Modern Japan

The Meiji Restoration

One productive way of looking at Japanese history--and you've probably recognized this already--is to look at its relationship to the outside world. Perhaps because of its geography, or for complex cultural reasons, or both, Japan has a long tradition of interacting with outsiders, borrowing technology and cultural characteristics from these outsiders, and then closing itself off from the outside world to absorb its new influences. Strangely enough, Japan seems just as determined about one approach as the other. At one moment it is reaching out with open arms, and then before you know it, Japan closes its doors and bolts them tight.

Now, to stop here in our analysis would be to do a great disservice to Japanese creativity. Unfortunately, the model suggested above has its downside. It encourages an understanding of Japanese history that is dominated by outside influences and may imply that Japan has little to offer from within. Japanese have often been portrayed as excellent imitators, so excellent that they can take another culture's technology, reproduce it with a Japanese flair, and then corner the market because these new products are superior. This is how the world explained the dramatic Japanese economic success that followed World War II. The Japanese took the inventions of others--transistors, say, or automobiles--ran them through companies like Sony or Toyota, and out the other end came Walkmans and Corollas for export to a breathless world market.

But what is it that happened in those companies? What happened behind the closed doors of Sony, or Toyota, or Japan for that matter, to create such miracles? This is a more difficult question to answer, but it is here perhaps that we can discover the secret of Japanese creativity.

One extended period in which Japan closed itself off from the outside world was the Tokugawa period. During the Tokugawa Japanese contacts with outsiders were severely limited, primarily due to the fear of the shogun and the other samurai that outside contacts presented a potential threat to their power. In this period foreign influences did not disappear; they were transformed into something new and uniquely Japanese. Confucian philosophy from China, for example, was used to structure the society, giving farmers a privileged position and relegating merchants to the lowest social level.

In 1853, after approximately 250 years of isolation, four American warships under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry appeared in Edo (now Tokyo) Bay with a request from the United States government to open its ports to trading and to establish diplomatic relations between the two nations. The Japanese were aware of western imperialist aggression in other parts of Asia, and the presence of warships suggested that this request could be backed up with force. After a period of debate among Japanese leaders, it was decided that the request was reasonable, and Japan and the United States signed the Treaty of Kanagawa. Soon after this, Japan reached similar agreements with European nations. Not everyone in Japan agreed with this direction, of course, and the unrest that it provoked ultimately led to the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji Restoration, in which the Emperor Meiji was "restored" to power. For, although the emperors had nominally held power during the Tokugawa period, in fact they were little more than figureheads, responsible only for ceremonial functions.

It was Emperor Meiji, young and full of new ideas, who set Japan on the path to modernization, with the western nations as his model. A restructuring of Japan in nearly every respect--political, social, and economic--soon followed. Emperor Meiji and his followers sent envoys to these nations to examine their political systems, and the ideas that they brought back to Japan shaped the new government. On the one hand, in order to modernize the government the new rulers would need to dismantle the old feudal system, which meant taking away the considerable privileges enjoyed by the aristocratic classes--although the new government posts were typically filled by these aristocrats, so they still wielded political power.

After a period of unrest in which many Japanese began to question the new system that was developing, Japan's leaders were forced to reconsider their path to modernization. Farmers, for example, resented the new emphasis on industrial development; agriculture had been, after all, understood in the feudal period to be the backbone of the Japanese economy. In addition, as Japanese developed contacts with the outside world, they absorbed many influences, including notions of democratic political processes. These Japanese demanded that the new government not simply replace one autocratic system led by the shogun, with another, led by the emperor. As a result, the government promised a constitution that would spell out the rights of citizens. In 1890 the Meiji Constitution was adopted, proclaimed as a "gift of the emperor" to the Japanese people. The Constitution established a Diet, a legislative body with two houses: members of the upper house were appointed while those of the lower house were elected. The emperor abolished the old class system. Land was taken from the large landholders, the daimyo, and redistributed. The samurai were no longer able to carry the sword, their former badge of status.

In the economic arena, the new government energized trends that had been established in the late Tokugawa period, which had begun to see a breakdown of the feudal system. As Japan developed commercially and industrially, there was an exodus from the rural areas to the cities.

As Japan absorbed Western political and economic influences during the Meiji period, its leaders also began to imitate the West's imperial ambitions. As part of its modernization campaign, the government dismantled the old feudal military system and replaced it with a national army. Conflict came in the 1890s with China, when both Japan and China intervened in Korean internal struggles. Japan attacked Russia in 1904, also over competing interests in Korea. In 1905, after a stunning naval victory by Japan, the Russians surrendered. All of Asia was watching. After centuries of dominance in Asia by Western powers, an Asian nation had resoundingly defeated one of those powers. Following the Russo-Japanese War, Japan annexed Korea, further establishing its influence in Asia and putting itself in a position to eventually challenge the Western national powers' Asian ambitions.

Your readings on the Meiji Restoration reflect this new openness to the outside world, particularly the West. Japan's current emperor, Akihito, himself a scientist, describes how contacts with Europeans during the Meiji period transformed Japanese attitudes towards science, particularly medicine, which had been strongly influenced by China.

Kumakura Isao takes a more intimate look at the everyday lives of the Japanese by examining how table manners changed as a result of the new Western influences.

Jeff Sellen

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