Leaving Asia
Island Japan has for hundreds of years had a complex and difficult relationship with the outside world. It was true before Japan’s first contacts with Europe in the sixteenth century, when China – though the admired fount of culture and learning – was resented as an overbearing influence. It was true in subsequent centuries when Europeans brought their ‘wicked cult’1 of Christianity, and later their unequal treaties and threat of colonization. And it is true today in an era when Japan is mistrusted by its former wartime enemies in Asia, and allied to a power halfway round the world, the US.
Even at the height of its economic prowess in the 1980s, when there was overblown chatter about Japan becoming the world’s most powerful economy, it lacked geopolitical clout. Stripped of its right to have an army by its American-written pacifist constitution, it was an economic giant but a diplomatic dwarf. That fact was painfully underlined during America’s first war in Iraq in 1990. Tokyo bankrolled the military campaign to the tune of $13 billion, but when Kuwait published a list of countries to be thanked for its liberation, the bankroller-in-chief was not mentioned.
Frequently referred to as a ‘western power’ – a reference to its advanced economy rather than its geographical location – Japan is isolated in Asia. Some regard it as a client state locked in a semi-colonial relationship with its US master.2 A member of the Group of Seven, a post-war cartel of rich nations now fast losing relevance, Japan has never been admitted into the club that really counts as one of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Nor has it ever taken the leadership role in Asia that its economic dominance once promised. Though its massive investments have helped power economies from Indonesia to Thailand, and though it blazed a development trail emulated by every successful Asian economy, including China, its hopes of a leadership position have been undermined by simmering wartime hatreds.
Japan’s struggle to find a place in the international hierarchy goes back centuries. Its self-imposed isolation from 1630 only delayed the necessity of joining the international discourse. When it finally did so, through its embrace of western learning in the Meiji Restoration, it was initially triumphant: a ‘European’ Great Power in Asian garb. But Japan’s timing was terrible. It became a colonial power just as the naked colonialism practised by the likes of Britain, Spain and Portugal was fading as a ‘legitimate’ practice. Its hopes of becoming the Great Britain of the Orient were dashed. That Japan’s colonial campaign was out of step with history was only compounded by the disastrous miscalculations of its semi-fascist government, whose adherence to the fanatical cult of emperor worship blinded it to the inevitability of defeat. Japan’s near-annihilation by war’s end closed for good any hope of achieving international ‘status’ through military means. All that was left was to take the economic route.
One scholar says Japan’s fraught relationship with the rest of the world has given it ‘a shrill sense of inferiority and a sometimes obsessive preoccupation with national status’.3 Kenneth Pyle, a US historian, describes brilliantly the semi-feudal society that emerged blinking into the glare of western enlightenment following the collapse of feudal Japan in 1868. ‘Japan’s worldview, the way in which it conceived of . . . the world of nation-states that it entered, was a projection of the ideas it held of its own internal society,’ he writes. ‘Its hypersensitivity to its rank in the world owed much to its distinctive honour culture nurtured over centuries of feudal life.’4 It brought into the international system ‘a confidence in hierarchy’. In conversation, he elaborated, ‘If you go back to Meiji, the Japanese are constantly measuring their steps up the ladder: “We are ahead of Turkey now, but behind Spain.” That kind of concern with international status has been more or less a constant theme.’5
Naoki Tanaka, an adviser to former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, once described to me how Japan had turned its back on Asia in its pursuit of international status. ‘After Meiji, our leaders thought that Chinese and Korean leaders were very corrupt,’ he said. ‘In order to survive the pressures coming from Europe, they thought that “leaving Asia” should be priority number one.’6
This sense of Japan’s ‘geographic tragedy’ – a ‘European’ Great Power somehow trapped by location and history – is a powerful theme. In the nineteenth century, as Japan struggled to break free of the intellectual yoke of China, some of its boldest scholars began to conceive of Japan in strongly European terms. Japan wanted to escape the indignity of becoming a colony, a fate to which many of its Asian neighbours, such as the Philippines, had succumbed. Even the mighty China, once considered the infallible centre of the world, had been defeated in the first Opium War of 1839–42, subjected to the indignity of unequal port treaties and eventually ‘carved up like a melon’ by colonial powers. By 1878, European nations and their offshoots controlled 67 per cent of the world’s landmass, a figure that would jump to an astonishing 84 per cent by 1914. The only way to resist this unstoppable force was surely to abandon Asia altogether and become ‘European’ too. That would require industrialization and the adoption of a modern constitution. It would also mean the acquisition of colonies. This was seen as the right, even the duty, of any self-respecting nation aspiring to Great Power status.
It is this process of rejecting Asia but failing – ruinously – to become a successful imperial power that lies at the heart of Japan’s still fraught relations with the outside world. Having tried and failed to join the western club, Japan finds itself in diplomatic limbo, surrounded by the resentful neighbours it once tried to conquer. How this came about is the subject of this chapter.
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Japan’s modernization has proved what was once unthinkable to Europeans, whose colonialism was built on racist theories: non-whites could match or even surpass western nations. For many Asians, though, its achievements have been inexorably tarnished, not only by the brutal facts of its war against its neighbours, but, more subtly, by the belief that Japan had sought to wrench itself free of Asia altogether.
Most of what we know today as Japanese culture had its origins in China. The Middle Kingdom, as its name implied, was the centre of the known world and the origin of all culture, technology, religion and ethics. Rice cultivation was brought from the mainland, via the Korean peninsula, as were techniques in the use of both bronze and iron. From around the first century, some of the many tribal chieftains who ruled Japan sent delegations to Korea, itself under the influence of China.7 From around AD 400, Japan was sending regular missions to imperial China, to Nanjing and then to distant Chang’an, capital of Tang Dynasty China. They returned inspired by all manner of Chinese practices and doctrine, most importantly the teachings of Buddhism (which had originated in India) and Confucianism. The Japanese ‘constitution’ of AD 604, an explanation of ethical codes attributed to Prince Shotoku, is full of Confucian and Buddhist assumptions.
George Sansom, a historian of pre-modern Japan, writes that Buddhism represented not merely a new form of worship, but a comprehensive set of beliefs. ‘It was as if a great magic bird, flying on strong pinions across the ocean, had brought to Japan all the elements of a new life – a new morality, learning of all kinds, literature, the arts and crafts, and subtle metaphysics which had no counterpart in the native tradition.’8 Prince Shotoku commissioned the magnificent Horyuji temple, a miracle of wood carving situated between the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto, in dedication to the Buddha. It stands, perfectly preserved, today. Chinese ideas on tax, land tenure and bureaucratic rank became deeply engrained elements of Japan’s social and political order.
Even then, when there was no disputing China’s cultural superiority, relations were not always smooth. In AD 607, the Japanese ambassador presented credentials to the court of Chang’an implying that the two nations were equal. That was a laughable suggestion to the Chinese court, where Japan was considered a peripheral nonentity.9 The Japanese continued to pay intellectual, if not monetary, obeisance to China. ‘From the beginnings of civilisation in Japan, the model had always been China, directly or indirectly,’ writes Donald Keene, a scholar of Japanese literature. ‘Inevitably Chinese ideas had been considerably modified in Japan, and some Japanese aesthetic and spiritual concepts were never vitally affected by Chinese example; but by and large China was admitted to be the fount of all wisdom.’10
The break with China – for it was nothing less than that – took several hundred years. It began, in piecemeal fashion, during the Tokugawa period, named after the family of military rulers who brought Japan under their control from around 1600 until the Meiji Restoration of 1868. ‘As knowledge of the world grew, the Japanese began to realize that China was not the centre of the world and to recognize the weakness of China,’ the scholar and author Ian Buruma told me. ‘So they thought: “We better start repositioning ourselves.” Japan did not free itself decisively from China’s intellectual yoke until the modernizing Meiji reformers had overthrown the Tokugawa regime itself. That was the year, if one can pinpoint such a thing, that Japan can be said to have ditched its Sinocentrism in the hope of becoming the first ‘European’ power in Asia. It was the beginning of Japan’s spectacular modernization, but also of its eventual descent into militarist adventurism and wartime defeat.
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The Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled over Japan for more than two and a half centuries, came into being after the battle of Sekigahara of 1600. There, Ieyasu, the first in the Tokugawa line, destroyed opposition forces to become the unassailable ruler of all Japan. The emperor, a figure of more symbolic than actual authority, conferred upon him the ancient hereditary title of shogun. Ieyasu established a centralized system from what had been, only a few decades earlier, a fractious polity fragmented into several hundred warring domains. From his new capital of Edo, later to become Tokyo, Ieyasu Tokugawa imposed, by brute force, an unprecedented peace. The period from 1600 to 1868 was marked by a total absence of warfare, so much so that the samurai warriors, whose raison d’être had been to fight for their daimyo lords, sank into a state of indulgent idleness. As they consolidated power, the Tokugawa shoguns neutralized all possible opposition – from Buddhist priests and peasants to the daimyo and the emperor’s court at Kyoto.
The Tokugawa brooked no external opposition either. A clampdown on Christianity, begun in the 1590s, accelerated in the first years of Tokugawa rule. There was to be no competition, particularly from a foreign god. The first missionaries had arrived with Portuguese traders in the 1540s. By 1600, some 300,000 Japanese had been converted to the Catholic faith.11 The Portuguese habit of taking slaves, as well as souls, had not endeared them to Japanese rulers even before the Tokugawa family had established absolute control. The subsequent clampdown on Christianity blended with a policy of severely restricting relations with all Europeans, Christian or otherwise. From 1633 to 1639, Iemitsu, the grandson of Ieyasu, issued a series of edicts designed to control, if not entirely sever, Japan’s relations with the outside world. The teaching of Christianity was banned. Japanese ships were prohibited from sailing west of Korea or south of the Ryukyu islands, an independent kingdom later to be incorporated into Japan as Okinawa. Foreigners were forbidden from travelling inland or distributing books.12 The British had already given up on Japan, since there were greater riches to be had in India. With the Portuguese expelled, among Europeans only the Dutch, confined to their artificial island, had any sort of contact with the Japanese at all.
These restrictions may strike us as hideously xenophobic today. But it is worth bearing in mind that contact with Europeans in those days rarely ended well. The Dutch, who were polite decorum itself in Japan, had, in 1740, carried out a massacre of some 10,000 ethnic Chinese in Batavia, present-day Jakarta. Japan’s prickly relations with the outside world have by no means always served it well, but virtually alone among Asian nations, the country escaped the indignity of outright colonization.13
Nor was its ‘seclusion’ ever as absolute as suggested by Herman Melville’s description of a ‘double-bolted land’. Marius Jansen, a historian of Japan, describes Tokugawa foreign policy as ‘more of a bamboo blind than a Berlin wall’.14 Trade and diplomacy continued, at least to some extent, with both Korea and China. Japan’s seclusion, Jansen argues, was aimed principally at the west. By keeping a close watch on outside events, he says, ‘the world of the Japanese was far from closed mentally, culturally, or even technologically’.15 Still, there were costs to Japan’s policy. It had chosen to restrict relations with the west at what proved to be a momentous period of European history – the start of the Industrial Revolution and the acceleration of European colonial expansion, including to the New World.
Technologically, despite what Jansen says, Japan did suffer. An obvious example was firearms. In the sixteenth century, many Japanese warriors fought with weapons made by Japanese gunsmiths modelled on those brought by the Portuguese. The Japanese even improved on the originals by adding a device to prevent the matchlock’s ignition from glowing at night.16 But in the nearly 270 years of peace that accompanied Tokugawa rule, knowledge of gun-making faded. The samurai, no longer required to fight for real, in any case preferred the sword. When Commodore Matthew Perry first stepped ashore in 1853 determined to prise open Japan, many of the warriors who faced him were armed with seventeenth-century flintlocks.17
• • •
By the eighteenth century, few Japanese had ever seen a foreigner, let alone a modern weapon. Some who lived in Nagasaki may have peered at Chinese merchants and sailors from afar. Those who lived along the road to Edo may have caught the briefest glimpse of a Dutchman being carried by palanquin on the annual mission of homage to the shogun. According to Keene, most Japanese regarded foreigners, particularly hairy Europeans, as ‘a special variety of goblin that bore only superficial resemblance to a normal human being’.18 The Dutch knew no classical Chinese, a barbarous omission in itself, and were widely thought to lift one leg, like the dogs to which they were often compared, when they urinated.
These vulgarities notwithstanding, it was necessary to speak to the Dutch with whom trading was conducted. By 1670, there were a number of interpreters who could read and speak Dutch, if not always fluently. Twenty families in Nagasaki had been given hereditary jobs as interpreters. The Dutch had much to teach the Japanese in terms of medical science and astronomy. But the Japanese government remained suspicious of western learning and its association with Christianity. Chinese books on western religion and science were banned, though a few illegal manuscripts found their way to private libraries. Kageyasu Takahashi, a court astronomer, paid dearly for his curiosity for western knowledge. When in 1828 he swapped Japanese maps for four volumes of Adam Johann von Krusenstern’s Voyage, an account of the circumnavigation of the globe, he was imprisoned for espionage and died awaiting trial. When a guilty verdict was finally delivered, his corpse, pickled in brine, was sent to the executioner so that it might be properly beheaded.19
The ban on western learning began to ease in 1720 when Yoshimune Tokugawa encouraged the study of the western calendar. Yoshimune had heard that Europeans could measure the passage of time more accurately than the Chinese. That might, he thought, better serve the needs of Japan’s hard-pressed, and occasionally rebellious, farmers.20 There arose a small, but dedicated band of scholars, known as rangaku-sha, acolytes of Dutch learning. It was the slow recognition by these scholars that European learning was not merely the match of Chinese scholarship but, in important ways, superior, that helped foster the eventual break with the Sinocentric world.
One significant hint of western scientific superiority came in the field of anatomy. In 1771, Gempaku Sugita, a Japanese physician, came across Tafel Anatomia, a book written by a German physician forty years earlier. ‘I couldn’t read a word, of course, but the drawings of the viscera, bones and muscles were quite unlike anything I had previously seen, and I realized they must have been drawn from life,’ he wrote.21 At that time, dissections in Japan were uncommon and performed only by eta, an untouchable caste of butchers and tanners who were considered unclean.22 Not long after Sugita had found the book, he attended a dissection on an execution ground at Kotsugahara, near Edo. The procedure was carried out on a fifty-year-old woman called ‘Old Mother Green Tea’, who had been put to death for some unknown crime. Sugita writes,
The dissections that had taken place up to this time had been left to the eta, who would point to a certain part he had cut and inform the spectators that it was the lungs, or that another part was the kidneys . . . Since, of course, the name of the organ was not written on it, the spectator would have to content himself with whatever the eta told him.23
When Sugita compared the actual arrangement of the organs with the illustrations in his European book, he found that it was exactly as depicted. That was not the case with the old Chinese books of medicine, previously considered irreproachable, whose drawings of internal organs had one flaw – they failed to correspond to reality.
Such discoveries marked the beginning of a slow recognition that, in matters of science at least, the European ‘goblins’ were more advanced than Chinese scholars. That the world did not revolve around China must have been a revelation on a par with the discovery that the sun did not revolve around the earth. To accept such a reality – that the Dutch ‘dogs’ were, in some areas, more advanced than the Japanese or Chinese – demanded painful intellectual contortion. Until then, the guiding ideal of Tokugawa Japan had been Chinese knowledge paired with the Japanese ‘spirit’. There was no room for a third set of accomplishments. To the extent that western learning was accepted, it would have to supplant Chinese influence.
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The break with China did not come about only because of the attraction of European learning. China itself had also lost its sheen. In 1644, the Ming Dynasty had fallen to invading Manchurians. As one writer put it, ‘The fall of China to an alien, “barbarian” dynasty certainly contributed to the demotion of China in the estimation of Japanese and tarnished the once burnished image of a cultural ideal.’24 Japan had a movement called kokugaku, literally ‘country learning’, which sought to break with China and fall back on nativist traditions. The idea was to discover in home-grown literature and religious belief a complete culture such that Japan could break loose from its intellectual bondage. Much emphasis was placed on the purity of Japanese poetry. ‘The evocation of nature and praise of emotion that they found there seemed to them to be far removed from the formal didacticism of Confucian teaching,’ writes Jansen.25 These ideas resonate even today. Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist politician known for his anti-Chinese sentiments, once told me about something the French novelist André Malraux had mentioned to him. ‘He said the Japanese were the only people who can grasp eternity in a single moment.’ Ishihara smiled, his eyes blinking in their owl-like way. ‘For example, the haiku is the shortest poetic style in the world. This was not created by the Chinese but by the Japanese.’
The life of Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835–1901), a great liberal thinker of his age, encapsulates the break with China. Fukuzawa was different from most of the young samurai caught up in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. For them, the object was not so much to embrace the west, but to learn the barbarians’ techniques the better to expel them. Fukuzawa, by contrast, thought that, by opening up to western ideas, Japan could join the modern world and be accepted as an equal. Instead of looking inward, he believed that only through embracing the west would Japan stand as a strong, independent nation.
Fukuzawa’s life straddles the extraordinary gulch in history that separates pre- and post-Meiji Restoration. As Carmen Blacker writes in the foreword to a translation of Fukuzawa’s captivating autobiography:
At the time of his birth Japan was almost entirely isolated from the outside world, with a hierarchical feudal system based on a Confucian code of morals. Her notions of warfare were medieval, her economy largely agricultural, her knowledge of modern science confined to the trickle of Dutch books which found their way into the country through the trading station at Nagasaki. At the time of his death Japan was to all effects a modern state. Her army and navy were so well disciplined that [in 1895] they had defeated China and [in 1905] they were to defeat Russia.26
Blacker says that, for Fukuzawa, ‘it was not enough for Japan merely to have the “things” of civilization – the trains, the guns, the warships, the hats, the umbrellas – in order to take her place with dignity and confidence among the nations of the modern world. It was also necessary for her to comprehend the learning which in the west had led to the discovery and production of these things.’
Fukuzawa, a low-ranking samurai, was attracted to western thinking from an early age and set out to learn Dutch so that he might unlock its secrets. His writing brims with the thrill of learning. His fellow students, he writes, ‘were interested in dissecting animals, stray dogs and cats, and sometimes even the corpses of decapitated criminals. They were a hardened reckless crowd, these aspirants for western learning.’27 Having studied Dutch to a high level, he was dismayed to find during a visit to the port city of Yokohama in 1859 that all the foreign signs were in English. By that time, the Black Ships of Commodore Perry, ‘veritable castles that moved freely on the water’,28 had appeared menacingly off the coast. The US had made significant progress in opening up Japan. In the very year that Fukuzawa visited Yokohama, the city had been designated a treaty port along with several others. As in China, where the humiliation of the unequal treaties and ‘extraterritoriality’ had long been known, foreign traders were not subject to Japanese law, but answerable only to consular courts.
Fukuzawa seemed more upset by his lack of English than by the dangers to Japanese sovereignty posed by the treaty port system. He quickly set out to learn English – like Dutch, a language ‘written sideways’ – and somehow got himself appointed as an interpreter on Japan’s first mission to America in 1860. Of his voyage across the almost unimaginable distance to San Francisco, he writes: ‘I trusted in western science through and through, and as long as I was on a ship navigated by western methods, I had no fear.’29
Though they took place 150 years ago, these early encounters with western culture are still part of Japanese folklore. A few years ago, I met Ichizo Ohara, a wonderfully animated Diet member then nearing retirement, who conjured up for me the comedy of one of the early expeditions to America. ‘They were dressed in traditional clothing with Japanese knives. They needed to dress as westerners, but they didn’t have shoes,’ he said, laughing at the thought of it. ‘When they went to buy them from the trading house, they were so big you could fit two people’s feet in. So when they went to the US they went “karang, karang, karang” down the street. Their shoes were like musical instruments. They arrived in San Francisco in these big baggy clothes and these outsized shoes and people made fun of them. Japan’s plenipotentiary didn’t even know how to use a knife and fork.’
To read Fukuzawa’s autobiography today is to be struck by his modernity. He championed the individual. He hated the feudal traditions that saw his father despised as a low-ranking samurai and that blocked personal advancement based on merit. ‘The feudal system is my father’s mortal enemy which I am honour-bound to destroy.’ In the school he was later to set up, which became Keio University, one of Japan’s best, he banned the practice of students bowing to teachers on the grounds that it was a waste of time – a rule that holds today. Of ‘iron-bound feudal’ custom, he writes, ‘I did not care to hold my head above others any more than to bow down before my superiors.’ One of the surprising things about reading Fukuzawa, whose words appear as fresh as the day they were penned, is how vehemently antagonistic he was to what he called ‘the degenerate influences’ of Chinese scholarship. For him the feudal system, with its backward codes and practices, was the embodiment of a Chinese value system that had to be jettisoned whole. During his student days, he recalls, ‘We came to dislike anything that had any connection with Chinese culture. Our general opinion was that we should rid our country of the influences of the Chinese altogether.’30
• • •
When Commodore Perry sailed into Uraga harbour at dawn on 8 July 1853, there were few people who thought like Fukuzawa. Most Japanese were terrified by the awesome display of firepower from the smoke-belching seaborne monsters, the largest of which, the 2,450-ton Susquehanna, Perry’s flagship, was more than twenty times the size of Japan’s biggest vessel.31 Knowledge of how a few thousand British sailors had brought the mighty Chinese empire to its knees a decade before in the first Opium War must have added to the sense of doom. The barbarians were coming. Japan may have been the land of the gods. But these westerners had technology that even the most divine country could not withstand.
In a sense it proved exactly thus. It took just fifteen years from Perry’s arrival to spark the Meiji Restoration, a social and political upheaval of extraordinary profundity that was a revolution, a resistance and a capitulation all at once. Staying on the periphery, in its splendid isolation, was no longer an option. Japan had to work out how to deal with the outside world. In this, the young leaders of Meiji proved ruthlessly pragmatic. ‘For them, when push came to shove, the importance of power and the preservation of the nation took precedence over the preservation of Japan’s own cultural practices,’ writes Pyle.32 In the name of the emperor, the feudal system was dismantled, the samurai disarmed and a process of rapid industrialization set in motion. Yet for most leaders of Meiji, the driving force was not change for change’s sake. Change was rather a means of national preservation. As so often in its history, Japan was altering so that it might remain the same – like the shrines at Ise. ‘Unlike most other modern revolutions, the Meiji Restoration was a profoundly conservative event.’33
Many of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration came from the lower samurai orders. They were military men who valued samurai codes. The revolutionary qualities they possessed lay in their willingness to set aside the feudal form of Japanese culture so that they could preserve what they regarded as its essence. As such, their determination to learn from the west was often wholly practical. Japan must learn how to make the trains, guns and floating battleships mastered by westerners, not because these were inherently honourable things to do, but because they were the tools with which they could stand up to western aggression. Their working thesis: know thine enemy.
• • •
Japan’s decision to end its isolation was reluctant from the start, a fact that has influenced its international relations ever since. Those behind the Meiji Restoration were military men who ‘readily adopted the vocabulary of Social Darwinism and spoke of jakuniku-kyoshoku (the strong devour the weak) to describe the mores of international politics’.34 From this beginning, Japan’s evolution from would-be victim of colonization to Asian predator has a certain predictability. We are so used to judging the Japanese – for the unspeakable violence and suffering their colonial campaign caused – that it is easy to forget how almost natural it was to slip into empire-building and war. ‘From the opening up of the country in the Meiji period, the Japanese idea of what westernization meant was to be a good imperialist,’ John Dower told me.35 ‘Japan’s pre-war success, its emulation of the west, is not simply industry, it’s not simply culture. Westernization also means imperialism.’
Even Fukuzawa, by the standards of his age a most liberal thinker, never doubted his country’s duty to bring ‘enlightenment’ to other parts of Asia. Of Japan’s victory over China in the war of 1895, he wrote, ‘How happy I am. I have no words to express it . . . I am often brought to tears of pity for those who died too soon [to see it].’36 Some years previously, an anonymous newspaper article had appeared that was later attributed to Fukuzawa. In ‘On Leaving Asia’, he wrote that China and Korea, which had failed to emulate the modernizing Meiji reforms, were too backward to join Japan on the road to ‘civilization’. Japan should therefore ‘leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with the civilized nations of the west’. It was not a big leap from there to suggest that it should emulate the great ‘civilizing’ endeavour of the European powers by acquiring colonies of its own. ‘Fukuzawa saw the future of East Asia as pivoting on a Chinese–Japanese conflict,’ Masamichi Komuro told me when I went to see him in his office in Keio University, the institution Fukuzawa founded. ‘This would resolve the issue: was East Asia to become a Confucian bloc or a modern bloc?’
By the end of the nineteenth century, just thirty years after the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s relations with the outside world had been transformed. From being a marginal backwater on the edge of Asia, it had won a dominant regional position and was fast to be counted, at least formally, among the world’s Great Powers. Its expansionism had begun in the 1880s, when it had imposed unequal treaties on Korea, much as America had forced such treaties on Japan. In 1894, a few weeks before the start of the Sino–Japanese War, Japan achieved its long-desired diplomatic goal of overturning the unequal treaties it had been forced to sign a quarter of a century earlier. That ended its status as a quasi-colony. In 1895, it gained control over Taiwan after its victory over China in war. China paid Japan reparations and Japanese ships were allowed to ply the river Yangtze. In 1902, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was signed, suggesting – at least on paper – that Japan had finally achieved Fukuzawa’s improbable dream of becoming ‘a great nation in this far Orient [to] stand counter to Great Britain of the west’. In 1905, Japan stunned the world by defeating the Russians and gained an early, ill-fated, foothold in Manchuria. By 1910, it had formally annexed Korea. The victim was turning victimizer. What was expected of a ‘civilized’ power was neatly summed up by Kakuzo Okakura, author of The Book of Tea. ‘The average westerner was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace,’ he wrote. ‘He calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on the Manchurian battlefields.’37
In addition to its external conduct, there was a systematic attempt, much of it rather po-faced, to adopt foreign practices at home. Japanese high society took to attending balls, to wearing tailored suits and top hats, to shunning the pleasure quarters and to eating beef, which Fukuzawa said would improve their physique. Kabuki, a ribald form of entertainment that had its origins in riverside performances by Kyoto prostitutes, became staid and classical. Danjuro Ichikawa IX, whose descendants are still acting on the stage today, decried the traditions of a kabuki theatre that he said had ‘drunk up filth’. Instead of wearing a dashing kimono or dressing as a demon on stage, he donned white tie and tails.38 The establishment took to pressing western morals on its populace, for example forbidding public nakedness and mixed bathing. One such ordinance proclaimed that although ‘this is the general custom and is not so despised among ourselves, in foreign countries this is looked on with great contempt. You should therefore consider it a great shame.’39
Yet for all its efforts, both on the battlefield and in its ballrooms and bathhouses, Japan never won the acceptance it craved. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Tokyo pressed for the principle of racial equality to be made part of the founding covenant of the League of Nations. The western powers refused, causing immense bitterness among the Japanese, who took it to mean – perhaps rightly – that a nation of ‘yellow-skinned’ people would never be accepted as equal by racist westerners.
The sense that Japan would always be excluded from the white man’s club is an important psychological backdrop for its eventual descent into aggressive militarism. The Japanese saw Woodrow Wilson’s newfound championing of the sovereignty of nations as hypocritical. Now that western powers had seized their colonies and established their control over the world’s natural resources, their aim was to shut out latecomers such as Japan. As early as the 1880s a popular song spelled out Japan’s view of what lay beneath the deceitful civility of the new world order. ‘There is a Law of Nations, it is true, / but when the moment comes, remember, / the strong eat up the weak.’40
Japan’s victories over China and Russia and its full annexation of Korea set it on a tragic course. These early triumphs instilled an over-confidence and sense of manifest destiny that ended with its brutal campaign throughout the region. Before the fighting was over in 1945, several million Chinese had been killed (the United Nations estimated 9 million in the war alone, not counting those who died of hunger and disease) and several million more Asians had perished as a direct or indirect consequence of war. Tens of thousands of forced labourers, from Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, China and elsewhere were worked to death in the mines or in the ‘death march’ construction of railroads. After the war, the French sought reparations on the basis that 5.5 per cent of the European population and 2.5 per cent of the native population had died during Japanese rule in Indochina. In the Pacific theatre, the American armed forces lost 101,000 men with a further 291,500 injured. The Japanese themselves were not spared. Some 1.75 million military personnel died, as did nearly 400,000 civilians, including those in the bombing raids on Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The total of more than 2.1 million dead represented some 3 per cent of the Japanese population.41
Yet as Japan had been gearing up for war after its unprecedented victory over Russia in 1905, some Asians had celebrated its military ambitions as a blow for Asian liberation, proof that non-whites could be a match for Europeans. Sun Yat-sen, China’s nationalist leader, said, ‘We regarded that Russian defeat by Japan as the defeat of the West by the East.’42 Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of an independent India, wrote in his autobiography, ‘Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm . . . Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.’43 John Frederick Charles Fuller, a British army officer and military historian, had no doubt about the significance of Japan’s victory. ‘Above all it was a challenge to western supremacy in Asia,’ he wrote. ‘The fall of Port Arthur in 1905, like the fall of Constantinople in 1453, rightly may be numbered among the few really great events of history.’44
That initial reaction lent a veneer of credence to Japanese propaganda that its invasion of neighbours was a war of liberation not of subjugation. It proved to be a lie. The claim was quickly undermined by the blatantly racist attitudes that the Japanese exhibited towards fellow Asians. Imperial ideology, with its faith in Japan as the ‘land of the gods’, had taught its subjects to believe that other Asians were inferior, even subhuman. Japanese working in the hellish Unit 731 in the puppet state of Manchukuo – where vivisections and biological and chemical experiments were performed on mainly Chinese and Korean prisoners – referred to their victims as ‘logs’, not human beings. Throughout Asia, those ‘liberated’ by Japan’s Imperial Army soon found their new masters to be worse than the old ones. General Aung San, father of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, helped the Japanese to invade Burma, but quickly saw how repressive the Japanese ‘liberators’ turned out to be. ‘I went to Japan to save my people, who were treated like bullocks by the British,’ he said in 1942. ‘But now we are treated like dogs.’45
• • •
Domestically, it was a failure to deepen the institutions established by the Meiji Restoration that allowed Japan to fall under the spell of a quasi-fascist imperial cult. Fukuzawa feared his country would not be able to embrace the philosophy of individual inquiry that he thought necessary to the success of a modern state. ‘His fundamental belief was that this spirit of inquiry was essential and that the only way to achieve it was to oppose hierarchical structures,’ said Komuro of Keio University. ‘Only with the autonomy of the individual could the nation also become autonomous.’ Contrary to Fukuzawa’s hopes, the early decades of the twentieth century saw the gradual snuffing out of individualism and the reassertion of hierarchy. Japan’s feudal order had been overturned not, as in some European states, by a revolution from below, but rather by one imposed from above by a modernizing clique of samurai. It had a parliament, elected by a narrow franchise of male voters, political parties and a prime minister, but it lacked the sense of a sovereign people characteristic of modern democracies. That made it easier for a conservative elite to rally people around a national project, namely rapid industrialization and colonial conquest, wrapped in the shroud of an imperial cult.
The Meiji era came officially to a close in 1912 with the death of the Meiji emperor. For a reign associated with startling modernization, the emperor in whose name it was conducted was afforded a fanatical devotion reminiscent of the feudal order Japan had supposedly discarded. On the day of the emperor’s funeral, 13 September 1912, General Maresuke Nogi, the hero of the Russo-Japanese War, stripped to his undergarments while his wife donned a black kimono. After bowing to a picture of the emperor, General Nogi plunged a knife into his wife’s neck and then committed ritual suicide by thrusting a short sword into his belly.46 It was the classic act of a loyal samurai, not that of a modernizing general bent on the assimilation of western learning.
The emperor who followed Meiji gave his name to the Taisho era (1912–26), one associated with a febrile political debate that could plausibly have developed into a more participatory democracy. The emperor himself was prone to bouts of mental illness and his reign was cut short, ending with it the putative development of a functioning civil society. The political system during his reign had evolved more quickly than the leaders of the Restoration had intended. Political parties grew stronger. The new labour movement engendered by rapid industrialization began to seek rights and influence. The number of street protests, often violent, mushroomed, culminating in 1918 with a push for universal male suffrage. In that same year, rice riots spread across the countryside. Troops were called in to quell disorder. Tenant militancy spread partly as a result of growing literacy among all classes. Masato Miyachi, a historian at Tokyo University, called it ‘the era of the popular riot’.47 Some elements of the labour movement even flirted with the Marxism that was energizing Europe. The constitution was ambivalent on quite where power resided. The emperor was sovereign yet the constitution rejected the idea of direct imperial rule.48 For a while, Japan’s democratic future hung in the balance.
‘Taisho democracy’ was a chimera. The 1923 earthquake, which flattened large parts of Tokyo and killed around 140,000 people, proved to be a turning point. In the wake of that disaster, police exploited the chaos to round up leftists and anarchists. Although universal male suffrage was enacted in 1925, other freedoms were rolled back. Political groups with radical agendas were banned while the Peace Preservation Law made criticism of the emperor, or of the system of private property, an offence punishable by up to ten years in prison.49 As the economy slid into recession towards the end of the decade, the scene was set for a further lurch to the right. In 1928, after general elections in which workers’ parties had participated, there was another mass roundup of leftists.50 In the end, party politics, with its inevitable divisions and competing ideologies, was jettisoned as an idea: it was regarded as incompatible with Japan’s principal national interest, namely the cranking up of a war economy. ‘Two-party politics can be a meaningful way to generate good policy for a wealthy, advanced nation,’ wrote Kazushige Ugaki, a moderate military leader, in 1931, in an argument beloved of authoritarian leaders even today. ‘But a weak, poorly endowed late-developer needs to seek the welfare of the people not only at home but in development abroad. That requires national unity, and the two-party system is not welcome.’51
Things shifted decisively into the hands of the military after the assassination on 15 May 1932 of Tsuyoshi Inukai, a liberal-leaning prime minister who had tried to restrain the armed forces. He was killed by fanatics seeking to ‘restore’ the emperor to his place at the centre of the system. From the time of his murder, prime ministers were no longer drawn from political parties but from the military or its sympathizers. With his death, descent into militarism and all-out war was sealed. At political rallies, anyone who criticized the military was silenced. Yet even then, radical parties struggled on. The Social Masses Party won nearly 10 per cent of the vote in the 1937 election, a sign that not everyone was swept up in the imperial cult. Still, the Japanese system came more and more to resemble the fascist states of Germany and Italy. There was a fanatical emphasis on the supposed purity of the Yamato race, a near religious devotion to the emperor and a strong desire, shared by some on the left, to spread Japanese ‘values’ to other countries. At the time of Meiji, Japan’s leaders had been determined to ‘leave Asia’ in order to join the Great Powers of Europe at the head table. Having not been invited to dinner, Japan felt humiliated. Many of its intellectuals were spoiling for a fight. ‘We are the so-called “yellow race”. We are fighting to determine the superiority of a race that has been discriminated against,’ wrote Sei Ito (1905–69) in his diary. ‘Our destiny is such that we cannot realize our qualifications as a first-class people of the world unless we have fought with the top-ranking white men.’52
That looked more and more inevitable as Japan’s campaign to be treated equally went nowhere. The number of naval vessels Japan could own in relation to Britain and America was frozen by international agreement. In 1933, after the League of Nations had condemned the seizure of Manchuria, Japan walked out in disgust. It had effectively given up on its long-held ambition to be accepted as a member of the western colonial club. Shorn of its moorings, Japan’s military flew out of control. By 1937, it had moved from Manchuria deeper into China proper, and in 1940 into northern Indochina. When Japan pushed further into Indochina, Washington responded with a full-blown international oil embargo. Boxed in, Japan’s leaders mounted what they portrayed as a ‘defensive’ attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The following February the Japanese seized Malaya and Singapore and, within weeks, the Dutch East Indies, modern Indonesia, fell into its hands. Not long after, it grabbed a large part of the Philippines and much of Burma.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was greeted with euphoria at home, where many saw it as revenge for Commodore Perry’s assault on Japan all those years before. It was celebrated by one poet, Kotaro Takamura (1883–1956), who saw in the bold act against the Anglo-Saxons revenge for years of humiliation and an affirmation of Japanese superiority.
Nippon, the land of the gods
Ruled over by a living god53
Yet now America had been provoked into entering the war, it was only a matter of time before the military tide turned. Just six months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy lost the decisive battle of Midway, which severely depleted its fleet and left its new empire in the Pacific exposed. The Americans pursued an island-hopping strategy, moving ever closer towards Japan. When, in July 1944, they captured Saipan, within bombing range of Japan, the great air raids on the Japanese cities began. Unfortunately, Japan’s military leaders were unable to face the inevitable. The navy was perhaps prepared to accept a negotiated surrender, but not the unconditional capitulation the Allies were demanding. Terrible battles ensued, not least the one for Okinawa, so catastrophically violent it was known as the ‘Typhoon of Steel’. The battle, in which kamikaze pilots mounted some 1,500 attacks on American ships and Okinawan civilians committed mass suicide, often instigated by Japanese troops, was one of the most ferocious of the Second World War. Then came the two nuclear bombs on 6 August and 9 August of 1945, followed by the unconditional surrender that Japan’s deluded leaders had so long resisted.
Japan lay in ruins. For the next seven years it would be a supplicant of America and the occupying force of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Japan had left Asia. But the price of doing so was to become subordinate to another power – the United States.