About

Daniel Botsman is the Sumitomo Professor of History at Yale University, currently on leave for Fall 2025. He teaches courses on the history of Japan from 1500 to the present. Born in Lae, Papua New Guinea, he spent his formative years in Brisbane, Australia, where he was introduced to the Japanese language at a young age. His interest in Japanese history and society was sparked after an extended visit to Osaka as a high school student. He completed his B.A. in Asian Studies (Hons.) at the Australian National University in Canberra and was awarded the 1992 Rhodes Scholarship for Queensland. He earned an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History at Merton College, Oxford, and a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University in 1999. His academic career includes teaching positions at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Harvard University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received the James M. Johnston Award for Excellence in Teaching. His publications include a translation of the memoirs of post-war foreign minister Okita Saburo and a study of the history of punishment in Japan from the 16th to the 20th centuries, titled Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan. His current research examines the influence of Western ideas about slavery and emancipation on Japanese society in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a focus on Japan’s outcaste communities.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Art history
• History
• Ancient history
• Media studies
• Law
• Economic history

Selected publications

• The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation ed. by Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess

  Monumenta Nipponica · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • History

  Reviewed by: The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation ed. by Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess Daniel Botsman The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation. Edited by Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 298 pages. ISBN: 9781108478052 (hardcover, also available as e-book). When the cabinet of former prime minister Abe Shinzō announced plans to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration in 2018, it was clear that the promotion of historical scholarship would not be a priority. Adhering to the template created by Abe's great-uncle Satō Eisaku with the 1968 Meiji centennial celebration, the government's goals were to stoke nationalism and promote regional tourism. Fortunately, there were some who saw different possibilities in the sesquicentennial. Foremost among them was Robert Hellyer, who, years before the government announcement, had begun talking with colleagues (myself included) about organizing a series of international conferences about the Restoration.1 In January 2015, Hellyer hosted the first such conference at Wake Forest University, focusing on the themes of civil war and national reconciliation in order to situate the Restoration in a global comparative frame. This was followed in July of the same year by another highly successful conference, "Global History and the Meiji Restoration," hosted by Harald Fuess at Heidelberg University. The present volume is a collection of some of the best papers from those two conferences. The overall quality of the twelve chapters is high, and the editors have done an admirable job of weaving them together into a cohesive whole. As the subtitle makes clear, one of the book's overarching goals is to explore the Meiji Restoration within the context of global developments in the nineteenth century, but its greatest strength may well be the attention it gives to local manifestations of these larger trends. The first of the volume's three sections, titled "Global Connections," opens with a stimulating chapter by Mark Metzler that foregrounds the state of the world's financial [End Page 385] markets in the years leading up to the Restoration. Rejecting any simple claims about cause and effect, Metzler nonetheless furnishes dramatic evidence of the disruptions caused by Japan's integration into global markets in the 1850s. After a century and a half of stable prices, he notes, Japan in 1859 entered a decade of "great inflation" (p. 34) driven in large part by the global commodities boom of the early 1860s. The financial panic of 1866 marked the end of the boom and also coincided with a year of anomalous weather in many parts of the world, including in Japan, where poor harvests and severe storms added to the sense of chaos that accompanied the bakufu's ill-fated second campaign against Chōshū. If meta-level developments in the global economy and climate formed an important part of the background to the bakumatsu upheavals, Metzler suggests they may also help explain why Japan's "refounding" as a modern nation-state coincided with similar developments elsewhere across Europe and the Americas. In the end, the precise nature of Metzler's "global synchronicities" remains "mysterious" (p. 38), but other chapters in this section provide a more grounded sense of the new connections that facilitated bakumatsu Japan's integration into the world economy. Noell H. Wilson leads the way with a fascinating account of the process by which Japanese sailors began being recruited to serve on Western and, in particular, US whaling vessels in bakumatsu-era Hakodate. By the 1840s, she reminds us, the North Pacific had emerged as the world's "most profitable whaling grounds" (p. 40), with the interests of American whalers forming an important part of the background to the Perry mission. Western captains had always been keen to hire Japanese sailors locally as a way to reduce costs, and over the course of the 1860s Japanese officials also began to see that such arrangements could help foster the acquisition of new skills critical for the assertion of maritime power. As a result, after restrictions on overseas travel were lifted in 1866, Japanese whaler-apprentices in Hakodate became some of the first beneficiaries of a new passport system that allowed them to legally join the...

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• Commemorating Meiji: History, Politics and the Politics of History

  Japanese Studies · 2018-09-02 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  2018 marks the 150th anniversary of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, a milestone that the government of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has actively sought to highlight and celebrate. Against this charged poli...

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• The Meiji Restoration and the Politics of Post-War Commemoration: 1968/2018

  Japanese Studies · 2018-09-02 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article offers a critical appraisal of the Abe Cabinet’s plans to orchestrate a national celebration of the 150th anniversary of Meiji in 2018, following the example of the Meiji Centennial celebrations of 1968. The article begins by introducing some of the criticisms voiced at the time of the 1968 Centennial by prominent Japanese historians such as Tōyama Shigeki and Yamaguchi Keiji, who saw clear links between the post-war celebration of Meiji and broader efforts to revive Japanese nationalism and promote the long-term goal of re-militarization. It goes on to consider some of the public statements that have been made by Prime Minister Abe regarding ‘Meiji 150ʹ and explores the significant gap between the government’s vision of the significance of Meiji and the perspectives that emerge from scholarship on the Restoration period produced in recent decades by historians in both Japan and the English-speaking world. It concludes with a brief consideration of the divide that separated Japan’s post-war historians from some of their American colleagues in the 1960s, and the role that scholars today have to play in combating the manipulation of the past.

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• Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan by Joseph D. Hankins

  Monumenta Nipponica · 2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan by Joseph D. Hankins Daniel Botsman Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan. By Joseph D. Hankins. University of California Press, 2014. 304 pages. Hardcover $85.00/ £70.95; softcover $29.95/ £22.95. What are the implications of "globalization" for social justice movements around the world? One way to read Joseph Hankins's rich and thoughtful study of the shifting landscape of Buraku politics in contemporary Japan is as an extended response to this question. Hankins's interest in Buraku issues was initially sparked (at least in part) by the discovery of one of those personally inflected strands of global connection that feel so emblematic of our current moment. Invited to participate in a field trip to a tannery in Tochigi as an anthropology graduate student, Hankins was taken aback when the manager of the facility began making small talk with him about his hometown of Lubbock, Texas. As it turned out, most of the rawhide processed in the [End Page 344] facility came from Lubbock, and a group of the tannery's employees had visited a few years earlier. Tanning, and leatherwork more generally, have of course long been associated with Buraku communities in Japan, and one of the central concerns of Hankins's study is precisely the relationship between labor and identity. As part of his exploration of this issue, Hankins himself spent six months working at a tannery in the Higashi Sumida district of Tokyo, a major center for leather production since the 1890s. There he developed an intimate understanding of the physically demanding and chemically saturated work of making leather. Even before working at the tannery, however, he sought to understand the nature of the work that goes into supporting and sustaining the Buraku political movement: in the mid-2000s, he conducted a year and a half of fieldwork in the offices of the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR), an NGO closely affiliated with the Buraku Liberation League (BLL). The contrasts Hankins draws between the two workplaces (blue collar/white collar, masculine/feminine) are stark, and yet, as the book also demonstrates, the challenges faced by the people who work in these different spaces remain closely interrelated. The landmark achievement of the BLL and its political allies in the postwar era was the enactment of the 1969 Special Measures Law (SML). In the decades after its introduction, the SML ensured that large amounts of government funding were earmarked for improving basic living conditions in Buraku neighborhoods and, in some areas including Tokyo, for supporting traditional Buraku industries such as tanning. By the 1990s, however, the need for this law was increasingly called into question. The gap in housing conditions and access to public facilities that had once separated many in Buraku communities from their non-Buraku neighbors had narrowed significantly. Although the BLL was able to secure two extensions, the law was eventually allowed to expire in 2002. In addition to ending the flow of public funds into Buraku communities, the mainstream political consensus that "special measures" to address Buraku concerns are no longer necessary has also had other significant consequences. Though Japan's bureaucrats once felt compelled to protect the domestic leather industry from international competition, in the first decade of the twenty-first century they have increasingly acquiesced to the dictates of the World Trade Organization. They have also accepted the need for increasingly strict environmental standards that threaten the viability of domestic tanneries. In the case of Tokyo, a 2007 ordinance imposing tougher standards for the filtration of water used in the industrial tanning process has had a particularly dramatic impact. According to Hankins, within just eighteen months of the ordinance, seven of the seventeen tanneries that had previously operated in Higashi Sumida had closed, with prospects for all but three of the remainder uncertain (p. 99). As Hankins notes, an association with pollution of various kinds has long plagued Buraku communities, and he is clearly sensitive to the ways in which the "greening" of Tokyo may now be contributing to processes of social exclusion with much deeper histories. [End Page 345] He also suggests, however...

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• Chapter 5. Of Pity and Poison Imprisoning Women in Modern Japan

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2017-12-31 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• The Return of the Outcast(e) Map: Kobe, Cartography and the Problem of Discrimination in Modern Japan

  Japan focus · 2016-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In November 1968, the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Kobe found itself at the center of a major controversy. At the beginning of the month, it had joined with Mitsukoshi stores in Osaka and Tokyo in exhibiting and offering for sale reproductions of a selection of historical maps as part of a special event to mark the centenary of the Meiji Restoration. The idea was to give interested members of the public a chance to imagine, through the maps, what different areas of the country had been like at the time of the Restoration—at that moment, in other words, when Japan as a whole stood at the threshold of modernity.

  PublisherDOI

• 11 Flowery Tales: Ōe Taku, Kōbe and the Making of Meiji Japan’s ‘Emancipation Moment’

  2015-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Flowery tales : Ōe Taku (1847-1921) : Tokugawa values and the making of Meiji Japan’s “Emancipation Moment”

  cIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2014-01-01

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• Of Pity and Poison

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2013-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter traces the forms of punishment to which women were subjected in the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1930s. In the early modern period, female criminals were often punished by confinement, either in jailhouses or in the brothel district of Yoshiwara, where they were forced to work as prostitutes. In the 1870s, as modern prisons were constructed, special facilities for women were established, and after 1900 a gender-specific discourse on female prisoners took form, reflecting a new concern for rehabilitation. Influenced by eugenics and class-based notions of femininity, prison officials debated how best to reform female prisoners so that they could become “future mothers of our country.” Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, the number of female prisoners began to decline dramatically, a development which may have been related to the medicalization of female criminality.

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• Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2013-12-31 · 15 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  "The kinds of punishment used in a society have long been considered an important criterion in judging whether a society is civilized or barbaric, advanced or backward, modern or premodern. Focusing on Japan, and the dramatic revolution in punishments that occurred after the Meiji Restoration, Daniel Botsman asks how such distinctions have affected our understanding of the past and contributed, in turn, to the proliferation of new kinds of barbarity in the modern world." "The first English-language study of the history of punishment in Japan, the book concludes by examining how modern ideas about progress and civilization shaped penal practices in Japan's own colonial empire."--BOOK JACKET.

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Frequent coauthors

• Adam Clulow

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2 shared

• Barbara Brooks

  National Centre for Atmospheric Science

  1 shared

• Dorian Q. Fuller

  University College London

  1 shared

• Thomas David DuBois

  Beijing Normal University

  1 shared

• Susan L. Burns

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

• Hiromi Mizuno

  1 shared

• J. Charles Schencking

  University of Hong Kong

  1 shared

• Maria Flutsch

  University of Adelaide

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• James M. Johnston Award for Excellence in Teaching (2006)
• Rhodes Scholarship (1992)