Revisiting Japan's Restoration

New Approaches to the Study of the Meiji Transformation

Timothy Amos, Akiko Ishii, Timothy Amos, Akiko Ishii

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000508185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

This volume presents the reader with thirty-one short chapters that capture an exciting new moment in the study of the Meiji Restoration. The chapters offer a kaleidoscope of approaches and interpretations of the Restoration that showcase the strengths of the most recent interpretative trends in history writing on Japan while simultaneously offering new research pathways.

On a scale probably never before seen in the study of the Restoration outside Japan, the short chapters in this volume reveal unique aspects of the transformative event and process not previously explored in previous research. They do this in three core ways: through selecting and deploying different time frames in their historical analysis; by creative experimentation with different spatial units through which to ascertain historical experience; and by innovative selection of unique and highly original topics for analysis. The volume offers students and teachers of Japanese history, modern history, and East Asian studies an important resource for coming to grips with the multifaceted nature of Japan's nineteenth-century transformation.

The volume will also have broader appeal to scholars working in fields such as early modern/modern world history, global history, Asian modernities, gender studies, economic history, and postcolonial studies.

PART IWorld

1The Meiji Restoration and The Long Nineteenth Century

Mark Ravina

DOI: 10.4324/9781003207771-3

I will begin this chapter in a slightly contrarian fashion, not with a thesis statement, but with a brief point-of-fact outline of key Meiji Restoration reforms. The Restoration dissolved the hereditary power of regional lords to create a powerful, centralized state. The scattered, regional institutions of the old nobility were replaced by a single national army, navy, and treasury. Hereditary restrictions on commoners and distinctions within the lower classes were eliminated to create a single national people. Male nationals were subject to conscription into a new national army, and children of all classes were increasingly drawn into a standardized system of compulsory public education. That new educational system emphasized vernacular literacy as part of a broad shift away from classical learning. The new government pressed for rapid economic development, importing foreign technologies and revising local laws. It officially guaranteed freedom of speech, although in practice the regime censored criticism of the state. It established an elected national legislature and, although suffrage was restricted to property-owning adult men, this reform still recognized the voices of commoners at the highest levels of government.

The summary of the Meiji Restoration above resembles that found in many textbooks and survey histories. The distinctive feature of this summary is the absence of any proper nouns. That omission is essential to the thesis of this chapter. Stripped of proper nouns, an outline of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 can serve quite well as a template for a “generic nationalist revolution,” requiring only the correct selection of proper nouns to explain a specific historical instance. The paragraph above, for example, can be adapted for either Japan in 1868 or Hungary in 1848. Who were the leaders? For Japan, Ōkubo Toshimichi will do, but for Hungary, Kossuth Lajos. Statement of principles? Choose, as appropriate, either the Meiji Charter Oath or the Hungarian April Laws. For educational reform, insert either the emphasis of Hungarian over Latin and German, or the promotion of vernacular Japanese over literary Japanese and Chinese.

These unexpected parallels between Edo/Tokyo in 1868 and Buda/Budapest in 1848 are especially intriguing because there are no direct points of contact. There were no expatriate Japanese in Buda or Pest in 1848, nor any Hungarian nationalists in Edo in 1868. In the absence of any direct Hungarian influence on Japan, we need instead to look at the common, tacit assumptions that made nationalist revolutions seem natural, logical, and inevitable: the discourses of nationalism and nation-states. Much nineteenth-century political discourse assumed that all civilized peoples needed their own nation-states in order to celebrate and express their distinct cultures. Nationalism was thus a universalist doctrine of extreme particularism. Nationalism asserted both the uniqueness of each nation-state and its national culture but also claimed that all nation-states were equal. It thus embraced a paradox: all nationalist movements were simultaneously identical and utterly dissimilar.¹

In some ways, my argument that the Restoration was a nationalist revolution is rather old. In 1972, W. G. Beasley argued just that, but, as Marlene Mayo observed, his argument was less a thesis than the absence thereof. “We arrive at nationalist revolution,” she noted, “almost by default, after everything else has been ruled out.”² In Japanese, Mitani Hiroshi has similarly observed that when historians describe the Restoration as a nationalist revolution, they treat nationalism as an oddly self-evident response to “foreign pressure” (gai'atsu) without interrogating what nationalism might be.³ These intellectual absences across historiographic traditions are actually a testament to the power of nationalist ideology: nothing could be more nationalistic than the sense that the nation-state itself is natural and inevitable and therefore unworthy of special scrutiny. But it was, of course, the transnational discourses of the long nineteenth century that produced nationalism's privileged ontology: the sense that both Japan and Hungary were eternal nations, just waiting for their respective nation-states to catch up.⁴

Benedict Anderson famously captured the essential similarities between rival nationalist movements with his phrase “modular” nationalism. In Anderson's interpretation, the nationalist module could be “transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations.”⁵ While acknowledging an intellectual debt to Anderson, I would argue that his phrase “module” fails to capture the tension between similarity and difference inherent in nationalist thought. The legitimacy of each nationalist “module” hinged on its difference from every other module. That tension is better captured with the term “template.” Each nationalist movement needed to fill in its own local details to establish difference within a field of similitude.⁶

National currencies reveal an explicit instance of local difference within a common nationalist template. Today, most national currencies feature images of national heroes (e.g., heads of states, military leaders, authors, or scientists) or of celebrated events in national history (e.g., military victories). That template now seems natural, but it emerged only in the late 1800s. By contrast, in the early 1800s, the iconography of paper currencies was largely decorative and focused on emblems of prosperity and beauty, such as bountiful harvests or auspicious deities. In Japan, for example, paper money often featured “lucky gods” such as Hotei, while European and US currencies often depicted cornucopia. The text of such notes focused on details of convertibility. Who issued the note, and how did they guarantee its value? From the mid-1800s into the early 1900s, nation-states began to assert the exclusive right to issue paper money, preempting banks, private companies, religious orders, and sub-national governments from issuing their own notes. At the same time, nation-states began to use the field of currency to depict national icons and national heroes.⁷

In the United States, the appearance of a new nationalist iconography was partly a response to the Civil War. The nation needed not only a new financial system, but a new sense of national unity. Until the early 1860s, hundreds of different local institutions had issued their own paper currency, and the iconography was distinctly non-national. In the United States, for example, a note issued by the Mechanics Bank of Tennessee featured, not surprisingly, industrious mechanics, and a note from the Delaware Bridge Company featured the Roman goddess of prosperity, Abundantia, holding a cornucopia. During and after the US Civil War, a series of National Banking Acts established federal oversight of paper money, resulting in a de facto national currency with a national iconography. The new notes featured events such as Hernando DeSoto's “discovery” of the Mississippi and the baptism of Pocahontas, which were intended to serve as a catechism on American history. In the words of Spencer M. Clark, the head of the National Currency Bureau, an ordinary “laboring man” who would never learn history from a text would “be taught leading incidents in our country's history” through handling the notes and inquiring about the images. Ordinary commerce would thereby arouse “a National feeling.”⁸ The familiar national iconography of US currency was thus part of an explicit project to create a post-bellum sense of national unity.

Figure 1.1 First National Bank of Paris, Illinois 10 dollar bill, 1875, reproduction. Photograph courtesy of the author.

A similar transformation occurred in Japan: a new national government issued a national currency featuring a national iconography. In the Tokugawa era, paper money was intensely local: many domains, hatamoto (shogunal liege vassals), villages, temples, and shrines printed their own paper money. The iconography and text of these currencies established their value rather than addressing any broader ideological agenda. A note issued by Toyota village, for example, featured the deity Daikokuten and explained that the note would be redeemed by Hinoue Magosaemon. A note from Ōgaki domain featured Daikokuten and Ebisu. Because those “lucky gods” were common to much of East Asia, the images on the notes were local invocations of a broader international vocabulary of wealth, rather than a uniquely Japanese iconography.

In 1873, however, the Meiji government released a new series of national bank notes, designed to celebrate the glories of the Japanese past. The ¥1 note, for example, showed the 1281 destruction of the Mongol fleet by a massive storm. The Mongols had conquered China and Korea, but Japan had driven back the invaders through a combination of samurai valor and divine intervention, specifically the kamikaze, a storm that sank the Mongol fleet. The ¥10 note showed legendary Empress Jingū (CE 169–269) leading troops in the conquest of the Korean Peninsula. Her victory, according to ancient chronicles, was divinely decreed and she defeated enemy forces while pregnant with Ōjin, a future emperor. Ōjin's willingness to delay his birth until his mother had finished her mission had made Jingū a patron deity of midwives, but the ¥10 notes emphasized her military prowess and imperial ambition rather than safe childbirth.⁹

Figure 1.2 Japanese 10 yen note, 1873. Photograph courtesy of the author.

A parallel process occurred in Italy as part of the Risorgimento. There was, of course, no Italian national currency before the 1860s, and local currencies featured either generic symbols of wealth or local iconographies, such as a winged lion on notes issued by the Venetian Republic. The issuance of banknotes was gradually centralized over decades, along with other aspects of the nascent Italian state. The Banca Nazionale del Regno d'Italia (Italy's national bank) was founded in 1861 but did not get exclusive control over currency printing until the 1890s. But the national bank's first notes were, unsurprisingly, pointedly “national,” featuring images of heroes such as Dante, Columbus, Cavour, and Manin.¹⁰ These were part of a new pantheon of Italian heroes for a new Italy, parallel to new iconographies of the US and Japan. As for Hungary, the Habsburg Empire crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and there was no independent Hungarian currency until after World War I. Those postwar notes, denominated in korona, rapidly lost their value under hyperinflation. But the notes were appropriately patriotic and featured Hungarian national heroes such as Matthias Corvinus (King Matthias, 1443–1490), Prince Árpád (c. 845–c. 907), and St. Stephen (c. 975–c. 1030).

Figure 1.3 The Banca Italian, 10 lire note, 1866. Photograph courtesy of the author.

What made these currencies, like nationalist movements themselves, both identical and distinctive? In part, the commonalities were the result of new international organizations and agreements, such as the First International Monetary Conference of 1867. Those meetings had the explicit goal of esta...