The boy who would become known to posterity as the Emperor Meiji was just 14 when he came to the throne, and had never known a time before the ports were full of western warships, bringing foreign emissaries and their demands. By the time of his death, in 1912, Japan stood among the world’s leading powers and had become the first non-western nation to inflict military defeat on a European empire in centuries.
Yet as Mark Ravina recounts in To Stand with the Nations of the World, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 began with immense difficulties. Soon after the fall of the old Tokugawa shogunate, imperial troops had entered the port city of Kobe and killed several soldiers in foreign concessions, causing consuls of western powers to issue a joint letter of protest. It took all of their diplomatic skills to restore relations, while the new regime faced continual fighting over 1868-9.
Although there were was economic discontent, there was also a religious, cultish air to much of the unrest. Protests sprung up demanding yonaoshi, ‘world renewal’, and large numbers erupted into ‘carnivalesque revelry’, with impromptu festivals inspired by the mysterious appearance of religious amulets. Bawdy but fatalistic songs were sung. There is the sense of an old world fighting a lost cause against modernity.
Soon, the defeated forces of the old regime fled to the very north where they held out in Ezo with two prominent Frenchman among their leaders, one of them, Lieutenant Jules Brunet becoming the rebellion’s de facto foreign minister, drafting their French-language announcements. The rebels wanted peace, he declared, but they had ‘legitimate rights to live honourably in the land of their fathers and [they] are ready to defend those rights, arms in hand.’ Brunet would become a model for Tom Cruise’s Captain Algren in The Last Samurai, although that film takes its inspiration largely from the later Satsuma Rebellion.
The Meiji government was forgiving of Brunet, who at first escaped to France. He was given a full pardon and eventually turned into a hero, granted the Order of the Rising Sun. But he was not alone; other Ezo ministers ended up employed by the Meiji regime, a culture of rehabilitation that seems to be characteristic of Japanese politics.
During this period, Japan also made the fateful step of sending half of its government to the west to study their civilisation, this Iwakura Mission inspired by Guido Verbeck, a Dutch-born adviser to the Meiji regime. (As an aside, a compatriot would also advise Lee Kuan Yew as he transformed Singapore from third world to first - the lesson from history being ‘get yourself a Dutchman’.)
Verbeck emphasised the importance of direct observation rather than mere text, telling his hosts: ‘There is something in the civilisation of the West that must be seen and felt in order to be fully appreciated.’ Western institutions were the result of ‘practice and experience’, not just ‘abstract reason’.
They were not the first Japanese to encounter the West. Enomoto Takeaki, head of the Navy in the old regime, had studied naval science in Holland for five years and was comfortable with westerners. When he met the British consul without a translator they spoke in Dutch, a sign of how important that language then was.
Ito Hirobumi, a former isolationist, had been transformed by his experience of Europe. ‘As late as 1862, Ito was a Sonnō jōi loyalist, joining other Choshu samurai in an attack on the British legation. In 1863, he was smuggled to London… and was amazed by the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the sophistication of British institutions.’ He now became convinced that Japan couldn’t expel the foreigners and hurried back home to argue against attacks on the British, advocating for Anglo-American institutions such as a national bank. In the the US and Britain he became ‘an exemplar of the “new Nippon”: diligent, progressive, and cosmopolitan.’
But the great mission would prove transformative. From November 1871 to September 1873, half the Japanese government would travel to Europe and the United States, leaving a caretaker regime (rusu seifu) at home. They were especially impressed by railways in England, as well as a brewery in Birmingham which Ōkubo Toshimichi described as being thirty miles long.
Britain’s anthem also inspired Japan’s own, the ‘Kimigayo’, which reflects the hope that the emperor will live long enough for small stones to grow into boulders covered in moss. ‘“Kimigayo” was both a modern copy of “God Save the King” and a declaration of an ancient and distinctive Japanese sensibility. It was modern and Western, but also ancient and Japanese.’
These nation-builders were especially inspired by Napoleon, who was big in Japan, as they say these days. ‘Reworked by Japanese intermediaries, Napoleon came to resemble an exemplary Confucian scholar-official: studious, wise, loyal, and self-sacrificing.’ He was especially popular with future Meiji leaders, often ambitious men from the lower ends of the samurai class, much like the Corsican Ogre himself.
Yet while France had initially been a model, after 1870 the Japanese switched their attention to the new power in Europe, and ‘The Iwakura Mission returned as converts of Prussian realpolitik’.
Ōkubo thought that French, British and American political models, built on liberal traditions, were inappropriate, and it was better to look to Russia and Prussia, which closely matched Japan’s level of ‘enlightenment’ (kaika).
‘But given the backwardness of the Japanese people, Ōkubo could not yet see entrusting them with political responsibility. Japan needed first to raise their intelligence (sairyoku) and foster their patriotism’. The people were of a ‘weak disposition’, he believed, lacking ‘diligence and perseverance’, so it was the job of the state to ‘press and induce’ them to undertake enterprises. (This rather harsh assessment of his compatriots would be surprising to most visitors in Japan today).
Western progress was impressive, but the brutal reality of European state competition had a dark edge. Kido Takayoshi was especially disturbed by how Poland, a wealthy and civilised nation, had been devoured by its neighbours. As with China, domestic squabbling had caused its ruin, allowing predators to move in – a lesson not lost on the Japanese.
Major reforms followed. Japan already had high levels of literacy, and by the mid-19th half of Japanese men could read and there were several hundred bookshops in Tokyo. But this was now accelerated with a concerted effort by the state, and the Meiji government proceeded to translate 10,000 technical books.