When China Rules the World (10 page)

The Tokugawa era, the 250-year period prior to the Meiji Restoration, saw the creation of a highly centralized and formalized feudal system.
⁸
Beneath the imperial family and the lords (
daimyo
), society was organized into four levels in such strict hierarchy that it possessed a caste-like quality: these were the warriors (
samurai
), the farmers, the artisans and the merchants respectively. One should also, strictly speaking, include the
burakumin
, Japan’s outcasts or untouchables - descended from those who worked in occupations associated with death, such as undertakers, buriers of the executed, skinners of dead animals - who were regarded and treated as invisible, just as they still are today, the exception (along with those of Chinese and Korean ancestry) to the social inclusivity described earlier.
⁹
One’s rank was determined by inheritance and set in stone. The head of every family was required to post on his doorway his class position and the details of his hereditary status. His birthright determined the clothes he could wear, the foods he could buy and the type of house he could live in. The
daimyo
took a portion of his farmers’ rice every year and out of that, apart from catering for his own needs, he paid his
samurai
. The
samurai
possessed no land: their formal function was to defend the
daimyo
, his land and property. They were the only members of society allowed to carry a sword and enjoyed wide and arbitrary power over the lower classes. During the Tokugawa era the
daimyo
were answerable to the shogun, who, in turn, was, at least formally, accountable to the emperor in his seclusion in Kyoto. Unlike Chinese Confucianism, which valued educational excellence above all (the mandarins being products of a highly competitive examination system), the Japanese, in giving pre-eminence to the
samurai
, and indeed the shogunate, extolled martial qualities.
¹⁰
During the Tokugawa period, China was, in effect, a civilian Confucian country and Japan a military Confucian country.

Not long after the Tokugawa family began their shogunate at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they closed Japan off to the outside world and suppressed Christianity, rejecting foreign influences in favour of Japanese customs and religious traditions. No European ships were allowed to use Japanese ports, with the exception of the Dutch, who were permitted to use the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki. The Japanese were forbidden from sailing in larger boats - it became an offence to build or operate a boat over a certain size - thereby bringing to an end extensive trading activity along the Japanese coast. The reasons appear to have been a desire to limit the activities of merchants together with a fear of outside influences, and especially the import of European firearms, which it was believed might serve to destabilize the delicate balance of power between the various provinces and the shogun.
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Notwithstanding this retreat into autarchy, the Tokugawa era saw many dynamic changes. Japan became an increasingly unified community, standardizing its language, engendering similar ways of thinking and behaving between different provinces, and evolving a common set of rules and customs. As a result, the conditions for the emergence of a modern nation-state began to take shape. Castle towns were built along a newly constructed road network which served to further unify the country, with these towns at the centre of what became a vibrant trade. By the end of the Tokugawa period, Edo, as Tokyo was then known, was as big as London, with a population of more than a million, while Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya and Kanazawa also had sizeable populations. As we saw in Chapter 2, Japan’s economy in 1800 compared favourably with that of north-west Europe although it suffered from the same intensifying resource constraints as Europe and China. Japan, like China, moreover, could not look to any colonies as a source of relief, though food and fertilizer from long-distance fishing expeditions, and the import of commodity-intensive products from its more sparsely populated regions, provided Japan with rather greater amelioration than was the case with China. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan possessed many of the preconditions for economic take-off apart, that is, from a government committed to that goal.

One final point should detain us: the changing nature and role of the
samurai
. Although their original purpose had been to defend the interests of the
daimyo
, their role steadily broadened as they assumed growing responsibility for the administration and stewardship of their
daimyo
’s estates, as well as for protocol and negotiations with other daimyo and the shogun. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration they had, in effect, been transformed from a military caste into a key administrative class within Japanese society. Although steeped in the Confucian tradition of efficient administration, their knowledge and predisposition were essentially military, scientific and technological rather than literary and scholastic as was the case with their Chinese counterparts: this orientation and inclination was to have a profound impact on the nature and character of the post-1868 era.

In 1853 the relative peace and stability of the Tokugawa era was rudely interrupted by the appearance in Tokyo Bay of Commodore Perry, an American naval officer, at the head of a fleet of black ships, demanding on behalf of the United States - along with various European powers, notably Britain - that Japan should open itself to trade.
¹²
Japan’s long period of isolation could no longer be sustained: like so much of the rest of the world in the nineteenth century, Japan could not ignore the West and its metamorphosis into such an expansive and predatory player. In 1858, faced with the continuing threat of invasion, Japan signed the unequal treaties which opened up the country to trade on extremely unfavourable terms, including the imposition of extra-territoriality on its main ports, which excluded Western nationals from the requirements of Japanese law. The unequal treaties represented a major restriction of Japan’s sovereignty. In 1859 Japan was obliged to lift the ban on Christianity imposed over 300 years earlier.

The intervention of the Western nations, with the British, American, French and Dutch fleets actively involved, was bitterly resented and led to a huge wave of anti-foreigner (or anti-barbarian, as Westerners were known) sentiment.
¹³
In the face of growing tumult and unrest, the Tokugawa regime was beleaguered and paralysed. During a process lasting two years, culminating in 1868, the shogunate was overthrown by the combined forces of the Satsuma and Choshu clans, and a new government, dominated by former
samurai
, installed. The
samurai
were the prime movers in the fall of the shogunate and the chief instigators of the new Meiji regime (named after the emperor who reigned between 1868 and 1912). Part of the price the
samurai
paid for their new-found power and prominence in a government committed to the building of a modern state was the forfeiture of their old feudal-style privileges, namely their monopoly of the right to bear arms and their previous payments in kind - with the payments being commuted to cash and rapidly diminishing in value.
¹⁴

This dramatic political change - bringing to an end two and a half centuries of shogunate rule - was driven by no political blueprint, goal or vision. In the early stages, the popular mood had been dominated by anti-Western sentiment. However, it became increasingly clear to a growing section of the ruling elite that isolation was no longer a serious option: if Japan was to be saved from the barbarians, it would have to respond to the challenge posed by the West rather than ignore it. The emergent ruling elite, which had previously shared these xenophobic and isolationist sentiments, underwent a remarkable political transformation, rapidly acquiring a very powerful sense of what needed to be done and implementing it with extraordinary speed. A modern imperial state was instituted, with a chief minister ‘advising’ the emperor, but with effective power concentrated in the former’s hands. By 1869 universal freedom of choice was introduced in marriage and occupation. By 1871 the feudal order had effectively been disbanded. In 1873 universal conscription was decreed, rendering the old
samurai
privilege to bear arms redundant. Almost immediately the government started to establish factories run mainly by former
samurai
, thereby ushering in a new and very different economic era.
¹⁵

If Japan had previously been shaped and influenced by its exposure to Chinese civilization, the threat from the West persuaded the new ruling elite that it had to learn from the West as quickly as possible if it was to preserve the country’s independence and forestall the fate that had befallen China after the Opium Wars, with its progressive loss of sovereignty. The speed, single-mindedness and comprehensiveness with which the new government went about this task, particularly in the absence of any prior commitment or programme, is a remarkable historical phenomenon. During a breathtaking period of two decades, it drew hugely on Western experience in the construction of a range of new institutions. It sent envoys and missions to Europe and also to the United States in order to study what might be learnt, borrowed and assimilated.
¹⁶
This was done in a highly systematic way, with the object of establishing which country had most to offer in which particular area. The results were almost immediate. The education system introduced in 1873 was modelled on the French system of school districts. The navy was based on Britain’s, the army on France’s, and later also on Germany’s. The railways followed the British example but the universities the American. Between 1871 and 1876 around 300 European experts were brought to Japan by interested institutions and government departments to assist in the process of design and construction.
¹⁷
The result was a patchwork of foreign influences that - in what became a typically Japanese manner - were somehow articulated into a distinctively Japanese whole.

From the late 1870s the government began to sell off its newly created factories. By so doing, it created a capitalist class. Many were former
samurai
who used the bonds that they had been given by the government - which had replaced the monetary stipends that they had previously received, which in turn had replaced their former feudal payments in kind - to buy the new companies. From the outset, then, the new capitalist owners had two distinguishing characteristics which have remained a hallmark of post-Meiji Japan to this day: first, they owed their existence and position to the largesse and patronage of the government, thereby creating a powerful bond of obligation; and second, the new owners were by background, training and temperament administrators rather than entrepreneurs.

The Meiji Restoration bore some of the characteristics of a revolution. The purpose was to build a modern state and shed the country’s feudal legacy. The new ruling elite was drawn not from the
daimyo
but primarily from the
samurai
, including those sections of farmers that had been latterly incorporated into the
samurai
class, together with some of the merchant class. There was clearly a shift in class power. And yet, unlike in Europe, the new rising class, the merchants, neither instigated the change nor drove it: in fact, for the most part, they had not come into conflict with the old regime.
¹⁸
The leaders of the Restoration, instead, were part of the existing ruling elite, namely the warrior class, whose role had steadily been transformed into one of more generalized administrative leadership.
¹⁹
To emphasize this sense of continuity and in order to consolidate popular support and provide legitimacy for the new regime, the
samurai
restored the emperor to a more central role in Japanese life, an act symbolized by his transfer from Kyoto to Edo, now renamed Tokyo. It was a coup by the elite rather than a popular uprising from below.
²⁰
Thus, although it had some of the attributes of a revolution, it is best described as a restoration, an act that sought to preserve the power of the existing elite in the name of saving Japan from the barbarian threat. It was designed to preserve and maintain as much as transform, its instincts conservative as much as radical. Japan is a deeply conservative country in which the lines of continuity are far stronger than the lines of discontinuity. Even when discontinuity was needed, as in 1868, it was instituted, unlike in France and China - both notable exponents of revolution - by the elite, who, mindful of the need for radical change, nonetheless sought to preserve as much as possible of the old order. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Restoration, certainly in contrast to most revolutions, was relatively bloodless. The ruling elite was to succeed in maintaining the way of life, traditions, customs, family structure, relationships and hierarchies of Japan to a remarkable extent. The Meiji Restoration is testimony to the resilience, inner strength and adaptability of the Japanese ruling elite and its ability to change course when the situation required.
²¹

There is one other fundamental difference between the major revolutions in Europe and the Meiji Restoration. The French Revolution was, amongst other things, a response to an internal development - the rise of the bourgeoisie - whereas the Meiji Restoration was a response to an external threat, that of an expansionist West. This was the fundamental geopolitical difference between Europe and the rest of the world: Europe was the leader and, therefore, the predator, while the rest of the world was, in response, obliged to find a way of dealing with Europe’s power and expansionist intent. This difference also helps to explain why the Restoration was instigated by a section of the elite rather than a rising antagonistic group: what obliged Japan to change course was not the rise of the merchant class but the external threat from the West.