The SAGE Handbook of Modern Japanese Studies

James D Babb, James D Babb, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848606630
• eBook ISBN: 9781412962353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A welcome addition to any reading list for those interested in contemporary Japanese society.
- Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Society, University of Oxford

"I know no better book for an accessible and up-to-date introduction to this complex subject than The SAGE Handbook of Modern Japan Studies."
- Hiroko Takeda, Associate Professor, Organization for Global Japanese Studies, University of Tokyo

"Pioneering and nuanced in analysis, yet highly accessible and engaging in style."
- Yoshio Sugimoto, Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University

The SAGE Handbook of Modern Japanese Studies includes outstanding contributions from a diverse group of leading academics from across the globe. This volume is designed to serve as a major interdisciplinary reference work and a seminal text, both rigorous and accessible, to assist students and scholars in understanding one of the major nations of the world.

James D. Babb is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University.

 

Part I Land, History and Culture

1 Modern Japan in History

Andrew Cobbing

How and when did modern Japan begin? Conventionally, histories of this topic embark with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the advent of a modern nation state that more or less endures to this day. Alternatively, they depart from 1853, when the arrival of Commodore Perry's ‘Black Ships’ signaled the ‘Opening’ of Japan and, with it, a notional leap forward into something called modernity. To those inhabitants who were not yet aware that their islands needed opening this came as a surprise; something was clearly afoot, but apart from the fear of upheaval who knew what it meant? The Americans and Europeans, however, thought they knew exactly what was going on. Now that commercial treaties – subsequently decried as ‘unequal’ – had been imposed on the ailing Tokugawa shogunate in 1858, to them it stood to reason that they were standing on the threshold of a new modern chapter in Japan's history.

So began their story and, by extension, ours as well (at least in part). Steeped in the values of the Enlightenment and emboldened by the achievements of the industrial age, their brave new world was driven by an absolute faith in the march of progress (and their own leading role). They had every right to be there, of course, since their civilizing influence would help to lift the Japanese people out of the relatively primitive state they must have endured to date. Central to their mission was also a desire to rescue Japan from the self-imposed isolation which they had been told kept the population sealed off from the outside world (and Western progress in particular). It took a few rounds of gunboat diplomacy, an arms race, civil war and regime change to carry this argument, but Japan under the new Meiji state would turn out to be a precocious pupil. Complete with railroads and telegraph lines, the rapid progress of the 1870s was hailed by Western observers as near miraculous, their praise reflecting as much on their own excellent tutelage as Japanese efforts to embrace this new modern era.

Essentially, these observers viewed Japan and its history through the prism of their own experience, including a romantic nostalgia for traditional cultures then being swept away by the onslaught of the industrial revolution. To them the Japan they had ‘unlocked’ recalled a feudal society from the distant past; few readers of Walter Scott's popular Ivanhoe, for example, failed to compare the two-sworded samurai they encountered with medieval knights. Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed this outlook vividly in his biographical portrait of Yoshida Shōin, the celebrated Chōshū activist. Describing a trip that Yoshida made overland to Nagasaki in 1853, he told readers how the hero of his tale had ‘travelled through the Middle Ages on his journey into the nineteenth century’ (Stevenson, 1882). In his view, then, the Dutch trading post at Nagasaki, for centuries the only point of contact with the West, made it seem like a beachhead of modernity on the shore of medieval Japan.

Before long such historical imagery would transform perspectives on this country's past. In Japan itself the custom for measuring the passage of time had been to count years by the imperial era in which they fell; in recent generations, for example, Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa and now Heisei. Alternatively, eras were labeled according to the seat of power of the regime then in charge, such as Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi or Edo. The notion of a ‘middle’ age being superseded by a modern era had not really featured before, but the idea took hold and has now come to frame the way that everyone views the history of these islands. So a European model for measuring historical time was projected onto Japan's past; everything up to and including the Edo period came to be known as pre-modern, and modern Japan just described everything after that.

At this stage our story seemed to be literally straightforward. In the event it was less so, partly due to the complex train of events that followed, and also because people today do not necessarily look upon this process in quite the same unequivocal light as Western observers in the nineteenth century. Questions that often surface include: What is the nature of modernity anyway? And what exactly is Japan? Historians usually make it their business, for example, to try and identify key turning points, the discontinuities that signal epochal change in the continuous river of time. 1868 (or 1853) may have been singled out early on as the start of Japan's modern age, but as we shall see this outlook has since come under review. Similarly, in the twentieth century, postwar historians immediately saw 1945 as a key turning point signaling the end of Japan's empire (and the start of the Allied Occupation), but even this perspective has now been questioned to some extent. And more recently 1990 has attracted attention as possibly marking the high watermark of Japan's postwar recovery, although this is still so fresh in contemporary memory that historians struggle to pin down the significance of changes that practically feel like yesterday. For want of any more definitive turning points, however, these dates will frame the parameters of the timeframe under discussion here.

Early Histories of Modern Japan

Historical accounts of these islands had been written before, of course, mainly in Japanese. Notable examples were influenced by Chinese dynastic histories, such as the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) produced as early as 712, which charted the imperial lineage from its inception in the ‘Age of the Gods'. A more recent project was the Dai Nihon Shi (Great History of Japan), a multi-volume narrative of the imperial line commissioned in the seventeenth century by Tokugawa Mitsukuni, daimyo of the Mito domain and a nephew of Ieyasu, founder of the new regime. Originally compiled by a Ming refugee who fled China during the Manchu invasions, this was developed by subsequent generations of Mito School scholars until its eventual completion in the Meiji period and publication in 1906. While Marco Polo had mentioned Japan briefly in his Travels as a land of gold, the first European historic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Illustration List
• Notes on the Editor and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Historical Timeline of Modern Japan
• Introduction
• Part I Land, History and Culture
• 1 Modern Japan in History
• 2 Anthropology of Modern Japan
• 3 The Practice of Religion in Japan: An Exploration of the State of the Field
• 4 Mass Media in Japan
• 5 Heritage Management in Present-day Japan
• 6 Geography's Contributions to Japanese Studies
• 7 Regionalism and the Local
• Part II Society
• 8 Education
• 9 Feminism
• 10 ‘How to Sex'? The Contested Nature of Sexuality in Japan
• 11 Gender Equity in Japan
• 12 Policing in Japan
• 13 Organised Crime
• Part III Medicine and Health Care
• 14 A Brief History of Japanese Medicine
• 15 Health Care in Japan: Excellent Population Health, Low Medical Expenditures, yet Ambiguous Place of Primary Care
• 16 Medical Education in Japan
• 17 Bioethics and Medico-legal Issues in Japan
• 18 Mental Health in Japan
• Part IV Politics and Foreign Relations
• 19 Political ‘Science’ and the Study of Japanese Politics
• 20 Parties and Elections in Japan
• 21 Postwar Democracy
• 22 Civil Society in Japan
• 23 Japan's International Relations
• 24 Japan and Globalization
• 25 Japan–United States Relations
• 26 Foreign Relations with China
• Part V Economy
• 27 The Japanese Economy
• 28 Japanese Business and Management
• 29 Japanese Consumers and Consumerism
• 30 Labor Relations1
• 31 Foreign Workers in Japan1
• 32 Agriculture
• 33 Energy
• Index