| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Joseph M. Henning. Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American-Japanese Relations. New York: New York University Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 243. $35.00.

The United States's propensity for elevating its self-image by diminishing others did not begin in the late nineteenth century. As this book by Joseph M. Henning shows, however, it assumed gale force in the writings of American observers of Japan during the sixty years after Matthew Perry's squadron initiated contact between Japan and the United States in 1853. 1

The book's major contribution is to make clear how a myriad of U.S. writers used Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912) to construct an identity for their own homeland, how they endlessly analyzed the Pacific archipelago not so much to understand Japan itself (their ostensible goal) as to reaffirm long-standing preconceptions about "white, Christian superiority" (p. 4). The worldview of these observers, Henning argues, was hierarchical, with white Christians at the apex. And while Japan rapidly embraced modernity and achieved world power status without becoming Christian, or white, most writers never gave up on the religious or racial yardsticks by which they measured national worth. . . .

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