Japan’s struggle into ‘modernity’

Inventing Japan? The title of Ian Buruma’s admirably concise overview of 101 crucial years of Japanese history has a twofold significance. A root meaning of “invent” is to come upon or discover something, as when East meets West, and vice versa. And of course the most common meaning of the word applies here too, as Buruma examines the ways in which Japan constructed its national identity in the modern world.

Buruma begins his history of modern Japan in 1853, when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his four heavily armed ships into Edo Bay with the mission to “open up” Japan to trade with the West.

Although this was not the first encounter between Japan and the West, it was the one that finally forced the Japanese out of their previous isolation. The vulnerability of the governing shogunate in the face of superior armed force set off a political crisis: “The Japanese were deeply divided about the best way to respond,” Buruma explains. “Some factions ... 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.” Critics of the discredited shogunate hoped to “place the emperor (and themselves) at the center of a more vigorous state,” while defenders of the shogun were determined to wipe out the opposition.

Although Buruma does not discuss how Westerners, particularly artists and poets, were affected by the West’s renewed “discovery” of Japan, he does want to remind us that the Japanese, “despite their relative isolation,” actually “knew more about America than Americans knew about Japan.” But -- as the central thesis of Buruma’s book has it -- the encounter with the West in 1853 precipitated the complex chain of ideas, reactions, decisions and events by which the ancient country of Japan “invented” (or perhaps “reinvented”) itself as a modern nation. With shrewd intelligence and sparkling lucidity, Buruma provides us with an informative and illuminating crash course in the history of Japanese politics.

In looking westward toward “modernity,” the Japanese of the latter part of the 19th century saw not only the charms of liberalism. Although knowledgeable about British and American political institutions, most of the Japanese elite also took the more authoritarian institutions of Bismarckian Germany for their models. They were also impressed by the benefits of British and other European colonialism and readily embraced the quasi-Darwinian theories of race that became so pervasive toward the end of the 19th century.

More subtly, Buruma would have us understand that the identity Japan constructed for itself relied upon a past that was equally “invented.” In looking toward their own history, the Japanese oligarchs promulgated the ideas that emperor worship, self-sacrifice and social conformity were time-hallowed traditions that were deeply, essentially “Japanese.” In fact, Buruma tells us, “Japanese had never actually worshiped the emperor as the supreme deity before,” nor was the religion of Shinto a state religion: “What [then Gen. Aritomo] Yamagata and other Meiji oligarchs did was to politicize culture and religion, while neutralizing secular political institutions.”

But, as Buruma also shows us, there were liberal Japanese writers, thinkers and politicians like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Yoshino Sakuzo, who did not share this view. As for the ordinary Japanese: “The enthusiasm with which politics was discussed in villages and towns by people of all classes is particularly interesting, given the common belief, held in Japan as well as abroad, that the ‘conformist,’ ‘consensus-minded,’ ‘obedient’ Japanese don’t take to politics. Not only did rural people form their own political parties, but Meiji Japan was marked by a huge number of rebellions.”

Sadly, the fate of many a liberal -- or even moderate -- politician or government official was to be assassinated by a right-wing samurai-style zealot. Usually, notes Buruma with grim irony, even those who did not share the zealot’s extreme views were nonetheless inclined to admire his “sincerity.”

“Inventing Japan” provides a good sense of the varied facets of Japanese political life and thought, from the 1920s urban scene with its avant-garde atmosphere that the Japanese later dubbed ero guro nansensu (roughly translated as “erotic grotesque nonsense”) to the frightening buildup of militarism that resulted in the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the brutal assault on China in 1937 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is instructive to be reminded that the Japanese considered themselves engaged in a “holy war” to “liberate” Asia from the influence of the West.

Unsurprisingly, hundreds of thousands of raped, tortured, enslaved and massacred Chinese, Koreans and Southeast Asians did not see it that way. Having previously emulated Western styles and notions, Japan now turned against them with a vengeance: “The Japanese war was, among many other things, a war against liberalism in the sense of individualism, pluralism, capitalism, and democracy.”

While Japan’s Nazi allies saw these evils embodied in Jews, Japanese propaganda whipped up sentiment to “smash the Anglo-American beasts.” Buruma places the chief blame for the war squarely on the shoulders of Japan, its emperor and its right-wing ethos.

Sadly, in the case of Japan, as with its Nazi ally, war and unconditional surrender were indeed the only effective answer to such strident bellicosity. It is impossible to overestimate the achievement of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in nurturing democracy in Japan and setting the defeated nation on a course toward peace, prosperity and renewed respect in the world. It might well be said that he wrote the book on “nation-building.”

Buruma is perhaps too snide and grudging in his account of MacArthur’s great accomplishment, but his central criticism of MacArthur is nonetheless well-taken. Buruma argues persuasively that the American general’s decision to exonerate the all-too-culpable Emperor Hirohito and keep him on as head of state served to perpetuate one of the chief flaws of the Japanese political system.

Concluding his history in 1964, with a prosperous and peaceful Japan playing host to the world at the Tokyo Olympics, Buruma offers a look at subsequent developments in his epilogue. One only wishes that he had done as good a job at providing readers with a picture of what life in Japan was like in the centuries before 1853. But as Buruma says, in another context: “I can only hope this has the effect of an hors d’oeuvre, which might whet the appetite for richer courses to come.”