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Part I Land, History and Culture
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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 âBlack Shipsâ signaled the âOpeningâ 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 â subsequently decried as âunequalâ â 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 âunlockedâ 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 ShĆin, the celebrated ChĆshĆ« activist. Describing a trip that Yoshida made overland to Nagasaki in 1853, he told readers how the hero of his tale had âtravelled through the Middle Ages on his journey into the nineteenth centuryâ (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, TaishĆ, ShĆwa 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 âmiddleâ 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 âAge 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...
