Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History

Sven Saaler, Christopher W. A. Szpilman, Sven Saaler, Christopher W. A. Szpilman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317599036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History is a concise overview of modern Japanese history from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. Written by a group of international historians, each an authority in his or her field, the book covers modern Japanese history in an accessible yet comprehensive manner. The subjects featured in the book range from the development of the political system and matters of international relations, to social and economic history and gender issues, to post-war discussions about modern Japan's historical trajectory and its wartime past. Divided into thematic parts, the sections include:

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• Nation, empire and borders

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• Ideologies and the political system

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• Economy and society

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• Historical legacies and memory

Each chapter outlines important historiographical debates and controversies, summarizes the latest developments in the field, and identifies research topics that have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. As such, the book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese history, Asian history and Asian Studies.

Part I

Nation, empire, borders

1

Japan in the global twentieth century

Akira Iriye

National, international, and transnational history

To talk about ‘Japan (or any country) in the twentieth century’ is to consider that the history of the century is comprehensible in the national framework. The world, it is assumed, consists of nations so that domestic national affairs and interrelations among nations comprise the century’s history. That is why national and international history still provide the key frameworks in which the past is examined.

But such privileging of the nation would obscure the large number of people who do not belong to any country, including refugees and migrants who are not admitted into specific countries as their legitimate residents or citizens. But they are all human beings. Why should they not count in any study of the world? In some respects, what matters is not so much population censuses of specific countries as the total number of people who inhabit the earth. This is particularly important when we consider the relationship between man and nature, that is, what people do to their physical environment (see also Chapter 28 in this volume). Different countries, of course, have different policies toward the use or protection of their natural habitat, but nationality is only one of many determinants of such a phenomenon. Religion plays a role, as do age, health conditions, education, and many other factors as they bear on the use of energy.

As such cases indicate, the nation is only one among many identities that define individuals. They are not just members of a specific country, but they also belong to other categories of humans, such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, and religion. When we look at the globe and consider how it has developed and changed in the span of a century, it would be just as important to examine these other categories.

For instance, take age as a framework. In 1900, the average life expectancy of the world’s people was around forty, whereas a hundred years later it had gone beyond fifty. That meant not simply that there were more people to breathe the air and to eat, but also that there were more opportunities for them to encounter one another. Moreover, longevity may lead to senility. The World Health Organization estimates that in 2017 there were some 47 million people in the world, or about a half per cent of the total population, who were diagnosed as suffering from dementia. People become ‘senile’ everywhere, although what happens to them may differ from country to country.

Likewise, all countries have people who are considered ‘disabled’. They used to be referred to as ‘handicapped’, even ‘abnormal’, but this adjective came to be considered inadequate and prejudicial in the second half of the twentieth century, and some countries came to call them ‘disabled’ instead, as can be seen in the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed by the United States Congress in 1990. The change reflected the sentiment that ‘handicap’ was a prejudicial term, whereas ‘disability’ seemed more benign or neutral. But regardless of how such people, as well as others afflicted with physical or mental problems, are referred to, their nationality is of far less significance than their state of health, physical or mental.

It is clear, then, that national history is only one part of the human story. To fully understand a country’s history, it must be ‘de-nationalized’ and ‘internationalized’ as well as ‘transnationalized’. It is part of international history in that the nation always exists among, and in relation to, other countries. Its people are never autonomous but are linked to what goes on elsewhere. The same holds true of all people. They are global as well as national beings. They are connected with one another not simply as citizens of their countries but also as fellow humans sharing certain ideas, beliefs, interests, and existential circumstances such as age, physical conditions, and, of course, expectations of ultimate death. They have always been transnational beings in this sense, but the process accelerated in the twentieth century.

Globalization

Whether internationalizing or transnationalizing the modern history of Japan, one of the key conceptual frameworks would be globalization. The term ‘global’ is synonymous with ‘worldwide’, but historians have preferred the former adjective in recent years. Scholars began using terms like ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ only toward the end of the twentieth century, long after the world and humankind had become ‘globalized’, that is, linked with one another across national and regional boundaries. This is an excellent example of the gap between reality and comprehension; it takes time for us to become aware of, and to understand, what has happened or is happening. The history of the twentieth century still tends to be viewed in terms of its wars, slaughters, and countless human tragedies throughout the world. Such a negative view of the century is often compared to the more ‘progressive’ or ‘civilized’ nineteenth century. Whereas ‘the long peace’ reigned between 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic wars) and 1914 (the outbreak of the Great War), the twentieth century witnessed two world wars, the sustained Cold War, colonial and postcolonial conflicts, and numerous instances of sectarian and tribal violence.

And yet another major theme of twentieth-century history must surely be globalization that, if anything, has proven to be an even more enduring and pervasive phenomenon than national divisions or international conflicts. That, after all, is what the term ‘global’ implies. The adjective has the connotation of different parts of the world being interconnected, even becoming borderless.

It is possible, of course, to apply the adjective ‘global’ to earlier periods, such as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Western technology and military power combined to bring separate parts of the world closer together. But that was imperialism, not globalization. Only a handful of nations had the economic resources and armed force to be called ‘powers’, and they dominated the rest of the world by establishing colonies and spheres of influence. But Western domination is not the same thing as globalization. A globalized world would have to be one in which various countries and regions were interconnected through cross-border movements of goods, people, and cultures.

Of course, a totally borderless world has never existed, and national boundaries have remained one of the key realities for the bulk of humanity. Indeed, the ‘modern’ centuries have been characterized by the growing number of nations among whom ‘international’ affairs have consisted of safeguarding those boundaries. Peace has implied the observance of such boundaries, and war the breaching of them. Yet at the same time, cross-border (‘transnational’) movements of people, whether as migrants or temporary visitors, have also been a major feature of the modern centuries. Their encounters have resulted in interactions among people, often producing ‘hybrid’ communities consisting of diverse races and cultures. Hybridity, indeed, may be taken as a main feature of the modern world. There may have been no such thing as a ‘pure’ race or culture anywhere in history, but even if it once existed, the human community has grown more and more multi-ethnic and hybridized since the nineteenth century.

The history of modern Japan, like that of any other country, must be understood in such a context. The emergence and increase in the number of separate nations are major characteristics of modern history, but so are transnational encounters and interactions. Nationalism has remained a powerful force to give people their identity, but at the same time a strong sense of transnationalism has emerged as they move across countries, whether physically (as refugees, migrant workers, tourists, students, or in other capacities) or mentally (through the books they read, the food they eat, the musical and theatrical performances they attend, and in many other ways).

Modern Japan, globalization and imperialism

An important key to understanding modern Japanese history, then, is to realize that Japan emerged as a modern nation in the age of globalization. The Meiji era (1868–1912) virtually coincided with the initial phase of globalization. This period of modern Japanese history is usually understood in the framework of the West’s modernization as well as of imperialism. The European powers as well as the United States, it is said, became ‘modern’ through their technological innovations, economic advances, and political reforms, all of which were aspects of ‘modernization’. But the rest of the world was not ‘modernized’ and in fact became subservient to the advanced and advancing West. Except for Japan. The nation modernized itself in certain ways – industrialization, military strengthening, etc. – and it also became imperialistic. Thus, modernization and imperialism went hand in hand in the case of modern Japan.

Modernization and globalization are not the same thing, but what is interesting is that in Japan’s case the two tended to coincide. The nation became a modern state just as the world was becoming global. The two coincided so that Japan benefited from, and took advantage of, a globalizing world. It would be more difficult to say, however, whether modern Japan made a significant contribution to globalization.

That Japan benefited from globalization would be hard to dispute. It borrowed technological innovations being developed in Europe and North America; it imported modern educational and professional practices from the West; and it sent its people out as emigrants, business people, and students (see Chapter 8 in this volume). As a consequence, the Japanese became ‘hybridized’ to a far greater extent than ever before. Ironically, however, the nation’s political and cultural leaders simultaneously came to emphasize its uniqueness and even its ‘purity’, concepts that would continue to characterize the way they defined their country. Japan was by no means alone in simultaneously becoming global and ‘exceptionalist’. Globalization and nationalistic exceptionalism characterized virtually all countries, but in Japan’s case, the potential conflict between the two may have been mitigated by the tendency to view globalization primarily in terms of military power and economic achievements, not of transnational connections or cultural sharedness.

Japan emerged as an imperialist at the turn of the twentieth century (see Chapter 6 in this volume), but it did not become global right away. In other words, for Japan imperialism came first and globalization much later than was the case with the European powers or the United States. Japanese trade and financial activities were constrained by the ‘unequal’ treaties the nation had signed in the mid-nineteenth century, and it did not gain tariff autonomy until 1910 (see Chapter 4 in this volume). Until then, Japan could not be said to be a full-fledged member of the global community. But this did not prevent it from expanding territorially and establishing overseas colonies. (Taiwan was annexed to Japan in 1895 and Korea in 1910.) Imperialism came before globalization. Indeed, imperialism may be said to have enabled the country to become more global, sending its people overseas as colonists and its goods all over the world.

Modern Japanese imperialism may be dated from the 1870s, when the island kingdom of Ryukyu was annexed (see Chapter 9 in this volume), to be followed by the establishment of ‘spheres of influence’ in nearby areas such as Korea and southern Manchuria. Korea was an independent kingdom, but Japan steadily encroached on its territory, turning it into a protectorate and eventually, in 1910, an outright colony. Japan was not unique in such behaviour, of course. Great Britain had established control over India in the 1850s, France over Indochina in the 1870s, and the United States over Hawaii and the Philippines in the 1890s. The globe was fast becoming divided between these and other imperialist powers and their colonies and protectorates. China was an important exception in that it did not undertake overseas expansionism, but neither was it turned into a formal colony. It maintained its nominally independent existence, but parts of its territory were carved into the imperialist powers’ spheres of influence. The main exception was the island of Taiwan (Formosa) that had been part of the Qing (Ch’ing) empire since the seventeenth century but was seized by Japan at the end of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95.

That war came about when Chinese and Japanese troops, occupying Korea ostensibly to maintain the security of their respective nationals in the peninsular kingdom, collided. None of the Western powers intervened and ignored China’s pleas for help. This was primarily because they could live with a weakened China so long as its ‘territorial integrity’ was maintained. In the end this principle was jeopardized when Japan annexed Taiwan, turning it into a major outpost of its new empire, but on the mainland no external power sought outright domination. Russia feared such a move on the part of Japan when the latter established its control over Korea, threatening the tsarist empire’s ambitions in southern Manchuria, where a railway, an extension of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, was being built. When Japan sought to establish its sphere of influence over the Liaodong peninsula, on the southern tip of Manchuria, Russia sought to oppose such expansion by reinforcing its army in eastern Siberia and sending its navy (the Baltic Fleet) to East Asian waters. The result was yet another war, this time between Japan and Russia over control of Korea and southern Manchuria. Japan won initial victories and, as a result, established itself in Korea and southern Manchuria. The other Western powers did not intervene; so long as Japanese territorial ambitions were confined to southern Manchuria, as it appeared likely to be the case at first, they could live with the aggrandizement. They accepted the postwar arrangements in which Russia ceded southern Manchuria as well as southern Sakhalin (Karafuto) to Japanese control.

These were all imperialistic acts, analogous to British expansion into India or the French annexation of Indochina. By the end of the nineteenth century, most regions of Asia and Africa had been turned into colonies or protectorates of the European powers. Even the United States, which had virtually stood by while the European powers and Japan were busily engaged in establishing overseas colonies and protectorates, eventually decided to act. It drove the Spanish out of the Philippines and established its control over the Caribbean, in the process turning Cuba and Santo Domingo into its protectorates.

Non-global imperialism

Japan’s international affairs were thus virtually interchangeable with the Western imperialist activities. Yet it would be difficult to say that Japan was also becoming global. One of the remarkable phenomena of world history at the turn of the twentieth century is that imperialism coincided with globalization. The European powers and the United States were becoming global empires. In other words, their imperial domination coincided with the globalization of their commercial and, it may be added, cultural affairs. Late nineteenth-century Western imperialism came in the age of globalization so that the two were virtually synonymous. The globalization of means of production and communication facilitated the extension of the Western powers, while at the same time their overseas empires helped promote economic and cultural globalization. It would be difficult to say which came first, imperialism or globalization. They were simultaneous phenomena.

The same cannot be said of Japan, however. Unlike the Western powers that pursued both imperialism and globalization, Japan’s was a non-global imperialism. To begin with, its imperialism had a sharply focused geographical focus, mostly limited to East and Southeast Asia. To be sure, there were exponents of trans-Pacific expansionism, among whom the socialist Katayama Sen (1859–1933) was perhaps the most influential. He and other expansionists believed Japan should establish its foothold in Hawaii and further extend it to the West Coast of the United States as well as of Canada. The New Japan in North America was the title of a little book Katayama published in 1901 in which he exhorted his countrymen to migrate across the Pacific and establish Japanese communities in the Americas. But they found it extremely difficult to do so because of immigration restrictions in California and elsewhere. It was cheaper and less complicated to move to and settle in Korea, Manchuria, or Indochina.

It may also be noted that Japanese expansion was couched less in the framework of globalization than that of the Western nations. The latter took with them modern technology as well as European religion and ideology, exemplified by Christianity and Enlightenment thought. These were being ‘globalized’ in the sense that Europeans and Americans were eager to spread their religious as well as secular ideas and ways of life to other parts of the world. They believed that modern Western culture was exportable so that as a result of their expansion, the world’s people would become interconnected and inter-mixed.

Japanese imperialism, on the other hand, was not seen as an aspect of a globalizing endeavour. It was more parochial, and a good way to understand modern Japanese history in the global context is to ask why this should have been the case.

For one thing, it may well be that the Japanese really wanted to globalize themselves by going abroad, but that they encountered serious obstacles on the part of the societies to which they sought to move. They encountered racial prejudice wherever they wanted to settle. They did manage to migrate to and reside in Hawaii starting in the 1890s, and soon they became the most numerous group in the islands. But that was when Hawaii was an independent kingdom. When it was annexed by the United States in 1898, many Japanese inhabitants proceeded to cross the ocean and sought to settle on the West Coast. But they met with local prejudice, and their entry into the United States came to be severely restricted around 1905 and was totally prohibited after 1924.

This is the well-known story of the immigration dispute between Japan and the United States, ...