How Japan caught up with the West

The Meiji Restoration and 'cosmopolitan chauvinism'

Japan’s rise to power in the face of European encroachment is one of the most interesting tales in history. Unique among non-western nations, Japan adapted to the outside threat with a concerted effort to imitate the west, and so to become an equal. This occurred during a period of reform known as the Meiji Restoration, after the emperor of that name, and is the subject of Mark Ravina’s To Stand with the Nations of the World.

Ravina’s account begins in 1871 at Welcker’s, a restaurant in Washington DC. It was here that Itō Hirobumi, Japan’s future prime minister, addressed a group of prominent Americans to promote friendship between the two countries. Itō told the assembled bigwigs that Japan had been in existence for 2,500 years, ‘during which time its intercourse with foreign nations has been exceedingly limited’.

This all changed in 1853, he pointed out, when the United States ‘kindly’ advised Japan to open up to the world. Now it was keen to reach ‘the highest stage of civilisation’ and would soon ‘stand among the first nations in its civilisation and progress.’

This was not entirely true, as Ravina points out – he was flattering his audience – but it was a convenient fiction for Japan’s leaders. The US had famously ‘advised’ the country to open up with the Perry Expedition, and what followed were the so-called unequal treaties. Among the humiliations fostered on the natives, westerners who committed crimes were to be tried in their own courts, and ‘key provisions of the treaties symbolically marked Japan as a subjugated nation’.

In most cases the arrival of Europeans in distant lands proved to be a tragedy for the native people, who could not compete with the guns and germs of the newcomers, but even in established civilisations the result was often subjugation. While China, timelessly confident in its own global pre-eminence, had been unprepared for a western carve-up, the Japanese had grown alarmed at what faced them and were keen not to share the same fate.

Perry’s arrival hastened the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1867-8, the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, retiring from public life (he would live for another 40 years). With this coup came the ‘Meiji Restoration’, notionally returning rule to the Emperor Mutsuhito, known to posterity as Meiji (Japanese emperors are given an imperial name after their death) but in reality with a group of modernisers taking charge.

The Meiji Restoration saw Japan transformed from a poor and relatively insular state at the mercy of western predators, to one of the world’s leading powers. Its social order and culture would radically change, including the suppression of the samurai warrior caste, culminating in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 - the inspiration for The Last Samurai.

When Tokugawa officials had rebuffed western requests for trade, they explained it as a policy of Sakoku, ‘closed country’, a policy seen as dating back to 1633. Yet Ravina writes that this had only explicitly arisen in the 1790s; it is true that the Japanese had since 1600s avoided direct communication between sovereigns, largely in order to avoid the explosive question of whether the Tokugawa shogun was equal to the Qing emperor. Because this was impossible to mediate, so trade between the two nations was conducted privately through the Nagasaki Chinese Translation Bureau and trade documents (shinpai) were ‘scrubbed of politically fraught language’.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to make contact, as far back as 1543, during a period portrayed in the highly praised recent television series Shōgun. These westerners were keen to spread their faith, and not unsuccessfully: according to the author, the Jesuits may have won over 150,000 Japanese converts from the 1580s onwards, and the Catholic population perhaps reached 700,000 during the 17^th century, some 5% of the population. It was found disproportionally among elites, and Christian daimyo (feudal lords) were common in the early modern period, as were Christian prime ministers in the 20^th century (eight in total).

This had provoked in the Japanese a suspicion of Christianity, fearful of the division it would cause. The religion was effectively banned, and discussion of the Bible made illegal. Hostility to Catholicism was only encouraged by the great rivals of the Portuguese, the Dutch, who were keen to emphasise that they had no interest in converting the locals and were only after money (a plausible explanation, it has to be said).

Russia had then attempted to open up trade in the 1790s. The shogunate granted them a shinpai to enter Nagasaki but insisted on removing references to the Russian throne. The Russians were also insistent, and translation problems made it worse. ‘Although the two sides avoided a full-scale war, the encounter deepened suspicions on both sides.’ It added to Japanese feelings that westerners were dangerous.

Curiously, though, Tokugawa officials did not think of Russia as a ‘Western’ country and emphasised the precedent of Japanese relations with South-East Asian nations, rather than the Dutch East India Company.

In 1771 Maurice Benyovszky, a Hungarian nobleman and adventurer of mixed Polish ancestry, had escaped from Kamchatka where he was a political prisoner of the tsar, and got revenge by spreading rumours of a Russian invasion in Japan. The Japanese weren’t fooled, but it led some intellectuals to look anxiously to the northern frontier. When they sent parties to the Kuriles and Sakhalin, those long-disputed islands to the north, they found Russian traders and crosses, a violation of the ban on Christianity.

Yet the incident also sparked curiosity about westerners. ‘The debate dovetailed with a growing sense that the Japanese domestic order needed radical reform’, and a belief that ‘the samurai estate had become a class of indolent urban rentiers rather than a rugged martial elite.’

Suspicion of foreigners remained, with expatriate communities seen as being ‘full of potential threats to Tokugawa hegemony: pirates, Christians and ronin’, masterless Samurai.

For now, the regime was happy to remain isolated. There was a fresh restrictive policy on foreign contact in 1825, called the ‘No Second Thoughts’ edict, while new coastal defence positions were built.

At first they seemed confident that this would work. Tōyama Kagemichi, a high-ranking official of the Tokugawa shogunate, confidently wrote that ‘What we are seeing now are nothing more than pirates, wandering the world and slipping into coastal waters to make off with whatever they can get their hands on. They are not worthy of our fear.’

There was no need for a large navy, he believed, since local knowledge and samurai spirit would see them through. ‘This was a reasonable response to Japan’s initial confrontations with Europe,’ he writes: ‘but Tōyama had no appreciation of European imperialism or state power. That misjudgement would prove fatal to the shogunate.’

Despite this insularity, from the start the Japanese showed great curiosity towards outsiders, especially their weapons. When president Millard Fillmore’s letter of state arrived in 1853 with Matthew Perry’s fleet, ‘both Japanese and American soldiers broke ranks to mingle and examine each other’s weapons. Edo [Tokyo] townsmen did not flee in panic but gathered on the shore and rented sightseeing boats to observe the foreigners more closely.’

There followed a race among western powers to seek treaties with Japan, and their intentions were not entirely benevolent, to put it mildly.

Commodore Perry wrote that ‘to me it seems that the people of America will, in some form or other, extend their dominion and their power, until they shall have brought within their mighty embrace multitudes of the Islands of the great Pacific, and placed the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia.’

The Saxon race were already coming close, and the Japanese had seen what the British had done to China and feared Japanese ports going the way of Hong Kong. Their solution was to use the French as a check, and there followed in 1867 meetings between representatives of the two countries. Shogun Yoshinobu wrote to envoy Léon Roches, appealing ‘both to Roche’s pride in la mission civilisatrice and to French animus toward Britain’, always a winning strategy. He told him that he hoped to ‘place my country among the nations of the civilised world’ and asked for his support in this ‘work of civilisation’.

Japan was opening up, whether they liked it or not, yet in a culture which prized continuity, its intellectual leaders had to frame this change in ways that stressed tradition.

‘The Meiji Restoration was a revolution,’ Ravina writes: ‘but its bold innovations were grounded in precedents from the ancient imperial state. The leaders of the Restoration deliberately ransacked the Japanese past in their search for the Japanese future.’

Although Japan had remained insular for many centuries, it could look deep into its history for a precedent. Between 600 and 700AD, the island had been deeply connected to the rest of east Asia and was especially influenced by China, borrowing ‘advanced political, social and material technologies’ from its larger neighbour. The name for Japan, Nihon, even comes from Chinese Rìběn, ‘origin of the sun’.

Among the most important foreign influences was Buddhism, and when the early Japanese built a huge temple, Todai-ji in Nara, and invited representative from as far as India to take part in consecrating its 250-ton bronze Buddha statue, ‘this was the eighth-century equivalent of hosting the Olympic Games: a costly but peaceful way of displaying power and technological prowess.’ The first era of Japanese globalisation ended with the Tang dynasty collapse in 907, but it was from this ancient past that Japan’s reformers drew.

Likewise, conscription was a modernising western reform but it was framed as a return to an ancient past when the emperor had made all strong men do military service. ‘The Meiji government’s depiction of ancient conscription was impossibly rosy, as factually challenged as Ito’s speech in Washington DC. The ancient state did, in fact, draw conscripts from across the land, but ancient commoners viewed the draft as forced labour rather than loyal service. They were unruly and unreliable troops, prone to desertion’.

The key to Japan’s cultural revolution was what sociologists call isomorphism, but most people call ‘imitation’. It is said of Japan that the key to its success is ‘adapt, adopt, adept’ and they proved good at all three. Just as Japanese adoption of Tang-style court caps was a form ‘ancient global isomorphism’, wearing British frock coats was simply ‘modern global isomorphism’.

The problem for Japanese intellectuals was how to square their inherent belief in their own cultural superiority with the daunting reality that the West had pulled so far ahead. Central to their thinking was ‘cosmopolitan chauvinism’, the strategy of integrating Japanese distinctiveness with cross-cultural norms. ‘Cosmopolitan chauvinism posited that certain great universal truths had been discovered outside Japan. Although discovered abroad, these ideas were universally applicable and would therefore enhance rather than degrade Japanese culture.’

Scientist Satō Nobuhiro, one of the earliest advocates of westernisation, insisted that European astronomy was more compatible with Japanese mythology than it was with the West’s own origin stories. The sun goddess Amaterasu corresponded with heliocentrism, while ‘modern western astronomy actually disproves the Bible but confirms the truth of the Kojiki, Japan’s ancient chronicle.’ Although advocating Westernisation, Sato thought that only Japanese texts could explain the origin of the universe. There was nothing ‘foreign’ about Western science.

Then there was Tadano Makuzu, one of a handful of women who wrote on political issues. The daughter of a well-connected physician, she had learned to read Japanese but not classical Chinese, and was also uncommonly familiar with European customs.

Tadano saw in the Kojiki, Japan’s great ‘records of ancient matters’, a challenge to conventional gender roles. She cited the example of Empress Jingū, wife of the 14^th emperor who had ruled as regent for her unborn son in the third century. According to legend the empress had a dream in which she was told to invade Korea, which she subsequently did, despite being pregnant. ‘Why, then,’ she asked: ‘can’t we be ambitious even though we are women?’

For Tadano, the elevated status of women in Europe was similar to the custom in ancient Japan, and so to imitate European gender norms would be a return to tradition.

She was sadly frustrated by the reality of gender norms in her own time. Author Takizawa Bakin ‘was both dazzled and repulsed by her “manly spirit”. He praised her talents, then refused to help her publish, and still later lamented the end of their correspondence.’ I wonder why.

Quite accurately, Yokoi Shōnan, an adviser to several daimyo, or feudal lords, argued that Britain and the US had grown strong by imitating other countries, and that in this George Washington was no different to a great Chinese sage king: ‘Since ancient times our country has had not one fixed school of thought, but Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Now we should also adopt the successes of the West”.

In contrast, nativists focused on ancient Japanese texts like the Kojiki, compiled in 712, which they saw as truthful accounts of jindai, the ‘age of the gods’, and hoped to discover evidence of a Japanese culture unsullied by Chinese influence. This they couldn’t find, but it led to advances in philology, similar, Ravina points out, to the way in which the popularity of Beowulf helped promote the study of Germanic languages.

Sadly, they also found in the Kojiki ‘no special reward for virtue. After death, everyone, both the wicked and the good, descended into a netherworld of pollution and decay… Instead of a coherent moral code, the Kojiki was full of strange mayhem; the gods desecrated each others’ palaces with faeces, performed lewd dances, quarrelled, tortured, suffered, and lied.’ Motoori Norinaga, one of the great scholars of this tradition, ‘was forced to conclude that the acts of the gods were often incomprehensible.’

Because morality was universal, so Japan could learn from the west. Even Dutch Calvinism emphasised ‘respect for their parents even though they were unfamiliar with Confucian teachings. Clearly, all civilized peoples shared the value of filial piety; they merely described it in a different way. Thus, Western thought, like Chinese and Indian thought, might offer Japanese reformers insights into creating a more virtuous society.’

The Dutch had been especially prominent in Japan, so much so that western science was simply called ‘Dutch Studies’. It was therefore a surprise to Japanese scholars visiting Europe in the early 19^thcentury to discover that the Netherlands was no longer a major power, and that learning the language was a waste of time.

One difficulty for Japanese reformers, and for relations with western nations, was their deep hostility to Christianity, although this was mixed with a begrudging admiration. Aizawa Seishisai’s New Theses, written in 1825, argued that the religion had helped the Europeans become strong enough to conquer other peoples. ‘Through the “evil and base” doctrine of Christianity, European countries destroyed their enemies from within. Preaching a deceitful doctrine, they induced people around the world to serve foreign masters.’

In this, he misdiagnosed the cause while understanding the cure. ‘Aizawa’s work was empirically flawed but also prescient,’ Ravina writes. He ‘thought that Christianity united the nations of Europe into a single coherent force. He thus conflated Christianity, nationalism, and imperialism. But he astutely understood the need for a new Japanese ideology, something that could unite the Japanese people. Aizawa’s thinking thus encompassed a powerful tension: he was repulsed by Christianity but enthralled by its power. His vision of Japanese religion was thus both retaliation and imitation. “We must transform [the Western barbarians] by appropriating the very methods that they now seek to use to transform us.” The only way to resist the West was to emulate the West, using religion for mass mobilisation. Cosmopolitan chauvinism led Aizawa to appreciate European statecraft.’

Aizawa’s writings would inspire xenophobic opponents of the shogunate, who promoted the motto ‘revere the emperor, expel the barbarian’ (Sonnō jōi). Among them was Tokugawa Nariaki, an iconoclast and author of Japan: Reject the Westerner, who used his academy to promote the idea of purifying Japan of foreign influence, including the ‘alien’ faith of Buddhism.

During Tokugawa’s reign as daimyo of the Mito domain, or province, dozens of temples were ransacked or destroyed. Some of these nationalists hoped that Japan might trade and learn from the barbarians, so that it grow strong enough to return to seclusion, a form of nationalist idealism that ignored the powerful forces of globalisation.

‘Much as European utopian Marxists expected that a proletarian revolution would lead to a withering away of the state, so too radical loyalists imagined that imperial rule would bring an end to politics in the conventional sense. The state would disappear, replaced by organic communities connected through Shinto ritual.’

This inspired years of terrorism by loyalist partisans called shishi who murdered nobles, samurais, foreigners and ‘anyone who challenged their vision of a “pure” Japan.’

Yet reformers won out, arguing for the adoption of foreign ideas because these were in tune with ‘popular sentiment’ (sejo) and also ‘the will of heaven’. Yokoi Shōnan, an adviser of great influence, believed that isolation was unsustainable and unnatural. He was also optimistic about the new international system which he referred to as ‘the nations of the world as one, a brotherhood of the four seas’ (bankoku ittai shikai kyodai).

The way ahead, however, was fraught with difficulties, and faced with European encroachment, Japan’s leaders took the fateful step of leaving their homeland to set sail for the West. It would prove to be the most important fact-finding mission in history.

Part two will appear tomorrow…