Outposts of Civilization

Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American-Japanese Relations

Joseph M. Henning

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814790649
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Discriminazione e rapporti razziali

Civilization and progress, Gilded Age Americans believed, were inseparable from Anglo-Saxon heritage and Christianity. In rising to become the first Asian and non-Christian world power, Meiji Japan (1868-1912) challenged this deeply-held conviction, and in so doing threatened racial and cultural hierarchies central to American ideology and foreign policy.

To reconcile Japan's stature with American notions of Western supremacy, both nations embarked on an active campaign to construct an identity for the Japanese which would recognize Japan's progress and abilities without threatening Americans' faith in white, Christian superiority. Japanese efforts included reassurances in diplomatic exchanges and in the American press that their nation adhered to the central tenets of Western civilization, namely constitutional government, freedom of religion, and open commerce. Many anxious Americans eagerly accepted such offerings, and happily re-conceived the Japanese as adoptive Anglo-Saxons.

As with the best new work in diplomatic history, in Outposts of Civilization Henning considers culture to be integral to understanding foreign relations. Thus in addition to official documents and press reports, he examines American missionaries' writings on the Japanese, and American and Japanese art and literature produced during the Gilded Age. In exploring the delicate and deliberate process of identity construction, and how these discourses on race and progress resonated throughout the twentieth century, Henning has produced a fascinating and important study of American-Japanese relations.

Chapter 1
THROUGH A REVERSED OPERA GLASS

During the 1854 treaty negotiations, Commodore Matthew C. Perry sent ashore a detachment of twenty-four boats filled with gifts for the Japanese: rifles, pistols, clocks, agricultural tools, Irish potatoes, whiskey, and champagne. These were not merely tokens of friendship. All had been chosen to demonstrate the benefits of commerce, and some were meant also to exemplify the power of American innovation and civilization.¹

Two items attracted special attention from the Japanese: a telegraph and a quarter-scale locomotive. After the Americans had unpacked and assembled the telegraph, its wires stretched from the treaty conference house to a building nearly one mile distant and carried messages in Japanese, English, and Dutch— all to the amazement of the Japanese. Another source of marvel was the steam locomotive, which came with a tender, a passenger car, and enough track to form a circle 350 feet in diameter. Because the locomotive was too small to enter, the engineer rode on the tender, feeding the fire with one hand and controlling the engine with the other. Although outfitted with sliding windows and upholstered seats, the car could accommodate passengers only on its roof. As the engine’s steam whistle pierced the air, the train sped around the track at twenty miles per hour while Japanese dignitaries took turns perching on the car, a spectacle that the Americans described as “not a little ludicrous.” As expected, these demonstrations of technological prowess duly impressed the Japanese, whose responses amused the Americans.²

Not to be outdone, the Japanese offered their own display of strength a few days later. Fifty sumo wrestlers, each weighing from two to four hundred pounds, filed out before the assembled Americans. Perry accepted an invitation to feel the immense arms and neck of one of these “stall-fed bulls” and was surprised to find solid muscle, which soon was put to use. Near the conference house, the Japanese had stacked two hundred bales of rice, weighing 135 pounds apiece, to present to the expedition. On signal, the wrestlers lifted and carried the bales past Perry and down to the beach three hundred feet away. Most bore at least two bales, whether above their heads, on their shoulders, or under each arm. Some managed four bales, while one wrestler even carried a bale suspended from his teeth. Next, the wrestlers engaged in sumo matches before the American sailors and officers. In the eyes of these guests, however, the bouts demonstrated little athletic skill. The Americans were truly fascinated by the wrestlers’ size and strength but found their sport to be little more than a disgusting and barbaric curiosity that sharply contrasted with the American gifts. After the sumo exhibition, the Americans turned with pride to demonstrate yet again the telegraph and railroad. “In place of a show of brute animal force,” noted the expedition’s official report, “there was a triumphant revelation, to a partially enlightened people, of the success of science and enterprise.”³

The members of the expedition were confident that they had proved the superiority of their civilization. In their journals, they declared with both disdain and disappointment that the gifts of fabric and lacquerware presented by the Japanese were of little value compared to those presented by the United States. Reflecting on these displays, an interpreter for the expedition wrote in his journal:

Indeed, there was a curious mélange to-day here, a junction of the east and west, … epaulettes and uniforms, shaven pates and night-gowns, soldiers with muskets and drilling in close array, soldiers with petticoats, sandals, two swords, and all in disorder, like a crowd—all these things, and many other things, exhibiting the difference between our civilization and usages and those of this secluded, pagan people.

From the perspective of the Perry Expedition, Japan’s only impressive strength—its loincloth-clad wrestlers—was no match for the technological trappings of American power.⁴

Like their naval forerunners, Americans who visited Japan after the Meiji Restoration expected it to be a barbaric or semi-civilized land full of amusing curiosities. Most travelers were bound by these expectations and saw little to contradict them. Depicting the Japanese as despotic, diminutive, and inferior, Americans reported that evolution and progress had long ago ground to a halt in Asiatic and secluded Japan.

Before examining the accounts of American travelers, we should first inspect their baggage. From eighteenth-and nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, Americans drew commonly held assumptions that influenced their interpretations of Japan. Japan eventually challenged many of these ideas, compelling American diplomats, missionaries, and scholars to reexamine and, in some cases, to revise their beliefs. In the case of the first American travelers to Japan, however, preconceptions tended to shape observations rather than vice versa. They considered the Japanese, as members of the “Mongolian” race, to be inferior to “Caucasian” Americans. A variety of racial and social theorists claimed to have demonstrated that this alleged inferiority was rooted in immutable biological traits and extended into social attributes.

Our understanding of the concept “race” has changed immensely during the last three centuries and continues to be the center of heated debate today. Anthropologists, physiologists, and geneticists currently are engaged in a discussion of the utility of race as an objective biological category. Many question whether race is a biological reality at all and explain it instead as a cultural construct, which physiologist Jared Diamond calls “another commonsense ‘truth’ destined to follow the flat Earth into oblivion.” From genetic research we have learned that races are not comprised of neat, distinct sets of biological characteristics. Using physical characteristics such as skin and eye color as visual indicators of race, humans have created categories, such as “white” and “black,” that do not hold up under closer scientific scrutiny. Genetic variation—blood type, for instance—does not cluster neatly within these categories; rather, it cuts sharply across them. In fact, variation between races is a minor component of human biological diversity; genetic variation is greater among individuals of the same race than between one race and another.⁵

Genetic data, of course, were not available to earlier scientists. In their efforts to explain human biological variation, these scholars too often were influenced—some unconsciously, some consciously—by social and cultural values. The result was biological determinism, in which social and cultural traits were ascribed to races as innate and permanent biological characteristics. Presumably, one’s race determined one’s character. Even the founder of the system of biological taxonomy, Carolus Linnaeus, included cultural characterizations in his descriptions of human subspecies. In 1758 he divided the species Homo sapiens into four geographic subspecies, and, though he did not organize them hierarchically, his characterizations reflected subjective value judgements: Americanus was “red, ill-tempered, subjugated”; Europaeus was “white, serious, strong”; Asiaticus was “yellow, melancholy, greedy”; and Afer was “black, impassive, lazy.”⁶

A student of Linnaeus, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, reconfigured this taxonomy into an ostensibly scientific hierarchy of races. Believing that Eurasia’s Caucasus region was the likely birthplace of humanity, he coined the term “Caucasian” to refer to Europeans. He believed that Caucasians represented the ideal standard of physical beauty from which other races had gradually deviated. Also, by adding a fifth subspecies, the Malay, to Linnaeus’s taxonomy, Blumenbach was able to propose a two-legged hierarchy capped by Caucasians. In one leg of the hierarchy, the Mongolian race deviated the most from the Caucasian ideal, while Americans appeared as an intermediary form. In the other leg, Ethiopians deviated the most, while the Malay race was intermediary. Blumenbach’s hierarchical taxonomy became common fare in American science and culture.⁷

In the mid-nineteenth century, the “American school” of anthropology, which embraced Blumenbach’s classification system, attempted to explain racial diversity by championing the theory of polygenesis: the races had been created separately. Racial characteristics and capabilities were innate, permanent qualities coeval with each race’s creation. Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia physician with a skull collection described by contemporaries as “the American Golgotha,” measured the average cranial capacities of the races and provided empirical evidence that seemed to support polygenesis. According to his findings as presented in Crania Americana (1839), Caucasians had the highest average capacity, followed by Mongolians, Malays, Americans, and Ethiopians. Morton argued that the Caucasian had “the highest intellectual endowments,” while the Mongolian was “ingenious, imitative, and highly susceptible of cultivation.” Ostensibly, these were permanent differences rooted in separate creations—they could not be explained by the effects of climate after a single divine act of creation. (Scientist Stephen Jay Gould has reanalyzed Morton’s data and found a “patchwork of fudging and finagling,” but no evidence of conscious fraud. Gould’s inquiry revealed no significant differences among Morton’s groups that could not be explained by differences in stature.)⁸

The American school’s ideas were summarized at length and widely distributed in Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854), which they dedicated to the late Morton. The leading American text on race in the second half of the nineteenth century, Types of Mankind claimed to provide extensive evidence for the idea of a racial hierarchy capped by the Caucasian race. Illustrations purported to demonstrate similarities between the faces and skulls of Africans and those of chimpanzees. In the section Nott authored, he contended that the “Negro” had never raised or borrowed a single civilization, and the “Mongolian” had achieved only “prolonged semi-civilizations.” In contrast, “Caucasian” history was replete with a series of distinct civilizations. Human progress, Nott wrote, had arisen primarily from racial competition and its stimulants of conquest and colonization.⁹

Lending additional support to the idea of racial hierarchy were Teutonic-germ theory and Anglo-Saxonism. Many Americans embraced the notion that England and the United States had inherited their capacities for free political institutions from the Anglo-Saxon descendants of Teutonic tribes in the forests of Germany. These tribes, who conquered Rome in the fifth century C.E., were believed to have established representative tribal councils that exemplified their commitment to freedom and individual rights; they had enshrined legal principles of trial by jury, private property, and the rule of law. Henry Adams and John Fiske were among the prominent scholars who asserted that the Anglo-Saxons, Germanic tribes who crossed the English Channel, had planted this Teutonic germ of freedom and civilization in England. Although not identical to the ideas of Blumenbach and Morton, Anglo-Saxonism augmented their claims for Caucasian superiority. Thus nineteenth-century Americans could trace the westward migration of freedom and civilization, beginning with the origins of the Caucasian race and continuing through the Teutons, the Anglo-Saxons, and the English, finally culminating in themselves.¹⁰

This continuing advance was manifested in America’s westward continental expansion, for which the telegraph and railroad served as visual symbols in popular culture. The Currier and Ives lithograph Across the Continent, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (1868) depicts a passenger train steaming through a settlement of log buildings, on the outskirts of which some residents are clearing land. A telegraph line parallels the railroad tracks. Across the tracks from the town, Indians on horseback watch the train but are held back by a wall of smoke from its locomotive. In American Progress (1872), John Gast painted an allegorical female figure in a diaphanous gown floating above a prairie landscape. Moving from right to left—east to west—she carries a telegraph wire stretching back to poles behind her and is accompanied below by settlers in wagons and a trio of railroads. Portrayed as tamers of the wilderness, the telegraph and railroad were engines of American civilization and progress.¹¹

Even Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871) lent support to the common belief in the westward course of progress by suggesting that American success could be explained by the immigration of Europe’s most “energetic, restless, and courageous men.” Darwin’s earlier work, however, had undermined theories of biological hierarchy and polygenesis. In The Origin of Species (1859), he argued that species had neither been created separately nor evolved along a hierarchy. Instead, different species had emerged through a process of natural selection in which random physical variations had facilitated survival and reproduction in certain environments. Individuals with such favorable variations were more likely to survive, reproduce, and thus pass on these traits to their offspring. Natural selection involved divergence, not linear progress. Species existed side by side in a taxonomy, not one above the other in a hierarchy.¹²

But natural selection was not the only influential nineteenth-century theory of evolution. While Darwin described a biological competition for survival that resulted in diverse species, Herbert Spencer addressed the evolution of both biological and social entities. Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Equating evolution and progress, his works sold more than half a million copies in the United States and were discussed in such journals as the North American Review, the Nation, and Popular Science Monthly. In his elaborate, multivolume “Synthetic Philosophy,” Spencer adopted the pre-Darwinian evolution theory of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who in the early nineteenth century had contended that physical traits can be acquired and transmitted to descendants. Giraffes, for example, had long necks because for generations their ancestors had stretched to reach food. Although Darwin had rejected Lamarckian theory, Spencer used it to argue that evolution produced progress, not merely diversity. Through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, species and races could gradually improve. According to Spencer, this evolutionary process could be traced in social as well as biological organisms.¹³

On the level of individuals, Spencer applied recapitulation theory. The discovery that vertebrate embryos develop gill slits that later disappear led him to conclude that human individuals pass through developmental stages that parallel human evolution from savagery to civilization. Thus the minds of civilized children pass through a primitive stage. For Spencer, however, in savage races the childlike stage was permanent. The adults of primitive races, for instance, were emotionally impulsive, like the children of civilized races. “The intellectual traits of the uncivilized,” Spencer proclaimed, “are traits recurring in the children of the civilized.” To him, contemporary primitive societies were living representatives of earlier stages in evolution. By studying them, scholars could reconstruct the early evolution of human social organization. Furthermore, from Spencer’s Lamarckian perspective, the nervous system of each individual was shaped by the experiences of preceding generations, and national and racial characteristics were inherited. Because the accumulation of historical experience in the course of civilization had produced higher forms of reasoning, civilized people inherited larger brains than the uncivilized.¹⁴

According to Spencer, both social and biological organisms evolved from simple homogeneity to complex heterogeneity. Societies evolved from the militant type, which restricted individual liberty, to the industrial type, which defended individuality. In his Synthetic Philosophy, the linkage of civilization and progress with the process of evolutionary natural selection buttressed the hierarchy first proposed by Blumenbach. Through biological competition, the human species had surpassed the rest of the animal kingdom; through social competition, Caucasians dominated primitive races. A theory of competitive social evolution now complemented the theory of biological selection and provided a “scientific” foundation for the development of Social Darwinism.¹⁵

Spencer’s reputation today, of course, pales in comparison to that of Darwin. Yet it is an injustice to the latter—one of the nineteenth century’s most brilliant thinkers—that the dubious creed of Social Darwinism bears his name rather than Spencer’s, as its laissez-faire principles relied far more heavily on the philosophy of Spencer than on Darwin’s science. And, adding further irony, Spencer himself was a Lamarckian, not a Darwinian.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Spencer’s star shined brightly. Darwin had designed an enduring theory of evolution, but it was limited to biologica...