This article explores how the Japanese translator-historian Murakami Naojirō created an understanding of the Japanese past that established seventeenth-century Japanese actors as equivalents to western European and overseas Chinese merchants. Creating a historical geography of the Southern Seas and the Pacific, Murakami celebrated Japan's expansionism, not only by stressing the seventeenth-century Japanese presence in South-east Asia, but also, more subtly, by identifying the existence of a progressive spirit in the Japanese individuals involved in it. His narrative strategy included implicit comparisons with the European age of expansion, whose protagonists in South-east Asia relied on the networks and services of both Japanese wakō (‘pirates’) and more complex actors such as the red seal merchant Yamada Nagamasa. The article is a case study for Japan's intellectual imperialism of the 1910s–1940s, which closely intertwined popular discourse and academic history.

本文探讨了日本翻译历史学家村上上直郎如何建立对日本过去的理解，该历史确立了17世纪的日本演员与西欧和海外华商的对等地位。村上创造了南洋和太平洋的历史地理，不仅通过强调日本在东南亚的十七世纪的存在，而且还通过识别日本人中具有进步精神的存在，来庆祝日本的扩张主义。个人参与其中。他的叙事策略包括与欧洲年龄的扩张，其主角在东南亚依靠两个日本的网络和服务的隐式比较WAKO（“海盗”）和更复杂的演员，例如红色印章商人Yamada Nagamasa。本文是对1910到1940年代日本的知识分子帝国主义的个案研究，它与流行的话语和学术历史紧密地交织在一起。