China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period

China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895-1904

Urs Matthias Zachmann

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415481915
• eBook ISBN: 9781134017188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first war between China and Japan in 1894/95 was one of the most fateful events, not only in modern Japanese and Chinese history, but in international history as well. The war and subsequent events catapulted Japan on its trajectory toward temporary hegemony in East Asia, whereas China entered a long period of domestic unrest and foreign intervention. Repercussions of these developments can be still felt, especially in the mutual perceptions of Chinese and Japanese people today. However, despite considerable scholarship on Sino-Japanese relations, the perplexing question remains how the Japanese attitude exactly changed after the triumphant victory in 1895 over its former role model and competitor.

This book examines the transformation of Japan's attitude toward China up to the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904/5), when the psychological framework within which future Chinese-Japanese relations worked reached its erstwhile completion. It shows the transformation process through a close reading of sources, a large number of which is introduced to the scholarly discussion for the first time. Zachmann demonstrates how modern Sino-Japanese attitudes were shaped by a multitude of factors, domestic and international, and, in turn, informed Japan's course in international politics.

Winner of the JaDe Prize 2010 awarded by the German Foundation for the Promotion of Japanese-German Culture and Science Relations

1 China in the Tokugawa and early Meiji period

The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and its aftermath led to a fundamental reversal of power relations in East Asia and lastingly changed Japan’s attitude toward China and the world. The energies that fuelled the shock-like transformation did not spring up spontaneously, but had accumulated over centuries in a gradual and complex process, the beginnings of which reach back into the pre-modern condition of Sino-Japanese relations. On the Japanese side, the relations betray an ambiguous and complex attitude towards China, in both its cultural and its political dimension. Already during the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), the two dimensions were separate, and the gap became even wider during the frist decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912), when Japan modernized along Western lines and openly challenged China’s political role in East Asia. This chapter gives a brief outline of Sino-Japanese relations from the Tokugawa period until the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, and describes the complex and ambiguous process by which Chinese culture could maintain a high social status in Japan, while China’s political role gradually changed from studiously ignored neighbor-empire to Japan’s open rival in the East and enemy of civilization per se.

China’s political and cultural role in Tokugawa Japan

China had two very different presences in the Tokugawa world. As a political rival, the Chinese empire was consciously excluded from Japan’s own self-centered ‘international order.’¹ As a cultural function, however, Chinese civilization was central in the intellectual world of Japan. This double role of China continued into the Meiji period, although adoration for Chinese culture became superimposed by the adoption of ‘practical’ Western civilization, and political China was declared the ‘enemy’ of civilization (and thus Japan’s enemy) in East Asia.

Politically, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s disastrous campaigns against Korea in the 1590s marked a historical low in Japan’s relations with China. The campaigns upset the whole balance of power in Northeast Asia and eventually contributed to the downfall of the Ming (1368–1644) and the rise of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).² However, Toyotomi’s successor Tokugawa Ieyasu was eager to restore good relations with Japan’s neighbors for reasons of domestic authority as well as of commercial expediency. Already in 1607, the Shōgun welcomed the first embassy from Korea. With China, however, the negotiations, begun only half-heartedly, soon reached an impasse.³ Diplomatic and commercial relations in the traditional framework of the ‘Chinese world order’ would have required that the Shōgun submit to the authority of the Chinese throne and thereby ritually acknowledge China’s political (and cultural) superiority.⁴ Yet neither Ieyasu nor his successors were ready to do so. On the contrary, the Tokugawa rulers persistently sought to establish international relations that would guarantee Japan’s sovereignty and security and the Bakufu’s legitimacy, all of which was incompatible with Japan’s integration into the Sino-centric order. Thus the Tokugawa rulers established their own ‘international order’ in the shadow of the Chinese political sphere, and when this order reached its perfection in the 1630s, China was conspicuously absent from it. In the new order, Japan had diplomatic relations (tsūshin) with the ‘foreign countries’ (ikoku) Korea and the Ryūkyū kingdom, but not with China. Merely individual Chinese merchants dealt with Japanese officials in Nagasaki on a commercial level (tsūshō), in the same way as the Dutch merchants who had remained after the expulsion of the Portuguese. Moreover, there was contact with the ‘foreign region’ (iiki) of the Ainu in Hokkaidō through the liaison of the Matsumae-han. Thus, in the ‘Tokugawa international order,’ we find China, the ‘Central Kingdom’ of East Asia, excluded (like the Portuguese), and its nationals treated like Dutch or even Ainu ‘barbarians.’

Even so, China was present in the ‘Tokugawa international order’ in more than one way: structurally in the fact that the Japanese ‘international order’ constituted a miniature copy of the Chinese order, born of the same defensive dogma that informed the latter until the middle of the nineteenth century: ‘That dogma asserts that national security could only be found in isolation and stipulates that whoever wished to enter into relations with China must do so as China’s vassal … It sought peace and security, with both of which international relations were held incompatible.’⁵ However, whereas China expected formal submission as a vassal, the Bakufu only demanded acceptance of its own norms of international behavior, most importantly the diplomatic protocol which guaranteed that the Japanese sphere remained an exclave from the Chinese tributary system.⁶

Yet, for all the care and the money that was spent to create an autonomous order of foreign relations (for example by subsidizing Tsushima), this could hardly disguise the fact that the small sphere was not exclusive and that it was overshadowed by the much bigger sphere of Chinese tributary relations. Thus, whereas Korea and the Ryūkyū kingdom sent envoys to Japan only sporadically, Korea sent tributary missions to China every year, and the Ryūkyū kingdom every other year, with only few exceptions. It is not accidental that the two countries at the intersection of the Chinese and Japanese order became the bones of contention in the early Meiji period. Moreover, informed Japanese during most of the Tokugawa period viewed China as the strongest power in East Asia, stronger even than the Western powers, and much more so than Japan.⁷

If China’s political presence was powerful but hidden in the Tokugawa world, its cultural influence was all the more obvious and omnipresent. All fields of human culture, such as ethics, law, ideology, religion, literature, the arts, etc., in Tokugawa times were felt to be indebted to the Chinese model.⁸ The Chinese classics and poetry lay at the core of the education of the samurai elite and of affluent, culture-conscious urban classes as well. But it was not only ‘old’ Chinese culture that informed the Edo society. Recent Chinese trends, brought to Japan in person by exiles and migrants from China, or through the medium of books, gave new impulses to the Tokugawa culture as well.⁹ The scope and content of China’s cultural influence has already been the subject of a number of studies and need us not concern here. Let it suffice to indicate the intensity of the influence by quoting Marius B. Jansen’s conclusion that Chinese culture in the Tokugawa world ‘assumed an importance that was religious in nature.’¹⁰

Although China’s cultural influence was strong, its hegemony did not go uncontested. It has often been observed that even those who, by profession, were the most susceptible to Sinophilia, the Japanese Confucianists, sought to break this cultural hegemony of China by dissociating the civilization from its original locale of production.¹¹ They applied various strategies of argumentation, all of which eventually aimed at universalizing the Confucian Way, or even ‘naturalizing’ it and thereby elevating Japan’s cultural position vis-à-vis the ‘original.’ Thus some of the Confucianists argued for parallel convergence—that the essence of Confucianism in a naive way had existed in Japan even before the advent of Confucianism in Japan.¹² Others argued that, since Confucianism was a universal way, the cultural center could be wherever its ideals were realized most fully.¹³ Some even positively declared Japan the current center of civilization, since it had preserved the original Confucian rituals and institutions more faithfully and realized the cardinal virtues more truly than did China, which, since its golden days, had gone into steep decline and now suffered ‘barbarian’ rule under the Manchurians.¹⁴ Consequently, Japan could claim to be the real ‘central kingdom’ of the present.

Thus Japanese Confucianists (and the Japanese elite in general) showed a strong competitive spirit towards China and were eager to best the former model by its own standard of civilization. However, one wonders whether this ‘game of one-upmanship’ (as Kate Wildman Nakai calls it) was not a rather one-sided and also desperate affair.¹⁵ Firstly, Ming and Qing China did not take much notice of Japan except as a political or piratical threat.¹⁶ Otherwise, in Chinese descriptions of civil Japan, it was merely seen as a minor but distant subvariation of China itself.¹⁷ Secondly, the Japanese assertion that China under Manchurian rule had gone into steep decline and thereby lost its claims of cultural centrality to Japan is quite extravagant.¹⁸ After all, the Qing rulers, beginning with the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722), were eager to appear as sage rulers in the Confucian sense by training themselves in the Chinese classics and also widely promoting cultural projects which were aimed at co-opting the Chinese intellectual elite.¹⁹ In fact, so successful was their patronage of learning and culture that Jonathan Spence describes its success as a ‘flowering of Chinese culture’ in the later seventeenth century, despite the recent imposition of alien rule.²⁰ Consequently, the behavior of illustrious Japanese intellectuals when meeting Chinese exiles or migrants in person contradicts their assertions of superiority, as the standard reaction on the Japanese side was ready submission to the authority of the Chinese (or, more often, Korean) guests’ erudition and refinement, thereby acknowledging a priori that contemporary China was still the arbiter in matters of civilization.²¹

Of course, not everybody shared the excessive Sinophilia of Japanese Confucianists, or even the more moderate veneration of the elite. It is well known that the school of ‘national learning’ (Kokugaku) rejected Chinese civilization altogether by taking recourse on a pristine Japanese culture that was supposed to have existed before the ‘contamination’ through foreign influences.²² However, their strong Sinophobia, too, has to be understood with qualifications. Firstly, inasmuch as the Kokugaku thinkers used China as a generic term for everything odious (cleverness, artificiality, empty rationality, etc.) in order to let the Japanese ‘golden age’ shine forth in an even brighter, purer light, it is obvious that China was little more than an ideological function.²³ Moreover, the very fact that the image could be exploited in that way testifies to the immense authority and polarizing power which Chinese culture had in the Tokugawa society. Thus one could describe the Kokugaku really as the radical exception to the rule of Chinese learning in these days.

In the Meiji period, the dominant position of Chinese learning in Japanese society certainly underwent a significant change, as we shall see presently. However, for all the changes, there were also continuities, most of all in the strategies through which the Japanese sought to maintain equality, or even claimed superiority in matters of civilization. Thus we will find the same strategies of ‘universalization’ applied to Western civilization—the argument that, if Western civilization was universal, Japan could be as ‘civilized’ as the European nations. After the Sino-Japanese War 1894–95, people even began to assert Japan’s superiority as a ‘truly civilized nation’ in contrast to some Western nations. At the same time, there was a tendency of denouncing the ills of excessive Westernization, although this, too, must be understood as a tribute to the immense authority of Western civilization rather than a viable alternative.

The foreign politics of the early Meiji period

The great event of Bakumatsu foreign politics (1853–67) was the advent of the Western powers seeking direct diplomatic contact with Japan. The Japanese government at first grudgingly, and after the Meiji Restoration (1868) quite proactively, accepted the proposition and entered into diplomatic relations with the Western powers on the legal basis of the European system of states. This led to a paradigm shift in Japanese thought on international relations.²⁴ Henceforth, the Japanese leaders sought to emulate the Western powers with the object of attaining equality vis-à-vis the Western powers, or even hegemony in the East Asian region. The paradigm shift consequently destabilized Sino-Japanese relations. The co-existence of the two overlapping political spheres could only work as long as both were intrinsically defensive in nature. However, as soon as Japan switched to the more competitive Western state system, co-existence with China became untenable and Japan began to actively break up China’s political sphere.

Japan’s relations with the Western powers

The advent of the Western powers thoroughly dislodged the Tokugawa international order. In March 1854, Japan concluded with the United States the ‘Treaty of Amity’ and, in July 1858, the ‘Treaty of Amity and Commerce.’ Ten more treaties of the latter kind were concluded by the Bakufu (the ‘Ansei Treaties’) and three more by the new Meiji government. The treaty with Austria-Hungary (1869) was among the last, and since it contained all elements of the preceding treaties and some additional, it is sometimes called the ‘definite edition of the unequal treaties.’²⁵ The treaties were called ‘unequal’ since they unilaterally granted the Western powers consular jurisdiction and also fixed Japan’s tariffs, thus depriving it of its tariffs autonomy. In particular, consular jurisdiction soon became a powerful symbol in popular discourse of an alleged discrimination against Japan on the grounds of civilization, race or religion.²⁶

Although discrimination on racial or religious grounds certainly played a role, civilization was the central argument for the Western powers’ unwillingness to yield jurisdiction over its citizens, or to grant full international status in general to any non-European country in the nineteenth century. A renowned German expert on international law in 1889, for example, defined the minimal preconditions of international intercourse as follows: International relations require certain preconditions, especially a higher level of civilization, the ability of and the reliability in ‘international relations.’²⁷ The ‘higher level of civilization’ for long remained an implicit set of requirements. However, the Western powers’ protracted negotiations with Japan over its full acceptance eventually led to the evolution of a more explicit standard of ‘civilization,’ which included as its basic requirements the prot...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 China in the Tokugawa and early Meiji period
• 2 The Sino-Japanese War, the Tripartite Intervention, and Japan’s ‘postwar management’
• 3 The Far Eastern Crisis of 1897–98
• 4 The Hundred Days Reform, 1898
• 5 The Boxer Incident and beyond
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography