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Thursday, September 30, 2021

Japan and the west

Japan and the west - HistoryExtra

"‘There isn't a feeling that Christianity is unacceptable in philosophical terms, or unacceptable theologically. Japan isn’t anti-christian in that sense. It's much more a law and order issue, and a politics issue... Hideyoshi Toyotomi… when he starts to try and bring the country together… he gets down to Kyussu. And he finds that a huge number of people have converted to Christianity. They're, including really influential feudal lords, when people convert, he finds them smashing up Buddhist temples, smashing up Shinto shrines, and some of these feudal lords, their loyalties, it isn't quite clear where they lie. Do they lie with the Portuguese? Do they lie with the pope? Is there some higher authority basically, than Toyotomi Hideyoshi. And he's a famously vain man, I don't think he could stand the idea that there might be. And so famously, he crucifies 26 Christians in Nagasaki... he has a very interesting worry about Christianity, in terms of what it says about European culture. He says, in Japan, someone who has a remarkable life would change remarkable things, may end up after death, becoming a God...

In the late 1860s, and 1870s, there's a real wide open embrace in Japan, of what the West might be able to offer. This is an era where slogans are really important. And there are two or three, which I think really get to the heart of what Japan's new leaders are thinking about in 1868. The first one is *something*, which is enrich the country, strengthen the military. Basically, if Japan is not going to go down the road that China has gone down in the Opium Wars, then they need to be wealthy enough to trade, build up their weapons, build up their military, and keep the West at bay otherwise, they are essentially next on colonialism’s to do list in Asia. That's the slogan on which more or less everyone can agree. 

Second slogan is civilization, and enlightenment. So one of their thinkers very famously, he's on one of the banknotes in Japan, Fukuzawa Yukichi, he says that he's been to the United States, and he's been to Europe, travelled there in the 1860s. He comes back to Japan and he says, you know what, as Japanese, we have nothing to be proud of, except for our scenery. In more or less every other way, the West has somehow ended up ahead of us. And amongst people like him, there is a kind of a blame game that gets going. He says how is it that Westerners have ended up so far ahead of us that their technology appears to us to be magical, that they've got steamships and telegraphs and gas lighting, they have these incredible ships, they dominate global trade, they dominate the globe militarily, they are picking out colonies here, there and everywhere in these years. 

One of the things he says is that it's the old Confucianists, who he talks about as being rice consumed dictionaries, they don't really have that kind of go getter, exploratory spirit that we need to have. Other people think that it's Buddhism, because they've been peddling cosmological lies about the world, we need to get rid of the Buddhists and there's lots of violence against Buddhism as well in the 1870s. But what Fukuzawa Yukichi says is that what we want is civilization. And what Japan really struggles to do in the 1870s and 1880s, is to make a differentiation between civilization in some general universal way, and simply turning itself into a version of a western country. 

And so in the 1870s, it kind of goes all out towards embracing the West in every way that you can imagine. So you have people saying that we should ditch the Japanese language, we should all speak English in Japan. Or if we keep the Japanese language, we should do away with kanji, our writing system, and we should write it using the Roman alphabet instead. Some people think the secret of Western success must be eating meat and eating beef, especially. And so loads of people start to eat beef, first in the military, and later, in Japan. If you go to Japan now you can have beef cooked in, in miso, and all these wonderful flavors. This will start in the 1870s, possibly as a way of building up stronger Japanese bodies. 

Even the first Japanese ambassador to the United States in, I think 1872, talks to Japanese students who've gone to New York, on a kind of study trip to learn about how America does business. He said to them, you know what, when you finish studying, go out and meet some American women, meet them, bring them back to Japan, marry them and have a family. And we can get American blood into the Japanese system, again, as part of our buildup of a modern country. Because they think it's not enough just to have western style weapons and technology and a banking system and our financial infrastructure. There's something deeper about the West that we try, if we can try to get hold of ourselves, then we can basically fast track our progress in the modern world. 

And this goes on across... the 1870s, even to the point where people don't want to do Japanese poetry anymore. So Japanese poetry in the past was wonderful. But now it's bred sort of effeminate people. And so we should do away with poetry. And we should have, we should have kind of narrative texts that are a little bit more martial and purposeful, and basically a little bit more like the West. And one of the turning points for this idea of how to deal with the West, I think, is the building that you see here. This is a building called the Rocker Meikan [sp?], which is built in the early 1880s, where the Japanese elite could basically dress up in European style finery, and dance the night away with the elites of Europe, and the United States.

And this becomes a turning point, because in the Japanese press, critics start to say, you know, what, if you went to a soiree like this, and you saw Japanese, basically, dressing up like Europeans, smoking like Europeans, drinking white Europeans trying to dance like Europeans to speak like Europeans, it's basically embarrassing. You know, this is the country with hundreds and hundreds of years of history, people in Japan know their history really well, we shouldn't be doing this, you know, we are turning ourselves basically into a facsimile of the West. And it's a national embarrassment. And there's a huge outcry in Japan saying, actually, we need to change course, we need to try to do something different. 

And so instead, in the 1880s, the Japanese start to take a very different approach to dealing with the West, they start to say, Actually, you know what, when we have our Constitution, we'll do things differently. When we have our civil code, we'll do things differently. And so the Japanese, instead, they have their own mix, in the end, of Japanese history, and Western history. This is the constitution being promulgated in 1889. And it's a mixture of the two in the end. They say one of the things we don't need from the west is British or French style, democracy. Instead, we can have political power in Japan, that comes from the Emperor, who's a figure in Japan, going back into mythological time, as far as Japanese of this period are concerned, he will hold all the power himself. And people's role is basically to try to strive in whatever job they have, in their professional lives, in their family lives, to build up the nation, for the sake of the Emperor.

And there's a loose parallel I think you can make between Japan, the settlement that they achieve in their dealings with the West in the 1880s, and what has happened in China over the last few decades, which is that when you're trying to borrow and adapt, especially from the West, it's possible to do it in a way that brings in technology, that brings in Western trading ideas, commerce, finance, without necessarily taking on Western ideas about individualism and liberalism and democracy. The Japanese in this era quite successfully turned their back on most of that, at least the leadership of Japan did, and they managed to flourish without some of those things that advocates in Japan really wanted to have. They wanted to have a British style Parliament, British style democracy etc, Japan managed to do actually quite well without it...

They achieve a military victory over China, which for the Japanese is psychologically enormous, because China for centuries has been the country Japan looked up to culturally and politically, and so to actually defeat China in war, would have been unthinkable just a few decades before…

In 1945, once the second world war is over, and the Americans come in, they had to do this fascinating thing of working out what it is about the 1868 moment that went wrong… their version of it ends up being that Japan's modernization, Japan's contact with the West was in the end the wrong mix. So you ended up with a country that had Western levels of wealth, Western levels of technological achievement, Western weaponry, that almost on the outside, looked like a western country, and as far as the Americans were concerned, looked like a civilized country. 

But on the inside Japan hadn’t really bought in. So what you ended up with was a people as the Americans in 1945, sorry, people who on the outside looked, in their words civilized, on the inside, who were still quite feudal. Part of the reason they took that view was because of what the Imperial Japanese Army was doing on the battlefield, that to them looked barbaric, to use that word, again. But it also looked like there was a mismatch between the inside of Japan and what Japan looked, looked like from the outside. And so America's role as they saw it, was to kind of revisit the 1868 moment and build Japan up along new lines. And one of the ways that Japanese think about their history since 1945, is that it was a chance to begin, again. To go back to 1868 and do things slightly differently. 

It wasn't an entirely American view of 1868. Because there were plenty of Japanese intellectuals who said, why didn't anyone in the late 30s and the early 1940s, why didn't anyone in government stand up and say, what we're doing is wrong? Going into Manchuria, going into China, going into Southeast Asia, starting a war that, surely we knew we couldn't win against the West? Why did no one stand up or not enough people stand up and say that was not a good idea. And so one of the great political scientists after the war says, it's because that element, we didn't manage to take, not necessarily from the west, we didn't manage to realize it in ourselves of what they called individual responsibility, that that was the kind of Japanese failing. And so after the war, this is something that Japanese intellectuals try to get, right, tried to build Japan up in a different way with a different sort of mentality…

Japanese critics of Japanese culture and politics now would say that that 1945 moment of revisiting 1868 in the end was squandered. It didn't go the way we wanted... the length of time that the Americans stayed around, and they're still there. Now famously, military presence in parts of Japan, Japan hasn't really had an independent foreign policy in the world because of its close relationship with America. In order to become an economic superpower, which Japan did, by the middle of the 1960s, sacrifices have been made in terms of people's freedom, in terms of enjoyment that young people might have at school, because they're thinking of the next thing, the exams and the career track and all the rest of it, the sorts of pressures that people end up being under to build the country after 1945. 

In many ways, the extreme Japanese critics would say, resembles what happened after 1868. To quite a large degree Japan’s politics is much freer. Women get the vote after the Second World War. It's a fully democratic country, but the power of Japan's media, the mainstream media, to create a consensus in Japan, to still persuade people that there are right and wrong ways of thinking right and wrong attitudes to take to the country. 

There is still that sense of Japan being a consensus culture, which some in Japan would regard as being not what 1945 should have been about, I suppose from the other side of it very briefly, there are those in Japan who would say that some of the Western institutions that get launched after 1945, from United Nations and all the others, that portray themselves as being global, portrayed themselves as being International, in fact enshrine Western values, they enshrined the values of the people who won the war. 

And so Japanese will constantly say we feel like whether it's, whether it's whaling, or whether it's the way that we remember or don't remember the Second World War, we constantly feel as though we are being told by the West what to do, as though we're seen as a catch up country still, even though we're wealthy. We're an economic superpower, a cultural superpower in the 1990s, you know, manga, anime, Haruki Murakami, all the rest of it, there is still this patronizing edge to Westerners when they're in Japan, but really has been there, since the middle of the 1500s, was really big in Japan in the late 1800s and early 1900s.'"

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