The Image of Japan

From Feudal Isolation to World Power 1850-1905

Jean-Pierre Lehmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136925320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Japan's image has experienced numerous transmutations. The book covers the metamorphosis from Japan's image of a feudal, exotic and romantic land inhabited by Madam Butterflies, to its sudden emergence as a geopolitical power following its defeat of Russia in 1905. More was to come. In the 1930s and 40s the image of the kamikaze vividly illustrated the fanaticism and barbarity associated with Japan in World War II. With the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Japan rejoined the international community as a friend and ally of the US. The next transmutation came in the 1980s when the Japanese economy appeared to be functioning on anabolic steroids and its continued ascent to take over the US was predicted. "Japanese management" became more than a science, almost a religion, among business schools and consultancies. Today there are two images: one is conveyed through manga, karaoke and the global fashion for sushi; the other is of an economically and demographically declining nation. Will this image correspond to Japan's swan song or are there more transmutations on the way? One constant in Japanese history and the image it has projected has been the country's constant ability to surprise.

1
THE NEW JAPAN—FAR EAST OR FAR WEST?

If Lemuel Gulliver had recently returned from a fourth voyage to ‘Laputha, Balnibari, Luggnagg, Glubbdurb and Japan’, his narrative would not have been more full of strange incidents and novel observations…. Indeed, it was by a happy conjecture that Dean Swift ranked Japan with those creations of his own misanthropic genius, where all the conditions of European society were at once reflected, distorted, and inverted. (1863)¹

Japan is no longer the hermit of the East, but the most Western of the nations of the West. (1903)²

Japan consists of a cluster of islands off the mainland of East Asia. The similarity between Japan’s geographic position in Asia and Britain’s in Europe did not go unnoticed, and as Japan became industrialised (and especially at the time of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902–22) it was not uncommon to refer to the country as the ‘Britain of Asia’. (The alliance, as a Japanese government minister proclaimed, joined the Empire of the Rising Sun with the Empire over which the sun never sets.) Although both Britain and Japan are island nations, their histories are very different. Japan, unlike Britain, was never conquered by a foreign power, until the American victory of 1945. There was no equivalent to Roman or Danish invasions, no 1066 in Japan. Britain participated in European affairs and wars; Japan’s involvement in continental Asian affairs remained minimal. When Japan came closest to being invaded, in the thirteenth century by the fleet of Kublai Khan, she was saved by a typhoon which destroyed the bulk of the enemy fleet; the typhoon was baptised the Kamikaze (Divine Wind). In the nineteenth century, while the Western powers carved up most of Asia as colonies, Japan remained a sovereign state.

Yet, if it is true to say that Japan never experienced military invasions until 1945, she was subjected, as a modern historian has pointed out, to a number of cultural invasions.³ The first and most important of these took place from the fifth to the eighth centuries of our era when Japan adopted practically all the cultural features of neighbouring China (architecture, writing, religion, etc.). China remained Japan’s fountain of civilisation until the nineteenth century, though to varying degrees. Thus, although from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries Japan entertained no official relations with her neighbour (apart from limited trade centring around the port of Nagasaki), the achievement of scholarship, for example, depended on one’s knowledge of and erudition in the Chinese classics. The cultural imports from China were ‘japanised’ over the ages, that is adapted to indigenous customs and needs. The second though far less significant cultural invasion took place in the sixteenth century and marked the first contact of Japan with the West, mainly in the form of Portuguese Jesuits.

Following this second cultural invasion, and partly as a result of it, from the early seventeenth century Japan’s policy towards the outside world was one of almost total isolation. The only exception was a small artificial islet in the bay of Nagasaki, Dejima, where Dutch traders were allowed to reside. This small ‘window to the West’, as it has been called, in fact proved invaluable: Japanese authorities were able to keep in touch, albeit remotely, with political events in the European world, while the availability of Dutch books and the presence in Dejima of doctors enabled a handful of Japanese scholars (the Rangakusha, or scholars of Dutch learning) to study Europe’s scientific discoveries and developments.

In many respects, however, this isolation was fruitful. Japanese political history prior to the seventeenth century was not unlike the history of all other feudal countries in that to a great extent it consisted of bloody battles, intrigues and assassinations between rival fiefs. Indeed the century preceding the policy of isolation is called the Sengokujidai, or era of the country at war with itself. Following the last great battle of feudal Japan, the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, peace was achieved, both internally and externally.

The following two and a half centuries witnessed a great flourishing of the arts, a phenomenal expansion of literacy, a very considerable increase in economic activity. There can be no doubt that this period sowed the seeds for Japan’s later modernisation. By the end of the eighteenth century and increasingly in the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a number of factors developed which seriously weakened the viability of the government and its policy of isolation. Serious economic difficulties were reflected in the increasing number of famines experienced during this period which caused numerous peasant uprisings. Political and intellectual dissatisfaction found expression in a variety of schools which tended towards a greater emphasis on national learning, as opposed to Chinese learning, and to a questioning of the government’s legitimacy, favouring a return to both the temporal and the spiritual power of the Emperor. Although the imperial dynasty remained unbroken, since the twelfth century the Emperor had been little more than a figurehead. The rulers of Japan came from successive dynasties of sh

guns (generalissimos); the ruling shogunal dynasty from 1603 to 1867 was the Tokugawa family. During this period the shogun ruled in Edo, while the Emperor in theory reigned in Kyoto, though under strict shogunal surveillance. Furthermore, Japan’s political institutions were full of contradictions. Whereas political power theoretically remained in the hands of a high-ranking, landowning nobility (daimy

), economic strength was increasingly acquired by a rising merchant class (the bottom of the feudal social hierarchy) and administrative ability was to be found in the ranks of the middle and lower gentry (samurai). Japan, therefore, in the early nineteenth century was facing grave problems and tensions with the government finding it more and more difficult to cope.

It was under these circumstances that Japan also had to face a menacing situation from abroad, in the form of Russian, British, French and American ships in Japanese waters demanding an end to the country’s policy of isolation. In 1853 the American Commodore Perry invited Japan to sign a treaty of friendship and commerce with the United States, leaving the Japanese a year to make up their minds. The shogunal authorities were in a state of panic and the country in general in considerable confusion. Although the mood of the ruling class was definitely not in favour of treating with the ‘barbarians’ (as Westerners were called), wiser counsels prevailed and, no doubt partly with the example of China before them (the Opium War), the shogunal government complied with the American demand. Japan, therefore, was not opened by force—as was China—but certainly with the threat of the use of force. The Japanese government had had to recognise that in material terms at least Western civilisation was superior.

The reaction of the people, however, was initially xenophobic. For the thirteen years following the first treaty with the United States (which was quickly followed up by the British, French, Russians and a host of other Western and some Latin American countries), the shogunal government found itself caught between two forces: on the one side the Western powers insisting that the doors to the Empire, only slightly ajar, be opened far wider; on the other, consistent and powerful pressure from within the country for the doors to be shut and bolted again. The first cry to capture the popular imagination was that of j

i, or ‘expel the barbarians’. The imperial court in Kyoto, under Emperor Komei, became a centre of intrigue against the shogunal government. To the slogan j

i eventually was added that of sonn

, ‘revere the Emperor’.

In 1867 Emperor Komei died and in the following year a major political revolution took place: the shogunate was overthrown and the restoration of the Emperor (the Meiji Restoration as it is called) was proclaimed. The original xenophobic character of the restoration movement was completely abandoned. One of the first proclamations emanating from the new government, the Charter Oath, boldly announced as its fifth principle that ‘Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world in order to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule’. Almost at once the government began to institute far-reaching and radical reforms: feudalism was abolished, education made universal and compulsory, military conscription established, religious toleration accepted, fully fledged embassies set up in Western countries, civil and criminal codes promulgated along Western lines, and so on. Just as the political structure of Japan was apparently undergoing a process of Westernisation, so was the economy: railways, lighthouses, factories, brick buildings, foundries, and all forms of armamentindustries were established.

The government’s intention, as the Charter Oath made clear, was to strengthen the country (and itself) by importing what was useful from the West. To the people, however, it meant more. From xenophobia in the 1850s and 60s, by the 1870s and 80s they had reached the other extreme—uncritical adulation of all things Western. The people in this context means mainly the upper middle-class urban dwellers. The life of the Japanese peasants, the vast majority of the population, was not significantly Westernised—except for a minimum amount of schooling, military service for boys, and textile factory work for girls. To the better off, however, experimentation in Western habits seemed limitless. Their diet was affected they began drinking beer and wines and eating meat, for example—the latter responsible for the culinary innovation of sukiyaki. So was their attire: Western hats, jackets, trousers and shoes were donned with enthusiasm, separately or together (the gentleman in Japanese dress with bowler hat was not uncommon). More important, Western literature, philosophy, politics, religion, architecture, painting, sculpture, and music all had their impact on Japan. Thus in the latter part of the nineteenth century Japan experienced her third cultural invasion.

There is considerable doubt and diversity of opinion among scholars today regarding the depth of Western penetration in Japan; in other words, while admitting changes in the surface, one may ask to what extent these changes were profoundly implanted in the Japanese people, their mode of politics, economics, justice, family life, and so on. This also raises a problem (and not merely a semantic one) about the extent to which ‘modernisation’, ‘industrialisation’ and ‘Westernisation’ are interchangeable terms. Thus, changes in the political or social structure, or the establishment of new institutions may appear as evidence of Westernisation but could also be interpreted simply as responses to a changing economic base. The point here, however, is that so far as Western observers of Japan in the nineteenth century were concerned there was no distinction to be made. The terms ‘modern’ and ‘Western’ were synonymous.

Westerners were in two minds about whether in fact Japan should attempt Westernisation. Kipling was very much against the idea:

It would pay us to establish an international suzerainty over Japan: to take away any fear of invasion and annexation, and pay the country as much as ever it chose, on condition that it simply sat still and went on making beautiful things while our learned men learned. It would pay us to put the whole Empire in a glass case and mark it Hors Concours, Exhibit A.⁴

This was a view with which the Japanese totally disagreed. The Japanese became thoroughly indoctrinated with the Western belief in progress (Samuel Smiles’s Self Help was a best seller in Japan for years). More significantly, Japan could not share Kipling’s confidence that an international suzerainty over the country would guarantee it against invasion and annexation. All of Asia was either being annexed or exploited by various means—military, political and economic. For Japan’s independence to be safeguarded strength was necessary and strength demanded radical reform of Japanese institutions.

There was another major problem that the Japanese had to confront. This had to do with the nature of the treaties Japan had entered into with the Western powers. These treaties were commonly referred to by the Japanese as the ‘unequal treaties’. They were not peculiar to Japanese-Western relations, but were in the same form as the treaties that the Western powers had signed with (or imposed upon) all non-Christian nations. With regard to Japan the main features of these treaties were the following. They included the ‘most favoured nation’ clause, which meant that if any privilege were granted to one treaty power it would automatically accrue to all the others. The treaties stipulated the opening of a number of ports, known as the Treaty Ports, where foreigners were permitted to reside and conduct business but were not able to reside, carry out trade or travel beyond a determined radius from these ports without special government permission. The treaties included a clause of extraterritoriality—which in time became the most controversial issue in Japan—whereby subjects of treaty powers could not be tried by Japanese magistrates, as they were solely answerable to the jurisdiction of their own consuls. Finally, Japan was not allowed to regulate unilaterally the amount of her tariffs; in general these were restricted by treaty at 5 per cent ad valorem.

The consequences of the various ‘unequal’ clauses of these treaties were considerable, The ‘most favoured nation’ clause imposed a straitjacket on Japanese foreign policy as bilateral negotiation could easily prove fruitless. Limitation on customs duties meant that, unlike Germany, France and the United States, Japan was not able to protect her infant industries, nor could she take full advantage of a potentially very valuable source of revenue. The question of the treaties in general quickly became a cause célèbre among the Japanese, perhaps the first issue in Japanese history to be influenced to a great extent by public opinion....

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE NEW JAPAN— FAR EAST OR FAR WEST?
• 2 WESTERN ENCOUNTERS WITH JAPAN—ENCHANTMENTS AND DISENCHANTMENTS
• 3 THE WOMEN OF JAPAN-IN REALITY AND FANTASY
• 4 POLITICS—ORIENTAL OBSCURANTISM TO OCCIDENTAL ENLIGHTENMENT
• 5 INDUSTRIOUSNESS, INDUSTRY AND INDUSTRIALISATION
• 6 YELLOW HOPE—YELLOW PERIL
• APPENDIX
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
• INDEX