Inventing Japan, 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles) - Hardcover

Buruma, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679640851 ISBN 13: 9780679640851

Publisher: Modern Library, 2003

Synopsis

In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan’s history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and economic dynamo.

What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues to this day. If one book is to be read in order to understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans, Inventing Japan is surely it.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Buruma studied and worked in Japan for many years. He is the author of Bad Elements, The Missionary and the Libertine, Anglomania, A Japanese Mirror, God’s Dust, The Wages of Guilt, and Playing the Game. He lives in London.

From the Back Cover

“Stylish and illuminating, Inventing Japan has the added virtue of being admirably concise. Students and general readers alike will find this grand overview of modern Japan’s many identities engaging and provocative.” —John W. Dower, author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize

“In his characteristically penetrating manner, Ian Buruma delves into why modern Japan—for all its intellectual and artistic vitality—has not developed a more open, democratic, and cosmopolitan political order.” —Sheldon Garon, professor of history and East Asian studies, Princeton University

“Those familiar with Ian Buruma’s impressive body of work on Japan will not be disappointed by Inventing Japan. This compelling narrative captures the excitement, triumph, and failure of the century in which Japan abandoned its traditional ways and entered into the modern world. Iconoclastic as always, Buruma offers fascinating insights into the nature of Japan’s uneasy experiment with constitutional government, the impact of bureaucratic planning on economic growth, and the ties that closely bind the present with the past. Equally intriguing are his comparisons of Japan’s development with those of China, Japan’s ancient cultural mentor, and with Germany, its modern cultural mentor and another late-developing nation.” —James L. McClain, professor of history, Brown University; author of Japan: A Modern History

“A witty and illuminating romp through a hundred years of Japanese history, written with Mr. Buruma’s usual style and insight. I cannot think of a wiser or clearer introduction to the subject for the general reader, and even the well informed will find something of interest.” —Ronald Spector, professor of history and international relations, George Washington University; author of At War at Sea and Eagle Against the Sun

Reviews

Compressing a century of complex history into one short but taut narrative, Buruma traces the remarkable metamorphosis that transformed an isolated island shogunate into an expansive military empire and then into a pacified and prosperous democracy. Predictably enough, Buruma begins with the oft-told story of Commodore Perry's 1853 naval mission to open Japan to American traders. But he invests this event with a new and darker meaning as he relates how this pivotal visit helped catalyze a firestorm of civil war, toppling the shogunate and ushering in the Meiji Restoration. The architects of that restoration Buruma depicts as tragically myopic, their nationalistic and religious authoritarianism dooming democracy to stillbirth and converting commercial wealth into imperial armaments. Just as impressive as Buruma's probing account of this cultural tragedy is his lucid analysis of Douglas MacArthur's remarkable--but finally flawed--achievement in guiding Japan toward the exemplary democracy that showcased its astonishing development in the 1964 Olympics, which Buruma takes as his end point. An excellent introductory study, complete with a helpful bibliography for those seeking more rigorous analyses. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A respected journalist adds this overview to the "Modern Library Chronicles" series.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Black Ships

When Commodore Matthew (“Old Matt”) Calbraith Perry sailed into Edo Bay on July 8, 1853, with four heavily armed ships, on a mission to open up Japanese ports to American ships, he could be forgiven for thinking the Japanese were an ignorant people. Japan had been cut off from most other countries for roughly two hundred years. Japanese rulers, fearful of foreign aggression and worried that Christianity, promoted by European missionaries, would make their subjects unruly, had outlawed the Christian religion, expelled most foreigners and all priests, and forbidden Japanese to go abroad. Anyone bold enough to defy these rules faced execution, usually of a most gruesome kind. Few were so bold. Trade with China and Korea still went on, but since the 1630s, the Western presence in Japan had been limited to a handful of bored Dutch merchants confined to a tiny man-made island off the city of Nagasaki.

It was one of the most extraordinary confrontations in modern history. There was Perry with his four “black ships of evil,” thundering an ominous salute at the Japanese coast by firing his cannon. And there were the Japanese, lined up on the shore, armed with swords and old-fashioned muskets. Commodore Perry insisted on dealing only with the highest representatives of the Japanese government, without really knowing who they were. The distinction in his mind between the emperor, a grand but still powerless figure, and the shogun was fuzzy. The emperor, living in Kyoto, the old imperial capital, was the symbol of Japanese cultural continuity. His duties were ceremonial and spiritual, while the shogun ruled, as the samurai generalissimo, from his seat in Edo, today’s Tokyo. From 1603, the shoguns all belonged to the Tokugawa clan, hence the name of their government, Tokugawa bakufu (shogunate), also known as Edo bakufu.

Perry, however, unaware of all this, kept on insisting that his letter from President Millard Fillmore of the United States of America, demanding the right to put up and trade at Japanese ports, be taken straight to the emperor, who, even if such a letter had ever reached him, would not have known what to do with it.

Communications with the Japanese were laborious, since the only European language known to their interpreters was Dutch. After Portuguese missionaries were banned from Japan in the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants, who were more interested in money than spreading the faith, were the only Europeans allowed to stay. The Japanese officials, though curious about American armaments and content to drink brandy and sugar on board Perry’s flagship, were under instruction to tell the “flowery-flagged devils” to go away. They insisted that the only place to conduct business with foreigners was Nagasaki. But Perry, confident in the power of his guns, refused to budge. The Reverend Samuel Wells Williams, the official American interpreter, whose grasp of Japanese was tenuous, wrote in his journal that “the universal Yankee nation” had come “to disturb [Japan’s] apathy and long ignorance.”

When, after long deliberations, during which the Japanese countered Perry’s imperious behavior with polite vagueness and other stalling tactics, Perry was finally allowed to go ashore, the two sides set out to impress each other with as much pomp as they could muster. The commodore strode forth, flanked by his two tallest black bodyguards. The Japanese were dressed in their finest silks. Presents were exchanged: rich brocades, porcelain bowls, lacquer boxes, fans, and other finely worked treasures for the Americans; a telegraph and a miniature train for the Japanese. The Japanese brought on some sumo wrestlers, whose stomachs Perry was invited to punch. Many toasts were drunk, and one of the Japanese officials, after consuming large amounts of whiskey and champagne, threw his arms around the commodore and said, in the common fashion of Japanese men celebrating international friendship in a drunken state: “Nippon and America, all the same heart.”

Williams, a cool man of the cloth, noted that it was indeed “a curious mélange” of East and West, “railroads and telegraph, boxers and educated athlete . . . shaven pates and nightgowns, soldiers with muskets and drilling in close array, soldiers with petticoats, sandals, two swords, and all in disorder, like a crowd—all these things and many other things, exhibiting the difference between our civilization and usages and those of this secluded, pagan people.” The Japanese gifts were clearly those of a “partially enlightened people,” while the American presents showed “the success of science and enterprise” of “a higher civilization.”

Twenty years later, many Japanese would take the same view, as though the “universal” West had come to bring light to a nation sunk in medieval darkness.

Commodore Perry may indeed have been convinced that his was a mission of enlightenment of lesser breeds, but his more immediate concern, on this and on a second mission in 1854, was to further the interests of American trade. The sixty-one guns on the decks of his ships, and the woefully unprepared Japanese coastal defenses (most cannon were fake, and there was no Japanese navy), finally convinced the shogun’s government in Edo that compromise was preferable to a suicidal war. Henceforth, American ships were permitted to enter two designated Japanese ports and load up on coal and other supplies, for which they would pay as a first step toward establishing trade relations.

All this was hugely gratifying from an American point of view, and Commodore Perry would be remembered in history as the man who “opened” Japan, a distinction that Perry himself was the first to claim and widely trumpet during his lifetime. It is true that Perry’s black ships, as well as other Western vessels lurking in the neighborhood, provoked a political crisis in Japan that led to the end of self-imposed isolation. The vulnerability of the Edo bakufu, whose autocratic rule had lasted more than two centuries, was shown up by superior foreign force, rather in the way that Japanese armies exposed the fragility of European empires in World War II. The Japanese were deeply divided about the best way to respond. Some factions, in a minority, had argued for some time to let the foreigners in and open Japan to trade. Others were in favor of rejecting the barbarians at any cost. A growing number of disgruntled provincial samurai and intellectuals were plotting to bring down the discredited bakufu and place the emperor (and themselves) at the center of a more vigorous state. Militant hotheads on the other side sought to cut down any opposition to the shogun. Perry alone was not responsible for creating all this ferment, but his actions surely brought things to a head.

However, Perry’s assumption of Japanese ignorance could not have been further from the truth. At the time of his arrival in Edo Bay, the Japanese elite knew more about America than Americans knew about Japan. Indeed, despite their relative isolation, the Japanese knew more about the West than most other Asians did, including the Chinese. The extent of their knowledge of American and British politics, of Western science, medicine, history, and geography, was truly remarkable. They had detailed maps of the United States. They knew about U.S. political institutions. Western science had been introduced in the seventeenth century. Studies had been made of the Russian military, the British economy, and much more besides. More important, however, in light of things to come, were the conclusions Japanese drew from their studies.

It is often assumed that Christianity never had a chance in Japan. In fact, sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese missionaries were so successful in converting Japanese, especially among the elite, that the shoguns and their house intellectuals developed a deep fear of the Western faith. Japanese converts were massacred in 1638, foreign missionaries expelled, and all foreign books assumed to contain a Christian message banned, including scientific books by Matteo Ricci and, more oddly, Euclid’s Elements and Cicero’s On Friendship. But this didn’t bring Western learning to a halt. The banning of presumed Christian propaganda in the early seventeenth century, and the presence of the Dutch merchants in Nagasaki, led to the emergence of Rangaku, Dutch learning. The students of this new discipline were called Rangakusha, or Dutch scholars.

The popular image of the Dutch was that of exotic beasts, who lifted their legs, like dogs, when they relieved themselves. Their hair was red and their eyes a devilish blue. But the official translators in Nagasaki, who also acted as state security agents, rather like the official guides in communist countries a few centuries later, quickly noticed the effectiveness of Western medicine and by implication the inadequacies of Chinese methods. Without dictionaries or grammars, they learned to read Dutch, an extraordinary intellectual achievement, and a number of physicians in Nagasaki and Edo became diligent scholars of European medical science. There was some official interest in Dutch matters, too. Once a year Dutch merchants were summoned to Edo, where the shogun and his entourage would pump them with questions and, for their amusement, ask them to sing songs, dance, kiss one another, and generally perform like circus animals.

In 1720, the ban on Western books was relaxed by the shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, who took a more serious interest in European affairs. He had an unusually open mind, but he was also a traditional ruler who felt responsible, like Chinese emperors, for agricultural prosperity. It was a time of commercial growth in the cities and violent rural unrest. To prevent more peasant riots, Yoshimune sought to improve life on the land. Since time is an essential factor in agriculture, the shogun was ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679640851
• ISBN 13: 9780679640851
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208