The New Penguin History of the World (158 page)

Perry’s arrival could be seen in Confucian terms as an omen that the end of the shogunate was near. No doubt some Japanese saw it in that way. Yet this did not at once follow and there were a few years of somewhat muddled response to the barbarian threat. Japan’s rulers did not straightway come around to a wholehearted policy of concession (there was one further attempt to expel foreigners by force) and Japan’s future course was not set until well into the 1860s. Within a few years the success of the West was none the less embodied in and symbolized by a series of so-called ‘unequal treaties’. Commercial privileges, extra-territoriality for western residents, the presence of diplomatic representatives and restrictions on the Japanese export of opium were the main concessions won by the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia and the Netherlands. Soon afterwards the shogunate came to an end; its inability to resist the foreigner was one contributing factor and another was the threat from two great aggregations of feudal power which had already begun to adopt western military techniques in order to replace the Tokugawa by a more effective and centralized system under their control. There was fighting between the Tokugawa and their opponents, but it was followed not by a relapse into disorder and anarchy but by a resumption of power by the imperial court and administration in 1868 in the so-called ‘Meiji Restoration’.

The re-emergence of the emperor from centuries of ceremonial seclusion, and the widespread acceptance of the revolutionary renewal which followed, was attributable above all to the passionate desire of most literate Japanese to escape from a ‘shameful inferiority’ to the West which might have led them to share the fate of the Chinese and Indians. In the 1860s both the
bakufu
and some individual clans had already sent several missions to Europe. Anti-foreign agitation was dropped in order to learn from the West the secrets of its strength. There was a paradox in this. As in some European countries, a nationalism rooted in a conservative view of society was to dissolve much of the tradition it was developed to defend.

The transference of the court to Edo was the symbolic opening of the Meiji ‘Restoration’ and the regeneration of Japan; its indispensable first stage was the abolition of feudalism. What might have been a difficult and bloody business was made simple by the voluntary surrender to the emperor of their lands by the four greatest clans, who set out their motives in a memorial they addressed to the emperor. They were returning to the emperor what had originally been his, they said, ‘so that a uniform rule may prevail throughout the empire. Thus the country will be able to rank equally with the other nations of the world.’ This was a concise expression of the patriotic ethic which was to inspire Japan’s leaders for the next half-century and was widely spread in a country with a large degree of
literacy, where local leaders could make possible the acceptance of national goals to a degree impossible elsewhere. True, such expressions were not uncommon in other countries. What was peculiar to Japan was the urgency which observation of the fate of China lent to the programme, the emotional support given to the idea by Japanese social and moral tradition, and the fact that in the imperial throne there was available within the established structure a source of moral authority not committed merely to maintaining the past. These conditions made possible a Japanese 1688: a conservative revolution opening the way to radical change.

Rapidly, Japan adopted many of the institutions of western government and western society. A prefectorial system of administration, posts, a daily newspaper, a ministry of education, military conscription, the first railway, religious toleration and the Gregorian calendar all arrived within the first five years. A representative system of local government was inaugurated in 1879 and ten years later a new constitution set up a bicameral parliament (a peerage had already been created in preparation for the organization of the upper house). In fact, this was less revolutionary than might appear, given the strong authoritarian strain in the document. At about the same time, too, the innovatory passion was beginning to show signs of flagging; the period when things western were a craze was over; no such enthusiasm was to be seen again until the second half of the twentieth century. In 1890 an imperial Rescript on Education, subsequently to be read on great days to generations of Japanese school-children, enjoined the observation of the traditional Confucian duties of filial piety and obedience and the sacrifice of self to the state if need be.

Much – perhaps the most important part – of old Japan was to survive the Meiji revolution and was to do so very obviously; this is in part the secret of modern Japan. But much, too, had gone. Feudalism could never be restored, generously compensated with government stock though the lords might be. Another striking expression of the new direction was the abolition of the old ordered class system. Care was shown in removing the privileges of the
samurai
; some of them could find compensation in the opportunities offered to them by the new bureaucracy, in business – no longer to be a demeaning activity – and in the modernized army and navy. For these foreign instruction was sought, because the Japanese sought proven excellence. Gradually they dropped their French military advisers and took to employing Germans after the Franco-Prussian War; the British provided instructors for the navy. Young Japanese were sent abroad to learn at first hand other secrets of the wonderful and threatening puissance of the West. It is still hard not to be moved by the ardour of many of these young men and of their elders and impossible not to be impressed
by their achievement, which went far beyond Japan and their own time. The
shishi
(as some of the most passionate and dedicated activists of reform were called) later inspired national leaders right across Asia, from India to China. Their spirit was still at work in the young officers of the 1930s who were to launch the last and most destructive wave of Japanese imperialism.

The crudest indexes of the success of the reformers are the economic, but they are very striking. They built on the economic benefits of the Tokugawa peace. It was not only the borrowing of western technology and expertise which ensured the release in Japan of a current of growth achieved by no other non-western state. The country was lucky in being already well-supplied with entrepreneurs who took for granted the profit motive and it was undoubtedly richer than, say, China. Some of the explanation of the great leap forward by Japan lay also in the overcoming of inflation and the liquidation of feudal restraints, which had made it hard to tap Japan’s full potential. The first sign of change was a further increase in agricultural production, little though the peasants, who made up four-fifths of the population in 1868, benefited from it. Japan managed to feed a growing population in the nineteenth century by bringing more land under cultivation for rice and by cultivating existing fields more intensively. Though the dependence on the land tax lessened as a bigger portion of the revenue could be found from other sources, it was still upon the peasant that the cost of the new Japan fell most heavily. As late as 1941, Japanese farmers saw few of the gains from modernization. Relatively they had fallen behind; their ancestors only a century earlier had a life expectancy and income approximating to that of their British equivalents, but even by 1900 this was far from true of their successors. There were few non-agricultural resources. It was the increasingly productive tax on land which paid for investment. Consumption remained low, though there was not the suffering of, say, the later industrialization process of Stalin’s Russia. A high rate of saving (12 per cent in 1900) spared Japan dependence on foreign loans but, again, restricted consumption. This was the other side of the balance sheet of expansion, whose credit entries were clear enough: the infrastructure of a modern state, an indigenous arms industry, a usually high credit rating in the eyes of foreign investors and a big expansion of cotton-spinning and other textiles by 1914.

In the end a heavy spiritual cost had to be paid for these successes. Even while seeking to learn from the West, Japan turned inward. The ‘foreign’ religious influences of Confucianism and even, at first, Buddhism were attacked by the upholders of the state Shintoist cult, which, even under the shogunate, had begun to stress and enhance the role of the emperor
as the embodiment of the divine. The demands of loyalty to the emperor as the focus of the nation came to override the principles embodied in the new constitution which might have been developed in liberal directions in a different cultural setting. The character of the regime expressed itself less in its liberal institutions than in the repressive actions of the imperial police. Yet it is difficult to see how an authoritarian emphasis could, in fact, have been avoided, given the two great tasks facing the statesmen of the Meiji Restoration. The modernization of the economy meant not planning in the modern sense but a strong governmental initiative and harsh fiscal policies. The other problem was order. The imperial power had once before gone into eclipse because of its failure to meet the threat on this front and now there were new dangers, because not all conservatives could be reconciled to the new model Japan. Discontented
ronin
– rootless
samurai
without masters – were one source of trouble. Another was peasant misery; there were scores of agrarian revolts in the first decade of the Meiji era. In the Satsuma rebellion of 1877 the government’s new conscript forces showed that they could handle conservative resistance. It was the last of several rebellions against the Restoration and the last great challenge from conservatism.

The energies of the discontented
samurai
were gradually to be siphoned off into the service of the new state, but this did not mean that the implications for Japan were all beneficial. They intensified in certain key sectors of the national life an assertive nationalism which was to lead eventually to aggression abroad. Immediately, this was likely to find expression not only in resentment of the West but also in imperial ambitions directed towards the nearby Asian mainland. Modernization at home and adventure abroad were often in tension in Japan after the Meiji Restoration, but in the long run they pulled in the same direction. The popular and democratic movements especially felt the tug of imperialism.

China was the predestined victim and was to be served much more harshly by her fellow-Asians than by any of the western states. At first she was threatened only indirectly by Japan. Just as China’s supremacy over the dependencies on her borders was challenged in Tibet, Burma and Indo-China by Europeans, so the Japanese menaced it in the ancient empire of Korea, long a tributary of Peking. Japanese interests there went back a long way. In part they were strategic; the Tsushima straits were the place where the mainland was nearest. But the Japanese were also concerned over the possible Far Eastern ambitions of Russia, particularly in Manchuria, and over China’s inability to resist them. In 1876 an overt move was made; under the threat of military and naval action (like those deployed by Europeans against China, and by Perry against Japan), the Koreans agreed to open three of their ports to the Japanese and to exchange diplomatic representatives. This was an affront to China. Japan was treating Korea as an independent country and negotiating with it over the head of the imperial court in Peking, which claimed sovereignty over Korea. Some Japanese wanted even more. They remembered earlier Japanese invasions of Korea and successful piracy on its coasts, and coveted the mineral and natural wealth of the country. The statesmen of the Restoration did not at once give way to such pressure, but in a sense they were only making haste slowly. In the 1890s another step forward was taken which led Japan into her first major war since the Restoration, and it was against China. It was sweepingly successful, but was followed by national humiliation when in 1895 a group of western powers forced Japan to accept a peace treaty much less advantageous than the one she had imposed on the Chinese (which had included a declaration of Korea’s independence).