Throughout the 19th century, Japan simultaneously expanded its interest in its affairs beyond its borders, but also reaffirmed its fear and distaste for foreigners and foreignness (jōi). While many of our readings address individual aspects of this problem, we have engaged less with scholarship that examines wholly the variety of ways in which Japan engaged with the outside in the tumultuous 19th century. In this paper, I intend to create a discourse on Japanese external relations that synthesizes a number of temporally narrow scholarly works in order to show not a rupture but a continuity in Japanese thought throughout the 19th century[CLB1] .
Given the limited scale of this paper and the limited available readings (as this is not a research paper), I want to stress that the epistemological current I trace and examine in this paper is decently[CLB2] speculative. Let us first, then, look at what exactly it means to be a nation. Kevin Doak says, it is the “conclusion of nationalism studies that the underlying force of nationalism is an emotional factor, or the sentiment of being a nation.” [1]But more than sentimental, nationalism is spiritual—a collective, albeit often nebulous, identity with one spirit shared by all or many people in a country, or area, or even across a diaspora. But nationalism, as any historian would say, is never black and white. It is never just “us” and “them,” or “inside” and “outside,” and the Japanese case is no exception. What, then, is complicated about Japan’s relationship with itself and with the outside world? Douglas Howland, in describing Meiji nationalist epistemology, says: “Central to the political and social restructuring of Japan was the work of cultural change or westernization. Given the widespread alarm over Japan’s international vulnerability, the oligarchy and its supporting intellectuals were determined to create a strong and wealthy Japan after the example of the West, a new Japan capable of resisting the Western aggression reported in China, India, and Africa.”[2] This quote begins my own essay perfectly because, as Howland shows, Japan developed a positive relationship with the outside (in this case, the West) in order to strengthen itself in the preexistent negative relationship that it had with the West. Japan, in other words, accepted the West in order to resist the West[CLB3] . And finally, while Howland is specifically talking about post-1968 Japanese thought, as I will show in this paper, Japan’s relationship with the West had been contradictory since long before the bakufu fell. Let us first turn to the 1820s, when new threats were looming just beyond Japan’s horizon.
Japan had nominally been in a period of “seclusion” or sakoku, since the 1630s. Much recent scholarship has debunked the myth of actual seclusion, showing that Japan was, for the first two centuries of the period, hardly isolated in anything more than name. But this changed in 1825: Bob Wakabayashi says, in Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan, “The Edo Bakufu’s 1825 Expulsion Edict was not a reaffirmation of its so-called “Seclusion edicts of the Kan’ei Era” issued from 1633 to 1639. National isolation and the expulsion of foreigners, as consciously-conceived state policies, came into being between 1793 and 1825.”[3] (Bob, 59) The Expulsion Edict advocated for unprecedented hostility toward Western foreigners, but this hostility was not an offensive-minded one. It was, in fact, mainly reactionary toward the increasing presence of colonial empires like Russia and Britain in lands all around Japan, from the north in Siberia, to the southwest in Qing China, and other parts of southeast Asia. Russia and Britain particularly had even taken offensive action toward Japan on its own territory, with the incursion of Russian ships in the north, and the Phaeton Incident of 1808 in which the British ship Phaeton sailed into Nagasaki and threatened to ravage the city with cannon fire unless the Japanese provided resources to the crew.[4]Even the Dutch, with whom the Japanese had long had a reasonably symbiotic relationship in Nagasaki, were removed of much of their preferential treatment as the Western threat grew: the Expulsion Edict of 1825 orders the Japanese people to “note that Chinese, Koreans, and Ryukyuans can be differentiated [from Westerners] by physiognomy and ship design, but Dutch ships are indistinguishable… even so, have no compunctions about firing on [the Dutch] by mistake; when in doubt, drive the ship away without hesitation. Never be caught offguard.” (Expulsion Edict of 1825, Bob, 60) [5]The last line is particularly important, because this strain of fear of being without proper means of fighting back continued, as we will see, well past the end of the Tokugawa period.
But what did Japan fear would happen with the increasing presence of Westerners in the surrounding area? Aizawa Seishisai, noted anti-foreign scholar and author of the anti-foreign 1825 New Theses, says “Certain people stress the need to enrich our country and strengthen our arms in order to defend our borders. But the foreign beasts now seek to take advantage of the fact that people in outlying areas crave a source of spiritual reliance, and furtively seduce our commoners into betraying us.” Furthermore, he suggests that, “should the barbarians win over our people’s hearts and minds, they will have captured the realm without a skirmish. Then the wealth and strength that these people stress will no longer be ours to employ.”[6] What Aizawa and many of his compatriots feared was not a full-on military assault—Wakabayashi stresses this—but a spiritual one, in which the Japanese populace are slowly subsumed from the outside into the advanced empires moving ever closer to the Japanese archipelago through external propaganda.[7] The bakufu and their anti-foreign jōi ideological followers believed that that an intense increase in militarism was necessary to combat this threat, which Wakabayashi says was contrary to the purely cultural resistance that Anti-foreignism (jōi) had entailed previously.[8] But the first line of Aizawa’s above quote suggests that militarism alone could not cope with the foreign threat. Wakabayashi suggests that, in fact, political scholars of the time believed what Japan needed far more than a military was a unifying ideology. What Japan lacked, according to both Fujita Yukoku and Rangaku scholar Takahashi Kageyasu, was a way to control the common people of Japan who “’by nature’ are easily alienated from their rulers and ready to feel affection for foreigners,” and who were “attracted to ‘novel and exotic’ gadgets that foreigners barter, and [were] susceptible to Christian teachings that foreigners spread.”[9] The unifying forces of Christianity and Western influence were clearly, at least to political scholars, threatening the existence of Japan.
But, to complicate this, I would suggest that scholars were just as eager to learn from the hated foreigner as they were to repel him. Aizawa himself, as well as other kokugaku and rangaku scholars, were not blind to the great success of the Christian West. Late Tokugawa political scholar Yokoi Shōnan “feared Christian-inspired Western government as much as Aizawa, but was more candid about praising it. He too believed that Japan’s leaders had to imitate European rulers, who skillfully used Christianity to cultivate popular unity.”[10] Wakabayashi says, “[knowledgeable Japanese] elevated [Christianity] to the level of Confucian ritual and music—an efficacious ‘device’ that sagacious Western rulers exploited to make their peoples love and fight for their countries.”[11]This is where our understanding of Japanese relations with the West gets contradictory; the entire premise of the Sakoku period, and the only Sakoku policy which the bakufu had actively pursued in practice, was a pure and unrelenting antipathy toward the Christian religion, the force which the shogunate perceived to be the bane of Confucian-Japanese existence. But Japanese elites recognized, and perhaps even exaggerated, the need for a unifying political or spiritual cause of comparable strength to that championed by the Westerners, so that, when the Westerns finally did arrive and try to slowly and peacefully consume Japan from without, the Japanese populace would not fall for their foreign rhetoric.
Wakabayashi’s argument ends here, but I would like to take it further and suggest that, as Brett Walker discusses in his article “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island: Cartography and Empire,” the bakufu had already found a potential unifying solution at the turn of the 19th century, 20-odd years before Aizawa wrote his Theses. There are two strains to this solution: the first is diplomatic, in which the bakufu tried to reassert itself as a sovereign country with sovereign rights similar to Western nations; the second is more internally nationalist, in which the bakufu tried to unite the populace as a collective entity within these sovereign borders. Let us first address the diplomatic solution. Walker says “[Japanese explorer Mamiya Rinzo’s] mission to determine borders in the north constituted a calculated shogunal response to the threat posed by Western surveying in the region, an effort to turn European cartographic tools of empire into tools that resisted imperialism by geographically binding and, thereby, cartographically guarding Japan’s sovereignty: tools that proved capable of delineating Japan’s borders in a manner recognizable – and hence more legitimate – to predatory Western nations.”[12] Here already, Walker identifies the tendency of the Japanese government to see the value in Western political models, similar to Aizawa and Shōnan, despite (or perhaps because of) the prominent fear that the West would use those same models to subjugate Japan. The bakufu knew, on some level, that a certain imitation of the West was necessary in order to not be victimized by the West. After all, if Japan did not have borders, who could rhetorically stop Russia from stepping in and claiming all the land north of Japan proper as Russian territory? Mamiya Rinzō, ever the dramatic anti-foreignist, feared that Russia already believed they owned all the islands north of Japan proper, and even the island of Hokkaido. (Walker)[13]
The second strain to the potential solution that bakufu-sponsored explorers like Mamiya Rinzō championed stemmed from the unifying factors of national self-determination (as much as the word “nation,” in the Western sense, can be applied to Japan in the early 1800s). Walker says Mamiya Rinzo’s fellow cartographer Ino Tadataka’s “mapping of Japan’s coastline and Mamiya’s mapping of Sakhalin paralleled the rise in prominence of ‘nativist’ learning, as represented by such figures as Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) and Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), and other ‘proto-modern’ national discourses, including the politically charged Mito School ideology.”[14] Furthermore, Walker says “Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century maps of Japan visually represented the spatial borders of Japan’s ‘collective memory,’ or what Benedict Anderson called an ‘imagined community’.”[15] (Walker) Mamiya’s and his associates’ cartographic practices, then, not only served (or at least, tried) to strengthen Japanese physical borders in the eyes of the looming imperial monstrosities on the Eurasian continent: they also potentially strengthened Japanese conceptual and spiritual identity. After all, a Japanese polity that doesn’t respect the Japaneseness of Japan is just as dangerous to the integrity of that Japaneseness as a fleet of 5th-class British warships circling like vultures around the Japanese archipelago. And, as Aizawa and his compatriots pointed out, the Western model proved that an ideological unity shared by all members of a nation led to great strength. By adopting the Western administrative model, Japan was already well on its way toward a self-definition that both Aizawa and Wakabayashi failed to recognize.
What we have seen thus far is a Japan still under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and still politically and economically secluded from the Western world. After American Commodore Matthew Perry’s Arrival in Japan in 1853, and the subsequent “opening” of Japan via the Unequal Treaties of 1858, this old Japanese world began to fall apart. Forced to interact both diplomatically and scientifically with the West, Japan became inundated with Western technologies, ideologies, and methodologies the likes of which it had never seen. But I would like to make the argument, which scholars we have read have not really touched on, that Japan’s conflicted and often contradictory relationship with the West actually remained basically constant between the Tokugawa period and the Meiji period. Susan Burns begins this comparison well in her discussion of Japanese fears of the West during and after the Bakumatsu period. Burns says, “Katsu Kaishu, the Bakufu official who negotiated the end of Tokugawa rule ten years later, was in Nagasaki in 1858 and wrote later of the popular theory that ‘officers from British ships had come ashore, sought out wells, and poisoned the water within them,’ thereby causing the epidemic.”[16] Additionally, she says a “Dutch naval officer in Nagasaki recorded a similar theory of origin: ‘it was rumored that Buddhist priests had declared that the disease of the sick was caused by poison that had been dumped into the wells and used this to inspire among the people the notion of expelling all foreigners.”[17] While these descriptions of the outside threatening Japan are more concrete than the ones composed by Aizawa and his compatriots, the message was nevertheless the same: the Japanese feared the West’s advance into their territory, not through direct military campaign but through insidious methods. It is significant that these fears existed even after Japan “opened itself up” to the West: no matter what Japan’s diplomatic relation with the West (isolated or accessible), the current anti-Western fears nevertheless remained strong.
And as Burns and others show, these fears by no means ended with the Meiji ishin and the “Westernization” of Japan. Central to the political and social restructuring of Japan was the work of cultural change or westernization. Let us quickly return to the last line of the Howland quote at the beginning of this paper: Howland reminds us that “the oligarchy and its supporting intellectuals were determined to create a strong and wealthy Japan after the example of the West, a new Japan capable of resisting the Western aggression.”[18] Let us then concretize this contradiction: how exactly did the Meiji plan to Westernize in order to resist Western imperialism? The answer is quite similar to the plans regarding Mamiya Rinzō and mapping of the north three-quarters of a century earlier: by adopting Western science, the Meiji believed they could harden themselves against further Western incursions. Burns reveals this in her essay about medical and political practices in Meiji Japan: she says the Meiji Japanese tendency to valorize “German medicine rested upon… an assumption of causality. As Miyamoto Shinobu has suggested, to the Japanese leadership of the 1870s Prussia in particular seemed to present a model of nation building worth emulating. It was a monarchic state with a strong military that had succeeded in industrializing rapidly.”[19] Like the model of geographic sovereignty that Mamiya Rinzō and his fellows adopted from the West, Meiji scholars believed adopting an administrative model of a successful Western nation would be causally linked to an increase in both diplomatic and internal sovereignty in Japan.
But what exactly was this administrative model that the Meiji believed Japan needed in order to be strong? Like the models identified both by Walker in his article on Mamiya Rinzō and by Aizawa Seishisai and his contemporary scholars, the Meiji model promulgated the absolute necessity for a strong and unified national polity to resist foreign imperialism. Extending from the Tokugawa model, however, the Meiji saw the necessity not just for conceptual strength but physical strength: the human body, as much as the human spirit, became the symbol of national strength. In her discussion of public health official Nagayo Sensai and the role of medicine in the formation of the Japanese nation, Burns says “Nagayo’s concern for the public understanding of eisei, which had come to signify a wide range of “healthy” practices from brushing one’s teeth to quarantining the sick, is revealing of the Japanese government’s interest in the bodies of its citizens, an interest that was intimately tied to the pursuit of the new national goals of ‘Increase Production and Promote Industry’ and ‘Rich Nation, Strong Military,’ as popular slogans of the day put it.” A fellow Meiji scholar even went so far as to say “healthy bodies and active spirits are the single great foundation of Japan’s wealth and power.”[20] Comparing this to the need for spiritual unity discussed earlier in this paper, we can then[CLB4] see that spiritual unity would be rather ineffectual without homogenized physical strength: only with a combination of physical and spiritual power could Japan become the defined, sovereign nation that it needed to be in order to remain Japan; but only by importing non-Japanese models for these powers could Japan attain the strength it needed to do so.
Scholarship on 19th century Japan so often treats the Tokugawa period and the Meiji period as absolutely separate entities, between which occurred a complete shift in thought and ideology. Even scholars who argue that Sakoku was a myth still tend to leave the Meiji period well enough alone; likewise, Meiji scholars often fail to address the similarities in thought between the two periods. I believe, in terms of the ideological and scholarly currents about Japanese relationships with the exterior, the late Tokugawa period and the Meiji period were actually quite similar. As I have argued in this paper, an analysis of scholarship ranging from the first to the last decade of the 19th century helps us understand both the causes behind and the practices of these ideologies. Japan was never quite isolated from the West, but it also rarely wanted more influence from the ever-encroaching Western empires. Furthermore, few scholars believed that Japan could remain safe from those empires if it just remained scientifically and politically stagnant. Many people saw the rather oxymoronic need to adopt Western methods into Japan in order to keep the West out: both the Tokugawa bakufu and the Meiji government knew Japan had to conform to the new world system in order to remain Japanese.
Bibliography:
Burns, Susan. “Constructing the National Body: Public Health and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Japan.” Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, eds., Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities. An Arbor: Michigan, 2000
Doak, Kevin Michael. A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Howland, Douglas. Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-century Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002.
Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi, and Yasushi Aizawa. Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986.
Walker, Brett L., “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island: Cartography and Empire,” Journal of Historical Geography, 33 (2007), pp. 283-313
[1] Doak, Kevin Michael, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 19-20
[2] Howland, Douglas, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002) 12
[3] Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi, and Yasushi Aizawa, Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986) 59
[4] Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism, 60
[5] The Expulsion Edict of 1825, found in Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism, 60
[6] Aizawa Seishisai’s New Theses of 1825, found in Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism, 124
[7] Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism, 124
[8] Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism, 101
[9] Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism, 105
[10] Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism, 143
[11] Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism, 143
[12] Walker, Brett L., “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese Exploration of Sakhalin Island: Cartography and Empire,” Journal of Historical Geography, 33 (2007)
[13] Walker, Mamiya Rinzō
[14] Walker, Mamiya Rinzō
[15] Walker, Mamiya Rinzō
[16] Burns, Susan, “Constructing the National Body: Public Health and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid, eds., Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities (Ann Arbor: Michigan, 2000) 21
[17] Burns, Constructing, 21
[18] Howland, Translating, 12
[19] Burns, Constructing, 24
[20] Burns, Constructing, 18
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Japanese History in Transition: Rupture and Continuity” at the University of Chicago, June 2016
Haus Lilienfeld 