Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (10 page)

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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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At that time, dissections in Japan were uncommon and performed only by
eta
, an untouchable caste of butchers and tanners who were considered unclean.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’,
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.

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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’.
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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.
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‘Japan’s pre-war success, its emulation of the west, is not simply industry, it’s not simply culture. Westernization also means imperialism.’