The Emergence of Modern Japan

An Introductory History Since 1853

Janet Hunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317870852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia japonesa

The main emphasis of this book is upon political, social and economic developments, as conditioned by Japan's interaction with the outside world, the advance of industrialisation and the emergence of the Japanese nation state.Unlike previous textbooks on the history of modern Japan, Janet Hunter's book adopts a thematic approach which makes the period much more accessible for readers who wish to pursue their particular interests throughout the period. Moreover, it will also establish a greater awareness of the cultural and institutional continuities which are crucial to any proper understanding of modern Japan.

CHAPTER ONE

Restoration and Occupation

The islands which make up the nation of Japan lie in an arc off mainland northeast Asia. There are four main islands – Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu – which stretch southwest to northeast for over 2,000 kilometres from the 31st to the 45th parallels. Clustered around are a host of smaller archipelagoes and islands. The northernmost tip of Hokkaido is less than 50 kilometres from the now Russian-owned island of Sakhalin. The point on mainland Asia closest to Japan is the southern tip of the Korean peninsula over 200 kilometres from northern Kyushu. The variation in latitude bestows considerable climatic differences on different areas of Japan; northern Hokkaido is subarctic, whereas southern Kyushu and Okinawa are near tropical. For the most part the climate is temperate, with strong seasonal fluctuations, harsh winters in the central and northern areas, warm summers and abundant rainfall. The total land area is less than 0.3 per cent of the world’s total; little more than 50 per cent greater than that of the United Kingdom. Much of the area is mountainous, with only around one-fifth permitting of cultivation. The staple crop has for centuries been rice, and wet-rice agriculture has been of crucial significance in the evolution of Japanese society. While the volcanic nature of the country means much of the arable area is intensely fertile, earthquakes, typhoons and other natural disasters are frequent. Mineral resources are sparse, and the raw materials for modern industry particularly so. Natural endowments are not such as to suggest the astonishing prominence achieved by Japan in the twentieth century.

The exact origins of the contemporary ethnic Japanese are unclear, but in prehistoric times the Japanese islands received various waves of immigrants from the mainland, to which they were once joined. Gradually members of these groups coalesced to form a dominant racial group; an elemental Japanese state appeared in the second–third century AD. The Ainu people, a proto-Caucasian racial group driven ever further northwards by the ethnic Japanese, are thought to be the remnants of an earlier wave of immigrants. Only a few hundred still survive on the island of Hokkaido. Through the centuries Japan’s proximity to Asia allowed for the absorption of Asian cultural influences, yet the distance proved sufficiently great to assist the emergence and maintenance of indigenous cultural traits and enable Japan to avoid a succession of invasions or new influxes of other peoples. From just over 30 million in 1870, the number of Japanese grew to 44 million in 1900, 64 million in 1930 and 83 million in 1950. By 1986 the population was 121 million. Most of these people are packed into the small area of flat land; the coastal strip – running from the Kantō plain round Tokyo to Nagoya and then through to the Kansai plain, with its cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe – has some of the highest population densities in the world. Population pressure, along with vagaries of climate and terrain, and geographical location, have strongly influenced Japan’s relations with the outside world over the last 150 years and have played a crucial part in shaping Japan’s evolution for much longer.

Two epochal events have dominated the history of modern Japan. The revolution of 1868, commonly called the Meiji Restoration, and the American-dominated Occupation of 1945–52 both proved major watersheds in Japan’s development. Each produced a significant shift in course and within a short space of time wrought a substantial transformation in the direction of national policy and popular attitudes. Such is the importance of these events that none of the radical changes in Japan over the last 150 years can be properly understood without reference to them. Yet modern Japan is also the product of much more than recent upheavals.

Japan has, for the last twelve hundred years and more, been reigned over by an imperial house which claims descent from the Yamato clan, whose control of the central part of Japan long predates written record. The secular and religious authority enjoyed by this clan was recognized over the years in an ever wider area of the country, and during the seventh century the head of the clan used the title of emperor or empress on the Chinese model. The family sought to legitimize its power by fostering a belief in its divine descent, claiming the first emperor, Jinmu, as a descendant of the sun goddess; his reign was dated to 660 BC. Although in the early years control did largely rest with the imperial family, others increasingly came to wield power in its name, and the years after 1185 saw hegemony pass to a succession of military rulers who achieved pre-eminent influence by virtue of superior military strength. These rulers did not seek to usurp the position of emperor, or to abolish the institution. Instead, they manipulated it to legitimize their own rule. They exercised power in the name of the emperor, and the imperial family maintained its nominal supremacy and its role as the nation’s highest religious authority. For centuries Japan had a dual system of rule: a reigning emperor based at Kyoto and a military government whose seat was normally outside the capital. Many of these military rulers were granted by the emperor the title of shogun¹, a designation according formal recognition as the emperor’s military deputy. This title often passed to successive members of the same family, creating military dynasties. The shogun presided over a military administration known as a Bakufu, but there was considerable diffusion of regional power to local warrior-lords. Bakufu control over the country was never absolute, but rested on the administration’s ability to hold in check the ambitions of various provincial lords and play them off against each other. Not until the late sixteenth century, under the warlords Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was the country unified under a single military hegemony, and this was only achieved by building on a series of successful military alliances.

In the military realignment which followed the death of Hideyoshi in 1598, power fell to Tokugawa Ieyasu, a lord from the Kantō area. The decisive victory won by Ieyasu and lords allied to him at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 established his supremacy over rivals throughout the islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. He had himself declared shogun in 1603. By 1614 he had eliminated Hideyoshi’s heir and overcome the final military opposition to his hegemony. Ieyasu sought to establish a system of rule that would ensure the continued dominance of his heirs. His son, Hidetada, was an equally able administrator and politician, and by the time of his death in 1632 his family’s position was unchallenged. For over 250 years after Sekigahara the title of shogun was handed down through the males of the Tokugawa family. The Bakufu administration that went with it was located in Edo (now Tokyo), the traditional seat of the Tokugawa family, and served de facto as the government of Japan.

The Tokugawa were essentially no more than primus inter pares. Influence rested on the various branches of the family’s directly controlling around one quarter of the total land area. The Tokugawa confirmed their hold on power by a complex structure of physical, political and economic controls over the several hundred local lords (daimyo) whose domains (han) made up the rest of the country, the samurai (warrior) class who constituted their followers and the populace who resided within their territories. The system of rule is often referred to as the Bakuhan (Bakufu-han) system, and many historians, both Western and Japanese, use the term ‘feudalism’ to describe it. The use of the term ‘feudal’ in relation to Japan is, however, a matter of some debate. Defined by early translators as the equivalent of the Japanese term hōken used to describe the Tokugawa system, the finer points of distinction between ‘feudal system’ and hōken seido soon became obscured. Further confusion was created by the inclination of many Japanese historians to adopt a Marxist framework. Suffice it to say here that the word ‘feudal’ is used frequently and loosely in relation to Japan, and this use has been based either on the existence in Japan of certain features associated with European feudalism, such as a military code of honour, or on a specific interpretation of the relations of production in Japanese society before the late nineteenth century.

Under the Bakuhan system daimyo were divided into two major categories: fudai (hereditary vassals) and tozama, those whose families had submitted to the Tokugawa only after Sekigahara. Disposition of territory and offices, public works, enforced residence in Edo, were only some of the means used to prevent daimyo from becoming too powerful. Notwithstanding the arbitrary demands of the Tokugawa, domains enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy. As long as daimyo did not contravene the rulings of their nominal liege lord, the shogun, they could handle their own territory pretty much as they chose. Mechanisms of political control were backed up by a harsh system of regulation, which attempted to minimize all social, political and economic change among the population at large. A rigid hierarchy of hereditary, occupation-related caste was presided over by the warrior (bushi) or samurai élite. An official orthodoxy based on Neo-Confucian doctrines emphasized the preservation of order and maintenance of social hierarchy. Potentially damaging foreign influences were minimized after 1640 by cutting off the country from virtually all contact with the outside world.

While these careful measures succeeded in preserving Tokugawa rule for some two and a half centuries, they could never hope to prevent all social, economic and political change. The Bakufu’s position was fatally flawed by its having little economic or political status as a national government: it wielded political power as proxy for the emperor using only the income from its own lands. The dynamic forces within society and in the economy eventually came into conflict with a national polity which sought to avoid change. By the early to mid-nineteenth century, many of the realities of life were totally at odds with the prescribed system of rule. Caste divisions became blurred; occupation, status, wealth and influence were no longer commensurate with each other or in accordance with legal stipulation. Advances in commerce and the use of money were placing great strains on the rice-based economy. The political control of the Bakufu was also weakened. In the face of acute financial difficulties besetting the whole ruling class, the balance of economic power had shifted to powerful tozama lords traditionally hostile to the Bakufu. The shoguns themselves lacked the personal charisma of their early predecessors and divisions within the Bakufu hierarchy and Tokugawa followers increased. New intellectual currents began to question aspects of the status quo, demanding reconsideration of the relationship between emperor and shogun. Lower status samurai, increasingly influential in domain or Bakufu bureaucracies, began to demand a greater say in the running of political affairs.

By the 1850s the tensions brought about by social, economic and political change were already beginning to pose a serious threat not merely to the rule of the Tokugawa but to the system itself. The reopening of foreign contacts with the United States and the imperialist powers of Europe rapidly brought matters to crisis point. From the early nineteenth century Japan had been approached on several occasions by Western nations active in Asian waters and anxious to initiate trading and other contacts. Unable to maintain the seclusion policy any longer in the face of strong pressure and superior military strength, Japan concluded her first international agreement in 1854 with the US. Agreements with other nations followed, and the extraterritorial, most-favoured-nation relationships adopted in China and Thailand were extended to Japan.

The development of foreign contacts posed a series of dilemmas for the Bakufu. It showed the Bakufu to be militarily weak and ineffective. It forced many Japanese to recognize the need for reform and a strong national government which might achieve for Japan a better deal in external relations. Yet reform could spell disaster for a regime whose very fundamentals rested on a resistance to change. From 1853, when the crisis over US demands for formal relations led the Bakufu to solicit the opinions of all daimyo, a move quite without precedent, Tokugawa authority went rapidly downhill.

While the Bakufu administration had for several decades been subject to criticisms from within its own ranks, a more serious threat to its supremacy emerged from within domains traditionally hostile to it. During the late 1850s radical samurai from powerful tozama domains, especially Satsuma in southern Kyushu, and Chōshū at the western tip of Honshu, began to steer domain policy towards open opposition to the Bakufu. At the same time the Bakufu was held responsible by the powers for attacks on foreigners by anti-foreign elements, over which it had little control. The question of ratification of treaties with Western nations opened up a gulf between the Bakufu and an imperial court whose nominal supremacy Tokugawa enemies were beginning to realize could be fruitfully exploited to the regime’s disadvantage. Pressured on one side by nations willing to exert force to achieve satisfactory trading relations, the Bakufu was by its domestic opponents accused of usurping imperial authority by giving in to them. Both the issue of imperial power and the question of foreign contacts became sticks with which to beat the Bakufu. The Tokugawa’s enemies took up the rallying cry of ‘revere the emperor and expel the barbarian’ (sonnō jōi), and kept it long after their leaders realized the impossibility of bringing external contacts to an end.

At the same time the Bakufu’s weakness was exacerbated by problems over the shogunal succession; the selection of the nearest blood heir, a young boy, to succeed to the title in 1858, highlighted the problems of Bakufu leadership at a time when the institution required all the strength it could muster. The assassination of the Bakufu’s foremost leader, Regent Ii Naosuke, in 1860 was a fatal blow to the regime’s attempt to re-establish Tokugawa supremacy. The re-emergence of the court onto the political scene and its collusion with many of the Bakufu’s other opponents promoted an attempted rapprochement between the Tokugawa and imperial factions in the early 1860s, but this proved short-lived. Divided among themselves over how far to adhere to the traditional policies and how far to adapt to a changing foreign and domestic environment, the Bakufu’s members became incapable of decisive action. More and more the sworn enemies of Tokugawa political power openly flouted Bakufu authority. In 1866 an alliance between the Bakufu’s two leading opponents, Satsuma and Chōshū, was signed, ending disagreements which had hitherto prevented concerted action, and depriving the Bakufu of Satsuma support for a military expedition mounted to chastise the more radical Chōshū for its insubordination. The Bakufu’s inability to demonstrate military superiority over Chōshū late in 1866 made it apparent to all that the Tokugawa no longer possessed the force majeure on which their power ultimately depended, and with their opponents allied with each other under the banner of imperial rule the Tokugawa’s fate was sealed.

Through late 1866 and 1867 conspiracy against the Bakufu mounted. Many of its own supporters advised Bakufu leaders that concessions were the only way to forestall more radical action. During 1866 Tokugawa (Hitotsubashi) Keiki, whose claims to the office of shogun had been rejected in 1858 on the grounds of precedent, succeeded to the headship of the Tokugawa family and subsequently to the title of shogun. Keiki was an able individual, an astute politician prepared to take heed of the views of both advisers and enemies. He pursued a programme of reform aimed at strengthening the regime and the Tokugawa’s position within it, but was unable to stem the hostile tide. Late in 1867, despite calls for resistance from among his more conservative supporters, he formally returned political authority to the emperor, but this move proved inadequate to appease his more extreme opponents, who argued that while the Tokugawa continued to control more than 25 per cent of the country they were bound to play the dominant role in councils of state. Early in January 1868, forces from Satsuma and Chōshū and other Tokugawa opponents siezed the palace in Kyoto, announcing an imperial restoration and the establishment of a new government from which the Tokugawa were excluded. Shogunate lands were to be confiscated and the title abolished. Keiki accepted this fait accompli and withdrew towards Osaka, but this acquiescence was not supported by some of his followers, who attempted to occupy Kyoto and clashed with troops mainly from Satsuma and Chōshū fighting as the ‘imperial army’. The Battle of Toba-Fushimi was a resounding victory for the imperial troops which, though outnumbered, were better equipped. After this defeat the Bakufu’s supporters gradually retreated towards Edo following the shogun’s appeals not to offer resistance. The imperial troops marched on the capital in pursuit of them, and the city fell with minimal resistance in May 1868. An alliance of northeastern domains led by Aizu had been forced to capitulate by the end of the year, and much of the country was little affected by the civil war². Only a last remnant of Bakufu supporters held out on Hokkaido through to 1869. The new government stripped the Tokugawa family of most of its land and Keiki was forced to resign its headship; many Bakufu supporters also lost their domains. National power passed to a new group of court nobles and activists from the four leading domains of Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa and Hizen, who moved quickly to consolidate their power. The dual system of rule which had prevailed for centuries was formally ended and national government brought under the aegis of the reigning sovereign whose authority was recognized throughout the country.

This transfer of power is referred to as the Meiji Restoration, or the Meiji Revolution, after the reign name now adopted by the young emperor who had succeeded to the throne the year before. The years from 1868 until his death in 1912 are known as the Meiji period. During these years Japan’s new leaders embarked on a programme of radical reform aimed at transforming Japan into a modern industrialized nation capable of dealing on equal terms with the nations of the West, and throwing off ‘unequal’ treaties viewed as a national insult. The new regime ruthlessly crushed all semblance of armed opposition which threatened national unity.

By the end of the Meiji period control was focused in a highly centralized state whose functions were carried out through Western style political, administrative and judicial institutions operating in the name of the emperor. Western style armed forces upheld the position of the Japanese state at home and abroad. Western style financial institutions, infrastructure and factory-based industry were promoted to provide the requisite economic foundations for international strength. A highly efficient education system served the aims of the state. Japan had already been victorious in two major wars, against China in 1894–5 and Russia in 1904–5; she was a world power and possessor of colonies.

Such was the speed of the changes in Japan at this time that it is easy to draw a somewhat misleading impression of unilinear progress, a clearly conceived plan of action from the beginning, logically carried out step by step. While motives may have been broadly consistent and widely shared, progress was in fact often erratic and haphazard, disagreements were many and the early Meiji leaders could scarcely have foreseen some of the longer term consequences of their policies. The course of this transformation, which followed on the events of 1868, and the degree to which it was fundamental or superficial, will constitute a major part of the subject-matter of this book.

The interpretation of the events of 1868 has become a major topic of controversy among historians of Japan. Even the term ‘restoration’ used in English has overtones of a return to the past; the revival of a hallowed Japanese tradition which accorded supreme power to the imperial family. Japan’s post-1868 rulers utilized this nationalistic focus and claimed throughout to exercise power in the name of the emperor. Yet the Japanese term normally used for the transfer, ishin, is more correctly translated as ‘renovation’ – a term which implies not retrospection but a sense of renewal and looking forward. This terminological ambiguity symbolizes a basic contradiction embodied in the whole process of change which followed 1868, a running tension between those who looked back and sought to revive what they saw as the best in Japanese tradition in the face of a Western onslaught, and those who looked to the future and were prepared to accommodate the values and techniques of their competitors, if only to compete effectively with them. In fact, of course, many of Japan’s new rulers shared both aspirations: modern methods and Western techniques could be embraced as wholeheartedly by those who saw them as the key to a restored ‘traditional’ Japanese independence based on indigenous social structure and values as by those who desired to embrace not only Western techniques but some version of Western ideology.

Int...