Commemorating Meiji

History, Politics and the Politics of History

D.V. Botsman, Adam Clulow, D.V. Botsman, Adam Clulow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367642853
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000441352
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

2018 marked the 150th anniversary of Japan's Meiji Restoration, a milestone that the government of Prime Minister Abe Shinz? has actively sought to highlight and celebrate. Whereas other studies have focused on the events of the Meiji Restoration itself, this volume reflects upon the politically charged history of commemorating Meiji, particularly in the twentieth century. This other history of Meiji remains largely unknown outside of Japan, even though it is particularly relevant in the aftermath of a wide range of government-sponsored celebrations marking the Meiji Sesquicentennial. At moments of official historical commemoration, it is natural enough to imagine a direct line linking the act of commemoration to the original event that is the ostensible focus of remembrance and celebration. In fact, the commemoration of Meiji today cannot be understood simply in terms of the relationship between the present and 1868, or even the longer Meiji period.

The chapters in this volume highlight the politics of memory as they played out across a series of milestones over the twentieth century. Together they show the pressing need to look more closely at issues of commemoration as a key topic in their own right.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Japanese Studies.

Commemorating Meiji: History, Politics and the Politics of History

D.V. Botsman and Adam Clulow

2018 marked the 150th anniversary of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, a milestone that the government of then Prime Minister Abe Shinzō actively sought to highlight and celebrate. This volume brings together seven chapters devoted to the history and politics of commemorating Meiji. Written against the charged political backdrop of the Sesquicentennial, they all explore the question of how the Restoration has been remembered and why.

The chapters are all based on papers presented at an international conference on ‘The Meiji Restoration and its Afterlives’ held at Yale University in the United States in September 2017. The Yale conference formed one part of a larger, multi-year project initiated by Robert Hellyer, himself a contributor to this volume, and was preceded by two other highly successful conferences on aspects of the Restoration organized by Hellyer at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in January 2015, and by Harald Fuess, at Heidelberg University in Germany in July 2015. In 2017–18 a number of other events and projects related to the Meiji Sesquicentennial were organized by colleagues around the world, including conferences at Duke University, the National University of Singapore and Nankai University in China, and an ambitious web-based project on ‘Meiji at 150’ launched by the University of British Columbia in Canada.¹ These projects are all worthy of attention for the significant contributions they have made to our understanding of Japan’s rich, and highly consequential, nineteenth-century history.

As Botsman’s lead-off chapter explains, however, one of the specific goals of the Yale conference was to reflect upon the politically charged history of commemorating Meiji, particularly in the twentieth century. Awareness of this other history of Meiji remains weak outside of Japan, but is particularly significant for understanding why Prime Minster Abe’s government was so determined to mark the 150th anniversary as it did. This was the reason we decided to gather these chapters, all of which were initially published in different issues of the journal, Japanese Studies, into a single volume.

Our plans for publication were aided by the Global Connections and Violence Focus Program, sponsored by the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. This program facilitated an extended period of collaborative work between the two guest editors, and also created the opportunity for us to work with Carolyn Stevens, who, in addition to her generous support and guidance as Editor in Chief of Japanese Studies, hosted a seminar focused on the issue of Meiji commemoration at the Japanese Studies Center at Monash in August 2018.

¹ Information about the various conferences can be found here: <https://build.zsr.wfu.edu/meijirestoration/>.

At moments of official historical commemoration, it is natural enough to imagine a direct line linking the act of commemoration to the original event that is the ostensible focus of remembrance and celebration. One of the overarching points that emerges from this volume, however, is that the commemoration of Meiji today cannot be understood simply in terms of the relationship between the present and 1868, or even the longer Meiji period.

The most obvious and important precedent for the government’s ‘Meiji 150’ celebration in 2018 was in fact the Meiji Centennial of 1968, which is the main focus of Nick Kapur’s chapter. The Centennial celebration was the brainchild of then Prime Minister Satō Eisaku, who was also the brother of Abe Shinzō’s grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke (himself Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960). As Kapur and Botsman both point out, members of Japan’s post-war historical profession were fiercely critical of Satō’s plans for the 1968 Centennial, in part because they saw them (correctly, according to Kapur, in this volume) as directly inspired by the mass mobilization of the Japanese population in 1940 to celebrate the 2600th anniversary of the mythical founding of the Japanese Empire. It was seen, in other words, as an event more closely connected to the ultranationalist fervor of the early 1940s than to any aspect of the history of the Restoration period.

As Takagi Hiroshi’s chapter reminds us, for much of the pre-war period the divisions of the Boshin Civil War remained too raw to permit any kind of national celebration of the Restoration. The sense of regional division eased as those with direct experience of the Restoration era began to die away and the idea of a nation fully united in its devotion to the Emperor took firmer root. Even so, Takagi suggests that it was only from the end of the 1920s, in the context of the deepening crises of the early Shōwa period, that romanticization of the Restoration era and its ‘heroes’ began to form a significant strand of national culture.

Keeping a similar focus, Colin Jaundrill examines the legacy of the 1868 Battle of Toba-Fushimi, which represented the first major battle of the Boshin War. Although the engagement was a decisive moment for the imperial loyalist coalition, it receded quickly into the background and did not become a site of commemoration for the new government. Decades of silence were succeeded by a Boshin “boomlet” following the 1889 General Amnesty and stretching into the early Taishō (1912–1926) period. Together Takagi and Jaundrill show that the violence of the Tokugawa-Meiji transition inflicted deep wounds, which took decades to heal.

Hellyer’s contribution shows that even in Yamaguchi Prefecture (Chōshū domain), home to many of the most powerful leaders of the Meiji government, as well as Prime Minister Abe’s post-war political dynasty, local commemoration of events connected with the Restoration was clearly shaped by later developments. In tracing the history and subsequent commemoration of the Second Kiheitai, a Restoration-era militia group, Hellyer notes, for example, that it was at the height of the Pacific War in 1944 that Kishi Nobusuke connected the effort to celebrate the group’s martial prowess with a determination to resist the anticipated US invasion.

If the other chapters help illuminate the broader historical context for the ‘Meiji 150’ celebrations in Japan, and their connections to the events of 1968, 1940 and 1928, Anne Walthall’s contribution, based on her keynote address at the Yale conference, offers a compelling survey of scholarship on the Restoration in the post-war era from her perspective as one of the most innovative and influential scholars in the field. Noting the ways in which Anglophone scholars have worked in conversation with Japanese scholars, including those at the center of the opposition to the 1968 Centennial, she also reminds us that among the most important historiographical developments of recent decades has been the embrace of the perspectives of ‘people’s history’ (minshūshi) and women’s and gender history. As Takagi and several other contributors note, this effort to tell the history of Meiji ‘in terms of the experiences of ordinary people, rather than just great leaders’ is something that remained strikingly absent from the government’s official celebration of ‘Meiji 150’ in 2018 and the associated campaigns to promote domestic tourism through appeals to cartoon representations of predictable figures such as Saigō Takamori, Sakamoto Ryōma and Itō Hirobumi.

As with any such collection, each chapter in this volume is not perfectly in alignment with the others. For example, we see a certain tension between Kapur’s skepticism of the Marxist intellectual framework within which Japan’s post-war historians expressed their opposition to the 1968 Centennial, on the one hand, and Botsman’s more wholehearted embrace of their criticisms, on the other. Equally, Botsman’s suggestion that the Meiji 150 celebrations, with their willful avoidance of the legacies of imperialism and militarist aggression, need to be understood in terms of the long-term campaign to revise the post-war Constitution and revive nationalism, forms something of a contrast to Hellyer’s more hopeful emphasis on the difference between the wartime celebration of the Second Kiheitai and today’s general lack of interest in the group. Overall, we believe that these tensions illuminate the pressing need to look more closely at the issue of commemoration as an important topic in its own right. Although the official celebration of the 150th anniversary of Meiji has already faded from public attention, we very much hope that the chapters gathered in this volume will provide a valuable starting point for further debate and investigation of this kind.

The Meiji Restoration and the Politics of Post-War Commemoration: 1968/2018

D.V. Botsman

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical appraisal of the Abe Cabinet’s plans to orchestrate a national celebration of the 150th anniversary of Meiji in 2018, following the example of the Meiji Centennial celebrations of 1968. The article begins by introducing some of the criticisms voiced at the time of the 1968 Centennial by prominent Japanese historians such as Tōyama Shigeki and Yamaguchi Keiji, who saw clear links between the post-war celebration of Meiji and broader efforts to revive Japanese nationalism and promote the long-term goal of re-militarization. It goes on to consider some of the public statements that have been made by Prime Minister Abe regarding ‘Meiji 150’ and explores the significant gap between the government’s vision of the significance of Meiji and the perspectives that emerge from scholarship on the Restoration period produced in recent decades by historians in both Japan and the English-speaking world. It concludes with a brief consideration of the divide that separated Japan’s post-war historians from some of their American colleagues in the 1960s, and the role that scholars today have to play in combating the manipulation of the past.

On 23 October 1968, Tōyama Shigeki (1914–2011), whose best-selling 1951 book on the Meiji Restoration helped establish his reputation as one of post-war Japan’s most important historians, addressed a gathering of concerned citizens in Nagoya.¹ Like similar groups all over Japan, they had come together to express their opposition to the government’s official celebration of the ‘One Hundredth Anniversary of Meiji’ (Meiji hyaku nen). Earlier in the day the government had held a special commemorative ceremony at the Budōkan in Tokyo. Tōyama’s address began by describing the television footage he had seen of it. Interspersed with shots of the various dignitaries gathered to hear speeches by the Emperor and Prime Minister, he noted, were scenes of associated events held in other parts of the country: a ceremony in Aizu, to commemorate the youths of the Byakkotai, or ‘White Tiger Brigade’, who famously committed suicide rather than suffer defeat at the hands of the new Imperial army; and at the other end of the country, in Hagi, the unveiling of a bronze statue of Yoshida Shōin, the firebrand samurai who helped inspire many of the men who went on to topple the Tokugawa regime and lead the new Meiji state.² Watching this, Tōyama noted, he had been struck by how entirely miserable the whole thing was (mite ite hijō ni wabishii kanji ga shimashita).³ All over the country empty events like these had been held without the support or involvement of ordinary citizens or young people. This, he suggested, was the sad reality of the government’s effort to celebrate the Meiji Centennial.

¹ Tōyama, ‘“Meiji hyaku nen sai”’, 1.

² Takagi Hiroshi’s contribution to this special issue discusses the commemoration of the Byakkotai in Aizu, while Robert Hellyer’s article explores local memory of the Restoration in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

³ Tōyama, ‘“Meiji hyaku nen sai”’, 1.

The failure to galvanize popular support was particularly significant, Tōyama continued, given the scale and ambition of the plans for the Centennial that had originally been announced by Prime Minister Satō Eisaku (1901–75) in 1966. One reason for this outcome, he suggested, was the strong and sustained criticism voiced by members of the country’s historical profession. Nick Kapur’s article in this special issue explores the background to the historians’ opposition in greater detail, but in the end a total of 54 historical associations, virtually every such group in the country, issued statements criticizing the official celebration. According to Tōyama, this played a significant role in convincing the government to scale back or drop various aspects of its original plans, including Satō’s publicly announced intention to issue a ‘high-minded’ statement (‘kakuchō no takai’ seifu seimei) of comparable significance to the Meiji Emperor’s famous ‘Charter Oath’ of 1868.⁴

While the opposition of historians was significant, Tōyama argued that the single most important reason for the failure of the government’s plans was the widespread recognition that the main precedent, and obvious source of inspiration, for the kind of mass celebration that the Satō Cabinet had hoped to engineer was, in fact, the 1940 commemoration of the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Empire by the mythical emperor Jimmu. As Kenneth Ruoff’s recent book on the subject makes clear, the 1940 celebrations mobilized millions of ordinary people and played a key role in spreading the spirit of ultra-nationalism on the eve of the Pacific War.⁵ For Tōyama, who would have been in his mid twenties at the time, those celebrations must have made a deep impression, but in 1968 he was convinced that the Japanese people had learned enough from the disasters of the past to resist the government’s efforts to resurrect the spirit of that era. Even members of the government’s own planning committee, which, as Kapur points out, included Iinuma Kazumi, the main architect of the 2,600th anniversary celebration, eventually recognized that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Commemorating Meiji: History, Politics and the Politics of History
• 2 The Meiji Restoration and the Politics of Post-War Commemoration: 1968/2018
• 3 The Empire Strikes Back? The 1968 Meiji Centennial Celebrations and the Revival of Japanese Nationalism
• 4 The 50th and 60th Anniversaries of the Meiji Restoration: Memory, Commemoration and Political Culture in the Pre-War Period
• 5 The Meiji Restoration as a Local Event: The Second Kiheitai in History and Memory
• 6 The Meiji Restoration Seen from English-speaking Countries
• 7 Toba-Fushimi Revisited: Commemorating the Violence of the Restoration Moment
• Index