Barbarian Sentiments

It must have been an awesome sight when, on July 2, 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Edo Bay with four large black-hulled ships, mounting 61 guns and carrying 967 men, to teach the Japanese a lesson in the benefits of free trade, that fine American doctrine. Not all--in fact, rather few--Japanese immediately saw the sense of letting long-nosed barbarians settle on their shores, trading and whoring and confusing the common people’s minds with subversive foreign ideas, but the size of Perry’s ships, the news of Chinese defeats in the opium wars and the 61 guns were mightily persuasive.

The Japanese then did what they have done many times since: They appeased the “red-haired” visitors with shows of goodwill, hospitality and promises, while mounting covert resistance and building enough strength to hold off further foreign encroachments or, better still, beat the foreigners at their own game.

Unlike the rulers of the Chinese empire, who pretended that foreigners had nothing to teach the Middle Kingdom, the Japanese were quick learners, but not always in ways Perry, or other Westerners who came after him, would have liked. It would be nice to think that Perry “opened” Japan to the fruits of liberty, that, to paraphrase Al Gore, he used American power to spread American “values,” but things were of course never quite so simple. The Japanese were picky about what they wanted from the West.

Soon after Perry’s arrival, Japanese government officials voiced the need for an institute to study barbarian ways. In the words of one such advocate, it was “urgent to know more about the West. [We should translate] books on bombardment, on the construction of batteries, on fortifications, books on building warships and maneuvering them, books on sailing and navigation, books on training soldiers and sailors.” And so on.

It would also be flattering, from a Western point of view, to assume that Japan, before Perry’s “black ships,” was a kind of medieval island of darkness and ignorance, only to be opened to the Occidental light in 1853. In fact, as Marius Jansen shows in his magisterial new book, “The Making of Modern Japan,” this was far from the truth. Japan may have been relatively isolated since the early 17th century, when the government decided to limit traffic with the outside world, but the Japanese elite was better informed about the West than their counterparts elsewhere in Asia. Scholars of “Dutch learning” (the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed to carry on their trade for more than 200 years) knew about medical science and astronomy; sophisticated maps were drawn up of the world, which showed conclusively that neither China nor Japan was at the center of it, and the shoguns made sure they were kept abreast with political events, even though the news was not always accurate.

Not only were the elite relatively well-informed, but 19th-century Japan was a highly developed society, with larger cities than anywhere else in the world, where rich merchants and cultivated samurai had created a culture of great refinement. The central government was oppressive and authoritarian, to be sure, but through pressure, negotiation and sometimes open rebellion, merchants, provincial samurai lords and even peasants had won themselves a surprising amount of room for maneuvering. This formed the basis for a wider revolt against the shogunate, after the demonstration of superior Western force showed up its weakness. When the revolt came a little more than 10 years after Perry’s arrival in Edo Bay, it took the form of an imperial “restoration.” A new form of government based on Western models was established by provincial samurai activists, with the emperor playing a central role, partly as a divine priest-king, partly as a Prussian-style monarch in a military uniform.

The result was promising and in some respects more liberal than anything before. Outcasts were officially emancipated. Political parties were formed. Civil rights were propagated, and constitutional debates were held in school halls and village assemblies. Extreme forms of “Westernization” were proposed and often rejected--English as the new national language, for example. Newspapers thrived. Literature flowered. Cities grew. Universities were established. Men and women waltzed in fine evening clothes. In sum, by the 1880s, Japan had all the hallmarks of a “modern” nation in the Western style. What, then, went wrong? Why did Japan, like Germany, grow into the increasingly authoritarian, bellicose power which came close, in the 1930s and early ‘40s, to destroying much of Asia?

Marius Jansen tells the story of the rise and fall and rise of modern Japan exhaustively, fairly and clearly. It is not a groundbreaking book, more a kind of summing up of his life’s work. Jansen has said much of it before, but I suppose it is convenient to have it all together. Jansen has a mandarin style, marred by the irritating academic tic of quoting every colleague, even when it is utterly unnecessary. About Tokyo in the roaring ‘20s: “Cafes blossomed everywhere and served as recreation, drinking and meeting places. Edward Seidensticker notes that the number of drinking spots doubled along the Ginza during the 1920s. The cafes were, Gennifer Weisenfeld notes, fashionable.” Even academic courtesy, surely, must have its limits.

Jansen’s view of modern Japanese history has two particular merits. He refuses to see Japan in isolation, as a kind of sealed-off island of uniqueness, the way too many Japanese still do. Indeed, he argues that political developments in Japan were almost always responses to events outside: Perry’s ships, Western colonialism, Russian and later Soviet expansion, the world stock market crash of 1929 and so on. He also goes out of his way to show how liberalism in Japan always had a chance. Authoritarianism and war were never inevitable consequences of some deep Japanese warrior instinct; when given the opportunity, the Japanese, like the rest of us, want to be free and live in peace. From the earnest schoolmasters discussing constitutionalism in the 1870s to the critics of imperial propaganda in the 1920s (and 1980s), Japan has not been lacking in liberal voices, even if they were often too easily stifled and not defended with enough civil courage.

So why did things go wrong? One reason is that Japan chose the wrong model, the wrong kind of “Westernization.” In 1871, a group of Japanese ambassadors visited the United States to see how political institutions worked over here. One of them, Kido Takayoshi, was, in Jansen’s words, “somewhat put off by American democracy, and relieved to learn from Japanese residents in Germany that other patterns were available.” By and large, Japanese elites have followed those other patterns: not the American but the Prussian constitution; not a polity based on citizenship and political equality but on race and a cult of divine leadership; not a democracy based on free commerce and parliamentary debate but a quasi-democratic authoritarian state based on military values. Germany, in other words, was the main model, not Britain, the United States or France.

From the 1880s, Japan became more and more a nation of civilian samurai. National unity was enforced by turning citizens into obedient subjects of the divine emperor. The armed forces owed their absolute loyalty not to the elected civilian government but to the emperor, who became a military figure himself. As Jansen points out, this “represented an enormous change for the long-secluded monarchy, which, in contrast to the European tradition of rulers on horseback, had always been associated with the arts of peace.” Indeed, Japan’s authoritarianism since the Meiji Restoration was curiously modern. Empire, nationalism, the Japanese Burden to enlighten and civilize lesser Asian breeds: These were modern ideas, even though they were often dressed up in quasi-ancient garb.

There was resistance to authoritarian rule, of course, and there were periods of relative liberalism. The prestige of the imperial court was dented in the 1920s, when the Taisho emperor, who succeeded his father, the Meiji emperor, was known to be soft in the head. In some ways, the Taisho period, which lasted from 1912 to 1926, was rather like the Weimar years in Germany. The popular culture was marked by what Japanese called “ero-guro-nansensu,” erotic, grotesque, nonsense. “Marx boys” and Mogas (modan garus, modern girls) fox-trotted and tangoed around the Ginza area in Tokyo, while more or less venal politicians made a chaotic stab at parliamentary demokurashii.

All this was deeply alarming to the military men, conservative bureaucrats and courtiers around the imperial throne, who looked for ways to counter this “extremism.” The alarmed conservatives included Hirohito, who acted as his father’s regent from 1922 and succeeded him as the Showa emperor four years later. It took some time to snuff out all the hedonism, criticism and political diversity of the Taisho years but, by the late 1930s, snuffed out it was. Marxists were forced to renounce their beliefs in acts of apostasy that bring to mind the wretched Christians of the 17th century who were made to stamp on images of Christ. The few who refused were locked-up and sometimes tortured to death. Right-wing zealots, supported by military officials, intimidated and sometimes murdered politicians who stood in the way of the sacred imperial cause. The press fell in line and “united” the nation in a populist frenzy when military adventures on the Asian continent resulted in Japanese victories--and even when they did not. And the emperor-worshiping cult, which had more in common with European fascism than with any ancient Japanese tradition, reached a level of near dementia. At the mere mention of the emperor, people would shoot up to rigid attention.

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German National Socialism, like communism, was a kind of secular religion. So was Japanese emperor-worship, even though the word “secular” barely applies. Teutonic mumbo-jumbo about blood, soil and national destiny was used by the Nazis to exert maximum control over the German people. The emperor cult played a similar role in Japan. But its roots were older than German influence. Political authority in Japan--and here it followed the Chinese model--always was legitimized by quasi-religious dogma, whether it was neo-Confucianism or a sacred view of the national polity. Obedience to political authority rested on “correct thinking” among the people. Hence the fear of the shogun’s officials of Christianity, which “confused” people’s minds; hence the fear in modern times of socialism or liberalism, which confused people’s minds also; and hence the need for public acts of apostasy.

Jansen describes some of this well enough, but his views on the emperor’s role do not seem to have taken account of recent scholarship. This is important because of the use the occupation authorities, working with Japanese officials, made of the emperor and his court after 1945. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was convinced that the Japanese could be kept under control only if the emperor were exonerated from any responsibility for the war. To this purpose a myth was carefully constructed. The emperor, according to the official story, had always been a peace-loving man who had gone along with any decisions made by his government, even when he disagreed with them, because he took his role seriously as a constitutional monarch.

Jansen goes along with the myth. The emperor, he writes, was invariably “a silent presence” at his war councils. But he “had been instrumental in bringing about the surrender.” We now know, from Herbert Bix, whose book “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” is based on much Japanese scholarship, that the emperor was by no means always silent, that he took an active part in wartime decisions and that he kept the war going long after he had been advised of the terrible cost of fighting for a lost cause.

These are not trivial points, because MacArthur, by absolving the emperor of responsibility, in effect let the Japanese off the hook. The emperor and his subjects (or his “children,” as the emperor himself liked to say) had been duped and betrayed by “military cliques.” This convenient lie could not be challenged without running the risk of lese-majeste. By protecting the emperor in order to control the Japanese people, just as all Japanese strongmen had done before him, MacArthur killed any serious inquiry into what had gone wrong with Japan after the Meiji Restoration. MacArthur once called Japan a nation of 12-year-olds. What he meant was that the Japanese were politically immature. He then proceeded to treat them as such.

It is also true, of course, that the emperor was made to renounce his claim to a divine status and that Japan got a new constitution, largely drafted by Americans, which was much more liberal than the old one. But even in this new, liberal constitution, the Japanese are treated as less than political adults. In the famous Article 9, Japan renounces the sovereign right to wage war. This seemed a fine idea at the time, and it still seems a fine idea to many people. But it made Japan entirely dependent on the United States for its security and thus for most of its foreign policy. It also politicized any debate on the Japanese role in World War II. Those who wish to keep the constitution as it is argue that Japanese cannot be trusted with matters of war. Look what happened last time, they say. And for that reason, those who wish to revise it have to argue that Japan did nothing especially wrong. The problem with this is that defense issues have been lifted out of the realm of democratic politics, just as they were, for different reasons, before the war.

Jansen skates over this problem by claiming that the “Peace Constitution” is “so popular that even conservative Japanese have so far resisted arguments that the language of Article 9 should be modified to permit Japan a larger role in world affairs, while liberal sentiment has opposed revision out of fear of even a partial restitution of prewar controls.” This is not quite true. Article 9 has been challenged, mostly by the far right. But especially since the Gulf War, opinion has begun to shift, and the largest national newspaper, the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun, tried to promote a serious debate about Article 9.

So far, people have shied away from such a debate, which is too bad. For the chances for a more democratic politics in Japan have never been so good. But they can only get better, in my view, if an essential part of any nation’s sovereignty can be openly discussed. To be able to do that, however, the main shibboleth of postwar Japanese liberalism would have to be open to legitimate challenge, the notion, that is, that one of the richest countries on Earth can remain in a state of innocence while issues of war are left to the grown-ups across the Pacific Ocean.