The Iwakura Mission to America and Europe

A New Assessment

Ian Nish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781873410844
• eBook ISBN: 9781135318796
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Driven by the need to identify, classify and assess western technology and culture together with a desire to advance a dialogue for reviewing the so-called 'unequal treaties' - the new Meiji government of 1868 despatched a top-level ministerial team to the west which, in 1872, arrived in the United States. In all, they spent 205 days in America, 122 days in Britain and two months in France, as well as visiting other countries including Belgium, Germany, Russia, Sweden and Italy.

Drawing on the papers given at the triennial conference of the European Association of Japanese Studies, held in Budapest in August 1997 (the year also marking the 125th anniversary of Iwakura's arrival), this volume presents a valuable new overview of the mission as a whole, with the significance and impact of the visit to each country being separately assessed. A supplement to the book looks at several 'post-Iwakura' topics, including a review of the mission's chief chronicler, Kume Kunitake.

1
AMERICA
15 JANUARY–6 AUGUST 1872

The First Stage in the Quest for Enlightenment

Alistair Swale

BARELY THREE YEARS after the Restoration in 1868, a group of high-ranking government officials and diplomats, the Iwakura mission, visited the United States. The mission, led by one of the prominent aristocrats in the Restoration, Iwakura Tomomi, was arguably Japan’s first attempt at top-level and full-scale diplomacy. The itinerary of the mission was to take in not only the major Western powers with a significant naval presence in the Pacific and Asia, America, England, France and Holland, but also quite an extraordinary array of other major and minor powers including Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, and, of course, Russia. In terms of the proportion of time spent in these countries respectively, America and Britain received by far the greater portion with just over six months in America and four months in Britain; practically half of the entire time spent abroad. Next was France with just over three months, Germany and Switzerland with approximately four weeks each, Italy with three and the remaining states, including Russia, being given itineraries lasting approximately two weeks at most. A notable exception among the minor powers was, of course, Switzerland where the mission relaxed at leisure as it had earlier done in Scotland.¹

The official objective of the mission was three-fold: primarily to present a credible face to the Western powers following the Restoration and thereby secure recognition; secondly, to investigate the social and economic conditions of the various powers and clarify the basis of their ‘enlightened civilization’; and, finally, to investigate the possibility of renegotiating the unequal trade-treaty provisions existent at the time. The first of these objectives was obviously of such importance as to warrant the touring en masse of some of the most significant figures in the Restoration, men who arguably could ill afford to turn their attention away from the domestic front. The second objective signified an attempt to address a further practical issue which probably doubled the urgency in undertaking such a mission in the first place; namely, the clarification of how domestic policy should proceed in detail.

The Restoration leadership realized that further domestic reforms would be necessary but they were not agreed on the proper course and, moreover, they also realized that, if the wrong policies were enacted, the consequences would be disastrous. Consequently, using the concrete examples provided by the Western powers as a set of references was an indispensable means to clarifying the way ahead. The third objective, treaty revision, was recognized as being ‘difficult’ to carry out to say the least. Yet there was hope that, given favourable circumstances, things might transpire in such a way as to enable them to achieve such a favourable outcome. Nevertheless, it was always intended to be a relatively secondary priority, the speedy resolution of which would be a bonus rather than an absolute necessity.

This chapter deals with the progress of the mission with regard to the above objectives while sojourning in the United States from 15 January to 6 August 1872. As an overall theme, the motif of ‘Enlightenment’, particularly in the sense of what it came to mean for the Japanese in their own terms, will be focused on. While the mission was fundamentally a diplomatic initiative it was, most significantly, also an exercise in initiation and discovery as well.² In the process of discussing the American sojourn under the aforementioned theme it is hoped that some distinction between the mythology surrounding early ‘Enlightenment’ thought in Japan and the vision of enlightenment and civilization that actually crystalized in the minds of contemporary Japanese commentators can be brought into clearer relief.³

The standard record of the mission’s activities is Kume Kunitake’s Beio Kairan Jikki which details the events and outcomes of the encounters with various Western powers on an almost day-to-day basis. This work is naturally indispensable. But another record of the visit, including transcripts of various speeches in English, was compiled by Charles Lanman and entitled The Japanese in America. A significant aspect of these speeches, both those made by the Japanese and the Americans, was the regularity with which they referred to ‘enlightenment’ and ‘progress’. Iwakura Tomomi stated boldly in Washington: ‘We came for enlightenment, and gladly find it here.’ Ito Hirobumi proudly detailed the internal development that had been carried out since the Restoration and how rapidly the country was advancing in emulation of its model, the United States.⁴

As for how the Americans themselves perceived the presence of such an unusual company, we find that the reception was almost without exception warm and enthusiastic. Commerce was the keynote for scores of businessmen attending various public functions and this should not be surprising given that America was entering into that period of extraordinary technological and entrepreneurial vigour which came to be termed the ‘Gilded Age’. As far as one can tell, the local media were eager to report on the mission’s activities and it was not merely for the sake of novelty. Lanman implies that there were some colourful, if inaccurate, depictions of the mission in some newspaper reports, yet he is also careful to note the more serious commentaries as well. In particular, we may note the following (perhaps overdone comment) from the Daily Evening Bulletin in San Francisco.

Japan is today, all the circumstances of her previous condition considered, the most progressive nation on the globe…. Unlike the Chinese, its people readily make changes in clothing, food, manufactures, and modes of living, when they see improvement therein. They are, as a race, impulsive, highly intelligent, brave to rashness, cleanly in their habits, have a high sense of personal honor, and are universally polite, from the highest dignitary to the lowest in the land, and withal are kindly disposed towards foreigners, especially Americans.⁵

Apart from the positive reception amongst businessmen and in certain media reports, one finds that the political reception was, if anything, even more cordial. It is certainly the case that the mission did not succeed in securing treaty revision as was at one point anticipated. yet the Japanese received quite extraordinary support from Congress itself when it voted that the money received for the Shimonoseki Indemnity be returned to the Japanese mission in total. It is also significant that the Japanese were accorded such favour given that the American government, on both the domestic and the international fronts, had plenty of other matters to hold their attention. President Grant’s administration was becoming embroiled in increasingly embarrassing corruption and scandals. In diplomatic affairs, there were several weighty problems to be resolved between America and Britain which included the Alabama claims and the issue of the future alignment of Canada. Consequently, the Japanese might well interpret the degree of cordiality and cooperation encountered from President Grant’s administration as being indicative of quite extraordinary goodwill indeed.⁶

As Iwakura’s words regarding the search for enlightenment, and indeed the undertaking of the mission itself, suggest, there was a desire amongst the Meiji leadership to gain some kind of meaningful appreciation of what was meant by ‘enlightenment’, both in the sense of what it meant to their Western counterparts and what it should mean for them. To be sure, there was an element of window-dressing in the exercise but it would not be adequate to dismiss the mission or Iwakura’s expressions regarding ‘enlightenment’ purely in those terms. Though more keenly felt by some than others, there was a broad realization that institutional reforms were inadequate by themselves and that some kind of internal reform was required as well. It can be said that the word ‘enlightenment’ was used by the members of Iwakura mission as a kind of catch-phrase for the particular mind-set or consciousness that would be required in the ‘modern age’.

Perhaps indicative of Japan’s preparedness for pursuing better relations with the outside world and attaining a deeper understanding of ‘enlightenment’ was the fact that Japan’s first formal representative in the United States was Mori Arinori, a young member of the Satsuma oligarchy who had spent several years in England and the United States, including a year-long stint in a reclusive religious sect. Mori was distinguished by his immense courage (he was one of the earliest proponents of the abolition of swords), mixed with extraordinary impetuosity.⁷ Nevertheless, Mori warrants special mention in relation to the Iwakura mission in that he was one of the leading authorities on American affairs at the time, was consulted on matters relating to the kind of image that ought to be projected to the foreign powers and, more importantly, was himself an extremely significant figure within the broader movement of ‘bunmei kaika’ that was initiated from this time onward. For these reasons he is incorporated quite significantly in the ensuing discussion.

CONCEPTIONS OF ‘ENLIGHTENMENT’

It should be acknowledged that conceptions of enlightenment are extremely broad-ranging and hard to pin down. Enlightenment is a word that has come down to us suffering from ravages of extraordinary over-use and acquiring some less than helpful nuances along the way. Much like the word ‘modern’, which merely denotes that some thing is contemporary or of the current mode, it came to function, for the most part, as a de facto synonym for ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. Enlightenment has connotations of moral or intellectual excellence, it indicates a higher or better form of consciousness, however it has evolved with a decreasing sense of what is practically excellent or what makes one form of consciousness ‘higher’ than another. Such terms tend to become largely ‘dead’ through overuse as terms of approbation and, to be sure, this was increasingly the way that the word ‘enlightenment’ had come to be used in the nineteenth century (the irony of such usage was not lost on some of the more acute Japanese observers of Western society and morals).⁸

However, in order to establish some kind of useful delineation of the core substance of what for the Japanese Enlightenment might mean, I propose first to consider the possibility of a less culture-specific definition which springs from a socio-historical view of what ‘enlightenment’ signifies within the broader context of social development toward industrialization. The kind of ‘industrial society’ constituting this context is intended as simply a social configuration that exhibits the organizational traits requisite for the establishment of large-scale human cohabitations: an advanced governmental and bureaucratic structure along with a productive sector that is characterized by the forms of division of labour that enable massmanufacture of goods and their efficient distribution. Enlightenment on a cultural level is profoundly related to the promotion of rational enquiry, both in the sense of scientific investigation in the physical realm or rational fathoming of less tangible entities such as society, the market, or the mind. It is also tied in, as Gellner rather deftly illustrates, with the universalization of intellectual discourses which are made accessible through generic educational and literary institutions. Enlightenment discourse, therefore, relates to the aforementioned mode of enquiry which occurs as part of an intellectual reorientation that is a sine qua non in the establishment of an industrial society.⁹

In the West, that which is referred to as ‘the Enlightenment’ was a very particular incarnation of rationality and it would pay to note some of the historical peculiarities that form the basis of Western conceptions of a proper mind-set for the modern world. Furthermore, we must make these peculiarities clear if we are to approach some more concrete and distinct notion of what came to be understood by Enlightenment by the Japanese during their stay in the United States.¹⁰

Perhaps the single most distinctive element in Enlightenment thinking in the West is Christianity. Not that there was one uniform conception thereof, nor even a uniform attitude in response to the demands that the various traditions made on their adherents. There were, of course, those who made opposition to the Church a point of priority outstripping other concerns. Certain ideologues of the French Revolution furnish us with several examples and one also finds examples of atheistic intellectualism among the English-speakers as well (Hume being perhaps the most obvious example). In contrast to these, however, there were also those who, far from seeing Christianity being inimical to Enlightenment, determined it was an integral part of it. We can trace this more conservative lineage from Locke through to Burke. Either way, the Christian doctrines conditioned the emergent conceptions of Enlightenment profoundly. In an ironic sense, the appeals for liberty (and sometimes equality as well) drew very directly on the history of religious enthusiasm from the preceding two-and-a-half centuries.¹¹ Moreover, it is tempting to draw parallels between state of nature theories and the biblical notions of the Garden of Eden and the Fall. It was precisely the presence of these Christian traditions which made the Pandora’s box of rational enquiry so iconoclastic, often engendering bitter disputes in the West.

A second major distinguishing factor in Western Enlightenment is arguably the experience of relatively intense international contact, with concomitant intense interaction and competition. As the interconnections between the royal families of Europe amply indicate, the nations of Europe had been in each other’s orbit over many successive generations. The intensity of interaction ensured that social developments, and indeed intellectual developments, would proceed with extraordinary rapidity. A military advantage gained today could well be lost tomorrow; the heresy of today could become the dogma of tomorrow. Under these conditions only the most hybrid and convincing forms of intellectual discourse would survive. Perhaps it is primarily to this factor that we can attribute the rise of universalized discourses that brook no plea based on particular interest or superstition, but rather demand an answer that holds water within a unitary cultural sphere. When we consider that this ‘unitary’ sphere was necessarily unitary only within the bounds of the known world and therefore somewhat relative, we may then perceive the peculiarities of rationalism and speculative philosophy in the Western context with greater clarity. Through rational measurement and speculation, universal measures and ideals were established. This is not to say, however, that all the results of this intellectual activity were necessarily universal in an absolute sense. The scientific and materially quantitative activities had a transparency that was perhaps more or less beyond dispute, yet there remained areas of speculative philosophy which, at least in some cases, won out not because they were necessarily verifiable or quantifiable, but simply because they made sense to European sentiment and experience.¹²

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF JAPANESE ENLIGHTENMENT

The above peculiarities have particular significance as we consider the initiation towards Enlightenment that followed the Meiji Restoration. We must note that Christianity was for the new government, philosophically speaking at least, a non-issue. The revoking of the ban on Christianity in 1873 signified the pragmatic recognition of the necessity of not provoking the Western powers needlessly. Kume’s record of the mission suggests that rather than being overawed by Christianity they were somewhat relieved. They did not underestimate its function in Western societies in general, but they were also aware of the potential incompatibilities between the Christian doctrines and the march of progress, and knew that it was by and large so alien in sentiment to the Japanese as to pose in all likelihood a minimal social threat.¹³

As for the language of internationalism and universalism, this was indeed to pose a greater difficulty. Japan’s isolation and almost negligible experience of intercourse with any foreign country in recent times, let alone the extremely foreboding industrialized Western powers, was a great hurdle by any estimation. As a result, the Japanese found themselves having to dance to a new tune and it was one th...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: AMERICA 15 JANUARY–6 AUGUST 1872
• 2: BRITAIN [1] 17 AUGUST–16 DECEMBER 1872
• 2: BRITAIN [2] 17 AUGUST–16 DECEMBER 1872
• 3: FRANCE 16 DECEMBER 1872–17 FEBRUARY 1873
• 4: BELGIUM 17–24 FEBRUARY 1873
• 5: GERMANY 7–28 MARCH, 15–17 APRIL, 1–8 MAY 1873
• 6: RUSSIA 29 MARCH–15 APRIL 1873
• 7: SWEDEN 23–30 APRIL 1873
• 8: ITALY 9 MAY–3 JUNE 1873
• 9: ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN JAPAN AFTER THE IWAKURA MISSION
• 10: THE SOCIAL WHIRL OF ‘WHITE’ YOKOHAMA AFTER IWAKURA’S RETURN
• 11: KUME KUNITAKE AS A HISTORIOGRAPHER Iwakura and After
• AFTERMATH AND ASSESSMENT
• APPENDIX THE KUME MUSEUM OF ART (TOKYO)
• ENDNOTES