Marius B. Jansen

Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji

In this book social scientists scrutinize the middle decades of the nineteenth century in Japan. That scrutiny is important and overdue, for the period from the 1850s to the 1880s has usually been treated in terms of politics and foreign relations. Yet those decades were also of pivotal importance in Japans institutional modernization. As the Japanese entered the world order, they experienced a massive introduction of Western-style organizations. Sweeping reforms, without the class violence or the Utopian appeal of revolution, created the foundation for a modern society. The Meiji Restoration introduced a political transformation, but these chapters address the more gradual social transition.Originally published in 1986.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Japan's drive to great-power status

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF A MODERN STATE Nothing is more striking, in tracing Meiji Japans foreign affairs, than the fact that the Meiji period coincided with the emergence of several “modern states.” The half-century before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 witnessed political, economic, social, and intellectual developments in the West that coalesced into the development of national entities, outlines of which have remained to this day. England, France, Germany, Italy, and other European countries, as well as the United States, evolved as centralized and integrated mass societies that, for want of a better term, have been called modern states. Although no two modern states were exactly alike, they were generally characterized by centralization of state authority, on the one hand, and mass incorporation into the economy and polity, on the other. These developments had, of course, been preceded by the democratic and the industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, but it was in most instances only after the 1860s that these earlier, and ongoing, revolutions conspired with other trends to create conditions for unified state systems. The twin phenomenon of centralization and mass incorporation may be illustrated by the United States, the country that held the greatest fascination for the Japanese during the two decades after Perry. The America of Perrys days was not yet a full-fledged modern state. It was a country with serious cleavages between regions and economic interests. Although shared mythologies of the American Revolution generated a sense of common heritage, what a later generation would call a “civil religion,” and although a sense of nationhood was buttressed by economic opportunity (a theme that Alexis de Tocqueville stressed in the 1830s), there also grew an apparently insoluble dispute about the nature of the American state.

The Tempō crisis

On the sixteenth day of the twelfth month of the year 1830, Japan entered a new era. By coincidence, that same afternoon, in a cottage not far from Shibuya, Matsuzaki Kōdō, a Confucian scholar, observed a flock of white cranes, “skimming over the hill” (as he wrote in his diary) from the direction of Aoyama. He recorded their appearance the following morning, too, “wheeling northwards in the sunlight,” his unmistakable delight suggesting just how reassuring it was that these stately and auspicious birds should show themselves at such a time. No era could have had so propitious an opening. Matsuzaki was equally happy with the new era name itself – “Tempō,” or Heavenly Protection. It was well known that selecting era names was a delicate business, for the least carelessness – the use of Chinese characters already encumbered with unhappy associations, or those inviting ominous paranomasia – could well prejudice the prosperity of the entire nation. In this case, there seemed nothing to fear. The two characters for Tempō, as the elderly scholar construed them, paid tribute to two previous eras, the first being the Tenna era (1681–83) and the second, the Kyōhō era (1716–35). Matsuzaki did not need to remind himself that for scholars at least, both periods carried favorable overtones, suggestive of new hope, of depravity reformed, and of righteousness restored. This, too, augured well for the future.

Opposition movements in early Meiji, 1868–1885

Like all the great revolutions of the modern era, the Meiji Restoration generated intense opposition from groups and classes displaced and disadvantaged by revolutionary change. What sets the Meiji Restoration apart, however, is the apparent ease with which opposition to the revolutionary regime was defeated or co-opted. Peasant riots over the new conscription law, village protests against the land tax revision, revolts by disaffected samurai, early campaigns for representative government, and uprisings by dispossessed farmers all were contained or suppressed. The original leadership group stayed in charge and did not change its basic policies. Viewed positively, Japan enjoyed extraordinary continuity and stability in government; viewed negatively, conservative and bureaucratic politics prevailed. Japanese and Western historians disagree sharply when explaining the failure of opposition movements to oust the ruling oligarchy or force changes in its agenda. Scholars in America and Great Britain influenced by modernization theory have generally viewed Japan as a model of peaceful transition from feudalism to modernity, a transformation in which core values of consensus and loyalty to emperor kept dissent within manageable bounds. On the other hand, most Japanese and some Western historians credit the failure of the opposition movements to the authoritarian character of the Meiji state, emphasizing the incorporation of oppressive semifeudal structures into the Meiji polity and the oligarchys control of the new states efficient state security apparatus.

Japan in the early nineteenth century

The first third of the nineteenth century in Japan was dominated by personalities and policies that appeared on the scene in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The reform measures of Matsudaira Sadanobu and the personal preferences of his shogun, Tokugawa Ienari, lent a considerable continuity to the Bunka (1804–18) and Bunsei (1818–30) eras. In contrast with the devastation and famine that the crop failures of the 1780s had brought, the quarter-century that followed seemed something of an Indian summer of Tokugawa rule. The years were marked by good harvests. The long continuity of Ienari, whose half-century in office marked the longest tenure of any of the fifteen Tokugawa shoguns, was reflected in a lack of political surprises in bakufu or daimyo domains. Economic growth, both in agriculture and in the provision of materials for the great metropolis of Edo, a striking rise in the diffusion of schooling, and the impressive production of material for the growing reading public all contributed to the impression of well-being. Arbitrary status divisions laid down by the seventeenth-century founders had less relevance in a period of economic change and growth. At the top of the samurai ranks, hereditary income and privilege stood as a guarantee of continuity, but the great urban merchants lived as well as did the petty daimyo, and the lower ranks of the samurai military were considerably worse off than were the middling merchants and artisans. In the countryside a clear division between the landholding village leaders and the landless and tenants was making a mockery of the regimes “peasant” ideal.

Takechi Zuizan and the Tosa Loyalist Party

Takechi Zuizan was born in 1829, the eldest son of a gōshi in Nagaoka A district in Tosa. By 1856, when he was 27, he had become known as a leading master of fencing ( kenjutsu ) in Tosa. He then travelled to Edo, where he met and cooperated with fellow spirits from Mito, Chōshū, and Satsuma. H e returned home the undisputed leader of Tosa loyalists. For a brief period in 1862 and 1863 he controlled, as much as any one controlled, the turbulent extremists in Kyoto and Edo. But at the point of his greatest success he overplayed his hand. His lord, Yamauchi Yōdō, proved to be unsympathetic to Takechi’s goals, and on the national scene the excesses of the Chōshū loyalists swung the balance temporarily in the direction of moderation. Takechi was restricted in his movements, imprisoned for his complicity in political assassination and his clear guilt in a presumptuous forgery, and he was finally ordered to commit hara-kiri in the summer of 1865. His career provides a useful close-up for the study of the loyalist movement in Tosa.

The Presidential Address: Monarchy and Modernization in Japan

Japan has undergone sweeping change twice in its modern history. Each time the imperial house served to help bridge the transition, although in different ways. In the 1860s every effort was made to emphasize the break with the immediate past, albeit in the name of a more ancient continuity. In the 1940s, on the other hand, close continuity with the recent past of Meiji was emphasized. The ability of the imperial institution to absorb and assimilate very different, in fact contradictory, changes, is my point of departure.

Sir George Sansom—An Appreciation

Sir George Bailey Sansom, who died on March 8 in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 82, was the last of the great amateurs and first among professional students of Japan in the Western world. Like Aston, Satow and Eliot, earlier pioneers of Japanese studies, he began his studies of Japan during his tenure in diplomatic posts. The long exposure and intimate knowledge of Japanese life that he received in the British Embassy in Tokyo between 1905 and 1940 provided a setting very different from contemporary academic arrangements whereby stays in Japan are reliefs from, and not the center of, professional life and activities.