Transforming Empire in Japan and East Asia: The Taiwan Expedition and the Birth of Japanese Imperialism

By Robert Eskildsen

​This book examines the history of a military expedition the Japanese government sent to southern Taiwan in 1874, in the context of Japan’s subordination to Western powers in the unequal treaty system in East Asia. It argues that events on the ground in Taiwan show the Japanese government intended to establish colonies in southern and eastern Taiwan, and justified its colonial intent based on the argument that a state must spread civilization and political authority to territories where it claimed sovereignty, thereby challenging Chinese authority in East Asia and consolidating its power domestically. The book considers the history of the Taiwan Expedition in the light of how Japanese imperialism began: it emerged as part of the process of consolidating government power after the Meiji Restoration, it derived from Western imperialism, it developed in a dynamic relationship with Western imperialism and it increased Japan’s leverage in its competition for influence in East Asia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9789811334801

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© The Author(s) 2019

Robert EskildsenTransforming Empire in Japan and East AsiaNew Directions in East Asian Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3480-1_1

1. Introduction

Robert Eskildsen¹  

(1)

International Christian University, Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan

Robert Eskildsen

Email: [e-mail]

At the beginning of June 1874, Saigō Tsugumichi wrote a letter from southern Taiwan to his superiors in Tokyo asking for permission to proceed with plans for colonizing the indigenous territory of the island. Saigō commanded an army the Japanese government sent to southern Taiwan to punish indigenous villagers there who had massacred dozens of people from the Ryūkyū Kingdom (present-day Okinawa), and in his letter he indicated that since he had finished pacifying the south he now looked forward to establishing a permanent presence in Taiwan. China’s reaction to the Japanese expedition concerned him, however, and his orders made it clear that the plans for colonization would be cancelled if the threat of war was too great. To address that concern he wrote another letter to an American advisor who he hoped would help overcome Chinese resistance to the expedition. ¹ We can see in Saigō’s letters hints of several issues that dominated the history of Japan in the 1870s: questions of domestic political control, diplomatic relations with China, the prospect of war, Western influence on Japanese foreign policy, colonialism, and abstract notions of territorial authority. Given the unsettled nature of Japan in the 1870s, it is remarkable that the massacre of the Ryūkyūans could spawn a plan for Japan to colonize half of Taiwan and nearly provoke a war with China, but while the plan was not an inevitable result of the massacre neither was it an accident. By chance, the massacre happened only a few years after the Meiji Restoration , a major revolution in 1868 that changed the nature of governance in Japan and decisively pushed the country toward a new diplomatic alignment with the West . Those political changes, due in part to the influence of Western imperialism, produced repeated confrontations between China and Japan during the final three decades of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Taiwan Expedition. To explain the expedition, it is therefore necessary to place it in the context of Western imperialism, revolutionary changes in Japan, and Chinese diplomatic dominance in East Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The diplomatic conflict between China and Japan over Taiwan ended with a negotiated settlement and for most Japanese the expedition to Taiwan soon faded from memory. The expedition was eventful but not particularly consequential, and for that reason its historical importance lies less in the modest results it produced than in the substantial historical circumstances it reveals. Most importantly, the conflict exposed a broad strategic competition between China and Japan over Taiwan, Ryūkyū, and Korea that continued at least until the end of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), ² and the early contours of the strategic competition can be seen in the issues that prolonged the disagreement between the two governments in 1874. In abstract terms, the conflict over Taiwan unfolded as a border dispute where China and Japan disagreed not simply about where Japan’s southern border should be located but also about what constituted the political authority of the state and how that authority should be inscribed onto territory. More concretely, the two governments disagreed about whether the idea of sovereignty , understood according to the norms of Western diplomacy, applied to China’s claim to the indigenous territory of Taiwan, whether China had an obligation to exercise civil administration there, and whether Japan could legitimately annex the territory. In their disagreement, the two governments found themselves on opposite sides of the question of whether Western norms of sovereignty applied to territorial claims in East Asia, and the disagreement extended beyond Taiwan, with the Japanese government simultaneously challenging China’s claims to suzerain authority over Ryūkyū and Korea . The dispute over Taiwan in 1874 thus constituted one part of a systematic Japanese challenge to Chinese territorial authority that extended across multiple areas in East Asia, and that systematic challenge gave rise to the long-term strategic competition between the countries. A specific problem of sovereignty lay at the heart of the dispute in 1874 but the long-term competition was rooted in broad-based changes in the diplomatic status quo in East Asia. In the decade before the Meiji Restoration, Japan took its first steps toward aligning its diplomatic stance with the norms of Western diplomacy, and after the Restoration it completed that alignment and began to adopt some of the practices of Western imperialism . The disruptive effects of these changes became fully visible at the time of the expedition.

The Restoration also had a disruptive effect on Japan domestically, and the expedition took place against a backdrop of the confusion and turmoil that it caused. Japan experienced profound political, economic, social, and cultural changes between the conclusion of the first treaties of amity and commerce with Western powers in 1858 and the promulgation of a constitution in 1889 that instituted a constitutional monarchy . The first decade of the Meiji period, from the ostensible restoration of imperial authority in 1868 to the last samurai rebellion against the new government in 1877, was particularly turbulent and the government obtained a measure of stability only in the 1880s. ³ It took decades for the new Meiji government to consolidate its power and to clarify what its new authority meant in practice, a process that involved considerable contention and negotiation. ⁴ The expedition took place in the early years of that process, and many signs of confusion and disagreement about domestic political authority can be seen in its planning and implementation.

The Meiji government also faced multiple urgent border problems during those years. In the north, Japanese and Russians had been skirmishing in Sakhalin for decades and the new government recognized an urgent need to stabilize that border, in the west the Korean government refused to accept the legitimacy of the new Japanese government because it would overturn the precedents of early modern diplomacy, and in the south the government sought to establish a clear claim to sovereignty over Ryūkyū at the risk of provoking China, which had a competing claim to suzerainty there. ⁵ When plans for the expedition first took shape, however, the government had not yet begun to address these territorial problems in a comprehensive manner, nor had it clarified the order in which it would deal with them; those changes happened concurrently with the planning of the expedition. In addition to the border problems, the new government also faced a threat posed by Western imperialism . In the 1850s, the Tokugawa bakufu , the old regime that had governed Japan for more than two and a half centuries and that had enjoyed a nominal monopoly over diplomatic relations, was drawn unwillingly into a system of unequal treaties with Western powers. The Tokugawa regime’s reluctant entry into treaty relations destabilized the government and contributed to its collapse in 1868. The new Meiji government inherited the treaty obligations of the bakufu and soon embarked on a decades-long quest to eliminate the treaties. ⁶ The attempted colonization of Taiwan took place at a time when Japan was still subordinated politically to Western imperialist powers under the unequal treaties, when it had only just begun its efforts to end that political subordination, and when perceptions of the threat from Western powers had not yet receded. ⁷ In retrospect, the first decade of the Meiji period would hardly seem a propitious time for the attempted colonization of eastern Taiwan.

The attempted colonization did happen, however, and for multiple reasons, ranging from narrow and particular to broad and general. Repeated massacres of foreigners in southern Taiwan created the perception of a shared need among Japan and Western powers to reduce violence in that area . Attempts by Western powers to establish the dominance of their diplomatic norms in East Asia provided a shared conceptual language that informed not just the revolutionary changes of the Meiji Restoration but also the specific justification for colonizing eastern Taiwan that the Japanese government appropriated from an American diplomat. Perhaps most importantly, Japanese people realized they could appropriate methods and ideas from Western imperialism and use them preemptively to exploit the indigenous territory of Taiwan. These and other conditions influenced the Japanese government’s decision to colonize eastern Taiwan in 1874. At the same time, the attempted colonization was closely related to the long-term competition for influence in East Asia between China and Japan. Indeed, both arose from a differential response in China and Japan to Western imperialism. Dynastic power collapsed earlier in Japan, with the fall of the Tokugawa house, and decades later in China, with the fall of the Qing dynasty. Western imperialism contributed to the collapse in both cases, but Japanese imperialism in only one, and that difference exemplifies an asymmetrical response to imperialism in China and Japan. The asymmetrical response was a fundamental condition of the Japanese attempt to colonize eastern Taiwan in 1874, it influenced Sino-Japanese relations well into the twentieth century, and it helped to define the nature of Japanese imperialism.

The Historiography of the Taiwan Expedition

To study the Taiwan Expedition in relation both to the history of Japanese imperialism and to the significance of the Meiji Restoration marks a break from the way historians have explained it in the past. Indeed, the expedition has typically been seen as a bilateral diplomatic conflict between China and Japan with little attention being given to the ideologies that informed the diplomatic positions of the two countries, to the colonial purpose of the expedition, or to what actually took place on the ground in Taiwan. The view of the expedition primarily as a bilateral diplomatic conflict emerged soon after the Japanese occupation of southern Taiwan ended. In January 1875, the Japanese government published a short official history of the expedition, the Shoban shushi sho , that set the paradigm for explaining it and for organizing document collections about it. ⁸ According to the Shoban shushi sho, the Japanese government responded to an atrocity committed against Japanese subjects and sent an expeditionary force to southern Taiwan only because the Chinese government repeatedly refused to acknowledge its obligation under international law to find and punish the people responsible, a refusal that undermined China’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan. The diplomatic narrative in that first history framed Japan’s invasion of southern Taiwan as a response to the Chinese government’s refusal to accept the obligations that are presumably inherent in legitimate claims to sovereignty.

There are several problems with this narrative that have had a long-term effect on how the expedition has been studied. For example, it takes as a given a crucial point of disagreement between China and Japan during their diplomatic negotiations, namely that the Japanese government had sovereign authority over the Ryūkyū Kingdom . Many historical studies have explored the role of the Taiwan Expedition in the Japanese government’s effort to annex the Ryūkyū Kingdom, ⁹ but the problematic nature of Japan’s claim to sovereignty over Ryūkyū is still often overlooked and it cannot be taken as a given. Another problem is the lack of explanation for why both Chinese and Japanese officials placed such great emphasis on the idea of sovereignty during their diplomatic negotiations about Taiwan. The idea of sovereignty, as it applied both to Taiwan and to Ryūkyū, became a central issue in the conflict but the historical reasons for its centrality have not been examined adequately. A further problem is the lack of attention given to the regional context that shaped the history of the expedition. Much good research has been done about the diplomatic conflict between China and Japan, including the excellent work of Ishii Takashi , but diplomatic histories still overwhelmingly treat the conflict between China and Japan as a bilateral affair. ¹⁰ Such a narrow framing overlooks how the regional context affected the conflict, and it obscures the fact that the Japanese government approached what it called the Taiwan problem not in isolation but rather as part of a linked set of problems relating to Japan’s territorial authority. The idea that Japanese territorial authority could be understood in terms of a system of borders was new, ¹¹ and a comprehensive approach toward clarifying the limits of Japanese sovereignty developed concurrently with the early planning of the expedition. For that reason, the Japanese government’s aims in the expedition need to be understood in the same comprehensive context.

More strikingly, most histories of the Taiwan Expedition, starting with the Shoban shushi sho, ignore what actually happened on the ground in Taiwan, and that includes the fighting that took place in southern Taiwan . ¹² Because of the lack of attention to what took place in Taiwan, it is not clear how or why the indigenous villagers fought the Japanese, ¹³ and because historians have not scrutinized the terminology the government used in its descriptions of the indigenous villagers (who were typically called savages ) we do not have a clear picture of the ideology that informed the Japanese government’s view of them. Historians have similarly paid little attention to the social organization of southern Taiwan. The Japanese expeditionary force did not encounter a tabula rasa when it landed there. Rather, by the time it landed others had already laid the groundwork for the Japanese to exploit social, political, and economic networks that stretched dozens of miles beyond the area where the fighting took place. ¹⁴ These networks matter because members of the expeditionary force hoped to use them to establish military and political control over the region, and the details of that effort make visible some of the motivations for the expedition that remain only implicit in the diplomatic record.

The composition of the army the Japanese government sent to Taiwan has also received little attention. ¹⁵ Historical accounts sometimes describe the force as a samurai army and they assert that the government sent it there as a way of defusing samurai discontent in the wake of the Saga Rebellion , when samurai from Saga rose up against the government in a dispute over its policy toward Korea . ¹⁶ There is some truth to this explanation, since many of the soldiers in the army that went to Taiwan were former samurai and disgruntled former samurai did in fact pose a risk to the government. The timing of the government’s decisions about Taiwan policy suggests, however, that the expedition was not primarily a response to debates about Korea policy and historians have not offered a detailed analysis of the army that might confirm how it was organized or who served in it. While it is difficult to discern the attitudes of most of the members of the army sent to southern Taiwan, it is possible to describe in some detail how it was composed, and its composition suggests that the expedition was not dispatched primarily as a response to samurai discontent.

It is also surprising that historical studies of the expedition have paid so little attention to its purpose of establishing colonies in Taiwan. Strong opposition from the Chinese government and from British and American diplomats forced the Japanese government to shelve its plans for colonization, and it subsequently denied that it had any colonial intent, even as it kept open the possibility of colonization during negotiations with the Chinese government. Evidence of the colonial purpose of the expedition is incontrovertible, however, and it complicates historical interpretations of the formation of the early Meiji government and the beginning of Japanese imperialism. In the case of the formation of the government, the attempted colonization of Taiwan happened early in the Meiji period, and not as the product of a stable political order in Japan but rather as part of the process of stabilizing the new regime that had recently been established in a revolution. This interpretation is informed by Andre Schmid’s argument that the colonization of Korea was integral to the process of Japan’s modernization, ¹⁷ but the attempted colonization of Taiwan happened decades before the colonization of Korea and it was entangled not just in the process of Japan’s modernization but more fundamentally in the process of defining imperial power in the early Meiji period. In the case of the beginning of Japanese imperialism, the expedition shows that explicitly colonial thinking arose in Japan both under the influence of and in response to Western imperialism . In both cases, the standard historical narratives of Japan’s political modernization and the emergence of Japanese imperialism do not provide adequate explanations for how this colonial thinking could have emerged. ¹⁸ In short, there is no accepted explanation for the connection, readily apparent in the documentary evidence about the expedition, between the formation of a new political order after the Meiji Restoration and the emergence of a specific plan, based on a Western model, to colonize eastern Taiwan.

These are the key historiographical issues that this book will address, and two ideas will be used to help address them. The first is the idea of a sovereignty revolution that will be explained in detail in Chapter 2. This refers to the global spread of a new way of thinking about state power and territorial authority from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It helps to explain why Chinese and Japanese diplomats placed so much emphasis on sovereignty in their negotiations about Taiwan, it makes it easier to identify the connections between the expedition to Taiwan and the creation of a new government in Japan after the Restoration, and it helps to explain how a Western justification for colonizing Taiwan was created and how it became available for the Japanese to appropriate. The second idea is recursive imperialism . This idea provides a way of describing, first, how Japanese imperialism emerged not as the result of industrialization or political modernization but rather as the result of a dynamic process of interaction between people from Japan and the West that took place in the context of Western imperialism, and second, how Japanese imperialism proved more destabilizing than Western imperialism to the political and diplomatic status quo in East Asia. The basic outline of Japan’s recursive imperialism will be explained below.

The Key Claims of This Study

Three key claims will be made here about the Taiwan Expedition. The first is that the Japanese government planned for the expeditionary force to begin a process of colonization in eastern Taiwan that would culminate in the Japanese annexation of the entire indigenous territory of the island. It is striking that the Japanese government seriously contemplated colonizing eastern Taiwan in 1874 despite the domestic political turmoil after the Meiji Restoration, the uncertainty over Japan’s borders, and the threat of Western imperialist intervention in Japan. Abundant and incontrovertible evidence shows that the expedition had a colonial purpose, but it is difficult to explain how that purpose could have existed at the time and it cannot be taken as self-evident. It needs to be demonstrated with care partly because it has not been widely accepted, especially in Japan, and partly because it forms the foundation of the other key claims.

The second claim is that the colonial purpose of the expedition, and more broadly the government’s embrace of colonization as a policy option, bore a deep and systematic relationship to the processes of political, social, and cultural change in the Meiji Restoration. One of the transformations of empire that found expression in the Taiwan Expedition was the transformation of the imperial house of Japan into a symbol of the nation’s political and cultural unity, and it constituted a fundamental precondition of the expedition. The correlation between the expedition and the revolutionary changes of the Restoration is unmistakable as a matter of timing, but the ideas and practices that played out in both of them reveal deeper correspondences. Part of the transformation of the symbolism of the imperial house entailed appropriating selected aspects of Western civilization, and that transformation was closely related to the way the Japanese government used ideas appropriated from Western civilization simultaneously to strengthen its domestic control over Japanese society and to create a new foreign policy stance in East Asia. This dual use of Western civilization for domestic and foreign policy purposes shows that after the Restoration the domestic consolidation of political power in Japan shared an important ideological affinity with the effort to gain recognition of Japan’s new government throughout East Asia, and that ideological affinity can be seen in the planning for the Japanese expedition to Taiwan.

The third claim is that Japanese imperialism, starting with the attempted colonization of eastern Taiwan, developed in a dynamic, interactive relationship with Western imperialism . This relationship involved selective Japanese appropriations and adaptations of the ideas and practices of Western imperialism , and the adaptations constituted the second of the transformations of empire that found expression in the Taiwan Expedition. The government’s new foreign policy stance combined features of Western diplomatic ideology with a willingness to use military force, and the government used that combination to press neighboring states in East Asia not only to recognize the authority of the new government of Japan but also to accept Western norms of sovereignty as the proper basis of territorial authority in East Asia. In effect, the new foreign policy stance replicated selected aspects of Western imperialism but it deployed them for specifically Japanese purposes.

Japan’s new foreign policy stance had far-reaching consequences. It spread the effects of the transition from portals to borders in Japan that will be described in Chapter 2 to areas outside of Japan, and it informed the government’s comprehensive approach to dealing with Japan’s multiple border problems that will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Over the longer term, Japan’s selective replication of Western imperialism provoked multiple diplomatic conflicts and military confrontations in East Asia, but the replication did not occur in isolation. Rather, it created a feedback loop between Japanese imperialism and Western imperialism that amplified the impact of Western imperialism and changed the diplomatic behavior of the Chinese government, the Korean government, and Western powers in East Asia. Through this feedback loop, Japan’s new foreign policy stance began to spread the effects of the Restoration to other regions in East Asia and to influence the ideas and practices of Western imperialism. Early signs of the feedback loop can be seen in the Taiwan Expedition and its effects comprise a third transformation of empire.

Japan’s Recursive Imperialism

Japanese imperialism has struck many observers as difficult to explain and one reason is because it does not fit the patterns of European experience. As Peter Duus explains in the conclusion to his book about the Japanese colonization of Korea, Ever since the 1920s Japanese analyses of Meiji imperialism have stressed the difficulty of fitting it into the Western model. ¹⁹ The debate in Japan over the nature of Japanese imperialism began with arguments supporting or opposing Leninist interpretations of Japanese imperialism, and the consensus view was that it developed for economic reasons and it could not be explained in the same way as Western imperialism because it was unique. Many explanations of Japanese imperialism, beginning with these Leninist interpretations, have assumed a fixed relationship between Japanese and Western imperialism or a relationship that is defined by static structural characteristics, and the view of the relationship as fixed is problematic. The history of the Taiwan Expedition, by contrast, suggests that Japanese imperialism evolved in a dynamic, interactive relationship with Western imperialism. Indeed, many of the characteristics of Japanese imperialism become easier to describe clearly and coherently if the relationship between Japanese and Western imperialism is understood as dynamic and interactive.

One of the central characteristics of Japanese imperialism, including the colonial discourse associated with the Taiwan Expedition, is that it derived partly from Western imperialism. The fact of its derivative nature raises obvious analogies to arguments from postcolonial studies, including Partha Chatterjee ’s discussion of the derivative nature of nationalist thought in India and Homi Bhabha ’s idea of mimesis as an ironic form of political resistance to imperialism, ²⁰ which have been used as a way of describing Japanese imperialism, but the analogies raise problems of interpretation. It seems absurd to use an approach from postcolonial scholarship that typically describes a stance of resistance to imperialism as a way of explaining Japanese imperialism, but this approach has become an established feature of the historiography. ²¹ Authors who use this approach often mark the seemingly illogical nature of Japanese imperialism by marginalizing it as absurd, contradictory, or ironic. These marginalizing strategies need to be treated with caution, however, because they encourage normative assumptions that Japanese imperialism cannot be real imperialism or that it cannot be fully logical because of its derivative nature. The normative assumptions also obscure another important characteristic of Japanese imperialism, that cultural adaptations of Western civilization, which was often perceived as inherently superior, were used in Japan in order to challenge the presumption of Western superiority. This characteristic demonstrates that Japanese imperialism had two simultaneous relationships to Western imperialism, one of affinity and another of antagonism. The Japanese strategy of appropriation and adaptation of Western imperialism gave rise to this simultaneous relationship of affinity and antagonism, and it is this relationship that has made Japanese imperialism difficult to explain.

The explanation that will be given here is that Japanese imperialism developed in a dynamic relationship with Western imperialism through a recursive process of change. This interpretation is informed by approaches used in the new interactional structuralism or constructivist explanations in international relations that stress the dynamic process through which new meanings and social structures are created. ²² A dynamic view of the relationship between Japanese imperialism and Western imperialism overcomes the limitations produced by seeing the relationship between them as static or fixed. To view Japanese imperialism as recursive also makes it possible to explain how it could derive from Western imperialism, then influence it, and then transform its impact in East Asia. Further, it explains how Japanese imperialism could have an affinity with Western imperialism and simultaneously be antagonistic toward it. Finally, it makes it possible to understand how Japanese imperialism could be seen as a means of resisting Western imperialism that shared an affinity with other forms of resistance to imperialism. Views of Japanese imperialism as a form of resistance to Western imperialism became fully apparent in the twentieth century and contributed to the appeal of pan-Asianism in Japan and to Japanese justifications of the Second World War, a question I will return to briefly in the Conclusion of the book, but early signs of the pattern could already be seen in the 1870s.

The concept of recursion will be used here to explain the Taiwan Expedition as a specific example of how Japanese imperialism emerged in a dynamic interaction with Western imperialism. It will be used as an analytical tool for understanding a specific set of operations associated with the Japanese appropriation of Western imperialism. The operations include (1) the selective appropriation by Japanese agents of various ideas and practices associated with Western imperialism, (2) the adaptation of those ideas and practices once they were appropriated, (3) the inclusion of ideas and practices not of Western origin in the adaptations as well as the selective exclusion of some Western ideas and practices, (4) the use of the adaptations in order to transform Japanese power relations at home and abroad, and (5) the influence of the adaptations on ideas and practices associated with Western imperialism. By disaggregating the process of appropriation this way, it will be easier to see how Japanese imperialism began to emerge in the 1870s through the effects of a feedback loop that influenced Western imperialism and accelerated the transformation of territorial authority in East Asia. The recursive replication of imperialism posed dangers to Japan that became increasingly apparent in the twentieth century, but from the outset it also provided opportunities to increase Japanese power and security. By transforming the nature of Western imperialism, the Japanese could extend to other parts of East Asia the influence of the Meiji Restoration, and in doing so they could change to their advantage the balance of power in East Asia.

Summary of the Chapters

Chapters 2 through 5 describe the regional context that the Taiwan Expedition took place in. Chapter 2 explains the shift in diplomatic thinking that happened in Japan after the Meiji Restoration . Debates about Taiwan in the 1870s took place in the context of a comprehensive understanding of Japan’s border problems , and the Japanese government’s long-term interest in the Taiwan problem , as well as in the status of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, arose in part because of the need to clarify where the border lay between China and Japan. It was necessary to define both the geographical limits of Japanese sovereign authority after the Restoration and the new meanings of those limits.

Chapter 3 describes the origins of the justification for colonization that the Japanese government later used in its diplomatic arguments about the indigenous territory of Taiwan. The government took advantage of a particular argument that an American diplomat named Charles LeGendre developed based on Western diplomatic practice in China. He applied an interpretation of international law to the terms of the Treaty of Tianjin, an unequal treaty between China and the USA, to assert that the Chinese government had an obligation to establish civil authority over southern Taiwan. To do so would validate its claim to sovereignty there, whereas the failure to do so would leave the area vulnerable to foreign colonization. LeGendre developed the argument in response to a massacre of Americans in southern Taiwan in 1867, and the Japanese government later appropriated it and applied it by analogy to a similar massacre that happened to dozens of people from Ryūkyū in 1871.

Chapter 4 describes how the Japanese government appropriated the justification for colonization in 1872 under the leadership of foreign minister Soejima Taneomi and adapted it for use as the basis for a planned Japanese expedition to Taiwan. Soejima hired LeGendre, who had recently arrived in Japan, as an advisor to the Japanese government and within weeks of his arrival Soejima dramatically adapted the scope and character of the justification. The adaptation included the idea that the Japanese could appropriate the methods and ideas of Western imperialism and use them preemptively to exploit the indigenous territory of Taiwan. At Soejima’s request, LeGendre drafted plans for an expedition based on that adaptation. Government leaders vigorously debated the wisdom of Soejima’s plans, some favoring an aggressive approach and others favoring a more cautious one. Soejima incorporated his plans for Taiwan into a comprehensive approach for dealing with multiple problems of territorial authority in areas that lay between China and Japan, and he applied that approach during his diplomatic mission to Beijing in 1873.

Chapter 5 explains how debates over foreign policy—especially the dispute over whether to chastise Korea (Seikanron)—split the Japanese government badly at the end of 1873. The dispute over Korea disrupted plans for the expedition to Taiwan and sparked a rebellion against the government early in 1874, but despite the rebellion the government united, if narrowly, behind a new and more specific plan for the expedition. The plan envisioned carrying out the Japanese colonization of the indigenous territory of Taiwan in the name of bringing civilization to the savages who lived there. Ongoing disputes about what imperial authority meant and how it ought to be exercised complicated the dispatch of the expeditionary force late in the spring of 1874.

The next three chapters explain what took place on the ground in Taiwan as Japanese people implemented the plan for the expedition. Chapter 6 describes the activities of a handful of Japanese agents who went to Taiwan in advance of the expedition in order to collect intelligence and lay the groundwork for establishing colonies there. The Japanese agents’ efforts to translate into practice the government’s plan for colonizing the indigenous territory of Taiwan reveal what the abstract ideas of the plan meant. They hoped to establish bases at several points along the east coast of Taiwan that would become the colonies from which Japanese authority would later be extended to encompass the entire indigenous territory. They believed they needed to act quickly to preempt the exploitation of the territory by Westerners, and they worried that the Chinese might preempt them by establishing civil authority there first, thereby invalidating their justification for colonizing the territory.

Chapter 7 explains the organization of the military force sent to southern Taiwan in the spring of 1874, how it established military control over the area through a combination of negotiations with local leaders and battles with indigenous villagers, and how it began preparations for expanding Japanese control over the indigenous territory. The expeditionary force experienced many problems of organization and it proved highly vulnerable to disease . These problems demonstrate the practical limits to the projection of Japanese military force overseas in the 1870s.

Chapter 8 describes what happened to the plans for colonizing eastern Taiwan after the expeditionary force established military control over southern Taiwan. Saigō Tsugumichi, the commander of the expeditionary force, received orders to carry out a two-phase plan for the expedition . The first phase of the plan involved pacifying southern Taiwan and the second phase called for colonization of eastern Taiwan but only after the Japanese government had a chance to evaluate the threat of war with China. Because of strong Chinese opposition to the expedition, Saigō had to set aside the plan for colonization. Events in southern Taiwan, and across the Taiwan Strait in Amoy (Xiamen), show that the justification for colonization that lay at the heart of the government’s plan developed in unexpected directions as the Japanese sought to implement it, and those developments threatened to destabilize the area. Several of Saigō’s staff officers continued to argue in favor of colonizing the indigenous territory, and Western residents in Amoy responded to the expedition with confusion about what Japan’s challenge to China’s territorial authority in Taiwan actually meant.

The next two chapters describe how Japanese people justified the expedition to Taiwan. Chapter 9 explains the negotiations that took place in Beijing that brought the conflict between the Japanese and Chinese governments to an end. By that time, Japanese negotiators did not expect to proceed with the plan to establish colonies in Taiwan, but they maintained the threat of colonization in the background as they demanded an indemnity from the Chinese government as compensation for its failure to establish effective civil authority over the indigenous territory. An indemnity would, at least implicitly, validate the Japanese argument that the Chinese government had a responsibility to civilize the indigenous territory, and according to the Japanese government’s argument the failure of China to acknowledge its responsibility would have justified the Japanese colonization of the territory.

Chapter 10 explains reactions to and understandings of the Taiwan Expedition on the home front. Media reports reveal some of the ways that Japanese people understood the connection between the expedition and key concepts such as civilization and imperial authority , and they show an awareness that Japanese adaptations of Western civilization being used at home to transform domestic society could also be used overseas to transform other parts of East Asia. The media reports used analogies to the domestic Civilization and Enlightenment movement to indicate how the Taiwan Expedition would spread civilization to the indigenes of Taiwan, providing a clear link between the domestic cultural transformation of Japan after the Restoration and the emergence of Japanese imperialism . Not everyone in Japan agreed with the government’s vision or its actions, however, and by the end of 1874 something resembling a public discussion of the politics of the expedition began to emerge in the media and in petitions submitted to the government.

Notes

1.

Saigō Tsugumichi to Ōkuma Shigenobu, June 7, 1874, Nihon Shiseki Kyōkai, ed., Ōkuma Shigenobu kankei monjo (6 vols.; Tokyo: Nihon Shiseki Kyōkai, 1932–1935), 2: 349–364; Saigō Tsugumichi to Charles LeGendre, June 7, 1874, Papers of Charles William LeGendre, Library of Congress.

2.

Urs Matthias Zachmann, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904 (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

3.

Mark Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

4.

Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2007); Stephen Vlastos, Opposition Movements in Early Meiji, 1868–1885, in John W. Hall et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Japan (6 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988–1999), 5: 367–431; and Roger Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

5.

Akizuki Toshiyuki, Nichi-Ro kankei to Saharintō: bakumatsu-Meiji shonen no ryōdo mondai (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1994); Gregory Smits, Visions of Ryukyu: Identity and Ideology in Early-Modern Thought and Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 143–155; and Lionel Babicz, Le Japon face à la Corée à l’époque Meiji (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2002), 39–54.

6.

Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Morita Tomoko, Kaikoku to chigaihōken: ryōji saiban seido no unnyō to Maria Rusu gō jiken (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2005); Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Louis G. Perez, Japan Comes of Age: Mutsu Munemitsu and the Revision of the Unequal Treaties (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London, Associated University Press, 1999).

7.

Fukuzawa Yukichi related the fear voiced by former American Secretary of State William Seward, who visited Japan in 1871, that Japan with her inflexible nature could hardly be expected to keep her independence. Seward mentioned the same sentiment in his memoirs. Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 206; and William Henry Seward, William H. Seward’s Travels Around the World, ed. Olive Risley Seward (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1873), 93.

8.

Banchi Jimukyoku, ed., Shoban shushi sho (1875), in Meiji Bunka Kenkyūkai, ed., Meiji bunka zenshū (7): gaikō hen (1928; Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1992), 153–178. The organization of sources about the Taiwan Expedition in the Dai Nihon gaikō bunsho, the main collection of published Japanese diplomatic documents, reproduces the narrative structure of the Shoban shushi sho. Gaimushō Chōsabu, ed., Dai Nihon gaikō bunsho (12 vols.; Tokyo: Nihon Kokusai Kyōkai, 1936–1940).

9.

Mizuno Norihito, Early Meiji Policies Towards the Ryukyus and the Taiwanese Aboriginal Territories, Modern Asian Studies 43 (2009): 683–739; Kobayashi Takao, Taiwan jiken to Ryūkyū shobun (I): Rujandoru [LeGendre] no yakuwari saikō, Seiji keizai shigaku 340 (1994/10): 1–16; Nishizato Kikō, Ryūkyū shobun to Karafuto-Chishima kūkan jōyaku, in Arano Yasunori et al., eds., Ajia no naka no Nihonshi (IV): Chiiki to minzoku/etonosu (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1992), 167–208; Edwin Pak-Wah Leung, The Quasi-War in East Asia: Japan’s Expedition to Taiwan and the Ryūkyū Controversy, Modern Asian Studies 17.2 (1983): 257–281; Kinjō Seitoku, Ryūkyū shobun ron (Naha, Okinawa: Okinawa Taimusu-sha, 1978); and Kuribara Jun, Taiwan jiken (1871–1874 nen): Ryūkyū seisaku no tenki toshite no Taiwan shuppei, Shigaku zasshi 87.9 (1978): 10–85.

10.

Ishii Takashi, Meiji shoki no Nihon to higashi Ajia (Yokohama: Yūrindō, 1983). Other accounts of the diplomatic conflict include Kō Sekai, Taiwan jiken (1871–1874), Kikan kokusai seiji 28.2 (1964): 38–52; Shu Cherin, Gaisei to tōchi: 1874 nen Taiwan shuppei o rei ni shite, in Gendai Kenpōgaku Kenkyūkai, ed., Gendai kokka to kenpō no genri (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1983), 389–416; Ichinose Norie, Meiji shoki ni okeru Taiwan shuppei seisaku to kokusaihō no tekiyō, Hokudai shigaku 35 (1995): 23–49. While accounts of the Taiwan Expedition from Chinese points of view do not always follow the narrative set down in the Shoban shushi sho, they often exhibit many of the limitations seen in accounts from Japanese points of view. See Mizuno Norihito, Qing China’s Reaction to the 1874 Japanese Expedition to the Taiwanese Aboriginal Territories, Sino-Japanese Studies 16 (2009), Article 8; Fujii Shizue, Jindai Zhong Ri guanxi shi yuanqi: 1871–74 nian Taiwan shijian (Taibei: Jinhe Chubanshe, 1992); Sophia Su-fei Yen, Taiwan in China’s Foreign Relations, 1836–1874 (Hamden, CT: The Shoe String Press, 1965); D. R. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire’s End (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 35–41; T. F. Tsiang, Sino-Japanese Diplomatic Relations, 1870–1894, Chinese Social and Political Science Review 17 (1933): 1–106; and Leonard Gordon, Japan’s Abortive Colonial Venture in Taiwan, 1874, The Journal of Modern History 37.2 (1965): 171–185.

11.

Takahiro Yamamoto, Balance of Favour: The Emergence of Territorial Boundaries Around Japan, 1861–1875 (diss., London School of Economics, 2015).

12.

An exception is the work of Fujisaki Seinosuke that describes in detail the fighting and many other events that took place in Taiwan in 1874. Fujisaki Seinosuke, Taiwan shi to Kabayama taishō (Tokyo: Kokushi Kankōkai, 1926). See also Saigō Totoku Kabayama Sōtoku Kinen Jigyō Shuppan Iinkai, ed., Saigō totoku to Kabayama sōtoku (Taihoku: Saigō Totoku Kabayama Sōtoku Kinen Jigyō Shuppan Iinkai, 1936). It is not certain but Fuijisaki probably took the lead in writing this book.

13.

Anthropologists and some historians have discussed the indigenous society in southern Taiwan. See, for example, Ōhama Ikuko, ‘Botansha jiken’ saikō: naze Paiwan zoku wa Ryūkyū tōmin o satsugai shita no ka, Taiwan genjūmin kenkyū 11 (2007): 203–223; and Paul Barclay, Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese Subalterns and Their Aborigine Wives, 1895–1930, The Journal of Asian Studies 64.2 (2005): 325–360.

14.

Historians have studied the political and economic networks that the indigenes participated in, although they have often concentrated on different geographical areas or different chronological periods. See, for example, Paul Barclay, ‘They Have for the Coast Dwellers a Traditional Hatred:’ Governing Igorots in Northern Luzon and Central Taiwan, 1895–1915, in Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 217–255; Paul Barclay, ‘Gaining Confidence and Friendship’ in Aborigine Country: Diplomacy, Drinking and Debauchery on Japan’s Southern Frontier, Social Science Japan Journal 6.1 (2003): 77–96; and Barclay, Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage. See also Robert Eskildsen, Foreign Views of Difference and Engagement Along Taiwan’s Sino-Aboriginal Boundary in the 1870s, in Ko-wu Huang, ed., Huazhong youhua: Jindai Zhongguode shijue biaoshu yu wenhua goutu (When Images Speak: Visual Representation and Culture Mapping in Modern China) (Taibei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2003), 253–287; and Paul D. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s Savage Border, 1874–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

15.

One of the few articles about the Japanese army sent to Taiwan is Gotō Arata, Taiwan shuppei ni okeru chōhei mondai, Musashino Daigaku Seiji-Keizai Kenkyūjo Nenpō 5 (2012): 135–172. See also Robert Eskildsen, "An Analysis of the