Upheaval

FIG. 3 Map of Japan

Unlike the other countries discussed in this book, for Japan I don’t speak the language, haven’t lived there for prolonged periods, and visited it for the first time only two decades ago. However, I have had much opportunity to learn second-hand about Japan’s selective changes and its mixture of European with traditional Japanese features. When I moved to California from Boston on the U.S’s East Coast, where I was born and grew up, I found myself in a part of the U.S. with a much larger Asian population, many of them Japanese or Japanese-Americans. Asians now form the largest proportion of the student body of my university (the University of California at Los Angeles), outnumbering students of European descent. I have many Japanese friends and colleagues, including a wonderful Japanese research assistant, who know the U.S. and Europe very well from having lived there for a long time, and who in some cases have intermarried. Conversely, I have many American friends and colleagues who know Japan very well from having lived there for a long time, and again in some cases from having intermarried. I myself acquired Japanese cousins and nieces when I married into a family with two Japanese branches.

As a result, I hear constantly about the differences between Japan and the U.S. or Europe, from Japanese, Americans, and Europeans with long experience of living both in Japan and in the U.S. and/or Europe. All of my Japanese relatives, students, friends, and colleagues talk about the big differences coexisting with the big similarities between Japanese and American/European societies. In alphabetical order without trying to rank them in importance, some of the differences that they identify involve: apologizing (or not apologizing), the difficulty of learning to read and write, enduring hardships silently, extensive socializing with prospective business clients, extreme politeness, feelings towards foreigners, openly misogynous behavior, patient/doctor communication, pride in beautiful penmanship, reduced individualism, relations with parents-in-law, standing out as different from other people, the status of women, talking directly about feelings, unselfishness, ways of disagreeing with other people— and many other features.

All of those differences are legacies of traditional Japan, coexisting with Western influences on modern Japan. That mixing began with a crisis exploding on July 8, 1853, and accelerated with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 (of which more below), when Japan embarked on a program of selective change that extended over half-a-century. Meiji-Era Japan is perhaps the modern world’s outstanding example of selective national change, and of using other nations as models. Like Finland’s crisis, which we discussed in the previous chapter, Japan’s began abruptly with a foreign threat (but not with an actual attack). Like Finland, Japan exhibited outstanding honest self-appraisal, and patience at experimenting with different solutions until it found ones that worked. Unlike Finland, Japan adopted much more comprehensive selective changes and enjoyed greater freedom of action. Hence Japan in the Meiji Era offers a good case study to pair with our discussion of Finland.

Japan was the first modern non-European country to match European societies and overseas neo-European societies (the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) in standard of living, industrialization, and technology. Japan today resembles Europe and neoEuropes not only economically and technologically but also in many political and social respects, such as in being a parliamentary democracy, having high literacy, adopting Western dress, and adopting Western music along with traditional Japanese music. But in other respects, especially social and cultural ones, Japan is still more different from all European societies than any European society is from other European societies. There is nothing surprising about those non-European aspects of Japanese society. They are entirely to be expected, because Japan lies 8,000 miles from Western Europe and has been heavily influenced by nearby countries of the Asian mainland (especially China and Korea), with which Japan shares a long history.

Before 1542, no European influence had reached Japan. There was then a period of influence associated with Europe’s overseas expansion (but limited by the great intervening distance) from 1542 to 1639, followed by a period of reduced influence until 1853. Most of the European aspects of contemporary Japanese society have arrived since 1853. Of course, they haven’t replaced everything about traditional Japan, of which much remains. That is, Japan, like Cocoanut Grove’s survivors after the fire, and like Britain after World War Two, is a mosaic of its old self and its new self— more so than any of the other six societies discussed in this book.

Until the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s actual ruler was a hereditary military dictator called the shogun, while the emperor was a figurehead without real power. Between 1639 and 1853, the shoguns limited Japanese contact with foreigners, thereby continuing along Japanese history of lesser isolation arising from the effects of their island geography. That history may at first surprise us when we glance at a world map and compare Japan’s geography with that of the British Isles.

Superficially, these two archipelagoes appear to be geographic equivalents of each other off Eurasia’s east and west coasts, respectively. (Just look at a map to convince yourself.) Japan and Britain look roughly similar in area, and both lie near the Eurasian continent, so one would expect similar histories of involvement with the continent. In fact, since the time of Christ, Britain has been successfully invaded from the continent four times, Japan never. Conversely, Britain has had armies fighting on the continent in every century since the Norman Conquest of AD 1066, but until the late 19th century there were no Japanese armies on the continent except during two brief periods. Already during the Bronze Age over 3,000 years ago, there was vigorous trade between Britain and mainland Europe; British mines in Cornwall were the main source of tin for making European bronze. A century or two ago, Britain was the world’s leading trading nation, while Japanese overseas trade still remained small. Why do these huge differences apparently contradict straightforward geographic expectations?

The explanation for that contradiction involves important details of geography. While Japan and Britain look at a glance similar in area and isolation, Japan is actually five times farther from the continent (110 versus 22 miles), and 50% larger in area and much more fertile. Hence Japan’s population today is more than double Britain’s, and its production of land-grown food and timber and in-shore seafood is higher. Until modern industry required importation of oil and metals, Japan was largely self-sufficient in essential resources and had little need for foreign trade — unlike Britain. That’s the geographic background to the isolation that characterized most of Japanese history, and that merely increased after 1639.

Europeans first reached China and Japan by sea in AD 1514 and 1542, respectively. Japan, which had already been doing some trade with China and Korea, then began trading with four groups of Europeans: Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British. That did not consist of direct trade between Japan and Europe, but instead of trade at settlements on the Chinese coast and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Those European contacts affected spheres of Japanese society ranging from weapons to religion. When the first Portuguese adventurers reaching Japan in 1542 shot ducks with their primitive guns, Japanese observers were so impressed that they avidly developed their own firearms, with the result that by 1600 Japan had more and better guns than any other country in the world. The first Christian missionaries arrived in 1549, and by 1600 Japan had 300,000 Christians.

But the shoguns had reasons to be concerned about European influence in general, and about Christianity in particular. Europeans were accused of meddling in Japanese politics, and of supplying weapons to Japanese rebels against the Japanese government. Catholics preached intolerance of other religions, disobeyed Japanese government orders not to preach, and were perceived as loyal to a foreign ruler (the Pope). Hence after crucifying thousands of Japanese Christians, between 1636 and 1639 the shogun cut most ties between Japan and Europe. Christianity was banned. Most Japanese were forbidden to travel or live overseas. Japanese fishermen who drifted to sea, got picked up by European or American ships, and managed to return to Japan were often kept under house arrest or forbidden to talk about their experiences overseas. Visits by foreigners to Japan were banned except for Chinese traders confined to one area of the port city of Nagasaki, and Dutch traders confined to Deshima Island in Nagasaki harbor. (Because those Dutch were Protestants, they were considered nonChristian by Japan.) Once every four years, those Dutch traders were ordered to bring tribute to the Japanese capital, traveling by a prescribed route under watchful eyes, like dangerous microbes kept inside a sealed container. Some Japanese domains did succeed in continuing to trade with Korea, China, and the Ryukyu Islands, the archipelago several hundred miles south of Japan that includes Okinawa. Intermittent Korean trade visits to Japan were disguised to Japanese audiences as visits tolerated to receive Korean "tribute." But all of those contacts remained limited in scale.

The small trade between the Netherlands and Japan was economically negligible. Instead, its significance to Japan was that those Dutch traders became an important source of information about Europe. Among the courses of instruction offered by Japanese private academies were so-called "Dutch studies." Those classes taught information acquired from the Netherlands about practical and scientific subjects: especially Western medicine, astronomy, maps, surveying, guns, and explosives. Within the Japanese government’s Bureau of Astronomy was an office devoted to translating Dutch books on those subjects into Japanese. Much information about the outside world (including Europe) also came to Japan via China, Chinese books, and European books translated into Chinese.

In short, until 1853 Japan’s contact with foreigners was limited, and was controlled by the Japanese government. Japan in 1853 was very unlike Japan today, and even unlike Japan in 1900, in important ways. Somewhat like medieval Europe, Japan in 1853 was still a feudal hierarchical society divided into domains, each controlled by a lord called a daimyo, whose power exceeded that of a medieval European lord. At the apex of power stood the shogun (Plate 3.1), of the Tokugawa line of shoguns that had ruled Japan since 1603, and that controlled one-quarter of Japan’s ricegrowing land. Daimyo required the shogun’s permission to marry, move, or erect or repair a castle. They were also required, in alternate years, to bring their retainers and take up residence at the shogun’s capital, at great expense to themselves. Besides the resulting tension between the shogun and the daimyo, other problems in Tokugawa Japan arose from the growing gap between the shogun’s expenses and his income, increasingly frequent rebellions, urbanization, and the rising merchant class. But the Tokugawa shoguns had coped with problems and had remained in power for 250 years, and were at no imminent risk of being overthrown. Instead, the shock that led to their overthrow was the arrival of the West.

The background to Western pressure on Japan was Western pressure on China, which produced far more goods desired by the West than did Japan. European consumers especially wanted Chinese tea and silk, but the West produced little that China wanted in return, so Europeans had to make up that trade deficit by shipping silver to China. In order to reduce the hemorrhaging of their silver stocks, British traders got the bright idea of shipping cheap opium from India to sell to China at prices below those of existing Chinese sources. (No, that British opium policy is not an invented anti-Western slander: it really was true, and needs to be remembered when one wants to understand modern Chinese attitudes towards the West.) The Chinese government understandably responded by denouncing opium as a health hazard, banning its importation, and demanding that European smugglers surrender all the opium stored on their ships anchored off China’s coast. Britain objected to that Chinese response as an illegal restraint of trade.

The result was the Opium War of 1839-1842 between Britain and China, the first serious test of military strength between China and the West. Although China was far larger and more populous than Britain, it turned out that Britain’s navy and army were far better equipped and trained than China’s. Hence China was defeated and forced into humiliating concessions, paying a large indemnity, and signing a treaty that opened five Chinese ports to British trade. France and the U.S. then extracted the same concessions from China.

When the Japanese government learned of these developments in China, it feared that it would be only a matter of time until some Western power demanded a similar treaty port system in Japan. It did happen, in 1853, and the Western power responsible was the U.S. The reason why, among Western powers, the U.S. was the one that became motivated to act first against Japan was the U.S.'s conquest of California from Mexico in 1848, accompanied by the discovery there of gold, which caused an explosion of American ship traffic to the Pacific coast. Sailings of American whaling and trading ships around the Pacific also increased. Inevitably, some of those American ships got wrecked, some of those wrecks occurred in ocean waters near Japan, and some of their sailors ended up in Japan, where they were killed or arrested according to Tokugawa Japan’s isolationist policy. But the U.S. wanted those sailors instead to receive protection and help, and it wanted American ships to be able to buy coal in Japan. Hence U.S. President Millard Fillmore sent Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan with a fleet of four ships, including two gunbearing steam-powered warships infinitely superior to any Japanese ships at that time. (Japan had neither steamships nor even steam engines.) On July 8, 1853 Perry sailed his fleet uninvited into Edo Bay (now called Tokyo Bay), refused Japanese orders to leave, delivered President Fillmore’s letter of demands, and announced that he expected an answer when he returned the following year.

For Japan, Perry’s arrival, and his open threat of overwhelming force, conformed to our definition of "crisis": a serious challenge that cannot be solved by existing methods of coping. After Perry’s departure, the shogun circulated Fillmore’s letter to the daimyo to ask their opinion about how best to respond; that was already unusual. Among their varied proposed responses, common themes were a strong desire to maintain Japan’s isolation, but recognition of the practical impossibility of Japan defending itself against Perry’s warships, hence the suggestion of compromising to buy time during which Japan could acquire Western guns and technology to defend itself. It was the latter view that prevailed.

When Perry returned on February 13, 1854, this time with a fleet of nine warships, the shogun responded by signing Japan’s first treaty with a Western country. Although Japan succeeded in putting off Perry’s demand for a trade agreement, it did make other concessions that ended its 215-year policy of isolation. It opened two Japanese ports as harbors of refuge for American ships, accepted an American consul to reside at one of those ports, and agreed to treat shipwrecked American sailors humanely. After the signing of that agreement between Japan and the U.S., the British and Russian and Dutch naval commanders in the Far East quickly reached similar agreements with Japan. The 14-year period that began in 1854, when the shogun’s government (called the bakufu) signed Perry’s treaty ending Japan’s centuries of isolation, was a tumultuous period of Japanese history. The bakufu struggled to solve the problems resulting from Japan’s forced opening. Ultimately, the shogun failed, because the opening triggered unstoppable changes in Japanese society and government. Those changes in turn led to the shogun’s overthrow by his Japanese rivals, and then to much more far-reaching changes under the new government that was led by those rivals.

Perry’s treaty and its British, Russian, and Dutch equivalents didn’t satisfy the Western goal of opening Japan to trade. Hence in 1858 the new American consul in Japan negotiated a broader treaty that did address trade, and that was again soon followed by similar treaties with Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. Those treaties became regarded in Japan as humiliating and were termed the "unequal treaties," because they embodied the Western view that Japan did not deserve to be treated in the way that Western powers treated one another. For instance, the treaties provided for extraterritoriality of Western citizens in Japan, ie., that they were not subject to Japanese laws. A major goal of Japanese policy for the next half-century became the undoing of the unequal treaties.

Japan’s military weakness in 1858 relegated that goal to the distant future. Instead, the bakufu’s more modest immediate goal in 1858 was to minimize the intrusion of Westerners, and of their ideas and influence. That was achieved by Japan’s keeping up the fiction of obeying the treaties, while actually frustrating them by delaying, unilaterally changing agreements, taking advantage of Western unfamiliarity with ambiguous Japanese place names, and playing off different Western countries against one another. Through the 1858 treaties, Japan succeeded in limiting trade to just two Japanese ports, termed "treaty ports," and in restricting foreigners to specified districts within those ports beyond which foreigners were forbidden to travel.

The bakufu’s basic strategy from 1854 onwards was one of buying time. That meant satisfying Western powers (with as few concessions as possible), but in the meantime acquiring Western knowledge, equipment, technology, and strength, both military and non-military, so as to be able to resist the West as soon as possible. The bakufu, and also the powerful domains of Satsuma and Choshu* that were nominally subject to the bakufu but enjoyed much autonomy, purchased Western ships and guns, modernized their militaries, and sent students to Europe and the U.S. Those students studied not just practical matters such as Western navigation, ships, industry, engineering, science, and technology, but also Western laws, languages, constitutions, economics, political science, and alphabets. The bakufu developed an Institute for the Study of Barbarian (i.e., foreign) Books, translated Western books, and sponsored the production of English-language grammars and an English pocket dictionary.

But while the bakufu and the big domains were thus trying to build up strength, problems resulting from Western contact were developing in Japan. The bakufu and domains became heavily indebted to foreign creditors as a result of expenses such as

4 Those two powerful rival domains — Satsuma at the south tip of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu, Choshu at the southwest tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu — played a major role at many stages of recent Japanese history. Both were defeated by Tokugawa armies in 1600. In the early 1860’s both took the lead in attacking Westerners and Western ships, and hence received the brunt of Western retaliation. Both buried their rivalry in order to overthrow the last shogun in 1868, but then staged the biggest revolts against the Meiji government in the 1870’s. weapons purchases and sending students overseas. Consumer prices and the cost of living rose. Many samurai (the warrior class) and merchants objected to the bakufu’s efforts to monopolize foreign trade. Now that the shogun had asked the daimyo for advice after Perry’s first visit, some daimyo wanted to become further involved in policy and planning, rather than leaving it all to the shogun as before. It was the shogun who had negotiated and signed treaties with Western powers, but the shogun couldn’t control outlying daimyo who violated those treaties.

The result was several sets of intersecting conflicts. Western powers were in conflict with Japan about whether to open Japan more (the Western goal) or less (the prevalent Japanese goal) to the West. Domains such as Satsuma and Choshu, which had already traditionally been in conflict against the bakufu, were now in sharper conflict, each side trying to use Western equipment and knowledge and allies against the other. Conflicts increased between domains. There was even conflict between the bakufu and the figurehead emperor at the imperial court, on whose behalf the bakufu supposedly acted. For instance, the imperial court refused to approve the 1858 treaty that the bakufu had negotiated with the U.S., but the bakufu proceeded to sign it anyway.

The sharpest conflict within Japan arose over Japan’s basic strategy dilemma: whether to try to resist and expel the foreigners now, or instead to wait until Japan could become stronger. The signing of the unequal treaties by the bakufu created a backlash in Japan: anger at the foreigners who had dishonored Japan, and anger at the shogun and other lords who had permitted Japan to be dishonored. Already around 1859, resentful, hotheaded, naive young sword-wielding samurai began to pursue a goal of expelling foreigners by a campaign of assassination. They became known as "shishi," meaning "men of high purpose." Appealing to what they believed were traditional Japanese values, they considered themselves morally superior to older politicians. The following statement of shishi principles, issued in 1861, conveys the flavor of their anger: it is a source of deepest grief to our Emperor that our magnificent and divine country has been humiliated by the barbarians, and that the Spirit of Japan, which was transmitted from antiquity, is on the point of being extinguished…​.It is said that, when one’s lord is humiliated, his retainers must choose death. Must we not set even greater emphasis on the present situation, in which the Imperial Country is about to know disgrace?…​ We swear by our deities that, if the Imperial Flag is once raised, we will go through fire and water to ease the Emperor’s mind, to carry out the will of our former lord, and to purge this evil from our people. Should any, in this cause, seek to put forward personal considerations, he shall incur the punishment of the angered gods, and be summoned before his fellows to commit hara-kiri.

Shishi terrorism was directed against foreigners, and even more often against Japanese working for or compromising with foreigners. In 1860 a group of shishi succeeded in beheading the regent Ii Naosuke, who had advocated signing treaties with the West. Japanese attacks against foreigners climaxed in two incidents in 1862 and 1863 involving the domains of Satsuma and Choshu. On September 14, 1862 a 28-year-old English merchant, Charles Richardson, was attacked by Satsuma swordsmen on a road and left to bleed to death, because he was considered to have failed to show proper respect for a procession that included the father of Satsuma’s daimyo. Britain demanded indemnities, apologies, and execution of the perpetrators not only from Satsuma but also from the bakufu. After nearly a year of unsuccessful British negotiations with Satsuma, a fleet of British warships bombarded and destroyed most of Satsuma’s capital of Kagoshima and killed an estimated 1,500 Satsuma soldiers. The other incident occurred in late June 1863, when Choshu coastal guns fired on Western ships and closed the crucial Shimonoseki Strait between the main Japanese islands of Honshu and Kyushu. A year later, a fleet of 17 British, French, American, and Dutch warships bombarded and destroyed those coastal guns and carried off Choshu’s remaining cannon.

Those two Western retaliations convinced even Satsuma and Choshu hotheads of the power of Western guns, and of the futility of Japan’s attempting to expel the foreigners while in its current weak condition. The hotheads would have to wait until Japan had achieved military equality with the West. Ironically, that was the policy that the bakufu had already been following, and for which the hotheads had been excoriating the bakufu.

But some domains, especially Satsuma and Choshu, were now convinced that the shogun was incapable of strengthening Japan to the point where it could resist the West. The daimyo concluded that, while they shared the bakufu’s goal of acquiring Western technology, achieving that goal required reorganizing Japan’s government and society. Hence they sought gradually to outmaneuver the shogun. Satsuma and Choshu had formerly been rivals, had been suspicious of each other, and had fought against each other. Recognizing that the shogun’s efforts to build up military strength threatened both domains, they now formed an alliance.

After the former shogun’s death in 1866, the new shogun launched a crash program of modernization and reform, including importing military equipment and military advisors from France. That increased the perceived threat to Satsuma and Choshu. When the former emperor also died in 1867, his 15-year-old son succeeded to the imperial throne (Plate 3.2). Satsuma and Choshu leaders conspired with the new emperor’s grandfather and thereby enlisted the support of the imperial court. On January 3, 1868 the conspirators seized the gates of the Imperial Palace in the city of Kyoto, convened a council stripping the shogun of his lands and of his position on the council, and ended the shogunate. The council proclaimed the fiction of "restoring" the responsibility for governing Japan to the emperor, although that responsibility had previously actually been the shogun’s. That event is known as the Meiji Restoration, and it marks the beginning of what is termed the Meiji Era: the period of rule of the new emperor.

After that coup gave them control of Kyoto, the immediate problem facing the Meiji leaders was to establish control over all of Japan. While the shogun himself accepted defeat, many others did not. The result was a civil war between armies supporting and armies opposing the new imperial government. Only when the last opposition forces on Japan’s northern main island of Hokkaido had been defeated in June 1869 did foreign powers recognize the imperial government as the government of Japan. And only then could Meiji leaders proceed with their efforts to reform their country.

At the beginning of the Meiji Era, much about Japan was up for grabs. Some leaders wanted an autocratic emperor; others wanted a figurehead emperor with actual power in the hands of a council of "advisors" (that was the solution that eventually prevailed); and still another proposal was for Japan to become a republic without an emperor. Some Japanese who had come to appreciate Western alphabets proposed that alphabets replace Japan’s beautiful but complex writing system, consisting of Chinese-derived characters combined with two Japanese syllabaries. Some Japanese wanted to launch a war against Korea without delay; others argued for waiting. The samurai wanted their private militias to be retained and used; others wanted to disarm and abolish the samurai.

Out of this turmoil of conflicting proposals, the Meiji leaders decided soon in favor of three basic principles. First, although some of the leaders had been among the hotheads who wanted immediately to expel Westerners, realism quickly prevailed. It became as clear to Meiji leaders as it had been to the shogun that Japan was presently incapable of expelling Westerners. Before that could be done, Japan had to become strong by adopting Western sources of strength, meaning not just guns themselves but also far-reaching political and social reforms that provided the underpinnings of Western strength.

Second, an ultimate goal of Meiji leaders was to revise the unequal treaties that had been imposed upon Japan by the West. But that required Japan to be strong and to be seen by the West as a legitimate Western-style state, with a Western-style constitution and laws. For example, Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Granville, bluntly told Japanese negotiators that Britain would recognize Japanese "jurisdiction over British subjects [resident in Japan] in precise proportion to their [Japanese] advancement in enlightenment and civilization," as judged by Britain according to British standards of advancement. It ended up taking 26 years from the Meiji coup until the time when Japan could get the West to revise the unequal treaties.

The third basic principle of Meiji leaders was to identify, adopt, and modify, in each sphere of life, the foreign model that was best matched to Japanese conditions and values. Meiji Japan variously borrowed especially from British, German, French, and American models. Different foreign countries ended up as models in different spheres: for instance, the new Japanese navy and army became modeled on the British navy and the German army, respectively. Conversely, within a given sphere, Japan often tried a succession of different foreign models: for example, in creating a Japanese civil law code, the Justice Ministry relied on a French scholar to produce a first draft, and then turned instead to a German model for the next draft.

Meiji Japan’s borrowing from the West was massive, conscious, and planned. Some of the borrowing involved bringing Westerners to Japan: for instance, importing Western schoolteachers to teach or to advise on education, and bringing two German scholars to help write a Japanese constitution drawing heavily on Germany’s constitution. But more of the borrowing involved Japanese traveling as observers to Europe and the U.S. A crucial step, undertaken just two years after the Meiji government had consolidated its power, was the Iwakura Mission of 1871-1873 (Plate 3.3). Consisting of 50 government representatives, it toured the U.S. and a dozen European countries, visited factories and government offices, met U.S. President Grant and European government leaders, and published a five-volume report providing Japan with detailed accounts of a wide range of Western practices. The mission announced its purpose as being "to select from the various institutions prevailing among enlightened nations such as are best suited to our present condition." When war broke out between France and Prussia in 1870, Japan even sent two observers with a much narrower purpose: to watch first-hand how Europeans fought.

A by-product of these foreign travels was that Japanese with overseas experience tended to become Meiji Japan’s leaders, both in government and in private spheres. For example, of the two most important younger men who rose to power in the Meiji government in the 1880’s, Ito Hirobumi (who led the design of Japan’s new constitution) had made several long visits to Europe, while Yamagata Aritomo (who became prime minister) had studied military science in Germany. Godai Tomoatsu used his European experience to become president of Osaka’s chamber of commerce and a Japanese railroad and mining entrepreneur, while Shibusawa Eiichi (financial comptroller of an 1867 Japanese mission in Paris) went on to develop Japanese banking and textile industries.

In order to make this massive borrowing from the West palatable to Japanese traditionalists, innovations and borrowings in Meiji Japan were often claimed to be not new at all, but just returns to Japan’s traditional ways. For example, when the emperor himself in 1889 promulgated Japan’s first constitution, based heavily on the German constitution, in his speech he invoked his ascent "to the Throne of a lineal succession unbroken for ages eternal," and "the right of sovereignty of the State [that] we have inherited from Our Ancestors." Similarly, new rituals invented for the imperial court during the Meiji Era were claimed to be timeless old court rituals.

This reframing of innovations as supposedly retained traditions — the phenomenon of "invented traditions" often invoked by innovators in other countries besides Japan — contributed to the success of Meiji leaders in carrying out drastic changes. The cruel fact was that the leaders faced a dangerous situation when they assumed power in January 1868. Japan was at risk of attacks by foreign powers, at risk from the civil war between the bakufu’s opponents and its supporters, at risk of wars between domains, and at risk of revolts by groups threatened with losing their former rank and power. Abolition of the samurai’s privileges did provoke several samurai rebellions, the most serious of them the Satsuma revolt of 1877. Armed peasant uprisings did break out periodically in the 1870’s. But opposition to Meiji reforms turned out to be less violent than might have been anticipated. Meiji leaders proved skilled at buying off, co-opting, or reconciling their actual or potential opponents. For instance, Enomoto Takeaki, the admiral of the fleet that held out on Hokkaido against Meiji forces until 1869, ended up being absorbed into Meiji ranks as a cabinet minister and envoy.

Let’s now consider what selective changes actually became adopted in Meiji Japan. The changes affected most spheres of Japanese life: the arts, clothing, domestic politics, the economy, education, the emperor’s role, feudalism, foreign policy, government, hairstyles, ideology, law, the military, society, and technology. The most urgent changes, effected or launched within the first few years of the Meiji Era, were to create a modern national army, to abolish feudalism, to found a national system of education, and to secure income for the government by tax reform. Attention then shifted to reforming the law codes, designing a constitution, expanding overseas, and undoing the unequal treaties. In parallel with this attention to pressing practical matters, Meiji leaders also began to address the challenge of creating an explicit ideology to enlist the support of Japan’s citizens.

Military reform began with purchasing modern Western equipment, enlisting French and German officers to train the army, and (later) experimenting with French and British models to develop a modern Japanese navy. The result illustrates Meiji skill at selecting the best foreign model: instead of selecting just one foreign country’s armed forces as the model for all branches of the Japanese military, Japan ended up modeling its army on Germany’s army but modeling its navy on Britain’s navy (because in late 19thcentury Europe Germany had the strongest army but Britain had the strongest navy!). As one example, when Japan wanted to learn how to build the fast battleships called battle-cruisers invented in Britain, Japan commissioned a British shipyard to design and build the first Japanese battle-cruiser, then used it as the model for building three more battle-cruisers in three different Japanese shipyards.

A national conscription law, adopted in 1873 and based on European models, provided for a national army of men armed with guns and serving for three years. Formerly, each feudal domain had its own private militia of samurai swordsmen, useless in modern war but still a threat to the Japanese national government (Plate 3.4). Hence the samurai were first forbidden to carry swords or to administer private punishment, then hereditary occupations (including that of being a samurai) were abolished, then the exsamurai were paid off in government stipends, and finally those stipends were converted to interest-bearing government bonds.

Another urgent order of business was to end feudalism. To make Japan strong required building a centralized Western-style state. That posed a delicate problem, because as of January 1868 the only real powers of the new imperial government were those just surrendered by the shogun; other powers remained with the daimyo (the feudal lords). Hence in March 1868 four daimyo, including those of Satsuma and Choshu who had instigated the Meiji Restoration, were persuaded to offer their lands and people to the emperor by an ambiguously worded document. When the emperor accepted that offer in July, the other daimyo were commanded to make the same offer, and as a sop they were then appointed as "governors" of their former feudal domains. Finally, in August 1871 the daimyo were told that their domains (and governorships) would now be swept away and replaced with centrally administered prefectures. But the daimyo were allowed to keep 10% of their former domains' assessed incomes, while being relieved of the burden of all the expenses that they had formerly borne. Thus, within three-and-a-half years, centuries of Japanese feudalism were dismantled.

The emperor remained the emperor: that didn’t change. However, he was no longer cloistered in Kyoto’s Imperial Palace: he was transferred to the effective capital of Edo, renamed Tokyo. In his 45 years of rule, the emperor made 102 trips outside of Tokyo and around Japan, compared with a total of just three trips by all emperors combined during the 265 years of the Tokugawa Era (1603-1868).

Education was subject to big reforms, with big consequences. For the first time in its history, Japan acquired a national system of education. Compulsory elementary schools were established in 1872, followed by the founding of Japan’s first university in 1877, middle schools in 1881, and high schools in 1886. The school system at first followed the highly centralized French model, shifting in 1879 to the American school model of local control, and then in 1886 to a German model. The end result of that educational reform is that Japan today ties for having the world’s highest percentage of literate citizens (99%), despite also having the world’s most complicated and hard-to-learn writing system. While the new national system of education was thus inspired by the West, its proclaimed purposes were thoroughly Japanese: to make Japanese people loyal and patriotic citizens revering their emperor and imbued with a sense of national unity.

A more mundane but equally important purpose of educational reform was to train recruits for jobs in government, and to develop Japan’s human capital so that Japan could rise in the world and prosper. In the 1880’s, recruitment for the central government bureaucracy became based on an exam testing Western knowledge, rather than testing knowledge of Confucian philosophy. National education, along with the government’s official abolition of hereditary occupations, undermined Japan’s traditional class divisions, because now higher education rather than birth became the stepping-stone to high government office. Partly as a result, among the world’s 14 large rich democracies today, Japan is the one with the most equal division of wealth, and the one with proportionately the fewest billionaires in its population; the U.S. lies far at the opposite extreme in both respects.

The Meiji government’s remaining top priority was to devise an income stream to finance its government operations. Japan had never had Western-style national taxes. Instead, each daimyo had separately taxed his own lands to fund his own operating costs, while the shogun had similarly taxed just his own lands but also demanded additional money for specific purposes from all the daimyo. Yet the Meiji government had just relieved the ex-daimyo of their responsibilities as "governors," had converted their exdomains into prefectures, and had decreed that those prefectures would now be administered by the central government, leaving the ex-daimyo with no need (so said Meiji leaders) for revenues to finance administrative operations of their own. Hence the Meiji Finance Ministry reasoned that it now needed at least as much annual revenue as the shogun and all the daimyo combined had previously extracted. It achieved that aim in a Western manner, by imposing a national 3% land tax. Japanese farmers periodically complained and rioted, because they had to pay cash every year regardless of the size of the harvest. But they might have considered themselves lucky if they could have foreseen modern Western tax rates. For example, here in my state of California we pay a state 1% property tax, plus a state income tax of up to 12%, plus a national income tax of currently up to 44%.

Less urgent matters included substituting a Western-style legal system for Japan’s traditional system of justice. Law courts with appointed judges were introduced in 1871, followed by a Supreme Court in 1875. Criminal, commercial, and civil law reforms followed different paths of Westernization by experimenting with different foreign models. The criminal law code was initially reformed on a French model, then changed to a German model; the commercial law code used a German model; and the civil law code used French, British, and indigenous Japanese concepts before ending up as German-inspired. In each case, challenges influencing the choices included finding solutions compatible with Japanese views, plus adopting Western institutions in order to achieve international respectability necessary for revising the unequal treaties. For instance, that required abolishing traditional Japanese torture and broad use of the death penalty, which the West no longer considered respectable.

Modernization of Japan’s infrastructure began early in the Meiji Era. The year 1872 saw the founding of a national post system, and the building of Japan’s first railroad and its first telegraph line, followed by establishment of a national bank in 1873. Gas street lighting was installed in Tokyo. The government also got involved in Japan’s industrialization by setting up factories to produce bricks, cement, glass, machinery, and silk with Western machinery and methods. After Japan’s successful war of 1894-1895 against China, government industrial spending came to concentrate on war-related industries such as coal, electricity, gun factories, iron, steel, railroads, and shipyards.

Government reform was especially important if Japan was to achieve international respectability — and especially challenging. Cabinet government was introduced in 1885. Already in 1881, it had been announced that a constitution would be forthcoming, partly in response to public pressure. It then took eight years to devise a Western-style constitution in harmony with Japanese circumstances. The solution to that challenge depended on taking as a model not the U.S. constitution but the German constitution, because German emphasis on a strong emperor corresponded to Japanese conditions. Japan’s constitution invoked Japanese belief that its emperor was descended from the gods through an unbroken line of previous emperors extending back millennia in time. In a ceremony taking place in the imperial palace’s audience chamber, ona date (February 11) that was the 2,549th anniversary of the day traditionally associated with the empire’s founding, the emperor himself invoked his ancestors and presented the scroll of the new constitution to the prime minister, as the emperor’s gift to Japan. Present at the ceremony were representatives of the foreign diplomatic corps and foreign community, to make sure that they did not miss the point. Japan was now a civilized nation with a constitutional government, equal to the world’s other constitutional governments (and — hint hint — no longer to be singled out by unequal treaties).

Like other spheres of Japanese life, Japanese culture became a mosaic of new Western elements and traditional Japanese elements. Western clothing and hairstyles are overwhelmingly prevalent in Japan today and were adopted quickly — by Japanese men (Plates 3.5, 3.6). For instance, a group photograph taken of five members of the Iwakura Mission in 1872, only four years after the Meiji Restoration and only 19 years after Commodore Perry’s arrival, shows four of the members with Western suits, ties, tophats, and hairstyle, and only one (Iwakura himself) still in Japanese robes and with his hair in a traditional Japanese top-knot (Plate 3.3). In the arts, traditional Japanese music, painting, woodblock prints, kabuki theater, and Noh plays survived alongside Western ballroom dancing, military bands, orchestras, operas, theater, painting, and novels.

Any nation risks falling apart if its citizens do not feel joined by some unifying national ideology. Each nation has its own familiar ideals and phrases responding to that task of creating a unifying ideology. For example, American ideals have included democracy, equality, freedom, liberty, and opportunity, as captured in phrases such as "rags to riches," "melting pot," "land of liberty," "land of equal opportunity," and "land of unlimited possibilities." Particularly in newly independent countries such as Indonesia (Chapter 5), or in countries undergoing rapid change such as Meiji Japan, governments consciously formulate and promote unifying national ideologies. How did Meiji Japan do it?

The need for a unifying Meiji ideology was expressed in a widely circulated 1891 commentary on the emperor’s 1890 Rescript on Education: "Japan…​is a small country. Since there are now

those that swallow countries with impunity, we must consider the

whole world our enemy…​ thus any true Japanese must have a sense of public duty, by which he values his life lightly as dust, advances spiritedly, and is ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of the nation…​. The purpose of the Rescript is to strengthen the basis of the nation by cultivating the virtues of filiality and fraternal love, loyalty and sincerity, and to prepare for any emergency by nurturing the spirit of collective patriotism…​.If we do not unite the people, fortifications and warships will not suffice. If we do unite them, then even a million formidable foes will be unable to harm us."

In the last two decades of the Meiji Era, having dealt with mun dane but urgent issues such as tax reform and law codes, the Mei government was able to devote more attention to that task of imbuing Japanese with a sense of public duty. That was achieved partly by government support for traditional religion, and even more by government attention to education. Traditional Japanese religion served to unify Japanese people by teaching shared beliefs in the emperor’s divine descent, patriotism, civic duty, filial piety, respect for the gods, and love of country. Hence the government promoted the traditional Shinto religion and Confucian philosophy, subsidized the leading national Shinto shrines, and appointed their priests. Those values, associated with worship of the emperor as a living god, were featured prominently in the uniform national textbooks prescribed at every level of Japanese education. Now that we’ve summarized the main components of selective change in Meiji Japan — other than changes in policies of overseas expansion, to be examined in the following pages — let’s reflect on Meiji changes and dispel some possible misunderstandings.

The goal of Meiji leaders was emphatically not to "Westernize" Japan, in the sense of converting it into a European society far from Europe — unlike Australia’s British colonists, whose goal was indeed to convert Australia into a British society far from Britain (Chapter 7). Instead, the Meiji goal was to adopt many Western features, but to modify them to suit Japanese circumstances, and to retain much of traditional Japan. Those adopted and modified Western features were grafted onto a Japanese core retained from Japanese history. For example, Japan didn’t need Europe as a model of literacy and urbanization: Tokugawa Japan already had high literacy, and the bakufu capital city Edo (renamed as Tokyo) was already the world’s largest city a century and a half before Commodore Perry’s arrival. Nor did Meiji Westernization consist of blindly imitating specific pieces of Western institutions: Meiji leaders operated from a remarkably clear overall understanding of Western society that underlay the Western military, educational, and other institutions adopted in Japan with modifications.

Meiji Japan was able to draw on many models. Those included multiple Western models: variously Britain, Germany, France, and the U.S. in different spheres. There were also many indigenous Japanese models on which to draw: late Tokugawa Japan consisted of 240 separate domains, differing in their tax policies and in other institutions. In addition to those positive models, Meiji Japan profited from an important negative model: China, whose fate of domination by the West made clear what Japan wanted to avoid.

Meiji reforms were directed at two different "audiences": a domestic Japanese audience, and an overseas Western audience. On the one hand, the reforms were aimed at Japan itself: in order to strengthen the nation militarily and economically, and to imbue Japanese people with a unifying ideology. On the other hand, the reforms also aimed to make Western countries respect Japan as an equal, because Japan had now adopted Western institutions that the West respected. Those institutions included ones of basic governance such as a Western-style constitution and law codes; and ones of outward appearance, such as men’s Western clothing and hairstyles, and the emperor’s celebrating a Western-style wedding with a Western-style single wife, the empress. (Previous Japanese emperors had openly had many concubines.)

While Meiji leaders were in agreement on their overall goal of strengthening Japan so that it could resist the West, they did not start off with an encompassing blueprint. Instead, Meiji reforms were devised and adopted piecemeal in stages: first, creating a national army, an income stream, and a national system of education, and abolishing feudalism; then, a constitution, and civil and criminal law codes; and even later, overseas expansion by wars (to be discussed in the next pages). Nor were all of these reforms adopted smoothly and unanimously: there was internal conflict in Meiji Japan, such as the already mentioned samurai rebellions and peasant uprisings.

The remaining major line of selective change in the Meiji Era that we have not already considered was Japan’s transformation from being a target to being an agent of overseas expansion and military aggression. We saw that Tokugawa Japan isolated itself and had no aspirations of overseas conquests. In 1853 Japan appeared to be at imminent risk from militarily much stronger foreign powers.

By the beginning of the Meiji Era in 1868, however, Japan’s military reforms and industrial build-up had removed that imminent risk and permitted instead a stepwise expansion. The first step was Japan’s formal annexation, in 1869, of the northern island of Hokkaido, originally inhabited by a people (the Ainu) quite different from the Japanese, but already partly controlled by the bakufu. In 1874 a punitive military expedition was sent to the island of Taiwan, whose aborigines had killed dozens of Ryukyu fishermen. At the end of the expedition, however, Japan pulled back its forces and refrained from annexing Taiwan. In 1879 the Ryukyu Islands themselves (the archipelago several hundred miles south of Japan) were annexed. From 1894 to 1895 Meiji Japan fought and won its first overseas war, against China, and did annex Taiwan.

Japan’s 1904-1905 war against Russia enabled Meiji Japan for the first time to test itself against a Western power; both Japan’s navy and its army defeated the Russians (Plates 3.7, 3.8). That was a milestone in world history: the defeat of a major European power by an Asian power in an all-out war. By the resulting peace treaty, Japan annexed the southern half of Sakhalin Island and gained control of the South Manchurian Railroad. Japan established a protectorate over Korea in 1905 and annexed it in 1910. In 1914 Japan conquered Germany’s Chinese sphere of influence and Micronesian island colonies in the Pacific Ocean (Plate 3.9). Finally, in 1915 Japan presented China with the so-called Twenty-One Demands that would have converted China virtually into a vassal state; China gave in to some but not all of the demands.

Japan had already considered attacking China and Korea before 1894 but drew back, because it recognized that it wasn’t strong enough and that it risked giving European powers an excuse to intervene. The only occasion on which Meiji Japan overestimated its strength was in 1895, at the end of its war against China. The concessions that Japan had extracted from China then included China’s ceding to Japan the Liaotung Peninsula, which controls the sea and land routes between China and Korea. But France, Russia, and Germany reacted by joining together to force Japan to abandon the peninsula, which Russia proceeded to lease from China three years later. That humiliating setback made Japan aware of its weakness, standing alone, vis-a-vis European powers. Hence in 1902 Japan made an alliance with Britain, for protection and insurance, before attacking Russia in 1904. Even with the security offered by that British alliance, Japan waited to issue its demands against China, until the armed forces of European powers were tied up in World War One and unable to threaten intervention, as they had done in 1895.

In short, Japan’s military expansion in the Meiji Era was consistently successful, because it was guided at every step by honest, realistic, cautious, informed self-appraisal of the relative strengths of Japan and its targets, and by a correct assessment of what was realistically possible for Japan. Now, compare that successful Meiji Era expansion with Japan’s situation as of August 14, 1945. On that date Japan was at war simultaneously with China, the U.S., Britain, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand (as well as with many other countries that had declared war against Japan but were not actively fighting). That was a hopeless combination of enemies against which to fight. Much of the Japanese army had been pinned down for years in China. American bombers had gutted most major Japanese cities. The two atomic bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A British/American fleet was bombarding the Japanese coast. Russian armies were advancing against weak Japanese resistance in Manchuria and Sakhalin. Australian and New Zealand troops were mopping up Japanese garrisons on some Pacific islands. Almost all of Japan’s larger warships and merchant fleet had been sunk or knocked out of service. More than 3 million Japanese people had been killed.

It would have been bad enough if blunders of Japanese foreign policy had been responsible for Japan being attacked by all those countries. Instead, Japan’s blunders were worse: Japan itself had been the one to attack those countries. In 1937 Japan launched a full-scale war against China. It fought two brief but bloody border wars with Russia in 1938 and 1939. In 1941 Japan simultaneously and suddenly attacked the U.S. and Britain and the Netherlands, even while Japan was still susceptible to resumption of fighting with Russia. Japan’s attack on Britain automatically resulted in declarations of war by Britain’s Pacific dominions Australia and New Zealand; Japan proceeded to bomb Australia. In 1945 Russia did attack Japan. On August 15, 1945 Japan finally bowed to the longdelayed but inevitable outcome, and surrendered. Why did Japan from 1937 onwards blunder stepwise into such an unrealistic and ultimately unsuccessful military expansion, when Meiji Japan from 1868 onwards had carried out stepwise such a realistic and successful military expansion?

There are numerous reasons: the successful war against Russia, disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of Japan’s export-led economic growth in 1929, and others. But one additional reason is especially relevant to this book: a difference between Meiji-Era Japan and the Japan of the 1930’s and 1940’s, in knowledge and capacity for honest self-appraisal on the part of Japanese leaders. In the Meiji Era many Japanese, including leaders of Japan’s armed forces, had made visits abroad. They thereby obtained detailed first-hand knowledge of China, the U.S., Germany, and Russia and their armies and navies. They could make an honest appraisal of Japan’s strength compared to the strengths of those other countries. Then, Japan attacked only when it could be confident of success. In contrast, in the 1930’s the Japanese army on the Asian mainland was commanded by young hothead officers who didn’t have experience abroad (unless in Nazi Germany), and who didn’t obey orders from experienced Japanese leaders in Tokyo. Those young hotheads didn’t know first-hand the industrial and military strength of the U.S. and of Japan’s other prospective opponents. They didn’t understand American psychology, and they considered the U.S. a nation of shopkeepers who wouldn’t fight.

Quite a few older leaders of the Japanese government and armed forces (especially of the navy) in the 1930’s did know the strength of the U.S. and Europe first-hand. The most poignant moment of my first visit to Japan, in 1998, came when my dinner table partner one evening turned out to be a retired Japanese steel executive, at that time in his 90’s, who recalled for me his visits to American steel factories in the 1930’s. He told me that he had been stunned to discover that the U.S.'s manufacturing capacity for high-quality steel was 50 times Japan’s, and that that fact alone had convinced him that it would be insane for Japan to go to war with the U.S.

But Japan’s older leaders with overseas experience in the 1930’s were intimidated and dominated, and several were assassinated, by young hotheads lacking overseas experience — much as shishi hotheads in the late 1850’s and 1860’s had assassinated and intimidated Japan’s leaders then. Of course, the shishi had no more overseas experience of the strength of foreign countries than did Japan’s young officers of the 1930’s. The difference was that shishi attacks against Westerners provoked the bombardments of Kagoshima and Shimonoseki Strait by powerful Western warships, which demonstrated convincingly even to the shishi that their strategy had been unrealistic. In the 1930’s there were no such foreign bombardments of Japan to force realism upon the young officers who had not been overseas.

In addition, the historical experience of the generation of Japanese leaders who came of age in Meiji Japan was virtually the opposite of the experience of Japan’s leaders of the 1930’s. Meiji leaders had spent their formative years in a weak Japan at risk of attack by strong potential enemies. But to Japan’s leaders of the 1930’s, war instead meant the intoxicating success of the Russo-Japanese War, the destruction of Russia’s Pacific fleet in Port Arthur harbor by a surprise attack that served as the model for Japan’s surprise attack against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor (Plate 3.7), and the spectacular destruction of Russia’s Baltic fleet by the Japanese navy in the Battle of Tsushima Strait (Plate 3.8). When we discuss Germany in Chapter 6, we shall encounter another example of successive generations within the same country holding drastically different political views as the result of different historical experiences.

Thus, part — not all, but part — of the reason for Japan initiating World War Two against such hopeless odds was that young army leaders of the 1930’s lacked the knowledge base and historical experience necessary for honest, realistic, cautious self-appraisal. The result was disastrous for Japan.

Meiji Japan strikingly illustrates parallels to most of the dozen factors identified in Chapter 1 as affecting outcomes of individual crises. For one factor (factor #5 of Table 1.2) Japan provides the outstanding illustration among our seven countries; for another factor (#7), it provides one of the two outstanding illustrations; seven other factors (#1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, and 11) are also important; and one factor (#12) operated both positively and negatively.

More than any other nation discussed in this book, Meiji Japan illustrates change by borrowing from foreign models (factor #5), after careful comparison of different models in order to identify which one best suited Japanese circumstances in a particular sphere. The result was that Japan’s constitution and army came to be based on German models, its fleet on the British model, its initial draft civil law code on the French model, and its 1879 educational reforms on the American model. Even the U.S. Declaration of Independence appears to have served as a model for a government reform proposal drafted in 1870 by Itagaki Taisuke and Fukuoka Kotei, who began their proposal with a preamble stating that all men were by rights equal, from which they went on to draw many conclusions. (Think of the second sentence of our Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…​," leading to many conclusions.) Itagaki’s and Fukuoka’s proposed American model of government was not adopted, but many other foreign models did get adopted. We discussed in the preceding section the role of realistic selfappraisal (factor #7) in Meiji Japan, rivaled only by its role in Finland. Our discussion made clear that successful national self-appraisal requires two elements. One is a willingness to confront painful truths: in Japan’s case, the truth that the hated barbarians were stronger than Japan, and that Japan could gain strength only by learning from those barbarians. The other prerequisite is knowledge. It wasn’t enough that Meiji leaders, and the shishi of the decade preceding the Meiji Restoration, possessed the willingness to confront the painful truth of Western military strength: they required knowledge of that strength from first-hand observation or experience. But Japan’s young army officers of the 1930’s lacked first-hand knowledge of Western military strength. Meiji realistic self-appraisal was linked to another of our outcome predictor factors: widespread Japanese consensus about the crisis with which Commodore Perry’s visit confronted Japan (factor #1). Meiji Japan illustrates well the necessity of building a fence, and of adopting change selectively (factor #3). Massive change was adopted in many spheres of Meiji society, including the economic, legal, military, political, social, and technological spheres. But other features of traditional Japan were retained in the Meiji Era, including Confucian morality, emperor worship, ethnic homogeneity, filial piety, Shintoism, and Japan’s writing system. Initially, changes were proposed for some of those features, too, such as proposals to make Japan a republic, and to adopt a Western alphabet. But Japan quickly built a fence separating traditional features to be retained from those considered in need of change. While the desire for change was strong, the desire to remain traditional was also so strong that some of the changes had to be portrayed as fictitious retentions of "invented traditions" in order to make them palatable. This coexistence of drastic change with conservative retention also illustrates the factor of situationspecific national flexibility (factor #10).

Along with the value of foreign models, Meiji Japan illustrates the value of foreign help (factor #4). Innumerable examples include the Nagasaki-based British trader Thomas Glover, who sent a group of 19 Satsuma men to study in England already in 1864; the many Westerners in Europe and the United States who hosted Japanese visitors; the German advisors Albert Mosse and Hermann Roesler, who came to Japan in 1886 to help Ito Hirobumi devise a constitution for Japan; and the British shipyard Vickers’s construction of Japan’s first battle-cruiser Kongo, which then served as the model for the battle-cruisers Haruna, Hiei, and Kirishima to be built in Japan.

Meiji Japan, and Japan today, illustrate strong national identity (factor #6). Japanese people and their leaders considered Japan unique, superior, and set apart from the rest of the world. That shared belief enabled Japanese to endure the stresses of the Meiji Era, sometimes differing about how best to secure Japan’s future, but never doubting their country’s value.

Meiji Japan exemplifies patience, the willingness to tolerate initial failure, and persistence until a workable solution is found (factor #9). Japan’s initial response to the foreign threats of the 1850’s and 1860’s was to try to keep the foreigners out, then (once foreigners had been admitted at specific Japanese treaty ports) to try to expel them again. But it gradually became clear, and accepted by the bakufu and the shishi and Meiji leaders, that that approach didn’t work, and that a different approach was necessary: opening Japan to the West, learning from the West, and thereby strengthening Japan. Similarly, Meiji efforts to devise law codes, a national system of education, and a constitution took years of drafts, experimentation, and changes. In each of those three spheres the Meiji government initially tried one or more foreign models, discarded them as inappropriate to Japanese circumstances, and finally settled on a different foreign model: e.g., the civil law code, which began with French-inspired and British-inspired drafts and ended up German-inspired.

Non-negotiable core values (factor #11) united the Japanese in their willingness to make sacrifices. High among those values was loyalty to the emperor. That was dramatically illustrated at the end of World War Two, when the U.S. demanded unconditional surrender. Even after the two atomic bombs, and in a hopeless military situation, Japan still insisted on one condition: "that the said [surrender] declaration does not include any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler." Without acceptance of that condition, Japan was prepared to resist the threatened U.S. invasion of the Japanese mainland. The strength of Japanese core values was also illustrated in World War Two by the willingness of large numbers of Japanese soldiers to commit suicide, far beyond the willingness of the soldiers of any other modern nation. Best-known were the kamikaze pilots of conventional aircraft and the baka pilots of rocket-powered gliders, who crashed their bomb-carrying machines into enemy warships; and the kaiten sailors who rode and piloted torpedoes launched from Japanese ships into enemy warships. The high-tech kamikaze, baka, and kaiten suicide weapons introduced only towards the end of World

'War Two were preceded by several years of low-tech suicides, when Japanese soldiers feigning surrender detonated hidden hand grenades to kill their captors as well as themselves. All of those forms of suicide served immediate military purposes by killing enemy troops. In addition, defeated Japanese soldiers and officers also routinely killed themselves without killing any enemy, in deference to the inculcated value of "no surrender." For instance, of the 2,571 elite Japanese troops defending Tarawa atoll in November 1943 against invading American troops, 2,563 died, many of the last ones by suicide, leaving only eight to be taken prisoner.

Japan, as an island archipelago without land borders, is in a relatively favorable situation with regard to geopolitical constraints (factor #12), compared to nations such as Finland and Germany, which do share land borders with other countries. We saw in the last chapter that Finland’s long border with Russia constitutes Finland’s fundamental problem. We’ll see in Chapter 6 that land borders with powerful neighbors have also been a main theme of German history. Nevertheless, powerful other nations did constitute the fundamental problem for Tokugawa and Meiji Japan, even though those other nations lay half-way around the world from Japan, separated by the world’s oceans. Already in the 19th century, and even more so in today’s modern world, technology modifies geopolitical constraints — but does not eliminate them completely.

Let’s conclude our discussion of Meiji Japan by asking where it falls with respect to four questions arising for national crises and not for individual crises: revolution versus evolution, leadership, group conflict and reconciliation, and presence or absence of a unified vision.

National crises may take the form of violent revolution (Chile in 1973, Indonesia in 1965) or of peaceful evolution (post-war Australia). Meiji Japan is intermediate, but closer to the latter end of the continuum. The shogunate was ended on January 3, 1868 by a nearly bloodless coup. Some supporters of the shogun, but not the shogun himself, then resisted and were eventually defeated in a civil war lasting a year-and-a-half. But that civil war caused proportionally many fewer casualties than did the Indonesian coup and counter-coup of 1965, the Chilean coup of 1973 and its aftermath, or the Finnish Civil War of 1918.

There was no leader who dominated the Meiji Restoration to the degree that Hitler, Pinochet, and Suharto put their personal stamps on Nazi Germany, post-1973 Chile, and post-1965 Indonesia, respectively. Instead, at any one time there were multiple Meiji leaders, and there was a gradual leadership transition in the 1880’s. The various leaders all shared the qualification of first-hand experience of the West, and they shared commitment to a basic strategy of strengthening Japan by selectively using foreign models. Japan’s emperor remained a symbolic figurehead rather than an actual leader.

As for group conflict and reconciliation, from 1853 to 1868 there were disagreements about basic strategy within Japan. From around 1868 onwards, when the basic strategy became established, there were the normal disagreements arising in any country about policies to effect that strategy. Until 1877, some of those disagreements were resolved by violence: especially between the bakufu and the Satsuma-Choshu alliance until 1869, between shishi and Japanese moderates in the 1860’s, and between the Meiji government and dissident samurai in the samurai revolts. The level of violence was again modest compared to that in Chile and Indonesia. Subsequent reconciliation between the opposing parties of those Japanese disagreements was much more complete than in Chile and far more so than in Indonesia: in part because many fewer people had been killed; and in part because Meiji government leaders went to more effort and displayed more skill in reconciling with their opponents than did Chile’s and Indonesia’s military leaders. Among the other countries discussed in this book, Finland after its 1918 civil war offers the closest parallel to Meiji Japan in dispelling the legacies of violent conflicts.

Resolutions of most national crises require numerous policy changes, which may either be adopted piecemeal or else may all be part of one unified vision. Meiji Japan is our case study that comes closest to the latter extreme of the unified vision. That isn’t to say that Meiji leaders launched all of their policy changes simultaneously: they knew that some problems were more urgent than other problems. They began by creating an imperial army, implementing tax reform, and solving a few other pressing matters in the early 1870’s, but did not unleash their first full-fledged overseas war until 1894. However, all of these policies stemmed from a principle on which agreement had been reached at the beginning of the Meiji Era: the need to strengthen Japan in many different spheres, by learning selectively from the West.

Meiji Japan has thus offered us a good second case for exploring the issues involved in resolving national crises through selective change. Finland (our first case) and Meiji Japan were similar in facing crises that exploded on one day, when an external military threat that had been developing for years suddenly materialized. Both Finns and Japanese have strong national identities and core values that they defended by sacrificing their lives against overwhelming odds; the Japanese were put to that test in World War Two rather than in the Meiji Era. Both Finns and Meiji Japanese were brutally honest and realistic. In some other respects, though, Finns and Meiji Japanese found themselves at opposite extremes. Meiji Japan received help from many nations, the very ones that threatened it; Finns received virtually no help during the Winter War. Japan solved its problems by drawing on abundant models; Finland could draw on none. Japan’s large population, economic strength, and distance from its enemies gave Japan the time and space necessary to achieve military equality with the nations threatening it; the proximity and relative sizes of Finland and Russia eliminated that option for Finland. In the next two chapters we shall turn to nations whose crises climaxed as suddenly as did those of Finland and Meiji Japan, but whose explosions were internal.