Although it is well known that Jonathan Swift studied books of travel in preparation for writing his Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and that such books were in his library, no special examination has hitherto been made of his treatment of Japan. Mentioned in each of Gulliver's first three voyages, Japan is treated significantly in the third -- a real country among the imaginary lands with outlandish names. "A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan" is our primary focus of concern in this essay, though we also show that Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Houyhnhnmland take hints from writings on Japan. 1
We attempt to throw light, not only on the parallels to Gulliver's Travels in early European accounts of travels in Japan, but on ways Swift may very well have intended his book to be read. Our first section deals with Gulliverian materials in Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas HisPilgrimes (1625), one of the travel books Swift owned, and especially with the account in Purchas of William Adams (1554-1620), the seventeenth-century Englishman who lived in Japan. The second section presents the observations on Japan by Engelbert Kaempfer, whose work was published almost simultaneously with Gulliver's Travels; and in this section we press the idea that Swift made specific use of Kaempfer. Our final section explicates Gulliver's curious plate depicting the Academy of Lagado's machine for automatic writing, in terms of a very similar plate engraved in Kaempfer.
What Japan did for Swift only begins to appear when we investigate the early histories from which he must have drawn his interpretations: his references to Japan's government; the geography and place names; the anti-Christian policy which he found, ironically, to he more honorable than the acts of the "Christian" Dutch. These and other historical matters became grist for the mills of his imagination, and by his treatment they provide transforming revelations in paradoxes. It is paradoxical, to begin with, that this first serious literary treatment of Japan should be in the context of make-believe lands. It is paradoxical that in the beginning of the third voyage a Dutchman -- a fellow Protestant -- demands the death of Gulliver, but the Japanese captain -- a "heathen" -- shows mercy and saves his life. Paradoxically, the only real nation he visits is the one whose language, Japanese, he can make no claim to have learned. Critics have noted, again paradoxically, that Part Three -- the Japan book -- is at the same time the core of the whole work, and -- critically speaking -- the least "successful" section. Paradoxical, finally, is the evidence we will present showing that it was precisely through the use of the historical materials about actual travels in Japan that Swift found orientation not only for some of the most imaginative elements he introduced in the adventures, but especially for the characterization of Gulliver.
To outline a composite figure that can be drawn from just two of the travelers in Japan is to come very near the figure of Gulliver. Will Adams was the first Englishman to visit Japan (1600 to his death in 1620) and his letters and "history" were recorded in Purchas His Pilgrimes. Engelbert Kaempfer, the author of a monumental two-volume study, The History of Japan published in London under the date 1727, was "the main source of knowledge about Japan in Europe throughout the eight eenth and nineteenth centuries." 2 Taken together these two contribute much of "Gulliver."
Our Gulliverian composite gives us an English-speaking ship's surgeon who becomes "Dutch," whose years of harrowing experiences at sea and in strange lands bear him finally to Japan, where he is put ashore by mutiny (as reported, inaccurately, by John Saris about Adams in Purchas), who is taken to "Yedo" after having been imprisoned and interrogated, who discourses about the life of his homeland, who is opposed by Portuguese who try to have him killed until merciful Japanese intervene, who is brought before the "Emperor" in a "floor-kissing" ritual, who is made to dance and do "apish tricks" which he at first scorns but later prides himself upon (like Gulliver in Brobdingnag), who comes to win the highest respect of the "Emperor" and emerges as one of the highest advisers of this ruler to whom he teaches the mysteries of guns and ships and European courts, who travels to "Nangasac" on various missions and writes of "cross trampling" there, who becomes such a favorite of the ruler that he receives a feudal lord's fief with a hundred families to serve him, who curses the Dutch "Christians," who thinks only fitfully and increasingly negatively of his family in England, who rejects the few Europeans he meets and despises their "odor" most particularly, and who is finally completely unwilling to return to England, having absorbed the dress and customs and even the marital life of Japan. Kaempfer and Purchas are also sources for reports on islands of tiny people and of beastly "Yahoo" ("Yedzo") types as well as of superior "horses."
The documentation and analysis of these elements drawn from the histories require that we try to approach them with some of the freshness felt by a poetic mind "when a new planet swims into his ken." The first reports of Japan were exotic in the extreme, yet they described a culture that had five cities as large as London, at least two very much greater. Japan, by Swift's time, had been briefly revealed to the world, and then had become the world's first society to systematically plan and execute a calculated withdrawal from intercourse with most other lands. In 1639 the Tokugawa Shogunate had deliberately severed ties with the western world and entered an age of isolation with the exception of the small Dutch "factory" at Nagasaki that endured over 200 years until the "Black Ships" of Perry anchored off her shores in 1853. Here was a society mysterious and powerful, fascinating in every respect yet able to keep other nations at arm's length. The Dutch alone held a tiny toehold in trade, bringing in a ship or two once a year to their "prison-like" colony, where a handful of Europeans lived under police guard on a manmade islet in Nagasaki harbor. 3
The fact that the Dutch alone maintained contact with Japan was enough to quicken Swift's interest in the situation, given the circumstances by which they had edged the British out of that apparently wealthy trade field a hundred years before. This still rankled British memories and it presented the opportunity for a most natural and sweet revenge, which Swift could seize upon to turn the Dutch record in the island empire -- especially their cowardly mercenary conformity to the anti-Christian program of the Shogun -- against the moral pretensions of Holland. 4 It is from this perspective that Swift must have read his Purchas and, as our evidence indicates, cast fascinated eyes over the translation of Kaempfer, finding here striking materials for the fertile powers of his imagination. 5