack America, it would be able to get steamships from Japan to the west coast but it wouldn't be able to get them back without recalling somewhere. And therefore, if America annexed Hawaii and the big coal stations at Pearl Harbor, that that would prevent the Japanese from effectively being able to attack the west coast of America. The idea of Hawaii, you know, becomes a kind of defensive point in which coal is central to the thinking and suddenly Hawaii becomes strategically crucial to the 19th century world. So I would say that this strengthens the idea that land and sea are entwined in very complex ways rather than sort of separate spheres. And that work argues that to your last as to the Anthropocene. If I may, I might just leave that to one side because I'm going to get into an area that I'm not all confident about speaking about but that's maybe a discussion you who have a lot more knowledge than I do could speak to. Alison asks, what did Japan mean by a middle kingdom? Or is that the Sino-U.S. concept there? I mean, we're getting into Tokugawa intellectual history here, which has never been my forte, but obviously you have this idea in the Sino sphere that, you know, the China, let's call it China, is the most civilized and sort of pinnacle of civilization in the world. And that that sort of places China at the middle of the world. This is the traditional middle kingdom framing. Then you find Tokugawa thinkers in the world, particularly in the early 19th century who begin to say, well, actually wait a sec, we could think of Japan as a middle kingdom of actually, this is a sort of new Confucian way of imagining the world. Japan in many ways is more civilized than China. And they provide sort of intellectual justifications for this. And this is part of a sort of repositioning of Japan in the Sino sphere that again is sort of crucial to understanding the development of late 19th century leaving Asia discourses. It's not just about Europe, it's about the relationship for Japan to China. I don't know how conscious Perry is of picking up on this language when he uses it in his diaries, but clearly, you know, people in North America and Europe understood this whole idea of the middle kingdom. And I imagine that Perry was trying to be deliberately provocative here and say, hey, you know, this this terminology doesn't belong to China anymore, we America are the middle kingdom. And there's a statement here more than a question, I think from Joseph, who says, which helps answer the question I posed I think you're reframing of the importance of coal is also supported by the chronology of the US Japan Treaty. The 1854 treaty that you mentioned opened up Shimoda and Hakodate as supply ports rather than trade ports where US ships could take on coal. So not until the 1858 treaty were Japanese ports open for US Japan trade. So yeah, so those supply ports were definitely where US ships were taking on coal. So thank you for, I think, pretty much adding to that. To add to that, that's where Catherine Phipps's work is very important. They're saying it's not just about the five treaty ports, but it's also about these open ports and special trading ports of which she particularly focuses on 21. I mean, it's a serious number of ports, which then are particularly developed to help the export of coal and rice from Japan. So yeah, thanks for that comment. Thank you. Many Franks, another great economic historian of Japan asks, what was the market and uses for Karatsuko and the Tokugawa period. She said I think you've just answered this but it has all sorts of implications in a great divergence context, if it's not used simply as a fuel source. Yeah, that's a really interesting question and thanks for linking to the great divergence as well I mean for those of you who are not perhaps familiar with a great divergence debate. So it's out of a set of debates in the 1990s among economic historians about to try and answer some question about the nature of economic difference between China and Europe in particular, from the sort of end of the 18th century onwards and I was advised by a book called The Great Divergence by Ken Pomerance, which was published in 2000, but he didn't coin the phrase himself I think it was coined by Samuel Huntington, in fact, in the class of clash of civilizations. And so my argument is to say that, you know, actually, in many ways, there isn't any kind of serious divergence between China and the European economic world, until about 1800 and in many ways, Europe looks like a kind of normal, exceptional economy, and therefore we can't sort of explain the European transformation in the 19th century, according to sort of cultural explanations or because, you know, the Europeans were far more innovative or because they had better political structures or whatever and Pomerance's argument is to say, you know, there are two really key crucial elements here one is that Europe had access to colonies which changed the whole nature of the European market and allowed also the the production of food stuffs overseas in particular, sugar, which could then lead industrial workers in Britain in particular but in Europe, and then the other key element was coal. And not only coal, but access to coal in ways that meant it could be transported very quickly China of course had a lot of coal but it was, you know, far away from the delta where much of the sort of proto industrializing work was being done whereas England's coal and particular Northwest coal and as I say Welsh coal as well was very close to transport networks in terms of sea and river and so on it could be transported all over Europe as well and it was the position of coal that helped explain the huge economic divergence that then you see in the 19th century. How does Karl answer fit into that, I mean I think it relates back to your masses question of, you know, why didn't Japanese people industrialists use coal and what we would consider to be to be sort of more rational, you know, productive ways, but I think Pomerance himself would say that's the wrong way of phrasing the question you phrase it as a negative why didn't Japan use coal in a particular way. And the more interesting thing is to say look the way that the Japanese economy was set up in the Tokugawa period made perfect sense, just as the way that the Chinese economy was set up in the sort of late 18th century. And that it's this sort of accidental discovery. I mean, the geopolitics of coal which mean that we now think of the steam engine as sort of, and the water mill as crucial technological developments and we don't think about the walk as a crucial technological development to the walk of course being a way of cooking that saves fuel. So I think I think probably if you're trying to fit this into a sort of Pomerance frame you would say this is another example of how Karatsu or how Japan and East Asia sort of don't quite fit the models that we want to impose on them. But once you have the natural resource there must be industrialization. So that's a terribly long-winded answer and you know much more about it than I do. But yeah, that's that's my initial stab at how it speaks to the great divergence debate. Thank you. So we've got a comment in question here from Roger Macie. So he says your late observation of the coal toilets in the hold of the ship was I think from the 30s when oil as the ship's fuel was generally replacing coal. So comparing the exploitation of coal with oil has all sorts of implications. So the very extraction of coal requires more of the value to flow black flow back to the hewers and toilets. That might be exploited in the process. So could this have been of indirect benefit to Japan? That's a good question. You're getting some really good questions. I'm glad it's you presenting tonight, not me. The first round is I'm sorry, Roger. I don't know the answer to that. I think the first question to ask you is I'm not quite sure what you mean by the value flowing back to the hewers and toilets. I think that's a lot to do with the market price of coal. And this gets me to the territory that I'm not very familiar with. I'm sorry. I think is quite important to know about all of this is that this is a bit of an aside, but it affects the economies of what we're talking about is obviously in a, you know, in a wind powered ship economy. You don't have to worry about carrying fuel. Whereas once you get into a coal powered ship economy, you've got to have big bunkers that will get your ships from Japan to Hawaii or Japan to Seattle or wherever it is. And that then uses up valuable space in the hold that you could charge for freight. And this is one of the reasons that then you see a sort of economic transformation in 90th century Japan from, you know, the individually owned ships, which is the classics of the Kitamaebune model from northern Japan of these regional ships sailing through the inland sea to Osaka and carrying goods, Osaka and then carrying goods back to North Japan. That could be a much more individualized model of ownership. But the minute you start getting into the big economies of, you know, big ships that have to have big storage space that begins to get beyond the capabilities of individual economies. And that's then to get to your point, Helen, why you suddenly have Mitsui and Mitsubishi and all these big companies becoming very key players here. It's to do with the use of space within the ship as much as anything else. So that doesn't really answer your question, Roger, but it's a tricky question. And I don't really want to make a stab at answering it either because I get myself into hot oil. I wonder if he, I mean, when he's talking about the value, the value flowing back to the hewers and toilets, I mean, just to comment, I mean, on on female labor, we know that a lot of that labor was actually couples working. So you were 80% of women who worked in the period that you're talking about were married women and often working with alongside husbands. And so, and it was quite well paid, relatively speaking, for the day. I don't know if that comes into the sort of value flowing back, but, but certainly later on when the big companies, you know, really start investing it, then then you're looking at a different value flowing back to companies as well as workers or employees by that stage. So, not sure. Okay, but thank you, Roger, if you want to add anything later, feel free, but I should probably move on to other questions. So, SJM says I'd love to hear more about what says thank you for your fascinating talk, Matt. I'd love to hear more about lives in transit. Gosh, where did it begin? Well, it was an accidental project as these things usually are. I try to write a book. I have been trying to write a book for absolutely ages about steamships in Japan about one particular steamship as a way of sort of trying to rethink our story of major Japan. Because when I got the job in Tiddish, we decided to put in a funding application for a bigger project which was shared between here and now Munich, about steamships in the late 19th century world. And one aspect of that was a digital project and I was very interested in sort of trying to use digital technologies, not in order to do sort of big data history, which is I think many of the ways that our university administrators want us to think that our history is done, which is sort of, you know, you feed all your data into databases and then you press buttons and off you go. But rather if we could use digital to tell stories in new ways. So that was sort of the funding application I put into the Swiss National Science Foundation and then when we actually got the money which was a bit of a surprise to me because it was a terribly strong application I thought. Then I realized that quickly actually what we had in mind which is sort of, you know fancy visualizations wasn't itself good enough and what I was more interested in was trying to get my students who were always asking the question not what is global history but how do you do global history I was I was thinking maybe I could try and create some kind of narrative for them to help them do that to put them in the position of being a historian and then having to do some research on the topic that's the sort of genesis of the game is it's a role playing game, not where you pretend you're a stevedore or a fewer or a migrant or whatever but rather you pretend you're a historian and you have, you know to do a research project and then you have to engage with sources and you have to sort of think about where you're going and all the time you've got to deal with your PhD supervisor who can be a pain in the ass and you've got to do funding applications and you've got to, you know, try and keep your part time job going and all this sort of stuff and to try and give a sense to the students that the types of knowledge that we are producing as historians is very much situated according to our access to resources who we are what kind of relationships we have and that it therefore sort of reinforces an idea about global history which is that we have to know the positionality of the scholar in question or the group of scholars and that inevitably is going to affect the way in which we narrate the world and this is a sort of interactive way of trying to get them to to engage with those ideas but it's open to anyone to have a play I'll send a link I can yeah and yeah have a look at it. I'm not sure if they can see that but we can we can extract it. There was a question in the chat rather than the Q&A so I don't want to miss that one from Thomas. Thank you for the fascinating talk, can you argue that there is something about the potentialities unleashed by coal that makes the states extracting it more expansionist so like sugar there's a strong link with empire and expansionism. So that's the one one question and then he's also interested in how Hashima Island might fit into this history of coal and how the geography of a small island shaped the production of a commodity and social lives of workers there. Yeah there's been lots of work done on Hashima by by people like Mark Pendleton I think but anyway go ahead. Can you see that. Yeah I can see that thanks. Hi Tom thanks for thanks for joining us. I suspect what lies behind your question is probably the, the idea that what's his name Timothy Mitchell is it has in his book on oil democracy I haven't got the title right but the idea that particular fuel regimes affect the way that power works. And then the question is there something sort of specific to coal that affects, that maybe affects a mindset of an expanding empire or something just as, you know, the sort of logic of sugar in the Caribbean led European empires into a particular sort of land ownership structures and and labor structures called slavery in that particular area. I think it's a brilliant question I don't. I feel like a broken record I don't know. I mean I think there's not just in general but certainly one of the things that I mean Phipps does in her book and the others have have done is to say that the story of recalling is absolutely central to understanding Japan's expansionist wars. It's the same story of the Russo Japanese war, and that you sort of need to know about how the Imperial Japanese Navy was getting its fuel supplies and also be able to fight on the Asian continent she has a brilliant chapter, I think a whole chapter in her book in which she sort of tells the story of the sign of Japanese war from Moji. And from the sort of coal refueling ships that were passing through Moji on a regular basis. So, I mean I think it's indisputable that coal helped Japan expand. But whether it in itself has a dynamic that sort of leads nation states towards expansion I just don't know I mean that that would be something for others to answer but it's a really interesting question. Thanks. Yeah. The story of Hashima Island has been told by scholars such as Mark Pendleton and Peter Matanele at Sheffield and, and it is a fascinating story and I'm struggling to remember whether it was Mitsui or Mitsubishi, one of them definitely not Simitomo, it was one of the Ems, and it was their their company that had the island as a coal mining island. It's an amazing story of, of literally a city of people living on that island, you know, and it had everything hospitals, you know, shops education housing and, and they literally when they decided to stop mining coal on Hashima. They literally left the island overnight so not overnight but in the space of a week or two and it is this deserted island where you can. You can't visit it's a UNESCO heritage site but those who have visited for research like Mark and Peter and from Sheffield have these amazing photos of this abandoned island where thousands of people who lived there literally left quickly and you can see this this abandoned island slowly decaying so it's a fascinating story if you want to follow up follow up with those Sheffield scholars. I'm to the ridiculous but wasn't one of the James Bond films. Yes. Yes. Sorry. Sorry to load the tone. No, no. I would have lowered the tone actually myself but it's that one where Javier, what's his name, the villain Javier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was 007 and to his lair and that is supposedly on Hashima Island. Yeah. Okay. So we should we go back to some. I don't know if everyone can see but I put the lives and transit link in chat. Brilliant. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. A question here from Annabelle saying you stated by the 1880 is that a large percentage of coal being sold in Shanghai was from Japan. So was Japanese coal significant in Shanghai then in the 1860s as well or was that something that only developed later on in the. Thank you, Annabelle. No, it wasn't significant in the 1860s is one of these really transformative events from the from the 70s and 80s onwards. It wasn't significant in the 1860s because as you may have heard from some of the questions actually there wasn't a really good extractive technology in Japan that the types of image that I showed you from Karate. So with digital mining it's quite easy to set up without fancy technologies but immediately in the 1860s then Japan particularly from British engineers had to learn about deep mining. So basically where you go down vertically and are yeah that that is a new technology which which needs to develop Hashima is important Takashima is important. And that's when you then are able to export on a large scale to Shanghai and East Asia. So that's one of those things where yeah the world looks tremendously different in energy terms or at least the East Asian world looks tremendously different in East Asian terms in the 1880s from how it did in the 1860s. Great. We have a question here from Andrew Elliott to who's one of our JRC visiting scholars at the moment. So it's nice to see him. And so he's making the comment that or basically asking about images of Perry and the black ship in popular culture today so he's making the comment that it got him thinking about NHK dramas like Yaino Sakura Ryoma Den and Atsuhime in which Perry appears mid series arguably as a sort of a bit part. So he says perhaps he apologised perhaps there's a too far off the topic of coal but could you talk more about how images of Perry and the black ships continue to function in Japan today in popular culture for example. That's a good question. He's taking you off topic though. Hi Andrew, thanks for that. I suspect we might have met at some point in the past. Anyway, very nice of you to attend today. I can't really speak very well to black ships in popular culture today. I mean one thing that I think is important to sort of knowledge about black ships is, I mean you know for a long time I thought black ships referred to the fact that they were black and I think many people do still think that. Then I think it's also possible that that whole idea of Kurogane relates to the smoke and you know the black belching ships which is I think then an important part of the story but it's also worth realising that you know the term black ships was being used in the 16th century in Japan to describe the Portuguese karaks that were coming and indeed in that famous print that Nagasaki print that I showed you of the of the of the belching ships. The ethnography actually is not of a steamship it's of a Portuguese karak so there's a longer history here which is pre closed country and looks back to Japan's relationship to Southeast Asia in the 16th and early 17th century It's actually important to bear that in mind because what you then see with the arrival of Perry is again this sort of this lens of memory as it were in which not only are Japanese intellectuals sing about China but they're also even looking back to a long history of Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia which predates the the the Sakoku regulations in the 1630s and is again a way of sort of complicating the story that we have here simply a relationship between Japan and the West. And this is sort of one of the things I was trying to keep arguing is when we tell these stories of the 19th century. You know, we've got to the very least have some kind of triangular imagination in our mind of Japan and the West and Japan and Asia and how those things are coming together. I don't know how that plays into popular images of Perry today but it would be something to look at if you're interested in this is to see how to what extent there's the popular use of Perry today. Tell it as a story about the West or as a story about America in particular, whereas at the time I would argue, it's much more complicated than that there's a sort of layering, which brings in longer memories of Japanese engagement with Southeast Asia as well so I think it's something to sort of look at in trying to answer that question but I'm afraid I can't answer that question myself. So Roger has helpfully added a context to the question that he asked earlier saying, for example the excess value of Norway's oil exports largely sits in financial funds, and very few people in Norway have seen the impact accepted in the term so I guess that's what he's saying about indirect, indirect value there. So then I think the key point here then Roger, okay so now I have a sense of where you're coming from is, is, you know that the, as I said, the, there has to be transformation how you extract the coal. And it is a mixture of big companies like Mitzi and Mitsubishi that immediately invest to do that because you need big capital to do that in a way that is not necessary in the sort of small scale. So that's what we're talking about in, in the, in the late adult period. And in other cases it's what Nakamura now for me has called sort of local zaibatsu in places like Kyushu of, I think there's a very famous guy called Yasukawa, who owns a lot of coal mines in northern Kyushu and is, is according to Nakamura who's central at pushing a kind of regional industrialization of Japan. And again that's another way in which we complicate the story of industrialization is so we look at the regions rather than the center. So, all of that adds up to the fact that I don't think then much of the sort of profits of coal trickle back down to the hewers, as your question was implying I don't think it's that different to oil economy oil extraction economies, because there are companies involved and of course they take the profits themselves and, and, you know, pay as little as they possibly can to the laborers. Thank you. And we have only one. Well, comment. Oh no, hang on. No, that's right. We only have one comment left. It's a lovely way to end in and it's exactly 630 and it's from, it's from the Diwa Foundation, but I can only imagine this is Jason James here, and he's ending on a very lovely poetic note. And I'm not quite sure how to copy this into the chat but maybe you can tell me but he's got this three verse poem here which neatly reflects the declining romance of maritime trade. Would you like, do you want to read the poem out, Martin? I think it's fine. No, not particularly, no. I'm going to paraphrase and summarize it, but it's a three verse poem. And the first verse, there's this depiction of a nice boat rowing home to sunny Palestine with this cargo, sorry, of ivory, peacocks, apes, sandalwood and sweet white wine, which is something I'm now craving. And the second verse, it's a more stately Spanish galleon, which is going back with the cargo of diamonds and emeralds and amethysts and topazes. So again, it's all very lovely. And then we get to the third verse, which is a dirty British coaster with a salt caked smoke stack, with a cargo of coal, road rails, pig lead, firewood, ironware and cheap tin trays. So I think it's pretty much putting British trade into historical context. That's true, although what I really like about this is it's important to say it's tine coal. And this makes me feel nice and nostalgic for my days of teaching at Newcastle University. Indeed. So yeah, thanks very much for that, Jason. And I think in the paper I read, I don't think you mentioned it in your presentation, but the ship that one of the early ships, the one that sailed into Hawaii, I think that you were talking or early Japanese ships came from Newcastle on tine as well. So you have that English link there. Yeah, that's the ship I'm trying to write a book about but watch this space. I hope it might be finished next year. Great. So it only remains to really thank you so much, Martin, for such a wonderful reframing of history, a lovely visual presentation and it certainly inspired a lot of really good questions which hopefully should help you. You did well to answer those on a Wednesday evening. I know you like me, you've been teaching all day. But just thank you to you for coming along and giving this presentation. Thank you to everybody who attended tonight. We can't see you but we're where we can see you there in numbers and thank you for all your great questions. Hopefully we answered them well or rather Martin did I think. And then thanks to Charles who's who you can't see here but his, his runs this whole thing logistically so smoothly and brilliantly. So, thanks everybody and we're back next week with another JRC seminar as well. Thank you for joining us. Thanks to everyone for all your great questions and hope to see you in the flesh again soon. Yeah, thank you.